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Editor’s Note: The arts are a significant thread in the fabric of Rockland County. They inspire, enrich, and chronicle our lives. They also play a role in our economic well-being; theater, writing, dance, crafts draw us to spaces. They invite strangers to share in our bounty. They are an indelible contribution. Welcome again, Christine Potter, a poet, to RCBJ.
Happy National Poetry Month! Marjorie Tesser is Our April Poet
By Christine Potter
One of the things I love the most about Rockland County is how upstate it feels—despite being downstate. I can get to the George Washington Bridge and upper Manhattan in under an hour on a decent traffic day, but on the way home have to keep watch for flocks of deer and wild turkeys. I’ve seen black bears. One even came through our yard but we had only the “yikes!” telephone message from our across-the-street neighbor and a certain unsavory calling card the creature left near our garbage cans to mark its visit.
You can see other houses from our place easily in winter, not so much when the leaves are out. And those deer I mentioned before? As voracious and common as they are lovely. So I related one hundred percent when Marjorie Tesser, fellow Rocklander and editor-in-chief of the excellent Mom Egg Review, told me the story of writing her first “real” poem at nine. I love her words about what such a poem entails: “experience, thought, and emotion distilled to language.” You’ll see how this all fits together. Here’s her story:
We had been upstate for the Thanksgiving vacation and were on our way home. Half-carsick from my dad’s cigar, my little brothers wrestling or leaning on me in the back seat, all I could do was look out the window. Some cars and vans that passed had an odd decoration; a deer carcass slung over the top. My heart broke. I wrote.
She’s right. That’s exactly how it happens. My first “real” poem was probably the elegy to JFK I wrote, aged eleven. JFK was one of those famous folks my parents loved so much I half-believed he was related to us. My heart, too, broke. Poems like that have to get written.
Here’s a (fully grown-up) poem of Marjorie’s that could have been written in today’s brilliant, early spring weather:
April
I am chill
drizzle
into spongy ground,
the picnic table
upended
in last week’s storm,
still not set right.
I’m the car
that waits behind
the school bus
blinking red,
the full recycle
bins at the curb,
that black bird
on the wire
calling, calling,
to the sky’s
blank slate.
I’m below,
a hungry wet cat,
looking up.
I’m the lines
that stretch from
pole to pole,
the lines I thought
but didn’t write.
Racing, but I
halt at amber.
I’m half-starts
and short stops—
ancient,
emerging ever,
a hard nub of bud
at the end of
a bare branch.
I’m a mailbox
full of flyers,
the thick web over
the front window
shining with droplets,
& the sweet shock
of a daffodil,
the season’s first
from a patch planted
decades ago,
gold as a hope.
With its short lines and subject matter, this poem makes me think of William Carlos Williams’ one-word-per-line “The Locust-Tree in Blossom.” I wanted to drink it down in one gulp, which I just did, and then went back to organize my thoughts. In Williams’ poem, he sketches an image of the tree, but Tesser’s narrator takes it a step further, and becomes the thing she writes about. She is April; she is both the mailbox and junk mail within it. The poem’s speaker seems anxious as she sits in (or is!) her car—“racing”—but stopping at amber lights. She’s “ancient/emerging ever.” And the spring’s first daffodil shocks her with hope. It’s a neat trick! And it’s a hopeful ending I loved reading after attending the No Kings marches yesterday. I’m greedy for some of that gold.
“April” took the Academy of American Poet’s John B. Santoianni For Excellence in Poetry in 2019. and it’s on the Academy of American Poets’ website. Tesser is including “April” in a new poetry collection of hers, Unquiet, due out this autumn from the Portage Poetry Series, Cornerstone Press. In fact, all the poems she shared with us this month are from that book, which looks like it’s going to be a honey.
Mom Egg Review, in case you are wondering, is a literary magazine that’s been around for over two decades. It’s about motherhood, and honors the creative energy of mothers who write and create art. MER publishes both quarterly (online) and annual paper-and-PDF issues, containing poetry, fiction, and all sorts of prose. You can find it here.
Marjorie Tesser’s poem “Mood Indigo” made me put on an Ella Fitzgerald recording of the Duke Ellington song after I read it the first time, so I could read it again with the tune playing. Here’s a link if you want to do that, but honestly, the poem is both musical and very wise on its own.
Mood Indigo
some babies are born with the blues,
souls tuned to the minor or diminished
fedoras permanently askew.
some babies are born to the blues,
pale eyes like searchlights or dark
eyes like pools read sagas in cloud
striations or the patterns
leaves make against sky.
some babies are born for the blues,
hearts soft and open as bruised fruit
Look! Don’t Look! flashing on and off
in their brains’ broken traffic lights.
some learn to sift the hue,
refine it to powder, twilight, midnight,
sky; to name, to testify.
Originally published in Anti-Heroin Chic
Tesser had me at “diminished fedoras,” but also, all the ooo sounds: blues, hue, pools, askew, fruit. The poem is fun to read aloud.
