The turns from narrative to lyric modes in Joan Larkin’s new poetry collection Old Stranger may especially resonate with readers who’ve attained longevity. An octogenarian, Larkin has been celebrated for blending lyric and narrative elements in her work and for nudging her poems toward resolution and epiphany. Her reliance on the lyric mode in Old Stranger intensifies as the collection progresses, while not entirely abandoning narrative. The superseding of narrative by lyric elements tends to form its own arc in a story about aging through perceptions of time and the past.
Larkin was born in Boston, a few months before the 1939 invasion of Poland that set off World War II. Eighteen years older than I, she is a writer I’ve respected as an elder who is always a generation ahead of me in experience, and in the wisdom that may come from it. I’ve followed her work for decades, beginning in the 1970’s at New Words Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I began seeking out queer and feminist literature as a teen. Now, almost 50 years later, Larkin’s poetry continues to create beauty and delight while offering wisdom as I enter my elderhood.
It’s uncommon for poets to have 50-year publishing careers, even now that life expectancy has grown over the past century. If a poet’s early work establishes their personal mythology, as Larkin’s did, what happens to that mythology over a lifetime? Does it grow stale, or get reassessed, or reinforced, or even abandoned? In Old Stranger, the subjects of Larkin’s foundational narratives – rape, abortion, miscarriage, coming out as lesbian, getting sober – are often reshaped through the lens of lyric, which emphasizes the distillation of seemingly truthful perceptions rather than the arc toward them. This turn to the lyric is a Swedish death cleaning of sorts that sweeps events to the side and prioritizes images of insight and emotional truth.
Of course, neither lyric nor narrative modes exist in separate bubbles. There’s a term in poetic discourse for combining them: the lyric-narrative poem. During the first months of an MFA program in the 1990’s, where I was struck by how much I did not know about poetry, “lyric-narrative poetry” especially confused me. Any initial recognition of ignorance may often play a part of the narrative arc of achieving wisdom, but I did not achieve any lasting wisdom on this point. Thirty years later, Old Stranger has revived my old confusion, especially in its poems treating narrative time as both rigid and flexible. Now, though, I can at least see the assumptions that stand in my way: that the lyric exists outside of time, but that narrative relies on time to be understood, and time relies on narrative to be parsed.
A disregard of narrative time first appears in the book’s fourth poem, “The Body Inside My Body,” where a second body, belonging to the speaker, asserts its power. This body wants “the breath it lost trying to escape / that afternoon in Hell’s Kitchen.” With short, declarative sentences establishing her authority, Larkin convinces me this alter-body can get that breath back. The poem offers hope to anyone with traumatic memories who, like the second body, “[h]as had it up to here with the scalding” and “wants the whole carcass unburied.” But the uncovering and implied dissection of the carcass of the past is just the beginning. The carcass’ obliteration is what this alter-body is after, as it wakes in a gothic setting that “any body wants,” where vultures “hiss in the low branches,” ready to do what vultures do. Who wouldn’t want painful events and their sequelae picked apart, swallowed, and annihilated by a vulture’s acid-bath gut?
The truism that silence equals death, a motto adopted during the AIDS epidemic, is applied by Larkin (and others) to family dynamics. Larkin’s poetry, and her writing on recovery for the Hazelden Foundation, has often been concerned with naming silenced experiences and bringing them into the light. The turns to lyric that occur in Old Stranger continue this project, recasting narrative versions of naming and uncovering in imaginative terms. The poem “Flamingo,” for example, avoids narrative, zeroing in on a female flamingo who “knows nothing of names / nor emperor / who ate her tongue.” This bird seems to exist outside of her own history, until we read that the bird’s parents fed her “the thick crop milk” colored as red as the birds’ feathers. The speaker envies this nonverbal transmission of family history, as if language has already failed to impart the family stories she needs. She and the flamingo merge as “Learning to hold one leg aloft,” she cries, “father, mother, give me your red milk” [italics in original].
The lyric revelation in “Flamingo” suggests that when family history is hidden or only hinted at, knowing oneself is impossible, just as it is impossible to understand loved ones whose pasts remain opaque to us. What sort of work is required under those circumstances to manage our physical, psychic, and emotional inheritances? The first step is uncovering memories, then recognizing the symmetries between memories and actions. In “Hexagon-Tiled Bathroom Floor,” first published here in On the Seawall, this is accomplished by a single shameful scene that transforms a bathroom floor into “the little theater of childhood.” The scene is isolated and free of narrative time’s chain reactions, but the memory of it is “stored bee-food / “waiting for the future” and the speaker’s inheritance of being “aloof from love.”
Anyone lugging an uncomfortable past behind them can find the immediacy of lyric poetry a relief, and as Old Stranger progresses toward its finale, the poems become more lyrical and less narrative. With intense attention to individual moments that launch consciousness into another person’s art, ekphrastic poems in the book’s third and fourth parts offer profound lyric respite from both the past and from any identity formed by the past. From “Fresco”:
I want to be that featureless dove
tucked in the saint’s armpit
. . .
I want to be that radiant
shape – bird only if you
step back to see me better.
Other ekphrastic poems lean into the timelessness of lyric, reinforcing the fact that being present with art frees both reader and writer from the beginnings, middles, and ends that may restrict narratives to specific eras and places. During the period of second wave feminism, from the 1960’s through the 1980’s, Larkin’s work found an appreciative audience that identified with her narratives and her concerns. Today, recognizing and identifying with narrative tropes from foreign geographies and eras may be too burdensome for people whose attention spans have gone untrained. The lyric, like a close-up in a film, communicates in an instant. From “Nude in the Bath”:
Cloth draped on a chair
Neither the moment before
Nor the moment after.
Light loves and dissolves us.
Stories dissolve.
Younger readers may find these lyric poems appealing and accessible thanks to these close-up moments. For older readers, the poems may resonate as concepts and experiences of time often grow more complex as we enter our last decade or two on earth. For me, attentiveness to the moment has grown increasingly useful as a way of slowing down time. In Old Stranger, Larkin’s elegant turns to the lyric mode disregard time but preserve memory, as if their intent is to stop the inevitable, fatal conclusion of human narrative in its tracks. In the book’s penultimate poem, “White Pine,” that intent is made flesh: “Death poem, wait. / Joan, keep walking.”
[Published by Alice James Books on August 13, 2024, 100 pages, $24.95 paperback]