WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: APRIL 24, 2024

Last month Poem-A-Day ran this wonderful prose poem by Ellen Bass that I can’t get out of my head…It reminded me of my grandmother teaching me “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” as sung by Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters. Though the song was recorded almost two decades before I was born, it remains one of my favorites.  Yay to Nanas everywhere for teaching babies Bing Crosby-duet showtunes.

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You're the Top    

Last night I get all the way to Ocean Street Extension, squinting through the windshield, wipers smearing the rain, lights of the oncoming cars half-blinding me. The baby’s in her seat in the back singing the first three words of “You’re the Top.” Not softly and sweetly the way she did when she woke in her crib, but belting it out like Ethel Merman. I don’t drive much at night anymore. And then the rain and the bad wipers. But I tell myself it’s too soon to give it up. Though the dark seems darker than I ever remember. And as I make the turn and head uphill, I can’t find the lines on the road. I start to panic. No! Yes—the lights! I flick them on and the world resolves. My god, I could have killed her. And I’ll think about that more later. But right now new galaxies are being birthed in my chest. There are no gods, but not everyone is cursed every moment. There are minutes, hours, sometimes even whole days when the earth is spinning 1.6 million miles around the sun and nothing tragic happens to you. I do not have to enter the land of everlasting sorrow. Every mistake I’ve made, every terrible decision—how I married the wrong man, hurt my child, didn’t go to Florence when she was dying—I take it all because the baby is commanding, “Sing, Nana.” And I sing, You’re the top. You’re the Coliseum, and the baby comes in right on cue.
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You can hear Ellen read the poem here: https://poets.org/poem/youre-top

And you can hear the song she references here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCfqIXiLxSE

Comments

[David Lehman]

Denise, you have great taste in poetry -- and in popular sonbg. Like you I locve "Accentuate the Positive," which Stacey and I turned into a skit in a variety show I put on at Bennington in January 1998. There's a great version by Johnny Mercer (who wrote the lyrics) with a girl chorus. It's on the soundtrack of "LA Confidential."
"You're the Top" is, it seems to me, the best of Cole Porter's list poems.
Kudos all around!

[jim c]

Ellen Bass is a good poet. I would just remind people that she was a co-founder of the "recovered memory movement" in the 1990s that destroyed numerous lives before Bass and her cohort were squelched years later. A product of ideological arrogance, the rmm was noted in the New York Times in 2022: "In 2005 a Harvard psychology professor, Richard McNally, called the recovered memory movement 'the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.'" You might want to take a look at Bass's poem "How to Apologize," in which her advice is to give the one you hurt an "oily, succulent" carp.

[Cindy Hochman]

This is a wonderful prose poem and I too love Ellen Bass. Thanks, Denise, for posting this and for all the great stuff you contribute to the blog.

[Susan Aizenberg]

I love this poem, too -- thanks, Denise!