Stephen Burt Looks at the Poetics of Fatherhood

At Boston Review, Stephen Burt considers poetry in the space of fatherhood. "The poetry of fatherhood is not so new, in part because more men have been able to publish," writes Burt. Also: "How does that poetry differ from what mothers write?" More, including a look at Chris Martin's most recent book, The Falling Down Dance (Coffee House, 2015):

For one thing, attention moves in different directions: poet mothers generally start out attached to kids and then contemplate autonomy, but poet fathers start separate and then seek connection. Jeremy Adam Smith, in The Daddy Shift (2009), argued that stay-at-home dads and purposefully equal parents were “mapping new territory for all fathers,” trying hard “to match mothers’ involvement.” Today’s poetic fathers may try to do in language what Smith’s dads do in real life, though time spent cuddling or cleaning up (as for mothers) still trades off with time writing poems.

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You can find this approach to fatherhood in individual poems from the 2010s (by Brown, Michael Dickman, Craig Morgan Teicher, Dana Ward, Kevin Young, and many others), but the best whole book about it stands among the most recent. Chris Martin, who takes his drifting, low-pressure cadence in part from James Schuyler, has looked since American Music (2007) like a sensibility in search of a subject. Now that he is a father, he has found one. In The Falling Down Dance (2015) he learns to accept in life what he had already half-accepted in his technique: the incomplete, the awkward, the interrupted, that which cannot stand up on its own. The title poem uses Martin’s characteristic line to imitate his toddler’s locomotion:

Sit up, spit up, endless
terror and frontier
of the body unfolding, sun
and bone, bubbling
forth, affront
to all things steady, he thinks
he’ll skip
crawling. He’s falling.

Fatherhood, like motherhood, is an “affront / to all things steady”; Martin’s poetry, like his days, is “awash / in the immense / and candied tedium of being / Dad.” Half the poems in The Falling Down Dance have the same title, “Time,” because once we become parents we learn how little we have, and how unsteadily it goes:

It’s late, it’s early, it’s less
crying than screaming, word-barren
banshee at 12:30, 1:15, 2:50, 5:00,
6:15 and we’re up, saggy
bags of face, throbbing relief
and content just
to flop on the carpet, don
our mixing bowls as hats, halos
of acrid urine mist
christening resolve and Atticus
blowing raspberries to the sun.

Such observation—and Martin’s halting, overtired way of representing it—belongs to the poetry of parenthood generally; so does Martin’s kid language: “Crumblefoot. / Chubbery bean. Gurgler.” To read The Falling Down Dance from cover to cover—and it’s best read that way—is also to see a dad start separate and strive for connection, catching the baby when he falls down, or feeling like a welcome but slightly distant addition to a maternal dyad. That’s not the subtext so much as the plot of “Business,” in which Martin watches his partner

half-doze, having
woke so
many times to feed
the teething baby, who himself
finally sleeps, his strangely strong arms
raised in mysterious victory.

Martin makes the clearest example for the new American poetry of fatherhood, but he’s hardly alone...

Read it all at Boston Review.