Looking Back

Photo by Wayne Hogan

Looking Back—Why I Stopped Writing Poetry and How I Started Again:
Embracing the Authentic, Contingent Self

Judy Kronenfeld

As many writers are fond of saying, we don’t choose our subjects; they choose us. In my case, my subjects tapped me on the shoulder or whispered in my ear, but, for a long time, I didn’t hear or I stifled them. And that has to do with cultural, historical and psychological factors that my analytical self has come to understand. My story is about how I stopped writing before I fully started—and it implies something about what it takes to write and what it took to resume. This is a story about the interaction of a person with family, culture, institutions, time and place—material for a complex novel—and so, necessarily, somewhat schematized here. It is also hardly a unique one; I expect it overlaps with many writers’ or artists’ stories, if not in the letter, in the spirit.
 
I suppose every bildungsroman is a story of feeling left out of something. I think of my former colleague, Goldberry Long’s debut novel; she herself was the child of hippie parents, and the eponymous character of her novel Juniper Tree Burning longs desperately for a far less hippie name and parental life-style. And I have certainly known members of sturdy but perhaps vanilla majorities who feel left out of the color, warmth, and internal bonds of ethnic or religious minorities.
 
Of course, sketches of one’s psyche in its cultural context are hardly unusual, ever since the ascendance of memoir about relatively ordinary personal experience, and not, say, “I chauffeured for Bill Clinton.” But in my long-gone formative years, and in the culture of my birth, repression was the better part of valor. It has taken me quite a while to acquire my perspective.
 
I am first-generation American, the only child of Jewish immigrant parents. My father, born in Germany, came to this country in 1934, the year after Adolf Hitler came to power. Although most of his family escaped the Holocaust, his eldest sister and her husband and children were eventually murdered in Auschwitz and other camps. My mother was born in Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now L’viv in the Ukraine), raised in Vienna, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1927. I grew up in a three-room apartment in a lower-middle-class immigrant neighborhood in the Bronx—Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia, Italians, and Irish. The apartment consisted of a kitchen, a living room where my parents kept their hide-a-bed sofa, and a bedroom which they generously gave to me, as well as a bathroom, of course. Thus, I spent much of my childhood longing for a four-room apartment which was not always in transition, would feel infinitely more formal, and would not embarrass me when the few friends I had the courage to invite came over and asked where my parents slept. Our building was next door to an Orthodox synagogue, which we attended a grand total of maybe three times during my childhood, though my mother did observe the domestic Jewish rituals connected with food: she kept kosher and cooked special Sabbath and Passover meals. My parents couldn’t afford the synagogue dues—we were close to the poorest in my mother’s and father’s families—and they didn’t have much time. My father worked a long day as a pattern-cutter in the doll factory owned by one of my maternal uncles, and, later, as a foreman in another factory. And, after that, my mother and he both got up in the wee hours of the morning six days a week in order to be ready for the 7:00 a.m. opening of the small luncheonette they bought in lower Manhattan—petit-bourgeois shopkeepers, but still so very working-class in style of life. Throughout my childhood, I heard the Hebrew melodies morning and night and high holy days wafting from next door, and I imbibed a kind of vapor of religion, if not the genuine draft, along with a fairly intense sense of ethnic and class identity.
 
My parents produced a child with the immigrant values of hard work, perseverance, a desire to please and be accepted, to fit in, and the goal of getting ahead and making good. The emphasis on “making a good impression” was huge and involved that mysterious essence, in the Bronxese of my ’50s youth, “poissonality.” As I say in a previously published essay, “Ingratiation for my immigrant parents—especially for my mother—was something like a savings account into which one regularly put money against the nasty turns of cold fate; she made regular deposits, in all weathers. The funny thing was how well it worked, for the most part.”^{1“Medical Management … Continue reading} Immigrants who want to be accepted tend to think, probably wisely, that they can’t afford to represent themselves as anything less than ideally adjusted, as well as thrilled with you, the established American, who deigns to listen to their hearts and lungs with a stethoscope or buys the merchandise they are selling. In the already conformist ’50s, my parents were proponents of the power of positive thinking and the efficacy of the rosy view (at least in their behavior towards others); they did not exactly encourage nonconformist individualism and radical self-expression.
 