So we are who we are from the beginning, and we are all different in our approach to sorrow and to the world in general. We are “tuned to the minor” or learn to read the stories in the clouds. Or we have hearts like “bruised fruit.” I admire the broken traffic light idea: “Look! Don’t Look!” instead of “Walk! Don’t Walk!”
I also admire how she closes the poem, saying there is a way for some babies to “sift the hue” and “refine” it. A world of understanding lives there. Plus, the poem just sounds great. I don’t doubt its truth; I find myself trying to figure out which of the babies in this poem I was.
Tesser has children, but doesn’t publish work specifically about them: “I have poems that reference family members, or draw inspiration from actual events, past or current, but they mostly provide jumping-off points for other ideas, speculation, observations, and similar meanderings.” She is a fan of some of the poets I, too, love reading: “Kelli Russell Agodon, Rebecca Hart Olander, Cindy Veach, Heidi Seaborn, Marie Howe, Diane Seuss, Patricia Smith, Catherine Esposito Prescott, and Ian Haley Pollock; I’m looking forward to new books by Donna Masini and Jennifer Franklin.” Her big role models are Marie Ponsot, (a late and beloved long-time mentor), and the late Jennifer Martelli, who had edited poetry at MER with Tesser.
Here’s some more springtime from her:
Another April
On this leaden day my husband cuts and brings inside
a fistful of daffodils, frilled and yellow as the organza dress
my grandmother gifted me when I was three or four,
the one that itched—I never was a very girly girl. They bear
a dense perfume, a high whine with a lower coffee note,
like a scented lady at the theater in the seat next to you
and nowhere to go; it’s strong enough to dissuade the deer
and they eat almost anything. They almost glow in my white kitchen,
shine million dollar smiles at my seasonal malaise. I can’t stay mad.
Yes, it’s just stupid April, but what else have we got?
Originally published in Voicemail Poems
The poem is rich in things-to-love also. The frilly yellow dress! (Memories of shopping trips with my Nana to Lord and Taylor’s!) And the description of daffodils’ scent. I love how it leaps from a “whine” to an over-perfumed theatre-goer in the next seat.
I think what I like most is the ambivalent last couplet. I’m one of those weirdos who actually isn’t quite sure she likes it when the leaves come out. Winter is my favorite season. But at the same time, you can’t “stay mad.”
Marjorie Tesser’s work has such a conversational quality that I know she must revise carefully. Poems that sound both smart and almost tossed off—like “Another April” especially—are seldom tossed off. They are carefully shaped. She notes that some of the poems in the forthcoming Unquiet have been tweaked since their initial appearances in lit mags. I know other poets who consider a lit mag publication the final word, but Tesser mentions the novelist Lore Segal and how she penciled in last-minute revisions to her work at readings. I’ve been tempted to go down that path!
Speaking of readings, here are some upcoming local appearances by Marjorie Tesser this poetry month:
Wednesday, April 22, 7-8 PM. Online.
Poets of Two Shores Reading for Ossining Public Library
Hosted by Melissa Joplin Higley (Village of Mamaroneck Poet Laureate) and Juan Pablo Mobili (Rockland County Poet Laureate), featuring Anne Graue, Pamela Hart, Julie Agoos, and Marjorie Tesser. Register on the Ossining Public Library for the Zoom link. https://ossining.librarycalendar.com/event/poetry-program-virtual-25698
Saturday April 25, 7-9 PM, Big Red Books, 120 Main St., Nyack NY
An Evening of Poetry Featuring Valzhyna Mort and Samyak Shertok
With community readers Kelly Jo Lilian, Conrad Lochner, Marjorie Tesser, Tedo Wyman, and Laura Zaino. Hosted by Lily Greenberg. Free and open to the public.
And if you have a literary mom, Mom Egg Review makes a fine Mother’s Day gift. It’s out May 1: Mom Egg Review vol. 24. Copies are available at online booksellers (Amazon, B&N) and on the MER website.
Here’s a poem I wrote about a year ago. Marjorie’s daffodil poem sent me into my files looking for it.
Long Car Ride
It puts the fussy baby in me to sleep,
lulls me with long views, the long
views. Dollops of distant mountains,
trees blinking off the last of winter,
pollen rain-streaked on the windshield,
the odd names of restaurants and
businesses at the edges of towns. Why
is everything a House or a Hut? Giant
liquor stores that all smell the same
inside: like cardboard cartons and
floor wax. The guy behind the counter
walking out front for his cigarette.
The steakhouse that now belongs to
a chain, the home improvement center
with its many racks of pansies: purple
and corn-yellow with confectionary
pink hyacinths beside them. The dull
sky setting it all ablaze by comparison.
Oh, the bardo of this journey, the death
of what came before it, this American
roadside. Neon. We’ll be home by dark.
Happy Spring! Happy Poetry Month!
I have two workshops down at Sparkle Book Store in Sparkill: Thursday April 16th (Making It New) and 30th (Writing The Aubade) at 6 PM. And then May 1st, on Friday at 6, a reading and signing of my new books, Why I Don’t Take Xanax and Before The World Was on Fire. Hope to see you soon!
