POVERTY IS NO DISGRACE

BUT IT'S NO HONOR EITHER

How do poets make a living? That’s a question that my future in-laws asked back in 1965. It’s also the question Robert Mezey’s mother is asking in his comic poem, “My Mother.” After you read it, look it over again and see what you can say about the form.

MY MOTHER

My mother writes from Trenton,
a comedian to the bone
but underneath, serious
and all heart. "Honey," she says,
"be a mensch and Mary too,
it's no good to worry, you
are doing the best you can
your Dad and everyone
thinks you turned out very well
as long as you pay your bills
nobody can say a word
you can tell them to drop dead
so save a dollar it can't
hurt—remember Frank you went
to high school with? he still lives
with his wife's mother, his wife
works while he writes his books and
did he ever sell a one
the four kids run around naked
36 and he's never had,
you'll forgive my expression
even a pot to piss in
or a window to throw it,
such a smart boy he couldn't
read the footprints on the wall
honey you think you know all
the answers you don't, please try
to put some money away
believe me it wouldn't hurt
artist shmartist life's too short
for that kind of, forgive me,
horseshit, I know what you want
better than you, all that counts
is to make a good living
and the best of everything,
as Sholem Aleichem said
he was a great writer did
you ever read his books dear,
you should make what he makes a year
anyway he said some place
Poverty is no disgrace
but it's no honor either
that's what I say,
love,
Mother"

The form isn’t as simple as it looks. To start with, you can pick out some true rhyme pairings like too and you, dear and year, but in fact virtually every pair of words has some sound connection, some slant rhyme: for instance the couplets of Trenton and bone at the start and either and mother at the end. In addition, if you count the number of syllables in each line, you’ll find that with one or two exceptions, they all have seven. So, in spite of its loose feel and grammatical gaffes, its run-on sentences, and idiosyncratic punctuation, Mezey was writing in a tight form, using rhyming couplets and a seven syllable line.

Something else to notice is that it’s a reverse letter poem, not a letter from the poet, which is pretty common, but a letter to the poet from his mother. And of course she’s the classic “Jewish mother,” a nag, yes, but as he says, one with heart. The tone mixes scolding with humor, and we’re laughing with her as much as at her. The poem rises to its climax when she alludes to Sholem Aleichem, the writer whose stories were the basis for Fiddler on the Roof, and asks, “did/you ever read his books dear,/you should make what he makes a year.” That last line with 8 syllables and a rollicking rhythm is the poem’s punch line.

*

POVERTY IS NO DISGRACE…

After graduate school, I taught for a couple of years as a visiting writer at the University of Virginia, then left academia to try my hand at fiction. I wrote two novels and found an agent who shopped them around for a while, but there were no takers. Meanwhile, Nancy taught music in junior high and then served as director of a nursery school. But when we decided to have children, it was my turn again and I applied all around the country for teaching jobs. Several colleges brought me to campus for interviews, but I hadn’t landed a job, and with Nancy pregnant and no money coming in, we were living day to day. At a low point, I visited the unemployment office in Peekskill, New York, to find out if I was eligible for assistance. But since I hadn’t earned a salary in several years, I learned that I was not, as far as the government was concerned, legitimately unemployed.

This led me to wonder what role, if any, poets play in the larger economy, the network of associations that turns work into products, products into money, and money into food and housing. In that chain, our poorly requited output pointed away from salaried labor, filling the gap with something less material which has no standing in the world of finance and business.

Only a handful of poets make their living from sales or by giving public readings. More commonly we have to find a day-job. In an earlier generation T. S. Eliot worked in a bank, hating every minute of it, while Wallace Stevens was a successful insurance executive, and William Carlos Williams earned his living as a doctor. Teaching was another solution but with such jobs now scarce, I’d recently heard of some poets who’d taken up a less savory enterprise. To pay the rent they signed on to write straight, gay, or S & M “stroke-books.” Working in tiny cubicles, they churned out a novel a week, each written to a predetermined outline, with the specified sex acts coming at set intervals—one every five or six pages. What’s more, if their product was any good, they could expect to gather a following and receive the kind of encouraging fan-mail (addressed to their punning pen-names) that most poets only dream about.

Apparently, the society I lived in valued pornography over poems—a discouraging thought—, but I wondered if that was the whole story. I recalled the bulky anthology of English and American poetry that I’d pored over during adolescence as I tried to find my bearings, hoping that my own writing might someday serve others in the same way. Back then I’d assumed that wealth and fame would follow. But in fact poems aren’t merchandise. Instead, as Lewis Hyde proposes in his book The Gift, they’re a speculative offering to the future, and unlike the chain that leads from product to cash, poets link into a more spiritual chain looking back to the writers of the past whom we value and learn from and ahead to our own future readers. Poems are like messages in bottles hurled into the sea from a cliff and we may never know when one reaches some distant shore and is taken into a reader’s heart.

