Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s Poetry in America (University of
Pittsburgh Press) is her third
collection of poems. It consists of forty-four poems organized, like so many
books of poetry, into three sections, with more than half of the poems cast in
invitingly readable two or three line stanzas. This collection has been a dozen years in the
making. Her last collection, Eve’s Striptease, was a quiet triumph of lyrical
and narrative poems.
With her latest book, what announces
itself to me on first read is a vein of Western Pennsylvania toughness and, related
to this toughness, a fondness for all that is no-nonsense, plain-spoken, and
expedient. The poem Garlic, for example, concludes:
Oh think of the time a person can
waste
All her life, she said, trying to
peel off
Impossible paper skins when you can
just
Strike the thing with whatever’s at
hand.
In the poem Cardio
Kickboxing in an Town of 6,000 the citizens
of the town are all punching through and toughening up—
Harder, harder! She screams, I know
you can
Hit harder than
that! She’s a third grade teacher
And mother of four. Yes! That’s
better, now
Give me your
uppercut. Swing from your legs!
Harder, harder!
Whatever you got, I can take.
The toughness even bleeds into the landscape as in this excellent
poem entitled Westmoreland
Jewel weed thrived along Stink
Crik, water rusted
in ponds of runoff and in parking
lots slag chips
were flamingo feathers. The Del
Bene brothers rode to fires
hanging off the fire truck their
bloody butcher aprons
flapping brides rode to their
wedding receptions
clinging to that truck, veils
trailing smoke tongues.
This is the world and time where—
Band members were faggots, thespians
were faggots, brains
Hid in the library during Activity
Period
Yep, Kasdorf definitely renders the
zeitgeist of the mill towns along Monongahela Valley in the mid- to late 1940s
and early 1950s, accurately. The steel
industry was king and few questioned the king because the king provided jobs. Few questioned the fact that there was
absolutely no vegetation of any sort growing in an half mile radius of the U.S.
Steel’s Zinc Works in Donora Pennsylvania. The infamous Donora smog inversion
of 1948, that forced school children, my own mother among them, to squint their
way to school wearing bandanas over their faces like bandits, that blotted out
the sun for four days, that killed twenty people and sickened thousands,
finally forced the American Steel and Wire Company and the U.S. Steel Zinc
Works to cease operations, but, rest assured, full operations resumed in the
less than 24 hours.
What separates Julia Kasdorf from
the run-of-the-mill town poets is her refusal to condemn. Even though the time
and towns were undeniably toxic, like living in a lit cigarette, finally there
is no place like home. Kasdorf treats
the landscape not with a judging, critical eye, but looks back with the almost absolving
fondness of a native:
Like all the Hawthorne they forced
us to read in the 11th
grade, was Westmoreland County wasted
on us, so young, all we could learn
was to hate it?
Perhaps part of the Western Pennsylvania
grittiness that saturates many of these poems comes from Kasdorf’s repeated use
of that apotheosis of steel—the automobile.
Fully half of the poems either involve cars overtly like the poems Doubling the Digits, 78’ Chevy, The Baby Screaming in the Backseat and The Girl in the Backseat Returns to Pittsburgh” or indirectly like
the poems Gettysburg 1996 or Gravity
Hill. In her poem English 213: Introduction to Poetry Writing, she writes
A car is not a metaphor, is a
machine made of countless metal parts
that keep us mindful of oil, coolant, a milk jug in the truck
in which to dilute it, mindful of
all the ways a day can turn. . .
Perhaps it is only right that a collection entitled Poetry in America should have the
automobile figure in so prominently, but lest I leave you with impression
Kasdorf is solely the poet of mill town blight, the Phillip Levine of the
Monongahela Valley, I hasten to highlight other aspects of the book.
As Kasdorf is an Associate
Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State, you might expect a
number of poems that deal with the classroom—teaching or memories of being
taught. There are several of these, and
the poem Elegy Against----Ten Years Later
is the best among them:
When I read the news, I imagined
him bloody
in a claw foot bathtub back home.
Surely
in poor Oklahoma the tubs are
ordinary, but
How could a plain tub hold his
body? I want
the graceful curve, white and smooth and cool
the graceful curve, white and smooth and cool
And tender against his large hard
shoulders.
The second section of the book also
features poems about motherhood. In
writing these poems, these songs of innocence, Kasdorf joins the chorus of
female poets-- Sharon Olds, Naomi Nye, and Robin Behn spring to mind—who have
written effectively of the new magic of childhood. The book also features
several fixed form poems—several deft sonnets and even a ghazal. This was a pleasant surprise. The final section of the book finds Kasdorf
returning to the familiar ground of life in the Mennonite community. Her first award winning collection, Sleeping Preacher, gave the world a
glimpse into the Amish-Mennonite community and dealt with the speaker’s
problematic cultural adjustments. This
new collection’s most powerful and memorable poem, Rachel on the Threshing Floor, returns to Mifflin County and the
poet’s own family tragedy:
All that is left of her: a long,
gray apron,
steel rimmed spectacles with one
shattered lens,
two diaries, her name Rachel embroidered
on a quilt patch, and the photograph
from 1948.
…
She was so beloved, the stable was
full and horses
had to be tied to fence posts the length
of the lane
Follow though buggy ruts and dung
piles, enter the barn
Find her body and children too
stunned to know she is gone
Kasdorf’s Poetry in
America sounds every note on the scale of tones, forms, and intensities. There are notes of toughness
and tenderness, notes of witness and experience—all the notes, to my ear, in tune.
