The Calling: My Path to Poetry
At age eighty, I am publishing my first volume of poems. Winter Bride pays tribute to my mother, who was afflicted with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. She was forty-six, I was five years old. My writing life began at her bedside when we collaborated on my first school composition. The path to Winter Bride, like the path to my academic career in medieval literature, was littered with choices conscious and unconscious, obstacles, coincidences, opportunities, and luck.
My parents, educated in one-room schools in rural Canada, were not book people. My father read his newspaper, my mother, her prayer book. In our home a hand-me-down set of mysterious volumes, intended only for display, filled one small bookcase. My elementary school had no literary curriculum, such as memorizing poems, that I can recall.
Yet this early schooling did offer two experiences that I believe created in me a hunger for lyric beauty. I was mesmerized by the basic elements of the Palmer Method for writing cursive. We practiced the tilted oval and slanted line over and over before we advanced to making letters. An aesthetic experience akin, perhaps, to Japanese calligraphy. My second love was sentence diagramming: arranging the words on a grid that revealed their functions. This exercise developed in me a sensitivity to what poet Ellen Bryant Voight, in Poetry and Syntax, calls “the rhythm of thought.”
The curriculum of my small college seemed at first a feast: Chaucer, Shakespeare’s plays, Greek tragedy, a course in “World Literature.” But there were also holes—no course on poetry—and quirks—a novel course featuring works by Catholic authors only. More subtly, over time I sensed that something was missing from the reading experience. My teachers’ commentaries seemed to float, untethered, above the texts.
My own limitations must be acknowledged. Facts, logic, analysis: these were my enthusiasms. Outside my classes, I read politics, sociology, history. My aesthetic and affective sensibilities were comparatively undeveloped. Happily, over time, literature and teaching together would help me attain what John Stuart Mill brilliantly defined as “thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty.”
At the University of Rochester my graduate professors—in Jacobean tragedy, neoclassicism, American transcendentalism—challenged me with their learned intimacy with texts. My choice of medieval literature as my special field was far from inevitable. I attribute it to the appeal of Chaucer’s humane vision and the inspiring teaching of Robert Hinman, and later, of Russell Peck, who directed my thesis. Their teaching would provide models for my own.
In my classroom I strove to combine close attention to artistry with panoramic views. In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, re-imagine the gruesome images in Mars’ temple as our daily news feed. Does Chaucer succeed in finding consolation not just for one knight’s tragedy but for what poet Adam Zagajewski has called “the mutilated world”? Sir Gawain and the Green Knight deploys brilliant language and intricate structural patterns to present us with a promised “wonder.” What is this marvel? Surely not just a green man who survives beheading. Perhaps it is the spectacle of history as an inextricable knot of high ideals and unavoidable evils.
In choosing medieval literature, I had, almost thoughtlessly, made a commitment to poetry. Before Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century prose Morte D’Arthur, and before new attention to prose works by women, much of the literary canon, though dominated by narrative, was composed in verse: the long alliterative line inherited from Old English or the tetrameter imported from French or the iambic pentameter introduced by Chaucer. In a course I taught on early British literature, the sonnets of Shakespeare and John Donne whetted my appetite for more lyric poetry.
In the early 1990’s, without realizing it, I started down the path to composing poetry of my own by taking drawing classes. One Sunday afternoon in December, 1993, I strolled the galleries of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts sketching animal sculptures. The best of the batch was a Greek ram’s head, fourth century BCE, drawn in black pen. Later, framed and hanging in my study, it stared at me out of its almond eyes. “The ram’s head is calling me,” I would say.
That same winter I drafted a poem about bare trees making “inky black assertions / against the advancing white-out.” A pen in my hand—I wanted to draw, I wanted to compose. I began to read modern poetry in an unsystematic fashion. The musicality and restrained passion of Louise Bogan were my first find: “Notes on the tuned frame of strings / Plucked or silenced under the hand / Whimper lightly to the ear.” Soon after came Richard Wilbur’s baroque meditations: “And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul / Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple.”
Encounters with free verse complicated further my understanding of line, which, more than image, dominates my fascination with poetry. Consider this example from Whitman, the first great practitioner: “I loafe and invite my soul,/ I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” The brevity of the first line, the extension of the second: they contribute to the meaning. “Loafe” is annotated by “lean” and “at my ease” and expanded by the image of grass; it is also enacted, so to speak, by the length of the second line. And since non-metrical, unrhymed lines often cannot be distinguished in oral performance, their visual appearance—marks on the page—is critical. The Palmer Method and sentence diagramming mated at last.
I retired from teaching at sixty-four. I believed that elders should make room for the young, and the field of medieval studies was moving in new directions. Years of program administration with my campus’s Honors Program made it difficult for me to meet my own standard of scholarly engagement. Yet I had once thought that Chaucer would be a life-long commitment. If I did not carry on to the end—and despite my published books and essays—had I ever really been a Chaucerian?
Still, my new love was clamoring for attention. I wanted to make poems. I had heard the warnings: ten thousand hours of practice to master an art; seven hundred bad poems to produce one or two good ones. How much time did I have left? Luckily, I found an inspiring companion: For the Love of It, a memoir by Wayne Booth, literary critic and amateur cellist. I wanted to meet his high standard for the amateur—persistent hard work in the knowledge of likely, if not certain, failure.
The comradeship of other poets has been crucial. In workshops the transition from instructor to student was smoothed by the delights of learning without the responsibilities of teaching—though my new colleagues may have detected flashes of the professor. The mutual critiques of our poetic drafts were at first difficult, since I was unused to public discussion of my work-in-progress. Now I value that practice highly, as I do our shared reading of accomplished poets. They are our oxygen, offering models of what poetry can be.
The major impetus for writing about my mother was a still painful sense of absence. “In front of a mirror / Mother and my teenage self. / Only one of us appears in the glass.” And yet she remains viscerally with me in everyday activities. “Morning coffee. / I seem to lift the cup / to lips not my own.” In a poem entitled “A Love So Physical,” I address my prolonged difficulty mourning the death of this absent/present woman. For me the solution came when I found words for my experience of caregiving. She became a “woman-child,” I was her “child-mother.”
Caregiving, especially in the case of a long-term degenerative disease, is a role not wholly encompassed by pre-existing relationships: spouse, daughter, friend. And this new role, to some extent unique to each case, is not always understood by the caregiver or by those around her. I hope my poems will speak to families contending today with similar challenges.
The topic of Winter Bride came to the attention of poet Fred Marchant in a workshop where Fred expanded my perspectives on illness and poetry. Subsequently, in what was for me a deeply gratifying learning experience, Fred accompanied me through several drafts with skill, tact, and wisdom.
As I entered retirement, I composed a last essay on medieval literature, exploring in a work by Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower the influence of Ecclesiastes 1.11: “Cast thy bread upon the waters and it will surely return to thee.” This biblical passage provoked meditation on my decision. I saw that I need not believe in a guaranteed “return,” however interpreted. It was the “casting,”—risky, irreversible, exciting—that would finally answer the call of the ram.
Monica McAlpine was the first in her family to go to college. She took her BA from Nazareth College and her PhD in English from the University of Rochester. Over a thirty-six-year career at University of Massachusetts Boston, she taught many first-generation students like herself. Specializing in medieval literature, she published two books on Chaucer (with Cornell University Press and University of Toronto Press), and several articles. Her study of Chaucer’s Pardoner, in PMLA, 1980, has been reprinted several times. Winter Bride (Main Street Rag Press, 2021) is her first volume of poems. Other poems of hers have appeared in Ibbetson Street, Leon, Poetry Quarterly, The Aurorean, and Wilderness House Literary Review.