Kultura i Historia nr 7/2004
Image, Ecriture, Histoire
16 janvier 2004
“Images of Memory: some poems by Mary Kennan Herbert”
…le passé est inevitablement lié au présent, et pour mieux comprendre le soi du présent, il faut comprendre le passé.
Anne Hébert [1]
When Memory is full
Put on the perfect Lid –
This Morning’s finest syllable
Presumptuous Evening said –
Emily Dickinson #1266 [2]
The most complete biographical statements about Mary Kennan Herbert I found on the web, and you can see several on your handout. Essentially, she is a writer with Midwestern roots. She was born in 1938 in St. Louis, Missouri, hometown of T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore, and spent most of her childhood there. During her adolescent years the family lived in Tennessee, and she wrote some poetry, accepted for publication by the Southern Baptist Convention, which payed her with blue, cloth-bound New Testaments. She obtained a University degree in art from Peabody College in Nashville, helping to pay for her education by selling art supplies. After she got her B.A. she took a greyhound bus to New York City. She married, moved to the suburbs, but her job and her children left her no time for creative pursuits in either poetry or painting. Her career as an editor in a publishing house went very well until the 1980s, when a merger ended her job security and 25 year-seniority. After several attempts at working for different publishers, she gave up her career. She also got a divorce. Then she remarried and moved to Brooklyn.
The summer of 1992 seems to have been a turning point. She began writing poetry again, for the first time in 30 years, and began psychoanalysis (but stopped 10 months later, for lack of funds).
She also decided to begin a graduate porgram in creative writing at The City College of New York, where she studied under Bill Matthews. Five months after she began writing poems, they started to be published. Aged 57, June 1, 1995, she obtained her master’s degree in creative writing and has since been teaching as an adjunct lecturer in several different Colleges in New York City, 12 months a year, to make ends meet.
In five years of sending out poems (in the period from 1992-1997), she managed to get 100 poems published. As she described it in a prose piece called “Poet or Perish” (posted on the web in 2002), “I was a frustrated writer who suddenly discovered that I had reached my mid-fifties… and I needed to work fast to make up for lost [3] years.” Her first chapbooks were published in Australia beginning in 1997. Her first American book, Coasts, was published in 2000. Her poems have been selected for poetry anthologies such as Mothers and Daughters: A Poetry Celebration (Random House 2001) and Line Drives, 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (Southern Illinois University Press, 2002). She won first prize in the 1999 poetry competition sponsored by the Midwest Conference on Christianity and Literature and first prize in the Jerseyworks’ Poetry Contest in 2002 (see www.jerseyworks.com).
*******************
Now, I want to retain a couple of guiding questions for this presentation, first, the question as presented in describing the theme of this workshop “Image, écriture, histoire” : “dans quelle mesure la dynamique visuelle participe-t-elle a la construction de fictions identitaires ?”, or, as I would like to put it in English, how do visual dynamics participate in the construction of identity?
Secondly, “What does it mean to be an American?”: I am guessing that this is a question Mary Keenan Herbert has asked herself many times. The poem “Fast Forward” (Inventory 6) speaks of her Polish father’s name change and religion change to become an all-American:
my father goes before a judge,
legally becomes a WASP.
He sheds his Polish name
like snakeskin.
(Inventory 6)
Later in the same poem the father writes :
on the back cover of my baby book,
on the occasion of my first Thanksgiving:
‘Mother’s and Father’s greatest desire
for Baby Mary Emelie
is that she be a real honest-to-goodness
American Girl
in a country where you can carve a turkey
and not a map – Quoting Eddie Cantor’s
telegram to President Roosevelt
on Thanksgiving Day 1938.’
