Dan Schneider on Marilyn Hacker

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This Old Poem #111:

Marilyn Hacker’s On The Stairway

Marilyn Hacker is noted for 3 things, in no particular order- 1) being a formalist poet, 2) being a lesbian, & 3) being political. Notably absent from that tercet is her being a good poet. She’s not. A close examination of her work shows that while a formalist in vague terms, she’s really not. Her poetry is more or less free verse with a hint of formalism- rhyme, known patterns, about the edges.

Exhibit A is the 3^rd of her Migraine Sonnets:

The face framed in the doorframe is a wild
card now, mouth could eat silence, mouth could speak
the indigestible. Eyes, oh tourmaline, a crack
in the glass, break the glass. Down a green-tiled
corridor double doors open. Who was wheeled
through, hallucinating on a gurney, weak
with relief as muscle and nerve flickered awake,
while a dreamed face framed in a doorframe opened and smiled?
Precisely no one’s home. No dog will come
to lay his jowls across bent knees and drool
and smile the black-gummed smile he shares with wolves.
The empty doorframe frames an empty room
whose dim fluorescence is perpetual.
The double doors close back upon themselves.

This is not a bad poem, in fact it’s pretty good, but it is evident that the form came after the thought. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, were all MH’s poems at this level she’d merit consideration for being considered a good poet. Nice alliteration, off-rime, & an an unfamiliar take on a too-familiar poetic milieu.

Yet, MH makes big leaps into free verse, and her weakness as a poet shows. She’s one of those poets that needs the stricture of formalism, however loose, to tighten her phraseology and heighten her metaphors. As Bobby Frost would say, ‘Girl, tighten the damn net on the tennis court!’

Take a looksy at her writing with the net down:

First, chop an onion and sauté it separately
in melted butter, unsalted, preferably.
Add mushrooms (add girolles in autumn)
Stir until golden and gently wilted.

Then, break the eggs as neatly as possible,
crack! on the copper lip of the mixing-bowl;
beat, frothing yolks and whites together,
thread with a filet of cream. You've melted

more butter in a scrupulous seven-inch
iron skillet: pour the mixture in swiftly, keep
flame high as edges puff and whiten.
Lower the flame to a reminiscence.

These 1^st 3 stanzas from her poem omelet are a typical ‘recipe’ poem- a kissing cousin to the hair braiding villanelle. I defy anyone to find a line that intrigues. There are none. In most part MH lives up to her surname’s implication. Why? That’s for minds wiser than ours. But, I can tell you a bit about Marilyn, culled from her ubiquitous online bios:

Marilyn Hacker was born in New York City in 1942. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Squares and Courtyards (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000); Winter Numbers (1994), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; Selected Poems, 1965-1990 (1994), which received the Poets' Prize; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986); Assumptions (1985); Taking Notice (1980); Going Back to the River (1990), for which she received a Lambda Literary Award; Separations (1976); and Presentation Piece (1974), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award winner. She also translated Venus Khoury-Ghata's poetry, which Oberlin College Press published in Here There Was Once a Country (2001). Hacker was editor of The Kenyon Review from 1990 to 1994, and has received numerous honors, including the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She lives in New York City and Paris.

Oh, there is a 4^th thing that 1 can say about MH- she is relentlessly dilettante. That is, she’s 1 of those Academic poets that love to toss in factoids about their latest retreat to Europe to write, or name drop about obscure centuries old philosophers she likes, or bemuse & bewitch young readers with her vast storehouse of knowledge on an arcane subject. This is exactly the sort of poem the poem in need of rehabbing is. Let’s read it. I ask you, my reader, if there’s a single hint of what is actually going on in the poem:

On The Stairway

My fourth-floor neighbor, Mme. Uyttebroeck-
Achard, a spinster in her seventies
wears champagne-froth lace sheaths above her knees
and patent-leather boots, and henna-red-
orange curls down to the white laminated
collar of her raincoat, like a striptease
artiste who’s forgotten whom she needs to please.
She looks a lot like Violette Leduc.
On the dim stairway where she’s paused and set
her shopping-bags down, the aide-ménagère
for Mme. Magin-Levacher, upstairs
one more flight, says Mme Uyttebroeck-Achard's "pas nette"--
not meaning "clean," but, in her dealings, "clear"
-- and I think of that muddy genius, Violette.

Ok, now, this sonnet may or may not be part of a longer series, but, given that it has a title & is not poem # X in a series, it’s fair to assume that MH meant for this poem to have some meaning. After all, the poem is not bad musically, & has a certain look on the page- as well as its liberal dropping of foreign words.

The speaker’s neighbor, an old woman, dresses oddly, & reminds the speaker of another woman. The neighbor pauses, & a 3^rd person comments on the 1^st person, enough so the speaker thinks of the 2^nd person.

Ok, what does it mean? Just what it means, would be the answer. But, that’s not much. Is there any insight or even a detail sketched oddly enough to be memorable. The poem is too detailed & not ‘silly’ enough to be dismissed as mere soundplay. In choosing to not be bound in 1 category MH’s poem instead becomes an amorphous entity. It is neither interesting enough to impel a reader to search out if the characters are based on historic personages, nor is the music delightful enough to sonorously dispel thoughts of what it could mean. This is not Wallace Stevens’ jar in Tennessee, nor is Mme. Uyttebroeck-Achard Weldon Kees’ Robinson.

The only real option to give this poem any hope of being more than a workshop exercise is to allow the poem to have some psychic dimension. Oh boy, must be in for a major rewrite:

On The Stairway

What? Nothing changed. Well, something did. The last line went from ‘and I think of that muddy genius, Violette’ to ‘and I am that muddy genius, Violette’. That slight change means the speaker is literally Violette, or identifies so strongly with the character that a reader might pause to reread & imbue something into the poem that is not there in the original version, where the speaker is simply looking from the outside in on some psychic dilemma we’ve no clue of.

I was tempted to play liberally with the internal structure- alter some verbs & modifiers, but that would Schneiderize the poem too much. Just the change & omission of a word can have as much impact on the overall poem as some extreme makeover, to borrow the parlance. Such is the story of MH’s career. So close, yet- pass the Maalox!

Final Score: (1-100):

Marilyn Hacker’s On The Stairway: 65

TOP’s On The Stairway: 75

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