Featured Poet Mary Jo Salter: “A Writer's Genealogy”

When I was very young, my parents told me repeatedly that I was half Italian, a quarter English, and a quarter Irish. These seemingly immutable facts had to be challenged many years later, after I sent a tube of saliva to Ancestry.com, and some surprises came back. Today I think I know that more of my American self originated in the ancient locality eventually called Ireland than from the one called England and that the people in my past from “Italy” spent some quality time with “Albanians” and “Aegean Islanders.” But my parents went with the 50–25–25 percentages, which made my name Mary overdetermined, being the same as my Italian grandmother's (in translation) and my English-Irish aunt's.Everybody for generations had been Catholic—until my parochial-schooled parents each left the Church in their late teens, met in their early 20s, married nearly at once, had children, then felt a responsibility to do something and so became Unitarian. Once I knew what a WASP was, I asked myself: was I one? I didn't feel like one. My parents, my two brothers, and I were the only people among grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins whose house wasn't decorated with crucifixes and hovering portraits of the Virgin Mary. These Catholics were, despite our secularism, our family.And the Italians counted more to me—because my mother's good-humored, generous parents, born in the same little town in Apulia, lived near us in Michigan, while my father's parents remained far away in California. If I was only a quarter English and a quarter Irish, surely I was more Italian than anything else. By the time I was a teenager, I felt grateful to be somehow associated with the deliciousness of pasta and the genius of Leonardo. My mother was a painter, and she declared that Italian painters were the best.But to say all this skirts the point that, like many adolescents, I assumed I was sui generis. I was always a writer and knew it, just as I knew I was no athlete. I didn't understand for a while that my feeling different was the natural alienation of the writerly type. We're often awkward and socially needy, and we can't wait to get away from people to write about it.Now that I am older than is remotely credible, now that I have confronted so many altered faces in the mirror, I understand that human beings are only a little self-made. I am a happenstance of a white female, mostly Italian/English/Irish, born in the middle of America in its heyday of power, in the middle of the 20th century. I'm a descendant of four grandparents, only one of whom finished high school; a descendant of two parents who achieved their BAs against considerable odds. My mother even earned an MA in middle age, despite chronic ill health that I've never had to face. In short, I'm a privileged accident.My parents, I've made clear but want to make clearer, had few advantages: my paternal grandfather's employment as a schoolteacher was so dicey that the family of seven moved from one Los Angeles-area home to another 18 times (sometimes at night, skipping out on the rent). My mother's parents, having fled extreme poverty in turn-of-the-century southern Italy, ran their own little independent grocery store in Lansing. As a girl, not yet in love with the Italian Renaissance, my mother was embarrassed that her parents spoke Italian, obviously a lower-class activity, at home. (That didn't prevent her from playing Verdi and Puccini at full volume the whole time I was growing up, nor did it prevent my older brother from becoming an opera singer. He set great store in being born on Enrico Caruso's birthday: that was the sort of thing a child in our family would know.) My Italian grandparents never stopped saying that we must make the most of our studies, and both of my parents—my father having benefited from the GI Bill—agreed. He became an ad copywriter, then “head of creative”; in time he founded an advertising agency of his own. Theirs was a generation that actually got ahead, became far more prosperous than their own parents.And in my era, a woman might achieve not just prosperity but something like liberty. Although I lacked a religious background, I was spared the religious strictures that can hobble lives, especially those of girls. In the 1970s at Harvard, I signed up for a course called “The Bible in English Literature” that reshaped my brain. It was taught by none other than the great critic Northrop Frye, whom I'd never heard of. The Bible led me to Milton, Milton led me back to the Bible. And studying Italian, at last, led me to Dante. I was largely already shaped by circumstances into the person I was—but I'd been shaped into a person who had the agency to make choices. Wouldn't Milton agree? Having entered college, and adulthood, just as women were beginning to assert their rights, I lived a life that wasn't spared sexist impediments—some of them self-imposed, I see now. Still, I had the luck to take a writing workshop with one of the great poets of my era, Elizabeth Bishop, who preferred not to be thought of as a woman poet.And I was lucky not least because my native tongue is English, where I found roots from other languages that invited wordplay and ambiguity, aspects of literature I prized. After college, I was admitted to the University of Cambridge to “read English” for a two-year degree. I joined a men's college choir that had put out a call for women sopranos (not enough little boys available), and I absorbed the liturgy of the Church of England—which moved me more than I wanted to admit. Was that me singing assent to “Oh Lord, save the Queen”? It was in Cambridge, studying Chaucer, George Herbert, Yeats, that I came to revel in feeling English and Irish. From England I took my first of uncountable trips to Italy—this precious time, with my sickly but determined mother. Dazzled by Venice and Florence, we then took several long, rattletrap trains south to her parents’ hometown, Castellaneta. There we were hosted extravagantly by cousins