Ed. note: At the editor's request Stephanie Brown has composed a prefatory note with facts and thoughts to keep in mind as you read her poems this week.
Real and Imaginary Husbands
Collage as a visual art became prominent in the early twentieth century, used as a technique by artists such as Picasso, Braque, Schwitters, and Grosz. Scraps and pieces were put together on the canvas. An artisan making a patchwork quilt sews scraps together into a rigid form and creates a beautiful whole. I’ve often thought these techniques were insights into the creative process. I think the poet uses scraps of ideas, words, thoughts, memories, and imaginary notions to create a poem.
My first book includes a poem called “Mommy is a Scary Narcissist.” This mother was a horrible person. When my real mother read it, she said simply, “That’s not me” and indeed it was not. I had pieced this character together out of mothers I observed from various parts and times of my life, from people I had known and people I had observed whom I did not know at all. I note this because these poems that the Best American Poetry blog is so generously posting this week have husbands as defining characters. These husbands are not portraits of my husband, but composite figures of husbands, men, and marriages I’ve seen. They may contain bits of things about the real husband, but in the end they are mostly about the writer’s imagination and are, I hope, a gift of insight for the reader.
Inspired by a scrap of a thought, a small thing that begat something else, scraps put together which do not really belong together. For instance, I was looking through a book of Civil War photographs at my job at the public library. Wonderful job that I have, I get to peruse books many times during the day, which often leads me to think of poems, some of which I actually write down. Looking at Civil War photos inspired the poem called “A Dear Devoted Husband” which was an amalgamation of many memories.
First it brought back a memory of helping my oldest son create a grade school triptych about the Battle of Bull Run. During the research, we came across the photo I describe in the poem, where Grant leans his hip to the right. I remembered a moment of surprise and delight I’d had, looking at a photo of the handsome young general, having only thought of him as a stout old man. Still standing there perusing the book at work, my second memory was of my husband reading one of those Library of America editions of Grant’s Memoirs several years ago. His reading of the Memoirs had actually inspired another poem, “Snobs,” which is in my second book, Domestic Interior. At a party I had watched him talk about Grant’s book to someone who was rude and dismissive of him. My husband’s intellectual acuity, and maybe the earnest and wholehearted enthusiasm with which he thinks, speaks, and lives, really bothered this person’s will-to-cool superiority. As Jon Anderson wrote, “The secret of poetry is cruelty”: yes, it is. That moment broke my heart and made me angry, and while those feelings were the basis of “Snobs,” none of the scenic details or actual characters entered into the composition of it and none of them will be found there.
Looking at the book of photographs, I returned to that memory. Why do some memories and images stay with us? Why do we return to them? How is it that it inspired two poems? How is it that someone’s work may be driven by the same things, again and again? I love that I can’t answer that; I love the mystery of that.
The mother of “Mommy is a Scary Narcissist” is alive and well in poems in my new book along with damaged husbands and wives. Unfortunately for my real mother, I have never been able to write a poem about her. In fact, it’s always clear to me and feels sad that my mother is never in my work at all. These husbands, too, are not my husband, who reads the poems and laughs at them and reads them as a reader. They are collages of many things, put together in a way that the writer likes to see them.
-- Stephanie Brown
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