(Inventory 8)
Real honest-to-goodness Americans learn how to play baseball, and one of her baseball poems, “One princess, four knights” is a beauty:
ONE PRINCESS, FOUR KNIGHTS
there were five of us I was the eldest
the only girl the one without wings
or so it seemed not having any family jewels
nor even a good pitching arm
I ironed their teeshirts and jeans
felt sorry for myself dreamed of princes and castles
volunteered to play left field
dropped the ball
they pretty much ignored me
finally okay you can play if you want to
had two teeth pulled to accommodate braces
my jaw full of Novocaine again offered to play ball
played till the armour began to wear off
so I bicycled home my mother tsked tsked
she told me to take aspirin
be brave like a boy
(Inventory 16)
Other poems indicate that this preoccupation with American (and feminine) identity is largely in the fore of her creative endeavor, such as “Adventures of An American Girl” (Coasts 26) which highlights some of the American people and places she finds important, including “Massachusetts and Emily’s poems” (26).
But let’s return to the first question. How do visual dynamics participate in the construction of identity? “The Education of Poets” will work nicely to help us think about that:
THE EDUCATION OF POETS
I was almost thrown by a horse. 1
My grandmother saw it happen. 2
She almost got kicked 3
when she tried to rescue me. 4
She dodged angry hooves, 5
falling – backward, 6
into the flower bed. I saw her 7
falling, into the peonies. 8
Her white hair, plump flesh, 9
surrounded by fat white flowers, 10
and now I see her stumble, then 11
tumbling into the flower bed. 12
I watch her fall. 13
The horse whirls, spins with me 14
clinging nervously, a horse 15
whirling in memory, like flung petals. 16
There are three actors here: the narrator, the grandmother, the horse. They are enclosed in four stanzas of four lines each, with verbs of observation in each stanza : “saw” (line 2), “saw” (line 7), “see” (line 11), “watch” (line 13). The visual image of the grandmother falling makes the strongest impression. Why? I suggest:
– because the grandmother is the one seen by the narrator.
– because 13 lines of the poem focus on the grandmother.
– because the sounds that describe the fall could also be the sounds of impact with the flowers:
Her white hair, plump flesh,
surrounded by fat white flowers
– because the grandmother is the one to save the narrator from falling off the horse and, at least metaphorically, into bad poetry.
The title of the poem being, “The education of poets”, the implications of poetic responsibility are present: the memory of the petals resulting from the grandmother’s fall must be preserved.
This poem is the first poem in her first published volume, An Inventory of Fragile Knowledge (1997), and its importance as an indication of intention cannot be denied. The rest of the poems in the volume are also “whirling in memory, like flung petals”…
So, this is a poetry of preservation, one dedicated to finding things which tend to get lost, to be forgotten. And this functions on a personal as well as on a more universal level. The final poem of Inventory of Fragile Knowledge, “Assume Crash position” is about what words the poet can muster in the final moments before death, but it also addresses, indirectly, the surviving poet’s memory-work of recovery.
The fact that the memory at work is given in the simile of “flung petals” turns attention to the visual. Another one of Mary Kennan Herbert’s adolescent jobs to finance her B.A. in Art was that of organizeing the slide collection in the college art department. Of this experience she wrote: “Staring at all of those images no doubt jolted my brain in poetic leaps; certainly they provided a storehouse of images to entertain my muse.” [4]
* * *
Being an American patriot is not an unambiguous task for Americans in war time, as we are all only too well aware. This was also true of the time period when Mary Keenan Herbert grew up in the 1940s. Her memories of this period are linked to her childhood, soldiers she met, and the mourning for lost soldiers. But the tone of this patriotism is more distanced and universal than the exacerbated nationalism advocated by George Bush in 2004. For this reason, at the beginning of the American election year, I though you might appreciate a closer look at some of the poems about non-heroic war… as in “War Stories”
WAR STORIES
I look over at their porch
and see our neighbor kiss his wife
the first time I ever see any man kiss his wife
a hero home from WWII on furlough
and public smooching is regarded as a good thing
this being the land of the free and this man
the defender of democracy
sweeps his wife into his arms
