May 18: Poet of the Week, Gregory Pardlo, "Problema 4"

For the past few years, I haven't liked the books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (with the exception of Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap).  I didn't even bother ordering last year's winner.  However, because of the poetry workshop I taught this past winter, I did order Gregory Pardlo's Digest, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize.

I opened the book and started reading it.  I was fully prepared to hate it.  In fact, I will venture to say that I was predisposed to hate it.  That's how unimpressed I have been with the poetry Pulitzers recently.  After reading the first poem, I didn't hate it.  After the second poem, I was pleasantly surprised.  By the third poem, I found myself really liking Pardlo.

In short, Gregory Pardlo won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and now he is Saint Marty's Poet of the Week.

Problema 4

by:  Gregory Pardlo

At thirteen I asked my father for a tattoo.
I might as well have asked for a bar mitzvah.
He said I had no right to alter the body
he gave me.  Aping what little Marx I learned
from the sisters down the street who wore torn
black stockings with Doc Martens, I said
I was a man because I could claim my body
and the value of its labor.  This meant I could
adorn it or dispose of it as I chose.  Tattoos,
my father said, are like children:  have one,
you'll want another.  I knew there was a connection
between the decorated body and reproduction.
This is why I wanted a tattoo.  Yet I reasoned,
not in so many words, his analogy only held
in the case of possession, i. e., I possess my body,
but can not possess my children.  His laughter
was my first lesson in the human Ponzi
scheme of paternalism, the self-electing
indenture to the promise of material inheritance,
men claiming a hollow authority because,
simply, their fathers had claimed
a hollow authority.  Knowing I had little
idea as to what my proposed tattoo might
resemble, my father sent me to my room
to sketch it using the pastels he had given me
for Christmas.  Based on his critique, he said,
he would consider my request.  But he had
already taken the shine from my swagger.
How can I beautify what I do not possess
and call it anything but graffiti?  Chris Rock says
my first job is to keep my daughter
off the pole.  Whether or not I agree with him,
I get his point.  As a father myself
I now see every mutinous claim of independence
as the first steps toward my sweet pea's
falling in with a bad crowd.  Richard Pryor
says we are bound to fuck up our kids
one way or another.  My father would
split the difference:  I made you, he'd say,
I can un-make you, and make another one
just like you.

Maybe they got it right this time...

 

May 11: Phoebe's Record, Sharon Olds, "Stag's Leap," New Cartoon

Then something terrible happened just as I got in the park.  I dropped old Phoebe's record.  It broke into about fifty pieces.  It was in a big envelope and all, but it broke anyway.  I damn near cried, it made me feel so terrible, but all I did was, I took the pieces out of the envelope and put them in my coat pocket.  They weren't any good for anything, but I didn't feel like just throwing them away.  Then I went in the park.  Boy, it was dark.

Phoebe's broken record is a pretty small loss for Holden, compared to all the other losses in Catcher.  He's lost his younger brother to leukemia.  He's lost his older brother to Hollywood.  He just got kicked out of school.  Jane, the girl he loves, is dating his roommate at Pencey Prep.  His mother is lost in grief, and his father is lost to work.  By the end of the book, Holden will be close to losing his mind.  Salinger's whole novel is pretty much about loss, but it's also about healing.  At the end, Holden is facing his losses head-on, probably for the first time in his life.

Last night, I shared a poem by Sharon Olds.  It was from her latest collection, Stag's Leap, which is all about loss and, eventually, healing.  The book, inspired by the dissolution of Olds' 30-year marriage, is full of pain and anger and love.  In each poem, the struggle to let go, forgive, move on takes center stage.  It is a painful and wondrous process rendered in Olds' typically stunning imagery.

