Perhaps the effort required to bring back a lost world relates to that “narrow bottle-neck” in Faulkner’s metaphor. (“he smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment…”). One of the great emotional generators of writing is when something sensory spurs the opening of involuntary memory, without one’s willing that memory.įamously, sipping a spoonful of tea with the soaked crumbs of a little cake called a madeleine, did that for “Marcel,” in Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” It gave him a feeling of sourceless happiness that he had to push into (“Ten times over I must assay the task, must lean down over the abyss.”) in order to bring back all the specific recollections contained in and responsible for that feeling. And so, my poems not infrequently want to begin there. That “huge meadow” (for me, a small New York City apartment, the building it was in, the tarnished lobby, the roof, street, neighborhood, shops) is available to be reclaimed, and reexamined, even to lead me to new insights based on perspectives generated by later experiences. What this metaphor says about memory seems true: The distant past can feel more spacious, vibrant, and green than recent decades, which can get pretty jumbled my first landscape is still extremely vivid and detailed. And that’s when I recalled a Faulkner description of the nature of memory for old folks that stuck with me since teaching one of his stories: For the characters in question, “all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.” When I read, “these poems triumph over loss with a ringing affirmation for the past” in Grace Cavalieri’s blurb for my fifth book of poetry, “Groaning and Singing,” I had to think about what she meant. By Judy Kronenfeld | Contributing Columnist
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