Carole Stone,
English professor emerita, Montclair State University, has published five chapbooks of poetry, her most recent being More Sweet, More Salt (Finishing Line Press), and a volume of poetry, Lime and Salt (Carriage House Press). Her poetry book, Traveling with the Dead, is published by Backwaters Press.
She received Fellowships to Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat, Scotland, to Chateau de Lavigny, Switzerland and the Rothermere Institute of American Studies, Oxford University, England.
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Here’s Looking at You
Orange Blossoms, Rob Roys, Bacardis, Gimlets, Sour Rye.
Down the hatch, revelers shout, raising their drinks
along with you, Father, to whom I never said goodbye.
After giving the password through a door slot, Joe sent me,
rounds of illegal liquor put your customers in the pink.
Orange Blossoms, Rob Roys, Bacardis, Gimlets, Sour Rye.
To a long life and a merry one or Here’s mud in your eye!
America’s dark heart parties as rich and poor think
along with you, Father, to whom I never said goodbye,
the good times will never end. No one told me why
you left or where you went. Your ice-cubed glass clinks.
Orange Blossoms, Rob Roys, Bacardis, Gimlets, Sour Rye.
For in my scenario you never die,
still at the bar flirting with peroxide wives in minks.
Father, to whom I never said goodbye,
I leave you in limbo, dapper in solid cream pants, regimental tie.
Here’s looking at you, a man forever linked
with Orange Blossoms, Rob Roys, Bacardis, Gimlets, Sour Rye.
Father, goodbye.
Artist’s Statement
Here’s Looking at You” is from a manuscript in progress, American Rhapsody, which addresses my parents’ deaths when I was four. Their absence has always been a motif in my poetry and it is an aesthetic challenge to reinvent them.
By shifting from the personal to the historical, I use the iconography of Prohibition, my parents’ era, to recreate my father in this poem. I want to make his loss not just personal, but historical, thus universal.
The second breakthrough is my use of form rather than free verse as a more potent vehicle to dramatize my father and his times. The villanelle’s repetition works as evocation and as farewell.
I am now more comfortable in using forms, not only the villanelle, but also sestina, ghazal and sonnet. This could be considered paradoxical since some critics believe formal verse is conservative. For me it is radical in that formal poetry is a tactic to harness and control emotion.
I have taken Edna St. Vincent Millay’s advice—“I will put Chaos into Fourteen Lines”—and tried to apply it to grief, not in the sonnet’s fourteen lines, but in the villanelle’s sixteen. I have also taken Ezra Pound’s advice to “make it new” by re-imagining my parents in their own time. “Here’s Looking at You” has taken my poetry in a more complex direction.
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