Like many people who become writers, I cannot recall a time when I wasn’t smitten with books. I was fortunate to be born to parents who were the first in their families to be able to attend college, and who consequently valued reading and education to an almost fanatical degree. My father was a first generation American who spoke only German till kindergarten. He went on to become a high school principal. His parents never really learned English. They spoke a mixture of German, Polish and Yiddish and remained semi-illiterate all their lives. I think my father was a little ashamed of them. Assimilation was his goal, his ticket to a new, improved life as “a pure product of America,” to quote the poet William Carlos Williams.
I never had a conversation with either of my paternal grandparents. We had no shared language. I have faint memories of visiting my paternal grandmother in Brooklyn, who smelled of sweat and boiled chicken. She’d pinch my cheek and babble sweetly to me as I looked to my father to translate. He’d just shake his head. I don’t believe either of my paternal grandparents had the opportunity to go beyond elementary school. At sixteen my father lied about his age, joined the Navy, fought in WW II and then went to college on the GI bill. Not an uncommon story back then. My mother played piano and accordion and had musical theatre ambitions. By the time I knew her family, they clearly had more money than my father’s people did, but this had not always been so. My mother’s father had had to quit school in sixth grade to go to work when his father died. My maternal grandfather built a textile business that prospered and employed his brothers and in-laws as it grew. He was able to send my mother to college. After marriage, like many women of her era and class, my mother made raising children her vocation. Her reverence for books, the arts and culture were a dominant part of my childhood.
I remember as a toddler being given a cloth picture book that was meant to be take into the bathtub. This floppy bathtub book conveyed the message that books could and should be taken everywhere. Even when I was small, whenever I was reading or carrying a book, I felt protected. Protected from what, I’m not sure, but I still lug books around like security blankets, stuff them into my purse, load them onto my phone, pile them like fortress walls around me, as though they are a charm against danger, ignorance, or an adverse fate.
In childhood, being able to read seemed a principle reason for being alive, one of life’s chief pleasures and consolations. Books were momentary stays against confusion to corrupt Robert Frost’s description of poetry. Books’ smooth or nubby covers, their heft in the hand, their smell if detectable (aroma of dry leaves, fabric and glue?), all provided a sense of refuge. Books meant connection, immersion and escape. They represented knowledge, inspiration, illumination of other places, minds, times. Sometimes they conveyed hints about how to wade through the minefield of my own consciousness and moods, how to navigate tricky interchanges with fellow humans. They seemed to give voice to what was leaping and seething inside one’s body and mind. When I felt like an alien, which I did much of the time, I could always regain some sense of belonging by reading. Looking back, it seems I often lived more fully in books than I did in the so-called “real world.” I still have to push myself at times to connect with other beings, and not just recede into a cave of my own making where I isolate, scribble and read.
Language, particularly written languages, seemed to me as a child and still seem to me now the most holy invention of the human race, something on the opposite side of the balance scale from all the harm humans do. I believe language and the art derived from it to be redemptive. (This is my feeling about art in all mediums.) I was a kid who loved staring at unfamiliar alphabets: wiry Hebrew letters in synagogue prayer books, photos of the Rosetta stone, vertical stacks of characters chiseled into markers in a Japanese graveyard, illustrations in a book on American Sign Language on how to sculpt words with your hands.
My parents’ house was filled with a motley assortment of books. The headboard of my parents’ bed had a little cabinet on each side with a sliding wooden door. My mother’s side contained whatever she had most recently borrowed from the library: bestsellers, Agatha Christie novels, current nonfiction. On my father’s recessed shelf sat paperback detective novels by Mickey Spillane and Ross MacDonald which he bought at a news-stand next to the barbershop he patronized. His detective novels were the first adult books I read, when my parents were safely out of the house. In the family room, where my parents’ records and record player lived, two walls of built-in bookshelves contained, in no particular order, James Thurber’s books of cartoons and essays, which I loved, novels by James Michener, Leon Uris and Irving Stone, and biographies of presidents and generals. A red and blue world book encyclopedia from the year I was born had a shelf to itself. One shelf down a couple of “great writers” series–volumes of different thicknesses but all bound in the same plain wrap style–a few books by Mark Twain and Norman Mailer, and a couple of art books with pale, tipped in color reproductions of European paintings shared space with a humor book called What Not to Name the Baby, which leaned against a memoir about Ernest Hemingway. And so on. My progenitors’ bookshelves were full of strange bedfellows. It did not occur to my parents to restrict my reading, and somehow I knew to keep quiet about it, so even though from an early age I was given plenty of children’s books, as soon as I was able I helped myself to any books in my parents’ hodgepodge collection that attracted me. Except the Hemingway memoir, which I never touched. Though I hadn’t read a word of Hemingway’s fiction, I was somehow aware he’d killed himself. The combination of the avuncular sounding title Papa Hemingway with the knowledge that “Papa” had committed suicide with a shotgun produced such anxiety in me that the mere sight of the book cover made me feel my mind had short circuited, or had suddenly gone off line, as our old black and white TV did every night after midnight, when it signed off and broadcast only static and blackness till morning.
