She is fearsome. And fearless. The poem draws on ancient Greek myth to explore aspects of trauma and suffering. Poet Laureate. That same year, she was named the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a position she held until She has one son. American Originality: Essays on Poetry. Sources: F. Diehl ed. Photo: Public Domain.
Download our mobile app for on-the-go access to the Jewish Virtual Library. Category » Biography. Actors and Comedians. Business Icons. There was also a sense of the unlimited power of women not yet actually affirmed in the world, but our household was, in its way, prophetic. Both my parents were born into matriarchies. The sisters were, many of them, actively political, radical for the time.
I grew up with my cousins, two girls in each family; each family, each duo of daughters, had its own special characteristics.
My mother, as the eldest daughter, tended to be lordly. Though she privately criticized us in the manner of the perfectionist ballet master, publicly she boasted, a fact unknown to me, but alienating to the cousins.
The summer I was seven and my sister was four and a half, we went to Paris. In Paris, we spent some afternoons sitting for our portraits in green square-necked dresses, but for the most part, we were at the convent school, theoretically learning French. My sister and I were being raised according to the principles of a particular class at a particular time; parents protected their children from knowledge that might trouble their light-hearted and merry childhoods.
I was never light-hearted and merry; rather, anxious and twitchy. Maybe it was thought that with enough protection I might still become light-hearted and merry, or maybe my parents were reluctant to admit that their older daughter was a very tense child. Or maybe they had, that summer, more pressing concerns. The nuns had assured my mother they would not proselytize, but obviously the nuns obeyed a higher authority than my mother. And, strictly speaking, introducing young Jewish children to Jesus was not proselytizing.
We were, one afternoon, taken to the chapel, just the two of us, with the kindly nun who spoke English since I had steadfastly refused to learn French, and my sister had followed my example. This is Jesus, the nun said, he loves little children. Now you must kneel and say a prayer. Young as we were, we had mastered two imperatives. We knew to obey the adult in charge, and we knew Jews did not bow down before statues.
So it was clear to me in that moment as it was to my sister that there was no possibility in this situation of not doing wrong. I did not bow down. But I did not obey. I judged the more serious sin to be the moral sin, not the social sin.
Decades later, when I was in my late thirties, my sister called me. For several years afterward my father had apparently been sinking perilously into depression. Finally my mother insisted he consult a psychiatrist who recommended analysis; this my father refused. He told the doctor he was going to take his family to Paris and come back whole.
School was my world. I loved school. Home was complicated, playing with other children was complicated. School was easy. The rules were clear. And my teachers loved me, as I passionately loved them. Starting in grade school. They were emissaries from the world of Blake and Shakespeare. It seemed wonderful to know so clearly what was wanted.
Obedience, in this context, was effortless, natural. I saw it as somehow collaborative, part of my dialogue with my teachers, and by extension with the great artists I hoped to follow. This was true in grade school and more intensely true in high school, especially with English teachers, and my Latin teacher. I did it all well. What I did not do well was the social world. There was one place, during the difficult period of my adolescence, where I was not ostracized. Starting when I was about thirteen, I spent most summers in music camps.
I was not a particularly gifted musician. I majored, as it was called, in drama. And though I was not a particularly gifted actress, I was a quick study; I could be counted on to know my lines. But in that summer world of driven and ambitious students, I was at ease; real friendships were made. I loved best a camp called Deerwood which collapsed when its director died, revealing immense debt on Saranac Lake, which became for me the model of all things great and true. Around us, the serene protective isolating mountains.
Woodmere was a different matter, darker and darker. I spent my afternoons in the public library, concealing the absence of a social life from my mother. My ambitions remained intense and steady. By the age of sixteen, I had finished my first book, or what I thought of as my first book, and sent it along to publishers with no timidity or sense of irony.
It ended up in a box, but lines I wrote at thirteen and fifteen showed up much later, reconstituted slightly, in poems that survived. I read constantly. Oddly, I knew nothing of what was being written in that period, or even in the period slightly earlier.
I read Keats and Dickinson, obsessively haunted by syntax. I read novels too, mainly British. I discovered Yeats. And I became, first inconspicuously, then dangerously, anorexic. In the middle of my senior year of high school, after I had applied early to, and been admitted to, the first rank college of my choice, I was taken out of high school. I had begun psychoanalysis a month or so earlier; in its slow way, ultimately it saved me from the narrower and narrower worlds I constructed for myself, from the arid brevities of my poems at that time.
Initially, of course, I was terrified. But the seven years I spent in analysis radically changed the course of my life. They made my life possible, really.
Two years with Leonie Adams, and many more than two with Stanley Kunitz, in whose class I wrote the poems that became my first book. It was also during this period, when I was nineteen or twenty, that I had my first grand mal seizure, on Fifth Avenue, opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on a beautiful October day.
I had been walking, I suppose to the subway, after an appointment with my analyst. Epilepsy was not immediately diagnosed a single seizure was not felt to be sufficient evidence ; when it was, it took some time to fix on a medication, and on the correct dose. I was fortunate in my teachers. Kunitz in particular did not condescend to his students; he seemed prepared to believe great work could be done in that classroom.
I believed the same, or I hoped the same, but his endorsement of high ambition was fortifying. Firstborn , begun when I was eighteen and finished when I was twenty-three, was rejected twenty-eight times and finally accepted by New American Library, which intended to make it the first book in its new poetry series.
Feit Diehl, Joanne, ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Morris, Daniel. Vendler, Helen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Have an update or correction?
Let us know. Episode E. Lockhart's New Jewish Superhero. Barnat, Dara. Jewish Women's Archive. Learn more. April 22, In Brief. Poet and Critic. Poetic Style.
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