A
Girl Goes Into The Woods
selected
poems
Lyn
Lifshin 2013
New
York Quarterly Books
ISBN:
987-935520-32-0
$24.95
Many
years ago Lyn Lifshin submitted her poems to the Wilderness House
Literary Review where I was new to the poetry editorial position.
When an email arrived with at least fifty poems, I was overwhelmed.
Who was this poet, Lifshin? I learned to take to reading her poems
slowly.
Reading
the poems one at a time I came to understand or at least I thought I
understood what the poems were saying or not saying. Sometimes
Lifshin would submit the same poem written three or four different
ways and ask me to chose which one to publish.
Through
that experience, I realized a poem could work in many different forms
and words began to take on many meanings at the same time. The word
choices were not better for the poem or not worse for the poem, the
words were just different, inferring differences when read in the
same context. Instead of thinking of poems as revisions, I thought
about poems as individual, momentary explanations, in which one
word's meaning could differ, depending on the location the poem
presented:
Some
Days
Don't
you want to just
be
invisible? Go out
in
one of those full-body
burkas?
The
beginning verse in 'Some days' we find how, line end words, as in the
first two end lines, 'just' and 'out', are short, curt and set the
tone, the poem rhythm, which then lends the writing its atmosphere.
The poem severs itself, meaning, the end line words, are not
extending, to make an easy turn, instead, the end words invite us the
reader to pause, to come to an explanation, of the, 'just'. The poem
asks us to read, relate, take each word as one would in a haiku,
fraught with intention, seen and unseen, visible and invisible. By
the time we get to read the word 'burkas' we understand why we are
dressing ourselves with the poem. Lifshin uses subject matter, in
almost every word, just as early Hebrew writing, uses each word to
depict God. Lifshin can be recognized for the writer she is, her
mood, her juxtaposition of mood and phrases:
of
course even
then
people would stare.
Those
two lines reveal through the use of 'even, and stare.' I take 'even'
as equality. An emphatic equality, even in wearing a burka the poem
is seen as naked. We come to be seen, at any moment, even when we
cover ourselves, this poem uncovers us from our need to please, to
profit from being seen in the right out-fit, shoes, labels, the right
body parts lifted to heaven:
“Haven't
you ever wanted
to
at least get rid of parts
of
your body you can't
stand?”
Wow!
Who would write such a thing!
Only
a woman? No! Yet we are sure the poem is about a woman because the
only word so far that references woman, is the word burka, until we
get to the “I.” The drama, the burka invokes leads us to an
uncovering or cutting off from what is meant to be hidden:
Belly
and chin,
maybe
thighs and every -
thing
that isn't as it could
be?
I could tell something
was
happening when I
stopped
lusting for clothes
as
if they were a man's
body,
stopped dialing
VS
late at night like
whispering
to a taboo love.
Again
a line cuts off the meaning, 'every – thing. The poem is being
written by and with a simple gesture, a hyphen, as Dickinson inserted
her hyphen. Make of that what you will. I see the hyphen as a
fragment, a space in time to meander into the unseen. Just as a nun
might cloister herself, as an anorexia girl who seeks the body
perfect, which seems demanded of her by her environment, to be
perfect, untouched by life or even untouched by sight:
In
fine
– line diary entries
I
often put down a favorite
or
hated dress. Other
friends
still bury depression
in
shopping. Tho I did, it
no
longer works, ineffective
as
certain long – used drugs.
“It”,
that word, 'it'. “tho I did, it”. The poem reduces itself to,
'it'. I am it, “tho I did, it.” the saving grace becomes the word
“did.” Did, becomes or takes us to the past and we lose the tense
feelings, “it no longer works.” First we the reader must get
around the corner after it stops the line with its it:
look
at me now, at the
kitchen
table in faded yoga
pants
and mismatched top
and
my hair hardly flowing.
Don't
you want to some -
times
just not make nice or
look
nice?
Just
as we read 'just' in the first part of the verse, we encounter, just,
in the middle of the poem. Finally the poem finds comfort in being
itself and perhaps asks the reader to read the poem on its own terms.
The poem becomes a poem because it doesn't have to look nice or read
nice. It just has to be accepted as the poem it is:
keep
the phone
off
the hook, stop checking
email,
not have to hear
about
anybody else's prizes
or
degrees, new books and
just
decide to never again
go
to any graduation,
any
place you have to pretend
to
be anything you're not?”
The
poem, Some Days, asks questions. Do we have to pretend we are reading
a poem. Do we pretend to read a poem by comparisons, by our cover –
up phrases, we expect, from a poem, instead of the poem as it being
its own poem? Lifshin's poetry continues to challenge me and I’m
glad 'it' does:
Drifting
Things
I have and
don't
have
come
from this
moving
between
people
like
smoke.
I've been
waiting
the way
milkweed
I
brought
inside two
years
ago stays
suspended,
hair in the
wind
it seems to
float,
even its
black
seeds don't under-
stand
how any-
thing
could stay
that
way
so
long
Every
poem in this giant of a book, A Girl Goes into the Woods, leads the
reader to an entirety. Each reader will be able to clarify for
themselves what the poet is saying and how the meaning effects each
life in different ways. We are privy to the way poetry grows wild, as
we walk into a woody area where one can find an assortment,
vegetation, sky, animal, bug and leaf. The poems teem with
wilderness. “sometimes I'd come in I couldn't tell it was me except
for my shape.”
I
think this is the best poetry book of 2013.
Irene
Koronas
Poetry
Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review
Reviewer:
Ibbetson Street Press
Reviewer:
Cervena Barva Press
