Ned Balbo’s Family Narrative — The David M. Katz Poetry Blog

(This essay also appears in the current issue of the Birmingham Poetry Review.)

As an undergraduate at Northwestern University in the late 1960s, I had the good luck to take a lecture course in modern American and British poetry taught by Richard Ellmann, the celebrated Joyce and Yeats biographer. Besides early exposure to the pantheon of poets who have long since exerted a powerful influence on my own work, the experience of writing its three required papers is what I remember most about the course.

From today’s perspective, the assignments can seem odd, especially coming from a scholar lauded for his work on poetic lives. For each paper, we were told to analyze a single poem: Yeats’s “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” Auden’s “Autumn Song” (“Now the leaves are falling fast”), and D. H. Lawrence’s “Piano.” The kicker — at first it felt like a strait jacket — was that we were forbidden to cite any information from outside the bounds of the poem itself. This meant that we could make no reference to literary, historical, political, or social science research. Absolutely no use of author biographies was allowed.

In retrospect, it’s clear that Ellmann’s idea for the assignments was based on New Criticism, the literary theory rooted in the discipline of close textual reading, which was still popular after its heyday in the 1950s. Often linked with what we may with hindsight call the Old Formalism, New Criticism forced its acolytes to analyze only the intrinsic elements of each poem by digging into such things as its rhetorical devices, prosody, and vocabulary. Restrictive as the method first seemed, writing those 5-page papers helped me learn how to read into the deep structure of a poem to gain access to its unique nature. It remains my primary approach to reading poetry.

Nevertheless, after reading 3 Nights of the Perseids and The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots, Ned Balbo’s fifth and sixth collections, I’m convinced that understanding the lives and evolving sensibilities of certain poets can add considerable depth and wisdom to the close reading of individual poems. Although Balbo’s prosodic and formal mastery enable him to rise to lyrical heights in individual poems, there’s a complex family narrative — call it a personal mythology — running through the entire body of work, starting with his first book, Galileo’s Banquet, that resonates powerfully from poem to poem as well as with the outside world.

Balbo’s finest lyrics contain vivid fragments of this overarching epic, which amounts to a lifelong quest for identity amid a tangle of secrets, half-truths, and outright fabrications stemming from his adoption. Born on New York’s Long Island to Elaine and Don, an unmarried couple, “Ned” (as I’ll call Balbo’s poetic alter-ego) is secretly adopted by Elaine’s much older half-sister, Elizabeth (“Betty”), and her husband, Carmine. Betty and Carmine “were the couple I knew as my parents till, at thirteen, at Don and Elaine’s urging, I was told of my adoption,” Balbo has written in Poets on Adoption, a blog.

While the poem “Elizabeth and Elaine” appeared long before the publication of the books under review, it provides a good introduction to the way autobiography functions in Balbo’s work. In this stunning sestina, the speaker—an adult version of the boy—recalls a poolside scene from childhood that suggests birth and revelation: “I shook off the drops, and looked for my mother.” The choice of the word “mother” as one of the repeating words required by the form sets up a verbal pattern that replicates the layered maternal ambiguities embedded in the poet’s family romance. To the six-year-old boy whose thoughts are being described by his adult self, there’s no doubt that the mother he’s looking for as he emerges from the water is Elizabeth. But another woman is also in the picture, dangling her feet in the pool. It will take seven years before the boy learns that the woman, Elizabeth’s much younger sister Elaine, is really his birth mother.

Tensions between the two women enter dimly into the boy’s awareness. “I’m his mother,” Elaine thinks to herself. “How could I give him away?” Perhaps overhearing Elaine’s whispered question to Elizabeth, “When will you tell him I’m his mother?” he bounces in the water, feeling himself to be “weightless in silence.” The images of Ned’s suspension — in the water, between the two mothers, and between the child who experiences and the adult who remembers — concretize the suspense. Although it will assume more mature guises in other poems—and one need not read the poet’s entire corpus to sense its narrative scope in discrete poems—a sense of displacement and an urge to find one’s true place in the world runs through the whole of Balbo’s native myth. Like Elpenor, the dead but unburied sailor Odysseus meets in Hades in the first of Pound’s Cantos, the hero of these poems often seems to be in a state of perpetually suspended animation — “A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.”

Like other displaced wanderers, Ned displays an outsider’s sharpness of observation. In the masterful “My Birth Father’s Mug Shot,” perhaps the strongest poem in 3 Nights of the Perseids, he recalls a sailing trip. Here the speaker addresses his birth father, rendering him in outsized, nautically heroic terms:

… a man too smart, too strong
to waste time looking back, your clear gaze trained
ahead beyond the mast toward some horizon
out of reach but always within sight

Taken out of context, however, the description deceives. Rather than an 18-year-old’s idealized view of a rarely seen father, it’s an insight into Don’s deluded self-regard, a dismantling of “the man / you thought you were.”

It seems that the man has had something of a checkered past. Perhaps researching his lineage as an adoptee might do, Ned, now an adult, unearths a jpeg of a mugshot of Don, who had been arrested years ago for an unknown crime, “probably/a DUI.” There’s a frisson of malice, even of revenge, in the poem, a dramatic monologue reminiscent of Poe. The speaker seems to savor the act of catching his subject unawares in a moment of weakness. (Balbo is, after all, the author of a previous book entitled The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems.) “I know that look: surprised, a little dazed,” the poem begins:

ashamed at being caught, transported here
against your will to face the camera’s shutter
for this female officer in blue
(or gray or khaki) calling out your name
as you recoil, suspended in the flash.

