To poet Midge Goldberg: "The Whole Gray Lake's a Sky"

I caught up with New England Poetry Club member Midge Goldberg. Goldberg has a new book of poetry out titled,  "The Whole Gray Lake’s a Sky." She generously agreed to this interview.

Midge Goldberg was born in New York but grew up in Florida. She attended Yale University and holds an MFA from University of New Hampshire. She received the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award for her second collection, Snowman’s Code, which won the 2016 New Hampshire Literary Awards Readers’ Choice Award for poetry. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published widely in the US and the U.K. She is also the editor of Outer Space: 100 Poems, (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is a member of both the Powow River Poets and the Derry-based Hyla Brook Poets, and lives in New Hampshire with her husband, the poet Robert W. Crawford.

You are a woman of many trades—you have evolved-- how do you feel your poems evolved over the years?

I’d say my poems evolved alongside me, sometimes following, sometimes leading the way. When I was younger, there were more poems about having little kids and the challenges people in their 30s and 40s face, wrestling with their own childhood and identity. When I’d written some of that out of my system, I still loved poetry, so I looked for new topics and forms. I ventured into writing dramatic monologues, because I love to eavesdrop! It’s fun imagining other people’s lives. As I’ve gotten older, I find myself reexamining early relationships, emotions, and beliefs with a new perspective. And just this year, I’ve challenged myself to write my first ghazal, and I’m working on my first sonnet crown. Whether it’s my poems following me, or me following my poems at this point, I don’t know!

The book's title centers on a lake in New Hampshire where you live. Why this lake? So many poems are written about bodies of water—what is the allure?

The title comes from a poem called “Out of Season,” which is about visiting what’s normally a summer resort town in November, when all the stores and restaurants except one are closed. The cold, gray lake is part of that feeling of being just out of step with the normal and expected, being “out of phase” (like Picard in a favorite Star Trek episode of mine).

The allure of lakes for me is their changeability. I wrote a poem called “Walking on Ice,” which describes my Floridian fear of walking out on a frozen lake, even when my husband reassures me that the ice is several feet thick. I never get over the surprise of seeing a lake that’s blue and refreshing in the summer become a frozen expanse in the winter. I live on a pond and watching it change throughout the seasons has inspired lots of poems.

In one poem "Argument of Periapsis" you exhibit the orbit of a relationship— the close alignment—the pull away, and the timid but inevitable return. It would seem like the space; the cosmos—would be a fertile ground for exploring relationships. Your thoughts?

Oh, absolutely. I’ve written poems where the moon, a planetarium, even the rover Curiosity are metaphors for relationships. Mind-bending, infinite, mysterious—what better metaphors for love and loneliness are there? In an anthology I edited, Outer Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2022), one of my favorite poems is “Delay,” by Elizabeth Jennings, who uses the speed of light as a remarkable metaphor for love.

You are a member of the Powow River poets.... a formalist poetry group. Do you consider yourself a formalist? Robert Frost wrote that "Free verse is like playing without a net." How do you look at it?

Absolutely. I write primarily in form; therefore, I’m a formalist. I write some poems in free verse—I teach that it’s another tool in your toolkit, and you have to match the form to the content. But in general, I prefer writing in form. The meter, the rhyme, the form, they all push me to revise and revise, and most times I end up with a poem that’s much better (and sometimes completely different!) than what I started with. If I were writing in free verse, I would have stopped sooner, thinking it was done, when there was so much more to uncover.

Funny story about that Frost quote: I have a poem called “Tennis Practice Against the Garage Door.” It’s about watching my son practice tennis, and it ends with “the beauty in tenacity and sweat, / the ace over the imaginary net.” That quote must have been lurking in the back of my mind—I need that net!

Why should we read your book?

I hope there’s a lot in it that people will recognize or relate to or be curious about—hiking, baking, deer hunting, a high school locker, saying Kaddish for your mother—everyday things that carry so much possibility for metaphor.

Out of Season

The whole gray lake’s a sky, clouded and cold,

but wrinkled, caught within each empty slip.

Bare oak branches mirror the matchstick dock.

Moored, dark, the tourist boat holds only wind.

We walk the harbor, past closed summer shops,

then up the hill of hunkered, shuttered mansions.

Woodsmoke hints at a winter resident,

a single light appearing as we climb.

A pick-up rumbles downhill—toolbox, ladders

rattling in the bed, heading for home

elsewhere as evening comes. Chilled and hungry,

we go back down to the one restaurant

open out of season. Vinyl curtains

inside the door protect us from the cold.

Three men at the bar put quarters in the jukebox,

inviting us to choose. We eat our dinners,

we winter few, and sing each other’s songs.

Counting Bricks Poems by Gary Metras

 

Counting Bricks

Poems by Gary Metras

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio

120 Pages

$21.00

 

Review by Dennis Daly

 

Mnemonic sentiment, boiled down to its essential, tear-charged elements, cannot be ignored. It drives human nature. It mobilizes the emotions. It guides our unruly impulses toward goodness. Poets who completely excise sentimentality from their art do so at their own peril. Thankfully, Gary Metras is not one of those poets.

