Natasha Sajé | November 2021

Natasha Sajé

Two years ago, a poem in the voice of an older man was rejected by the undergraduate student editors of ellipsis…literature and art, a literary magazine for which I am the faculty advisor. The most negative comments came from young men. Why did this poem—which I thought was publishable—prompt such a vehement reaction? In that class, at that moment, I didn’t know. Over months of research, I realized that the students’ reaction was the tip of an iceberg. My students couldn’t appreciate the poem’s subject, the adoption of sophistication through age and experience; in fact, closely reading the poem put them into a foreign and uncomfortable space.

This might be akin to the experience of reading dramatic monologues like the murderous Duke in Browning’s “Last Duchess,” Frank Bidart’s serial killer “Herbert White,” or Ai’s “The Kid,” psychological portraits that make us uncomfortable but at the same time illuminate the range of human behavior and thinking. Although we may loathe the speakers’ crimes, we are interested in—and learn from—their thought processes. The poem we discussed in the literary magazine class, however, was not in the voice of a murderer, but rather, an ordinary man performing the quotidian task of grocery shopping. This was a persona the students didn’t like, and not because the poem was badly written. Indeed, after the ellipsis editors rejected the poem, it was published in The Heartland Review, and later collected in a book. The author, Richard Foerster, gave me permission to use it for this essay.

Watercress

To pick a crisp salad from the
garbage of the past is no snap.
                        —Wallace Stevens

Did you find everything you were looking for?
the teen at the checkout asked as he scanned
the groupings I’d arranged on the belt.

No, I said, looking deep into his earnest face.
Sixteen perhaps, with lashes like a pasha’s fan
and the downy bloom of a first beard,

he tightened his brow with concern,
making golden threads in his green eyes
unapproachably alluring. No fault of his,

still I complained the market doesn’t stock
watercress, which I consider essential
for salads with Boston and romaine.

What’s watercress? He was too young
to appreciate the nourishing appeal
of bitterness, a taste admittedly at odds

with youthful cravings, yet one a man
acquires almost in defiance—to ingest
the biting world and not succumb

to its poisons. The boy nodded and smiled,
all the while deconstructing my neat piles
for reassembly in some adolescent application

of chaos theory. A half-century his senior, childless
and lacking necessary morsels of wisdom
a parent needs to nurture with neglect and let

inexperience stumble on its way, I watched
my canvas sacks begin to brim with disorder,
eggs wedged in with canned tomatoes,

as if the boy were gathering a future, there
before him, raw ingredients of a harvested
past, and I knew to hold my tongue.¹

(Reprinted with permission by the author, Richard Foerster)

The poem’s sadness about the fact that we never find everything we are looking for is antithetical to youth, when everything seems possible and attainable. Students had to google “watercress.” They didn’t like the complicated syntax; for example, the last sentence that spans the concluding three stanzas. They didn’t like the wit (“garbage of the past”), the arch and wry tone, the elegiac echoes, and they overlooked the homoerotism in the speaker’s description of the clerk, or perhaps they were afraid to point it out, because for someone older to notice the appeal of someone younger, perhaps especially when both are male, made them uneasy.

“To ingest a biting world and not succumb to its poisons” might be another theme of the poem. The speaker’s understanding that the clerk has a long future while the speaker does not is an essential aspect of the poem. Because my students were in their late teens and early twenties, they felt themselves “talked down to” by the speaker’s criticism of the “adolescent” clerk’s “chaos theory” packing method. Because they themselves were inexperienced, they couldn’t change their own points of view to that of the 70+-year-old speaker.

ellipsis…literature and art receives over 2,000 submissions a year, mostly from writers who are much older than the students who edit the magazine. Although I manage the budget and train the students in literary evaluation, I do not choose the work for the magazine, and am usually not consulted on it. On occasion, however, as in the case described above, I can prompt the managing editor to include a poem in our class discussion. It was “Watercress” and the resulting discussion that led me to investigate a prejudice that is rarely discussed in our culture—ageism. During my research, I saw that the issue was even larger than bias—I was also investigating the cues by which we read, and how readers configure a space they enter when they read a poem.