Nevertheless, I did write prose and poetry as a naïve child and as an adolescent, gifted by a doting uncle with many books, encouraged by my mother’s pride in the skills of her American offspring, and by “creative writing” in elementary and junior high school—with its tendency to endorse the two-happy-adjectives-before-each-noun school of aesthetics (“fluffy white clouds,” “delicate pink petals”). But one of the pressures against writing that I felt from early on in my nuclear family was my parents’—particularly my mother’s—clear desire that all representations of our household and family be outstandingly cheerful and rosy. Perhaps that sunny ideal was even shared by the educational system in my immigrant world. In seventh grade, a teacher summarily wrote on my slightly melancholy essay: “You are too young for weltschmerz”—that is, world weariness and romantic discontent.
 
“Writing,” says the novelist Merrill Joan Gerber in an interview, “was the only place one could be totally honest; in all other areas of life the opposite was required. This put a great strain on me; it was an acrobatic feat always to have to say the correct (untrue) thing.” My social and psychological circumstances and my youth itself didn’t allow me to be quite as confident about my own self-expression.^{2Susan Koppelman, … Continue reading}
 
I commuted to an entrance-exam public high school for “gifted girls” in glamorous Manhattan, a borough scarily full of rich people, powerful people, men and women wearing suits, the women sporting little circle pins on their lapels. Those women probably wore negligees or silk lounging robes—just like in the movies—when they weren’t in their suits; my mother wore a ratty “house dress”—an often partially torn, loose floral print—and slippers down at the heels when she wasn’t dressed for the street in her “street dress”—and that was most of the time. Still, high school was a step up and away. I wrote well-turned sonnets about disappointed adolescent love for my adored and brilliant eleventh-grade English teacher who didn’t censor such melancholy, world-weary subjects, and I contributed frequently to my high school literary magazine. And I tried mightily to identify with Manhattan. This wasn’t that easy. Not only was the Bronx to which I returned each afternoon painfully without glamour, but everyone from the Bronx spoke in a way that marked them as Bronxites; they spoke Bronxese, a nasty nasalized dialect that my high school considered a serious social liability. In fact, we had to attend classes to retrain our speech habits, to eradicate those terrible accents that would keep us stuck in the lower social classes for the rest of our blighted lives. Class embarrassment and a sort of ethnic minority embarrassment felt closely linked for an upwardly mobile girl in the waspish ’50s and early ’60s.
 
Over three decades after that high school speech class I published a poem, “Relapsing into a Bronx Accent While Sitting on the Couch with My Daughter,” which recalls how
 
        …our obedient tongues
        pirouetted, en pointe, so
        to speak, unlearning steamy rooms,
        cabbage, brisket, men in underwear
        at the kitchen table, playing pinochle.
 
This poem actually embraces my lower-middle class Bronx first- generation roots—at least as a metaphor for a sort of relaxed earthiness. If in Manhattan they ate artichokes and (un-kosher) lobster (foods I didn’t get to sample until late in my teens), in the Bronx, that doting uncle got all excited when my mother made a dish out of calves’ feet—a sort of Jewish soul food with an odd name, which I pretend to like for the sake of this poem:
 
        Yet how good to unpack
        and speak
        the mother tongue—
        even years later—
 
        as good as releasing
        numbed taped toes
        from ballet shoes,
 
        how good to tickle my wrinkling nose
        with a feast
        of truck-stop d’s and t’s
        and flayut vowels,
 
        Jeez! as good as
        garlic-rubbed toast
        and jellied calves’ feet
        that had a name
        that sounded like a sneeze (pcha!),
 
        as good as Ah!
        rubbing your dirty feet,
        my little big one.^{3Kansas Quarterly 24, … Continue reading}
 
But it took me a long while to get to such a place. And my college experience, if anything, fattened my little inner demons.
 