In an early poem, Olds talks about the loss of things:

Object Loss

The banjo clock, suspended in thirty-weight
dreaming marriedness, for a third of a
century, doesn't come down easy from the wall,
rusted to the hook, then it lurches up,
its gangle throat glugs.  Big-headed, murmurous,
in my arms it's like a diver's bell,
Davy-Jonesed.  When I lean it by the back
door, it tocks, and ticks, it doesn't even
cross my mind I might wish to kick it.
Using his list, I remove his family
furnishings, the steeple clock,
the writing-arm chair, the told-and-brass
drawing table--I had not known
how connected I'd felt, through him, to a world of
handed-down, signed, dated,
appraised things, pedigreed matter.
As I add to the stash which will go to him,
I feel as if I'm falling away
from family--as if each ponderous
object had been keeping me afloat.  No, they were
the scenery of the play now closing,
lengthy run it had.  My pitchfork
tilts against the wall in the dining room,
web thick in its tines, spider
dangling in one cul-de-sac. . . .
What if loss can be without
dishonor.  His harpoon--a Beothuc harpoon--
and its bone and sinew and tusk and brine-wood
creel I add to the pile, I render
unto Caesar, and my shame is winter sunlight
on a pine floor, and it moves, it sways like and old dancer.

Loss is a palpable being in Olds' poems, a creature that must be confronted, described, tamed.  Olds is losing a three-decade-long life, full of banjo clocks and harpoons, children and sexual desire, the most intimate and sacred elements of her existence.  It is a long and difficult process to behold.  The book is divided into six sections, titled for seasons and times:  January--December, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Years Later.  The poems in each part reflect the healings brought on by sunrises and sunsets, snows and thaws, August heat and October harvest.  In the end, it's all about holding on to the precious things of memory, finding out what is left in the fields of the heart after years of cultivating loss, as in the final poem of the collection:

What Left?

Something like a half-person
left my young husband's body,
and something like the other half
left my ovary.  Later,
the new being, complete, slowly
left my body.  And a portion of breath
left the air of the delivery room,
entering the little mouth,
and the milk left the breast, and went
into the fat cuffs of the wrists.
Years later, during his cremation,
the liquids left my father's corpse,
and the smoke left the flue.  And even
later, my mother's ashes left
my hand, and fell as seethe into the salt
chop.  My then husband made
a self, a life, I made beside him
a self, a life, gestation.  We grew
strong, in direction.  We clarified
in vision, we deepened in our silence and our speaking.
We did not hold still, we moved, we are moving
still--we made, with each other, a moving
like a kind of music:  duet; then solo,
solo.  We fulfilled something in each other--
I believed in him, he believed in me, then we
grew, and grew, I grieved him, he grieved me,
I completed with him, he completed with me, we
made whole cloth together, we succeeded,
we perfected what lay between him and me,
I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,
I did not leave him, he did not leave me,
I freed him, he freed me.

 Stag's Leap recently won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.  It's a work personal and universal.  It touches upon the very core of grief and relief, holding on and letting go, being imprisoned and being freed from the past.  Sharon Olds' poems are full of wisdom and a visceral truth that grab the reader by the scruff of the neck and don't let go.

Saint Marty can still feel their grip on him, their fingers strong and urgent as a lost lover's kiss.

Confessions of Saint Marty

May 10: Sharon Olds, "To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now"

Any person who know me knows that I love Sharon Olds.  She is the Darth Vader who brought me to the Dark Side.  I wouldn't be writing poetry today if it weren't for her.

I have studied with Sharon Olds.  I have read drafts of my poems to Sharon Olds, and she has commented on them, offered me advice.  She is, hands down, amazing.

Today, Saint Marty would like to offer you a heartbreaking poem from Olds' Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Stag's Leap.

To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now

Though I never saw you, only your clouds,
I was afraid of you, of how you differed
from what we had wanted you to be.  And it's as if
you waited, then, where such waiting is done,
for when I would look beside me--and here
you are, in the world of forms, where my wifehood
is now, and every action with him,
as if a thousand years from now
you and I are in some antechamber
where the difference between us is of little matter,
you with perhaps not much of a head yet,
dear garden one, you among the shovels
and spades and wafts of beekeeper's shroud
and sky-blue kidskin gloves.
That he left me is not much, compared
to your leaving the earth--you shifting places
on it, and shifting shapes--you threw off your
working clothes of arms and legs,
and moved house, from uterus
to toilet bowl and jointed stem
and sewer out to float the rivers and
bays in painless pieces.  And yet
the idea of you has come back to where
I could see you today as a small, impromptu
god of the partial.  When I leave for good,
would you hold me in your blue mitt
for the departure hence.  I never thought
to see you again, I never thought to seek you.