In the past few years, my students seem more sensitive to discomfort, and less willing to experience what is outside their norm than I have observed before in my thirty previous years of teaching. Students expect trigger warnings for material related to abuse and violence, and it is now customary at my college to permit students to stop reading material they deem harmful to their psyches. A few students have disability accommodations, but even those who do not sometimes avail themselves of avoidance. Reasons for such increased sensitivity in Generation Z include being born after 9/11 and thus knowing only a country worried about terrorism and the economy, as well as immersion in screens, technology, and social media.² As psychologist Sherry Turkle points out in a 2012 TED Talk,³ effects of screen immersion include an unwillingness, and even inability to converse with live people in real time, in part because those conversations cannot be edited and involve risk. Yet, rejection of disturbing or discomforting literature has consequences beyond the individual. We might be creating a less complex national discourse by endorsing the disinclination to get outside ourselves, one of the very reasons we read literature in the first place. Some magazines even proclaim what they will not read. For example, Foundry Journal announces on its homepage: “We will not consider work with sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, or ableist content.”⁴ I note the omission of “ageist” in this list, and I wonder how the editors recognize the content of work without first considering it.

In evaluating submissions, I teach students to use M.H. Abrams’s four theories of poetry: mimetic (art shows us the world); pragmatic (art has a social purpose); expressive (art conveys emotion); and objective (art should be evaluated on how it is made). Teaching these lenses through which to critique poems, I emphasize that it’s not always possible to separate reactions to a piece, and that sometimes the power of the whole determines its appeal or excellence. Moreover, literature can resist analysis, and still be worth reading. I also stress generous criticism: a reader must give each writer their donée, their given subject matter. I teach students to critique how, not what. Who are we to tell a writer they should not be writing about what matters to them? Yet, in the case of Richard Foerster’s poem, the students did not give the writer his subject matter. Interestingly, like the Foundry editors, my students are very sensitive to other “isms”: they have, in previous years of high school, college, and life, developed the ability to sniff out racism, sexism, ableism, transgender phobia, etc. But not ageism.

Of course, each literary magazine has its own flavor; an amalgam of the editors’ tastes. One might argue that literary magazines edited by undergraduates should not publish work by people in their seventies because there are plenty of magazines edited by people of retirement age that do. Moreover, the accrued social capital of older editors, who can use their power and connectedness for their own gain, for instance in applying for grants, far exceeds that of young editors. We might also argue that undergraduate student editors provide a needed balance to the preponderance of these older editors in the literary world, editors who hold onto their power past the point at which it is culturally useful, and whose choices and favor paybacks don’t make room for younger writers.

Still, like other kinds of bias and prejudice, denigration of aged people results in not honoring their humanity, in treating them as members of a group instead of individuals.⁶ It results in unequal rights. Months after the discussion of the Foerster poem, one student made an even more blatant ageist comment in the class, and I talked to him in private. I told him that age is a protected rights category, even though ageism is an implicit bias that is not as much studied as others—and a bias that presumably changes over time, as the biased person ages.

Robert N. Butler, a psychiatrist, coined the term “ageism” in 1969, and Margaret Morganroth Gullette is the literary scholar who might be credited with initiating age studies thirty-five years ago. Gullette notes that ageism is neither a sexy “ism” nor one with many theoretical frames.6 Examples of ageism in everyday life include the presumed compliment: “You look young for your age.” The comment implies that it is good to look young, and it implies a visual set point for age. Even more obviously, “he’s too old for this job” presumes that an older person does not have the needed skills or energy. Such stereotypes are reinforced by media. While we are surrounded by images of young people, only very few actors on television, for example, are over seventy (termed “old-old”), and those tend to be portrayed as parodies of old age. The prevalence of dyeing one’s gray hair and undergoing various cosmetic surgeries points to ageism, as do birthday cards suggesting that anyone over thirty is in decline. Most surprising, perhaps, considering capitalism’s dominance in the US, is the fact that consumers over fifty (a wealthy group) are “shunned and caricatured in marketing images.” The AARP’s 2019 study of advertising images found that although “more than 53 million people older than 50 are employed, making up a third of the American labor force…. only 13 percent of the images… showed older people working.”⁷ One reason for these erroneous representations, in addition to the prevalence of ageism in our culture, is that advertising workers tend to be young. Age segregation is an ancillary problem, and most importantly, age discrimination on the rise.⁸

