The Best American Poetry

Grace Kelly: Born to Be Aphrodite [by Stephanie Brown]

              Born on this day in 1929, Grace Patricia Kelly, iconic American star and Princess of Monaco, remains the ne plus ultra of the beautiful woman, exuding an effortless femininity, grace, charm, and self-confidence.  With her regal mien, she became a princess in real life by marrying Prince Rainer of the Principality of Monaco in 1956.  Her stuff-of-fantasy royal wedding foreshadowed Diana Spencer’s thirty years later.

             She exited Hollywood sans scandal, married well, and seemed to make no backward glances to that career or toward her ambitious lower-upper class Irish-Norwegian-American Catholic family from Philadelphia. She devoted herself to her life in Monaco as princess, mother of three children, charity maven, and fixture in the pages of Paris Match, until her violent death in an automobile accident at age 52. 

Princess Grace left Hollywood on a high note, getting out before she had a chance to see her career falter, avoiding the clichés of grim determination seen in steely stars like Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, the boring domesticity of other fifties stars such as June Allyson, or the tragic fate of a love goddess like Marilyn Monroe.  While Kelly won an Oscar for her portrayal as the wife in The Country Girl in 1954 (a controversial choice as she was up against Judy Garland for A Star is Born), her star rose higher in retrospect in tandem with Alfred Hitchcock’s.  She appeared in three of his films: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief in 1955. 

Kelly ispresumed to have been Hitch's favorite actress, the archetypal “cool blonde” of his obsession. Donald Spotto (The Dark Side of Genius) reads Vertigo as a key to both Hitchcock’s personality and his obsession with Kelly; the actresses that he employed after her, such as Kim Novak in Vertigo, were rebound-romances for Hitchcock — he replaced her with lookalikes in an attempt to replace his beloved.

Hitchcock’s genius was to reveal the shadows in the iconic images of Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Grace Kelly. (She and Grant are a match of amoral schemers in To Catch a Thief.)  Often noted is his reveal of Grace Kelly’s sexuality from under the surface of her cool, proper, glamorous, and even slightly forbidding exterior in both Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.  Yet, as noted in many Hollywood tell-all books (such as Oleg Cassini’s), Kelly was noted for being a very sexual woman, reportedly having affairs with William Holden, Oleg Cassini, Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, and others. 

"The Alcoholic and the Ball and Chain" [by Stephanie Brown]

The Alcoholic and the Ball and Chain

He takes her on a date — a “date,” a “surprise!” —
But nothing’s planned.
It’s just another requirement, like passing a written exam.

Another night with the wife.
He doesn’t even know what to write
So there’s no card. An unwrapped box — here — this’s for you.

What she wanted.

Did she get what she wanted?
This is the way she looks at life — so he calls her a child
When they fight.
He’s putting in his time with her —
Before the bottle of beer (her disapproval, her smirk)
And the bong hit (out of work).

-- Stephanie Brown

From Domestic Interior by Stephanie Brown (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). The poem originally appeared in American Poetry Review.

 

"A Dear Devoted Husband" [by Stephanie Brown]

A Dear Devoted Husband

Ulysses S. Grant was a handsome man — wow — I love how
The men in those old uniforms cocked their hips the clothes
Looked like they got dirty and Ulysses is leaning
His hip to the right, kind of messy
Kind of like those sexy cowboys with a hand on a rifle
And a hip cocked in the same direction, yes, indeed, they were firmly
Planted in their hips; they were
A little greasy but it’s faded out in the black-and-white reproduction
And you can’t smell what it must have smelled like, not like
Today the way the world tries to smell like 18th century France
Though that was just a cover-up really for bad odors after
Too much gray-haired-we-are-all-the-same-age palace rutting;
I’ve looked up this photo because for a good month you have been reading
Grant’s Memoirs and reading me things from the volume though
That is a habit of yours I don’t like at all I don’t like
When you read me things out loud: you make me stop what I’m doing!
But you had to interrupt and tell me how you found out that Ulysses’
Pet name for Julia, his wife, was, “Pupie”
Which may sound something like the name we gave each other — “Poopie”
           is how
I spell it on e-mails or how I imagine it spelled when I say it out loud
And like me, Julia had strabismus in her right eye.
Okay, so, even though Grant is sexy and saved a nation, you are more sexy
Than that: your forearms especially are nice, and you will never get
So portly that no one remembers how gorgeous you were once;
You will never be president, but that’s all right too.
And when you read me things out loud, I sometimes listen, I do.

-- Stephanie Brown

"The Caretaker" [by Stephanie Brown]

The Caretaker

Hatred is what a kid knows.
There is no understanding of how the life
Created the monster, who thwacks
Her bottom, each day;
Who ridicules the girl
And her pathetic attempts at a bathing suit.
Who sighs, shakes head, purses mouth, pissed, opens purse.
And then,
When the girl makes her very rational case, brave little attorney,
This makes the monster unleash
A new kind of articulate and sneer for which
The girl is not prepared. The girl
Can’t win against a slap or against the words:
Tears are pathetic excuses, there is no excuse, she has tried
Too hard and the girl is impossible and
Too sensitive to boot, oh there are so many illustrative
And air-tight examples! This
Is not how the monster wants to spend her life, either,
Taking care of a monster!

-- Stephanie Brown

"Manipulating the Husband" [by Stephanie Brown]

Manipulating the Husband

The husband behaved badly.
I am the bringer of shame, I am cross.
Yes, he will toss in the sheets while I sleep, and snore, soundly.
Oh yes.
I will not forgive easily, but I
Am incredibly polite.

Now things get difficult.
The husband’s guilt, welling up behind the dyke
which the little Dutch boy is holding behind the wall
with one finger,

Will burst. You’ll see.
I am the keeper of many things, including
Secret crushes on Halle Berry and the teenage girl
across the street;

I will cook a dinner even though I work
Much too much to support this family; I will

Make it taste like courtship again and tonight,
In the sheets, I make sure he wins.

-- Stephanie Brown

Real and Imaginary Husbands [by Stephanie Brown]

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.

A Week of Poems by Stephanie Brown

Each morning this week we will be posting new poems by Stephanie Brown, whose new book, Domestic Interior, was published this fall in the Pitt Poetry Series edited by Ed Ochester. Friday's poem is from that new book, which you can order here.

-- DL

You Get Comfortable and Relax

Yesterday at work,
Pam said, I think it’s like slipping off really tight clothes, you get
comfortable and relax; there are all these
things to do. I said,
I think there’s real estate. No, I said,
I always imagined my Dad went first so he could find
A nice place for my mom. That’s the way he is;
This is a joke but not, you understand, and made her laugh.

She said, I would like to be wearing a great looking Armani coat
And lie down and choose to die
Like Indians. You know, “good day to die?”

I said, I think that’s what they said before battle, not suicide.
I might not be right about that but I know what you mean.
I said, But you can’t do that. What if

It really is a sin to commit suicide? I said, All those
Near-death people who tried, they came back
To report the mistake, the grave mistake, I emphasized,
Trying to make it funny again. I love that we have
Conversations like this! she said. Me too,
And then we turned our backs to each other, back
To the computer screen, back to work. 

-- Stephanie Brown