Poet Michael T. Steffen sees his own life flash before his eyes.

I had the privilege of interviewing the accomplished poet and respected Boston/Cambridge/Somerville literary figure, Michael T. Steffen. Steffen has a new collection out titled, " I Saw My Life." His publisher (Lily Poetry Review Press) writes of this collection:

"From the saying I saw my life flash before my eyes, the book's title announces thresholds, things and moments of arrest and luminosity, resplendent, but also shocking as a near-death experience might be, and fleeting as any flash may be. The stars in their constellations at night glimpsed up through leaves of a tree, the drama of a scull tipped in a powerful mid-river current, a woven shopping handbag, such objects in their places and handling evoke the weights and sensations revisiting the body in reflective memory, at the heart of poetry's deeply personal yet widely shared and recognized expressions."

 In the "Bell Jar" Sylvia Plath writes, “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked." Your book is titled " I Saw My Life," how would you respond to Plath's quote in the context of your own collection?

The title for my new book comes more generally from the saying “I saw my life flash before my eyes.” The narrator utters that at one point in the poem, about the heart attack he has suffered. At other points in the poem the meditation shifts to a different meaning of a near death experience and comes to the consolation that all of life is lived near death. That is what being mortal means. On a lighter level, the poem wanders with a father in the wake of his daughter’s leaving for college, and she plays the little twist on her parents of paying an unannounced visit home that weekend. The narrator and his wife are also preparing to leave the apartment they’ve lived in since the girl was very young. So it’s a coming-to-middle-age scenario, revisiting a world that is slipping through my fingers. You with your current huge life move from Somerville out to Revere might sympathize a good deal. The Sylvia Plath quote is pertinent, I do really admire her poetry. Figuratively, when she talks about the ramifying fig branch, I think it speaks to the method of my writing, how the meditation of the sections of the long poem proceed to constellate and affirm the vital diversity of correspondences in the weft of the author’s love, his life, his relationships as wells as his orientation in his home town. There is a narrative movement, in the poem, from crisis to acceptance, that I’d like to underscore here, in my belief that the “narrative” speaking voice and all that unfolds from a sequence of events in a narrative poem or short story or novel provide a rich source of feeling and personal revelation. I think that element has been underplayed or shoved to the back of the Modern long poem, in our preferences intellectual confidence in Cubism or Dada, the simultaneity of all time—an expression from Joyce—in post-Modern times.

In your poem "Atlases" it seems you feel like Atlas to a Zeus-like father. From speaking to you over the years it seems you and your father have very different sensibilities. In most father/son relationships there is a love/hate component. Your take?

There is no hate in my relationship with my father. As a well-provided for son in every material and educational respect, there was a petty filial want to blame him for everything in my life that turned south. But I’m way over that now. We enjoy talking about sports, he was a true athlete, a good football player through college, a Golden Gloves Midwest welter-weight champion in boxing, and on the U.S. Army boxing team in Germany, then had a short semi-pro boxing career before the boss (my mother) made him hang up his gloves and stick to his job as a salesman in residential and then industrial glass. The poem “Atlases” evokes his keen interest in Atlas maps, of the United States for when he and my mother began traveling, long before the Internet and GPS, and then abroad. They were large floppy bound print maps that spread easily over a living room coffee table. When I left for England to do my Masters degree, he started collecting maps of Great Britain and then Europe, when I moved to France, as a way I guess of orienting himself in some geographical way to where I was living. I used to think my undertaking in poetry yoked me to an immense disciplinary burden, but now I see it more as any long-term commitment, a relationship, a career, kids, home. The Greek myths often were both poignant and widely relevant. We all might feel like we’ve been condemned to hold up the weight of the world.

We are often told not to assume the speaker of a poem is the poet itself. At this stage in time did you feel the need to cover the waterfront of your life, so to speak?