I don’t think my parents owned any poetry anthologies, but they did have several books of humorous short verse by Ogden Nash, which I read. In second grade there was a schoolwide poetry contest, to which I submitted this Nash-influenced couplet:
Hiccups, Hiccups, up they perk.
I would like to know where they lurk.
After receiving much unexpected praise and attention for this shimmering bit of literary brilliance, my head swelled, and I began telling grownups when they asked the inevitable question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” that I planned to be a writer.
Once I got a library card, I discovered volumes of “nonsense poems” by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Hilaire Belloc in the children’s section. I checked them out repeatedly, first to have them read to me, then to read on my own as I honed that precious skill. This trio of poets deemed acceptable for children were inventive and funny. Dark undercurrents glimmered in their work. I discovered their comrade Edward Gorey. Reading these writers may have shaped my taste for black humor, and my later adulation of poets like James Tate who could seamlessly integrate the absurd, pathos, imaginative flights and eruptions of grief.
My parents owned a copy of Havelock Ellis’ two volume tome The Psychology of Sex, which was much resorted to on the sly once I hit puberty. The Ellis book, which I still have, was both arousing and bewildering. Most of the important terms were in Latin and hence incomprehensible, as was the entire looming subject of sex. This was during the 1960s, so the internet was still a twinkle in its inventor’s eye, and the lone dictionary in the house was no help with Latin. Context clues and imagination were the only tools I could use to decipher the italicized Latin that cropped up at key moments. This inability to translate led to misconceptions I was not disabused of till an embarrassingly late age. In The Psychology of Sex, when not roadblocked by Latin, I read about the sexual significance of modesty, fetishes, and other arresting subjects. Later, I used this book as a source for images and quotations for poems. For one longish poem, I combined quotes from the Ellis books with passages from some of my mother’s Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason) novels. Perhaps my obsession with those volumes, and the jumbled, eclectic nature of my parents’ library, fueled my jumbled, eclectic taste for literary collage. As I began to try to write poems more seriously after college, I developed a penchant for plundering reference books, magazines, novels, cookbooks, nature publications, science reports, etc. for lines and images that could be played with, bent and recombined.
At age eleven I discovered a paperback copy of Lolita in our family room, shelved in a spot just beneath the ceiling. I had gotten wind that this book was practically illegal, so naturally I needed to read it. Lolita could only be reached, even by adults, by standing on a chair and then climbing on top of a built-in cupboard under the bookshelves and standing on that. So, when my parents went out, despite being clumsy and unathletic, I climbed. I understood very little of Nabokov’s novel, but did find something incantatory in his prose which produced a high similar to that catalyzed by the cadences of a set of songs I was learning by heart.
My mother had a collection of cast recordings of musical comedies in a closet in the family room. She had trained as a singer, adored opera and theatre, and had a cultivated mezzo soprano voice. As a kid I spent a great deal of time listening to her LPs of Oklahoma!, Kiss Me Kate, Flower Drum Song, Camelot, The Sound of Music, over and over. This was not a sign of mental health. I was a fearful and socially awkward kid. The comfort I derived from the rhymes and wordplay in these song lyrics, the delight and sense of mastery I got from memorizing musical comedy songs was unprecedented in my life at that time. Whenever I was stressed or scared I found I could repeat songs in my head and enter a calm, ordered world, where the rhymes in songs, and later in poems, could, to quote Yeats, make “a sound when it is finished like the click of the lid of a perfectly made box.” Why this was so soothing to me I don’t know, except to cite the obvious, that I think there is something primally comforting to most people in song, in poetry and well-turned rhyme, in language play, in music, all of which are so endemic to being human, and which exist in all languages and cultures. In any case, this strategy of memorizing songs and keeping them in my mental library for use when needed seemed to alleviate panic and therefore became necessary to my survival. It was a new sensation, this feeling of being overtaken by and becoming part of the beauty, rightness and satisfying order that occurred when words and music fitted together just so and became this magical thing: a song. I could put myself into a kind of trance as a child by playing and replaying these songs, memorizing them so I could sing whole records. Some songs were sad, and I could make myself cry while singing them. Others were comic “character songs.” I liked both kinds. Unfortunately, I was not blessed with my mother and brother’s musical talent, either in terms of voice or ear, so I quickly learned my love of singing would have to remain a solitary pursuit. Later, I discovered that I could obtain the same transports of excitement by memorizing and repeating poems I liked in my head, and I didn’t have to be able to carry a tune. When I learned, much later, that writing or reciting poetry is considered a kind of singing, that poets had referred to it that way for centuries, I felt a secret gladness, and a weird sense of kinship, however unearned.
