About Lucie Brock- Broida’s “Real Life”
As I was scrolling through my Facebook feed on Monday, after having posted the previous blog earlier in the day, I discovered Lucie Brock- Broida’s (1956- 2018) poem, “Real Life” (poets.org>poem>real-life). I say discovered because I’d never encountered the poem before. “Real Life” was published in Brock- Broida’s first book, “A Hunger” (1988); a book which was followed by three other books: “The Master Letters” (1995), “Trouble in Mind” (2004), and “Stay, Illusion” (2013). In addition to having been a poet, Brock- Broida was also a teacher who taught at Bennington, Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia. I’d never heard of Lucie Brock- Broida either— not until I discovered her along with the link to “Real Life” on my Facebook feed. The link appeared between posts from other sources: I found it before and after friends’ responses to the prompt what’s on your mind? And I found it between promotions, advertisements, and conspiracies. In the years I’ve had a Facebook profile, I’ve liked, followed, or subscribed to poets.org, the Poetry Foundation, one or two other such sites, and a dozen or more other poetry- related pages. By being supplied in this way with one or two poems a day that I otherwise would never read, I expand on the number of poets I’m aware of, and sometimes I find another new favourite.
There’s no such thing as a useless poem: If nothing else can be done with it, it can be written about. As I was reading “Real life,” it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to write something about this new- to- me poem. I started a new blog a few weeks ago, and for a new blog there is always a search for writing prompts and content: Why not turn poetry into content? There’s a confidence I feel in discussing poetry that I don’t feel so much in discussing other things. Forty-five years of reading and writing poems have defined my life; contributed to my decision to enroll in university and earn a BA in English Literature, as well as a host of other decisions I’ve made as an adult, and some choices I chose not to make. Despite all the other things I’ve done in my time, poetics is what I’m most identified with in the community. I’ve worked and played with the stuff and know it well enough to have theories about it: Know it well enough to begin writing regular posts about it. This writing about poetry will be used to begin developing the character of both the blog and of my WordPress website. That character, I hope, will also come to include posts of audio and video recordings of me speaking or performing some of my own poems and eventually, offerings of merchandise. But to begin with, I’ll stick to writing about what I’m reading.
There’ll never be a shortage of poems, so I don’t expect there’ll ever to be a shortage of things to write about. But writing about poetry is not the purpose of writing about poetry, nor should writing a blog be the purpose for writing a blog. One purpose for this writing and for this blog is to serve the featured poem and its poet, as a way of beginning to serve poets and poetry in general. I propose to do this by introducing and promoting the poem and its poet. My hope is to develop the idea of a poem as a thing of relevance by contributing to making the poem, its poet, and poetry into things that are talked about. The thing I’ve missed most since graduating university is the in- class discussions about a poem: It always seemed someone had something to say about it. These days when I share a poem with someone in person or online, there’s rarely a discussion that results from that sharing. Poems aren’t questioned or discussed in everyday dialogue: Either the listeners and readers of poetry have no time to talk, or they’re not convinced that a discussion could be useful.
This brings me to another part of the purpose for writing about writing; to help make a poem more useful to the reader. I’m not on my way to doing other things, so reading a poem is not an inconvenience. And there’s time to read patiently and attentively: to discover the intricacies in how it’s put together, and to pay attention to the language, thought, imagery, metaphors, and other features; and how these things are developed between a poem’s beginning and its end. I want to get to know the poem I’m writing about, well enough to determine the relevance or irrelevance of the things in the poem— to other things in the poem, and to things outside the poem. In this way I’ll be able to begin to develop opinions about the poem, and solid grounds for those opinions; and I’ll be able to begin to talk about the poem with confidence.
To achieve that confidence, often there’ll be things in a poem I’ll need to research: In “Real Life” it’s ‘the thirty-six things’ in lines six through nine:
Because in the thirty-six things that can happen
To people, men & women, women & women,
Men & men, in all these things the soul is bound
To be broken somewhere along the line,
When I first encountered these lines, I didn’t know the source for them, nor their relevance. Yet, from the fact that ‘the thirty- six things’ are discussed in the poem; and from the fact that four lines in the middle of a twenty- two- line poem are given to speaking of them; and from the fact the subject is returned to in the closing couplet, ‘the thirty-six things’ should be expected to be significant. By googling “Real Life” by Lucie Brock- Broida, and from visiting some of the pages where the poem is published and reading some of the threads that respond to the poem on those pages, I find in a goodreads thread at (https://wwwgoodreads.com>show) that someone by the name of Renee states that ‘the thirty- six things’ refer to the Thirty-six Dramatic Situations, a list first prepared by Georges Polti in 1895. By going farther and googling the ‘thirty-six dramatic situations’ by Georges Polti, I discover it’s a list of words and short phrases that might be used to sum up almost any country song or literary plot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations). Even the most obscure reference is important, and it’s necessary to overcome that obscurity to help make the reading of a poem complete. Until the reference is clarified, a reader can’t know what a poem is about, nor begin to know the poem.
