Molly Fisk makes poems of the things people would rather
die than tell you. Reading her poems is often like starting down a path in
May only to find yourself surrounded by December disclosures. Perhaps enclosures
is the better word, because her poems close around you. You're busy savoring
her observations of her surroundings until that moment when they've dropped
away and you're standing in that holy of holies, the mysterium of a fellow
being's life. Not that these are confessional poems — not in the manner
of Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Lowell — but rather that Fisk has brought
you to the realization that everything is a facet of the same jewel. The priests
of biblical Israel used to enter the inner sanctum of the temple in Jerusalem
bound by a cord anchored in the world outside so that they wouldn't fall into
the abyss of the unknowable. This may explain why confessional poets frighten
us. We've all seen enough of that abyss to know it's not where we can bear
to go, but Molly Fisk writes poems that reassure us that a certain fragrance,
beauty and light mark the trail. We can travel to her most dread experiences
— incest inflicted on her by her father and grandfather — and come
back to where we began with gifts in hand, not just taint that we're in a
panic to scrub off. And so in this sense her poems — at least those in
her book, Listening to Winter (HeydayBooks.com)
— are vessels in which we have performed ablutions preparatory to walking
on. We have bathed in light.
The way a poet comes to poetry, that first impulse, can tell us a great deal
about her poetry. If the misery and bafflement of adolescence has given rise
to a poet's first utterance, we can usually track her journey into adulthood,
which may come later than one might think. The adult brain doesn't really
mature until our twenties. Molly Fisk came to the writing of poetry at age
35. She had already been a businesswoman in Boston, a banker in Chicago. She
was writing analyses of the Canadian timber industry for a bank before she
wrote a line of poetry. She had a wealth of experience to bring to bear on
her first lines of poetry. She had something to say. She wasn't trying to
grope her way into adulthood, however much poetry is a useful searchlight.
She was used to getting across her ideas as if her livelihood depended on
it, because it did, so she didn't romance obscurantism as so many young poets
do, usually because they don't want to be caught dead saying what they mean
or meaning what they say. And that should be no indictment of them, because
so many of us, like Molly Fisk, enter adulthood toting a dreadful sack of
secrets, sometimes not even knowing what's in the sack.
Poets know a great deal about recovered memory. While the psychiatric and
legal communities argue about it, poets know it's part of their stock in trade.
What is more important to them than questions of its validity is the way memories
pour back into our consciousness. Fisk had worked for a year with a psychotherapist
in high school, and then another year in college, and then again four years
later. But none of this hard introspection triggered the memories that imbue
her poems with authority. Her family's terrible betrayal of her flooded back
into her adult head only after spending six years in Al-Anon, the organization
for the families and friends of alcoholics, and returning to childhood smells,
sounds and sights. If you haven't experienced this theft of innocence you
can't imagine the lengths to which a victim will go to cover it up, to become
a co-conspirator with the perpetrators.
Readers who have studied James Joyce will remember that books have been written
about his uses of olfactory sensation. Most of us rummaging through old attics
and barns have encountered the odors of ghosts welcome and unwelcome. It's
one thing to find a ghost — it's another thing to entertain one. This
is how she describes her first encounter with the ghosts of her tortured past:
I had my first memories in late November 1990, just after Thanksgiving. A
conversation at the dinner table with my family members is what I think opened
the door: one of my in-laws who didn't know us well was asking what our dad
was like, and we were all telling stories, and she asked if he had been violent.
I said, not really, he'd get mad and yell about every six months, and then
there was the time on Martha's Vineyard when he kicked me down the back stairs
of the place we were renting. She wanted to know the story, so I told it,
and then my siblings (all younger than me), and my mother looked at me strangely,
and said that I had left the part out about him following me down the stairs
and kicking me around in the back yard. (I was 12 at this time.) I had no
memory of that, and the idea that they would know something and I wouldn't,
when it had been about me, really shocked me. I asked my mother why she hadn't
done anything — I knew that she and my aunt and uncle were there —
and she said "You know what he was like, no one could stop him." I'd never
heard about repressed memories at this time but started to have flashbacks
the next week. I think understanding from my mom's statement how little willing/able
she was to protect me also had a profound effect.
Fisk was able, when she turned to poetry, to confront these memories with
a dispassion not usually available to us when we're younger. She brings dispassion
and a mature delicacy to bear on her specters. She doesn't overstay her time
as a poet or overstate her case, and for that reason her readers probably
won't ask themselves if they can trust her, because they're usually much too
far down the path from which she has beckoned them to stop or turn back. They're
just outside her enclosures of realization and they've already begun to notice
the unusual light. To write a poem of this order is a notable achievement,
all the more so because the poet usually doesn't proceed from a donnée but
rather apprehends her poem whole or almost whole. She isn't so much building
an edifice for you to admire as she is engulfing you. You can throw a lot
of words at an attempt to describe a poet's mind and in the end you'll just
say more about your reading of the poet than anything else, so when Molly
Fisk says "The Dry Tortugas," the last poem in Listening
to Winter, came to her whole it says more about her psyche and prosody
than any critic could. We want to think that this is how a poem should sound,
as if it arrived whole, but most us believe poems are built brick by brick,
line by line, with an occasional stroke of inspiration. And if you won't take
her word for it, just read the poem; it's like a nickel-brick façade, you
can't find the mortar. She writes the kind of poems you're moved to run your
fingers over. You think there's been a conspiracy with the typographer to
conceal the interstices. She sometimes writes a poem on a bank deposit envelope,
pulling her car over to a shoulder to write.