When my mother compelled me to take piano lessons, I became a grouchy, recalcitrant, ungrateful piano student. I think she hoped I had inherited some form of her gift for music and that lessons would reveal whatever musical talent might lie hidden in me. For years I grimly insisted I hated piano, and I made my piano teacher’s life if not hell, then a grim outpost of purgatory. But he was smart. “If you don’t like music, what are you interested in?” he managed to ask, a couple of years in as I glowered at the metronome. “Poetry!” I hissed. The following week, he showed up with a gift: a small anthology of poems. I’m not sure I knew what an anthology was until I was given this book with that word on the cover. The book introduced me to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost: a smattering of what was considered the well-mannered canon back then. The book blew my mind. Finally, I could begin to find out what poetry, grown up poetry, was all about. The piano teacher’s present also made me feel recognized, listened to, and for weeks I was dizzy with gratitude. I tried to be a little more diligent about practicing the Sonatinas I was butchering after that.
Throughout childhood, often in the middle of the night, before I had much idea what poems were, I tried to write them. Rhyming, self-conscious, halting, and mannered, these youthful attempts involved fairies and heartbreak and sad, brooding revelations. Though I nursed vague ambitions to be a poet after my early success with the hiccup poem, I also believed that poetry was something practiced only in the distant past, like jousting or clavichord playing. I knew no examples of living poets. Everyone published in the anthology my patient piano teacher had given me was, to the best of my knowledge, long dead. Reviews of novels appeared in magazines my parents subscribed to, magazines I leafed through, like Time and The New Yorker, but I never saw a review of a volume of poetry till I was in my late twenties. Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell were labeled poets by some of the hipper teachers in high school who were vying to be thought cool by students, but we never studied these singer-songwriters or their lyrics. Plus, I already knew that I couldn’t sing worth a damn, so that door was closed. As punishment for some minor misbehavior in Junior High, I was made to memorize a poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and recite it in front of my history class. I didn’t mind committing the poem to memory, this was something I felt I was rather good at, having had copious practice, but being pathologically shy and having to stammer out the poem in front of thirty of my sniggering peers was painful. Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost were the only poets we read in high school, and while their verses were stirring, I somehow formed the idea that they, like the poets in the little anthology I’d been given, had lived hundreds of years ago, and were thus the last American poets to walk the earth. I might as well aspire to be a dinosaur.
When I got to college it was big news to me that there were living humans who wrote and published poetry. There was even a real live poet teaching at my college! I could take a class with him, despite the fact that I was a psychology major! Also, a huge newsflash in my blindered little world was that many of these contemporary poets wrote in the language I spoke, more or less, not some archaic version of English. More breaking news: some of these living poets composed poems NOT about being a shepherd or ancient wars or contemplating a vase (fine poets and poems, these, but not relatable for me at that time.) Rather, these mythical poets of my moment wrote on topics like drugs, sex, drunkenness, movies, telephone calls, dreams, crushes, friends, politics, what they ate and read and hated and worried about day to day. These were exciting developments, and my world was duly rocked.
Once I got over the shocking revelation that people all over the world were busy writing poetry in my own time, tangling with both contemporary and ageless concerns, I tried to educate myself. I had eighteen years of lost time to make up for. I signed up for a poetry class with the resident poet at my college, Bert Meyers, and bought and read the two required texts: Naked Poetry, and the first edition of the Donald Hall edited Contemporary American Poetry with the stars and stripes on the cover. I also bought a book of Bert Meyers’ and found that I loved his poems: their compression, darkness, and humanism; their humility and reverence for image, their humor, meticulous construction, and the ways they processed the influence of Eastern European poets. Instead of feeling that there were no contemporary poets, I now was alarmed that I would never catch up with them all, with the reams and reams of what I needed to read. But that was a happier, richer problem.
For class, I read “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, a handful of poems by Sylvia Plath, and all the rest of the poets who populated the class anthologies. It was amazing and heady stuff, but I hungered to find more women poets. Not out of some nascent feminist stance…I wasn’t that advanced. I didn’t know shit about feminism. I just longed to see what women would do with this whole poetry thing, and I was looking for models. Most anthologies I unearthed at the library contained what seemed like an average of two or three females to about thirty dudes. Frank O’Hara was wistful and zippy. Langston Hughes was beautiful and spoke openly of the soul. Tom Clark had digested all of English poetry, it seemed, and used the word “Wow” in a poem which I never forgot. But I was trying to figure out how to be a female, or if I wanted to be one, so I hoped to find women poets who could advise me. Bert Meyers was a great teacher for me and encouraged me with vast generosity. The two poetry classes I took from him were revelatory. I worked up my courage over the course of several weeks to ask if he could make me a list of female poets he thought were worth reading. I still have the list he wrote out for me, on a piece of yellow ruled paper, in elegant, spidery handwriting. After I buzzed through his list, I trolled libraries for woman poets. As anthologies of female poets began to be published, I discovered Elizabeth Bishop, Wislawa Szymborska, Gabriella Mistral, June Jordan, Alice Notley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Eileen Myles, Elaine Equi and many others. I stumbled on Sappho, and an anthology of excerpts from Japanese Poetic Diaries, all of which seemed to have been written by women. This led to finding the work of Sei Shonagon, a feisty, tart tongued writer born in 966 AD, whose Pillow Book remains dear to my heart.
