I remember a woman, a researcher from Brazil, who took my hand and said our shared name was for strong women who thought what they wanted and were good at school, remember when the tall man brought me a little tamed mouse, somehow carried from Colombia through customs in his handkerchiefed pocket. As I read The Cat’s Table, the latest novel from Michael Ondaatje, it these strangers I think of, who first built my ideals of beauty and independence and passion.

In his sixth novel, Ondaatje writes of the people we meet as children, the people who direct our gaze even late in our lives. The main character, a Sri Lankan boy also named Michael (who the author admits shares many experiences and similarities with himself, but calls fictional) narrates from adulthood the three weeks where he and his two friends learned “our lives could be large with interesting strangers.”

In 1954, he boards an ocean liner bound for England. For those three weeks, he eats at the cat’s table, the 76^th, placed farthest from the captain’s, among a vibrant group of characters—a flamboyant pianist who has “hit the skids,” a silent tailor whose ever-present red scarf hides a serious wound, a retired ship dismantler, and the two boys, Ramadhin and Cassius, who would become his companions for this journey, whose friendship would follow him far into his life.

This novel, part coming-of-age story, part mystery, part elegy for lost friends, takes place on the Oronsay, a ship resurrected from history and from Ondaatje’s previous novel, Anil’s Ghost, which becomes a sort of microcosmic circus for the three boys navigating its maze. Michael meets a wild array of passengers—a cultured thief (the Ondaatje staple), a high-security prisoner, a gracious, tentative scholar who becomes a teacher to him and his friends—and through the eyes of his eleven year old self, weaves each of their stories into a larger, sometimes diffuse but never disjointed, narrative about how we become what it is we become.

The structure of the narrative keeps even restless readers from feeling constrained to the ship, as Michael floats from 1954 to present and to many years in between, finding those he’s lost touch with, detouring to break our hearts with the short life of Rahmadhin and giving us both the tragedy of his failing heart and the redemption and loss in Michael’s marriage to Rahmadhin’s sister.

Here, as in his 1992 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient, Ondaatje’s prose is, sentence by sentence, some of the most luminous, remarkable writing I’ve read. He writes with a musicality that is never over-studied, that can brighten the dim corners of a place like a flare, or can break across the page with such force that I have to read that page, that paragraph, that sentence again and again, before I set the book down to breathe.

With equally steady hand, Ondaatje paints the “lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odor), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall” and a storm the boys are caught in that “pulled the air out of our mouths. We had to turn our heads away from its rush in order to breathe, the wind buckling like metal around us … Lightening lit the rain in the air above us, and then it was dark once more. A loose rope was slapping at my throat. There was only noise.”

While arguably Ondaatje’s most accessible novel, as the only one narrated in first person, The Cat’s Table retains that essential mystery Ondaatje is known for, like Miss Lasqueti, the spinster who carries pigeons in her coat and tosses her thrillers overboard when they fail to be more interesting than her secretive life. It is in this woman, in the thieving count, in the silent daughter of a convict, in the mysteries that drift like smoke through our grasps at closure, that we find the familiar Ondaatje, the author who delights in lovely hands, a twist of the mouth, the hints of inner, unexplained lives.

The narrative can be dizzying at times, but it works because Michael’s young self is naturally skeptical and self-aware. Having been “trained into cautiousness” at boarding school, he keeps a log of strange and interesting occurrences aboard the Oronsay. And yes, the never-ending new acquaintances can be tricky to remember by name, though Michael’s careful observance of their habits makes them easy to recall. Some of the characters are briefly sketched, and serve as background details to an already colorful group of people, but we see the author’s careful hand reflected in that of the botanist, Mr. Daniels, who is transporting an Asian garden across the two seas, whose collection of exotic plants amazes even the skeptical Cassius.

This “field of colors,” loudly crowded betel leaf, snapdragon, star fruit, pencil trees, black calabash, even strychnine blossoms, eventually becomes not only a gathering place where the members of the cat’s table eat together before the journey’s overcast end, but also a vibrant image of the parti-coloured variety of the strangers—some lovely, some fragile, some dangerous—who the boys watch with unblinking stares.

In the decades after this voyage, Michael admits “It would always be strangers like them, at the various cat’s tables of my life, who would alter me,” and it’s this realization, this recognition of my own strangers that keep this story blooming in my head.

Related Posts:

• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth
• Elizabeth Bastos: The Last Book I Loved, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

…to slip naked into the slough
with the wiry boy who peeled each apricot—
as if slightly uncertain how to partake of it—

and savored: dribbling it down his damp chest,
between his long clammy legs, and moistening
his whole delinquent body with pleasant juices.

Indeed, it’s been a long spell for each of us (and our tribe, and our nation, and our…). Yes, this is just what we need—a beautiful adonis in the orchard, naked and engulfing a sweet, juicy apricot. Or at the very least, Powell is taking us there through his own watchful eye, a masterful lens by which he forges, always, poems unparalleled in their meeting of play, and its cousin pure joy, and the high art of exacting poetic craft. I can’t think of a poet that does it better than Powell. Nor do I want to.

Who else can sustain a stanza with an image, deceitful in its simplicity, such as this—

The river rocks globular and slick,
the catfish with its wet dark skin,
and the afternoon’s durable glassy eyes.

As a boy from the Ozark Mountains, place with endless rivers and caves, place chockfull of deceptively simple pleasures, I can tell you Powell is spot-on in the scene he bestows here. I’ve been the boy in this orchard by the water, and in turn, I’ve been the boy watching him, longing for him. But I’ve never been able to paint the picture like Powell does.

Like so many of the verses in Useless Landscape, this poem partakes in giving superlatively versed wisdom (it isn’t alternatively titled A Guide For Boys without just reason). The inviting wisdom, which here is somehow both witty and quiet, bubbles gracefully to the surface: “I do not mind you closing your own eyes, reclining. / Summoning the image of a lover put away. / Because virtue is hardly what either of us saved // from our separate, desperate beginnings.”

