Placing Myself
Excerpt
My older brother writes me from Alabama that if I could taste a fig grown in his garden, I would realize I am living in the wrong location. He may be right. Being the sort of fellow who is often out of place—mistaking the hour, the calendar, or the map—I could easily have gotten the place where I live wrong, too. Yet at age 58, with Northern New England in my blood, and in my poems, which amounts to the same thing, I no longer have a choice. I'm here. Figs may not grow
in this place, but it is by now pretty clear the place has grown me.
Since I was born in Northern New England—Newport, New Hampshire, to be exact—the region is in my earliest memories. Among seasons, I remember winter most—the long, quiet snowfalls, the chinking of tire-chains on cars as they passed through the neighborhood, the bleak
sunsets that tinted the snow before the onset of darkness. I spent much of my childhood in a low-rent project outside of Springfield, Vermont, called Southview. It was there my father moved us just before he left my mother, my two brothers, and me. His departure filled my days with loneliness and longing; I see as I write this that wherever those feelings may exist in my poems about northern New England, they began that early. One winter morning after he left—did I experience or dream this?—I peered into a deep patch of ice, where I had discovered a large coin attached to a silver key. Frozen there, the coin promised to anyone who could retrieve the key a cash prize of many zeros. With no way to reach what glittered under my hand, I went on looking into the ice, caught in its spell just as the coin and its key were.
In those sunsets of my childhood, I found more longing. Bleak in winter and wistful in summer, they took the world of our play with them and left me and my childhood friends in twilight, listening to the plaintive vowels of our names as our mothers called us home. Do today's children of my region still gather on hills after school in January to see whose sled is the fastest, or play "kick the can" in the long evenings of June? In the 1940s, long before cable TV, the kids of Southview were outdoors as long as light permitted. During the summer, on the hottest days, the
assistant manager of the project, a good-hearted man named "Stocker," fit as many of us as he could on the hand-sawed bed of his truck and took us to a nearby lake. I still recall the joy and fear we felt each time that old truck hit a bump dipping us on soft shocks down to the tires; and I
can smell the sweet odor of wood against rubber as we went on to the next bump, clinging to each other and shrieking.
In these first years as a New Englander, what do I remember of poetry? I must have written some in elementary school, since I was sometimes called class poet. One day when I was in second grade, my teacher brought a guest to class and passed out a poem in purple ink called "Lilacs," by Robert Frost. Unlikely as it seems by hindsight, she asked the class, not yet finished with the basic reader, to read this poem for discussion, and I had the feeling my response was the one she wanted most. Yet try as I might to understand it, the poem remained impenetrable, and when she called on me, I had nothing to say. I couldn't have known then that this was the beginning of my struggle with Frost, a literary father of sorts, and that one day I would have to find my way past him if I were to become a New England poet.
Nor could I have known that through my mother, I was obtaining a sense of character and story I would later use in narrative poems. Before my father left, she read a long series of Thornton Burgess's Old Mother West Windstories to my brothers and me, and later on, to me alone, the stories of a black child named Little Brown Koko, serialized in Woman's Daymagazine. My first book was a collection of these stories, cut out and pasted on construction paper.
Other characters I remember from that time came from humorous anecdotes I heard my mother tell her women friends about people who lived around us in the project. There was Marguerite Coates, who vastly outweighed her little husband Wilmer, and ran him ragged with chores and ultimatums. Since the Coateses lived in the tenement next to ours, we often heard her demands right through the partition, and my mother repeated them, doing her best impression of Mrs. Coates. On the other side of us were the Quelches— Bob and his wife Eleanor, the world's worst house-cleaner. My mother once heard Eleanor's excited voice through the wall as she discovered in a discarded pile of clothes "my old tan suit!" It is perhaps from my mother I got my tendency to use humor in poetry as a release from tension and sorrow; for happiness did not last long in her house. Left by her feckless husband to support three children, she was often upset and angry with us all. I may have gotten certain methods of narration from my mother as well. I have never forgotten the way she told a story, aiming all details at an emotional climax, as I myself try to do. Nor have I forgotten how, switch in hand, she expressed her anger—the mixture of desperation and fear I heard in her voice as it broke through conventional grammar with an emotional syntax of its own. Whenever I write a dramatic monologue involving a speaker under stress, the poem imitates my mother's voice—its thickness of emotion, its sense of language driven
by feeling.
