Contemporary Themes

Right after the last post my mother took sick and then died, unexpectedly. For a couple of months I ate candy and played video games. While there is much that could be said about all that, in terms of poetics, I wondered if someone could still write a poem about the death of a mother? All that Victorian fodder seems so passé. No one writes poems about flowers any more, except Amy Clampitt did and an occasional New Yorker poet does, but it's rare. In private, flowers themselves are not passé, nor is grief, but I think a poem about one’s mother’s death would be hard to pull off if you meant to show it to people.

Someone gave me a book of contemporary grief poems after mom died. Mostly they are confessional streams of stuff, and I am glad the flood of that school is receding. Ted Kooser has a couple of good ones in it, and there are a few other fine and delicate poems in there. When they are good, they are kind of indirect, often by deflection.

Much could be said of that, of poetry being overheard not heard, or of grief being very personal. Or of poetry’s habit of using obfuscation for mystical effect, or how sometimes we just stare into the ineffable and scribble notes and leave it at that. The other side of it is the audience, we as readers, so highly intellectualized. And, frankly, jaded – or shall we say at least very sensitive to cultural repetition, so what some might call forthright, we might call cliché. We're too cool for school. Yet the death of one’s mother seems so prosaic and thoroughly explored, what else but taking some of the tangents and back roads could deliver any aesthetic pleasure?

Well, maybe. I’m not sure. I suspect I am talking about all this at least in part as a way of not talking about my mother, whom I miss very much. At the risk of being cliché, may your mother be blessed with good health, and may she go to heaven when she dies.

2/10/2010, p.s.,
Here is a nice elegy written for a parent, by Natasha Tretheway, in the current New England Review. Click here.