The United States is a youth-driven culture, but as is the case with other ideologies, we are so immersed in it that we don’t see its problems or even realize its hold on us. Perhaps because the US is a relatively young nation, we have always revered youth, and thus ageism is our most culturally acceptable bias. An emphasis on youth and the new, however, can result from or lead to the ignorance of history. Recalling the Asian stereotype about honoring elders, I thought perhaps that China was not youth-driven—until I read research to the contrary.⁹ Perhaps the whole world moves this way now. In Biblical times, older people were revered because they were assumed to have been given a long life to fulfill a divine purpose, and until the advent of the printing press, they were also valued as repositories of information.¹⁰ Now, life expectancies are longer, more people are old, and we have many ways to store information. We also have technologies that can, to some degree, defy aging, or turn older people into cyborgs, while age is increasingly pathologized in the medical community.¹¹ Whatever the reasons, ageism is on the rise, youth-driven initiatives flourish, and these factors are apparent also in contemporary poetry.

The last twenty years have seen a sea-change in US poetry. Unlike mathematics and music, poetry has long been presumed to be the province of those with life experience. W.D. Snodgrass, born in 1926, won the Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Heart’s Needle, in 1960 when he was thirty-four, but he was an exception. Such honors were accorded mostly to the aged. I remember attending a reading by the Academy of American Poets Chancellors in Washington, DC in 1994, a group in which Rita Dove was the only woman, the only person of color, and the only person under the age of sixty. This lineup would not happen today. No longer are the stars of the poetry world all white men over sixty. In the 1960s, or even the 1990s, no one could have predicted that a twenty-seven-year-old with their second book (Danez Smith) could compete with an eighty-eight-year-old with his tenth book (Frank Bidart) for the National Book Award. Thankfully, today’s Academy of American Poets and other influential literary boards are more inclusive than in the past. In addition, increasing numbers of first books by young and diverse poets (Fatimah Asghar, Safiya Sinclair, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, to name a few) get noticed. Our culture is opening previously closed doors to poets under thirty. Indeed, a September 2018 Atlantic Monthly article, “How Poetry Came to Matter Again,”¹² argues that young poets are “saving” poetry by making it more relevant to younger readers and writers, and widening the audience for the art. The UK Guardian points to a parallel trend abroad.¹³ This presumes that subject matter is age-specific. A related question, the one I started this essay with, is whether older writers write about subjects or in ways that turn off younger readers.

Precociousness on the part of the poet who wants to publish is possible in part because of changes in publishing technology (more presses, more magazines) and increasing numbers of MFA programs (more training for more poets, more and younger editors). However, older poets sometimes grumble about the literary quality and narrow view of the youthful work, which tends to focus on family and personal stories. And some older poets resent young poets who leapt past years of obscurity and hard work to quick fame and generous honoraria.

In the undergraduate poetry workshops I teach, for the last ten years, I’ve included members of the community, and I routinely teach first books as well as books by established poets. I have noticed age-specific reactions, as when two years ago, William Olsen’s book TechnoRage was rejected by the young students. They interpreted the book as a simple rant against technology coupled with an appreciation for nature, and several couldn’t follow Olsen’s convoluted syntax. The most vocal reduced the subject matter to a meme of the title. Interestingly, Olsen writes evocatively of persistent physical pain that very few young people experience, so I wonder if the theme of bodily pain and aging, along with the sophisticated and confident style, was what made the young students unable to appreciate the book—as well as unable to acknowledge their discomfort with it. Health privilege, we might note, is still off the radar in the discussion of privilege.