It’s the poem of my young life’s most intense losses. I worked on it for a long time and it underwent many mutations. In its original form, the manuscript reached over 200 pages. David Ferry read one of those Ur-texts for me and we talked extensively over the next few years about it. There really could have been nobody but David Ferry to dedicate this collection to. I miss his generous attention. I miss him. Finally, I decided today’s readership might feel stretched with such a grand presentation all in one cover, and the original text splintered into three separate long poems. At the end of the long poem in this book, allusions are made to an uncle of mine and his participation in the D-Day battle at Normandy. I did go on from England to teach in Normandy and then closer to Paris for a good ten years before returning to the States to write. At this point I just feel a deep gratitude to Eileen Cleary and Michael McInnis at Lily Poetry Review Press for publishing this book. It helps me think the other two longer poems—which are more in the way of historical narratives—may attract interest and notice and that one day—the long vision of my journey in poetry—will see the publication of the trilogy.

What do you hope is the cumulative effect of this book on a prospective reader?

My simple hope is that readers will enjoy the language and the moments of the poem, maybe appreciate the dilemmas the writer finds himself struggling with. Poetry and literature have helped me feel less alone on the journey of my life. I’m prone to inwardness and solitude. Books and the voices I find in them keep the interior conversation lively and relevant. They help me belong.

from I Saw My Life, section 26

The men arrived and took the furniture

out of the living room, leaving the space

an emptiness of eggshell,

of abandoned

walls with their reach up to the lofty ceiling.

They’d taped up curtains of translucent plastic,

themselves becoming shadows with the tools

that tapped and scraped. A power sander whined.

A powder of old surfaces was kept

from the adjacent kitchen as it fell

and drifted onto the plastic, onto the paper

taped on the hardwood floors as I imagined

a soul being emptied of its residues—

Sleeping In The Dead Girl's Room by Cynthia Bargar

 

I had the chance to catch up Cynthia Bargar and communicate with her about her new collection of poetry "Sleeping in the Dead Girl's Room."   This is a challenging work about a challenging subject-- mental illness. Having worked in the field of mental health for many years I have an acute interest in this book.

Your new poetry collection " Sleeping in the Dead Girl's Room," takes place at Glenside psychiatric facility where you were a patient. I worked for 37 years at McLean Hospital and for the most part patient care was good. But your poetry deals with some traumatic experiences that you had while in that institution. I guess the saying goes, " Great pain brings great art.." Does this speak to you?

Glenside Hospital was not a “therapeutic environment” for me. I was lucky that the two staff members I met on intake, Winston and Sterling, were good to me. They tried to show me the ropes and keep me out of trouble. They were a little older than me, sharp and funny, and I have always considered them my guides through that locked ward experience. Despite this connection, I wasn’t safe at Glenside. In my poem, “WATER CURE”, I write of being raped by a staff person when I was granted a single room. When I was discharged the chief (and perhaps only) psychiatrist told me “you’ll be in and out of places like this for the rest of your life”.

I didn’t see this period as one of great pain. It was an adventure, capped by a visitation from my aunt, the one who presumably died by suicide when my mother was pregnant with me and for whom I am named. She spoke to me in an incomprehensible language, but there was a transmission. Only when I started writing the poems that became this book, did I remember her vaporish visit to Glenside. And then it took some years to see what that was about: haunting, entanglement. If you’re saying that my book is “great art”, thank you. I don’t know if it’s great pain that propels artistic endeavors. For me, it’s obsession. I can never let go of that drug-fueled (Haldol) time at Glenside. And I was desperate to know what happened to my aunt and if being given her name and her bedroom and living in the house where she died for my first five years had seeded the haunting. I’m grateful to my poems for braiding this all together and then helping me to begin to untangle the braid.

I know Sylvia Plath was referenced in the collection. Of course, Plath met her end by placing her head in an oven. A lot has been said about the romantic notions of the "crazy" poet. Did this influence you at all? Was Plath a sort of mentor?

