Traverse City Record-Eagle

Fleda Brown: On Poetry

LIVING WHERE THEY RAISED ME

Delaware is ripe with cancer --
its shallow fields and factories without run-off,
but we don't speak of it, the hometowners,
because we aren't going anywhere.
From here, Ohio sounds exotic.
But we wonder how it will settle in,
where the curdled cells will take root.
In school, I was impressed
by the filmstrips of the woman born armless,
who could do everything with her feet --
trim her son's bangs, swat flies,
stir cake batter with her rump on the counter,
one leg around the bowl,
a wooden spoon hooked in her toes.
A nervous child, I prepared,
practiced the barefoot art
of turning pages, scrawling my name.
But my arms never fell off.
In fact, they are still here,
my feet still holding ground,
my pink organs turning this into that,
and Delaware, surrounded by the rumor
of mountains, is still flat,
its back unbroken, refusing to attempt
that sort of useless resurrection.
It's easy to blame the land,
to think if we lived somewhere else --
Hackensack or Damascus --
believing would be so easy.

-- Julianna Baggott from "This Country of Mothers" (2001), Southern Illinois University Press, by permission of the author

Related Photos

  • Fleda Brown

    CSS8108.jpg
October 3, 2010

On Poetry: All places sacred to someone

By FLEDA BROWN Local Columnist

Julianna Baggott's a lot younger than I am, but we've been friends for years, since we both lived in Newark, Del., before I retired from the University of Delaware and she finally went to teach at Florida State University. We used to get together and work on poems, though by that time, Julianna was deep into writing her first novel. She's always been most interested in narrative and in the strangeness of life. You can see how the story of the armless woman kind of takes over the speaker's imagination in this poem.

Julianna grew up in Newark; I didn't. She had a deep, personal connection to that particular land that I could never muster in myself, despite the fact that I was the state's poet laureate for a number of years. I'm sure she carries that soil, those trees, those streets, with her now in her thoughts. This is the way it is with the place we grew up, whether it's smelly, urban, bleak or gorgeous. If we stay there, we make do with it like the woman with no arms made do. It becomes our unquestioned life.

The last line of this poem — I've thought about it a while — how it takes that turn toward the religious. It's easy to think we'd believe if we'd had the experience of Paul on the road to Damascus. But we haven't. So we have to believe without it.

The poem doesn't ask that we read it as a religious tract, though. It asks that we consider how place forms us and doesn't form us. It asks us to consider what we believe about the place where we live.

Didn't we, nearly all of us, think when we were younger — "If I only lived in [fill in the blank], my life would be better, more exciting, more full of opportunities"? "It's easy to blame the land," as Julianna says in her poem. I grew up in Arkansas, and I couldn't wait to get out. But when I moved to the East Coast, I found myself still warmed by the good soil of Arkansas, still writing about it.

Traverse City — there's another story. Those of us who grew up swimming in the bay or coming regularly to a cottage on a lake may have trouble identifying with the adjustment to the less-than-perfect of Julianna's vision. For those of us with privilege — we who've been able to come here in the summers and play, we who've retired here — it's pretty perfect. Easy to feel smug. It's good to remind ourselves that all places, no matter what they're like, are sacred and beautiful to someone.

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.

Text Only