Linguistic skill is accrued over time. When I was working as a poet-in-the-schools, however, it became clear to me that children see the world in fresh ways and that this freshness also helps them avoid linguistic clichés. The film The Kindergarten Teacher (the 2018 US version with Maggie Gyllenhaal is a remake of a 2014 Israeli film) tells the story of a Staten Island kindergarten teacher in her early forties who is taking a poetry writing class. She is a good teacher, committed to her students, but she is struggling as a writer of poetry. Her writing instructor criticizes her work as derivative (I would argue with that term: derivative of what or whom?); clichéd might be the more accurate way to describe her poems. She herself recognizes more original poems uttered by one of her five-year-old students and then proceeds to ingratiate herself with him and his father. This leads to her first passing off his poems as her own and then finally, to her kidnapping the child. One aspect of the plot that rings very true is the fact that the larger culture, including the boy’s father, does not value poetry. The teacher’s spiral into obsession leads to her arrest and to the child no longer having a scribe who values his linguistic gift. The teacher’s midlife crisis morphs into much larger themes: a study of mental illness, the issue of plagiarism, and the value of art in a capitalist society. Yet the film sidesteps a central question: is it possible for a five-year-old to produce good poems? In the film, the five-year-old’s poems are not clichéd in part because they juxtapose images and do not presume to process experience, but perhaps also because the poems were actually written by the accomplished poets Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong. There is, of course, much learning between five and twenty: my undergraduate students often surprise me with their abilities to both process experience and avoid clichés.

I believe that my students’ rejection of “Watercress” was in fact a rejection of their own aging and mortality (i.e. that will never happen to me) and thus, an “unconscious defensive strategy which younger adults use against death anxiety.”¹⁴ The term for the reaction people have when faced with their own mortality and the resulting psychological work they do is “Terror Management Theory.” According to psychologists, when we look at people, we immediately categorize them. Evolutionary psychology has shown our preferences for symmetrical features and height.¹⁵ We also categorize people according to age, gender, and race—and that first assessment often comes with bias. Harvard University’s online bias tests offer ways for users to test their own visual reactions to others. Unconscious bias, even directed at oneself, is common.

At a brunch I hosted for my mother and seven other women, I saw that my then 86-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer’s, had internalized ageism. Afterward, she noted, “The young one was pretty, not the old ones.” Interestingly, I (and probably everyone else who didn’t have Alzheimer’s) knew that the “young one” was a woman in her late sixties who’d had a lot of cosmetic surgery and dyed her hair blonde, and even though this woman wasn’t particularly nice to my mother, my mother approved of her youthful appearance. Like my mother’s predilection for photos of babies, this bias seems deeply ingrained. Perhaps Alzheimer’s merely removes the self-correcting bias filter many of us have. In any case, there is conflicting research on the bias of older people against their own age group.

Is the effect of bias different when, instead of facing a real person, we are reading poems? In that case, identity factors can only be gleaned through inferences from words, or the assumption of congruence between author and speaker. When we read poems, we evaluate tone—the speaker’s attitude toward subject matter, and we even take on that tone, temporarily, because poetry offers such intimate access to a mind different from our own. To use a spatial metaphor, reading poems is like walking into a room that you have not designed and that you do not usually live in—a room that offers a sometimes uncanny sense of being somewhere you do not belong. That experience can be prompted by curiosity and the desire for expansion but is sometimes curtailed when we feel revulsion or distress. Reading offers a way to know and feel more than is permitted by our own physical bodies in the world. Interestingly, people generally become better readers as they age, because they have more context for what they read, as well as more practice.¹⁶ Perhaps they are also more willing to enter different consciousnesses because they have been encouraged to do so by the practices common in their generation.

