How Proust Ruined my life & Other
Essays, Gloria Frym
Blazevox, 2020
I have long found my own tendencies as a poet more or less aligned with Frym’s. When she asserts, “To read and to engage in the created world is to partake in the architecture, the ordering, the shaping, the form that nourishes us as humans and gives us meaning.” (“A Habit of Reading” 43) I recall my fondness for reiterating: reading is writing just as writing is reading. We seek discover our own senses as defined by our capabilities in relation to these two joined so often for poets seemingly inseparable activities. Who are we? What do we believe in? What is it we do with our lives? Addressing these questions—though never necessarily answering them—is in part the ongoing work of the poet.
Ready dedication to belief in such
practice is evident in Frym’s “Posthumous” that withholds the identity of her
tribute-subject—short prose extraordinaire Lucia Berlin—until its closing yet
throughout manages intimate assessment of a meaningful relationship:
“she’d read everything. Once I visited her grave. It was emotional because she is buried next to a great poet, her own mentor and advocate. We’re literary family, in some way. And I want to say to her, you were so right about so many things that I sometimes dismissed as old-fashioned! She was a generation older, after all, didn’t believe in “quality time” with your kids, didn’t believe entertaining them, always wrote thank-you notes by hand, loved moving and re-decorating, hated orangey-yellow flowers, loved fuchsia and high heels and bright pink lipstick and expensive perfume, Coco by Chanel, eyebrow pencil, settees, pancake make-up, Elmore Leonard and Anthony Trollope.” (179)
(If there is curious interest, Berlin’s grave is located in Boulder near the Naropa campus and the poet Ed Dorn’s grave lies beside hers. It is quite the worthwhile pilgrimage.)
Close associations to other notable poets remain prominent throughout. From Allen Ginsberg’s knees, “The image of the most famous poet in America wearing shorts on a summer’s day is framed forever for me like an autograph.” (172) to her address at Robert Creeley’s San Francisco memorial, “His poems influence, never dictate (form) or duplicate. They are a constant teacher of words, unadorned, no makeup, no jewels at their throats.” (163) and her laudatory assessment of New College Poetics colleague David Meltzer, “He’s a scholar of everything that’s interesting and makes everything that isn’t rise to his occasion just by speaking of it.” (166) However, her investment in her own reading and accompanying writing pursuits remains everywhere prevalent.
Frym’s sense of the importance of
having both awareness and ownership over one’s historical poetic lineage prominently
rises up in “Lorine Niedecker’s Plain (Language)” when she lightly yet
decisively rakes Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams over the coals for
their much too easy assessment of Niedecker as the Emily Dickinson of their
era:
“Niedecker’s diction and syntax are plain and simple, deriving from her desire to condense the poem into a spare, intense, brief object. As we can see from most of Dickinson’s mature work, while her poems are intense, her syntax is complex and laced with exotic diction.
Perhaps it is the sense of condensation that struck Zukofsky and Williams; perhaps they had not read their Emily Dickinson quite so well, confusing the subtle differences between compression and condensation, which is somewhat akin to misidentifying perfume as essence.” (65)
Denying that there be left any question as to her position, Frym asserts, “Niedecker and Dickinson are oranges and apples.” (65) This is a poet’s handbook entry on rendering judgement upon the past insufficiencies concerning the faulty discernments of one’s masters. She maintains such lucid explication of her position throughout all these pieces.
Encouraging poets retain accountability
for what they write Frym urges a custodial responsibility in relation to
society. Despite the challenges of consumer-driven expectations, solipsistic
navel gazing is not what a poetic calling should be all about and Frym will not
have it. She reminds us:
“To witness and declare accurately, truthfully—these have always been the jobs of the poets. Always!!! In a country with so little memory, little recorded and so much distorted history, we have come to label our poetic acts as political. They are political because they directly counter the public myth and attempt to offer a private, more accurate version of history.” (“Poetics After the Millenium”185)
Never forget that poets are seers. They look beyond the ken of current times. There are no limits to what a poem accomplishes simply by existing. Of course, this is never easy. As Frym continues to note, “Poets, like any other citizen, have to resist amnesia and corporatism, which is sameness in the end, in spite of the many products it appears offer. Poets also have to resist the fatigue that ensues from such resistance.” (186) Poets of the future should take away from Frym’s essays the encouragement that is proper coming from a teacher. Namely, be aware, be opinionated, and do not hold back. Write the stuff you want to read (David Meltzer), that you need to read, that bears repeated re-readings, don’t stop and don’t look back (too much). Onward!
