Prompt: Write a poem that tells a story about a silent interaction with a stranger.
Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “Lynne’s note accompanying her submission was simply, ‘Just having some fun with this one.’ Here, the fun for the writer becomes positively seductive for us readers. The sharp turn of the last line volts us from an initial reaction of laughter to a lingering exploration of what it means to age.”
Lynne Knight: “Getting old is something I’ve been hesitant to acknowledge in poems, as if doing so might decrease my chances of getting published because, really, who wants to hear about it? And yet, here I am, an old woman, and I know my default position every single day ought to be gratitude. Most days, it is. But I love being alive so much, and I love being able to write every day so much, that at moments it’s hard not to long to be young again, just starting out.” (web)
Lynne Knight: “One of my poet friends said several years ago that she was sick of reading poems by women who were just whining about getting old. I thought at the time that I’d never end up writing such poems. But I’m getting old, and here they come—not, I hope, without humor and hope.” (web)
My first class left a little early. He came in, hesitant. I need for someone look my grammar, he said, holding out a sheet of paper the color of old mushrooms. His hand was dirty, his coat, his clothes. You teacher? he asked. You could help me with the English? I nodded. I am plumer an electricin, his paper began. Sometime I like my work but is dangerus. Very busy putting heavy pipe.
I wrote in missing words, corrected the spelling, made him read it aloud. Sonetines, he read. I stopped him, made him say sometimes, hum the mmmm. He practiced humming then asked if he could stay in the room to copy his paper over. He wrote slowly, keeping his eyes on the words, as if they might slip away. Midway, without looking up, he asked if I’d read Heningway.
Hemmmingway, I said. Mmmm.
Mmmm. He smiled, or half smiled, hiding bad teeth. He’d read the one about the man with the fish, read it in Spanish. Did I like teach literature, he asked. I loved to teach it, I said, stressing the to. I was a poet, I added. I loved Neruda; did he know Neruda?
Both hands flew to his heart. His smile forgot to hide his teeth. And he gave me Neruda, the last of the twenty love poems, his voice rising, his face like the old man’s when he feels the fish take, feels the line running, running, taut, sure, his.
Lynne Knight: “I write poems to find out what I think and feel about the world. So I’ve never stopped feeling like a student, even after having taught for three decades. The experience in ‘The Lesson’ seems to me proof that when a student is ready (as I try always to be), a teacher will come.” (web)
Lynne Knight is the guest on episode 16 of the Rattlecast, Tuesday, November 5th. Click the image to watch and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel!
Lynne Knight: “I was a new mother fifty years ago, a hippie in Toronto, and reflecting back, I’m struck by how much of the optimism and hope we felt then has been darkened or eclipsed today. I continue to believe we can achieve things across or despite borders—I’m sure many of the NASA scientists who worked on the Apollo mission were immigrants! It’s heartbreaking to see the frenzy being whipped up against ‘the other’ when we’re all here together on the same planet, subject to the moon’s gravitational pull.” (web)
“Fugue: Red Bird Taking Wing” by Lynne KnightPosted by Rattle
Lynne Knight
FUGUE: RED BIRD TAKING WING
after Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s La Femme qui fuit, a novel based on the life of her grandmother, the poet and artist Suzanne Meloche Barbeau (1926–2009)
I. With Abandon
I had to leave. I couldn’t breathe. It had nothing to do
with love for my beautiful babies, Mousse & François.
Nothing at all. It had to do with a disappeared bird,
a red bird I’d painted, a bird taking wing, about to soar.
One day I came home to all but the last of one red wing,
disappeared under my husband’s work.
My bird taking wing, about to soar: painted over by Marcel.
I couldn’t breathe. I had so many words they flew
in my throat like birds trapped in a room. They stayed there for years
until I could no longer breathe. So I had to leave.
I loved my babies, their small feet & hands, their sweet skin,
the way their eyes looked into mine like a mirror,
like a road with no end. But I had to leave.
My red bird was so beautiful, just taking flight,
about to soar, how could anyone do what he did,
what I did, leaving them—not the right questions.
Not the right questions, at all. When people can’t breathe
they do what they must do for air. They undo all the ropes
wrapped around their hearts: they tug & pull until they begin
to gasp. The ropes loosen: they can breathe. So they breathe.
II. My Mother’s Piano and the Manifesto
Night after night she dusted the keys, but otherwise
my mother left the piano untouched. She could play beautifully,
but child after child after child after—what use was music
to her exhausted body except a means to exhaust it more.
Would she have abandoned me and my siblings
if she’d followed her desire? She could have been a concert—
No. No. Useless to think that way. I could have been
a famous poet, a famous painter, but I kept needing
to leave. I was part of the group against all forms
of established order, even the order of words.
But they omitted my work from our manifesto,
the Refus global, so I insisted they remove my name:
no work, no name. I held fast although it meant reprinting
400 copies of the last pages. I held fast years
before when leaving my mother’s house: I stood at her piano,
playing a scale: here’s how you breathe, Mama.
III. Red Nowhere Bird
The woman who fled, my granddaughter called me
yet I wasn’t fleeing: I was seeking. Like the others
in the group, I believed the old words in the old order
needed to be broken. We fractured lines, syntax,
we twisted diction, made words out of new combinations
of letters. We painted against strictures.
Like the others, I lived for art. I wrote poems, I painted,
but I couldn’t breathe: no choice but to leave.
I wasn’t fleeing. I was feeling. Strange, how
close those two words are in English. You see
what happens: I’m in one place, one tongue,
& I seek another. Afraid of roots, of being rooted.
IV. In My End Is My Beginning
There’s no explaining it no matter what order you use
for the words: a mother leaves
her children: rupture: wrench: heartache: cleaving:
& the story is almost lost until her daughter, Mousse,
seeks her mother, & years later Anaïs,
Mousse’s daughter, tells her grandmother’s story: my story:
I, Suzanne Meloche Barbeau, who all her life kept fleeing:
no: seeking, seeking: while the heart
beats on with its story of love and death, its terrible need:
Lynne Knight: “Since reading Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s La Femme qui fuit, I’ve been engrossed in the life of her grandmother, Suzanne Meloche Barbeau, who’s the subject of the novel and who abandoned her babies when they were three and one to pursue her life as a poet and artist. The novel is as closely based on the actual as seems possible, but I finished it wanting more, and after reading more about Meloche Barbeau’s life and watching a film made by her daughter, I started to write in her voice. I write a lot of persona poems, but they don’t always seem like persona poems—people just assume I’m the ‘I’ when the poem is actually based on things women I know have said or done, re-imagined into one voice. The same thing happens with them as happened here with the voice of an actual person: I love the release from the tyranny of the self.” (web)
Lynne Knight: “I spent much of Sunday mourning the death of Donald Hall, who taught me much of what I know about poetry when I was his student at the University of Michigan. Much later, we had a correspondence over twenty years that sometimes included the exchange of poems. I’ve been re-reading some of his letters, and I came upon this: ‘I want the poem to be as hard as a piece of sculpture, and as immovable, and as resolute, and as whole. I want every word in it to be absolutely inevitable … but another part of the requirement, by and large, is that it should not seem so.’ Then he quoted Yeats: ‘A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought …’ His letter begins: ‘I love talking about this stuff.’ Donald Hall gave so much to the world of letters that I wanted to mark his death with a small poem that evokes his life and work, borrowing his image in the last two lines (“white apples and the taste of stone”). I don’t know if this poem does evoke him, but among many, many other things, he taught me to be persistent.” (web)
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