I enrolled in Professor Meyers’ poetry classes on the advice of a guy I met at the beginning of college. This person, Dennis Cooper, changed my life. I’d gone off to college nursing some murky, floaty notion that I wanted to be a poet. Before I left for school, my quiet, dignified, kind father, who I adored and longed to please, and in some ways wanted to be, asked what I thought I might like study, what I was thinking to do with my life. “I think I’d like to write, maybe poetry” I admitted. “Yes,” my father said, after a moment of silence. “It’s good to have an avocation. A hobby. Something you do on weekends to unwind. Some people enjoy putting ships in bottles. You can write poetry in your spare time. But I’m asking about your vocation, a real career, work that can earn you money and security, where you do something significant in the world to help others.”
This was a question I had to spend time pondering. I knew my father’s background, and how keenly he wanted his children to do something that conformed to his idea of being a bright, American success, the only path, he felt, to their future happiness. I was beginning to have some sense of how much I owed my parents. I knew that my father would be disappointed if I became a poet, maybe heartbroken. As I have said, I had no earthly idea of how to be a poet or write poems, and believed it likely impossible, though I couldn’t erase my weird yearning. Eventually, I decided that since love of language was so central to me, and in my view the gifts of speech and writing were so crucial to being human, I would study psychology, and maybe then become a speech pathologist, helping people who had difficulty speaking or writing or reading. I felt I would enjoy this and hoped that I would be able to find time in that projected life to write a little. Armed with this plan, I drove off to college, and enrolled in abnormal psychology, behaviorism, and physiological psychology classes, with room in my schedule for an elective or two. Shortly thereafter, I met Dennis.
Dennis proclaimed himself a poet. He was proud and insistent. He was also the first “out” gay person I’d encountered. He read poetry, talked about it, wore a t-shirt featuring a photo of Arthur Rimbaud. He spoke about writers he liked as though they were gods. He made no bones about the fact that he was going to be a writer. In his universe being any kind of artist was the noblest of callings. Back then, the idea that art could be your religion was brand new to me, and incendiary. Dennis represented a possibility, a direction, a kind of gospel, the advent of a life path I’d hoped, but hadn’t exactly believed, existed. The message that you could put art at the center of your life, and that if you wanted to be a writer this was what you had to do was the opposite of, a corrective to what I was being told by family and the world, which was that if you wanted a ‘serious’ adult life you prepared for a ‘serious’ job and could write poetry as a hobby, if at all. But Dennis didn’t regard being an artist as self-indulgent, wayward, or unrealistic. He treated this idea as sacred and created space for you to do that, too, if you wanted. If you don’t devote yourself to it, he said, how are you ever going to achieve anything? How are you ever going to get better at it? He educated me not only by modeling work habits, attitudes, ambition, constant consumption of art, by counseling me to “cultivate your obsessions” (a mind-bending concept to me then) but by buying me books he felt an aspiring writer must read, and taking me to see art films, dance performances, plays, bands, and by perpetually wanting to discuss same. He was adamant about finding and connecting with other artists. He showed me what a life aimed squarely at being an artist could look like. He also introduced me to the idea that being an artist was work and that if you wanted to write, you’d better acquire an appetite for constant revision. Meeting him and falling under his sway for a few years was one of the luckiest things that has ever happened to me.
I got my BA in psychology, worked with autistic children for a while, took odd jobs, and tried to grope my way towards a writing life. I was accepted into a graduate program in speech pathology at Boston University, but never ended up attending. I’m not sure my father ever got over my vocational about-face, but he never made me suffer for it. Before he died, my father hinted that while my choice of careers still didn’t make sense to him, had made his peace with it. I don’t think he ever read my writing. I have had to make my peace with the fact that some of the people I love have little or no interest in poetry.
As I got older, I managed to eke out a living from journalism and teaching for long enough that my father’s anxiety about my financial well-being and survival, and probably my sanity as well, began to ease. He let me know that the fact that I was teaching at several colleges was for him a source of pride. I’m still struggling to figure out how to write well, how to be a poet, what that might mean, how to cheer younger writers and myself on, how to, as the poet Henri Cole said, “keep poetry on the front burner.” I know I’ll never read enough, will always feel undereducated and under read, and that I can’t possibly keep up with the richness of literature, both past and present. But that is by far the happier problem to have than never having allowed myself to cobble together my version that irregular, difficult-to-envision life of poet. Even at 63 I feel a little abashed calling myself that.
Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry.