and they bend long and low in their sweet embrace
against the peeling wooden bannister of their porch in St. Louis
I being five am much impressed with passion
and can see how a brave soldier can
make any lady swoon
we took a trio of soldiers out to dinner
they are young and laughing
it is the least we can do says Dad
they are fighting for our country
these guys in uniform bend close to ask me my name
their courtesy like pieces of carefully folded paper
the little gold bars on their caps like slivers of the sun
laughing and smiling they are longing to have a good time
and I watch them for a long time while we walk into the future
worthy of an entire book
my cousin in the Navy home from the Pacific
comes for a visit and easily lifts up my best friend and me
and holds us high in the air over his head
he is the handsomest swab we ever have seen
I am seven and too embarrassed to look at him or return his smile
I don’t think I can stand
being up in the air like this held so securely
by those handsome brown hands that know about the sea
and the endings to stories
(Coasts 19)
This is a poem about seeing things, as the verbs “look”, “watch” and “see” (used 4 times) indicate. The three stanzas present three different scenes. In the first stanza, the movie-like embrace the five year-old sees, is highlighted for the reader as “the first time” the child has witnessed such marital affection. It is described with a child’s language: “public smooching is regarded as a good thing”, and using the abbreviations of history class: “WWII”. The image is stereotypical, like a visual cliché, a romantic moment in a war movie, or a scene from Gone With the Wind (1939).
In the second stanza, the three soldiers the family invites to dinner are “slivers of the sun”, (notice also the homonym son, sons of the fatherland, and like sons for the father). Clichés, verbal this time, are at work here: “it is the least we can do”. These soldiers are doomed, but their uniforms are sparkling. Perhaps it was their fortune cookies at the end of the meal that inspired the visual simile, “like pieces of carefully folded paper”. Or should that image be associated with the folded letters to inform their mothers of their deaths? But for the young child, “their courtesy” is what is remembered as she watches them “for a long time while we walk into the future.”
In the third stanza, the child is seven when her cousin in the Navy returns from the Pacific. His strength and handsomeness are on exibit as he “holds us high in the air over his head”. The youngster and her friend are ready to swoon for him, (wonderful 19th century word, “swoon”, reminiscent of past wars such as the American Civil War)… except for a more adult thought that intervenes:
I don’t think I can stand
being up in the air like this held so securely
by those handsome brown hands that know about the sea
and the endings to stories
The language works in euphemism to say that the cousin’s hands know about death, and the ends of soldiers’ lives. So the three part narrative of the poem’s structure, highlighted in the first line of the third stanza by “worthy of an entire book” is undermined in the last line by “the endings to stories”. The closing negates the propaganda images and clichés of the earlier moments in the poem. The total effect is to reinstate value to the lives that were lost, and to subvert the discourse of propaganda which accompanies war in any country.
Another undermining of propaganda occurs in “WATCHING Victory at Sea”.
WATCHING Victory At Sea
Fifties ennui:
Friday nights we watched TV,
Victory at Sea, with Richard Rodgers music
and that voiceover with noble litany:
the Japanese, the Japanese, the Japanese
take over the Pacific, but only for 30 minutes,
until our boys arrive with air power,
holding our dreams aloft, delicately,
for a half an hour. No other love have I,
the lyric replied when asked, why
must we die? Those little toy planes
skitter across the black and white
flight deck, on our Magnavox television set,
with soaring commentary and music
making WWII news footage new, splendid,
instant replay for veterans now safe
at home sipping a beer while gawky kids
are growing up, getting ripe for Viet Nam
and the end of Broadway musicals
as we knew them. No more cowboys
dancing, no more fighter planes –
unless they are in color, worthy
of Tom Cruise. The Pacific still roils.
Under her breast lie aircraft carriers,
coral-encrusted Sherman tanks,
old television sets, dog tags.
(Coasts 37)
The allusions here are visual once again: to TV programmes like Victory at Sea, “WWII news footage”, the dancing cowboys of the Broadway musical Oklahoma (1943), and then Viet Nam, the permanent TV news broadcast of the 1960s.
