The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Three): Rebecca Morgan Frank [by Angela Ball]

The Grande Dame

And I thought, clarity.
I thought mark and force,
I thought the green canopy.

I thought you, out there
pushing against the door-
knobs as if that could
make them turn, slamming
your body against walls
as if they would give in

to your body, the one giving
like the new playground material,
durable, sinking under
our feet even as it looks
like pavement. And I thought

maybe there is something
to be made of this, the ways
my own persistence plays
like a funny video on repeat–
the persistence of a pet
too innocent to know the move
still won’t work. Or like a ball

bouncing over and over again
slowing down, lowering
into a roll out into the brush,
disappearing. I was told this
is what happens. This is what will
happen to you when, but
I thought, I thought, I thought
maybe it would be different,
maybe it could be, for me.
                                         -Rebecca Morgan Frank

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four collections of poems, most recently, Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon, 2021), and her poems have appeared such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Three): Rebecca Morgan Frank

“The Grande Dame,” Rebecca Morgan Frank’s lucid and forceful poem of persistence, presents as a persona poem. Like all such poems, it magnifies a component of the poet’s self not always on display—as Browning is, in part, the tyrant of “My Last Duchess” and Pound “The River-Merchant’s Wife.” We think also of Flaubert: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” But here the theatrical bows to the subjective.

Of the poets of The New York School, John Ashbery comes to mind most, for his continual suggestion that real life, whatever that may be, drives onward mentally, the world’s fleet/garage/menagerie/Toonerville Trolley of metaphors for vehicle.

This poem’s first engine is thought—often believed to be passive. Here, it’s anything but.

     And I thought, clarity.

     I thought mark and force,

     I thought the green canopy.

These lines somehow combine sureness and doubt—as if the speaker is summoning ammunition, naming values. Then the “you” appears, as the fourth object of the forceful anaphora “I thought.”

     thought you, out there

     pushing against the door-

     knobs as if that could

     make them turn, slamming

     your body against walls

     as if they would give in

The “you” is both us, I think, and someone beloved. Love is frightening in part because its object shares the dangerous, frustrating surroundings everywhere to be seen. This is particularly scarifying for a mother envisioning her child’s stubborn contacts with the immovable.

     And I thought

     maybe there is something

     to be made of this, the ways

     my own persistence plays

     like a funny video on repeat–

     the persistence of a pet

     too innocent to know the move

     still won’t work. . .

The poem surprises by openly implicating its speaker in the persistence she describes—a persistence the repeated “I thought” has already demonstrated. We are ambushed by truth. A less complex poem would keep the speaker beyond the process that the “you” is undergoing—the speaker wised-up, positioned to advise. Instead, she has “the persistence of a pet / too innocent to know the move / still won’t work. . . .”

The poem’s last stanza darkens further, at the same time growing more beautiful:

     Or like a ball

     bouncing over and over again

     slowing down, lowering

     into a roll out into the brush,

     disappearing.

We hear the action of the ball as its persistence flattens to a “roll out.”

     I was told this

     is what happens. This is what will

     happen to you when, but

     I thought, I thought, I thought

     maybe it would be different,

     maybe it could be, for me.

The fatalism here is akin to the sun’s announcement near the close of Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” that “they” are calling him away:  “ ‘Who are they?’ / Rising he said ‘Some / day you'll know.  They're calling to you / too.’”

Like O’Hara’s poem, Rebecca Morgan Frank’s “The Grande Dame” possesses the all-too-rare quality of unbroken dream. Or a dream broken just at the end, with the words “for me” that unexpectedly twist the poem back to its speaker and her consciousness of the failure of her own persistence, a failure mirrored in each generation. Those two short syllables deliver a poignant falling off after the climactic repetition of “I thought, I thought, I thought / maybe it would be different, / maybe it could be, for me.” Imagine the poem with one less “I thought,” or without the movement from “would” to “could,” or—horrors!—without its final two words—what a lesser thing it would be. “The Grande Dame” enacts the saving grace of art. In life, our drives so often dead-end unsatisfied. This poem is a triumphant paragon of the very persistence it despairs of. The feeling of those two attributes co-existing is indeed sublime. -- Angela Ball

 

Comments

[David Schloss]

A lovely stream of consciousness argument. Thanks.