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I stayed in New York for a few years. I doggedly persisted as I thought writers needed to do. I sat at my desk, surrounded by blank paper. The longer this went on the more rigorously I banished from my life every possible diversion or distraction. I have written about this period elsewhere.
At the end of something like two and a half years I had to face the fact that it was not given me to make art. I was twenty-seven, living, by then, in Provincetown, with one of a series of romantic attachments, following my very brief first marriage. Provincetown: a bad place to be confronting this despair. In the spring of my last year there, I was invited to participate in a colloquium at Goddard College; other guests would include John Berryman, whom I revered.
It was a moment, in the U. I took a bus, a series of buses, to Plainfield, Vermont. When I got off the bus, the clouds shifted a little. I had a profound sense that I was meant to live in this remote, rural village, in one of the coldest parts of the country, though I had thought of myself as a person who thrived in cities and needed warmth.
But I realized, gradually, that I recognized the landscape; Plainfield was like Saranac, the calm mountains surrounding the protected valley. Ponds and rivers replaced the lake. I had found my way back, it seemed. The festival lasted four days. At one of the parties after one of the readings, all of us enjoying ourselves immensely, one of my soon to be best friends urged me to come back to teach there.
In my extreme naivete, I had no notion of the fact that drunken English teachers are not empowered to offer jobs to strangers. For me, it was an epiphany. A waste of those vital resources we should channel into our work. But in my new life as a wandering desolate girl, I said yes.
Why not, is what I thought. Then the four days were over, and I went back to Provincetown. This was, I imagine, May. But an actual job, abbreviated, provisional, materialized at the end of the summer, four days before the start of school.
So I moved my never unpacked boxes, which had followed me from New York to Provincetown, to a rooming house where my new friends, now colleagues, had found me a room, a cross between a New England farmhouse and a bordello.
And my spirit rested, if elation can also be experienced as rest. Plainfield was indeed the place I believed it to be. But teaching was a miracle. Nor did I viciously and jealously offer them bad advice to suppress their gifts. What I felt was the old avidity to transform the inert poem with its single luminous line into something wholly memorable and distinctive.
My mind was being used again. And then, amazingly, I started to write my own work, poems utterly different from the rigid performances of my first book. I had noticed, as I labored over the structure of that first book, that I seemed to have forgotten how to write sentences. So I set myself a task: poems that were, ideally, built out of a single sentence, but in any case, built of complex sentences with long suspended clauses draped over several lines.
I think my silence, my long sleep, was teaching me a new sound able to enact that assignment. The year that followed, my first year in Vermont, was extraordinary. I was elated to be writing again, and excited by this new, much more original work. And I loved teaching. Moreover, it seemed probable teaching was something I could do, unlike my own writing, regardless of internal factors.
And my heart was yet again engaged. I joined a workshop of local poets, stern, discriminating readers, and some of them, electrifying writers. I discovered that I could teach one term elsewhere, when Goddard dried up, and make enough to live in Vermont the rest of the year. I moved out of the rooming house into a series of charming dilapidated apartments. At some point, when my second book was nearly done, I went with one of my best friends to see the famous local psychic.
She had an encouraging report. Great success, she said; she saw five books in my future. A magnificent fortune; I was writing very slowly; at one book per decade, five books would take me well into old age, at which point I could probably die serenely triumphant.
This prediction came to have another message sometime later. Meanwhile, I was pregnant. Unintentionally, as had happened before. But this time, I had a second book; I had, also, a profession. And I had a home. That he balked suited me; in Plainfield, Vermont in the early seventies, people were making these choices.
Noah was born in June; I was just thirty. Looking at him, I felt immediately the rashness of my decision; who was I to say a child needed only one parent? Especially if that parent was me, someone deeply preoccupied and, in most matters, impatient. When I thought about having a child, I was also aware that my poems had begun to seem to me repetitious. I wrote love poems, and naturally I also wrote poems of loss. It was clear to me that unless my life contained more experience than my native cautiousness would naturally put in my path, I would be a lyric writer of no real range.
I found myself a mother, inextricably involved with another person, at a time when I was, for various reasons, more open to bold experiment, to risk. But the poor baby! At the typewriter, while he slept, I set myself a task.
In this case, to eschew the moody nouns and luminous adjectives that gave my second book its otherworldly detachment. When Noah was just shy of two, I met the man I would marry.
Years passed. We bought a house in the country; the house burned down. We bought another house, back in the village. Books were written, a few prizes won. We made a small garden, then a bigger garden. I had a new task: to use contractions and questions. Manchester: Carcarnet Press, , Vita Nova. Manchester: Carcarnet Press, The Seven Ages.
A Village Life. Poems Manchester: Carcarnet, Faithful and Virtuous Night. American Originality: Essays on Poetry. See Also:. Donate Help us elevate the voices of Jewish women. Listen to Our Podcast. Book Club. Educator's Updates. This Week in History. Enter your email. Shop JWA Get sweet swag.
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