The ‘Poem of the Week’ for this week’s edition is one that is rather different stylistically and visually than past weeks’ poems, but before we discuss it, we should get to know the author first: Allison Benis White.
White, an associate professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, first received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine before embarking on a writing career that would include many honors and awards. Among them are the UNT Rilke Prize and a Foreword INDIE Book of the Year Award for her collection Please Bury Me in This, the Levis Prize in Poetry for another collection, Small Porcelain Head, and a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award. She has had work published in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, The 2017 Pushcart Prizes, and The Iowa Review, amongst others, and has been recognized with a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference and an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Writer’s Center. Overall—pretty impressive resume.
Personally, I stumbled onto White’s work when I was browsing the ‘New Book’ section of a local library and found her newest collection, The Wendys, on a shelf. It is a slim volume, coming in at only 80 pages, but it intrigued me from the cover photo—that of a woman leaning backwards with flowers coming out of her mouth, reminiscent in a way of the DVD cover for the classic movie Benny and Joon—and the way the poems were structured inside. They were mostly short, with many of them less than a full page, but they were powerful when I read them. The book itself is unique—White focuses the poems on reflections of and for five women named Wendy ‘as a way into the complex grief that still lingers after the death of a sixth Wendy, the author’s long-absent mother.’ They are basically musings on the life and times and deaths of the other Wendys, and they are used to explore the grief she feels at the loss of her own mother, even if she was mostly absent from her life, a complex kind of grief that confuses the poet more than comforts her.
The poem for today though was first published in The Iowa Review, called ‘Portrait of Estelle Degas. The poem visually looks much different than ‘normal’ poems—it is composed of two blocks of text, neither of them technically stanzas, and the poem itself is an ekphrastic poem (a type of poem about a work of art with no rules for form) touching on the painting Portrait of Estelle Musson Degas by Edgar Degas. Estelle Degas, the aforementioned woman of both the poem and the painting, was a woman surrounded by tragedy throughout her life—her husbands either died or divorced her, she lost many of the children she birthed either soon after birth or a few years down the line, and she was blind by age 30. Her family life was turbulent, including one husband leaving her for the woman who aided her after she went blind, and she died alone, lamenting how women of her time (she died in 1909) were so identified and judged according to the men in their lives.
White’s poem also touches on such themes of loneliness, despair, grief, the loss of identity, partnership, and lack of feeling. Take the first chunk of text—while the poem starts out describing the painting itself, we readers already start out with a sense of melancholy, as White writes that Degas ‘arranges without satisfaction’ before adding, ‘Then it is better to feel nothing at all.’ The speaker is in a state of numbness, alone and wanting to slip away from the world around her, and she seeks the comfort of a bar instead to try to feel better in the next few lines, ultimately failing to do so and ending up home alone, yet again.
The second block of text starts out just as dark, but it eventually ends on a lighter note. While the first block explored grief and melancholy and the idea of being alone, the second block is full of ‘others’—the speaker’s mother is mentioned (mothers are typically a sense of warmth and joy for many people), a ‘doubled self’ as she glances up in an elevator and sees her own reflection, and the image of people in a pool when glancing down at them from atop a diving board. It dips back into a sense of melancholy again, as the speaker chides herself for wanting to cry on the walk home and the sense that she ‘wants to leave [her]self, as opposed to someone else,’ but the mood quickly changes with the next line, one that is more hopeful and light than not: ‘Of course one shoe has no purpose without the other and when I put the second on I was taller…” The speaker makes the point, by comparing one shoe with a lost shoe, that it is better to be a part of a partnership, whether with yourself or with another person, and that loneliness can be defeated by finding the missing piece of the puzzle for each individual. For some people, it is feeling ‘comfortable in their own shoes’ and being happy with who they are, and with others it is by finding that friend or lover that makes them feel complete each day.
White’s latest collection, The Wendys, published this year, can be found in our catalog here and purchased through either Amazon here or locally in Milwaukee here.
'Portrait of Estelle Degas' by Allison Benis White
A few red flowers among the white in a glass cylinder she arranges
without satisfaction. A problem of color and containment. Her
hands on the vase or the white and red unfolding of the head.
Then is it better to feel nothing at all. Another vodka and tomato
juice until the glass is clear and reflected in the mirror behind
the bar. I don't remember anymore. Somehow I got home and
passed out on the bathroom floor, a black blouse and one black
shoe still on. Like a red flower and when pulling the flower to
your face with your eyes closed, it smells like nothing.
My mother singing above my crib with no expression, my first
memory looking up. Then my face in the mirrored ceiling of
an elevator. What is expected of vased flowers is to lean away
from each other and die within days. It is not polite to cry and
I limped and found the other shoes still black and upright in
the hall. Somehow to look up is worse. Also to leave yourself,
as opposed to someone else. Of course one shoe has no purpose
without the other and when I put the second on I was taller
and looked down as people do when shy or standing on a
diving board.
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