I first heard this poem in October, when Powell read in Pittsburgh. When Useless Landscape came out on Valentine’s Day, I read it again and again, longing first for the boy in the orchard, then for the pure pleasure of reading such a superlative poem. I’m still reading it. And again. If there’s a poem that can save us, one that can take us from season to each new season with hope, it’s certainly Powell’s “Reaching Around For You,” which finally promises that “stonefruit from a tin is almost as good as fresh, / when the spiteful frost arrives.”

Related Posts:

• The Last Poem I Loved: Zachary Schomburg’s Poem-Film “Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off In a Farm Accident.”
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Modotti” by Adrienne Rich
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat With D. A. Powell
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Announces…
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Poem at the New Year” by John Ashbery

was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely’s mysticism, her tale-telling….She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie’s secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.

There are books I love and books I fall in love with, books that catch me up in their language and envelop me in the world of their story, and books that do all that and also stay, books that lodge themselves inside me. I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as its narrator describes Francie, a collage of experience and inheritance, and I am in love with it.

When I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I read about my grandparents, born in New York to Irish immigrants just a year after the book closes. I read about myself, a girl from a city who loved to look at trees from her apartment window and read as if her life depended on it. I read about the Williamsburg streets that I walk down today, then populated with pickle barrels and rag pickers. I read about women who have sexual lives, whose sexuality affects every aspect of their experience, whether they feel plain desire or mere curiosity, the fear of pregnancy or a longing for children, a weary awareness of unwanted attention or the terrifying reality of violence. I read about shame and class and loving people who hurt you as well as themselves.

It’s not a flashy book, though it is often beautiful, and it’s unafraid to tell you what it thinks. Betty Smith has no mercy to spare for the condescending doctor who talks about Francie like she isn’t there (“I know they’re poor but they could wash.”), or the patronizing teacher who informs her that her family’s story is sordid, unfit for consumption. But there is nothing romantic about the Nolan family’s poverty: it is grueling and it degrades. The grandchild of immigrants, Francie, 11 and then, ultimately, 17, feels a curious mixture of hatred and pride for the conditions she lives in. She tries so hard to escape them and when she finally does, she takes a last walk through the streets of her childhood.

The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.

No, she’d never come back to the old neighborhood.

Besides, in years to come, there would be no old neighborhood to come back to. After the war, the city was going to tear down the tenements and the ugly school where a woman principal used to whip little boys, and build a model housing project on the site; a place of living where sunlight and air were to be trapped, measured and weighed, and doled out so much per resident.

She has no illusions about the unloveliness of the soon-to-be-demolished school, of whipped children, but she also has no affection for the future project, with its precise stipends of air and light, that will be built in its place. This is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at its best—when it is ambivalent: Francie’s complicated relationship to the geography of her childhood, to a beloved father crippled by alcohol, to a mother who loves her brother best, to familial obligation, to her own body. Her grandmother reveals the value of these tugs of war when she explains why children should both believe in Santa Claus and also later discover he isn’t real: the glut of hope and then its loss “fattens the emotions and make them to stretch.” Both are necessary, belief and cynicism, and it will teach them to survive.

Everything happens. People are born and die, people get married and others don’t, people have kids, people take kids, abortions are offered, periods arrive, school is taken up and put on hold, jobs are acquired and lost, money is painstakingly saved and spent. (Did I mention there’s a serial killer? There is also a serial killer.) Most of all, there is Francie herself, so often brave and stoic and unapologetically literary. How can you not love a girl who writes in her journal, “Am I curious about sex?” The narrator goes on, “She studied the last sentence. The line on the inner edge of her right eyebrow deepened. She crossed out the sentence and rewrote it to read: ‘I am curious about sex.’” This book is so intensely about being a woman, being poor, being alive, and I have not read another one with its breadth or accuracy.

There is a beautiful passage toward the end of the novel, when Francie and her brother go up to their tenement’s roof on New Year’s Eve and they look out over their neighborhood. Francie sees “at the end of their street, the great Bridge that threw itself like a sigh across the East River,” and says aloud, “There’s no other place like it.”

“Like what?

“Brooklyn. It’s a magic city and it isn’t real.”

“It’s just like any other place.”

“It isn’t! I go to New York every day and New York’s not the same….It’s like—yes—like a dream.”

Brooklyn’s magic, for Francie, is as dreamlike as her grandmother Rommely’s Santa Claus, even though it’s “a dream of being poor and fighting.” Francie’s Brooklyn is all belief and cynicism, hope and loss, and it has fattened and stretched her heart and made it strong. Though she leaves it behind, Francie is better for having lived there.

Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not dreamlike—it is thoroughly real. Still, it’s the kind of story Francie’s grandmother would take up and tell, the kind of story that makes the heart bigger, the kind of story that sticks. It’s not always the subtlest of novels, but it’s one of the wisest. I am always carrying it with me.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth
• Elizabeth Bastos: The Last Book I Loved, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

This last poem I loved was the poem-film “Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off In a Farm Accident” based on a work from the collection Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg.

Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off in a Farm Accident from Zachary Schomburg on Vimeo.

When I saw this poem, I took it personally. I cried. I sent it to friends and family. “Look at this, look at this!” My emails were demanding. “This is what happened to me.”

I didn’t really go so far as to say that this happened to me, but it did happen to me.

The personalization and taking to heart of poetry is like the personalization of the political: unavoidable if at all provoking. Therefore, both poetry and politics are ignored by many, deplored by some, and loved by a scattered few. The motives of those few are often questioned, as is their sanity.

I didn’t really read the poem. The poem is a movie, too. I heard and saw and loved the poem.

It was like me. I was the poem already; my own limbs had been torn off when I moved to a farm in the Oregon woods, where I became a sort of tree. That reads as little bit new age, but I can explain the metaphor no better than Schomburg does in his poem-film. It is his own. It could be a redneck metaphor, or a hippie one, an academic one, or a Freudian one. Sometimes a metaphor is just a cigar.

I mean only to say, I met this poem at a time when it might have saved my life and I have returned to it many times since for CPR.

“Farm Accident,” as I first was introduced to it, is a moving poem. It’s a video poem, a synthesis of art and verse for which I hold great admiration. Poetry lends itself to film sometimes, and the results can change a mind; change it about poetry and what it means, or what film means, or what the world means. It might tickle the back of your throat like a cold, or satisfy your eyes like a lake on a hot day, or punch you in the face like Muhammad Ali. “Farm Accident” did all of these things to me.

