Tensions and dichotomies are memorable. Happy melodies with sorrowful words. Sometimes memory is faulty, and all we take away is an impression, a fragment, a feeling or a phrase. We remember things wrong. We think we love a poem, then we figure out we don’t. Or, we continue to love it because we once loved it. Our response changes when our situation changes.

When the women poets I studied with were becoming women poets, there weren’t a lot of women poets. Thanks to them, however, it didn’t occur to me that being a woman presented any obstacles to being a poet. Elaine Equi’s work would occasionally hint at these hurdles, and it would occur to me to be grateful for her. Having a woman poet for my first workshop teacher was probably a lot more important to me than I can even know.

I think of Elaine’s poem, Three Deaths, again and again. It appears in The Corners of the Mouth (Iridescence, 1986), possibly the first book of poems I owned that was written by someone I knew personally, and certainly my first signed book. I looked at the poem again after 10 years or so recently, and I found that all I really remembered was the last section. The language has a flatness that makes the pain with which it trembles all the more moving, and I think that tension between tone and content is what vaults it into the stark clarity of the unforgettable.

Elaine Equi
from Three Deaths

3.

My father was a samurai
that killed over 9,000.
He wore his armor to the
dinner table.
Grown men wept
at the sight of his mustache.
My mother committed hari-kari
rather than face him
without a son.

But instead of being angry,
he called me Chicken Little.
My nursery was guarded
by nine dragons
of gold and jade for good luck.
When I accidentally fell
into a pit of hot coals,
my father sat before a statue
of Buddah, trying to
strip off his own flesh.
The neighbors lost respect
for him and said he was bewitched.
Even over a male child,
such grief was considered excessive.
But for a girl, for girl,
for a girl—they clucked.

“Memorable” is a quality that may have nothing to do with greatness. Where does “memorable” fall in the hierarchy of value? Some poems, like certain aromas and weather, remind us of something, they connect to our personal history, an event or specific time. But there must be more to it than that, since only a tiny percentage of what we encounter achieves the status of “memorable.” The poems we remember best may not reflect our aesthetic; they may be the only poem we know by that writer; it may only be a certain line that sends the synapses firing.

The first poetry reading I ever went to was in a bar on Belmont St. in Chicago. Elaine Equi, my first poetry teacher, took the whole workshop to hear a few local poets. Elaine has written some memorable poems herself (one of which I’ll post later this week). I heard a lot that night, but this piece, by Lydia Tomkiw, is the one I never forgot. I don’t know if the “Paul” in the poem is Paul Hoover, but signs point to yes. Lydia was a student in his undergraduate workshop at that time.

Hearing a poem read aloud adds to the experience (see Linebreak), but many of my own memorable poems were first encountered on the page. The common thread running through the pieces I think of first is place and time: They’re written by the poets I encountered when it was first becoming clear what poetry really was, and what it would mean to me.

Lydia Tomkiw
Little Dead Body Poem

How right you are, dear Paul, that
We hear of famous people’s deaths while on vacation.
Perhaps it’s so that their funerals are not too crowded,
With their loyal fans being out of town and all.
Those celebrities are pretty clever.
I’ve heard that somebody is born every eight seconds,
so I presume that someone dies every eight seconds,
Just to keep things even;
It makes me feel shortchanged when I read the obituary page—
Someone’s holding back information.
It also prompts me to flip through the telephone directory on
Sleepless nights, saying over and over again,
“Yup, you’re all going, every last one of you...”
Wow, heaven must be a big place.
I don’t know too many dead people, but folks tell me I’m young.
When my grandfather died, he was laid out
In the Bub Funeral Home, and I was secretly glad Mr. Bub did not
Change his name to something more romantic
When he went into business.
I just wish it was less memorable.
My high school locker partner, Ned, worked part-time
For a mortician. Imagine dressing dead people,
Straightening their ties, fluffing up their hair
So you can afford to take a girl to the movies on Saturday night.
That’s love. That’s adolescent desperation.
I would have been honored to go to the movies with Ned and
Have him buy me popcorn. Instead, I went out with a boy
Who died. The hardest part for me was knowing that
His body did not just dissipate on the bed the minute he died. I
Think that’s what keeps me off of suicide: the idea that something
Is left for someone else to clean up. How rude and inconsiderate—
It’s a pain to take out the weekly trash, let alone figure out what to do
With over a hundred points of flesh that’s about to go bad.
It would be even worse in India where there’s a religious sect
That believes you can’t desecrate any of the elements with the dead—
They can’t be buried or burned, they can’t be cast out to sea,
So they’re taken to the top of the Tower of Silence
Where they become the vulture’s problem.
How’s that for passing the buck?
No, when I go, I want to go clean, convenient, leaving no mess
As if I vaporized while taking a shower,
As if I moved to Antarctica leaving no forwarding address.

first appeared in COLUMBIA POETRY REVIEW