Why We Read Poems

I’m on the couch reading the Spring 2008 Threepenny Review; Maisie’s on the floor with a whirlpool of kiddie books around her. She’s been “reading” them for almost half an hour, pretty good attention-span for a 14 month old, but starts pulling some plastic off one of the book covers. I don’t care what happens to the book—it’s a cheapie having to do with bunnies and mommies that wash dishes, that probably fell off a truck somewhere and ended up at a South Philly junk stand where Jim bought it for a dollar—but I don’t want plastic to end up in her mouth. So I get up off the couch and she jumps like a criminal caught red handed, tries to hide the plastic, as if I’m some kind of Enforcer.
And it comes to me: I am the Enforcer! The Mother!
Technically I knew that—she came out of me, after all, and I do my best to feed, clothe, bathe, play with, comfort her, etcetera along with my husband, all day every day—and generally have a quite lovely time doing it. But it shocked me to be looked at as an authority figure. And it shocked me that it shocked me.

I’ve reached 40 without ever having been a boss. Teaching doesn’t count. When I teach (usually undergraduates), obviously I’m an authority figure, since I set the class structure, requirements, and consequences for not doing what’s supposed to be done, but whether or not they do what they’re supposed to is up to them—after all, they’re adults. I don’t have to get plastic away from them, and I’m not responsible for their safety or moral development.
I did have a secretary once, when I was 23 and a medical malpractice paralegal, but I wasn’t her boss, she was the same age as me and just assigned to type things for me and the other paralegal, just as I was assigned to summarize cases, dictate standard motions, and “produce documents” which was a fancy phrase for photocopying designed to convince the client that it was reasonable to pay $75/hour for said services. (Which went to the law firm, not to me.) Other than that I would mostly dig out scary pictures of boob-jobs gone wrong which my firm was defending, because I knew my secretary took a lurid interest in them, as did I. I didn’t, thank god, have power over her. It was clear to both of us that she had more skills than I did. And who wants power over anyone but themselves?
And that’s what’s different about my life now.
I thought: Does Maisie really think I’m such a bossy person?
I thought: Right, I do have to tell her what she can and can’t do. Boundaries. Morals. Safety. Etcetera.
No plastic in the mouth.
I thought: Oh Christ.
I thought: Ok, you can do it. You’ve been doing it for more than 14 months now, haven’t you?
And I thought: What fun Maisie’s going to have, trying to get away with stuff for the next 17 years!
I thought: That might be the only thing I miss from my childhood—not being allowed to do what I wanted, and getting away with it anyway.
This might have something to do with why I’m a poet.
In writing, aren’t you always trying to see what you can get away with?
Then, after I got the plastic away from Maisie, who gave it up without a struggle and went back to “reading” Run Mouse Run and Whose Nose and Toes? I went back to reading Threepenny Review and Tony Hoagland’s terrific poem “Complicit with Everything.” Hoagland gets away with something quite wonderfully in this political poem. It’s an allegory, really, in which the central figure is a retired mailman. Allegory is pretty limp poetry, as a rule, but this being Hoagland, the mailman and his setting are both fully realized. Everybody should go out and buy the issue so you can read the poem and the rest of the excellent magazine. The mailman is watching TV and has cancer, and, unbeknownst to him, an invasive vine is climbing up the house “nourished by water from his very own air conditioner.” Why aren’t there more air conditioners in poems? And why aren’t they dripping the way they always do in life—and in this poem? What Hoagland gets away with is the thing we tell undergraduate workshops not to do: Don’t state explicitly at the end what the poem means. It’s clear what Hoagland’s poem means—what it’s allegorizing—all the way through, but somehow, brilliantly, the act of explaining the poem deepens the poem, makes it more complex. One of those how did-he-get-away-with-that? moments that are rare in poems. And are why we read them.