I went, on scholarship, to one of the then-called “seven sister” colleges, an all-women’s school, definitely considered “elite” at the time. At least fourth-fifths of the students seemed to be the daughters and grand-daughters of those rich and powerful Manhattan eaters of artichokes and lobster and wearers of silk lounging robes. My sparsely-educated parents wanted their child’s life and social position to be better than theirs, and saw education as the means, as I surely did myself. In addition, that marvelous high school English teacher had gone to Smith—one of five black^{4Transcript of … Continue reading} students at the time she attended, in the ’40s—and strongly urged me to apply. The fact that she couldn’t have been an average Smithie encouraged me.
 
But first there was the process of getting in, with the hefty scholarship that would make it possible, a process that made me feel I was in training to become an imposter. I had to be interviewed, at home, in the living room slash parental bedroom of our three-room apartment, by the impeccably suited, circle-pinned Park Avenue Ladies of the Smith College Club of New York, who controlled recommendations about scholarships, and the interview had to be in the presence of my mother. As I knew she would, my mother followed her own inner cultural directives, serving bowl after bowl of fruit, plate after plate of cake and cookies, as if the ladies’ disinclination to sample the goodies meant she hadn’t yet hit on the right offering. Finally, when there was no room left on the coffee table, each of the Ladies removed her gloves and politely accepted one very small cookie. My mother had the wisdom not to speak too much. But when she did speak, in her heavy German-Yiddish-New York accent, it was in what she fancied a genteel manner, as she extolled my fervent desire for the heavenly blessing of admission to Smith. I bit down my embarrassment and smiled and smiled and said humbly how honored I would be if they graced me with their largesse. I had to snuff out a tiny flame of pride (tiny, because I barely knew it could burn) about the boot-licking position I was taking which they seemed to respond to quite favorably. Noblesse oblige. Ingratiation—it works.
 
And then came Smith itself. Even though I had managed to get there, and surely felt it was intellectually deserved, it was easy to feel like an arriviste. There were medieval Freudian customs like Father/Daughter Weekends. My dad drove the four or five hours during his backbreaking work week, laid his head on the desk in my Abnormal Psych class, and promptly fell asleep, causing my cheeks to flame, however much I loved him. I was acutely aware that my parents were very far from the professionals most of my peers’ parents were and vastly removed in finances and cultural style.
 
The furnishings of the living and dining rooms in the “house” in which I lived were far nicer than what we had at home. There were linen napkins, and napkin rings, for heaven’s sake, something I’d never seen. Girls wore jodhpurs—something else I’d never seen—rode horses, and owned horses boarded nearby. There were silver tea and coffee services in the residences (the motif of the time was “gracious living”). I was so tongue-tied by class-consciousness that I was even afraid to approach the liveried doorman in the elegant Manhattan building where a wealthy friend from my Smith dorm lived. I would hang back from asking him to announce my presence when I met my friend for the drive back to Smith in her car.
 
I was also conscious of being from a minority culture as a person of Jewish background, not so much because there were no other Jewish women at Smith (there were a good number, and we all seemed to have been given Jewish roommates), or because I experienced any overt anti-Semitism, but because, before the advent of multiculturalism, the dominant Protestant culture was so clearly the only game in town. Nondenominational chapel was Protestant nondenominational chapel. The very coolness of Ivy League or preppy culture—its esteem for the blasé attitude—was like an implicit or even explicit raised eyebrow at ethnic excitability. Indeed, when I was enthusiastic in class—I did tend to get excited about literature—one of my professors encouraged me to moderate my tone and voice. In my graduation picture of black-robed women from my Smith house—a row standing on one leg behind those sitting, most everyone smiling and a few cracking up as we clown—I seem to be one of the most, if not the most, abandoned. My body is tilted, my head thrown back in unselfconscious glee, my knee not lifted genteelly, like one of the other women’s in the back row, showing off a shapely calf; instead my leg is plopped without forethought, flat on the shoulders of two women sitting in front of me, so that my full broad knee is exposed and my calf appears thicker than the calves stretching into the front row on my right and left.
 