Schomburg’s poem moves like a wildcat in the woods. You don’t know it’s there until it’s done, until it’s too late. It creeps up on the viewer like a farm accident, and what comes after the poem ends or the cat attacks or the accident happens? Resolution, of course: if your limbs are gone, you learn how to use the things that are left, or grow in their places, to operate the machinery of your life. Other kinds of limbs might do, too.

It’s a simple piece. The film is of a landscape. Low bushes, some trees, some sky. It’s the part of the trip where the desert meets the forest, or the forest is for some reason at a distance. Maybe it’s a short forest, or maybe it is a normal sized forest, with a few giant trees, filmed from a very tall car, or a low flying aircraft. It’s hard to tell. My fingers want to report that the landscape rolls by the viewer, but the truth is not that easy. It’s clear: the viewer is rolling by the landscape on his or her way to somewhere important. The eye sees a pathway to a place where things will be different. Perhaps the very tall car or low flying aircraft is rushing someone to a hospital, or it could be a truck full of fruit driven by a farm worker with trees for arms. The film’s sun is going down or coming up before you, obscuring your vision somewhat, and the driver or pilot is going quickly now. The changing light and shifts in color are a blur.

Only Schomburg’s subtle use of music and text give the scenery context, bringing the poem itself into focus, allowing the poem to sidle up to its witness and get familiar.

It is not a tale of explicit gore or even suddenness. It is matter of fact in tone. It is sad, but there is a happy ending. The subject of the poem adapts to change, which is all any of us can hope for in our lives.

***

You’ll cry a little at night
as your limbs curl around your still soft face.

This is where it gets personal; this is why “Farm Accident” is the last poem I loved, and likely, the poem I will most love for a very long time. This is where I lost my own limbs, and how tree limbs grew in those places.

I moved to the woods suddenly; nearly violently. My family lived in Las Vegas, Nevada during the 2000s. We did well there. The three of us were a blue collar pipe fitters union family. We decided to go into business for ourselves, purchased a union plumbing shop, worked our way to modest material comfort during the construction and real estate boom. Las Vegas went from being an oddly and arguably socially sustainable tiny desert city to a behemoth of growth and profit of unimaginable proportions. It was the fastest growing city in North America at that time, and it was the place to own a small construction business.

I worked in special education law, serving the poor and the wards of the state as an advocate. The job was for a nonprofit civil law center, and our services were free to the qualifying (poor) public, so the pay was low, but the work was worth it. I got to help make school a better place for some of the most vulnerable children in Las Vegas. My own son went to the best public school in town, just up the street from our pretty little house with a tiny greenbelt for a backyard. Late at night, I wrote my poems and notes and little stories. Little pink houses for you and me. Eventually, I quit my job to homeschool my son. I wanted to be there for him in a more meaningful way. I didn’t need the income.

I had plenty of money to get by.

Until I didn’t.

The Las Vegas economy collapsed. We fell with it. Not one to realize how good something is until it’s torn from my chest, I was paralyzed by what was happening around me. It happened overnight: home prices crashed, construction projects shut down, half built casinos and hotels stopped their projects, and suddenly, corporate casino giants were no longer paying their bills. If daddy ain’t paying, ain’t nobody paying. From the start of the collapse in late 2008 to summer 2010, we remained in Las Vegas, swimming against the current and trying to survive and save what we had. If a mistake could have been made in trying to keep on our feet, it was made. We were unable to work our mojo well enough to keep our home. We realized we were going to lose it.

Our parents tried to help us but there was nothing anyone could do. We prepared for the worst by no longer paying our mortgage payment, as the foreclosure expert (read: Las Vegas real estate agent) advised us to do.

One day, we got a call from family. They are West Coast restaurant owners and had recently settled into Portland to shift some of their operations to the Northwest. A huge farm had been purchased near Portland, Oregon; help was needed there. Would we like to come visit it and see if we might like to stay?

I had never been to Oregon. I had never really been on a farm.

as your skin toughens
a hummingbird will to hover near your ear.

***

My desert heart fell in love with the sixty acre abandoned lily plantation in the mossy forest of the Mt. Hood Wilderness in Oregon. Five separate residences, a huge administration building, barns, warehouses, 1940s glass greenhouses overgrown with weeds, a formal garden as gothic and taken back by the wilderness as anything reasonably still defined as a garden could be, a derelict lily bulb packing facility, a grass airstrip, airplane hangars, chickens, and except for those inhabiting the farm dwellings themselves, the nearest neighbor a mile away. It was April, 2010 and it was cold and partly rainy, the way an Oregon spring can be. Liquid sunshine. I fell in love with the constant Sandy and Bull Run river mist and the fire in the giant fireplace in the 5,000 square foot main 1930s farmhouse. I fell in love with the potential and the energy behind it. I fell in love with a dream. It was a farm set a half mile down the road in a river gorge. It was surrounded by a cloud forest; because of the two rivers below it, the forested gorge was continually filled with fog and mist. It was the farthest thing from a desert I could imagine.

I liked Portland, too. Old and new colliding with culture and coffee and food and beer and music. Books. Books. Books. Portland was the first city I’d ever been to that looked like a poem in and of itself.

The decision to abandon my life and what was left of my net at the age of 38, to leap off the high wire and pack up like an Okie to drive a thousand miles north of home, came down to me and a margarita.

If saying I turned into a tree sounds too new age, saying I chose to turn into a tree because I was a little drunk does not sound new age enough. It was the closest thing to a moment of spiritual clarity I have had in this agnostic lifetime.

Our family took us to eat before returning us to the airport for our flight home. They were optimistic, cheerful and they were buying the drinks. They really wanted us to come. They wanted us to say yes. We would be able to live on the farm. I’d have a house set out in one of the back fields, fifteen minutes up and down windy, narrow, pine lined roads from the nearest business. We could help build the lily plantation into a sustainable organic produce farm. Before I knew it, three margaritas in, I said, “We are doing it. We are coming.”

***

soon you’ll be more tree than person.

