Mona Van Duyn
is a living fossil- 1 might say she’s poetry’s coelacanth. A decade ago
(1992-1993) she reigned as American Poet Laureate- yet, even then (& since),
most poets would be pressed to name anything she wrote. She is America’s
answer to Stephen Spender- a famed British poet from last century of whom it was
said- ‘He’s the most famous poet from whose work no one can quote a
single memorable line.’ Bingo, again, for MVD.
Here’re the
goods (such as they are):
Mona Van
Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1921. She is the author of nine books of
poems: Firefall (1994); If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959-1982
(1994); Near Changes (1990), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Letters
From a Father, and Other Poems (1982); Merciful Disguises
(1973, reissued 1982); Bedtime Stories (1972); To See, To Take
(1970), which received the National Book Award; A Time of Bees (1964);
and Valentines to the Wide World (1959). With her husband, Jarvis
Thurston, she founded Perspective, a Quarterly of Literature in 1947, and
co-edited it until 1970. She has been awarded the Bollingen Prize, the Hart
Crane Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Prize of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize and the Eunice
Tietjens Award from Poetry, and the Shelley Memorial Prize, as well as
fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
She has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor
of The Academy of American Poets. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
Is MVD a doggerelist? No. She is a competent wordsmith. She’s just not
a poet. Read the god-awful piece of masqueraded prose that is this essay’s
bane:
Letters From A
Father
I
Ulcerated
tooth keeps me awake, there is
such pain, would have to go to the hospital to have
it pulled or would bleed to death from the blood thinners,
but can't leave Mother, she falls and forgets her salve
and her tranquilizers, her ankles swell so and her bowels
are so bad, she almost had a stoppage and sometimes
what she passes is green as grass. There
are big holes
in my thigh where my leg brace buckles the size of dimes.
My head pounds from the high pressure. It is awful
not to be able to get out, and I fell in the bathroom
and the girl could hardly get me up at all.
Sure thought my back was broken, it will be next time.
Prostate is bad and heart has given out,
feel bloated after supper. Have made my peace
because am just plain done for and have no doubt
that the Lord will come any day with my release.
You say you enjoy your feeder, I don't see why
you want to spend good money on grain for birds
and you say you have a hundred sparrows, I'd buy
poison and get rid of their diseases and turds.
II
We
enjoyed your visit, it was nice of you to bring
the feeder but a terrible waste of your money
for that big bag of feed since we won't be living
more than a few weeks long. We can see
them good from where we sit, big ones and little ones
but you know when I farmed I used to like to hunt
and we had many a good meal from pigeons
and quail and pheasant but these birds won't
be good for nothing and are dirty to have so near
the house. Mother likes the redbirds though.
My bad knee is so sore and I can't hardly hear
and Mother says she is hoarse form yelling but I know
it's too late for a hearing aid. I belch up all the time
and have a sour mouth and of course with my heart
it's no use to go to a doctor. Mother is the same.
Has a scab she thinks is going to turn to a wart.
III
The
birds are eating and fighting, Ha! Ha! All shapes
and colors and sizes coming out of our woods
but we don't know what they are. Your Mother hopes
you can send us a kind of book that tells about birds.
There is one the folks called snowbirds, they eat on the ground,
we had the girl sprinkle extra there, but say,
they eat something awful. I sent the girl to town
to buy some more feed, she had to go anyway.
IV
Almost
called you on the telephone
but it costs so much to call thought better write.
Say, the funniest thing is happening, one
day we had so many birds and they fight
and get excited at their feed you know
and it's really something to watch and two or three
flew right at us and crashed into our window
and bang, poor little things knocked themselves silly.
They come to after while on the ground and flew away.
And they been doing that. We felt awful
and didn't know what to do but the other day
a lady from our Church drove out to call
and a little bird knocked itself out while she sat
and she bought it in her hands right into the house,
it looked like dead. It had a
kind of hat
of feathers sticking up on its head, kind of rose
or pinky color, don't know what it was,
and I petted it and it come to life right there
in her hands and she took it out and it flew. She says
they think the window is the sky on a fair
day, she feeds bids too but hasn't got
so many. She says to hang strips of aluminum foil
in the window so we'll do that. She
raved about
our birds. P.S. The book just
come in the mail.
