Transformations

For one who missed a proper career, it is as if I arrived at the table in time for the rich dessert. I never anticipated that having lived without a formal itinerary, I would spend my last decades at HILR leading a group of intelligent adults—including professional educators—in reading and writing poetry.

Despite a degree cum laude in English literature from Radcliffe, I had opted, as did my closest friends—how archaic it seems now—not to pursue a career of my own. When Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, I wrote an essay arguing that a liberal education was valuable for its own sake. A married woman with a college degree should stay home caring for her family and serve her community as a volunteer.

That is what I had been doing for many years as the wife of a successful professional man. I did my share of committee work. As president of a hospital guild, I learned how to preside at meetings. I served on boards of an art museum and child guidance clinic, co-chaired a major project-finding committee of the Junior League, and gave art talks to children in schools. I also belonged to a reading group, skied, traveled, played golf, permitted a few toads to live in the laundry tub, and gave great cocktail parties. I did not share the frustrations that many women felt in that old-style role.

Then my world turned upside down. A traumatic divorce in middle age led to my finding work at a local publishing company where, in return for very little pay, I picked up skills as an editor. I also learned to budget time in 15-minute intervals. We kept job sheets ordering so many lines of type, proofread so many lines, researched a question or had editorial conferences, and were efficiency-rated against standards for each task. I punched a time clock and had to put in a 44-hour week before I could earn time-and-a-half. Before long I sold our home and most of our possessions.

With both children in college, accompanied by Lyndon, our black Labrador retriever, I moved a thousand miles away from where I had spent a quarter of a century to become a career girl in Boston.

Fortunately someone had done the major edit job on Fortran IV before I arrived at Allyn and Bacon. With my background in English literature I was able to steer that first book through its final stages to publication. I found something stabilizing about textbook editing, on a par with doing a New York Times crossword puzzle: satisfying, but hardly creative. With a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style (we each had to purchase our own!) I was soon pasting pink slips to the edges of manuscripts and making suggestions for changes in the text. A couple of authors commended my work to the boss, and once I was taken for lunch at the Top of the Hub by a local professor who had written a book on Utopia. I myself was getting closer to same, but that’s another story, my truly happy second marriage.

Bill became a member of HILR before I did. I saw his delight in the courses he took, such as one on fractals. As soon as I moved east, I had also returned to taking classes. I enrolled in a couple of Radcliffe seminars on “The Reading and Performance of Poetry” and took poetry writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education, as well as art courses at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Bill thought we might attend school together. We could commute from our house on the South Shore for a day in Harvard Square. Membership at HILR led to our moving just a few blocks away from 51 Brattle Street in Cambridge.

I had no idea what a big deal it was to be accepted as a member of HILR. Scanning the current Member Directory, I would probably not meet today’s criteria for acceptance; admission was easier in 1989. I remember giving my first report on Lavoisier to a study group in a basement room of Lehman Hall in Harvard Yard, where HILR classes met at that time. I also recall the moment when Wayne Ishikawa, then director, approached me and suggested that I offer a course. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but this was a major turning point in my life, for which I will always be grateful.

When I first moved east I wrote a column for the Beacon Hill News, and a few of my poems were published in journals. I won a local poetry contest naming me poet laureate of Marshfield, Massachusetts, where for 10 years I volunteered reading poetry over WATD’s Talking Information Center, a radio program designed for the blind and print-handicapped. I gave a talk on Anne Bradstreet at the Historic Winslow House and participated in poetry readings. Once, someone forgot I was invited to read at the local library. I found a performance of spinning “From Sheep to Shawl” on the festival’s program. Displaced by Sophie, the sheep, I returned home and thanked my neighbor’s cows for inspiration: my poem, “The New Calf,” had been selected for the Anthology of Magazine Verse. (Because of alphabetical order, the poem appeared right across the page from one by John Updike. Tell that to the sheep!)

The New Calf

The calf came two days ago.

I left the plumber standing in the kitchen

when I heard the news

and ran across the yard,

my shoes catching dew from the long grass

in the neighbor’s field

where I’d picked daisies and Queen Anne’s lace

for my daughter’s wedding.