The best parts of this memory are how happy they were, and how happy my son was. He had become invested the moment we landed in Oregon. He did not want to go back.

We went home, managed to short sale the house, avoiding the dreaded foreclosure, had a massive garage sale, packed up, and left.

It was not so easy as that, but that is how it was done. We decided in April and arrived to Oregon in late July, just when the weather here is the most beautiful, and the trees the deepest green.

I cried a little at night for what I was losing. Some nights, I still cry for what was lost. The transition from a suburban desert with a Whole Foods within walking distance and a doting mother and father just up the street to a sort of rough and tumble experiment with what amounted to barn-raising and living in a tiny community in a forest where all it ever does is rain and snow was not seamless. We live in Northwestern Oregon, a land even Lewis and Clark described as ‘inhospitable’ in the winter. We are far, far more poor than ever were before in our entire lives. The economy is still collapsing. Coming here did not change that.

Somehow, though, the trees and the constant rush of two rivers colliding 150 feet straight down a gorge below us made up for those losses as well as they could. They became gains and I became those things, better for giving up, better for actually trying.

The people I met and grew to love in Oregon did the rest; the people here were salve to the deep wounds.

***

You’ll go camping
in the woods
and never come back.

It was here on the farm, at the kitchen table where I write this, that I first heard of Schomburg’s poem-film. I had lived here for nearly one year. I was seeking video poetry submissions for the literary journal I recently had founded when a new friend said I should look at Portland resident’s work. He had published a small volume of Schomburg’s poetry, and said it was some of the best he’d ever read.

I saw “Farm Accident” first, and it defined the change in me to myself with just a few words. I was reading Thoreau and Whitman and Abbey and Isabella Lucy Bird and Betty MacDonald like some read the Bible since the move to the woods, looking for something to help me understand. I read poem after poem, and wrote even more than I read. None settled it for me. Nothing was sealing the deal.

It was this poem and its spare words that finally did that for me. It was okay. I could be here now and love it. I could relax and let my skin toughen. I understood. I had gone camping and I was never going back.

I’ve been to Shanghai many times. If I had settled there, perhaps I’d be more skyscraper or taxi cab than person. In Las Vegas I was perhaps more convenience than person; more ease and easy celebration than person. If I’d moved to Portland proper I might be more bridge or more brewery than person, but I’m here in this little house in the big woods where I camp every night.

Schomburg’s poem-film defines that we become the place where we are. We are adaptable, adept at camouflage. We must become our environment in order to survive it. I had already done that, but was too busy missing what I had lost to embrace it.

What those things were, I barely remember today, just a year later. I miss the people very much, but none of them are lost. I know exactly where they are.

Even when I leave, I will never really go back, and my limbs are gone forever, replaced by something brown and green that rustles in the wind and splits just a little during heavy snows.

Related Posts:

• The Last Poem I Loved: “Reaching Around For You” by D.A. Powell
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Modotti” by Adrienne Rich
• Trees Are Blooming Into Bright Lightbulbs
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Poem at the New Year” by John Ashbery
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Nothing Twice” by Wislawa Szymborska

…and that bleak corner where a lamp shines, and winds swirl, a paper, fog, I see the great discouraged face of myself and my so-called love drooping in the lane, no good…ah and who said I was great—and supposing one were a great writer, a secret Shakespeare of the pillow night? Or really so—a Baudelaire’s poem is not worth his grief—his grief—(It was Mardou finally said to me, “I would have preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he’s left us,” which I agree with and I am Baudelaire, and love my brown mistress and I too leaned to her belly and listened to the rumbling underground).

Yeah. He wishes.

Or maybe it’s just me. The above passage from The Subterraneans, like most of Kerouac’s prose, reminds me why I love literature and long to create my own. So be it if that means I merely wish to type.

In the most recent Fiction Issue of The Atlantic, I read an essay titled “Don’t Write What You Know,” wherein Bret Anthony Johnston contradicts the usual workshop advice, champions instead Imagination, and says, “Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.” And, “Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.” Along with being the reluctant “King of the Beats,” Kerouac was also arguably the King of Writing What You Know, as I’ve read all of his books and can’t think of one that isn’t largely based on his own experience. But I can understand why John Clellon Holmes said that this “Neanderthal with a typewriter” was the most imaginative writer he’d ever known: it’s precisely Kerouac’s ability to create stories that are things, that are actions unto themselves. And he pulls it off again and again by staying true to his emotions—writing them as and how they come, with no apologies except perhaps to angels and his mother (“O the pain of telling these secrets which are so necessary to tell, or why write or live”)—and by giving his characters their due regard. It also doesn’t hurt to use words like “handsapockets,” “deepwell,” “shnuffling,” “ploop,” “slippy,” “leching,” “enwomaned,” “malely,” “mindswum,” “blooping,” “meekened,” and “hightingled,” all of which Microsoft underlines in jaggedy red, much to my delight.

Like most of Kerouac’s novels, I don’t love The Subterraneans for its plot, but for its breathless prose, delicious existential suffering, and larger-than-life characters. In On the Road, we have the yea-saying Dean Moriarty, crackling and cackling with energy while also practically undulating with sexual bravado. In The Dharma Bums, Japhy Ryder is a lumberjack elfin bodhisattva, scrambling up steep Matterhorn and dumbfounding Kerouac’s Ray Smith with the sudden knowledge (though he realizes it might not actually be true, which doesn’t sap his knowledge of any conviction) that “it’s impossible to fall off a mountain.” In The Subterraneans, Kerouac gives us a rare heroine instead of hero, Mardou Fox, whom he wanted for

the way she imitated Jack Steen that time on the street and it amazed me so much… [her] showing the walk (among crowds) the soft swing of arms, the long cool strides, the stop on the corner to hang and softly face up to birds with like as I say Viennese philosopher—but to see her do it, and to a T, (as I’d seen his walk indeed across the park), the fact of her—I love her but this song is … broken—but in French now … in French I can sing her on and on….