Oh, enthusiasm was definitively not genteel. It was lower-class and possibly even too ethnic. Even the reigning approach to literature when I was an undergraduate, the New Criticism, valued cold perfections, encouraging poetry of restraint, impersonality and ironic distance. It tended to devalue the personal, to exclude social, cultural, political and historical contexts. Yale’s Department of English, housing such luminaries as Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and W. K. Wimsatt was “the foremost center”^{5Colin Campbell, “The … Continue reading} of the New Criticism in the ’50s and ’60s, and the seedbed of its dissemination to nearby places like Smith, some of whose faculty had obtained their advanced degrees there. And the atmosphere in the English Department at Yale in the ’50s has been described as “very High Church and stiff,” and its now illustrious professor Harold Bloom, born of Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents and raised in the Bronx, like myself, as “big and messy and emotional, and, in a department whose Anglophilia often functioned as a genteel form of anti-Semitism, Jewish.”^{6Larissa MacFarquahar, … Continue reading} Indeed, “in the traditionally Anglophilic circle of academic English, . . .Yale’s social reputation [was] one of wealth and class.”^{7Campbell, “The … Continue reading} The early ’60s, when I was at Smith, were much like the ’50s; revolutionary cultural and social changes did not begin until after I graduated.
 
The clincher to my experience of—well, I have to call it a sort of inauthenticity—was probably my exposure to that reigning school of literary criticism. Now, the New Critical approach had enormous virtues of close attention to texts and their formal features, virtues that definitely contributed to my scholarly development, and, ultimately, to my creative development as well. And I loved even the “controlled” poetry I was reading as an undergraduate, perhaps because its control, like the control of baroque music, suggested emotions all the stormier for requiring restraint. But the manner in which poetry was presented in class had the effect of making the young potential writer think writing was canonical and not something a living contemporary could do, especially a woman, and a minority woman at that. The manner of teaching made it hard to think that poems—no matter how much refined and revised—came out of feeling, that they were expressions of lived experience and the need to explore and capture it, rather than elegant collections of poetic devices that were willed into being out of a disinterested desire to create a perfect artifact. At my first college seminar at a faculty home—on the English novel—I ventured to ask a question about the eighteenth-century economic and social context of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders—and was stonily stared into silence. What did all this avoidance of social and economic contexts mean? Were writers imposters, suppressing ungenteel backgrounds like my own? Or, worse, were they true aristocrats born to the purple and didn’t need to mention their socially pure origins?
 
Looking back on these experiences, I think of a Woody Allen moment from his 1977 movie Annie Hall. Woody imagines how he appears to Annie’s family when he’s at their prim lace-covered table—as if he were wearing a rabbinical beard and side curls. When I saw that movie, even as a long-married parent of teenagers, I still blushingly identified with the lower-class Jewish culture it pictures: food eaten almost standing up, with a haunch on the table; a female relative who grabs Woody’s cheek between thumb and forefinger and shakes it in greeting.
 
These circumstances, then, combined with my own weaknesses and history, led to a frame of mind not conducive to exploring my emotions and experiences in creative work, a frame of mind inimical to the writing of poetry as I’ve since experienced it, from the early ’80s, twenty years after I graduated from college, when I rededicated myself to writing poetry, and, eventually, to personal essays and the occasional short story as well. It’s not as if I didn’t thrive intellectually in college and graduate school. From the time of my undergraduate honor thesis on Gerard Manly Hopkins, I was intellectually and emotionally involved in the analysis of poetry, and intellectually involved in thinking about a critical approach that would overcome the a-historical tendencies of the New Criticism while maintaining close attention to the text. But the creative writer in me was not nourished or developed very much at all. I kept a sporadic journal which I showed no one. I took one undergrad creative writing course in fiction and poetry in which I performed modestly, but no such writing courses as a graduate student. As an undergrad, though almost never as a grad student, I wrote poems here and there on my own, some of which I submitted to the college literary magazine which roundly rejected them; I found the editors snooty and gave up. I lacked discipline, re-visioning, consistent exposure to contemporary work, feedback from others—amateur or professional. When leaving (for family reasons) a tenure-track job teaching English at a Midwestern university in the ’70s and thinking vaguely again of returning to poetry, I was quite susceptible to a comment from a colleague: “Why do you want to get involved in all that emotional stuff?”
 
