The Work of Poetry

Yesterday was a glorious day in New York City. I dropped my sons off at school and decided to walk home instead of taking the bus or subway. I walked down Riverside Drive, thinking, as I often do when walking on Riverside Drive, about my grandparents. My father’s parents fled Paris just after my father was born in late December 1940. They stayed in Cuba for a time, waiting for visas, then moved to the Bronx and then to 88th and West End Avenue where they lived for the rest of their lives. I spent my childhood in Greenwich Village (my grandparents called it “the Willage”) but visited them often in their Upper West Side rental. In elementary school my grandmother would pick me up from school once a week and I’d sleep over at their apartment. She’d make me cheese (usually leyden and Jarlseberg side by side) melted on tinfoil and buttered Pepperidge Farm toast with the crusts cut off. I’d eat the toast first and pick the melted cheese off the tinfoil as it cooled.

Sometimes we’d play games together or watch television together. My grandma Lotty would sit with me and I did my homework. She’d work a golden delicious apple with a small paring knife and offer me the unbroken spiral peel and perfect slices. I liked to watch her make the spiral; I liked to touch the parallel ridges on her square-cut fingernails. But the big event of the evening was my grandfather’s arrival. I can picture him in his suit and overcoat, the beautifully polished shoes, the hat with a feather in it. My grandmother often asked him if he’d walked up Riverside Drive. If it was dark and if he had she’d give him a disapproving grimace and tsk her tongue. My grandpa Charlie would smile back and shrug, and we’d sit down to dinner: my favorite was lamb chops followed by berries and cool whip.
Yesterday I walked down Riverside Drive toward home in the cool March air of morning and tried to picture my grandfather walking with his quick, long strides up Riverside in the early dusk toward home thirty years ago. Every once in a while a strange gray shadow would scoot across my path. I startled at the first one thinking it was a small mouse. Then a group of three scuttled by like miniature tumbleweeds. Two blocks later I noticed a gray mass the size of a baby rabbit jump the curb and disappear under a car. Then, a few blocks later I came across and woman walking her dog. The woman was neatly dressed, about 70 years old. Her dog—a large black dog—walked with slight limp and was graying all over with age. Every few steps the woman would turn and gently drag a metal loop with a plastic handle along the dog’s back. A wad of black-gray hair would rise and hover for a moment and then drop and scuttle along the sidewalk.
I arrived home and spent the next seven hours sitting at my computer writing emails asking for the right to reprint poems and essays in Efforts and Affections, an anthology I am co-editing with Arielle Greenberg. Applying for permissions, I discovered yesterday, requires a strong back, patience, organization, perseverance but hardly a whit of creativity or intelligence. It is thankless drudge work but absolutely necessary for a book like this to exist. Despite Kwame Dawes’ criticism of anthologies (“Poets may not know this, but the anthology is not our friend”), I’m proud of our anthology and excited about its publication. The book is a collection of essays by younger women poets about older living poets who have mentored or influenced them in some way. The essays are smart and funny and provoke important questions of mentorship, influence, friendship, artistic communities, and gender. The book documents a new reality for younger women of writing in a community of women writers. Editing the book has created a community of women writers within the larger community for me and introduced me to amazing poets I hadn’t read or heard before.
Last night, however, my back in spasm from too much sitting, my wrists tingling and aching from too much typing, my husband (legitimately) annoyed because I was in a foul mood, my older son nearly in tears because his homework was to look through our trash and act like an archeologist but “there is no good trash!,” my younger son begging and pleading and threatening for just one more sweet anything, please, while I’m trying get them to finally settle down for one chapter of Anne of Green Gables so that they’ll go to sleep early enough for my husband and I to get our nightly fix of “Battlestar Galactica” or “Lost” or “24” before I floss and brush my teeth and finally, finally lie down just as the penisfetus wakes up and starts his “Saturday Night Fever” routine against my ribs and bladder. But I’d forgotten to set out the boys’ clothes so, in the half-dark I put out pants and socks and a new t-shirt. It’s black and has a pink picture of a woman in Victorian garb stepping out an egg. Poet Danielle Pafunda designed the t-shirts for members of the mompoets list-serve (run by Arielle Greenberg) to wear to AWP. Danielle also designed this kids’ version that says, in pink letters, “my mom is a poet.”
At the end of my day, I thought about this and wondered, “where, if anywhere, was the work of poetry today?” Was it in the conjuring of my grandparents who died so many years ago—the reverie of personal history? Was it in the apprehension of the tumbling canine hair balls? Was it in the hours of emailing poets and editors—the dreck work of making poetry public? Was it in the appreciation and survival of the rush of life that burst through the door when the boys came home from school even if “but there is no good trash!” never ends up in a poem? Was it the distinctly unpoetic double blink that Jack Bauer does while the camera lingers over his abused body? Is it the bizarre movements of the baby inside me who has the dubious honor of living inside a mompoet? Is it here, in the blog—the description of one woman’s life to an imagined audience? Or, since nary a poem was written or revised, was poetry a no-show yesterday?