SHIPS IN BOTTLES
Like many people who become writers, I cannot recall a time when I wasn’t smitten with books. I was fortunate to be born to parents who were the first in their families to be able to attend college, and who consequently valued reading and education to an almost fanatical degree. My father was a first generation American who spoke only German till kindergarten. He went on to become a high school principal. His parents never really learned English. They spoke a mixture of German, Polish and Yiddish and remained semi-illiterate all their lives. I think my father was a little ashamed of them. Assimilation was his goal, his ticket to a new, improved life as “a pure product of America,” to quote the poet William Carlos Williams.
I never had a conversation with either of my paternal grandparents. We had no shared language. I have faint memories of visiting my paternal grandmother in Brooklyn, who smelled of sweat and boiled chicken. She’d pinch my cheek and babble sweetly to me as I looked to my father to translate. He’d just shake his head. I don’t believe either of my paternal grandparents had the opportunity to go beyond elementary school. At sixteen my father lied about his age, joined the Navy, fought in WW II and then went to college on the GI bill. Not an uncommon story back then. My mother played piano and accordion and had musical theatre ambitions. By the time I knew her family, they clearly had more money than my father’s people did, but this had not always been so. My mother’s father had had to quit school in sixth grade to go to work when his father died. My maternal grandfather built a textile business that prospered and employed his brothers and in-laws as it grew. He was able to send my mother to college. After marriage, like many women of her era and class, my mother made raising children her vocation. Her reverence for books, the arts and culture were a dominant part of my childhood.
I remember as a toddler being given a cloth picture book that was meant to be take into the bathtub. This floppy bathtub book conveyed the message that books could and should be taken everywhere. Even when I was small, whenever I was reading or carrying a book, I felt protected. Protected from what, I’m not sure, but I still lug books around like security blankets, stuff them into my purse, load them onto my phone, pile them like fortress walls around me, as though they are a charm against danger, ignorance, or an adverse fate.
In childhood, being able to read seemed a principle reason for being alive, one of life’s chief pleasures and consolations. Books were momentary stays against confusion to corrupt Robert Frost’s description of poetry. Books’ smooth or nubby covers, their heft in the hand, their smell if detectable (aroma of dry leaves, fabric and glue?), all provided a sense of refuge. Books meant connection, immersion and escape. They represented knowledge, inspiration, illumination of other places, minds, times. Sometimes they conveyed hints about how to wade through the minefield of my own consciousness and moods, how to navigate tricky interchanges with fellow humans. They seemed to give voice to what was leaping and seething inside one’s body and mind. When I felt like an alien, which I did much of the time, I could always regain some sense of belonging by reading. Looking back, it seems I often lived more fully in books than I did in the so-called “real world.” I still have to push myself at times to connect with other beings, and not just recede into a cave of my own making where I isolate, scribble and read.
Language, particularly written languages, seemed to me as a child and still seem to me now the most holy invention of the human race, something on the opposite side of the balance scale from all the harm humans do. I believe language and the art derived from it to be redemptive. (This is my feeling about art in all mediums.) I was a kid who loved staring at unfamiliar alphabets: wiry Hebrew letters in synagogue prayer books, photos of the Rosetta stone, vertical stacks of characters chiseled into markers in a Japanese graveyard, illustrations in a book on American Sign Language on how to sculpt words with your hands.
My parents’ house was filled with a motley assortment of books. The headboard of my parents’ bed had a little cabinet on each side with a sliding wooden door. My mother’s side contained whatever she had most recently borrowed from the library: bestsellers, Agatha Christie novels, current nonfiction. On my father’s recessed shelf sat paperback detective novels by Mickey Spillane and Ross MacDonald which he bought at a news-stand next to the barbershop he patronized. His detective novels were the first adult books I read, when my parents were safely out of the house. In the family room, where my parents’ records and record player lived, two walls of built-in bookshelves contained, in no particular order, James Thurber’s books of cartoons and essays, which I loved, novels by James Michener, Leon Uris and Irving Stone, and biographies of presidents and generals. A red and blue world book encyclopedia from the year I was born had a shelf to itself. One shelf down a couple of “great writers” series–volumes of different thicknesses but all bound in the same plain wrap style–a few books by Mark Twain and Norman Mailer, and a couple of art books with pale, tipped in color reproductions of European paintings shared space with a humor book called What Not to Name the Baby, which leaned against a memoir about Ernest Hemingway. And so on. My progenitors’ bookshelves were full of strange bedfellows. It did not occur to my parents to restrict my reading, and somehow I knew to keep quiet about it, so even though from an early age I was given plenty of children’s books, as soon as I was able I helped myself to any books in my parents’ hodgepodge collection that attracted me. Except the Hemingway memoir, which I never touched. Though I hadn’t read a word of Hemingway’s fiction, I was somehow aware he’d killed himself. The combination of the avuncular sounding title Papa Hemingway with the knowledge that “Papa” had committed suicide with a shotgun produced such anxiety in me that the mere sight of the book cover made me feel my mind had short circuited, or had suddenly gone off line, as our old black and white TV did every night after midnight, when it signed off and broadcast only static and blackness till morning.