V
Say,
that book is sure good, I study
in it every day and enjoy our birds.
Some of them I can't identify
for sure, I guess they're females, the Latin words
I just skip over. Bet you'd never
guess
the sparrow I've got here, House Sparrow you wrote,
but I have Fox Sparrows, Song Sparrows, Vesper Sparrows,
Pine Woods and Tree and Chipping and White Throat
and White Crowned Sparrows. I have six Cardinals,
three pairs, they come at early morning and night,
the males at the feeder and on the ground the females.
Juncos, maybe 25, they fight
for the ground, that's what they used to call snowbirds. I miss
the Bluebirds since the weather warmed. Their breast
is the color of a good ripe muskmelon. Tufted Titmouse
is sort of blue with a little tiny crest.
And I have Flicker and Red-Bellied and Red-
Headed Woodpeckers, you would die laughing
to see Red-Bellied, he hangs on with his head
flat on the board, his tail braced up under,
wing out. And Dickcissel and Ruby Crowned Kinglet
and Nuthatch stands on his head and Veery on top
the color of a bird dog and Hermit Thrush with spot
on breast, Blue Jay so funny, he will hop
right on the backs of the other birds to get the grain.
We bought some sunflower seeds just for him.
And Purple Finch I bet you never seen,
color of a watermelon, sits on the rim
of the feeder with his streaky wife, and the squirrels,
you know, they are cute too, they sit tall
and eat with their little hands, they eat bucketfuls.
I pulled my own tooth, it didn't bleed at all.
VI
It's
sure a surprise how well Mother is doing,
she forgets her laxative but bowels move fine.
Now that windows are open she says our birds sing
all day. The girl took a Book of Knowledge on loan
from the library and I am reading up
on the habits of birds, did you know some males have three
wives, some migrate some don't. I
am going to keep
feeding all spring, maybe summer, you can see
they expect it. Will need thistle seed for Goldfinch and Pine
Siskin next winter. Some folks are going to come see us
from Church, some bird watchers, pretty soon.
They have birds in town but nothing to equal this.
So the world woos its children back for an evening kiss.
The trope-
absent father recalled- is not new; nor are devices like the need to name bird
species (just for sound- ala spice poems); & is the stanza break in
section 5 between ‘words’ & ‘I” a bit forced? Those tough Latinisms!
Is there anything egregiously bad? No; save for the length. Let’s trim &
add some poetry within by concision:
Letters
From A Father
I
It
is awful not to be able to get out.
Prostate is bad and heart has given out,
feel bloated after supper. You say you enjoy your feeder,
I don't see why you want to spend good money on grain for birds
and you say you have a hundred sparrows. I'd buy poison.
II
I
used to like to hunt and we had many a good meal
from pigeons and quail and pheasant. Mother likes
the redbirds though.
III
Mother
hopes you can send us a kind of book
that tells about birds. There is one the folks called snowbirds,
they eat something awful. I
sent the girl to town
to buy some more feed.
IV
One
day we had so many birds and they fight
and get excited at their feed you know
and it's really something to watch and two or three
flew right at us and crashed into our window
and bang, poor little things knocked themselves silly.
I petted one and it come to life right there.
P.S. The book just come in the mail.
V
Squirrels,
you know, they are cute too, they sit tall
and eat with their little hands, they eat bucketfuls.
VI
I
am going to keep feeding all spring, maybe summer.
Some folks are going to come see us
from Church, some bird watchers, pretty soon.
They have birds in town but nothing to equal this.
We cut
through the prosaic dance around emotion between the father & child &
get symbolism. The birds are that thing that is missing, & the tale in the
rewrite is the attempt to fix it that all those excess words in the original
attempted to do. The last line, instead of the original’s manifest attempt at
injecting depth & poetry at the last second to force a reader to reread for
what was ‘missed’, is now clearly in line with the rest of the poem, yet the
line’s last ½ reveals a hubris that may be the cause for the distance between
the 2 main characters. A bland, dull ‘poem’ is now 1 with potential.
That’s a plus. If only other PLs’ work were so easy to rectify.
Mona Van Duyn’s Letters
From A Father: 60
TOP’s
Letters From A Father: 72
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