I first fell in love with Sylvia Plath as a depressed teenager reading The Bell Jar. I identified with the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, many of whose struggles seemed to mirror my own. Sylvia Plath lived in Winthrop, MA, for six of her childhood years. I was born in Winthrop and my early childhood was spent there. My aunt was three years older than her, and in my poem, “MY AUNT TALKS TO SYLVIA PLATH” I imagine them meeting in an afterlife. When I started writing poems I didn’t have any connection to the idea of the “crazy” poet and I don’t connect with nor have I been influenced by that notion. I came to Plath through her novel, way before I wrote or read poems. When I did discover her poetry I was ecstatic.

You have a Jewish background. How does the culture, your family influence you and your writing?

In Jewish families it’s very common to name children after deceased relatives. I think there was an expectation that my parents would name me for my aunt. Oftentimes, the English version of the

name, as opposed to the Hebrew, uses the first letter of the deceased’s name. So I could have been a Carol or a Claire and that would have satisfied the tradition. But I was given my aunt’s first, middle, and last names: Cynthia May Bargar. My poem “MIDRASH ON NAMING” explores Jewish naming and the potential problems associated with naming a child after someone who died a violent death or by suicide, misfortune (dormant until stirred)/ will find the child.

I’m aware that keeping secrets within the family is not exclusively a Jewish phenomenon, but for some reason I do attribute the particular kind of unwillingness to speak about my aunt and the circumstances of her death to our being Jewish in what was as a hostile Christian environment/country. Assuming she died by suicide, I think the shame associated with that act and the fear of further stigmatization contributed to the silence.

Being Jewish — culture, family — has influenced all aspects of my life, including my writing. Some of my relatives spoke Yiddish and had limited fluency in English. The intonations of the Yiddish language probably had an influence on my writing.

The book is dedicated " For all the women and girls who stories were buried with them." By writing this book, unearthing your story, did you have a catharsis of sorts—a sort of clearing out of the repressed demons?

I wasn’t able to fully excavate my aunt’s story, which certainly was buried with her. But it no longer seems pressing to know exactly what was going on with her and exactly how she died. I’m okay with the not knowing. During the writing of the poems, I was immersed in the making and not the feelings. But once the book was published and I starting reading the poems to friends, family, and strangers, there was a shift in consciousness and I no longer felt haunted. I also developed compassion for my father, whose sister the other Cynthia was. We had a rocky relationship when he was alive, and because I was kept in the dark about the family tragedy, I didn’t have a way in, couldn’t understand what made him tick. I have come to see the poems as my way of making amends to him for judging him harshly.

I was interested in your fractured sense of self that you had under the spell of manic depression. Was this some sort of coping mechanism?

I think the "fractured sense of self" had to do with being haunted by the dead Cynthia, sometimes being confused by who was who, and often having to be differentiated (each of my grandparents referred to her as "my Cindy"). I absorbed much gloominess and grief in the house and family that may have fractured my sense of self. This fracturing was not just when I was in the throes of depression or mania, it was most of the time. It wasn’t a coping mechanism. On the contrary, it made it often impossible to cope.

You often use the pronouns "You" and "I" in reference to your late aunt and yourself. You also used "the She" to refer to your aunt. Why did you do this? Is this a way to portray your confused mental state—the blurred lines between you both? Did you want to have the reader as confused as your younger self?

Regarding the pronouns, I don’t know why I did what I did. I wrote the first poem in the book, “CREATIVE NONFICTION” last, after Lily had accepted the manuscript. As I was writing it, “the

She” presented itself and I liked it, so I went with it. The pronouns for me and my aunt are slippery because the line between us was sometimes blurry. The slip and blur are due to my being haunted and how mysterious that was.

I didn’t intend to confuse the reader and when I started distinguishing between the she who is not me, and the she who is me, in my mind it was a clarifying gesture. If readers are confused, that’s okay. I hope they enter my sphere and just go with it.

Why should we read your book?

I wouldn’t say anybody should read my book. I have heard from many readers who were moved by it. I think it resonates with readers because it illuminates some things about family secrets, memory and post-memory, and the human condition that many of us have experienced in very particular and mysterious ways. Even if their circumstances are different from mine, readers have told me they identify.