A personal account of memories and writing

When I read, “these poems triumph over loss with a ringing affirmation for the past” in Grace Cavalieri’s blurb for my fifth book of poetry, “Groaning and Singing,” I had to think about what she meant. And that’s when I recalled a Faulkner description of the nature of memory for old folks that stuck with me since teaching one of his stories: For the characters in question, “all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.”

What this metaphor says about memory seems true: The distant past can feel more spacious, vibrant, and green than recent decades, which can get pretty jumbled; my first landscape is still extremely vivid and detailed. That “huge meadow” (for me, a small New York City apartment, the building it was in, the tarnished lobby, the roof, street, neighborhood, shops) is available to be reclaimed, and reexamined, even to lead me to new insights based on perspectives generated by later experiences. And so, my poems not infrequently want to begin there.

One of the great emotional generators of writing is when something sensory spurs the opening of involuntary memory, without one’s willing that memory.

Famously, sipping a spoonful of tea with the soaked crumbs of a little cake called a madeleine, did that for “Marcel,” in Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” It gave him a feeling of sourceless happiness that he had to push into (“Ten times over I must assay the task, must lean down over the abyss.”) in order to bring back all the specific recollections contained in and responsible for that feeling. (“he smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment…”). Perhaps the effort required to bring back a lost world relates to that “narrow bottle-neck” in Faulkner’s metaphor.

I can’t say that all or even many of my poems began with such “madeleine moments.” But I do know that still mysterious and compelling images or sensations from childhood, rather like Proust’s madeleine, have led me to the recovery of lost worlds.

“On the Roof” (“Groaning and Singing”) developed from remembering how it felt to walk on the “warm and sticky” “tarlike” roof of my building, “billowy / as the ocean on a mild day,” when I accompanied my mother to hang our laundry. The way “stripes /of sunlight” would “flush and vanish” on the wall of my childhood bedroom as the Venetian blinds “swung out from the window— / cracked for the breeze’s cool burst— / and clattered back” led me to the absorbing completeness of my once snug world, in “Tiny Apartment Early Childhood Recall.”

Invoking memory is a discovery process in itself. I set myself the task — on some pandemic nights when falling asleep was difficult — of mentally walking through that tiny apartment, and taking note of every detail I could remember, to calm myself. I got only as far as the foyer (where I found my long-dead father, taking his heavy woolen coat and brimmed and banded hat from a closet of winter clothes), because there was so much to remember.

What’s interesting to me is that I remembered things I didn’t know I remembered — small as they were — in that apartment foyer: A little art deco table and the mirror above, into which I saw my father look while tipping the brim of his fedora just so. The ritual became “The Fedora.” (“Verdad,” 31).

In another poem, a rather Proustian stimulus — “uspended above the digital hum of a late summer evening / at home… the rare tune / of an ice cream van, somewhere” brought back my mother “saying ‘Ask nicely!’ before handing over the nickels and dimes, / her own mouth never watering for a bar or cone.” And then, to my surprise, she crosses “her dangling legs” at the local ice cream parlor where my father is treating us, orders a “hot fudge sundae with vanilla ice cream / and burnt almonds,” “eyes glittering.”

The openness of this past moment to reexamination actually led to a tiny pleasing discovery: My immigrant mother must have said “burnt almonds” because roasted almonds were “Gebrannte Mandeln in the German of her childhood in Vienna!” (“Trickle of Pink on a White Blouse,” ). I later realized the sound I heard but couldn’t locate (because I am deaf in one ear), was actually the tune played by my new washing machine at the end of the cycle. But, no matter! It had already done its work.

Such stimuli that provoke memories are like the tantalizing shouts of kids I can’t see, playing a distance away. I always want to follow the sound, and see where it takes me.