 

Metras, in his new poetry collection, Counting Bricks, injects physical awe and unusual detail into the ordinariness of passion and its rolling tides of melancholy and elation. His precise, yet down-to-earth, verbiage contains and grounds any unseemly maudlin excess.

 

The poet’s opening piece entitled Splinter engages the peculiar bond between mother and child. He reduces the extraction of an everyday splinter into a series of detailed components. Using first his adult perception, then morphing into his child-memory, Metras nails the moment. From the beginning of the procedure to its end, specifics trump pain and fear (although both wait patiently in abeyance).  Metras’ pre-teen protagonist concludes the poem this way,

 

it will not do to cry. I watch the needle

enter where the splinter entered.

The needle opens skin, probes beneath

the straight, dark path, snags it, lifts.

She does not take up tweezers.

She bends as if to kiss my finger,

but closes her teeth on the splinter,

draws it out, swipes it with the ball

of her middle finger. We stare

at the tiny slice of the world that yielded

such distress. I walk away healing

and remember the pain.

 

As poor Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear laments, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” Yes, the human condition accepts and to some extent submits to chance and nature’s blind cruelty. In Metras’ poem, The Ants, the poet paints these same boys at it again. This time with the help of lighter fluid the youngsters destroy a multitude of unsuspecting ants devouring a candy bar. Utter meanness or child’s play? The perpetrators of this massacre went on to live their anonymous, albeit somewhat messy lives. Metras redirects despair and all obvious bleakness, ending his poetic litany with an ironic flourish and a bit of karma,

 

… Shy-Dickie went

into the Air Force and never came

back. Adelle, we think, is still in jail

in Mexico. Jerry drives the school bus

and his cute sister was pregnant seven

times by five men. Know-It-All-Stanley

sweeps the floors at Merriam-Webster’s.

Susie is a nurse’s aide and a mother and a

grandmother and seldom sees her twin

brother. Holy-Roy retired from the Post Office

and walks his neighbor’s dogs.

Billy B. has ex-wives and inherited my father’s

worn bar stool at the Royal Café. And one day

walking into the drugstore in my 53^rd year,

I step on a can of lighter fluid and

remember the smell of burning ants.

 

Counting Bricks, the title poem of this collection, dryly delivers its vital minutiae of clan history using the medium of an old photograph. The picture, portrayed on the book’s cover, includes the poet’s father and a host of his siblings. A family member had found the photograph and scanned it. Now every few years it surfaces and insists on being noticed and, with sentiment built in, remembered. As with most large families (and this reviewer has some firsthand knowledge of that subject), the odds and ends—marriages, pregnancies, poverty, drinking, union strikes, births, deaths, poker games, and sadness are tallied together with moments of fragile ardency. T.S. Eliot might call this associative device an objective correlative. In any case, it does the trick of turning conflicting emotions into a positive, even celebratory beauty. Consider this charged, detail-laden stanza at the heart of Metras’ poem,

 

                                                        … I remember

counting bricks and piling them as father built

a backyard barbecue for brother number ten,

and mixing mortar for the block foundation

of number eleven’s new house, while we lived

through the noise of the projects. I remember

holidays of whiskey-and-beer breath stories

of war, Memorial Days of fading photographs—

brothers in uniform, all in combat—number

three a POW, these brothers mentioned only once

or twice a year in voices charged with pride,

then remorse, then silence,

then tears.

 

Pointedly, in a second person poem entitled Making Pierogis, Metras conjures up a microcosm of labor and love in a mother’s kitchen. Daily cooking routine and repetitive meal preparation (meaning sore fingers and aching legs} merge with a doting mother and comforted, now cooing daughter, distracted by spoons and cups and a magic white dot of floury dough. Later the woman’s husband joins this hallowed scene. Everything seems well with the world! It cannot change. The poet has placed his spell on this composition. Metras conveys the wonder of it all in these lines,

 

The backs of your hands are splotched

with tiny blisters from the splash of boiling water

as you tossed into the pot raw pierogis.

 

You rescue each one from drowning and place them,

row upon neat row, in the glass pan that shines

with anticipation. As they cool, you clean.

 

When you lay the daughter in the crib for a nap,

you whisper that one magic word, pierogis.    

 

Women, at their best, civilize all of us. Continuation and evolution of our species need the complexity of the female touch. In Thanksgivings, Metras’ tight, celebratory poem lauding clan continuation, mortality vies (or rather, combines) with genetics for spatial supremacy. Mankind, blessed with a higher consciousness, rises to its ritual moment in this very American holyday. The poet lovingly blesses his dual grandmothers in the poem’s opening,

 

My grandmother, bless her DNA, dead

When my mother was a child.

My fake grandmother, the real one’s twin,

Bless her hugs, also dead many years.

But I give thanks to both, one for

birthing, one teaching my mother

to roast the perfect turkey, bake

the perfect pie crust, delicious

even three days afterward.