My experiences with Richard Foerster’s poem and the combined community-undergraduate poetry workshop led me to experiment with another mixed-age workshop, this time at a Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program residency. I was interested in how readers of different ages feel when they encounter poems that signal the speaker’s advanced age. I revealed the authors’ names only after the discussion. I chose poems that contained additional identity signs and speculated that readers might react differently depending on their own age. I asked the group of about forty students and faculty, aged 26 to 75, to assess the speakers by linking cues and clues (i.e. words) to identity factors. I asked, “What signals the age of a speaker? Style or content or both?” Because the moving parts of poems are so complex, the exercise offered ways to discuss assumptions about age.

Barbara Strasko’s “Blossom” features the same situation as “Watercress”—an older person noting the habits of a teen during a supermarket transaction—with a very different tone. In “Blossom,” the speaker is wise and sympathetic toward a teen who is being overly careful in packing the speaker’s groceries. As in “Watercress,” this teen is also seen by the speaker as mistaken—albeit in the opposite way. She’s too careful, and the speaker mourns the girl’s resulting inability to risk, to break things and deal with the consequences, presumably because the speaker herself has done exactly that and not only survived, but learned from it. The clerk’s perfectionism might hold her back just as the carelessness of the other teen might affect his life. In “Blossom,” although the speaker is the same sex as the teen, there’s no attraction and no affinity. The two are opposites. In both poems, the older person is observing the younger from a distance and with judgment. Both older people hold their tongues during the encounter, but offer the reader what they think through the poem. The poems remind us that people are always noticing and judging what and how we do, even in the supermarket. The Vermont College group remarked that the two speakers in “Blossom” are almost speaking a different language, each not understanding the other’s values, for example when the speaker doesn’t answer the girl’s direct question about having the meat packed separately. The speaker answers “don’t worry,” a phrase that also offers life advice. Interestingly, the female student editor-in-chief of ellipsis chose this poem for publication in our 2019 issue.

Blossom

Last night I mistook a shivering leaf for a hummingbird.

Today the girl at the checkout tries to please me:
I’ll pack your eggs in a separate bag. I say, I don’t care.
Then she says Do you want your meat packed separately?
I say, don’t worry.
Do you want the toilet paper in a bag?
I say, it makes no difference.

Some people desert themselves
and look for another. Some conquer, then leave everyone behind.

Very thin, frail and perfect, she keeps asking.
Finally I say, I bet you get all A’s.

I graduated last year with a 4.0.
I want to be happy for her
but all I can imagine is her hovering like the hummingbird.
She may never feel the liquid of broken eggs.¹⁷

(Reprinted with permission by the author, Richard Foerster.)

At the beginning of the poem, the speaker “mistakes” a shivering leaf for a hummingbird; at the end, the speaker imagines the girl hovering like a hummingbird. I take this as the speaker’s acknowledgment that she might be mistaken; her admission that she doesn’t really know the girl. The conditional quality of the word “may” in the last line underscores this tentative assessment, unlike the surety of Richard Foerster’s poem.

The Vermont College group also discussed Foerster’s poem “Watercress.” An older man objected to the arch tone, and a few others said that they, like my students, would not have published the poem. Some readers want speakers less sure of what they know. Adrienne Rich wrote, “Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask of any poem is, ‘What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?’”¹⁸ Perhaps Richard Foerster’s poem, its excellence as a made thing notwithstanding, is not so much breaking silence as joining a chorus of privileged voices, a chorus some readers have heard enough of.

The speaker in Elaine Terranova’s poem, “Stone,” is at a ceremony honoring her deceased brother. Readers glean that the speaker is a woman, old enough to have grandnieces. One sign of the speaker’s femininity is her noticing her grandnieces’ dresses; her description of the “shawl of lace” (presumably covering of the headstone until it is placed over the grave) might be another. Her Jewishness is marked by the Hebrew prayer. One of Judaism’s commandments is helping loved ones find their final resting place, and it is traditional to place earth in the grave and stones on the grave and headstone. Thousands of years ago, marking graves with piles of rocks showed passing priests the location of the graves, important because priests became impure within four feet of a corpse. Another reason for placing stones, more relevant to the poem, is the belief that stones keep the soul where it belongs, because for a while, a soul continues to dwell in the grave. Stones also keep evil spirits from getting into the grave.