descended from the few relatives who hadn't emigrated. My schoolbook Italian, and my mother's unwitting detours into the southern dialect she'd grown up hearing in Lansing, were both met with wild praise. The first poem in my first book was to be entitled “For an Italian Cousin,” and more recent poems have alluded to the Castellaneta clan; but there's always—as I'm finding this moment—too much to say.And now it's a dozen years ago, more, that my older daughter, Emily, and I took a brief course together at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. Afterward, we boarded a bus to Galway and then a ferry to Inishmore, in the Aran Islands. We rented bicycles and spent a day tooling along paths bordered by centuries-old stone walls. Such health, such freedom! What Emily and I had been born to, it occurred to me, was the right to ride a bicycle. My mother always complained that her Italian father, whom she otherwise adored, wouldn't give her a bicycle like her younger brother because she was a girl.The following three poems are by Featured Poet Mary Jo Salter.At the end of the documentaryin which two Frenchmen—one writer, one photographer,each of them well-regardedin the distant, overpeopled worldof galleries and book tours—have spent uncounted subzero hoursin the mountains of Tibetand among a few Tibetanswho sometimes come into the framedespite the lion's shareof film time for the lonely pairof backpacking explorers trekkingon stippled outcrops of rock,picking their wayin snow-feathered airacross flats of ice,squinting through wool-wrapped telescopes,pitching camp, eating vacuum-packedmeals warmed up by karate chop,then rigging their own videocamera to run nonstopin their sleep through an eye-shapedslit in the tentin case some day-shy animaldrops by (as now and then one does,pupils eerily hollowed outby the night camera light),and again breaking camp,waking next time in a metal hutto follow the roaming, rug-like yakswith horns like bicycle handlebars,or antelopes with straight horns as thinas twinned antennae,and while watching them,whispering philosophicallybehind a ridgeserving as their makeshift blindthat this whole extreme experiencehas not been abouttheir own ambitions, has not beenonly about their seeing othercreatures, but also about beingseen (though often unaware)by creatures for whomthe hardly-ever-spotted humanmust be bizarre as the bharal(blue sheep-goat) is to us;and in extolling“the art of patience”they have just arrivedat a consensusthat it would strangely be OKif they never happenedupon the oneliving trophy they most desirewhen the two men finally getwhat they've come so far for,as unlikely as Godot:the magnificent snow leopard.And indeed they came already knowingthis is what Peter Matthiessennever saw in Tibet, yetfound here fifty years ago,summing up his book'swisdom by that paradox.Solitary, in silhouettehigh on a sun-blocking cliff,regal, tall as myth made real,she is the object of their questand somewhere along the waybecame mine, butstubbornly I have beentoo human; I'm both enthralledand detached enough to comprehendI can barely standanother minutestranded in the grandeur of nowhereand here's the other thing: I've beentransfixed for nearlytwo hours every time the stubbledmovie star faceof the marveling photographerappears in superlative resolution(every pore, every faintcrow's foot recorded lovingly)and when the beast arrives as herselfbut also as removed, improved,enlargeable in his viewfinder,I'm seized with wonderat how instantly the leopard movesMunier to weepa single crystal,which on falling has frozento his right upper eyelid.I doubt he can feel itbut I can; unableto wipe it awayor to offer anyone anything,I think of the lost years I was youngand life was for wasting:liking myselfto look in mirrors,I'd go into a shop withalmost no moneyand buy, say, imitation diamondsto glint from the holesin my ears.Daily, with the rising of the sun,I reach for my phone to scan the news, and it'salways the first thing I say: We're done.The fires, the droughts, the icecaps warmed to runlike a bitter ice cream cone, the selfish twitsdaily, with the rising of the sun,tweeting their rights while children die and gunsales climb, and ancient Congress sitson its finger-pointing hands and sighs We're done . . . It is finished, Jesus said, but then the Sonof God heads for Heaven. Here, opinion splitsdaily, with the rising of the sunon the Japanese flag an emblem of the oneatom or two that made them call it quits,whether by building bombs like that we're done.When it comes to gratitude, they sure have none,the machines we taught to teach their bytes and bitsdaily, with the rising of the sun,to sink us faster. Think of it: at Verdun,at Carthage, Gettysburg, and Austerlitz,when people at their limits cried We're donea battle lost at least meant people won.I'm going down with poems. As my witsdaily, with the rising of the sun,decline, I still say We're done, we're done.Dozing, twitching to untellable dreamsof raising your mouth to your mother's breastor maybe of earlier liquid long months flailingin the womb, finally settlinghead-down for a while,you don't often show your eyes, born baby blue.Alertness catches you several times a dayby our measure, moments we seize uponwith both hands at the backof your funnily slumpy neckto look into you like a pool of dark blue water.Ink blue: that's their color on day seven,inky irises thinking of turning brown,much the way your gingerhead-fuzz ponders blondness.Change is coming. But oh the stilled attentionwhen a grown-up thumb the very length of the soleof your foot gently strokes it; or two thumbs,one for each sole: your eyescould hardly be wideras they say to us What is this? What, new kindsof pleasure?—which is, we see, preciselywhat you supply by means of that blissed-out gaze,even though you are notat all our first babyand once, in some unremembered time, we were you.Newness arrives as if there's neverbeen anything new before: that's what weare startled to gain again, the dozed-off gift you wake us up for.