I don’t think my parents owned any poetry anthologies, but they did have several books of humorous short verse by Ogden Nash, which I read. In second grade there was a schoolwide poetry contest, to which I submitted this Nash-influenced couplet:
Hiccups, Hiccups, up they perk.
I would like to know where they lurk.
After receiving much unexpected praise and attention for this shimmering bit of literary brilliance, my head swelled, and I began telling grownups when they asked the inevitable question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” that I planned to be a writer.
Once I got a library card, I discovered volumes of “nonsense poems” by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Hilaire Belloc in the children’s section. I checked them out repeatedly, first to have them read to me, then to read on my own as I honed that precious skill. This trio of poets deemed acceptable for children were inventive and funny. Dark undercurrents glimmered in their work. I discovered their comrade Edward Gorey. Reading these writers may have shaped my taste for black humor, and my later adulation of poets like James Tate who could seamlessly integrate the absurd, pathos, imaginative flights and eruptions of grief.
My parents owned a copy of Havelock Ellis’ two volume tome The Psychology of Sex, which was much resorted to on the sly once I hit puberty. The Ellis book, which I still have, was both arousing and bewildering. Most of the important terms were in Latin and hence incomprehensible, as was the entire looming subject of sex. This was during the 1960s, so the internet was still a twinkle in its inventor’s eye, and the lone dictionary in the house was no help with Latin. Context clues and imagination were the only tools I could use to decipher the italicized Latin that cropped up at key moments. This inability to translate led to misconceptions I was not disabused of till an embarrassingly late age. In The Psychology of Sex, when not roadblocked by Latin, I read about the sexual significance of modesty, fetishes, and other arresting subjects. Later, I used this book as a source for images and quotations for poems. For one longish poem, I combined quotes from the Ellis books with passages from some of my mother’s Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason) novels. Perhaps my obsession with those volumes, and the jumbled, eclectic nature of my parents’ library, fueled my jumbled, eclectic taste for literary collage. As I began to try to write poems more seriously after college, I developed a penchant for plundering reference books, magazines, novels, cookbooks, nature publications, science reports, etc. for lines and images that could be played with, bent and recombined.
At age eleven I discovered a paperback copy of Lolita in our family room, shelved in a spot just beneath the ceiling. I had gotten wind that this book was practically illegal, so naturally I needed to read it. Lolita could only be reached, even by adults, by standing on a chair and then climbing on top of a built-in cupboard under the bookshelves and standing on that. So, when my parents went out, despite being clumsy and unathletic, I climbed. I understood very little of Nabokov’s novel, but did find something incantatory in his prose which produced a high similar to that catalyzed by the cadences of a set of songs I was learning by heart.
My mother had a collection of cast recordings of musical comedies in a closet in the family room. She had trained as a singer, adored opera and theatre, and had a cultivated mezzo soprano voice. As a kid I spent a great deal of time listening to her LPs of Oklahoma!, Kiss Me Kate, Flower Drum Song, Camelot, The Sound of Music, over and over. This was not a sign of mental health. I was a fearful and socially awkward kid. The comfort I derived from the rhymes and wordplay in these song lyrics, the delight and sense of mastery I got from memorizing musical comedy songs was unprecedented in my life at that time. Whenever I was stressed or scared I found I could repeat songs in my head and enter a calm, ordered world, where the rhymes in songs, and later in poems, could, to quote Yeats, make “a sound when it is finished like the click of the lid of a perfectly made box.” Why this was so soothing to me I don’t know, except to cite the obvious, that I think there is something primally comforting to most people in song, in poetry and well-turned rhyme, in language play, in music, all of which are so endemic to being human, and which exist in all languages and cultures. In any case, this strategy of memorizing songs and keeping them in my mental library for use when needed seemed to alleviate panic and therefore became necessary to my survival. It was a new sensation, this feeling of being overtaken by and becoming part of the beauty, rightness and satisfying order that occurred when words and music fitted together just so and became this magical thing: a song. I could put myself into a kind of trance as a child by playing and replaying these songs, memorizing them so I could sing whole records. Some songs were sad, and I could make myself cry while singing them. Others were comic “character songs.” I liked both kinds. Unfortunately, I was not blessed with my mother and brother’s musical talent, either in terms of voice or ear, so I quickly learned my love of singing would have to remain a solitary pursuit. Later, I discovered that I could obtain the same transports of excitement by memorizing and repeating poems I liked in my head, and I didn’t have to be able to carry a tune. When I learned, much later, that writing or reciting poetry is considered a kind of singing, that poets had referred to it that way for centuries, I felt a secret gladness, and a weird sense of kinship, however unearned.
