This week's poem is by the American-born poet Leah Fritz, who celebrated her 80th birthday earlier this summer. "Going, Going…", the title-poem of her most recent collection, published by Bluechrome in 2007, will be included in Whatever Sends the Music into Time: New and Selected Poems, due from Salmon Poetry next year.
Growing older, in the narrator's words, is "no catastrophe", but it's an unsettling experience that can shake the most solidly-founded identity. Fritz charts the physical effects and, particularly, the psychological shifts entailed, with wry humour and a firm technical grip. The metre is the alexandrine, traditionally the standard, 12-syllable unit of French prosody. It has a slow, slightly choppy rhythmic effect in English, "like the walk/ of one unsure of how or where she's meant to go." The stanzas are all sextains, with lines two, four and six sharing a full rhyme, and one, three and five unrhymed. Although the line is syllabic, the rhymes create a contrastingly accentual effect. Contrast is the core of this poem.
The first-person narrator is keenly aware of the tension between how she is seen and how she sees herself. Sometimes she borrows the "sharper eyes" of a perhaps judgmental, and rather less perceptive, other. She may be amused by the bafflement she causes, or resentful at being patronised. The "I" has a strong voice and presence: the "you" is more of a mystery.
A medical investigation might be suggested in the opening stanzas: there are the microscope and slide, and those weakened states implied by "your specimen" and "a victim". "You" could be a doctor, perhaps. But a more ambitious and metaphorical reading would be that the speaker is addressing society in general: "you" could be the reader of the poem, or the speaker's younger self. Either way, she feels reduced by her auditor to "the child I was", a shrinkage taken to surreal and witty extremes in imagery that goes back to the cellular beginnings of life, to a minute, trapped being "wriggling" like a spermatozoon under a microscope.
In the next stanza, the remembered child relishes the spoon that "overfeeds my avid mouth". A political critique of western values is intimated. The irony (and punishment?) is that privileged birth and "right attitudes" lead to long life and so to that inescapable "bind" of extended age.
Defamiliarisation is expressed in puns, such as "tail-end" and "tale" and the double meanings of "slippery slide" and "mind". In the third stanza, the speaker seems rather to enjoy her hearer's impatience with the way she constructs her sentences, and she demonstrates the poetic skill of pausing "in the middle" by placing, twice, the word "middle" mid-line. It's implied that subtleties like the punctuation of "a dash", depend on transcription: the reader sees two dashes, in fact. Again, the poet takes advantage of the pun: "and dash I would, my friend,// if only…". It carries her into a new setting – a crowded morning bus-ride.
In a curiously poignant exchange, one person reluctantly gives up his seat, and the other reluctantly gives up her pride. The smiling social mask hides anger, perhaps, and certainly a profoundly doubled identity. The dismissive idiom, "the likes of me", is self-mockingly appropriated, and a line-break after the definite article emphasises the dislocation ("The/ likes of me").
The next stanza borrows the famous Shakespearean metaphor of world as stage, people as players. The part the speaker has is not the one Shakespeare so shockingly describes, "sans everything". Fritz's player is from a culture where the old simply cease to be visible, and retreat to "a faint/ shadow in the backdrop". She has travelled from the awareness of being a closely observed "specimen" to "something that the artists/ tried unsuccessfully to hide…"
But she, too, is an artist. Although the alexandrine metre is claimed to be "too quaint", it represents a conscious artistic decision. Both the poet and the metre know where they're going. In fact, the poem has consistently reconstructed the self, contrasting the uncertainties of living in time and human skin with the sturdiness of form and syntax.
There has been no indulgence in blame, bitterness or self-pity. The speaker has delivered no lectures. She has simply offered an insider's un-illusioned view of age, and made it clear that the going is tough – interestingly and even amusingly tough, but tough all the same. She readily concedes that "it's not the way I'd choose". And then she delivers a bracing, almost throwaway punchline: "Odds on, I bet my life that I will get there, though." It's an understatement, with a hard truth embedded in the idiomatic word-play, a punchline more than worthy of the name.
Going, Going...
At this tail-end that might unwind a longer tale
than I would care to tell, how vividly I see,
under the microscope's unfocused lens, the child
I was and, viewed through sharper eyes, I still may be,
wriggling on the slippery slide on which I'm caught,
none the wiser in this, than that, lost century.
Born with, though not quite silver, nonetheless a spoon
to overfeed my avid mouth - that I now find
myself your specimen is no catastrophe
perhaps, but I do feel a victim, and I mind
my length of life, assiduously extended
by right attitudes, has got me in this bind.
You find yourself impatient with my sentences
which start out one way, turn around and start again
most often in the middle; then, just when you think
there's no hope of an ending, suddenly do end –
but some place in the middle, yet again. A dash
will do, as in 'I must' – and dash I would, my friend,
if only... Slowly do I rise and slowly sit,
and those who face a working day each morning sigh
when offering their hard-won seats on buses to the
likes of me. Embarrassed, I'd rather stand, but try
as I might with smiles and all five feet of solid
inner pride, it's the outer me I can't deny.
As if I am an actor made to play the part,
and nature applied the putty and the grease-paint,
I walk out on the stage, an extra in the scene,
to no applause. Indeed, I feel I am a faint
shadow in the backdrop, something that the artist
tried unsuccessfully to hide, something too quaint
for the production that the playwright had in mind.
And so is this alexandrine, a rhythm slow
yet jogging quite irregularly, like the walk
of one unsure of how or where she's meant to go.
Wherever, however, it's not the way I'd choose.
Odds on, I bet my life that I will get there, though.