ESSAY The Muse and Margaret Blum

The night had too much Scotch in it. And bourbon. The department chairman had banged his head on the overhanging light two times, and his wife had shown exasperation both times, and the hostess had suggested moving the table both times; and the poetry teacher’s wife had lost enough money to cool her nervous gaiety and leave her staring glumly at her husband’s accumulation of chips; and the game had been going long enough that, when I tossed four blue ones into the pile, we had all forgotten that they were worth only a quarter apiece.

The poetry teacher, with a hard face that said nothing, folded; the chairman tossed his cards aside, rose, banged his head a third time, and went off to pour another, leaving only his wife to stare at my four diamonds showing, then glance at her king, pair of deuces, and ace up (and one down, if her betting ran according to pattern).

“I know you’re bluffing,” she said. I shrugged. She tried to look through me. “Of course, you’ve been playing by the book all evening, but then bluffing with an apparent flush would be by the book, too.” I gave her my most innocent, tell-me~more-about-how-your-mind-works smile. She caressed the chips she had left. In the kitchen, ice cubes clinked into an empty glass.

“It’s just not worth it,” she sighed. “Fold.”

I flipped the diamonds over onto the down card and passed them to the hostess, Peggy Blum, who deftly riffled her three among mine, cut them, and handed the thin stack to the chairman’s wife with a cheerful, “Your deal, I believe.” She knew the rules, Peggy did, the rules of poker as well as the rules of poem-making, and the one applicable in this case she knew especially well: you want knowledge, you pay for it.

When the poetry teacher felt compelled to deal with rhyme in his advanced workshops, he would invite Peggy in for a session or two, and she would show his students how in terza rima the middle line furnishes the rhyme for the first and last lines of the next triplet, whose middle line does the same for the beginning and end of the next triplet, and so on, forming a close-knit chain, properly ended, as Dante more than 600 years ago had ended each canto from Hell through Purgatory to Paradise, with a couplet. Peggy herself used the form for a lighter topic, the not-so-real meaning of Christmas.

When febrile shoppers, seeking for solutions To credit-card exhaustion, furtive, stealthy. Write checks on the accounts of institutions

Of which they ’re treasurers. (For Grandma’s wealthy, And counts the love of grandchild by the dollar. Relationships like this must be kept healthy.)

The grip of winter tightens on our collar; Both rain and sleet pound down for all they’re worth.

We cannot find a single star to follow.

And Christ, unwitting cause of this false mirth, Sighs wistfully, and turns his face from earth.

And terza rima, literally “third rhyme,” would lead easily to a discussion of a more restrictive form, the villanelle, which allows only two rhymes for nineteen lines with two alternating refrains, which must fall together naturally to close the poem. Would you care to compete with Dylan Thomas’s thunderously powerful “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” or attempt the evocatively mystic heights achieved by Theodore Roethke in “The Waking”? Best keep it simple, low-key, maybe even a little self-mocking, as Peggy did in this fragment from a poem simply called “Villanelle.”

Life is never what we make it.

Life’s a game without a score.

Put it in a cake and bake it.

Life’s a mess of give and take it. Think you two and two make four? Life is never what we make it.

You might be even better advised to try a form so restricted that no one else would bother with it, such as the sestina, which requires six six-line verses to ring changes on the same six line-ending words, all to be brought together in the last three lines. (And you thought the Beast was in the Book of Revelation!) Then, once you’ve wrestled even semi-successfully with the villainous villanelle and soul-searing sestina, you’ll be ready for something that will really cramp your style. Look at her ballade about not writing a ballade:

Since finishing my first Sestina My mind is freed; its spirit, Untamed, unchecked in its demeanor. Seems bibulous or near it.

But still I cannot bear to steer it Where it strayed anon; it Scorns the fixed form-who could cheer it?

A curse, a pox upon it!

The Couplet: is it not much cleaner? Hark, my ear, and hear it- ta TA, ta TA.. .and “meaner.. .leaner”? Does it not endear it-Self to you? Nor need you fear it As one might fear a Sonnet, Fixed form-may the hell-fires sear it! A curse, a pox upon it!

Envoi

And the Ballade: a form so drear it ’S best to have forgone it.

I’ll not write a ballade! I swear it!

A curse, a pox upon it!

And so Peggy would leave the burgeoning poets with much to ruminate upon, particularly when they attempted those forms, virtually unused by poets in this generation, and found them not nearly so easy as her verse had made them seem.

