my parents asked when I told them I might want to be a poet. “Nobody reads poetry—at least not for pleasure.” I think of this now that it’s the season of beach reading—of easy plot-filled novels to enjoy while lying in a hammock or sitting beneath an umbrella and sipping a cool drink.
I had wanted to become a novelist, but I suspect my parents dislike of poetry was one of several reasons I chose it. My parents were intellectuals who read and knew everything. Except poetry. Poetry could be mine and nobody’s. Emily Dickinson’s nobody.
But I’ve often wondered, what made others choose poetry? Or is it the other way around? Does poetry choose the poet?
The first person I asked this question to, ages ago, was my parents’ friend, the late southern poet, Eleanor Ross Taylor. She said she’d planned on becoming a fiction writer before she married Peter Taylor. “You can’t have two fiction writers in one household,” she explained. “Besides, after marrying and having babies, I barely had time to write. Poetry was all I could manage.” She also told me that when Peter had writer’s block, he could not stand to hear her typing.
I think about that now, years later, after rereading my favorite short story by Peter Taylor, “The Gift of the Prodigal.” Whenever I read his stories, I can hear him talking in our living room about his Tennessee heritage—endless tales about various relatives and families and their demise. Peter had what he himself called the gift of gab. I can also see Eleanor watching, listening, softly commenting. She was his background music: beautiful, elegant, ever-present.
But when I read her poems, I think poetry must have been her calling. Terse, lyrical, other-worldly, she is often compared to Emily Dickinson. I particularly love her early poems like “Painting Remembered.” I find in the poem an endearing sense of existential angst and spiritual questioning.
Nevertheless, a part of me wonders if her marriage, or rather her view of marriage, made her into a smaller, tighter, quieter voice—terse and fragmented, sometimes sharp-edged, darkly witty, always brilliant.
Painting Remembered
Wake, girl.
Your head is becoming the pillow.
In the other room
Your husband writes a letter.
The mirror is waiting to hold you.
The books at your side
Are dreaming, are murdering, are kissing,
The ticks are stuck to the dial.
You’re too late too early.
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Author: Nin Andrews