To continue developing a familiarity with a poem, as I read it, I pay attention to the word, image, and metaphor patterns, and how they change and develop. I’m not going to address all the patterns in “Real Life:” Just those that most immediately jump out at me. The first of these begins in the opening line: “Soon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow.” This line establishes that the narrative of the poem begins in late autumn or early winter, with the deeper snow of a deeper winter expected to arrive soon. The winter motif continues in the fifteenth and sixteenth lines: Rather than a forecast for snow as in the opening line, here is given “… the white impossible ice hour, starving/ Past the electric blue of the rivers melting down.” Where the opening line speaks of a forecast for heavy snow and winter, here the wintertime has become impossible, and the rivers are melting. The first line is set in the before- winter, while the fifteenth and sixteenth lines are set in the after- winter. This use of winter imagery early in the poem, and the return to it later in the poem, helps tie the parts of the poem to each other. But the snow and ice imagery in “Real Life” is contrasted in the poem by other image patterns.
And what better contrast is there to snow and ice than fire. This contrast is immediately developed in the second line. The image of electrical wires that’ll grow heavy under the snow in the first line is followed up immediately in the second line with, “I am thinking of fire and the possibility of fire….” Where the first line, it seems to me, is a looking outward at a forecast of winter, the second line is a looking inward at a want, a hope, or an expectation for fire, for warmth. The second line is an internal response to the external reality of snow in the first. This juxtaposition of images in the opening couplet of “Real Life” serves to immediately begin to develop a tension in the poem. This tension is maintained throughout the poem by repeating the juxtaposition. If the fire imagery isn’t returned to in the fourteenth line with “…the bitter sunrise to a new age,” then it certainly is with the words “…nude, snuff, terra cotta, maybe fire” in the seventeenth line. And this reference to fire in the seventeenth line immediately follows imagery that refers to snow and ice in the fifteenth and sixteenth lines. The contrasting of images is repeated, and the tension is maintained. This repetition of imagery and language develops a smaller story that is apart from the bigger story of the poem, while at the same time being a part of that bigger story.
Earlier readings of the “Real Life” developed in me a wondering if the poem is a story about a migration: Later readings convinced me that it is. It’s the story of a “…moving across America” in lines two and three, and a proceeding across America in lines eleven and twelve. It’s a tale developed through the development of its images: The plot that begins in the second line with “…the possibility of fire,” continues in the fourteenth line with “…a bitter sunrise”, and in line seventeen it speaks of “…maybe fire.” “Real Life” tells of a moving from a time, from a season when “[s]oon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow” in line one, to a season in lines seventeen through twenty that’s:
… nude, snuff, terra cotta, maybe fire
Over the tiny fragile mound of finger bones
Of an Indian who died standing up
Through the heliotrope of a song about the sunset
It’s the story of a migration from a time before winter to a time after winter: From a time in autumn, before the electrical wires grow heavy under snow, to a time in spring when ice has become impossible, and the rivers are melting. But in the cycle of the year, it must be remembered that the time after winter is also the time before winter; that the time of winter past is the time of winter to come. There are external winters, and there are internal winters; And the internal winter times, the winter times of the soul— in “Real Life” it’s indicated that they are consequences of any one or more of the thirty-six things, the thirty- six situations the soul is bound to be broken by. “Real Life” is the story of a soul’s migration, from thirty- six things early in the poem to thirty-six things at the end of the poem: From one of the thirty- six situations and its winter to the next. I’ve read ”Real Life” numerous times now; researched what was obscure to me and connected words and images in the poem to each other, and in doing these things I’ve begun to open the poem up and give myself access to it. I hope that, in having begun to open the poem up for myself, I can begin to open it up for the readers who’ve read “Real Life,” and now come to read this.
I hope those readers come to contribute to the appreciation for “Real Life” by adding to the reading of the poem— by adding what other readers can safely read out of it, and what they can safely read into it. I want readers to develop their own appreciation for and perspectives of “Real Life” — So much so that they feel confident in adding their thoughts and ideas in the comment thread for this post. In starting this dialogue, I’m just starting to get acquainted with “Real Life,” and most of what can be said of the poem I haven’t touched on. I’d appreciate people adding things, or leaving links to their own blog posts in which they expand on what I’ve started here — I’m curious about the relationship between “Real Life” and the number two.
aging Agriculture biblical childhood domestic Dramatic Poetry early modern early modern Europe Education Europe family Family Dynamics fiction ghost haiku Hamlet Hamlet and Horatio Historical Fiction Horatio & Hamlet Imagery imagination Landscape literary literature lock letter love marriage metaphor music nature poem analysis Poetry recruiting religion religious sacrifice Serial Poetry short-story specters/ghosts Spoken Word time voice waking writing young family
i labour with the season in my spirit
Good morning: I thought I’d share a bit of the evolution of a poem this morning. In the process of drafting this up, I googled images of Early Modern European peasant women: This poem is the composite sketch of those women. The image that’s linked provide the eyes that are translated from the visual to…
two days to the south
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before it could be read
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Jake's Flea Market 
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