These people are alive. They are not devices to propel the plot along. They are the plot. And the man describing them—be he Sal Paradise, Ray Smith, or Leo Percepied—is too, his great dramatic conflict rooted in love, for at times he loves these people so much he wants to become them. At others he simply wants to worship them. But in both respects he deems himself a failure. It is impossible to love anything worthy of love, enough. I realize now while writing these words that this very impossibility is the common thread connecting all of Kerouac’s writing. His intense love—the mother of all emotions, the source to which all emotions can be traced back—drips from every sentence. That’s why people who try mimic Kerouac’s prose so often fail. It isn’t just about syntax and punctuation, or lack thereof. It’s the emotion he conveys with what often seems childlike simplicity. Such emotion must exist in great literature, which, if it speaks to the Human Condition, must focus on the humans and what they mean to each other, how they love and hate and sometimes become angels—holy—or, in Kerouac’s case when alcohol’s involved, maniacs.

The Subterraneans, like my most beloved of his novels, Big Sur, focuses in large part on the narrator’s alcoholism. There are significant hints at the same disease in The Dharma Bums, and in all three books the tortured protagonist is able to go long stretches without a drop (stretches in which he writes and hikes, and lounges happily with loved ones), but once the stuff touches his tongue, he cannot stop until his body forces him to. In The Subterraneans we watch Leo forsake Mardou time and again for just another drink, abandoning her slack-jawed in taxis she can’t pay for. The next day he remembers the man he’d become and his bones ache with shame. He feels monstrous and mean. But soon he will do it again. Soon he will lose her. The retrospective narrator knows this, can see it coming but can’t stop it. He still recalls in touching detail the look of hurt shock on her face as he slammed the taxi door and went whooping back into the bar.

Poor Mardou. Those two words appear many times throughout The Subterraneans. She depends on regular psychoanalysis to keep from cracking up, and yet she is the sane one in this lost-love story. Leo is the bad guy, as alcoholics tend to be, but the story is filtered through his memory and sincerest remorse, so we sympathize with them both. And though Kerouac gives away the ending early on, this novel is a page-turner—not because you want to see what happens next (though it’s partly that), but because you want to see where each sentence leads and how it gets there. There are few “good stopping places” in this book, as many of the sentences don’t even end, or at least not with periods. But the dash-riddled prose pulls you along just as feverishly as Kerouac must have typed it, so it’s like you’re a part of it. You’re a part of the action, as it were. A witness to the thing.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth
• Elizabeth Bastos: The Last Book I Loved, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky,
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.

There are many such times when I wish I this book were with me. The poems are chiseled out of plain language, soaked in warm light, and radiate wisdom. Although deeply felt, the writing is never sentimental. For example, when Hirsch writes about meeting his old football coach, dying of cancer, he turns the poem to his memory of the coach’s love for well-drilled execution of plays:

And I remembered the game in my senior year
When we met a downstate team who loved hitting
More than we did, who battered us all afternoon
With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing
And power, with deadly, impersonal authority,
Machine-like fury, perfect execution.

Hirsch allows the tenor of this metaphor to remain unstated, so that we realize, as the passion of these final lines builds, that the cancer is doing to his body what the other team did to them. This kind of subtle, crafty turn away from raw feeling is also the key to one of the very best poems in the collection: “Special Orders.” It begins starkly: “Give me back my father…” and by the seventh line the poet is overwhelmed: “I don’t understand this uncontainable grief.” Yet, just at this moment of utter nakedness, the poem turns back to consideration of what the father actually did in running a container business: for whatever anyone needed, he would “sketch you a container for it.” Here the poem ends, having—paradoxically—contained the grief that was uncontainable.

Many poems in this collection dance at the edge of emotional nakedness—yet not always painfully. The world is also there to enjoy and praise. In “Wild Gratitude,” Hirsch plays with his cat and recalls Christopher Smart’s long and wonderful poem to his own cat Jeoffry: “the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving Him.” The simple life of cats, seen through the lens of the “wild gratitude” of Christopher Smart, opens the author to the holiness of the quotidian:

And only then did I understand
It is Jeoffry—and every creature like him—
Who can teach us how to praise—purring
In their own language,
Wreathing themselves in the living fire.

Hirsch is an American poet who, perhaps more than any other, has incorporated the sensibility of Eastern European poetry, especially that of Czesław Miłosz. He is a writer engaged with the world, and committed to communicating its mystery, its pain, and its capacity to evoke wonder. The language is clear and precise, yet the writing does not lack experimental touches. “Mergers and Acquisitions” takes us in a single sentence of twenty-five lines on a breakneck journey through the failures of contemporary capitalism, and ends in a surprising finish of reflective understanding: “there is something else that drives us… some unprotected desire, / greed that is both wound and knife, / a failed grief, a lost radiance.” And of the new poems presented here, “Dark Tour” is uniquely structured as a series of haikus, each set in a different city, each tracking the stages of a relationship.

In another new poem, “The Case Against Poetry,” the poet finds himself explaining Plato’s critique of literature to other poets, only to be distracted from his endeavor by the view:

night deepened in old windows,
swallows gathered on a narrow ledge
and called to the vanishing twilight,
and a beggar began to sing in the street.

Plato, with his focus squarely set on unchanging Forms, might not have been convinced. But Czesław Miłosz, who placed poetry on the side of the vanishing particular, would have been proud. Edward Hirsch’s The Living Fire carries on this tradition of the saving and praising powers of clear, well-honed language. So, even if they are not always in your bag, these are poems you will carry with you.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth
• Elizabeth Bastos: The Last Book I Loved, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

White Teeth, Zadie Smith’s debut novel, published on January 27^th, 2000, begins in 1975 and ends at the moment when 1999 became 2000. The plot concludes on a sort of narrative precipice, with enough uncertainties and unfinished bits to induce extreme millennial panic in the calmest of readers. Smith crafts storyline after storyline, and once she reaches the midnight countdown, she lets each one fly off on its own velocity, like unmanned garden hoses spouting water all over the yard. Can we blame her for not tying up loose ends? Time was supposed to dictate the terms of the Y2K bug nobody could control time. Even though Smith has complete control over the temporal aspect of her novel–when to begin it, when to end it–she doesn’t go so far as to make a prediction, not even a fictional one. Rather, she lays the groundwork for about a dozen potential resolutions, doing so with an audacity that can often only be found in debut novels.