 

Whether you love or lament this strange and affecting world that we live in, you’ll want to read this book and marvel at Metras’ poetic particulars and well-placed particles of dry sentiment and restrained passion. He’s genuine in his emotions and spot-on in his details.

Red Letter Poem #315

 Red Letter Poem #315

 

 

 

 

 

An Unnoticed Moment in Eden:

      the Apostrophe’s Fall

 

“That fallen leaf from the ruined garden”

                     ––from: “Grief’s” by Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

Still high above the ground, in

The moment of someone else’s weakness,

When it is still too early for

 

The woodchucks and mice and trout,

The beetles with their shining elytra,

To know they are now dying,

 

The apostrophe has just detached

And is surprised and unaware

It now means loss or is possessed

 

By the serpent-S following,

And is about to start the slow

Descent, to drift into its

 

Increasing shadow, into

That twilight-dimming space

The dead will own.

 

 

                           ––Jack Stewart

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before I can discuss my response to Jack Stewart’s startling little mythology, I must begin with the literary elephant in the room: the epigraph.  Poets, of course, use epigraphs for a whole range of purposes.  Sometimes it’s to invite the work of another poet into the reader’s mind––a choral background awaiting a new soloist to take the stage.  Or it might signal the harmony or antiphony of thought between an older work and one’s own.  But often, it is a small homage to acknowledge that some element in another’s poem so thoroughly entered this writer’s consciousness that it triggered a new creation in response.  I can say that, over the years, I’ve tipped my hat in this manner dozens of times.  But when I received “An Unnoticed Moment. . .” from today’s poet, who I’ve gotten to know through his Red Letter contributions, I was shocked to realize that this was the first time I’ve ever been a recipient of this gesture.  We forget, sometimes, that when we put our work out into the world, there are actual readers who might lay claim to these poems, use them for unanticipated purposes­­––and even, in the most intense instances, feel the need to respond to what they’ve discovered on the page.  I felt deeply honored. . .and then immediately fearful: what if I didn’t actually like how Jack used my line as a jumping-off point?  But I’d nothing to worry about: this poet took some thematic elements from my recent collection, Grief’s Apostrophe, and used them to challenge his own vision––about the grammar of loss and the power of a simple punctuation mark.

 

Among other things, my collection explored the way we struggle to carry our deepest emotions into language, and how every element at our disposal must be used in an attempt to portray and illuminate.  In one poem, I used a metaphor for the apostrophe that seems to have lodged in Jack’s ear: “That fallen leaf from the ruined garden.”  Such powerful meaning to be embedded in so diminutive a symbol; it signals both possession and a placemark for absence.  Somehow Jack found himself within an Edenic space where all once seemed possible––but now some dire change was taking place.  In his poem, the leaflike punctuation mark hovers “high above the ground”––that earthly domain from which, according to the Biblical text he’s called to mind, we arise and to which we return.  Circumstance is about to lay claim to some unsuspecting pronoun: “The moment of someone else’s weakness.”  The poem has brought to mind the essence of all mortal frailty, and the passage from an inherent grace to an inevitable decline.  I loved those lines of enumeration––“The woodchucks and mice and trout,/ The beetles with their shining elytra”––which also echo the primal human task of naming all we see (even as we are reminded that we creatures must share the same fate).  “The apostrophe has just detached/ And is surprised and unaware/ It now means loss or is possessed/ By the serpent-S following…”.  Here, the apostrophe itself is a consciousness whose descent signals the great transformation––and I found myself smiling ruefully at that “serpent-S,” as if all fruitful knowledge was embodied in every mouthful of language.

 

Today’s poem marks Jack Stewart’s seventh appearance in the Red Letters (which may be a record).  His fine first book, No Reason, was published in the Poeima Poetry Series––and, over the years, his work has appeared in scores of literary journals including Poetry, the New York Quarterly, and the Iowa Review, as well as international journals in Ireland, Austria, and Italy.  Formerly a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology, he taught creative writing in Fort Lauderdale at the Pine Crest School––but, for the first time, I’m having to shift that verb to the past tense.  After four decades as an educator, working with students at various levels and educational centers, Jack has recently retired.  My hope is that this new expansive time will bring us closer to an anticipated second collection.  I love how Jack’s poems celebrate the creative impulse, play within the endless possibilities of human experience––but do not shy away from the most challenging discoveries along the way.  In today’s piece, that inky curl––like a dried leaf or a wisp of imagination––is about to “start the slow/ Descent, to drift into its// Increasing shadow, into/ That twilight-dimming space/ The dead will own.”  Nothing we can do will prevent that fall––but the attention we bring to the moment, and the way we are able to memorialize the experience in language, feels as if we’ve done more than simply surrender.  Tell me: is it too much to think that all we commit––to each other, to that sacred ground––renews the garden’s fertility?  (Apostrophe-S––because we belong to that green beauty even still, as it belongs to us.)

   

  

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

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* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

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http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

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