Poet: Jill Alexander Essbaum
Background:
Essbaum, born and raised in Bay City, Texas, is a poet, novelist, and editor. Educated at the University of Houston, the University of Texas, and the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest, her poems are often explorations of divinity, word play, and sex. According to the Poetry Foundation, “Essbaum is influenced heavily by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simon Armitage, and Sylvia Plath, and her poems blithely work with received forms and displaying a nuanced attention to rhyme and meter.” Essbaum, in a separate interview recently, described the relationship between religion and sex in her poems as one that is both strange and not strange, saying that the Puritanical influence in America, whether you’re religious or not, has seeped into our American culture everywhere you look. In other words, she believes that, as Americans, we are told to keep our impulses and wants and needs moderate, displaying our true selves only behind closed doors and feeling guilty about some of our wants and desires. Instead, her poems seek to break those doors down and expose the trueness of the human condition within all Americans, and human beings for that matter, and she seeks to do so in tasteful but thought-provoking way, including not shying away from bluntness when needed in her poems.
Her debut of collection of poems, Heaven, won the 1999 Bakeless prize, and she has written two other collections of poems along with a long-poem chapbook. Her novel Hausfrau was a New York Times Bestseller in 2015, named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronical, Huffington Post, and Shelf Awareness, and was nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. She has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and has served as an editor for the online journal ANTI-, the National Poetry Review, and the Nanopress project.
She currently teaches in the University of California-Riverside Palm Desert’s low-residency MFA program and lives in Austin, Texas.
Poem:
‘Easter’
is my season
of defeat.
Though all
is green
and death
is done,
I feel alone.
As if the stone
rolled off
from the head
of the tomb
is lodged
in the doorframe
of my room,
and everyone
I’ve ever loved
lives happily
just past
my able reach.
And each time
Jesus rises
I’m reminded
of this marble
fact:
they are not
coming back.
Analysis:
This is a simple poem drenched in regret, despair, and grief, but there also is hope underneath it all if you take some polish and rub some shine on it.
The poem is obviously influenced by the holiday of Easter and the story of Jesus, the height of importance to Christians and their religion, and it equates the coming of the Lord, according to their Gospel, with the loss of everything that the speaker of the poem loves and yearns for. By juxtaposing the two competing ideas, the theme is simple: even though it might be a gain for some people, or the idea of something new starting in a way, there is always loss at the same time. Similar to the clichéd sentiment of ‘for each ending, there’s a new beginning,’ the speaker of the poem is trying to find personal hope and something to be excited about during the time of year when greenery, often associated with good feelings and getting outside again after a long winter, appears once more and the world seems to come alive again. No longer are we all stuck inside, huddled around a fireplace where it’s pitch black by five in the afternoon—the world outside is coming alive again, with flowers sprouting and trees budding, the sounds of children’s laughter heard through open windows, or the cool patter of rain on the windowsill as we sit and listen with a cup of tea. Spring is usually a time of rebirth, and the story of Jesus rising from the dead is tied hand-in-hand with that, a celebration of joy of life for all Christians everywhere, tied with Spring for the rest of the world.
But the speaker of the poem doesn’t see it that way. Instead of looking at Spring as a time of rebirth, the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the feeling of newness that Spring brings along is looked at differently—while the world may be coming alive once more, the loved ones and friends who have passed of the speaker’s will never come back. They will not be resurrected, and they will not be given new life. They won’t appear miraculously at her door, appearing a few days after burial, and the only thing that is springing anew for her is the idea of these loved ones and friends who have passed. She may have their pictures, and mementos, and memories of them deep within her heart, but they will never come back to form new memories, forever lost to the darkness that is the afterlife or lack thereof.
But, there isn’t only despair and existential crisis within the poem—there is hope with the idea that once Spring ends, Summer will start again. Though not explicitly stated in the lines of the poem, it can be read that, as the speaker says that Spring is the season of Defeat for her, there are three other seasons after that, and all three seasons will bring with them their own distinct feelings and tones to her. While Spring might remind her of new beginnings that will never materialize, by the time it is done and Summer brushes it aside, everything else is already alive, and the speaker can move forward in the world to try to start new memories, traditions, and activities that will give her back the joy of life. Instead of wallowing in Spring with the grey skies, constant rain showers, and reminders of those who have passed, stuck inside most of the time, Summer allows her to get out and soak in the sunshine. She can be with others, even if that’s walking through a farmer’s market or sitting on the beach, and she doesn’t have to feel cooped up in her room. She can get outside and observe life in all its glory and ugliness, both concepts beautiful to an extent, and she can let her mind wander away from the thought of those who have been lost and won’t return and instead shift it to the joy of simply being outside, smelling fresh air, and realizing that you’re alive.
The poem, while extremely melancholic, has a few cracks where the light shines through, and readers shouldn’t mistake this beautiful, short poem for one that’s colored in the blackness of nothing and the absolutes of endings.
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