White Teeth might be the definitive millennial novel, if only because of the sheer amount of stuff in it. It bowls itself over with broad genealogies and garbled histories. It crackles with paranoid energy, and it overloads information in the most charming of ways. Smith plays the clever seamstress, weaving together the threads between mothers and daughters, fathers, sons and distant great-great-grandfathers, only to take the end results and rend them, Penelope-style.

In profiles of Smith at the time of White Teeth’s release, most journalists paid attention to her youth in relation to her novelistic scope, but twelve years later, I see Smith’s accomplishment as less the result of youthful zeal than that of just plain zeal. To read White Teeth one needs energy; to have written White Teeth must have necessitated unbelievable amounts of caffeine and nerve. It’s important to pay attention to the discrete elements Smith pulls together by both her writing skill and her sheer force of will: religious fundamentalism, adolescent awkwardness, British pubs mouldering in suburban obscurity, the morality of scientific experiments, the difficulties of being a twin.

The novel encompasses wide swathes of time and a tall family tree. Irie is the daughter of Archie, a bumbling, affable war veteran, and Clara, a Jamaican ex-Jehovah’s Witness. Samad, a Bengali scientist manqué and Alsana, his prearranged bride, have produced identical twin offspring Millat and Magid. These two sets of kin generate three generations worth of drama: Millat, the cool kid, joins an Islamic activist group whose name, the Keepers of the Eternal Victorious Islamic Nation, begets the unfortunate acronym KEVIN; Magid, the consummate nerd, works with a geneticist who creates a divisive “FutureMouse”; Irie, not quite nerdy and not quite cool, wavers crucially between the two brothers. None of this fits well into a synopsis, and this is why I love it.

I want debut novels to be indescribable. I don’t want debut novels to fit into a single-sentence précis. Alex Carnevale, who runs the audiovisual stimulus website This Recording, expresses his desires for debuts in this way: “Above all things a first novel should be (1) lascivious, (2) impossible, and (3) autobiographical.” White Teeth is not exactly lascivious (though there are a couple of carnal moments) and Smith herself has denied the novel’s purported autobiography, stating in an interview that, “none of my family appear in White Teeth in any obvious way.”

But the novel is impossible, and what characterizes the sense of its impossibility is its focus on the immigrant experience. This experience is as literal as Samad and Alsana’s moving from Bangladesh to London, or as figurative as Clara’s crossing over from Jehovah’s Witness to agnostic. As Smith writes, “This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune.” Characters are forever transgressing borders: riding a bus from a run-down neighborhood to a posh one, escaping from one island to another, moving from an atheist England to pious Bangladesh and back, changing spiritual outlooks simply by taking a plane ride in the middle of the night.

I’m not an immigrant. The country where I was born is the country in which I live now. Even when I studied abroad in the Czech Republic, my inability to speak the native language wasn’t of much consequence, and on the metro it would have been impossible to distinguish me from any native Praguer. It isn’t difficult for me to cross borders because of my blue-and-gold passport cover, because of my white skin, because of my nativity, because of whatever.

So I look to novels like this one in order to gain some kind of understanding. White Teeth elucidates immigration for those who have never had to immigrate; it constantly evokes the queasiness I imagine occurs every time someone moves from the familiar to the foreign. The novel’s multiplicity of voices, both in the various dialogues and the omniscient narration itself (Smith introduces a young outcast couple as such: “Ryan was red as a beetroot. And Clara was as black as yer boot”), stretches the plot’s orbit so it can encompass more people, more places, more stuff. Smith’s writing does the impossible because it acknowledges borders, then swings them wide open. The bold lines become perforated. The distances between Bangladesh and England and Jamaica are nothing.

As I read, I felt that familiar tingle of Y2K fear. Why? That millennial anxiety should have come pre-digested, the way birds and wolves deliver dinner to their babies. I should have read the story and chuckled at the doomsday prophecies, but I didn’t. Twelve years ago Zadie Smith whipped up a tale about a strange possibility: that the new millennium would render every person an immigrant in a new and unexplored time. The border between 1999 and 2000 seemed uncrossable. We all ended up crossing it, but reading White Teeth took me back twelve years, when I was only ten and I watched that stupid ball drop, the countdown ticking toward zero, ever so slowly.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Elizabeth Bastos: The Last Book I Loved, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

A culture existed in 1666 that was used to hardship and illness. “It is folly to love an infant,” the townspeople tell the book’s main character, Anna Frith, when she so publicly grieves the death of her son. There are disgorge-the-contents-of-your-belly descriptions of mine accidents, the smeared-face stonings of supposed witches, death rattles, “surrounded in her own gore” descriptions of birth rooms, and child-drownings. This book is not for the brittle. It is horrific, but it is not horror. It is human life, really graphic. As I’ll admit I have done, people don’t just drop off food and skedaddle when they hear of a neighbor’s illness. Back in 1666 they come in, sit by the bed, and wipe the spittle from the fitful hollowed-out lips of their friends. Imagine. I’ve got no kit for such a thing, no “whisket” from which Anna dishes out oatcakes, salves, and cotton for the tending of wounds.

I think that’s why I liked it so much. Most of us live in a brittle world in which we have learned to recoil at suffering. We are at a remove from death and birth, from the slimy, the wet, and the phlegmy. We are at a remove from the muck with which our not so distant relatives were well acquainted: sickness, the frailty of the body, the truth of how much we need each other. Frequently, we don’t deal with life well when it raises it’s head menacingly, mockingly, grotesquely, as it sometimes still does. It’s fucking scary when someone gets sick; call in the professionals, and hie ye to ye therapist.

At least half of the book’s length is devoted to how to get healing roots or worts out of the ground, and how to care for “buboes,” the revolting sores that reveal themselves on a plague victim’s groin or neck. There were no doctors or grief counselors. It would be your neighbor lancing your wound with a hot poker, or making you vervain tea with her grandmother-knowledge. I wouldn’t want this–it’s medieval. But I would like half of Anna Frith’s courage. It’s a feminist tale, in that Anna grows greater than her place in history would have her be. She defies her minister and Puritan law, and comes to believe, atheistically, that, as we said in the ‘80s: Shit Just Happens. Plague is no act of God, it is nature, red in tooth and claw. Luckily, nature is also the newborn lamb, suckling, and gamboling.