I found him in the trampled place—

sleeping, curled loosely,

his soft face tan and white—

and bent to pat the infant bull

while Abby,

devouring cornstalks

as if it were her last supper,

raised her eyes at me across the wire,

and the farmer pronounced,

in the accent of all his New England ancestors,

If you don’t pat the newborn

Early and often,

They’re apt

To grow up hostile.

To be invited to become a study group leader and share my love of poetry at HILR was an affirmation of myself. It was a real challenge for someone who had never taught a class (other than once as a substitute Sunday school teacher when my son’s friends took refuge under the parishhouse table). It became an increasing challenge to prepare the course each semester as students wanted to go on with the study group, and I needed to replenish my syllabus with new readings.

At first I began learning what had happened to poetry since I stopped my formal studies: The poetry of women, blacks, and gays, paralleling the great social changes of the last half-century, had become recognized. Translations from a wider reach of foreign cultures influence contemporary writing. Few general magazines now publish poetry, but there are a great many small journals and a wide offering of readings, workshops, and retreats with big-name poets in residence, as well as opportunities to earn MFAs in writing. Most poets are writing free verse, likewise paralleling society’s trend toward a more open culture with many of our absolute values coming under acute scrutiny.

I bought the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by J. D. McClatchy, and began studying. I pursued each line, studying critiques of the poems by other poets and scholars, including Harvard’s distinguished Helen Vendler. The pages of that worn paperback are covered with notes.

I was captivated by the poets’ images: Philip Levine’s swimming with a girl in the Detroit River (I had lived in Michigan), a magical moment in their bleak lives, and his “Sweet Will” with its close-up view of the life of an auto-factory worker: “they have gone up to heaven singing/ ‘Time on My Hands’ or ‘Begin the Beguine,’/ and the Cadillacs have all gone back/ to earth . . . ” Ted Roethke’s “Morning fair, follow me further back/ Into that minnowy world of weeds and ditches/ When the herons floated high over the white ditches . . .” not only the poet’s images here, but the sound of his words in which I was hearing echoes from Dylan Thomas’s sonorous verse on recordings I played.

The sound of poetry is integral to its being. I read aloud Robert Lowell’s lament for his cousin in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and heard the sea in “Whenever winds are moving and their breath / Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,/ The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death.” (Now these lines bring back my beloved husband, whose ashes are in the sea off the Maine coast. There is a reason for people’s love of poetry; it connects us with other lives through the ages.)

Richard Wilbur’s form was familiar—I’m a stickler for knowing formal structure before writing free. Hear this from “Hamlen Brook”:

At the alder-darkened brink

Where the stream slows to a lucid jet

I lean to the water, dinting the top with sweat,

And see, before I can drink.

The delicacy and lightness of sound and the ease with which the lines run on, rhyming, yet not intrusive—such great art.

Seeing this one existence from so many perspectives is enriching. We can point to the craft of how this has been done by other poets, but the art of poetry is up to the writer. All I had to do was lead these bright HILR members to water and watch them drink. Being close to another as he/ she discovers his/her original voice was the extraordinary gift I had not anticipated when I became study group leader.

I’ve been so caught up at HILR that I ignored the fact that during these years I too have been aging. Now I’m secure in a new network of good friends—a few still older, most now younger—whom I would have never known without our having taken classes together. Through them I’ve also enjoyed a major transformation in my political life. I’ve come a very long way from being an active Young Republican, typing envelopes for my acquaintance Jerry Ford.

With billions of uncharted years now staring me in the face I wish I had time to steep myself in all knowledge; there must be plenty of time to contemplate a synthesis with some real perspective. How do ideas leap from synapse to synapse within the human brain? How much control over it do we really exercise? Will encyclopedic chips of facts be implanted in the human brain? Though membership at HILR is not renewable for eternity, maybe I can Google from wherever and find out what’s going on. Send me an implant through Amazon! I’m still curious to know.

On a US Geological Survey Map saved from a science course, I continue to follow action along the earth’s tectonic plates. It reminds me of the fragility of the planet itself. I marvel at how consciousness has evolved, at what has and is and will be discovered. The beat of the human heart sounds against the obliterating ages from century to century, across continents and human divides, in poetry. Each of us is a voice of this evolving planet, learning and discovering itself.

Talk about transformations!

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