Memoir. Memories. Poem.
These poems of Karla Huston's, in Catch and Release, have a touch that belongs to memoir. Perhaps poetry and memoir are the twin-sister arts. This is a poet's life, shaped. One kind of telling can be shaped to a prose account, the other to the beat and break of the line. The life that is recalled in a poem is not less true than that which would come to us in memoir; it is simply that the poem insists on being immediate and urgent, banging and humping as poems do. Sometimes memoir loses this sense of urgency, though the best does not. The difference between the prose telling, and the poem? As May Sarton has noted in her Journal of a Solitude, "Perhaps it is that prose is earned and poetry given."
What has Karla Huston been given in Catch and Release?
In "Night Swim," there is the sweetness of the memory. It was "after supper in hot August." The poet and her brother stepped carefully into the water. Mother "tucked pin curls into her tight bathing cap." And dad? "My dad would barrel-ass down the bank,/slice the water, show up on the other side//of the safety ropes, smiling." As she was falling asleep later, the lake came back to her, the water hugging her skin, her father's face grinning mischief, and "those waves rocking me to sleep."
In "Tumbling," there is an uncertainty. The poet's mother is "conniving about macaroni" over the back fence while her brother has thrown himself down the basement stairs; he challenges his sister to do it too. She does. Oh, her mother is angry. "My lip quivered in shame, the taste/of blood a little sour in my mouth." In the end, she is "unsure why some things/hurt so bad they almost feel good." In such uncertainty is the beginning of wisdom, yes?
The poet is ten years old in "Matinee," watching April Love and falling for Pat Boone. She cannot believe the heartbreak: "I knew I could do it better, cherish him,/save his pretty and impossible heart." She struggles with "this longing/larger than anything I'd known."
"Coming Home" is about another kind of longing.
When I was a kid, I'd go so fast
I felt like I was being chased
running home from Patty's house....
Now when she sees a tortoise in a pet shop "trapped in a plastic aquarium," she wonders if someone is calling him home. "The need that calls him/is insistent and familiar," the poet thinks, "his feet/trembling with every forward step."
The poet was the only girl allowed to play work-up in "Rounders," a kind of sand-lot baseball you play when you don't have enough for two teams. She was the permanent catcher, at least until she asked to bat:
... For a joke, he pitched
an empty bean can that split
my scalp....
Later this kid, the oldest in the neighborhood,
... caught up
with me in the alley
across the street and asked to touch
the cut. I didn't cry
until he tried to kiss me.
The poet finds a dead bird in "Dead Cardinal." She examines the bird and feels a need
... to say something
about this moment, something about choices,and the dark roads we travel. I want to say
how close we all are to the edge....
But she cannot, at this moment, be profound. She talks instead about the ants crawling in and out of the dead cardinal's mouth. She notices that
Even in death,
industry and patience have their reward.
The title poem, "Catch and Release," is a tour de force about two boys who drowned and were lost in Lake Winnebago "one November storm ago." The dead boys will
... be glad to be found -
if the dead are glad of anything -after all those months of freefall,
the second rising that always comes in spring.
There are twenty-seven poems in Catch and Release; lines and stanzas continue to resonate after you put the book down. How, for instance, does one teach this girl to write of war?
She must hunt for the wounded,
seek the man with no eyes, the woman
with a hole in her heart,
the boy too dumbed to speak.
In one poem, the poet wonders, "How can I write about the moon/tonight...."
And, again, in another poem, she might be "a nice girl, not the kind to frolic//in hotels with men," but for the moment her glass "is half full, the animal of her loosed and for a moment, free."
The final line of the final poem reads: "in praise of great and dangerous things;" this speaks as much about the purpose of the poems Huston's book, I think, as about the raised arms of the "Saguaro."
Could these poems be imagined life? Yes. Yes, of course. If this is not the life the poet had, it is the life the poet could have had; it is the life the poet has in her heart. A life where the small things we've noticed have meaning beyond the frail particulars. Such tellings are no less true for being imagined, but admittedly one cannot say that to a roomful of students still learning to tell the literal truth. Huston has stepped beyond the need to tell the literal truth, into the realm of the larger truths she carries out of memory.
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*Catch and Release by Karla Huston. ISBN 0-9718909-8-6. Marsh River Editions, M233 Marsh Road, Marshfield, WI 54449. $10.00.
"banging and humping as poems do"
O.K., so I'm not just imagining things when I hear strange noises from the poetry shelves at 1:00 a.m.? They really are procreative?
"Now when she sees a tortoise in a pet shop 'trapped in a plastic aquarium,' she wonders if someone is calling him home."
Very likely, something is. Land tortoises have a very strong homing instinct.
Sounds like a great book. I am currently inundated with new (to me) poetry books, donated by a friend who is cleaning out her library. The more poetry I read, the closer I feel I am getting to something true, beyond words.
Posted by: Dave | May 29, 2005 at 02:59 PM
Yes, something true, beyond words: our task is to find that, then perhaps we might sit for a bit with a glass of wine.
Posted by: Tom Montag | June 03, 2005 at 06:17 AM