The poem falls in its last line, with death conveyed in the visual “old television sets, dog tags.” The fall is also in sound, as “dog tags” stands apart, giving a closure of sound (the lower sounds of the vowels and the two /g/). The decline toward death is made more powerful with the bringing of the past into the present by mentioning Tom Cruise an allusion to that popular movie of the Reagan era, Top Gun (1986) where Cruise learns about flying an F-14 at the “Top Gun” Fighter Weapons school. [5] Inspired by Reagan’s defense policy phrase “Star Wars” and box office hit of the year, it generated the largest influx of recruits to the US Navy since conscription in World War II, and can be considered precursory American propaganda for the 1991 Gulf War.
As in the previous poem, the childhood memories, recalled visually, are linked with now. Then ending is so powerful because those final words “dog tags” create a break with the fiction of propaganda to describe the reality of war, then and now.
Herbert’s references to the Second World War hardly mention Europe, and speak mostly of the Pacific. [6] Is that because her cousin was in the Pacific? Should it be linked to the guilt many Americans feel over Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is it because American political discourse never alludes to anything but saving Europe when World War II is mentioned? Herbert finds links between war, material gain, and consumerism in another poem in Succulent Confessions, “Variety Story Going Out of Business” (Succulent 40). The reason for the store’s closing could perhaps be traced to the moment when those “objects MADE IN / OCCUPIED JAPAN, mysterious” are no longer available. Without them, the store can no longer make a profit, and goes out of business.
* * *
One of the defining characteristics of Modernism is its atavistic use of the past, that is to say, the resuscitation of the past within the present, throwbacks to the past, suggesting that the past is not over. [7] For poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, that meant reviving authors, words, events from the distant past. But this can also work for a personal past, revived in memory. The poem “Skinned Knees, 1945” is an interesting example:
Skinned Knees, 1945
Not all of us made it to Olympic fame or motorcades.
I never learned to skate very well, whether on rollers or blades.
Careering downhill in a St Louis alley,
I fell to my knees and bloodied them impressively.
Age seven, determined to master the art of the wheel,
but lacking wings on my heals, I stained my city well.
I scraped my way across rough cement sidewalks,
and returned home with blood leaking from both legs.
What folly it is to seek such glory in an act of will.
A girl child on the home front, offering zeal, but no skill.
Ah, but she deserves a pat of recognition, smiles some GI.
Her right to skate, her taste of freedom! That’s why I’m game to die.
What did she know of heroism? She wanted to be
competent. She knew nothing of Guadalcanal.
(Succulent 33)
The last couplet of “Skinned Knees, 1945” (Succulent 33) is a bit disturbing, bringing the past into the present, where young women in America, then as now, strive for competency, knowing little of the history of American wars or of the West Pacific island Guadalcanal, site of one the first American offensives in the Pacific, November 1942. The Historical reference to Guadalcanal and the war in the Pacific may also point backward (other wars in the Pacific, the bloody massacres of the Philippines, for example), but it certainly, if only subtly, points forward to 1945 in the Pacific, the bombing in August of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this poem, the girl “stained” her city with “blood leaking from both legs”. The images here are images of war, transposed into the innocence of roller-skating wounds.
Let us also consider the allusions in line one: “Olympic fame” implies something visual, and one might think of the 1936 Berlin games. “Motorcades”, also visual, could be those of the 1945 victory parades, but perhaps also allude to the motorcade in Dallas, November 1963, so indelibly carved into the visual memory of every American. In which case, the second line can be read as a rather humoristic self-reflexive apology for the historical anachronism, slip-sliding with a word from a victory to a tragedy: I never learned to skate very well, whether on rollers or blades.
Now, speaking of motorcades, notice the childhood experience of transportation in “A Matched Team of Two Good Ole Mules” (Inventory 14)
A Matched Team of two good ole mules
Recall, this was Tennessee in the 1940s,
well launched into the age of gasoline,
the automobile era of our sorties.