And “When Shit Happens,” what makes Anna great for us moderns is that she does not turn her gaze from the swellings and the oozings of her fellows’ rheumy eyes, or from the ewe’s “red flower” as she births a breeched lamb. She does what she can with what she has in her whisket.

Related Posts:

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• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
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• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth

But then I read Committed, her follow-up and improvement on Eat, Pray, Love, a thoughtful interrogation of marriage across cultures. I devoured her lectures on Ted Talks as well as her earlier long-form stories on the Coyote Ugly Saloon and La Grande Randonnée, a dream vacation I hope to take one day. In building backwards from Eat, Pray, Love, I discovered just how major an anomaly that book has become. Gilbert had made her career in journalism writing for GQ, writing for a certain kind of high-brow men’s journalism—she hardly seems the type to fall over at the chance to eat spaghetti and meditate in an ashram. (And hardly someone who could only be played by that grande dame of casually girlish womanhood, Julia Roberts.)

The strain throughout all of Gilbert’s writing, the one that really defines her style and substance, is the exploration of wanderlust. Nowhere is this clearer or more deliciously readable than in The Last American Man, Gilbert’s portrait of Eustace Conway. When you first learn that Conway is casually greeted and frequently referred to as “Davy Fuckin’ Crockett,” you know you’re far away from Italy, India, and Indonesia. Conway wears buckskin clothes and carries a bowie knife; he has trained himself to hunt, fish, and live off the land. He has accumulated over 1,000 acres of pristine wilderness to call his own, a sanctuary for a natural, unadorned life. You could call it an affect, except he puts his whole heart and body into committing to this way of life. He is the anti-Gilbert; a journeyman who lives for the journey itself. Gilbert (and the reader) are entranced by his story, but also quietly concerned about its cost. Conway is wildly charismatic and friendly, and Gilbert’s totally charmed by him. Yet even when he gives her a big hug of welcome, she stops to think, “This guy likes me, but he doesn’t really need me.” Meeting a figure who is genuinely impersonal, even as he pushes himself towards physical, intellectual, and moral perfection, poses a quandary for the reader. Given how impassioned he is, isn’t it a waste for Conway to be so alone? Where is his congregation, his family, his perfect partner?

The problem, Gilbert illuminates, isn’t that Eustace Conway needs to settle down. It’s that settling down would fundamentally change who he is. Gilbert sketches a droll personal profile for him that captures this quandary perfectly:

“Lonely heart who makes fire with two sticks, eats squirrel brains, quotes Faulkner, crosses continents on foot or horseback, understands Navajo jokes, swings through trees during lightning storms, kayaks across the Arctic, builds homes without the use of nails, climbs sheer cliffs, makes honey and envisions altering the very destiny of humankind SEEKS SAME. SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY.”

She adores his commitment to his cause, and so do we, and unfortunately that means that to stay adored, he must stay solo. If her memoir had instead been titled Eat, Pray, Live this may well have been our final impression of Gilbert as well. Gilbert’s revised memoir, ending with self-reliance instead of new found romance, would have been a radical portrait of the cost that people must pay to self-actualize and to reach their fullest potential. But instead, the first two parts only serve to enable the third; Gilbert rides off into the sunset of literary fame with her dreamy Brazilian husband, carried on the back of her blockbuster hit, while Eustace Conway, the luminous and lonely figure of her writing past, continues his journey on Turtle Island. Perhaps if The Last American Man had been her big hit, Gilbert would’ve stayed behind, too.

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• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth

Like so many others, Rich was The One to me, America’s greatest living everything I ever wanted to be: a titan of poetry, an icon of feminism. The woman who articulated the fundamental truth of female unity: “The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”

There is little I can say about Rich that has not yet been said: that her activism was uncompromising and a beacon, that her work, more than any other, activated me as a poet, that like the aspiring acolyte I was, I stalked her poems and her career like a detective. In this mode, one Rich poem has integrated itself into my literary DNA more than any other: “Modotti,” Rich’s elegy for the revolutionary photographer and activist Tina Modotti. Diving into The Wreck may indeed be Rich’s masterwork, but it is Midnight Salvage, in which “Modotti” appears, that owns my greatest loyalty in her canon.

Your footprints of light on sensitive paper
that typewriter you made famous
my footsteps following you up stair-
wells of scarred oak and shredded newsprint
these windowpanes smeared with stifled breaths
corridors of tile and jaundiced plaster
if this is where I must look for you
then this is where I’ll find you

I open my copy of Midnight Salvage, purchased from a used bookstore in high school, and pieces of my own history quite literally fall from its pages: three old Polaroids, taken for a photographer friend’s portfolio when I was nineteen or twenty, saucy and red-lipsticked. Myself, holding a birthday cake in gartered stockings. Myself, in black camisole. I remember how I pored over these pages at sixteen, twenty, twenty-five, all with equal awe, how my own sexual becoming has been charted in the varied shades of desire to which Rich allowed me a smoldering access.

I discovered this particular poem after seeing the film Frida, in which Modotti is portrayed by Ashley Judd, and presented as a trophy to Salma Hayek’s Frida Kahlo after Kahlo bests Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The two women dance, and share one of the hotter onscreen Sapphic kisses in cinematic history. All too appropriately, I saw the film with the first woman I ever loved, and sent her “Modotti” in an email afterwards, writing Let’s move to Mexico and wear flowers in our hair and drink provocatively. We’ll share an apartment and radical politics and dark-eyed men. It was the kind of absolutely earnest, self-serious correspondence one can only make at nineteen, and in the end, the poem, and the letter that enclosed it, would be the only lasting evidence of that fantasy.

Yet as a young woman in love, I was bitten by the tone of Rich’s pursuit, its fervor, its unwavering determination. Rich’s panegyric to Modotti is clear, direct, and inevitable: Rich does not ask if she will find Modotti, or even where to look. Like a dogged archaeologist, Rich must look, and she will find. The search is sensual—“smeared with stifled breaths”—tinged with revolution, and marred by scars and sickness: the political body in pain. Rich lurks in the shadows of this recovery with notebook and pen, history’s most eloquent journalist.

