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Banner file photo/Harrison
Gail Mazur, shown here at fellow poet Stanley Kunitz’s 95th birthday party, is always taking in life, preparing to return it in the form of concise poems. |
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Mazur mines the details of life for nuggets of universal truth
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
Like a wizard in a star-studded robe, holding a mysterious crystal globe aloft and beckoning one in for a closer look, Gail Mazur writes poems that reveal the unexpected with clarity and precise force. She will read from her latest book, “Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems” (University of Chicago Press), at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., at 8 p.m. on Saturday. Poet Keith Althaus (see sidebar this page) will also read.
Perhaps Mazur herself says it best in “Bluebonnets” when she writes, “This is what my hands do well/ isn’t it, touch things about to vanish.”
It is her ability to first of all perceive the shifting, vanishing truth and then put her hand upon it that sets her poetry apart and gives it its strength.
The new book contains excerpts, and sometimes the entirety, of work from Mazur’s earlier books “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” (2001), “The Common” (1995), “The Pose of Happiness” (1986) and “Nightfire” (1978), along with 22 new poems.
Currently, Mazur is the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College and is the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center in Cambridge. She teaches at FAWC and splits her time between Cambridge and Provincetown. Mazur is married to printmaking master Michael Mazur, a charismatic and dynamic artist who appears surprisingly infrequently in her work. When asked if he is off limits as a poetry subject she says he must be.
“I’m unsentimental and I don’t write love poems,” she says, adding that if she does there is usually some wry twist.
An exception to that is “Air Drawing” from “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” which was a National Book Award finalist.
In that poem, Mazur takes a roundabout, unsentimental way to deal with love by recalling Mike’s brush with death. In the poem, the narrator is reading a mystery book and watching her husband sleep.
“I watch his right hand float/ in our bedroom’s midnight,/ inscribe forms by instinct on the air,/ arterial, calligraphic/ figures I’m too literal to follow. … Is this the way it has to be —/ one of us always vigilant,/ watching over the unconscious/ other, the quick elusory/ tracings on the night’s space./ That night two years ago/ in the hospital, tubes/ in his pale right hand,/ in his thigh, I asked myself,/ Does he love me?/ and if he does,/ how could he let that steely man/ in green scrubs snake his way/ nearer to his heart/ than I’ve ever gone?”
“I tell my students they can’t use the word heart as the seat of love,” she says, and explains how she sidestepped one of her own basic rules for avoiding tired or clichéd phrases. “I love that irrational leap of jealousy because the surgeon was getting closer to the heart than I could.”
Born in Cambridge, Mazur went to Smith College in Northampton. While she was there she met Mike, who was finishing up his thesis with a portfolio of woodcuts. They met in February and married in December when she was still a senior. Since then life has taken them to other locales but only briefly. The majority of her life has been lived in New England, first in New Haven after college and then in Providence before circling back to Cambridge and adding the Cape to her loop.
Mazur came to poetry late, at 28 and didn’t publish her first book until she was 40. Her work comes to her usually as a line or two which then leads to some unseen destination.
“That’s the happiest time for me, when I have a note jotting a line about a poem to take to the cold computer,” she says. “I have to move into the poetry. Mike gets up every day dying to go to the studio. I have to climb a mountain of dread to get to the desk. When you finish a piece of work, you are elated. Then, you wake up the next day and realize that you have only begun the thing you thought was done.”
She writes and rewrites, sometimes making small, tight revisions and sometimes wholesale changes. She says she tells her students that “you must kill your darlings” in order to get the poem you really are seeking.
One thing for sure — she says she is always surprised by where a poem goes.
“Robert Frost wrote that if there are no tears for the writer there are no tears for the reader. I’d say, if there’s no surprise for the writer there’s none for the reader.”
“I usually start with a line or phrase, not a concept,” she says. “Each line has its own sound and the poem starts to be propelled from that. … I’m excited to go where I don’t know how to go, to open out and let myself be taken there. Usually, I’m as surprised as the reader.”
And, indeed, her work offers abundant surprise and deep emotional resonance. She fills her lines with an acute sense of noticing, and that noticing sets the reader up like an actor moving to stand on a mark on stage before delivering the next line.
In “Not Crying” she writes, “Whatever the intention,/ a poem about grief is not grief./ … This is paper,/ ink, not a heart breaking/ — nor a healing, either./ Something I make,/ so when the day is over/ there’s something here.”
Her words add up to much more than just “something here,” and she often uses a memory to segue off. In “At the Ear, Nose and Throat Clinic,” a mundane trip to the doctor and a chance meeting with another patient in the waiting room veers off to a remembered childhood trip to a town down the road, where the shopkeepers won’t recognize her or her friends, for the express purpose of shoplifting.
She also writes poems graced with humor. In “Evening” she writes of her mother, losing ground to old age, finding a robin’s egg and taking it inside. Worried, the daughter (Mazur) asks if she’s keeping the egg warm only to have the mother reply, “Gail, I don’t want/ a bird, I want a blue egg.”
Going through each poem, the reader feels suddenly caught inside a shimmering bubble with the kernel of truth that lives there.
She succeeds in capturing the kind of fleeting thoughts that follow in the wake of emotion, thoughts that trail at a safe distance and can be approached and touched, thoughts that have the ability to deliver a thin, well-aimed arrow into the heart.
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Mar 2nd, 2006