[Jeff Holt]

Cally,

You just set up, perfectly, my last entry for this thread: that on one of my best friends, Josh Mehigan. I want to give a little background on how we met and what Josh has taught me as a poet, and then move into an analysis of his poem “The Abject Bed.”

13 years ago, at 26, I was sitting at a lunch table at the 3rd West Chester Poetry conference. Uncharacteristically, I was actually the center of attention for a few minutes, leading a discussion on various poets, some of them well known, others more obscure, and at some point I brought up Weldon Kees, a poet whom I had just discovered a few months before the conference. Suddenly the quiet, hunched figure who was dressed in all black, and looked to be about my age, spoke up. It became clear, within moments, that he knew far more about Weldon Kees than me or anyone else at the table. I instantly grew fascinated. After he said his piece about Kees, though, Josh said little else until the others cleared out.

When everyone else was gone, I looked at Josh, still not knowing his name, and, thinking back on how talkative I had been, offered “I hope you don’t think I’m some gregarious asshole or something.”

Josh replied amiably, “Oh, no, that’s okay. I’m just socially retarded.” We became friends on the spot, trading sheafs of poems and favorite poets, some of whom we had in common, such as Philip Larkin and Edwin Arlington Robinson, as well as others that were peculiar to one or the other of us, as was Thomas Lovell Beddoes in my case.

Josh was 27 when we met, but about to have a birthday, as he always has at West Chester. So, he was approximately a year and a half older than me in age. Reading his poetry, though, I felt that he could have been a decade older. He was, honestly, the first poet whom I ever met whom I thought, consciously “He should get a book published. Before me. He deserves it.” Many of the poems that were to appear in “The Optimist” were in that original sheaf that he gave me, in final form.

An important side note is that Josh and I both, independently, met Rhina Espaillat at that third conference in 1997. Both of us bought her first book, “Lapsing to Grace,” out of a box she had brought with her, and shared our amazement at how good she was. Little did we know how well the next 13 years would bear our judgment out…

When Tim Murphy started this thread, he had intended it to be a back and forth between Josh, Tim, and me, as he recognized a thread of “quiet despair” that ran through the work of Josh and me, as well as some of his own earlier work. I have to say, though, that while Josh and I have always shared an affinity for one another’s work, our writing styles are extremely different. The common thread between us, I think, as opposed to despair, is disillusionment. When I was enjoying many poems in “The Optimist” again in order to find a poem that well represented “quiet despair,” what I found, aside from “The Abject Bed,” were poems of disillusionment. I think, at a deep level, Josh and I share Weldon Kees’ sense in “Early Winter” that “What we have learned is not what we were told.”

I can’t possibly summarize everything that Josh has taught me over the last 13 years, but I do want to share three things that have become crucial to me as a publishing poet. The first is that Josh has been the most significant influence on me in teaching me what I think of as “close writing.” We’ve all heard of “close readings” of poems, but Josh, in his comments to me on poems, slowly taught me to weigh every single word I used in terms of whether or not it was the best word, and to be the “best word” it had to fit the best in terms of the meaning, the meter, the rhythm, the overall line, and the overall poem. This was not something likely to be accomplished in one task.

Which brings me to the second thing that Josh taught me: revise obsessively. As a writer, Josh embodies the notion that it is better to keep revising the same poem until it is as close to perfection as it can be than to write more poems. He was the first person ever to ask me “Have you ever continued revising poems after they have been published?” Since then, I have; before that, I wouldn’t have considered it.

Finally, Josh taught me, through example, what it was like to have a reader whom I could truly trust with my work. At the time I first started showing him my poems and asking for feedback, I was doing the same with several other people, and was often disappointed by the feedback, not because it was negative—it usually was a mixture of positive and negative—but because I didn’t know what to do with it. Josh was the first fellow poet my own age who read my poems and gave me feedback as if he were peering out from between the lines of the poems themselves. He truly understood them, and for that I owe him a great debt. Despite having the same fragile ego of any young writer, I never grew resentful at Josh over comments about my poems because I knew that he understood what I was trying to say. That was, and still is, invaluable.

And now, for his poem:

The Abject Bed

She couldn't do a thing, could only stare
As the white frocks carried her husband out,
Up from the abject bed at last. Nowhere
Were friends so kind, she heard herself declare
Before the costly funeral; though, throughout,
She couldn't do a thing, could only stare.

She mourned her proper year. But then despair
Was packed away so she could court self-doubt
As, up from bed at last, she found nowhere
Hired one for seeming proper or debonair,
And pay was nil for being the most devout.
She could do nothing! so, she'd sit and stare
At classifieds until her child was there,
Driving her to the store.

Years went that route,
From bed to store and back at last, nowhere
To go but round and round, no need to wear
More than a robe till life was carried out
And she could do her thing, could finally stare
Up from the abject bed, at last, nowhere.


The first thing to point out about this poem, which would be obvious if Josh had not used unconventional line breaks, is that it is a villanelle. If a reader doesn’t recognize this, the brilliant way that poet plays upon the repetends will be far more hidden, and these repetends themselves convey the quiet despair of the poem in themselves:

“She couldn’t do a thing, could only stare”

“Up from the abject bed at last. Nowhere”

Initially introduced, these lines refer to the shock of grief, which is emphasized by the end of line 3 and line 4: “Nowhere / Were friends so kind, she heard herself declare.” That she hears herself declare a platitude such as this reveals the depersonalization that is common in grief, when someone is simply going through the motions of living, and so far removed from the waves of grief inside herself that she is nearly outside of herself. And her internal paralysis is further emphasized by the repetend in line 6, in which the poet states, that, throughout the funeral, “She couldn't do a thing, could only stare.”

Lines 7 and 8 underscore the disillusionment, in the poet’s perspective, even with such a sensitive issue as grieving and the despair that accompanies it:

“She mourned her proper year. But then despair
Was packed away so she could court self-doubt”

This reader gets the sense, from the word “proper,” and from despair being “packed away,” that all of the elements of grieving, while not entirely inauthentic, were, in a sense, simply cultural practice. And when the woman is done with this, rather than entering something better, she enters into self-doubt, finding that what she has been taught was important is worthless, monetarily speaking.

Given that this is a brief analysis of the poem, I am going to skip ahead to the final three and a half lines of the poem. The lines pack the greatest punch, and, again, make a different, and unified use of the repetends, all of which to combine to make the poem, and the poem as a villanelle successful:

“no need to wear
More than a robe till life was carried out
And she could do her thing, could finally stare
Up from the abject bed, at last, nowhere.”

Now the situation is reversed from the beginning of the poem: the woman, rather than the husband, is dead, and thus her inability to do anything but stare is appropriate. And perhaps the most despairing note in the poem is the addition, immediately prior to “nowhere” in the final line, of “at last.” This two word phrase brings home the reality that this woman has been waiting for years simply to die, to be, at last, nowhere, as she simply has no place in the world anymore.


Note: This will most likely be my final entry in this thread, as I believe the thread ends tomorrow. I am happy to end it with a tribute to my long time friend Josh. If I said more about our friendship than the villanelle, it is only because 1) I got carried away with the first task, and 2) it is 11:00pm now. Consider my brief analysis an introduction to a poem that is well worth digging into further.

Cheers!
Jeff