POETRY MONDAY February 1, 2010
Irene Willis
We’ve had requests to feature more of the poems and background of our Poetry Editor, so here she is.
Irene Willis has been publishing in different genres and venues for many years – children’s books (including four co-authored with Arlene Kramer Richards), textbooks, articles and poetry. Her first published poems, in the 1970’s, appeared in Cosmopolitan, which at the time, she tells us, had a good poetry editor and featured poets like Robert Graves and Erica Jong. Later she began appearing in literary journals such as Crazyhorse, Laurel Review, Literary Review, and New York Quarterly. Since the 1990’s she has devoted herself primarily to poetry, with considerable success.
Her recent work has been published in Ploughshares, The Women’s Review of Books, Nightsun and others, as well as in anthologies such as For a Living: The Poetry of Work (University of Illinois Press) and Eating Her Wedding Dress: An Anthology of Clothing Poems (Ragged Sky Press), and her own three collections: They Tell Me You Danced (University Press of Florida); At the Fortune Café (winner, Violet Reed Haas Poetry Prize from Snake Nation Press); and Those Flames (Bay Oak Publishers, 2009).
She has been awarded grants and fellowships for her poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Berkshire/Taconic Foundation and the Millay Colony for the Arts and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
A lifelong educator with an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University and an M.F.A. from New England College, Irene Willis is currently on the adjunct faculties of American International College and Westfield State College in Massachusetts and is leading a poetry workshop at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz, New York. She lives in Gt. Barrington, Massachusetts, with her husband, Daves Rossell.
The three poems below are those she has selected to share with us now.
She also wants you to know that she will be reading in at the Green St. Café in Northampton with poet Brooks Robards on February 4 at 7:00 p.m., in case any of you happen to be in the area.
Three Poems by Irene Willis:
Of Mice and Men
What kind of world is it
when something that does
exactly what it’s supposed to do
can make you feel like this?
I thought of ipecac, castor oil
and all the other stuff my
virtuous parents foisted on me,
how I opened wide for their nostrums.
Mine was books, bringing books
to kids and kids to books,
and now I was a mom,
bringing my nostrums home.
When I found my seventh-grade son
face-down on the bed and saw
his shoulders heave, I thought
he was laughing hard, the way
he often did, humor rising in him
from the first, quick to see the joke
in a turn of phrase, a visual pun,
loving the upside-down world
of the unexpected. But when he
didn’t stop, I touched him,
turned his face toward mine
and saw it red and swollen,
eyes shut tight with tears
I hadn’t seen since he was told
the lie we tell our sons to dry them up.
I’ll never read another book again
if this is how it makes me feel
was what he said, meaning it
with all his heart broken
by Lenny, by George
by the girl in his class
who wouldn’t dance with him
after he took lessons all year,
waited months to get to that
middle-school gym,
tied a tie without help
and buttoned a blazer.
I drove him to that dance.
I gave him that book.
from At the Fortune Cafe’ (Snake Nation Press, 2005)
(first published in Karamu)
The Yellow Shirt
Every day in his house
he likes what his eye
falls on:
his blue bathrobe
worn in the seat
his slippers
with the soft suede soles
and suede tops
the brown leather chair
the dent in the ottoman
where he rests
the same heel every evening
one leg crossed
over the other, his bottom foot
digging in, the way he likes it
the remote control at his elbow
the small dog
asleep across his knees.
He likes her eyebrows
her beard
the black lashes under her brows
and her eyes, like the agates
he shot as a kid
on the hill near the high school.
He likes his wife
in her soft old blue jersey slacks
and yellow shirt
the mailman coming up to the porch
dropping letters and bills
through the slot in the door.
He likes greeting the dog
walking the dog
feeding the dog
putting the dog to bed.
He likes turning off the TV
and going upstairs to bed himself.
And his wife can see him
liking all of this
from the faint smile on his face
as he goes about his business
of liking the house, his dog
his wife, the remote control.
And she likes his liking it
and he can feel her
liking him liking it.
This is a state
that some will recognize
and call love
and that others will think
is either less or more
than they are entitled to
and so will consider divorce,
break-up, suicide, murder,
taking a lover.
Meanwhile, of course,
the man in the blue bathrobe
and his wife in the yellow shirt
go on as before. The man
carries a picture of the dog
in his wallet on trips
and sets it up on the dresser
before turning out the light.
His wife
sends the yellow shirt
to the cleaner’s
and it comes back
with broken buttons
a shoulder pad hanging by a thread
and a tag hooked to a button saying
Sorry. We tried and tried
but couldn’t remove this stain.
It’s about this time
she begins to think
something has gone out
of their marriage.
So she tells him
about how it used to be
and how it is now
and he says
Whatever happened
to that yellow shirt you used to wear?
from They Tell Me You Danced (University Press of Florida, 1995)
(first published in Laurel Review; re-published Her Easting Wedding Dress: An Anthology of Clothing Poems.
Reunion
… The thought
of no one listening anymore –
I like that least of all.
— Philip Schultz.
Old men, embracing
each other’s girth,
tears in old eyes.
Blazers freshly pressed,
old spouses at their sides.
Well-worn wives whose smiles
have outlasted distance and time
bravely set forth as I
to sit on this green lawn
before the college dorm
under a yellow tent
gamely observing
old faces across the table,
hands, freckled and veined,
reaching for mustard and relish.
Here and there a young wife,
traded up for, ill at ease
with all these grandfolk,
some lecherous, fixing
her slim young body
with rheumy stares.
Other wives, innocent
and earnest, talk of golf,
children’s careers.
Is this what I came for –
all in green with my love riding
past lakes, valleys, cows,
huddled houses, trees –
to watch a sweet old man
try for one last score?
Old Red, out from California
on a high-money ticket,
“because I wanted to see you fellas,”
buttonholing the one man here
who doesn’t want to see him
never did, but now, lean and tan
in a custom suit, listens?
Those Flames (Bay Oak Publishers, 2009).