The poem for this week’s installment of ‘Poem of the Week’ comes from an author who is better known as a fiction writer—Barbara Kingsolver, author of the best-sellers The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, and Unsheltered, amongst others.
Kingsolver, a novelist, essayist, and poet, was born in Annapolis, Maryland in 1955 and raised in rural Kentucky after spending a brief period of her childhood in the Congo. After graduating from high school, she attended DePauw University in Indiana, where she received a degree in biology, before heading to the University of Arizona and obtaining a master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology.
Her writing career didn’t take off until the mid-1980s—at the time, she was working as a freelance science writer for the university, and she didn’t consider fiction seriously until she won a local Phoenix-area short story contest in 1985. She never looked back after that, diving headfirst into publishing a novel and a short story collection within a few years, and her star and literary reach has grown tenfold since then, with all of her books published after 1993 reaching the New York Times Bestseller List.
She has won numerous awards: the National Humanities Medal in 2000 from US President Bill Clinton, the James Beard Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Edward Abbey EcoFiction Award, the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Library of Virginia. She also was responsible for establishing and starting the Bellwether Prize in 2000. The Bellwether Prize is intended to support writers whose unpublished works support positive social change. In 2011, the PEN American Center agreed in negotiations with Kingsolver to take over administration of the prize, changing its name to the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
Much of Kingsolver’s work focuses on the subjects of social justice, feminism, and environmentalism, especially in regard to how humans interact with our natural world and other human communities, the subject of biodiversity, and the environment of our home environs at large. A social justice warrior for most of her life, Kingsolver has taken many of her personal life happenings, such as protesting against the Vietnam War in the 1970s and moving out of the country during the first Gulf War to protest American involvement in it in the early 1990s, and used them to influence her work, oftentimes drawing on autobiographical details to enhance her stories, essays, and novels. Her poetry is no different—much of it is focused on nature and the way that humans interact with each other, while some of it is also much more personal. A significant amount of her new collection, How To Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) deals with family trauma, love and heartbreak, personal travels, and interpersonal relationships. This collection, her second poetry collection overall and published a few months back in September of 2020, is where I have pulled this week’s ‘Poem of the Week’ from, a poem called ‘Thief.'
'Thief,' a simple free verse poem, revolves around the idea first espoused by T.S. Eliot: 'Good writers borrow, great writers steal.' It is well known in literary English circles, and much of the broader literary world in general, that many greats credit those who came before them for making their own works great. There's a saying that all modern-day plots are based on at least one of Shakespeare's plays, and, when you look at the plays he wrote, and the basic plots of each, it's hard to argue with that sentiment.
Kingsolver seeks to explore that idea of 'great writers steal' throughout the simple seven-lined stanzas, and the images and ideas conjured up by her pseudo-thieving furthers her exploration of the theme of borrowing and stealing from authors who came before us. In the first stanza, she talks about 'casing the joint for plots'--she's literally looking for plot ideas, even if they're small details here and there, to use in her own works, ideas that she can twist and mold into her own style of writing and story and then give it a shine of polish, passing it off in the end as hers. However, she goes on to note a major difference between outright plagiarizing someone like Dickens, such as stealing his entire plotline for a book perhaps and casting it as her own, and simply taking little things here and there with the line 'This / will not be a holdup... / just a shoplifter's itch...' Shoplifters almost never get away with anything major--it's hard, after all, to carry a seventy-inch TV out of Target's front doors without being stopped. Likewise, Kingsolver is trying to show that, while it might seem outrageous at first that one author is stealing a few plot ideas and details from another, it's more harmless than not, with shoplifting never really hurting anyone's bottom line compared to larger crimes of outright armed theft. This first stanza also gives a little nod to Dickens and the time period he wrote during, saying that she's reading him 'by dim lamplight,' the same kind of imagery that so many who read him today associate him with.
The second stanza carries on in much the same manner, describing another way that authors today steal from one another--reading Woolf makes her feel 'naked.' Worried about her writing skills and talents compared to Virginia Woolf's, she is able to quickly get the better of her when, metaphorically cornered by Woolf's tremendous novels and stories, she 'swipe[s] her / badge, mak[ing] off with her authority.' By ducking Woolf while 'getting her badge,' Kingsolver is stealing some of the best aspects of Woolf's writing once again while still leaving parts of herself behind. In order to incorporate that which makes Woolf successful into her own writing, Kingsolver has to shed some of her own clothes and be comfortable with who she is, refusing to hide behind anything else that might try to restrict her style or prose.
The third stanza continues the same sentiment as the first two, but this one focuses simply on those who are more known as poets--Emerson, Shelley, Thomas, and H.D. were all famous poets in their own time, and their work continues to be admired today, and in some cases even more so than when they were alive. But, this stanza doesn't just explore the idea of stealing from other writers--it also explores relaxation and the idea of mortality. By suggesting that she is 'read[ing] with my face / planted, belly to earth,' she is conjuring up an image of a person lounging peacefully in the grass on a summer's day perhaps, her chin on her hands as she peruses a book in the summer sun. It is a calming image, one that brings pure bliss to mind, and it is the opposite of the idea of theft. The poem ends on a serious note with a touch on the idea of mortality and that everything returns to nature and earth itself eventually. Her stomach has 'infinit[y] / composing in [her] rib cage / sun and rain on [her] back / bringing up a pelt of new grass.' When humans, or any living creatures for that matter, die, their remains are always returned to the earth, no matter what, and they enrich the soil or the earth itself around them, no matter if it is pure soil, or grassland, or prairie, or the ocean. Human beings, and all creatures in nature, are of the earth and will return to the earth when we die, and by invoking ideas of 'infinity' forming in her rib cage, and the sun and rain of the sky reaching through her to nurture the growing of new grass, she reminds all readers that we are only temporary, little specks of dust in the long history of the cosmos, and we need to enjoy our time here on earth, no matter what we do or what happens to us. Find bliss where we can, in other words, and hold onto it.
To read her newest collection How To Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), check it out from our catalog here or buy it from Amazon here or your local bookstore here.
'Thief'
I read Dickens by dim lamplight
casing the joint for plots. This
will not be a holdup, no clearing
out whole cash drawers into my bag--
just a shoplifter's itch: I'll take
the convict benefactor, the woman
who knits rebellions, into my pockets.
Woolf, I read in my room
behind a locked door where she
commands me to empty out everything
like airport security: Nothing!
Walk naked through the passage,
but quick as life I swipe her
badge, make off with her authority.
Emerson, Shelley, Dylan Thomas, H.D.
I read with my face
planted, belly to earth,
leavings of the infinite
composting in my rib cage
sun and rain on my back
bringing up a pelt of new grass.
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