I came to know her better than I knew anyone else at the university. She had undergone surgery that had left her neck and upper back twisted askew, and her head turned permanently down to one side, making it impossibly painful for her to drive long distances; so I chauffeured her once to a neighboring city to visit her son and daughter-in-law and grandchild, and in the course of the journey she told me of growing up pretty and much sought-after, of picking the most daring man and bearing his children and seeing him through the hard times, and of suffering the turmoil of a disastrous affair of the heart that nearly ruined her career and tore her asunder. No, she was never unfaithful-that ran too much against the grain-and she had eventually realized what everyone else had seemed to know all along: that the fellow was a smooth-talking scoundrel.

Once and for all, for my own good, I’ve doffed the claim to “Lady”-hood.

So she wrote a poem addressed to a pair of liberated colleagues.

It’s hard now. to remember that ’A Tennessee aristocrat

Should be concerned, but be aloof”

(Though lacking documentary proof , My people never doubted we Were of the aristocracy.

Although by Yankees hard besieged We’d, I was told, noblesse-oblige-d.

And as for Women’s Liberation- The females of my generation

Knew quite well what to do, and when, Confronted by the whims of men.)

But what was, was; and what is, is. I’ve given up Mrs., become Ms. And (mark you this confusing sequel) I’ve finally learned, men are my equal.

Our paths diverged eventually, after many kindnesses from her and many failures to acknowledge them from me. My copy of her Verses From Dallas Hall, printed at her own cost, includes “those auctorial emendations which, according to T.S. Eliot, make a collector’s item”-so says her note to me inside the cover, which also expresses the hope, in Latin, that I will flourish in eternity. It is one of my treasures.

I thought of Margaret Blum often over the years, as my slack of rejection slips with prestigious letterheads grew gradually thicker. I have a sneaking hunch that everyone’s closet contains the buried skeleton of at least one attempt to cultivate the muse. Where is your dusty notebook, my friend, the one left over from the seventh grade, the one you never had the heart to throw away’? And if your work merited some recognition in the school quarterly, or even a mimeographed sheet… We will keep banging the lever that doled out the food pellet, will we not, mon semblable, mon frere?

In my case, the food pellets had been especially juicy: a poetry award my junior year in college kept me addicted to the occasional hunting and pecking and rejection-collecting, culminating thirteen years later in an acceptance, and another the year after, and so on.

If you have ever given birth to a poem, the one that writes itself through you. so that you watch your pen move across the page generating quick, sure lines so much better than any your effort could create that you cannot in good conscience call them your own. . .if that ever happens, then you are doomed, and a pen and paper will grace the nightstand by your deathbed.

And you will sit at the typewriter far too many times, attempting to re-create that moment that you did not create in the first place, and you will struggle to buy with your efforts that effortlessness that cannot be at-tained. “There is no road.” wrote one poet, “to Grace’s House.” Nevertheless, I sat one morning at the upright, in hopes of entering Grace’s House-“the round Zion of the water bead,” as Dylan Thomas called it. My name for it was, ’a circling ring of flame,” and it did set my imagination to work. Soon an “old crone came,” and disturbed me with a prophecy:

“On June the twenty-third,” Crone saith, “Your,universe shall whisper, ’Death!’”

I dutifully recorded this morbidity as it arrived, pushing aside the troublesome observation that the Crone sounded too much like the Wicked Witch of the West in Judy Garland’s Oz.. and in the midst of my fevered imaginings a flashbulb popped; two eyes of unmistakable clarity confronted me, and a sharp voice spoke words that I also recorded:

“You write like Edgar Poe,” she said. “That style of yours is what is dead.”

That put an end to my versifying. 1 toyed with reworking it a bit. tried the title. “Poe-em,” and finally admitted that the only thing salvageable from this fiasco was the anecdote, which I would have to share with Peggy Blum.

As I dialed the English department’s number, I was formulating my opening remarks: “Peggy, I wouldn’t trouble you after all these years if I didn’t have a good excuse. Believe me, fellow rhymester, you were with me today in spirit and in truth. …” But when 1 asked the receptionist if Ms. Blum was in. she told me Peggy had died. Last winter. She wasn’t sure exactly when, sometime in November, she thought.

Somehow it goes against the grain To write without accomp’nying rain, Or even overhanging clouds That grey the sky, the heart, the brain In mis ’ruble November-O

So she had begun “A Throw-away Ballad for November.” In another poem on the month she quibbled with the name, which etymologically suggests that it is the ninth month rather than the eleventh, and closed with the proposal;

thai to the truth we turn us And call it as it should be called-Avernus. The gate, that is, to the Underworld.

She knew quite well when I was running a bluff.