Poetry can’t begin, says the poet Jane Hirshfield, if you have not conquered your “fear of public exposure, of being found unacceptable if [you] speak honestly, if who [you] really are were to become known”^{8Jane Hirshfield, … Continue reading} —however complex and paradoxical that you is, I might add.
 
The reasons I was gradually able to conquer that fear of self-exposure and write, revise, submit and publish since my early forties are many. One major reason was certainly the sheer process of growing up, the passage of time taking me from being a child in my natal family, vulnerable to parental and cultural pressures, to an adult parent in my own family with its own status and culture (in an America where there can be, thankfully, class mobility—even startling mobility—through education). Changes in the cultural atmosphere as a result of feminism and a variety of movements broadening that “Anglophile” emphasis in literary studies and creative work are other reasons. I was fortunate, too, to be able to participate—just when I had rededicated myself to writing poetry—in an informal public poetry workshop led by a kind and brilliant teacher with no formal credentials (she did not write or publish poetry) at the California university where I had taught composition and literature, and, eventually, to participate in a poetry group I started with a local writer. Thus I began a lifetime of sharing my work, getting feedback, revising according to my own understandings, as well as learning, first-hand, that writing, however necessarily well crafted, is often sparked by vulnerabilities. And I was also fortunate in being able to teach creative writing at that same California university soon after my rededication to the craft, further schooling myself in contemporary work and practical criticism and building on the habits of close reading I had gained from my New Critical undergraduate years. I learned from the authors I read and used as models, as well as from the students’ work I commented on and hoped to bring to greater proficiency.
 
But with my first-generation American and rather Puritan nose-to-the-grindstone leanings and the sense I got from my own academic experience, one part of me originally did think that poems could simply be “willed into being.” I had to learn otherwise. As the poet William Stafford says:
 
        Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your
        eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious
        interest in it is worse than no interest at all. It’s like a very faint
        star. If you look right at it you can’t see it, but if you look a little to
         one side it is there.^{9William Stafford, … Continue reading}
 
Maybe other poets got to this place much faster than I!
 
Even if there are certain melodies that repeatedly play within us, poems do come from our contingent selves, the selves we are at a particular transient moment in time, selves that are going to feel slightly different in an hour, and maybe quite different tomorrow. There are no maps. The fact that I wrote a poem yesterday doesn’t really say anything about whether I will pull off another rough draft that I’m moderately happy with today.
 
Every poet has some method or methods to tap into that contingent self, to reach the universal through the particular and transient, to sneak up on the authentic. I often need the “permission” that certain poems I stumble on or reread may give me (there’s definitely an element of accident in all this) to write about something equally true or disturbing or secret or daring, or surprisingly joyful, or comic or trivial—or all of these. Poems have to be snuck up on because they can come from places in my psyche that are full of tension and contradiction, from things I fear that I may not even know I fear, things that make me squirm or give me pain that I may not realize give me pain. One of my methods is to keep throwing scraps of paper with thoughts, images, ideas, and lines into a file folder. In order to get started, I often type up the scraps, which can result in some unexpected juxtapositions as unrelated thoughts fall against each other and sometimes spark. Later, I return to the collections of typed-up scraps to get started again. Because I am constantly changing, yet also do have those melodies that keep playing within me, certain of the images or sensations I recorded will appeal to me at the very moment I am getting ready to write and lead to a line, a stanza, or the rough draft of an entire poem. Others will seem dull or uninteresting at that moment. But all it takes is the one or two that will compel.
 
