One Art
Tess Gallagher (b. 1943)
I think poems can give courage and hope. But there's no mandate for poems to simplify experience in order to do that. Sometimes the poem will simply be a portrait of unsolved fears.
Tess Gallagher (née Bond) was born on July 21, 1943, in Port Angeles, Washington. The eldest of five children, she had an idyllic childhood. She would go out and collect pine cones, and then sell them in order to contribute to the meager family budget. The Bible was the only book in the house for most of her childhood, and when she discovered "The Jungle Book" hidden in a drawer, it was a surprise. She read the biographies of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin and Mozart and played classical piano from the age of five until she was fifteen.
My brothers and I played in the woods while my mother and father worked at logging in a clearing nearby. […] Sometimes we got lost and had to find our way back to the road or the clearing through the timber. I used to imagine that our parents might go off and leave us one day like the woodcutter in Hansel and Gretel. […] All of this has everything to do with my poems, a tone of self-sufficiency with an appreciation for sacrifices and hard work, the closeness of family, its heartaches and tenderness.
Gallagher studied under Theodore Roethke - "Your rhythms are too irregular, dear. I want you to memorize 'Tears, Idle Tears' by next week" - at the University of Washington, receiving a BA (1968). Working with Mark Strand, she received an MA (1970) from the same college. She then attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop (MFA, 1974). From Roethke she inherited a deep affection for William Butler Yeats ("His 'Collected Poems' are always in my suitcase") and since 1968 has traveled to Ireland regularly, where she is a partaker in Irish letters. Her first full-length volume of verse, "Instructions to the Double" (1976), won the 1976 Elliston Book Award but received a poor review in The New York Times. ("I knew the reviewer, a man, had perhaps read the title poem and skimmed the rest. He was reacting, not reading. He didn't like my seriousness and advised me to develop a sense of humor.")
In 1978 Gallagher published "Portable Kisses," "On Your Own" and "Under Stars." A number of poems in "Willingly" (1984) praise her father. "Moon Crossing Bridge" (1992) consists of a series of poems that speak the anguish incited by the death of her husband, Raymond Carver, the acclaimed short-story writer (1938-1988). Among her other books of verse are "The Valentine Elegies" (1993) and "Dear Ghosts" (2006). Writing about the latter, Fran Brearton (The Guardian, 2007) said: "It is a rich and expansive body of work that takes the reader on a confessional journey through suffering, loss, grief and, ultimately, hope." Gallagher's honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.
About Gallagher's poems, Hayden Carruth wrote:
If Jane Austen, in creating her characterizations, was often writing about herself, then Tess Gallagher, in writing about herself, is often creating characterizations, i.e., fictions, people existing in words, whom she cannot know, yet whom she regards with wonder and sometimes with Sapphic pathos.
My favorite poem by Gallagher is "Kidnaper," from "Instructions to the Double"; it is also the opening poem in "Amplitude: New and Selected Poems" (Graywolf Press, 1987). While the current dictionary meaning of "kidnap" is to abduct a person by force or deceit, at first the word meant to steal children (kid + obsolete napper thief) for service on the American plantations. This original connotation may be pertinent in light of Gallagher's early youth spent in the woods.
Emmanuel Levinas observed that acts of violence are to be found not only in the obvious, mundane cases (e.g., the master who mistreats his slave). He then came up with a broad formulation:
Violence is to be found in any action in which one acts as if one were alone to act: as if the rest of the universe were there only to receive the action; violence is consequently also any action which we endure without at every point collaborating in it.
I think "Kidnaper" owes a good deal of its achievement to its concealed resistance to conform to this formulation. Although the sense we normally attach to an act of kidnapping is precisely in accord with Levinas, it seems that Gallagher's heroine is "collaborating" with her kidnaper.
NOTES
- The photo shows Gallagher in 1984 with Carver.
- All quotes by Gallagher are from her "A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry" (University of Michigan Press, 1986).
- The Carruth quote is from his "Impetus and Invention: Poetic Tradition and the Individual Talent," Harper's Magazine (May 1979).
- The Levinas quote is from his "Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
Kidnaper
He motions me over with a question.
He is lost. I believe him. It seems
he calls my name. I move
closer. He says it again, the name
of someone he loves. I step back pretending
not to hear. I suspect
the street he wants
does not exist, but I am glad to point
away from myself. While he turns
I slip off my wristwatch, already laying a
trail
for those who must find me
tumbled like an abandoned car
into the ravine. I lie
without breath for days among ferns.
Pine needles drift
onto my face and breasts
like the tiny hands
of watches. Cars pass.
I imagine it's him
coming back. My death
is not needed. The sun climbs again
for everyone. He lifts me
like a bride
…