BUT IT’S NO HONOR EITHER…

Not having landed a job in my first go-round, for a second year I sent out applications. My new poems were starting to attract interest from magazines, including The New Yorker, which eventually published two of them, and I took encouragement when Vassar College invited me to campus for a lunchtime interview. They weren’t looking for a creative writer, however, just checking me out as someone who lived in the area and might help with a lower-level writing section if the need arose.

Then in mid-January a junior faculty member resigned unexpectedly, and the chair of the English Department called. Would I be willing to take on his two sections? Classes started the next week. I said that would be no problem.

Elated at being employed at last, I enjoyed everything about the job—the students, my colleagues, even the forty minute commute through rural Putnam and Duchess counties. In mid-semester I joined several faculty poets, including Nancy Willard and Eamon Grennan, in a campus reading and afterwards I was taken aback when someone from the audience came up and asked: “Are you the John Morgan?” At first I assumed he must be thinking of someone else, but he explained that he’d seen my work in several magazines and in the Paul Carroll anthology, The Young American Poets. So apparently the cloak of invisibility surrounding me wasn’t as impenetrable as I’d thought.

As the semester was ending, I received a call from another school, one that I’d applied to without much forethought or expectation. It came from the head of the English Department at the University of Alaska, asking if I’d be interested in coming up to Fairbanks for a year to teach and direct the creative writing program there. With a newborn son and no assurance that my Vassar job would continue, I accepted.

*

Poems about the writer’s financial difficulties are not very common, but one of my favorites is Mary Oliver’s “The Black Walnut Tree.” Ironically, like Robert Mezey’s poem it starts with the words “My mother,” but the tone is completely different—brooding rather than comic.

THE BLACK WALNUT TREE

My mother and I debate:
we could sell
the black walnut tree
to the lumberman,
and pay off the mortgage.
Likely some storm anyway
will churn down its dark boughs,
smashing the house. We talk
slowly, two women trying
in a difficult time to be wise.
Roots in the cellar drains,
I say, and she replies
that the leaves are getting heavier
every year, and the fruit
harder to gather away.
But something brighter than money
moves in our blood—an edge
sharp and quick as a trowel
that wants us to dig and sow.
So we talk, but we don't do
anything. That night I dream
of my fathers out of Bohemia
filling the blue fields
of fresh and generous Ohio
with leaves and vines and orchards.
What my mother and I both know
is that we'd crawl with shame
in the emptiness we'd made
in our own and our fathers' backyard.
So the black walnut tree
swings through another year
of sun and leaping winds,
of leaves and bounding fruit,
and, month after month, the whip-
crack of the mortgage.

Written in occasionally rhyming free verse, this poem puts us in a particular place, rural Ohio, and in the middle of a discussion of money and a possible solution to the family’s financial problems. The conversation is reported indirectly: “Roots in the cellar drains, I say, and she replies/that the leaves are getting heavier/every year….” The poem sets the tree’s inconveniences and monetary value on one side and its historic and aesthetic value on the other. In one interesting line-break, Oliver gives us a hint of the outcome: “So we talk, but we don’t do/anything.” The significance of their ancestors’ efforts in establishing the home and perhaps planting this very tree outweighs the cash it might bring in. But the poem ends darkly, returning to their financial worries, with another notable line-break: “So the black walnut tree/swings through another year/of sun and leaping winds,/…and, month after month, the whip-/crack of the mortgage.” The word “whip-/crack” slapped over that line-break is a remarkable example of onomatopoeia and brings the poem to a dramatic close.

Both poems in this Substack offer an account of a poet’s financial struggles and speak to a problem most writers (most people, I expect) go through at some point in their lives. They aren’t explicitly political, though it’s certainly possible analyze them from a political standpoint (capitalism, sexism, environmentalism, take your pick), but that’s not why they’re so effective as poems. Rather, it’s their attention to the personal, to what’s intimate and local, that holds our attention. In Mezey’s we hear about Frank who at 36 still lives with his mother and can’t sell his books, while his wife works (yes, I’ve been there), and Oliver reports a dream of her forefathers who immigrated from Bohemia and still seem to watch over their home. In addition, and even more important, it’s the way the human voice comes through in these poems focusing on the emotions behind the financial issues and earning the readers’ admiration.