And so, of course, as I returned to, and really created my relationship with poetry, I wrote (admittedly, after her death) about my mother’s sometime unkindness to my father, surely a shanda (Yiddish for a humiliating shame or disgrace, especially when shared with the public world), if there ever was one. The Yiddish that sometimes embarrassed me as a child began to warm my poems. Katshkele, little duck, for example, my father’s nickname for me that mortified when he yelled it out, as I got off the bus from a junior high field trip, is crucial in “Yiddish Kisses.” This poem describes with love and sorrow, and an eye for the sadly comic, my already somewhat demented dad becoming almost wordless in his retirement home, lavishing kisses on my hands as he holds them, sometimes missing, and kissing his own, depositing
 
        another wet word juicily
        on my cheek—not quite missing
        my ear—as if to speak
        my nickname, katshkele.^{10Light Lowering in … Continue reading}

 
No rosy picture in my mother’s sense here; this daughter is already calculating escape, though daughters were supposed to care for their ill parents until they got well!
 
A kind of store that was linked to a not entirely comfortable intimate experience—getting measured for a bra or seeing my mother get so measured—appears as well, given a lavish made-up name: “Madame Goldfarb’s Foundation, Lingerie, and Prosthesis Shoppe,” as does the live poultry store in the primeval peasant Bronx of my childhood where chickens were slaughtered on the spot, their blood draining into the straw-covered floor, their feathers smoked off with a candle, causing a putrid stink. Farshtunkene kez drops in, rotten cottage or farmer’s cheese, which my mother loved mixed with scrambled eggs, most likely a remnant of her own childhood when no food could be wasted. Acutely embarrassing gestures that would have mortified me in front of my Smith friends make their appearance as well: my father’s brother looking at my teeth as if I were a horse (my mother thought he was a ruffian); my mother superstitiously fake-spitting twice and saying poo-poo (apparently the gesture and the sound both required) to ward off the evil eye, when something praiseworthy was said about her only child.^{11“Spaghetti … Continue reading} The very modest parental means and education, and the gestures that once filled me with mortification, were ickily cloying or what my mother called coarse: naturally, all this stuck with me and became the memory seeds that grew poems. Even that living room/parental bedroom appears in a poem recalling with belated understanding how my father used to set the alarm ten minutes early, though still before dawn,
 
        so he could fall back
        into a hazy sleep on the hide-a-bed

        in the living room,
        adding a step
        between oblivion and the icy jolt
        of another exhausting day.
 
Significantly, that hide-a-bed is “gone” and the one bedroom redecorated in “chenille” for the dead parents in the surreal dream of “Lives of the Dead”; there they play a game of Scrabble, necessarily “anarchic” because they cannot spell, in their “40-watt-/dim Bronx kitchen” “still in the ’50s.” Meanwhile their daughter, “visiting from the 2010s,” gets robbed in the street of her “grocery money” by “someone brandishing an AK-47,” “someone out of a conflict somewhere” / Ukraine, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Gaza?”^{12“Ten Minutes,” … Continue reading}
 
Perhaps because our earliest impressions are the ones most imprinted on our hearts and minds, like Wordsworthian landscapes, my poems are full of the unglamorous aspects, “beyond the glistening districts,” of cities, cities “greasy as dirt / under my nails, close as soot / on my eyelashes,”^{13“Time Zone,” … Continue reading} but with their own remembered patina: “the cracked sidewalks flashing mica,” the corner with “newsstand, candy store, barber shop— / utterly, beautifully, unremarkable.”^{14“My Long-Left Birth … Continue reading}
 
And, of course, vulnerability enters at every point, vulnerability personally experienced, observed, or imagined (or something of all of these), comic or poignant, or both at the same time: of the bereaved, the homely, the “billowy-waist[ed],” the huge-nose[d]” reliant on their hairdressers for compensatory beautification, the extravagantly made-up, the needy child wrapping himself around a parent’s or step-parent’s leg, the grad student who rebuffs a professor who hits on her and is told: “I’ll still write you / a good letter for that job,” the long-named not blessed with Smith, Brown, or Jones as surnames (“Nice to see you, / Secretary Svidinskaia,” “Family well, / Senator Sarangarajan?”)—the unlistened to or unheard, tired of being regarded like “clouds / gliding by,” or being told “Tell me what you want me to say.”^{15“At the YW Indoor … Continue reading}
 
I suppose I hardly need to say, Go figure.