New Chryslers, Buicks, Chevies, sleek and lean,
trucks and tractors and the basic black Ford
had conquered all that I have ever seen,
even in poor west Tennessee but, my lord,
my poor cousins drove to town with mule power –
a team of mules hitched to an old buckboard.
On board, I got to sit up front an hour,
I got to hold the reins and give commands,
on the seat next to cousin Gene, the driver.
I said ‘gee,’ ‘haw,’ – held power in my hands,
as we travelled slowly through Weakley County,
me waving like a princess to the stands.
It was a peaceful clip clop. The bounty
and rhythm of life blended together.
All became part of a synchronicity –
a mule team and Jungian inner weather,
I now feel on the paths of my fifties,
along rutted roads that seem to matter.
The road itself moved gently, so gently;
again I see the mail carrier trot by
on horseback, the last one, inevitably.
I watched him disappear, and then I try
to command him to stop, but he never will –
things will fade: road, rider, Tennessee sky.
But I was young. what we were thinking of, still,
were cold Grapettes at the general store.
‘Get yourself a soda,’ Gene said, and I feel
again the thrill of cold soda and more:
in the ice house, we poked under sawdust
to see the gleam of ice at summer’s core.
Uncovered booty, as children must,
to revel in soda, a humble memory,
on the warm afternoon that I cannot trust.
It will not wait for me, it is reverie.
Gone. I too have waited to be nine again,
under the warm sun singing songs to me.
Feel the wagon move with a soft yearning,
thoseold iron wheels rolling not now, but then,
turning, then, into a happy ending.
(Inventory 14)
The most striking line for me here was “the automobile era of our sorties.” For the young girl narrator, the sorties were to raid the general store, for a “soda” with her cousin Gene (line 30), and see “Uncovered booty” (line 34). But the word sortie also means a plane attack on the enemy. The juxtaposition is all the more striking as it announces an opposition between the mechanical and the organic, to put it into Bergsonian terms. This continues to be expressed with war vocabulary, where the automobiles in stanza two “had conquered all…”. The natural ways, the love of nature itself, will inevitably be sacrificed to the car, suggests the poet of the present, who resists the temptation to fall into nostalgia of a past she “cannot trust” (line 36).
“August on the Home Front” is another childhood memory. Whether or not you postulate it as a narrative of 1945, the month August links it implicitly to the Atom Bomb.
AUGUST ON THE HOME FRONT
Jimmy’s Dad bought a tin bucket full of beer
for the evening’s respite on his front porch,
after the dishes were washed and his worn wife
would join him on the swing and I would watch
their silhouettes become darker and thicker,
as the dark came in warm folds to hold us closer.
Under the swing sat the bucket and by dark
it would be empty, and Jimmy’s Dad would on a bad
night go fetch another and on a good night went
inside to talk on the phone to their newly married
daughter. Then he might make love to his worn wife,
or so I was told, and what I was able to figure out
looking at this pre-TV scenario from our kitchen
window with the flaking paint and no screen to hide
our desires or our front row view of American life.
The tavern across the street featured three fine
thoroughbreds in the window, a cutout cardboard
profile of a trio of champoin racehorses in their
winner’s circles of roses; A splendid die cut
and four color lithographed dots to impale
my tender imagination when I dreamed of horses
and winning. The best pictures of equine
achievement were to be found in the window
of the tavern and in Jimmy’s father’s Irish tales
of disappointment and glory, especially noticeable
at his darling daughter’s wedding. The whole
neighborhood was invited, including me age seven
and a half, half in love with Jimmy and life
in St. Louis, even in summer, in the thickest days
of late summer when the hum of planes overhead
reminded us daily of the power of America
and the end any day now of WWII. Home would come
heroes including young husbands and boys whose
silence we had heard every night on the porch
when without television or air conditioning
it was necessary to wait out the evenings
from supper to sex, waiting on the porch
or racing across August browned lawns to catch
lightning bugs and thunderheads and freedom
in that sweet time when wives waited for husbads
to bring home the bacon, the sudsy bucket, victory
over the Nazis, or some soapy daydream worth keeping;
Then, one dusk when almost dark an owl came to rest
from his predations on Japs and was foolish enough
to perch for a bit of R and R on overhead wires
silhouetted like a bomber’s target he loomed
all too symbolically over all of us until loca [8]
of boys and men arrived with rifles from some pioneer
Boone paste in our Midwestern closets. They used him
as target practice and general excitement ensued
until the sun plummeted into the night and we were
grabbed by adult hands to be hurried to bed
and the mortally wounded owl fell into our circle
amid hoots of joy. We got ‘im and we got ‘im and we-
why did you want to kill him I asked, drowned out
by the sudden joy of macho victory of lads and tall
warriors too old for WWII- with a kill, after all.