Fisk has a hunch poetry plays a sub rosa role in our lives rather like our
fantasies: we don't own up to them, but they're part of the governance of
our being. This means that on the one hand poetry is never going to make a
dent in the publishing industry's marketing budget, but on the other hand
poetry slams and performance poetry in general are wildly popular, to say
nothing of the fact that rap and all manner of lyrics are poetry. So when
we call it poetry and wrap it up like a book, it's not so popular, but when
we call it by other names it has a huge vogue. Nothing unusual about that.
Whenever a genre wears its own uniform it's unlikely to be as successful as
when it wears mufti.
When D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov wrote their notorious
books about rampant desire the ensuing falderal purported to be about taboo.
The more the idea was talked about, the more people wanted to read Lady Chatterley's
Lover or Tropic of Cancer or Lolita, but real taboo is hidden deeper, so deep
that the society that titillated itself about those books is far less inclined
to talk about two of the world's dirtiest little secrets, that child abuse
and alcoholism are pervasive and account for much of the destructive behavior
in the world. We witness prime ministers, presidents, generalissimos and clerics
acting like school-yard bullies because alcoholism or childhood abuse or both
have locked them up in the prisons of their adolescence. But so pervasive
is human experience of these dread diseases that we would rather distract
ourselves with celebrity worship and shallow controversies about homosexuality
and other red herrings of the day.
So how then did Molly Fisk, knowing perfectly well that when the issue of
child abuse is raised we tend to behave as if the person who raises it smells
bad, decide to address it in her poetry? She started where we all would have
to start and where some of us, perhaps even most of us, remain stuck-the feeling
that something is wrong. It's a bit like the feeling that someone is watching
you but when you turn around no one is there. Sometimes we try to deal with
it, and that's usually when some Pollyanna says, Everybody feels a little
blue now and then, or, Into each life a little rain must fall, or, You just
have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and soldier on. People who say
such things are not to be trusted. They have an agenda-probably to keep the
lid on their own demons.
But how did sensing that something was wrong feel? Was it a kind of emptiness,
a blackness, a panic? Fisk describes it this way:
It wasn't any of those feelings-not panic, or fear or blackness — I just
felt stymied and couldn't figure out why someone as nice as I was, as smart,
as clear-headed, wouldn't be able to keep a relationship going or figure out
what kind of work to do. It was a certain amount of naïveté, perhaps, as I
saw everyone around me (what I thought was everyone, any way) settling down
and having these lives that I couldn't seem to build for myself. I did lots
of different jobs, went from one boyfriend to another, and was always overtaken
by restlessness and the feeling that something I couldn't identify was wrong.
When you've repressed memories, you are carrying a burden, but it really doesn't
feel like one, because it's so buried. Your behavior can show it — not
being able to settle down — but I was actually pretty OK in college —
I did a lot of work, maybe it's partly that I had been a good student all
my life and schoolwork was my refuge already, so having more of it in college
wasn't a bad thing, it was what I was used to. I also rowed in college, and
that took a lot of time and physical energy, so it distracted me from thinking
about my restlessness.
How did she make it through Radcliffe, a famously demanding school, carrying
such a psychic burden? She says she competed in rowing and buried herself
in her studies. The feeling that something was wrong would have to wait for
a catalyst. That was to be Mary Oliver, whose book of poems, American
Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. In Oliver she saw a way
at first to talk to herself about what she had suffered and then to sing about
it. Child abuse and the abuse of women was receiving long-due attention in
the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Fisk edited The Healing Woman in the San Francisco
Bay area for about five years. She connected with it by submitting a few poems.
But by the late 1990s cliché drew its pall over the subjects. Once she had
read Oliver's work she decided on more psychotherapy. She was in her early
thirties when she felt she could address her childhood traumas in poems. Her
father had died when she was twenty-nine. Her mother died six years ago, having
briefly acknowledged the incest she had failed to protect her daughter from,
but then recanting.
While it was Mary Oliver who revealed to her the role of poetry in plumbing
fearful depths, the poet Dorianne Laux actually taught her the craft. For
four years in in the riverfront town of Petaluma, California, Fisk studied
poetry in Laux's living room. Laux now teaches at the University of Oregon
in Eugene. Today Molly Fisk (MollyFisk.com)
lives in Nevada City in the California gold country. She wasn't aware when
she moved there that Gary Snyder, one of America's most widely read poets,
lives there. They have since become friends. She teaches poetry, like her
mentor, in her living room, and at the University of California at Davis,
and at PoetryBootCamp.com.
In the last three years some 450 people from all over the world have joined
her online at The Poetry Boot Camp to study the craft. They write one poem
a day for six days, corresponding with their teacher about each poem. There's
surprising intimacy in the method. If it's true we wouldn't write down many
of the things we say, it's also true that on the world wide web we often write
down the things we wouldn't say.
Most of Fisk's living room students are over 40. Her oldest student is 88,
a member of her cancer survivor writing class at a local hospital. Survivorship
is a leitmotif for Fisk. She knows the world is peopled with survivors and
that the headlines that inflame us are often rooted in the abuses we have
survived. But are we survivors merely because we're still alive or are we
survivors only when we have consciously come to terms with the root causes
of dysfunction? And when are we dysfunctional? When we can no longer hold
down a job, whether it's on a loading dock or in the White House? Or when
we accept that the dark abuses we suffered stood in the way of growing up
and held us captive in the darkest corners of our childhood-and that we are
just bluffing our way through our lives?
You may not find answers in Molly Fisk's poems, but you will certainly find
your way to the right questions, and you will find it a blessing that it's
such a lyrical way.