Poet: Carol Muske-Dukes
Background:
Muske-Dukes, born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1945 and raised in Forest Lake, Minnesota, is the author of 9 collections of poetry (one of them, titled Sparrow, was nominated for the National Book Award in 2004), 4 novels, and 2 essay collections. Formerly the poet laureate of California, Muske-Dukes is arguably best known for founding the PhD in creative writing and literature program at the University of Southern California, where she has taught since 1993. She has won numerous awards for her work over the years, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, several Pushcart Prizes, and a Witter/Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and won a grant from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation.
According to the Poetry Foundation, Muske-Dukes is ‘a careful writer who balances rhetorical precision with a unique manner of relating personal experience.’ She focuses much of her work on the daily minutiae of life and, considering the existential philosophical concerns of our everyday actions, the Poetry Foundation goes onto add: ‘While [her work] is well-anchored in daily life, it moves far beyond to become a meditation on philosophical concerns like the nature of time and the value of life.’ In her own words, she considers herself to be a ‘visual poet,’ saying that ‘images come…easily to me. I feel very close to painters, our processes are similar.’
When Muske-Dukes is not teaching at USC or writing poetry, essays, or other prose for her own publication, she writes for the New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. She lives in Los Angeles, where she lived with her husband, actor David Dukes, for many years before his death in 2000.
Poem: ‘Grief Dream’
When he appears, he looks into my eyes With the gaze of a child missing a perfected Will. Then, like a child, he moves suddenly— Insisting on his own space, summoning up that
Odd power that makes us seem real to ourselves. His life failed him. Fame, which he had in hand, Failed him. He believed it was because he chose me. When I catch or remember his ripped-from-pure-terror
Characters onscreen and off (murderer, father, diplomat)— I get that he was always a version of the liability of “us.” He comes to me alone in dreams, spinning into a glimpse Of such blue-eyed hate it might have been love—O
I was never sure of that living kid on the lit stage, Floating now into the twentieth year of his death.
Analysis:
I stumbled onto this poem through Poets.org’s daily ‘Poem-A-Day’ a few days ago, and it struck me as a poem that I wanted to include in our ‘Poem of the Week’ feature because of the strong imagery and melancholic mood of the poem. I had never encountered anything else written by Muske-Dukes, and it led me to put her most recent collection, Blue Rose, on hold at our library.
In her own words, Muske-Dukes says: ‘This is a poem about grief. I’ve said before in my life that grief has no clock or calendar. It has no expiration date—we only learn how to live with it. Like memory, it is not locked in the past, rather an ongoing fluid phenomenon. I question ongoing grief, I return to the deceased, to meditate on them as if they still live. It can still cause anger, passion, a sense of love and betrayal. ‘White washing’ the tomb is a false comfort; we honor the dead by remembering them as they were—and are. That is what I hope this poem manages to express.’
Her words describing the poem also struck a nerve somewhere deep inside me—I’ve always been drawn to melancholic/gothic/death-based pieces of writing, ranging from Poe to Stephen King to poetry collections dealing explicitly with grief, loss, and death. I don’t necessarily know where the fascination comes from internally, but I think it has something to do with one of the rawest human emotions, which is the utter gut-punch of losing someone you love or are close with, and the finality of their death and how they will never physically be with you again. I think people who are grieving and have experienced a deep loss are people that bare their souls and hearts to you, and, in true human condition, they need to be comforted, whether that’s through being with other people or putting their feelings onto the page, or any other manner they see fit.
In terms of what the poem is actually about on the surface, it references the death of her husband, character actor David Dukes (no, not that David Duke). He died in 2000, and she wrote the poem in 2020, referenced in the last line of the piece, and it describes his death as not a concrete object, something that happened, but as an idea that ‘floats’ into the future, the anniversary of his death ‘floating’ to her after the two decades that they’ve been apart. The concept makes one think of death not as a finality, a ‘period’ to the end of life, but as something that continues even after death, affecting those who are left behind more than anything.
Underneath the surface, the poem appears to describe a relationship in flux, exploring the idea that, even after the death of a loved one, we still remember all of the memories we have of and with them, both good and bad. You cannot whitewash memory and try to block out all of the bad to focus on the good, and Muske-Dukes strips herself raw describing rather painful memories of her husband, even going far enough into her heart to talk about how he blamed his marriage to her as the reason he didn’t become a bigger actor.
Marital problems and rifts are usually kept between couples (at least, it was more often before the advent of social media and Facebook), but Muske-Dukes doesn’t hold back here. She explores the darker side of her marriage to Dukes, describing the ways they sometimes hated and loved each other simultaneously, and yearns for the days when he was still alive and they could hash it out in person while facing the reality that she can only ‘physically’ see him now in her dreams.
I don’t know the entire background or story of their marriage, but, from the poem she has written, it seems to me that there is lingering grief not only for the loss of Dukes, but also of some problems or rifts that might’ve been left untended. Almost everyone has experienced the loss of someone and wished that they had said or done something before the person died that let them know how much they actually cared for the person who passed away, whether it’s forgiving a father on his death bed or telling a best friend how much they really meant to you, and the poem seems to be a riff on that idea, personalizing the idea of ‘what could’ve been?’ if Dukes had lived.
Overall, it’s a tremendously melancholic poem, but the images that Muske-Dukes conjures, including that of a ghostly apparition coming to visit her out of the depths of darkness in her dreams, creates a stunning backdrop to balance the sadness against, and the result is a deep, searching poem that everyone who has ever felt grief in their hearts can connect with.
For Future Reading:
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