When my mother compelled me to take piano lessons, I became a grouchy, recalcitrant, ungrateful piano student. I think she hoped I had inherited some form of her gift for music and that lessons would reveal whatever musical talent might lie hidden in me. For years I grimly insisted I hated piano, and I made my piano teacher’s life if not hell, then a grim outpost of purgatory. But he was smart. “If you don’t like music, what are you interested in?” he managed to ask, a couple of years in as I glowered at the metronome. “Poetry!” I hissed. The following week, he showed up with a gift: a small anthology of poems. I’m not sure I knew what an anthology was until I was given this book with that word on the cover. The book introduced me to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost: a smattering of what was considered the well-mannered canon back then. The book blew my mind. Finally, I could begin to find out what poetry, grown up poetry, was all about. The piano teacher’s present also made me feel recognized, listened to, and for weeks I was dizzy with gratitude. I tried to be a little more diligent about practicing the Sonatinas I was butchering after that.
Throughout childhood, often in the middle of the night, before I had much idea what poems were, I tried to write them. Rhyming, self-conscious, halting, and mannered, these youthful attempts involved fairies and heartbreak and sad, brooding revelations. Though I nursed vague ambitions to be a poet after my early success with the hiccup poem, I also believed that poetry was something practiced only in the distant past, like jousting or clavichord playing. I knew no examples of living poets. Everyone published in the anthology my patient piano teacher had given me was, to the best of my knowledge, long dead. Reviews of novels appeared in magazines my parents subscribed to, magazines I leafed through, like Time and The New Yorker, but I never saw a review of a volume of poetry till I was in my late twenties. Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell were labeled poets by some of the hipper teachers in high school who were vying to be thought cool by students, but we never studied these singer-songwriters or their lyrics. Plus, I already knew that I couldn’t sing worth a damn, so that door was closed. As punishment for some minor misbehavior in Junior High, I was made to memorize a poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and recite it in front of my history class. I didn’t mind committing the poem to memory, this was something I felt I was rather good at, having had copious practice, but being pathologically shy and having to stammer out the poem in front of thirty of my sniggering peers was painful. Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost were the only poets we read in high school, and while their verses were stirring, I somehow formed the idea that they, like the poets in the little anthology I’d been given, had lived hundreds of years ago, and were thus the last American poets to walk the earth. I might as well aspire to be a dinosaur.
When I got to college it was big news to me that there were living humans who wrote and published poetry. There was even a real live poet teaching at my college! I could take a class with him, despite the fact that I was a psychology major! Also, a huge newsflash in my blindered little world was that many of these contemporary poets wrote in the language I spoke, more or less, not some archaic version of English. More breaking news: some of these living poets composed poems NOT about being a shepherd or ancient wars or contemplating a vase (fine poets and poems, these, but not relatable for me at that time.) Rather, these mythical poets of my moment wrote on topics like drugs, sex, drunkenness, movies, telephone calls, dreams, crushes, friends, politics, what they ate and read and hated and worried about day to day. These were exciting developments, and my world was duly rocked.
Once I got over the shocking revelation that people all over the world were busy writing poetry in my own time, tangling with both contemporary and ageless concerns, I tried to educate myself. I had eighteen years of lost time to make up for. I signed up for a poetry class with the resident poet at my college, Bert Meyers, and bought and read the two required texts: Naked Poetry, and the first edition of the Donald Hall edited Contemporary American Poetry with the stars and stripes on the cover. I also bought a book of Bert Meyers’ and found that I loved his poems: their compression, darkness, and humanism; their humility and reverence for image, their humor, meticulous construction, and the ways they processed the influence of Eastern European poets. Instead of feeling that there were no contemporary poets, I now was alarmed that I would never catch up with them all, with the reams and reams of what I needed to read. But that was a happier, richer problem.
For class, I read “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, a handful of poems by Sylvia Plath, and all the rest of the poets who populated the class anthologies. It was amazing and heady stuff, but I hungered to find more women poets. Not out of some nascent feminist stance…I wasn’t that advanced. I didn’t know shit about feminism. I just longed to see what women would do with this whole poetry thing, and I was looking for models. Most anthologies I unearthed at the library contained what seemed like an average of two or three females to about thirty dudes. Frank O’Hara was wistful and zippy. Langston Hughes was beautiful and spoke openly of the soul. Tom Clark had digested all of English poetry, it seemed, and used the word “Wow” in a poem which I never forgot. But I was trying to figure out how to be a female, or if I wanted to be one, so I hoped to find women poets who could advise me. Bert Meyers was a great teacher for me and encouraged me with vast generosity. The two poetry classes I took from him were revelatory. I worked up my courage over the course of several weeks to ask if he could make me a list of female poets he thought were worth reading. I still have the list he wrote out for me, on a piece of yellow ruled paper, in elegant, spidery handwriting. After I buzzed through his list, I trolled libraries for woman poets. As anthologies of female poets began to be published, I discovered Elizabeth Bishop, Wislawa Szymborska, Gabriella Mistral, June Jordan, Alice Notley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Eileen Myles, Elaine Equi and many others. I stumbled on Sappho, and an anthology of excerpts from Japanese Poetic Diaries, all of which seemed to have been written by women. This led to finding the work of Sei Shonagon, a feisty, tart tongued writer born in 966 AD, whose Pillow Book remains dear to my heart.