It could not have helped my mother's emotional state that ours was one of the poorest families in the project, barely saved from destitution by the sewing she was able to take in and the haircuts she gave neighborhood kids on Saturdays. As I look back on our life then, I recall only a few details of our deprivation: carrying leftovers home from the school cafeteria; standing in front of a small electric heater one day when the coal ran out; wishing for a bicycle my mother could not afford. Yet when I look at the characters who inhabit my poems, it is clear my upbringing has
left its mark. Where a poet like Robert Lowell features a New England family of pedigree, connected to the history of high culture in the region, my poetry family is lower class, consisting of mongrels whose history is mostly unknown. Where Donald Hall skips a generation to write
about his grandfather and the agrarian tradition he represents, I write about a broken family with no patriarch and no clear tradition. My extra-family characters seem to be marked by my experience in Southview, too; for they are often underprivileged or misfits, living outside the
social mainstream.
My life in Southview ended in the summer before I entered fifth grade. That was when my mother remarried, and the new family moved to my stepfather's city of Claremont, New Hampshire, on the other side of the Connecticut River. While we lived in an apartment there and he worked in a machine shop, we helped him settle on land he had purchased in the river valley.The relationship my brothers and I had with my stepfather was not without conflict. Yet, to see things his way, what was he to do? A relatively simple man, he had in his view provided us with room and board and did not understand why we shouldn't spend our time helping him build a
house on his property and raise vegetables and goats there. His response when we were reluctant or broke his rules was harsh, spoiling any chance of a bond with him. But it was my stepfather who introduced me to the farm life that had gone on by the Connecticut for centuries. Eventually,
I began to work on other farms in the area, gathering experiences that would one day lead to my own agrarian poems.
The most important experiences came from the Kuhre farm in Cornish, New Hampshire, where I worked in the summer of my fifteenth year. Though I had been accepted for admission at Boys' State, my parents insisted that I take the job in Cornish instead. I was not pleased with the
arrangement—particularly when I met the farm's owner, an ancient Danish man who was crippled by a stroke and missing one eye. But the day came when my stepfather dropped me off there, and I entered a world of farming rituals that had been brought from the Old Country, rising
with Kuhre's son, a married man who lived upstairs in the farmhouse, to milk the cows, then spending the long day gathering hay and silage.
Poets sometimes speak of making poems from events that linger in the mind waiting to be lived more deeply. Though I did not especially like the work at Kuhre farm, my days were full of such events: the dreamlike movement of the cows as they went out into the field in the morning; tramping on silage as it rained down inside the silo in a green light; the figure of old Kuhre himself on his tractor, circling, as I put it in a later poem, "all my afternoons." Each day after breakfast it was my job to start Kuhre's tractor, one of the first the John Deere company ever made, by
turning its immense flywheel again and again. In the meantime, Kuhre would be making his way toward me on a crutch which he then hooked onto the gearshift, hoisting himself into his seat and driving away. At night, the son upstairs with his wife and young boy, Kuhre and his wife sat with
me over a late supper of leftovers from the large noon meal. Shipped to New Hampshire from Denmark in an arranged marriage, Mrs. Kuhre had apparently gotten no closer to the old man than I or anyone else had, for she spent the whole meal talking to him in Danish and getting no response except for an occasional grunt. Sitting on his left in that room lit only by a table lamp, I saw an eyeless face when I looked at him, and that view made me feel his silence even more strongly. In a way his alien quality was like the farm itself, an unacculturated place, the more mysterious because the farm life there was so pure. It did not rely, as my stepfather's did, on work elsewhere to support it. Furthermore, it was totally removed from the culture of the megalopolis that had long since arrived in Claremont, through products like margerine and hula-hoops and the rock n'roll music I listened to after supper at the farm on the portable radio I kept in my room.
How delicious the voices of Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly seemed to me as I brought them in, like contraband, from WBZ, in Boston, or WPTR in Albany, New York. How I looked forward to those moments when, riding a truckload of hay back to the barn, I could pull out the flat piece of wood I carried in my back pocket and strum it while singing my own rock n' roll tunes. Putting the ten dollars a week I made at the Kuhre farm away, I was saving my money for an electric guitar and amplifier; in the meantime, I learned chords by playing this soundless instrument, on which I had drawn fret lines and tacked string. Later on, in college, I would play in a rock band, using the guitar I finally purchased with my summer earnings. Still later, when I no longer played, I would express my love of American popular culture through images of comic book thugs, hair on television, and big cars—then write long pieces that mixed the popular and rural cultures together. Edward Hopper once maintained that no artist ever changes much, only refines the tendencies with which he began. As a poet in my middle fifties, I may well be back where I was at 15: part of me in the farmhouse, the other part in the culture of everywhere,
U.S.A.