Where She Always Was
by Frannie Lindsay
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Lindsay’s poems throw out just such life-lines: fine filaments meant to catch our emotions and bind them with hers. She asks for either truth or tenderness.
Foreword by J. D. McClatchy:
Back when, we were told to trust the tale, not the teller. More recently, we were informed that there are no authors, only texts willed into being by social and political circumstances. I don’t think any passion- ate reader ever bought into that sort of poppycock. Not only does the writer–her ambitions, her background, her personality–fascinate us, but we know from experience what crucial perspectives onto her work this information offers us. There are two facts about Frannie Lindsay that I think are important to keep in mind as you read through this book: her age, and her music.
In a country where many poets have made belated debuts—Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens were near forty when their first books appeared—Lindsay is pushing things. She was born in 1949, and endured a familiar apprenticeship, graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in 1979, winning fellowships and going to writers’ colonies, publishing in the Right Magazines. Then, in 1991, she stopped. She didn’t just stop the hamster-wheel of a career, she stopped everything. Poets have, of course, stopped writing, some altogether, some for a decade or more, most famously Paul Valéry, before resuming again. And Lindsay too resumed. In 2001, poems began to occur to her, in a voice much different from that of her earlier work. When I asked her to describe the effect of this “second coming,” she was feisty in her response: “At middle age, I no longer have time to relax into easy poetry. I’d rather craft truth and wind up with a good knot in my shoulders.”
Notice the canniness when she says her aim is to craft truth, with its implication that the “truth” is made up. That attitude may also be an effect of age. As a poet, Lindsay was educated in a certain way: probably taught by the New Critical doctrines of the day to appreciate poetry’s textures and ironies. Having been grounded in a set of expectations, she next witnessed during the decades since the Sixties a pageant of personalities and styles flash and fade. She was old enough to be both surprised and unimpressed. Confessionalism’s lash, feminism’s earnest agendas, po-mo hijinks—they have come and gone, and left in their wake many ruined poets who had swallowed one party line or another. Lindsay wisely kept herself above—and then for a long while helplessly apart from—the fray. As a result, her poems are resolutely unfashionable, the way the best poems always are. They count lucidity and reserve among their virtues. They won’t be forced into areas of experience deliberately outré or manic. When she writes of love— which is to say, of soured chances and small pleasures–she writes with a wisdom that charges her metaphors:
What if I’d watched
each time you grew almost lost,
neither one of us trying?
The rain turning to snow
won’t tell
where the first flake forms
its way through the downpour, avoiding
shoulders, making its last
slow choices.
Another virtue of age is its composure, and Lindsay’s poems are alert as well to a rare sort of gentleness. It comes not from reticence but from understanding—as it was said of Tolstoy that he is the greatest of novelists because there was not a single human emotion that he did not know, understand, and sympathize with. Take her poem “Aging Nude.” She considers a model and an artist, but her little moral para- ble has everything to do with the flesh, with mortality and the feelings it forces. Her instructions to the painter end this way:
Think how little touches her
already: gazes brushing past her
like erasures. Don’t make her young.
Caress the stoop of shoulder, stomach,
breast. Be exact in this.
Or drape her, and in that
be tender.
She asks for either truth or tenderness. That tenderness does not consist in lying but in covering up. Who looks on her erases, who drapes her discloses. Throughout her book, Lindsay has written poems of remarkable sympathy—not identifying herself with old dog or dying parent, but keeping her distance, the better to take the measure of another creature. James Baldwin once remarked astutely on the way writing can—is meant to, really—connect us: “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or had ever been alive.” Lindsay’s poems throw out just such life-lines: fine filaments meant to catch our emotions and bind them with hers.
During the decade she abandoned the writing of poems—or rather, that it abandoned her—she returned to music. She had grown up in a musical family (her mother, a concert violinist, appears over and over again in this book), and turned, as she had when young, to the rigors of practice. She bought a grand piano, and before long was concertizing Mozart and Rachmaninoff were favorites. It is impossible, reading her poems, not to hear a musical hand at work. This is not just a matter of delicacy or virtuosity. It is also a matter of know- ing how to phrase a line. Dizzy Gillespie once noted that “there are only so many notes, and how you get from one to another is what makes a style.” Lindsay moves from detail to trope with utter poise, with an intuitive sense of what to sustain or emphasize. Her language is crisp. I can pick a stanza at random—
chafed wrists. In come the bits of foam
from his bitten and mended bed.
In twitch the ragged dreams
—and praise its plosive energy, its modulated vowels, its variety and élan.
What age and music both teach is patience. That is not the hall- mark of beginners, eager to make an impression. At its root, patience is an allowance—allowing things to happen, in their own shape, at their own pace; and allowing yourself to endure them, whether to see through them or to see them through. Where She Always Was allows us, in turn, the rare gratification of watching a poet—wonderfully accomplished, quietly persuasive—look back on a lifetime’s worth of emotions and calculate their bearing on the present. In her craft is the truth. In our admiration is the lesson, and in that lesson is the further joy both of language with the concentration of prayer and of prayer as, in George Herbert’s phrase, something understood.
J. D. McClatchy