Subtly, gradually, the poet reveals Ned’s case against Don. There are more than hints of jealousy in the speaker’s voice as he recounts his experience as a summer employee at a branch of the auto radiator repair chain owned by Don, who, Midas-like, drives a gold Cadillac. Identifying Ned as an employee and not his son, “except to those who knew, or guessed, the truth,” Don kneels and talks gently to his acknowledged — and, unlike Ned, legitimate — younger sons, “the boys / born once our mother had become your wife.”

But there’s more serious evidence in the speaker’s brief against his birth father. In an apparent gesture of kindness, Don enables the out-of-work Carmine to set up a plumbing business on the premises of the auto shop, thereby sparing Carmine thousands of dollars in licensing and other fees. In an act of betrayal, however, Don tries to persuade Carmine to sign over his house in return for Don’s “investment” in the plumbing business. Carmine refuses, and Don lays him off “for good.” Not for nothing does the poem’s narrator leave Don’s mug shot dangling online, perhaps as an embarrassing payback for the man who “purged” his beloved adoptive father.

Dark as this part of the story is, light pours forth in The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots. Following 3 Nights of the Perseids — a veritable book of forms, including the Swinburnian cross-rhyme octave, chant royal, unrhymed rondeau redouble, dizain, and Berryman dream song, to name just a few — Cylburn is a breakthrough for Balbo, a blossoming of the poet’s essential content. Long associated with the New Formalists, he emerges with a freshness of tone in the newer book, in which overt formal virtuosity recedes in favor of a more spontaneous musicality and openness of emotion.

For example, after reading his poem “Moonglow,” I found myself exclaiming: “This book is so filled with feeling.” In its marriage of memory and music and motherhood, Balbo’s poem reminds me of Lawrence’s “Piano,” which I’d first read so long ago.

Both poems reveal music’s ability to pull the mind inexorably into the past. With remarkable economy, Lawrence’s plangent lyric shows the speed with which a song can spark a personal reminiscence, only to leave the speaker overwhelmed by a sense of loss: “I weep like a child for the past.” Beginning similarly at dusk, Balbo’s poem assumes a similar, but more benign, stance regarding what will become the recollection of a mother singing:

Outside at dusk, watching the full moon inch
beyond the treetops in a sky still blue,
I find myself appreciating speed,
time’s tidal passage leading back

Delicately managing the shift of his stanza from pentameter to tetrameter, Balbo likens the recursive movement of the soon-to-be waning moon to that of memory itself. By association, the poem moves on to “Moonglow,” a 1933 romantic popular tune sung by Betty to her adopted son when he was child. “You sang with so much feeling,” the speaker says of her.

In an extraordinary elegiac sonnet that merits full quotation here, the poet replies to the memory of her singing in a “reciprocal” voice:

For a Mother Born During the Great War

Too soon they leave us. But, in time, our dead,
lives measured by the anniversaries
we honor or forget, accept release
and offer it to us. One day, instead
of adding one more year to those they had,
wishing them back to life, we realize
the sum exceeds a lifetime; and we freeze
at what we’ve always known: life’s limited,
and less than what we’re owed, or think we’re owed.
I hear you sometimes — do you hear me, too?
— Voices reciprocal, lost time renewed
as if, still at the woods’ edge, out of view,
I heard you call at midday from the flood
of all that followed, and I answered you.

By linking Betty to the time of World War I, Balbo’s title shows that his personal myth chimes with a broader idea of history. Another poem, “Social Drinking by a Solitary Couple,” illuminates an entire era (the late 1960s) and social stratum (working-class suburbia) through specific patterns in the life of Betty and Carmine. In a manner reminiscent of Anthony Hecht’s panoramic blank-verse marriage narrative “The Short End” — but much more cheerfully — Balbo evokes the intimate complexities of the couple’s life together over the years via mention of the brand names typical of a particular time and place. While Carmine “seldom drank / hard liquor in the house,” he sometimes warms himself after shoveling snow in subzero weather by making use of “years of Christmas gifts — Canadian Club, Seagram’s, J & B.” Mowing the lawn on hot summer days, Carmine quaffs low-priced beer: “Schaefer or Rheingold foaming from the can / through churchkey holes like jack-o’-lantern eyes.” While Betty may scorn Carmine’s tipsy serenades during the week, on New Year’s Eve she’s willing to toast their life together with a gin highball.

In 3 Nights of the Perseids, especially, Balbo displays the ability and inclination to provide richly detailed verse time capsules of the eras he’s lived through, including mentions of album covers, political reports, photographs, and the like. Much of the book entertainingly contemplates the poet’s aligned interests in science fiction, space travel, and stars both astronomical and cultural. The title of the final poem in the book, “For the Voyagers,” alludes wittily to the Voyager space missions and not — as a reader might expect — to epic heroes, for example. Sometimes, the poet’s archaeological tendencies lead him to include light-verse exercises and other playful efforts, such as a poem based on the notion of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s book series, that distract the reader from the book’s more significant poems, such as “The Ghosts of Thunder Road” and “Full Circle.”

These two monologues probe deeply into the lives suggested in songs by Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell, respectively. Echoing the discomfort with family schisms expressed in Balbo’s directly autobiographical poems, the speaker in “The Ghosts of Thunder Road” finds flaws in the romantic mythology of a pop star’s disdain for settling down, “whatever the cost in lies or broken lives.” Similarly, the poet slips knowledgeably into the world-weary persona of Mitchell’s daughter, who, given up for adoption by the singer-songwriter as an infant, didn’t know the truth of her origins until decades later. “What doors would open?” the speaker asks resignedly after learning who her birth mother was. “Who would you be now?” When Ned Balbo’s poems resonate with his central myth, they pack an emotional potency and depth that’s rare among those of his contemporaries.