Terranova’s poem turns through the last two lines. The speaker ends with an alternate wish for her own death; she wants to “evaporate” into the atmosphere instead of being held down with stones. The ubiquity of the stones in the graveyard—that they go “back and back”— disturbs her, perhaps because the speaker doesn’t want to be one of many. She would rather be disseminated into air. She would like her spirit to be airborne.

Aside from the fact that the speaker’s brother died, that she has grandnieces, and is thinking about her own passing, the poem is not self-referentially “old.” Although Terranova was born in 1939, and Perdido is dedicated to the memory of six friends who died, the speaker of her poems does not dwell on age. The poems are image-driven, are spurred by memory, and convey a tone of wonder. They suggest that art is history, and art is what remains to be looked at. The third section, titled “Exchanges,” is where we find “Stone,” along with the title poem “Perdido,” where the speaker tells us she is the youngest, “born to be a good steward,/take care of what grows beside you/ what you must watch die.”

Stone

I went to the graveyard where they lay, my parents,
but I didn’t look for them. All the family rested here
after they’d finished living, as they might at the end
of a heavy meal. Instead, I found myself
in my brother’s plot, a headstone being unveiled.
The stone bore his name, I could see, having already
shrugged off its shawl of lace. And though I’d left
a smaller stone on top to say I’d been, as others had,
it was the living I was there for, my nephew who chanted
Yisgodal, v’yiskadish, the Hebrew prayer, in the same
appropriate monotone the rabbi used to usher his father
into eternity, and my niece and her daughters stood by,
pretty shadows in black mini funeral dresses
and sunglasses. The stones went back and back,
straight shouldered in rows, soldiers of death. I myself
didn’t want it to be known where I’d lie, even here among family,
just return to the atmosphere as if I had evaporated.¹⁹

(Reprinted with permission by the author, Elaine Terranova.)

“Inside the Trap of Your Knowing,” from Wanda Coleman’s 2011 book, The World Falls Away, written when she was in her late sixties, is perhaps the most complicated of the poems I discuss in this essay. The poem addresses a specific entity and wraps that entity together with the speaker by using the pronoun “ours,” yet the two are also distinguished at places in the poem. Speaker and addressee share a dialectic, but the addressee has the power. “I keep trying to tell you something important/about my life” suggests that the speaker has a history of attempting to communicate with the addressee. Yet the addressee is a know-it-all, “repeatedly interrupting” the speaker. I might term the addressee a combination of patriarchal and capitalist ideology, the dominant voice of our society, one that drowns out individuals, especially poor black women.

Inside the Trap of Your Knowing

ours is a severed dialectic

i keep trying to tell you something important
about my life but you interrupt me repeatedly

                  you know about these things. You read them
                  they are Euclidian and euphonic

may be analyzed & annotated in the hip journals. you
studied them in philosophy generations ago,

                   it was broadcast. nationwide.
                   last night

you harbor a superior knowledge that allows
you into my experience before I have it

                  you know better of course
                  because you have always known

your science is exact and applied—the universal nature of bars,
the chemical composition of smog & smegma, what governs
the economics of our dialogue, the molecular structure
of the carbohydrates forming the cellulite gathering in my thighs

                 you know it all—from
                Alexander to Zeno of Sidon

you/the authority on emotional pogroms, spiritual
holocausts and the intellectual hajj

we will reduce my disjuncture to the hierarchal nature of man
we will reduce my empty purse to the fact that
melanin loss is the byproduct of aging

we will reduce my son’s death to the stress limits of metal

               we will curl up in our Justinian cave,
               feed the fire with wishes and words

and await the glacier you are certain is icing us over²⁰

(“Inside the Trap of Your Knowing” (28 lines) from The World Falls Away, by Wanda Coleman,© 2011. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.)

