Pastoria
These dark hills can be
beaten into form:
mountain sonnets, grassy
odes. Words, feelings,
defined within fenced
pastures. Over reelings
of the Willis river, my
husband informs,
“Each stream has its own
sound—this one bubbles,
but listen to the Slate
River, how it scrapes along
the rocks.” To me, water
is water, no song
of differentiation, no
washed troubles,
no real rhythm, the
thump, jolt, swing of trains
on elevated tracks
synchronized
with airport takeoffs
from LaGuardia—
just ripple, bubble,
scrape of rock. A tin can gains
speed going downstream—like
me, nothing there
to grab hold to, floating
down in water’s lair.
You
might be forgiven for not being familiar with the name of American poet Susan
Montez, author of Radio Free Queens (Braziller, 1994) and Teaching Shakespeare (Astoria Press, 2020). According to the author biography of this
new, posthumous collection (distributed by ugly duckling presse), she was “born
in South Carolina, but grew up in Farmville, Virginia” and spent the bulk of
her adult life, it would appear, ping-ponging between Virginia and
Brooklyn/Queens. Her biography at the back of the collection ends: “In March
2016, Susan Montez decided she would go back to writing poetry and publish
Teaching Shakespeare. Four days later, she died.” There is something darkly
ironic about a posthumous poetry collection so full of life. Teaching Shakespeare
is very much a poetry of lived experience, composing a lyric somehow more
conversational, and more intimate than what might have appeared via memoir or
journal writing. “Blotchy skinned and pregnant,” Montez writes, to open the
poem “My $3 an Hour State-Subsidized Analyst Suggests / Lithium for Balanced
Decision Making,” “I watch Soul Trail and look / at old pictures while
my husband works / nights at the prison. Here’s me / last summer by mother’s
pool, / palmetto trees, looking like Jacquie / O.” Montez and her work were
first revealed, to me, at least, through the book’s touching introduction (an
introduction that appears to leave out as much as it reveals) by her friend, the
novelist Binnie Kirshenbaum; the introduction speaks to how the two of them
first met, and Kirshenbaum’s first-hand knowledge of how Montez’ not-uncomplicated
but fearlessly lived personal life revealed itself through the scope of her poems:
The impetus for her switching
from fiction to poetry was a boy, the peculiar boy, the very peculiar
boy, from our fiction workshop with whom we often palled around. One [of] the
many ways in which this boy was peculiar was his steadfast refusal to reveal
any information, no matter how mundane, about himself. Ask him where he was
from, and he’d say, “That’s classified information.” The only exception to this
was his invariable response to Susan’s declarations of love and devotion: “I
don’t do wet stuff.” The more he hid, the more Susan snooped. She discovered he
was in a student production of Hamlet, which was the inspiration for the
poem “A Fine Hour.” Once, enamored of an actor/ who ate fire between acts of
Hamlet, …. Another thing she learned was that he’d applied for a coveted
spot in a poetry workshop taught by Marilyn Hacker. She didn’t learn this until
the day before applications were due. That night she cranked out the required
dozen poems. One might say that her letter, expressing her desire for proximity
to the peculiar boy, was self-sabotage, but she assured Mrs. Hacker that there
would be no “vomitous” love-y poems forthcoming. “I don’t do wet stuff,” she
wrote.
The obsession with the
peculiar boy lasted another year or so. The passion for poetry took hold.
A
particularly delightful element of the introduction, also, includes the
footnote: “In graduate school, after reading one of her poems, John As[h]bury
said to her, ‘Susan, if you’re going to quote Miss Piggy, you have to credit
Miss Piggy.’ She marveled that John As[h]bury would know the source of, ‘So continental,
moi.’” Montez was student of Ashbury (spelled correctly in the introduction,
but misspelled in the footnote) and Allen Ginsberg as well, who prompted the curious
biographical musing “A Guru Dies; A Child Is Born,” as Montez wrote on her two
poles of connection, from her friend and mentor to her own son. Kirchenbaum offers
that it is “a poem that celebrates, in a most unexpected and comical way, their
curious kinship before it turns to ache with grief.” As the poem begins:
When Ginsburg’s guru
died, the guru’s spirit appeared
in a vision: crystalline,
prism, an angel of Jacob’s ladder.
Ginsberg said, “I’ve done
the William Carlos Williams thing
all my life. Am I right?”
“No,” the guru said, “get
married and have a baby.”
Seeking
references online to the late poet who, according to the introduction, also
went by, at times, “Susan Bartlett,” “Susan Bartlett Montez” and “Susan
Bartlett Montez Nixon,” I did wonder if her life and work was, in fact, a
fiction, perhaps composed by Binnie Kirshenbaum herself, who is an accomplished
fiction writer. But no, there do seem to be enough references to Montez, both
as poet and teacher at Norfolk University in Virginia, that this appears not to
be the case (which is a relief, admittedly), including references to her debut
collection. The bulk of Montez’ activity was long enough ago that there would
be very little of her online, which I’ve noticed as well for late Canadian
poets such as Diana Brebner (and I know very much that she existed). Teaching
Shakespeare reveal a lively, thoughtful poet working quietly in her own
way, and one that, for reasons unknown, stopped writing immediately after the
completion of this manuscript, pushing the manuscript into a drawer for years, until
mere days before her death. This is a beautifully-produced collection, and the lyric
narratives of her poems are warm, open, funny, intimate, dark and devastatingly
clear, and the liveliness of the poems make the loss of the author that much
more tragic.
La Mer de Deux
Waves scud fresh salt;
sand crabs burrow
quickly.
White feet, Etruscan feet
walk the opalescent
memory.
We two, the small, the
finite
are lost and parted by
this
sea-green foam. Our
Love is residue
flailed under the pier,
barnacles hung on rotting
wood while the sea jolts
under gray storms.
Scullions lost,
a chest rusts in the
sea’s interior, the
forgotten
pearls.
What pearls have you now
across this
cyclopean ocean?
