What Persists by Kitchen Judith; Corey Stephen;

Author:Kitchen, Judith; Corey, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2016-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Interlude

On Madeline DeFrees’ Blue Dusk: New and

Selected Poems; Linda Gregerson’s Waterborne;

Li-Young Lee’s Book of My Nights; Philip Schultz’s

The Holy Worm of Praise; and Natasha Trethewey’s

Bellocq’s Ophelia.

LOOKING AT BENJAMIN was like seeing my own sons all over again. A physical memory swept over me: the long nights, the worry, the overwhelming sense of responsibility. But this was different. I found myself doing what grandparents have done from time immemorial; I reassured, I reminisced, I recalled how quickly things change. Benjamin’s parents can’t imagine, now, that he will ever sleep through the night. They can’t imagine he will drive off in the car—alone. I have a different perspective now, so I don’t mind sitting for an hour, holding a sleeping child, listening to the little sounds he makes, noting his tiny fingernails, the way his downy hair stands straight up, feeling him shift into deeper sleep, his mouth twitching with whatever dream newborns have. I remember, though, when I coveted that hour, wanted that hour for myself. My life had been usurped, and I wanted it back.

Why don’t I feel that way today? If anything, I am even busier than I was back then. And maybe that’s the reason. How could I be too busy to hold Benjamin as he squirms and begins to cry? I can laugh at his howl. It will stop. It’s only a matter of months and we will have all forgotten. Interval, hiatus, lacuna—there’s something to be said for a distance in time that allows for simultaneous recollection and prophecy. Benjamin’s very existence alters my point of view. The world he has so recently come into captures my attention and I see things in a different light.

Interval, hiatus, lacuna. Interval hints at a space of time between events—the thirty-five years (to the day) between his father’s birth and Benjamin’s. Hiatus suggests a break in continuity, but this baby is continuity, the sense that life goes on in some predictable fashion. The hiatus, then, was in me. Lacuna implies a missing part, a gap. Lacuna is recognized after the fact. We didn’t know we missed him until he was here.

Many of today’s poets, pressured not so much by the urgency of their material as by academic structures or their publishers’ bottom-line exigencies, seem to be putting out books at the rate of approximately one every two or three years. They leave themselves little time for genuine assessment of the very project they have set themselves, following instead what often looks like the path of least resistance. So when a poet returns to the publishing scene after quite a few years between books, it’s difficult to know which word to select. Was it interval, the natural spacing of books in an on-going—and comprehensive—oeuvre? Was it hiatus, a necessary break for the poet to take stock, to assess the direction of the work, to experiment with new directions? Was it lacuna—a crisis of confidence, failure to find a publisher, what is commonly called “writer’s block”? There are several possible reasons for such an interlude, so let’s just call it interlude.

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