From a streetlamp’s wet lozenge bent
on a curb plastered with newsprint
the headlines aiming straight at your eyes
to a room’s dark breath-smeared light
these footsteps I’m following you with

Rich’s lines are an excavation, an attempt to return the matter of women’s lives to the hands who wrought them. Her effort to self-align with Modotti is, of course, a laden one. an Italian-born silent actress, Modotti spent the 1920s photographing the revolutionary intellectuals of Mexico: Rivera, Kahlo, and Julio Antonio Mello, her murdered lover, whose typewriter is the subject of Modotti’s most well-known photographs. The circumstances of Modotti’s own death are murky and unresolved, making Rich’s poem a canonization of sorts: an elegy for one of the martyrs of the cause. In characteristic form, Rich dives into the wreck of Modotti’s history, in all its sex, chaos, and revolution, and recovers the lost art.

down tiles of a red corridor
if this is a way to find you
of course this is how I’ll find you

I found Rich in person only once. During my freshman year in college, my best friend and I attended a reading Rich held at Barnard. We sat in the room, crowded with breathless undergrads like us, waiting for Rich to appear. The clock crept five minutes past the appointed start time; the lights dimmed. All of a sudden, a commanding Black figure, haloed with dreadlocks, swept up the aisle to a seat in front, and the whispers cascaded across the room like a cloud of loose feathers: that’s Toni Morrison. Oh my god, Toni Morrison is here. The event was now fraught with new significance; Morrison’s appearance reminded us that the node of Rich was interlinked, with lifelong deliberation, to a whole network of female and literary greatness.

And then Rich herself appeared, already frail in 2002, requiring assistance to ascend the stairs to her podium. A senior girl named Diana Thow had the honor of introducing Rich, thus garnering an envy in me that has prevented me from ever forgetting her name. The poet’s name, I learned, was not AYD-rienne Rich, but ADD-rienne. I committed this information to my heart as though it brought me closer to Rich herself, though in actuality it only brought me many conversations of looking like the pretentious asshole I was as I corrected another’s pronunciation.

I can’t remember what poems Rich read that evening. I only remember sitting in that hushed room enraptured and on the verge of gobsmacked tears for the entirety of her reading. I remember clutching my copy of Midnight Salvage, the very one that sits beside me now, rehearsing what I would say as she signed it. Your work has meant so much to me. I waited in the long queue after the reading, still rehearsing. When I was there, before her, my heroine of heroines, the words inevitably bungled, and what I blurted was You have meant so much to me. She nodded as placidly as a monk, having heard these nervous blurts so many times before, never knowing what they’d mean to me, and reached for the book.

The bristling hairs of your eyeflash
that typewriter you made famous
your enormous will to arrest and frame
what was, what is, still liquid, flowing
your exposure of manifestos, your
lightbulb in a scarred ceiling
well if this is how I find you
Modotto so I find you

Rich herself, in this elegy to Modotti and so many correspondences like it, was a nexus of those full, transformative connections between women. I think of the contemporary who chose her as rival, Sylvia Plath: Plath was, as the legend goes, wildly jealous of Rich’s 1951 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and proclaimed Rich her “only competition.” The two poets’ work is eminently comparable, though undeniably distinct: both came of age before women’s liberation, both made an early passage into marriage and children, and both placed the drama of the female experience, in all its banality and stigma, as the lodestone of their poems. Plath, of course, ceded the competition with her suicide.

In a sense, I think that Rich lived out what Plath could not: a full and varied life of letters, thirty books, a self-actualized liberation from the constraints of domestic life. Rich identified as a feminist, claimed the title as a mantra; Plath did not. Certainly we cannot fault Plath for the scourges of her mental illness, or the fact that they cost the poet her life. We can only mourn that Plath was not able to give us more, and celebrate that Rich was, and did. I celebrate that Rich stood against the destructive power of female competition, as when she shared the stage of 1974 National Book Award ceremony with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, and accepted the award as sisters-in-arms, on behalf of all women. I venerate Plath’s contribution to literature, and to my own literary becoming. But Rich’s, in so many ways, was simply greater.

In the red wash of your darkroom
from your neighborhood of volcanoes
to the geranium nailed in a can
on the wall of your upstairs hideout
in the rush of breath a window
of revolution allowed you
on this jaundiced stair in this huge lashed eye
these
footsteps I’m following you with

So many of my footsteps have followed Adrienne Rich: those of a teenager, of a college and graduate student, of a woman writer. Rich’s streets were those that I wandered most devoutly, her streetlamps, her newsprint, her darkroom and geranium the talismans I clutched, her huge lashed eye my headlamp. I dreamed of interviewing her, knowing always that the window of time during which we both claimed crossing on this earth would be narrow, but never got the chance.

But I followed her, I followed her, I still follow her: as not just a reader, but as a novitiate, a revenant, a pilgrim. I did not merely read Adrienne Rich’s poems; I followed her poetic ethos and claimed it as my own. I did not merely encounter Rich’s feminism, or her position as a paragon activist for race and class equality; I followed her imperative for “a society without domination.” I viewed her “exposure of manifestos” and developed my own.

“The rules break like a thermometer,” Rich writes in my next-most-cherished poem of hers, XIII of Twenty-One Love Poems, “we’re out in a country that has no language/no laws”. Perhaps it is best to articulate this way what my years of following Adrienne Rich have yielded: Rich gave me the roadmap to that country with no language, no laws, the country where “whatever we do together is pure invention”. With as much tenacity as grace, Rich obeyed no authority but her own, and in doing so, fashioned an unbridled mode of womanhood for all of us who had previously lacked the manifesto we sought. More than that, the crashing swings Rich took through the stubborn brush of white male domination cleared the way for my generation, her literary granddaughters, to write our own.

I’ve withheld the real lump in my throat of poem XIII, the line revealing that it was both the roadmap, and the territory it charted, which Rich’s poems showed me: “the music on the radio comes clear—/neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdammerung/ but a woman’s voice singing old songs/ with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute/ plucked and fingered by women outside the law.”

Rest in power, Adrienne-called-Addrienne. If this is how I must look for you, now, so I find you.

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