The speaker signals her female identity by mentioning cellulite, a condition of fat below the skin that results in dimpling. While most women have cellulite, fewer men do, in part because men’s body fat is not distributed in the same way. Thin skin, aging, and a bad diet also contribute to this “orange peel” dimpling of the skin. Cellulite is a beauty problem cum medical condition constructed by a culture that does not like women’s bodies.

The voice of the poem uses cool, mostly scientific, often Latinate language: smegma, Euclidian, euphonic. This establishes the speaker as capable of “playing the game” of the addressee—but with sarcasm, in part because some examples are disgusting. The addressee engages in reductive thinking and does not believe in global warming; for example, the addressee is “certain” of a glacier. The speaker’s age is apparent in her knowledge of life, the fact that she has a son (who died), and her confidence in addressing the oppressor so directly. The reference to melanin suggests she is a woman of color, the “empty purse” that she is poor. The title of the poem points to “knowing” as a “trap,” suggesting that an attitude of unknowing is more desirable. This contrasts with the tone of “Watercress,” which focuses on and demonstrates knowing.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “Slingshot”²¹ (which can be accessed through the New Yorker magazine archive), is a third person reminiscence of a rural boy transforming a bicycle inner tube into a slingshot. He whittles wood and practices his aim while learning lessons in moral behavior. “The boy/ untangles a triangle of pull/within a triangle of release,” and “settles quietly into himself.” The slingshot practice is a parable, with the boy learning right from wrong, and reaching some self-understanding. The poem has an elegiac tone, and details such as the construction of the weapon-toy point to a time in the past. In other words, slingshot components made from inner tubes and shrub oaks, and whittled by hand, suggest a less technological time. There is no sign of race in the poem, although heterosexuality is signaled by the boy’s reluctance to approach the girl he likes. Even though the insight of the last two lines is credited to the boy, the words “compass” and “cross” have double meanings accessible only to the older narrator. The poet wrings the words to give the poem more gravitas. The description of the boy is not, as in “Watercress,” focused on the differences between speaker and boy, but rather, as in a work of fiction, filtered through the controlling consciousness of the speaker who reimagines a scene from childhood with the knowledge of an adult. The Vermont College discussants did not object to any aspect of this poem, but also found it less interesting than the others.

Christopher Howell’s poem “A Short Song,” the first poem in his most recent book, Love’s Last Number,²² is a “song of consciousness” of an old man, expressly noted as such. There are no cues for race, but images of physical and mental disability are abundant. In fact, because of these images, the depressed tone, and deliberate pointing, VCFA readers saw the poem as a parody—written by someone who was trying to convey old age but who was not himself old. Unlike Terranova’s speaker who looks ahead to what will happen to her body after death, the speaker in “A Short Song” is most concerned with the indignities, shrinking, and confinements of old age.

The “short” of the title might refer to the brevity of any human life. The first two lines position the speaker as “faltering” and “an old man.” Interestingly, the poet says “our” consciousness in the first line, which can be taken as the poet’s assumption that readers share his plight, a universalizing gesture. This might also be an attempt to unify human consciousness before distinguishing it in what follows. Other cues about age include “grit” and “dust,” and the “wrinkled sack of groceries that will have to last” as a trope for the body. The decline of the ability to remember is rendered as “broken glass” and the loss of beauty is “nameless meaning casting flowers.”