April 20: Daddy's Going to Kill You, Sharon Olds, "The Father," New Cartoon

"Daddy's going to kill you.  He's going to kill you," she said.

Holden doesn't have a great relationship with his father.  His dad is a highly successful corporate lawyer who produces Broadway shows.  Holden is his middle son who can't seem to get his crap together.  Holden's sister, Phoebe, knows that Holden and their father have issues.  When she finds out Holden has been kicked out of school again, her immediate response is simple:  "Daddy's going to kill you."

As I informed you earlier this week, Sharon Olds just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Stag's Leap.  I don't own a copy of Stag's Leap yet, but I do own a copy of her book The Father, a collection of poems about her relationship with, you guessed it, her father.  The poems are full of beauty and pain, detailing a father/daughter bond that is fraught with complications.  The father in the poems is dying of cancer, and the speaker is caring for him during his final days.  As can be expected, the situation stirs up all the emotions, deep and raw, harbored throughout a lifetime.

One of the deepest poems of The Father is about words, the final shared exchange between daughter and father:

Last Words

Three days ago, my suitcases
were hunched there, in his hospital room,
in the corner, I had to pick them up
by the scruff of their necks, and leave him.  I kept
putting them down, and going back
to kiss him again although he was exhausted,
shining like tarnished silver, and yet
I could not seem to pick up those bags
and walk out the door the last time.  I kept
going back to the mouth he would lift, his
forehead glittering with effort, his eyes
slewing back, shying, until
finally he cried out Last kiss!
and I kissed him and left.  This morning, his wife
called to tell me he has ceased to speak,
so those are his last words to me,
the ones he is leaving me with--and it is ending with a kiss--
a command for mercy, the offer of his cracked
creator lips.  To plead that I leave,
my father asked me for a kiss!  I would not
leave till he had done so, I will not let thee go except thou beg for it.

It's a holy moment, a sacred thing, the last words exchanged between child and father.  The very last line of the poem is filled with ancient yearnings, the inability to surrender, to let go, of father love.  Not all of the poems are this tender.  The love expressed in Sharon Olds' poems is tough, hard as permafrost.  It doesn't melt easily.  It distills, warms over time into something alive and nurturing at the end of the book, where the father has the last word.  The poem, titled "My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead," concludes,

...
I have been in a body without breath,
I have been in the morgue, in fire, in the slagged
chimney, in the air over the earth,
and buried in the earth, and pulled down
into the ocean--where I have been
I understand this life, I am matter,
your father, I made you, when I say now that I love you
I mean look down at your hand, move it,
that action is matter's love, for human
love go elsewhere.

It's a comforting moment, an extension of father love into something beyond matter and time, into eternity.


The Father fills Saint Marty with hope for love never dies.  It transforms into something deeper, like snow into melt into earth into lilacs, like words into kiss into memory into poetry.

Confessions of Saint Marty

April 16: Sharon Olds Pulitzer, No Snark Here

Usually, when the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry is announced every year, I get very snarky and make nasty and disparaging comments.  It has nothing to do with the quality of the poet being lauded and everything to do with my inherent jealousy.  Here is a list of some of my favorite snarks:

"Well, of course he won.  He's practically dead."

"I think she slept with all the Pulitzer judges."

"Does he really need a Pulitzer?  He already teaches for Harvard."

"Her?  Are you kidding me?  Why don't they rename it the I-can't-write-shit Prize?"

"Oh, him.  He deserves it.  He needs to complete the Triple Crown--Pulitzer, National Book Award, and Nobel Prize.  Go, Seabiscuit."

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Well, this year, you will find no snark here.  The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 2013 is Sharon Olds, for her collection Stag's Leap.  Sharon Olds has been my muse since I started writing poetry.  I took a workshop taught by Sharon Olds.  I've got four books autographed my Sharon Olds.  Sharon Olds is long overdue for a Pulitzer Prize, and that injustice was corrected yesterday.

The only snarky thing Saint Marty will say is that it's about time the Pulitzer Prize judges got their heads out of their asses.

For she's a jolly good poet....