(“Gangway #12”: www.gangway.net/12/gangway12.1.html)
As usual, in this poem the reader is made to see things with the narrator, especially in the first eight stanzas of the poem, through the use of words like “watch”, “looking”, “front row view of American life”, “pictures”. The poem is rather rich in objects that fly: “planes overhead” (line 30), “lightning bugs and thunderheads” (line 39), “an owl” (line 43ff), “bomber’s target” (line 46).
As far as I can tell, the turning point of the poem comes in line 43, “Then, one dusk when almost dark an owl came to rest / from his predations on Japs…” The choice of the word “predation” is extremely interesting here. It means “the act of preying or plundering” as my Webster’s describes it, which was first coined in 1942. Owls, normally nightly birds of prey, are thought to modify the populations of their prey, such was the theory initially presented in 1942 by Charles Elton in a book entitled Voles, Mice and Lemmings, Problems in Population Dynamics (Oxford University Press, 1942). Elton’s notion of predation as a factor in shaping population dynamics did not catch on in the forties, and was not re-evaluated until the seventies. Since then, the thesis has grown in popularity, demonstrating for example, that population cycles of small mammals in Northern hemispheres can be linked to the effects of density dependent predation and food shortage. What I find particularly striking here, within the context of the poem and within the context of the war as it was experienced in August, is the rather subversive notion that war theory (or perhaps rather peace theory) goes unrecognized as a form of predation… I am also rather grateful for a poet who makes a link between the damage caused by war and the environment, which is always the second casualty, bearing in mind the adage that “Truth is the first casualty of war”.
But is there more? “he loomed/all too symbolically” strikes me as an indicator. Is the owl also symbolic of something else? Wisdom? A creature with feathers as scapegoate? A figure in Tar and Feathers? The owl is lynched, no question about it. And that recalls other lynchings. Just how active was the KKK in St. Louis during the war? Perhaps the poem evokes the desire of African Americans to have V for Double Victory, over racism at home as well as abroad.
The bloodlust of the hunters in the poem is brought out with sounds of doom: “loomed” at the end of line 46 is taken up in reverse with “Boone” at the beginning of line 49, it’s /b/ recalling the “bomber” and “boys” of the previous stanza. But the wise guys that shoot the owl give out “hoots of joy” (line 54), and the little girl’s question of “why” brings no satisfactory answer.
When thinking about Mary Kennan Herbert’s contribution to poetry now, I could not agree more with Paul Volsik’s recent comment concerning Irish poetry: “…one feels strongly that from the point of view of literary history in the traditional sense, the rise of women poets… is indeed one of the major defining characteristics of the recent past.” [9] This remark can easily be applied to contemporary poetry in general, and more particularly to poetry dealing with war and violence. (One charactersitic of most feminisms is a fairly solid opposition to war.) Herbert brings to these topics an interaction between the personal and the political, the subjective and the universal that seems appropriate. In this sense, like the modernists, her presentation of the past revives lost memory. Her interaction with the historical has a passionate side to it.
I would like to end this presentation by considering how Herbert treats one recent tragedy, with the poem entitled “Twin Towers Tango”. In Freud’s discussion of traumatic experiences in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), what returns to haunt the victim of trauma (that is, the person who sees it but suffers no physical injury) “is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known.” [10] Narratives of trauma present a double telling, they oscillate between a crisis of death and a crisis of life suggests Cathy Caruth. Historical witness is based on this double telling of “the inextricability of the story of one’s life from the story of a death”. [11] For Caruth, trauma can lead “to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound.” [12] The listening to the other seems to be what is operative in this poem. It is worth keeping in mind that Herbert is a resident of New York.
TWIN TOWERS TANGO
Your ashes, your ashes, your ashes, your ashes,
your ashes times thousands cover my words
with a fine coating that I am afraid to wipe away.
I am afraid.
I might erase you.
I apologise for these words like rashes,
burns, lesions.
Yes, I am alive and you are not. Planes still fly.
Dust and words are mundane.
Less than 5,000 fans at the game today, folks,
yet that is the number of deaths, jokes, and death jokes.
The death of jokes. All a matter of perspective.
Some of the rescue dogs died from fumes.
I am comparing dogs with humans?
Have I no shame?
Cynics chortle. Hearts still beat strongly.
Perhaps thousands of dog lovers died too,
in those tombs.
Read again Thomas’s poem. Rages, rages.
Smoke is coming through the walls, Mum,
I can’t talk now. I can’t breathe.
Hell is mundane with its cliches of burning hands
and calm farewells.
Ashes cover neat stacks of button-down shirts,
WSJ computers, a statue of a rearing, defiant horse
in a hotel lobby near Ground Zero.
Firefighters’ bodies are underneath, of course.
Fire fighters, a frightened girl, all part of the Pile.
Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in Wall Street garb
are still grinning through the dust,
smiling while a watch theif is still sinning. Life goes on.
Dig we must for a Greater New York.
How can this poem get written? A cartoon character
is smitten, grinning at ghosts. Bugs
is still wearing his trench coat.
Seven jumped together, clasping hands.
Burned birds were found on suddenly sacred ground.
A guy is hosing down the sidewalk.
Talk, talk, talk, it’s good for you.
In the name of,
in the name of, in the name of,
smapshots made by a commuter show the horror
again and again.
But why me, asked #2,345.
We only wanted to party, to marry, to feel next summer’s sun
at the Jersey Shore. What can I say
that has not been said. Tide is in, tide is out.
Here are my words.
I know you want to give them back.
Sorry, I hear him or her say, I know you mean well,
but I miss my mum, my dad, my husband,
my wife, my lover, my children, my pals at Chumley’s,
my boys of October,
my nightmares,
my misery and dreams of happiness.
(Travelling 68-70)
The other is imagined here, perhaps to help Herbert get on with the business of living. Could one also say the same of the novel by Frederic Beigbeder, Windows on the World (Grasset 2003)?
This poem, without belittling the tragedy of lost lives in any way, also lets in some critical distance. The Disney characters hint at what is wrong within American society. The effects of the exacerbated consermerist [13] culture that infantalizes [14] its members are not neglected. Nor is the fact that the towers housed the Wall Street Journal. Once again, the distancing to think about the event keeps Herbert from unleashed, uncritical American patriotism as well as its opposite, a lack of sympathy for the victims. The question asked by #2,345 is the question any one might ask, and it can be shared with the unjustly held prisoner of Guatanamo, a civilian victim of the 1991 bombing of Bagdad, or by the American foot-soldier who dies through sabatoge in Irak.
What the narrative of trauma can accomplish, suggests Caruth, is a path to “an ethical relation to the real.” [15] I feel pretty certain that Mary Kennan Herbert would like that phrase, so I will stop.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Caruth, Cathy.
Unclaimed Experience: Tauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1996.
Herbert, Mary Kennan.
An Inventory of Fragile Knowledge, Charnwood, Australia : Ginninderra Press, 1997.
Coasts, A Collection of Poems Bound By the Sea, Marshfield Hills, Massachusetts: Meadow Geese Press, 2000.
Succulent Confessions, Ginninderra Press, 2000
(Poet or Perish, Ginninderra Press)
(A Path Clearly Marked, Ginninderra Press)
“Poet or Perish” on Freeindiamedia.com (2002): http://www.freeindiamedia.com/poetry/23_oct_poetry.htm page 4/18 (12/1/04).
Travelling, Ginninderra Press, 2003.
Volsik, Paul. “Engendering the Feminine: two Irish poets – Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian” in Etudes Anglaises 56:2 (April-June 2003) 148-161.
* * * * *
HOW I DID THE WORK LEADING TO THIS PRESENTATION
1) Stupidly, I procrastinated before starting the work (this is what usually happens with me). Long ago (say last October), I wrote to the author asking her to mail me a chapbook – and she was exceedingly generous and mailed me 4 volumes, which after acknowledging I promptly lost among the piles on my desk. From time to time I would relocate the books, open them at random and read a couple of poems. I also printed out a few poems by MK Herbert found on the web, and put them in a folder.
2) On December 31, I began serious work on this project, since finally I was unable to procrastinate any longer.
3) I read the 4 volumes in my possession in chronological order, beginning with the oldest first. This happened in several 2-4 hour work sessions. I made notes while reading: first impressions, links with other poems just read, thematic preoccupations of the author… unusual structures or poetic figures noticed in a first reading. Then I reread the poems posted on the web.
This enabled me to begin to see what I liked (the historical poems especially those which spoke of World War II) and disliked about the poems (the rather narcissistic use of poet and poetry in a number of poems). I began to wonder if the presentation should even happen, if I hadn’t chosen the wrong poet to work on, and having procrastinated too long, would not have the time to change anything…
4) I began typing the handwritten notes into the computer, beginning to see what directions I would like to take when working on Herbert’s poetry. I decided to say some negative things, and to begin with those, but then to move rapidly into the parts of her work that appealed to me, so as to give you something to think about.
* * * * *
CRITICISM existing on MK Herbert (no articles yet??)
on jacket cover of Coasts, Janet McCann,an anthologist for Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, praised the collection.
NOTE THE REGISTER: Many poems include low-level American English. “smooching” (Inventory 11), “tsked-tsked” (Inventory 16), “happy-go-lucky” (Inventory 8). What efforts is she making to get to a noble vernacular?
[1]
Hébert recorded by Kelton W. Knight, Anne Hébert, In Search of the First Garden, New York: Peter Lang, 1998, 1.
[2]
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, London: Faber and Faber, 1975, 554.
[3]
Mary Kennan Herbert, “Poet or Perish” on Freeindiamedia.com (2002): http://www.freeindiamedia.com/poetry/23_oct_poetry.htm page 4/18 (12/1/04).
[4]
Mary Kennan Herbert, “Poet or Perish” on Freeindiamedia.com (2002): http://www.freeindiamedia.com/poetry/23_oct_poetry.htm page 5/18 (12/1/04).
[5]
Top Gun was just re-released on CD in 2002, aptly timed for the current war in Irak.
[6]
There is however a parrellel poem to this one which is more European in focus: “Wartime years in St. Louis” in Kultura I Historia,
http://www.kulturaihistoria.umcs.lublin.pl/archives/140
[7]
This is discussed by Herbert N. Schneidau, Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism. NY: Oxford UP, 1991.
[8]
Perhaps an article is needed here. This is the way the poem reads on the web page.
[9]
Paul Volsik, “Engendering the Feminine: two Irish poets – Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian” in Etudes Anglaises 56:2 (April-June 2003)161.
[10]
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Tauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1996, 6.
[11]
Ibid., 7-8.
[12]
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Tauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1996, 8.
[13]
Consumerism, a term coined in 1944, refers to the theory that an increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable.
[14]
The verb infantilize was first used in 1943, to make or keep infantile or to treat as infantile.
[15]
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Tauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1996, 102.
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