The many tropes in the poem suggest both the difficulty of describing this state of being and its universality as a human stage of life. When “his wishes” toss their hats in the air, they recall an image of a joyous Mary Tyler Moore in the eponymous television series, but the wishes could also be losing themselves, as in the idiom, “I lost my hat,” which can mean to be baffled. These wishes “watch the last boat depart,” a somber situation if one is stuck on an island. “As the sun goes down” is a pastoral trope that compares a human life with a day—it echoes “sundowning,” a person’s physiological weakening after the exertion of the day, more common with older people and those who are ill. This song is a “song of the bridge that never ends/really,” which recalls the poem’s opening image of not making it across, but rather sitting down in its grit and dust. At the end, the old man listens for either the silence or the song “that might be his.” Both silence and song can be ways to communicate, and one assumes that the poem itself is the speaker’s chosen method. The use of the conditional “might be his” seems pathetic (in its original meaning of provoking emotion). Does the reader feel sorry for the speaker with so little verve and drive, so few memories, so little work left to do? Who would want to enter this space, willingly, if they knew it would be so bad? Is this depressing news in fact a point of the poem, sticking the reader on a bridge to nowhere, when the last boat has departed?

A Short Song

This is a song of our consciousness, that faltering
old man who will never make it across the bridge,
who sits down in the grit and dust of it with his wrinkled sack
of groceries that will have to last. A song of his foolish bravery
and terror, his hope that will not stay focused, that wanders
a springtime path between peach trees
and the berries, humming something, forgetting,
and humming again. A song of his wishes
tossing their hats in the wind and watching the last boat
depart, its cargo of nameless meaning casting flowers, waving
out of sight as the sun goes down.
It is a song of memory’s little ways and sudden corner-like loveliness
turned to smoke and broken glass it eats and eats
to stay marginally alive. A song of the bridge that never ends
really, and never whispers this
as the old man listens for the one spot of silence
or the one clear voice that might be his.

(From Love's Last Number, published by Milkweed Editions. Reprinted with permission by the author, Christopher Howell.)

Interestingly, although the speaker in “A Short Song” bemoans the intellectual losses created by aging (dementia notwithstanding), research shows that while the brain does change, older readers compensate for any lost speed in assessment with a larger bank of items to which to relate new items, and thus are better at synthesizing and interpretation.²³

I offer these examples to suggest the importance of all readers examining their age bias in reading poems. That bias may be a rejection of one’s own mortality as much as it may be the rejection of a world view different from one’s own. I want also to note the intersectional experience of prejudice. As Yoko Ono noted in an interview, throughout her life she experienced sexism and racism, but as an old woman, ageism compounded the other two forms of prejudice.²⁴ A recent study by Catherine Harnois confirms that the experience of racial or gender bias is multiplied by age.²⁵

We are used to seeing and reading poems with the name of the poet attached to them, and we presume an alignment between poet and speaker unless specifically told otherwise. When we have a visceral reaction to a poem, it’s useful to try to pinpoint, what ticks us off or interests us. What characterizes this space? What are the cues to the speaker’s identity? Perhaps poems that create spaces we don’t want to be in, can energize and instruct us about the qualities of those experiences.

The poet Mary Ruefle notes in a 2016 interview, “thematically, aging and death become one and the same for writers, and very often you lose young readership because you’re no longer interested in the things young people are interested in.”²⁶ In fact, I’m not sure this is true for Ruefle, whose readership increased as she aged, and when she found a steady publisher in Wave Books. Poets of various ages can self-consciously create themselves in their work, within a narrow time frame, but usually, unlike Komunyakaa’s retrospective consciousness in “Slingshot,” young poets don’t present themselves as “young,” presumably because they cannot imagine any other than the state they are immersed in. It’s said that there are only two subjects for poetry, love and death. A poem written by a twenty-five-year-old about her mother’s death is different in tone from a poem written by a seventy-five-year-old about her own impending death. Once the young editors of Generation Z become old, will they, like my mother, prefer the appearance of youth to reality? More pressingly, how might all readers of poems interpret identity clues, and then interrogate our personal biases alongside those of our culture?

Natasha Sajé is the author of three books of poems, including Vivarium; a book of poetry criticism, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory; and a book of creative nonfiction, Terroir: Love, Out of Place. She teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program

Notes