I enrolled in Professor Meyers’ poetry classes on the advice of a guy I met at the beginning of college. This person, Dennis Cooper, changed my life. I’d gone off to college nursing some murky, floaty notion that I wanted to be a poet. Before I left for school, my quiet, dignified, kind father, who I adored and longed to please, and in some ways wanted to be, asked what I thought I might like study, what I was thinking to do with my life. “I think I’d like to write, maybe poetry” I admitted. “Yes,” my father said, after a moment of silence. “It’s good to have an avocation. A hobby. Something you do on weekends to unwind. Some people enjoy putting ships in bottles. You can write poetry in your spare time. But I’m asking about your vocation, a real career, work that can earn you money and security, where you do something significant in the world to help others.”
This was a question I had to spend time pondering. I knew my father’s background, and how keenly he wanted his children to do something that conformed to his idea of being a bright, American success, the only path, he felt, to their future happiness. I was beginning to have some sense of how much I owed my parents. I knew that my father would be disappointed if I became a poet, maybe heartbroken. As I have said, I had no earthly idea of how to be a poet or write poems, and believed it likely impossible, though I couldn’t erase my weird yearning. Eventually, I decided that since love of language was so central to me, and in my view the gifts of speech and writing were so crucial to being human, I would study psychology, and maybe then become a speech pathologist, helping people who had difficulty speaking or writing or reading. I felt I would enjoy this and hoped that I would be able to find time in that projected life to write a little. Armed with this plan, I drove off to college, and enrolled in abnormal psychology, behaviorism, and physiological psychology classes, with room in my schedule for an elective or two. Shortly thereafter, I met Dennis.
Dennis proclaimed himself a poet. He was proud and insistent. He was also the first “out” gay person I’d encountered. He read poetry, talked about it, wore a t-shirt featuring a photo of Arthur Rimbaud. He spoke about writers he liked as though they were gods. He made no bones about the fact that he was going to be a writer. In his universe being any kind of artist was the noblest of callings. Back then, the idea that art could be your religion was brand new to me, and incendiary. Dennis represented a possibility, a direction, a kind of gospel, the advent of a life path I’d hoped, but hadn’t exactly believed, existed. The message that you could put art at the center of your life, and that if you wanted to be a writer this was what you had to do was the opposite of, a corrective to what I was being told by family and the world, which was that if you wanted a ‘serious’ adult life you prepared for a ‘serious’ job and could write poetry as a hobby, if at all. But Dennis didn’t regard being an artist as self-indulgent, wayward, or unrealistic. He treated this idea as sacred and created space for you to do that, too, if you wanted. If you don’t devote yourself to it, he said, how are you ever going to achieve anything? How are you ever going to get better at it? He educated me not only by modeling work habits, attitudes, ambition, constant consumption of art, by counseling me to “cultivate your obsessions” (a mind-bending concept to me then) but by buying me books he felt an aspiring writer must read, and taking me to see art films, dance performances, plays, bands, and by perpetually wanting to discuss same. He was adamant about finding and connecting with other artists. He showed me what a life aimed squarely at being an artist could look like. He also introduced me to the idea that being an artist was work and that if you wanted to write, you’d better acquire an appetite for constant revision. Meeting him and falling under his sway for a few years was one of the luckiest things that has ever happened to me.
I got my BA in psychology, worked with autistic children for a while, took odd jobs, and tried to grope my way towards a writing life. I was accepted into a graduate program in speech pathology at Boston University, but never ended up attending. I’m not sure my father ever got over my vocational about-face, but he never made me suffer for it. Before he died, my father hinted that while my choice of careers still didn’t make sense to him, had made his peace with it. I don’t think he ever read my writing. I have had to make my peace with the fact that some of the people I love have little or no interest in poetry.
As I got older, I managed to eke out a living from journalism and teaching for long enough that my father’s anxiety about my financial well-being and survival, and probably my sanity as well, began to ease. He let me know that the fact that I was teaching at several colleges was for him a source of pride. I’m still struggling to figure out how to write well, how to be a poet, what that might mean, how to cheer younger writers and myself on, how to, as the poet Henri Cole said, “keep poetry on the front burner.” I know I’ll never read enough, will always feel undereducated and under read, and that I can’t possibly keep up with the richness of literature, both past and present. But that is by far the happier problem to have than never having allowed myself to cobble together my version of that irregular, difficult-to-envision life of poet. Even at 63 I feel a little abashed calling myself that.
Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry.