it was never simple, even for birds,
this business of nests.
– Linda Pastan, Meditation by the Stove
The 2005 Prairie Schooner Poetry Book Prize was awarded to Kathleen Flenniken’s luminous collection, Famous (University of Nebraska Press 2006). The prairie schooners were the Conestoga wagons that snaked their way across “empty” plains filled with unknown terrors, up over the Western peaks, to the promise of a new life. The image of a sleek schooner plying the cracked earth of distant dreams, coddling within its ribs daily domestic dramas, linked to the great train by communal yearnings and a visceral need for survival, is an apt one for this collection. In poems that veer from quietly feminist to desperate housewife, Kathleen Flenniken uncovers the desires that drive us, headlong, into life.
A caveat: I am totally unqualified to review Famous because I am Kathleen’s friend, I am twice published in a journal Kathleen co-edits, I am not a woman, and I am not an academic poet, though Kathleen is well on the way to an MFA. A comfort: I am totally qualified to review Famous, because I know Kathleen too well to believe she would countenance false flattery, I am half of a near quarter-century marriage, I helped my younger daughter prepare for an exam and cooked dinner while writing this review, and I am not an academic poet, a blessing that leaves my mind relatively uncluttered.
In my playful opinion, there is one measure which trumps all others in recommending a poetry book to others: does it contain "go back to" poems? I’m sure you all know what I mean. Go back to poems are poems we go back to time and again as life bounces through us. We each have our own personal list of go back to poems, as unique as our DNA, and often as overlapping. Mine includes Yeats’ Adam’s Curse, Li-Young Lee’s From Blossoms, and Denise Levertov’s The Secret, among many others.
Famous has ELEVEN go back to poems, by my count. Now, let’s be clear. These are not just good poems. These are GO BACK TO poems. The kind that fill a lacuna in our cellular structure, just as surely as bagels & lox. As far as I’m concerned, the other 40 poems could be “I think that I shall never see / A koan as lovely as XYZ,” and Famous would still be an essential poetry book.
But they are much more than that. In her clear-eyed presentation “On the Writers’ Craft” for the It’s About Time writers’ series in Seattle (curated by Esther Helfgott with assistance from Denise Calvetti Michaels), Kathleen said: “I didn't discover poetry, not really, until I was into my 30s, already with a husband, two toddlers and a strong desire to make my escape from diapers and ‘what's for dinner?’ Though at the same time I loved that life.” Her response is to write poems of discovery within the constraints of family life. Not the sentimentalized Hallmark version of family life, but the monotonous, identity-swallowing existence that drives so many of its inmates, naked and crying, into the arms of a lover or the grill of an oncoming semi. The kind of imperfect monogamy and flawed parenting we really live, if we are courageous enough to stick it out.
We have plenty of poets of divorce and abandonment, but not enough poets of sticking with it and even, in fleeting moments of glory, growing and glowing, despite everything. And so, Famous accomplishes something terribly important and rare. Famous takes the unsexy humdrum of what Kathleen calls “the way you spend your real life, succumbing / to the siren call of ice cream and original Star Trek”
(Everybody Wang Chun Tonight), and helps us see afresh its deepest rhythms, its comfort, its satisfaction, its triumphs, humor, loss and pain.
Let’s start by examining How to Read This Story to Your Children. The title tells us what the poem is “about”, though Kathleen’s poems are rarely about what they are ostensibly about. It is peopled (dogged?) by all the characters in a conventional family – the dog, the child, the clueless father, “the smiling mother”. Each has their dark side, even the “grey at the muzzle, / profound and gentle” dog who has “a taste for tasseled loafers.” The child is “suspiciously good natured.” The father has “only just / wakened into his life,” – “Where / have I been? he seems to ask / behind his newspaper. / How do I enter the story?” The mother “who speaks of nothing / but blueberries and making jam” is seething with anguish, ready “if her child asks one more question,” to “run out and cut off all her hair.” But despite this spot-on, devastating portrait of the family, there is kindness and humility in Kathleen’s point of view, for “no matter how they never learn, / you forgive them everything.” Kathleen’s profound connection to the shared humanity in the portrait deepens the poem’s ability to communicate our domestic selves.
However wonderful, I haven’t even tallied How to Read This Story to Your Children as one of my go back to poems. No; I reserve that rarified encomium for poems such as the next one in the collection, Elisabeth Reads Poetry, which is the kind of poem that every poet with children must kick themselves for not having written first. “Elisabeth is two and reads / a book of poetry off my shelf, / opens with Yah yah sumpin to eat”, and immediately the reader knows that this is one of those channeled poems so true and clear that not a word could be altered. But do I hear someone out there thinking “saccharine”?! Listen closely; if you have wit you can’t miss the acerbic undertones: “while I read over her shoulder / to check for genius, / like my friend who found / her two-year-old breaking / the alphabet code, / reading real words / as if he’d climbed / into the high cupboards, / eating sugar and poison / willy nilly – a horrifying miracle.” It turns out, of course, that Elisabeth is making nonsense sounds instead of reading, but the poet turns our foolish notions of genius around on us: “she’s a genius / of prolonged babyhood, / of its light, its wild uncoded rhythms, / playing late into the open afternoon.”
Please indulge me one more go back to poem of joy before we get into the many poems echoing Thoreau’s aphorism about quiet desperation. I can’t contain myself – I’ve lived this too many times. The poem is The Beauty of the Curve, a portrait of the third grade Spring recorder recital, illuminated by the standard distribution bell curve. Need I say more? “Ninety third-graders / fumble with their instruments, take a breath // and blow. Their parents, braced, breathe too / as ‘Hot Crossed Buns’ emerges, a little scattershot – / the Normal Distribution brought to life.” This knowing humor welcomes all our flaws, the children’s and the parents’: “In consecutive measures of almost unison // it’s easy to believe these children are musicians. / Their parents do, so stirred by ‘Ode to Joy’ / they rise to their feet with the final phrase, // clapping from the darkened auditorium / at once, as one, heroically, like the parents / they’ve meant to be.” There it is – that brief glimpse of redemption within the strictures of family humdrum and cruelty.
Kathleen Flenniken, like all of us, is at her best when she tells truth, and of course she knows it. “I am not against happiness in love poems. I am against dishonesty,” she told the It’s About Time gathering. But for the poet of daily life, honesty can be a dangerous business. Kathleen succeed less well upon the rare occasion that she pulls her punches. An example might be Map of the Marriage Bed – who could really publish such a poem while still married? It starts out promisingly enough: “Some nights he wants directions / and she tells him which crossroads, / where to idle, where to drive fast and hard.” It deepens: “Some nights only half-way there he pulls / into a motel hidden in a grove of Douglas firs / because they’re lost – they’re always lost”. But it ends in a muddle, in which they crawl out the passenger window, weep, say a prayer, cling to each other, and we are told: “Once she found a knife in the field where they lay. / And once she found a ruby ring.” Excuse me? What we’d really like to see is the earlier drafts, not this limp-wristed version in which the poet pulls back to the refuge of jumbled symbolism.
Kathleen also succeeds less well in the sprinkling of little academic poems – poems about poets that lack immediacy (Reading Hamilton’s Biography of Robert Lowell; Miss Marianne Moore Takes a Tango Lesson); her sketch entitled Life and Art. Most often, however, Kathleen delivers unvarnished insight and a belly blow to the lunar plexus. As in What I Learn Weeding: “But mostly, love, we pull [dandelion] heads off / to achieve our shallow vision of a garden. / The root cleaves to the darkness, // the same dark that sets our hips to rocking, / to burrowing into the other’s body / or slapping it away.” As in Calling Up Ghosts, while in the kitchen making small talk with her (we learn) dead father: “It’s our way // of marking time until Mother wakes up. Maybe / because she died first, she’s undependable about rising”. A more chilling “maybe” I’ve never read. As in A Middle Child is Born, describing the newborn “short on talk // and a little standoffish”, and the new (old) mother “Grave with perfection / and all the ways she would let him down.” As in the go back to poem Preservation, which describes a trip to the museum leading a class of third graders just four weeks after losing love, and coming upon a stuffed gorilla the protagonist had known as a child: “I think irreverently // of the milk expiring in my refrigerator, / how attached I am to the date on the carton, / the day before the world went sour. // Even milk observes the rites of decomposition, / the holy rites that Bobo was denied.”
This may be the only poem to express both lost love and religion denied through the metaphor of milk – isn’t it marvelous? And, perhaps most devastating of all, as in another of my personal go back to poems, Sarah Chang Plays Violin, beginning in a flight of musical prodigy, bleeding into a self-portrait of the precariously married couple: “A man rapt in profile and his wife, a spigot / of weeping, streaming gratitude to this girl / whose playing reveals who I am – lover, / mother and daughter, afraid, alight, awake, / alone. Nothing, again, we’ll ever talk about.” In the car ride home, after the couple witnesses a near traffic collision: “You can’t hear her anymore, I almost ask / as you touch and touch the brake. / And you switch on the radio.” What a poignant and horrifying portrait of non-communication! Must I admit to a glimpse of myself in this mirror?
Kathleen complained (too strong a word – Kathleen doesn’t complain) to me that a reviewer called her book “too modest”, and indeed the back-cover blurbs start out with “winning surface modesty” and move right into “[u]npretentious, self-effacing” and “quietly surprises.” I’m not sure what sousaphone-playing school of poetry would consider this a drawback, but it seems to me that twirling silver tassels have never been a requisite of fine poetry. It is true that Kathleen avoids so-called “dirty” words and her characters tend to live inside themselves, but they are not always so modest, as in Built Like That, whose protagonist confesses that “The alphabet makes love to me / while the tots are at school”, and moans “O Monsoon, / must you cling, I’m already drenched / in juice?” Even quieter poems like Woman Reading are plenty sensual, as the common act of licking a finger to turn the pages vexes her, “all context lost // but blouse and skirt, this urge / to take them off”, until she finds that “maybe just a finger to her lips / is all the afternoon / was asking for. // And lays aside her book.” Which lips? Nothing modest here! Nor in Prayer Animals, the final poem that calls us to “pray to the pink flamingo / who migrated north to a snowdrift. / When you’re that fabulously wrong / and lost and cold, pray to be exotic. / Pray to be shocking and irresistible.”
With Famous, Kathleen gets at least half her prayer granted: though not shocking (except, perhaps, to people in her old hometown), her poems are irresistible. Her essential success lies in showing us the many ways in which small lives like our own are big. Famous comes in three parts: I. Minor Characters; II. The Minor Celebrities; and III. Fame. But the characters in each are entangled in the same conversation. From the first poem, The League of Minor Characters, in which the main character we’ve shunned becoming comes to our door, “The music crests // and it’s time to speak”, to The Minor Celebrities such as “The lover in a major poet’s poem, / draped naked at either end or slipping / in and out of the poem’s surface like a dolphin, / slick with the words you want for your own”, to the penultimate The New Language that makes us “wet // with what will suck us back to the living / ready to speak with new tongues”, Kathleen’s poems are a conversation in which we’re already deeply engaged. It is an essential conversation, the conversation with those we love best, need most, and hurt worst. It is a conversation with that part of our self that longs to be – if not exactly famous – then wild and free as can be without letting go of spouse, ghost parents, and dear sweet children. It is the Conversation With a Sensualist engaged in by even the most prim and proper housewife. “When he invokes / eroticism – a word she’s never actually said / out loud – its syllables recline spread-eagled // on the chaise lounge of his tongue.” In the end, “Her defense devolves into dots and dashes / in her mouth, an oral SOS, / then even the S’s say too much // and all that’s left is oh oh oh”
Go back to the poems of Famous. You may find yourself already there.
