In Praise of Joan Larkin
JOAN LARKIN Photo Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
The following is an edited version of the text of my introduction to a reading by Joan Larkin from Old Stranger, her new book of poems, as part of the Morningside Poetry Series at Suite Bar in New York City on October 20, 2024.
Almost a half-century ago, a poem by Joan Larkin led off the third issue of ENDYMION, a poetry journal published by Linda Stern and me. I won’t speak for Linda about our objectives, but I had felt immediately that Joan’s poem epitomized the kind of high lyricism we were looking for in contemporary poetry—an acute and natural musicality, a directness and intensity of statement, a sense of mystery, and an embodiment of the highest aspirations for poetry. The poem, called “Secret Song,” has lingered in my gray cells all these years.
Secret Song
How can I tell you I’ve been
stealing. Stole from you.
Hid memories in my skin
of what we did, we do.
Your mouth, my sibling mouth
were printing histories
of children without milk,
predictions of a drought
and long winters in exile—
my poems all the heat, my smile
a code for hurt, a lie
I told you, learning how to spy.
How can I tell you I’ve been
spying. Looked at you
as you lay sleeping, blue
jacket by my bed, sin
our dead religion—there’s no sin
but shame, shame, for shame
I touched you; from your skin
I stole my photo, papers, name.
That poem was published soon after in Joan’s first collection, Housework, by out & out books, a groundbreaking publisher she co-founded. out & out went on to publish chapbooks and broadsides by the likes of Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Marilyn Hacker.
Since then, through four other books, she has honed her poems to a concentrated brilliance. In a careful, persistent way, she has pried open the difficult, partly exposed secrets alluded to in “Secret Song” to reveal hard and elusive truths. They are the secrets of our origins, our histories, our identity. As she writes in “Restoration,” one of several fine ekphrastic poems in Old Stranger:
No artist
made me. No one sees me
but you who are broken
open, almost whole.
Remarkably, courageously naked, Joan’s poems enact a brokenness calling out to the brokenness in each of us.
It is a call that can seduce us with siren-like music. Listen to the soft, subtle rhymes, alliteration, and assonance of “The Turnaround,” a poem addressing an aged, severely compromised brother and describing his attempt to make his way through snow:
Brother,
I understand you now,
your cane stabbing the snow,
your lurch, your halt mid-hill,
your clenched monosyllable.
Each of those end-stopped lines calls for a pause, recalling in very physical terms how the brother lurches and halts. Joan’s control of the line often supplies her poems with a tense, poised quality followed by a release. It’s an effect that makes me think of Emily Dickinson’s famous lines:
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away –
Indeed, there are quite a few poems in this book that carry me away. “My Father’s Tie Rack,” for example, ravished me with its accumulation of metaphors for neckwear, a buildup of descriptive meaning that, strangely, reminded me of the multiple phrases George Herbert uses to describe prayer. Similarly, Joan evokes her father’s ties by comparing them with “tongues,” “witnesses waiting to be sworn,” “a silk body, a man’s plenty./A wild ache. A knot.”
There is also the shock of surprise when one discovers who or what the old stranger is in the title poem, an ars poetica that cuts deep with the sharpness of this poet’s art. (Spoiler alert: The old stranger is a knife.) And again: When I heard Joan read from the book at the Brooklyn Public Library, I can honestly say I was stunned by the grateful beauty of her poem, “White Pine.”
The last two lines of that poem are especially uplifting: “Death poem, wait. // Joan, keep walking.” It’s my pleasure to introduce Joan Larkin.