Barbara Louise Ungar

May 7, 2014

“Distracted Notes …” by Barbara Louise UngarPosted by

Barbara Louise Ungar

DISTRACTED NOTES ON BEING
A SINGLE GERIATRIC-MOTHER POET

An Essay

When I gave birth at 45, I discovered that 35 and above is deemed “Advanced Maternal Age,” so I coined a term for my slim but growing demographic: Geriatric Motherhood. And my marriage was on the skids.

I found that pregnancy, like impending death, which it resembles, concentrates the mind wonderfully. At least, internally. According to my OB, I was the most ecstatic pregnant woman in the world, and I have poems to prove it. I was on sabbatical, so out came (after the kid) my second book of poems, The Origin of the Milky Way, my baby book. I trained myself, while nursing, to write poems in my head; once my baby went down for a nap, I ran to the computer to get the poems down. The poems in this collection are mostly short, telegraphic, and baby-centric. Obsessed as I was, I learned to write a collection focused on one subject: motherhood. I had become a vessel, and the poems, like my son, came through me. When I gave birth, I felt helpless in the grip of a ferocious life force: a model for the ancient idea of possession by the muse.

When my son was still an infant, I could set him down and he’d stay put while I scribbled, but once he began to walk, at ten months (early), it was all over. I had no help, and it was all I could do to survive.

I was lucky enough to be on sabbatical while pregnant and on maternity leave for my son’s first year. Then I went back to work.

“How is it?” a friend asked.

“Impossible.”

And so it remains, nine years later. Single motherhood is impossible. Single working motherhood. Single, working, writing motherhood. Then there’s poe-biz: a fourth impossible.

As my marriage crumbled, I found my next subject, which led to Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life: divorce (and, of course, single motherhood). These poems were exorcism and catharsis. Life for me had been so bad in the marriage that it was far easier to be alone.

When visitation began, I had one and then two days a week without my son to try to concentrate on writing. To paraphrase Anne Lamott, “I used to think I couldn’t write with dirty dishes in the sink. Then I had a child. Now I could write with a corpse in the sink.” This quote is probably from Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, the best book about single motherhood I know, a book I loved even before I joined the ranks of motherhood, and singletude, but I don’t have time to look it up because I should be grading papers, and I only have a few hours before my son comes home from school. So, the choices are always writing, poe-biz, or life-plumbing (my catch-all phrase for dishes laundry cleaning mail email bills car and body maintenance recycling garbage yard work plunging toilet fixing furnace shopping cooking dishes laundry cleaning … ). Writing wins, almost every time.

But my son comes first. Always. Reflexively. I learned this shortly after giving birth: Walking down an icy sidewalk with my babe in his padded plastic basket (one of those snap-in car-carrier doodads), I slipped. As I went down, instead of my hands going out in front of me to break my fall as they always had, my entire body curled around my son in his NASA-grade carrier. I hit the ground on my side and back, my arms holding him high up off the pavement. I was stunned by the realization that there had been no choice: My very reflexes had been rewired. I’d protected him, rather than my own body, without a thought. I realized in that instant that I would throw myself in front of a car, bullet, madman, shark, raptor, zombie, to save him, and there wouldn’t even be a choice. Natural selection: Moms’ brains are rewired.

I read a study, “Joys of Motherhood Include a Rewired Brain” (probably in the Science Times, where I love to fish for poem ideas): Virgin rats took nearly five minutes to snag a cricket, while lactating mother rats nabbed the food in just 70 seconds.

How is writing a poem like snagging a cricket? You learn to write like a mother rat: Faster. Leaner. Meaner. Shorter. Fewer drafts. More focused on what really counts: more desperate. Fearless. Loving.

If I am lucky and get a poem, sometimes I’ll have a little time left over to send a few things out. More often, I’ll obsessively revise the poem. On unlucky days when I give up in despair, instead of sending poems out, more likely I’ll get caught up in

that tiny insane voluptuousness,
getting this done, finally finishing that.

—Theodor Storm, trans. Robert Bly, “At the Desk”

A tree fell in my yard. I need to help my son with his homework and schlep him to Hebrew school grocery shop return cellos exercise relax. Instead, I’m writing this.

Mornings are hardest. Getting us up, dressed, breakfasted, washed, combed, lunched, and ready for school (which usually involves my packing five, count ’em, five bags of stuff to get through our days), and out the door on time for work often involves a bit of roaring. Or whimpering. Once he’s gone, I’m madly scrambling, mopping up the milk I’ve spilled in my rush.

“It’s too hard.” But then I woman up. Help. It would be nice to have help.

A friend doing a performance piece once asked for someone to come up on stage to help her. I volunteered. I was asked to cry. I have no acting experience but, having read about The Method, simply repeated what I had been doing earlier, hunched on the toilet, sobbing and keening, “I can’t take it anymore, please, help, somebody please help me!” I was a great success. People thought I was making it up.

I do not mean to complain. We do not live under a tarp in a refugee camp. I did not have to walk across Cambodia pregnant, as one of my students did. Kvetch a little, yes. An Irish friend, a young, married professor of English, wrote me in rage after she had her son: She told me that working mothers are trapped—we have no time or energy to write about it, let alone organize to do anything about it—so no light escapes our black hole. Tillie Olsen’s classic Silences describes profoundly the ways that love can silence women, mothers in particular. I’ve recently discovered Sandra Tsing Loh’s “The Bitch Is Back” and Mother on Fire; they’re hysterical, but Sandra is fifteen years younger than I am, and she has a really nice husband who helps her. (Old, bad feminist joke: Men are good for two things: One is taking out the garbage, and I forget what the other one is.)

There are good reasons for menopause, too: You wouldn’t want to do what I do if you were one second older than I am. (I was definitely on my last egg.) I think about women having babies into their fifties or sixties, and I know they’re mad. But even younger women with good husbands, like my friend and Sandra Tsing Loh, are overwhelmed, and most of us just don’t have the wherewithal to tell anyone about it. So, thanks for asking, Rattle.

It’s a little easier now that my son is older: The TV, computer, Xbox, and reading give me a little breathing space. He can dress, feed, wash, and go to the bathroom himself. I don’t have to watch him every second. Often we sit side by side on the couch; I grade while he reads, draws, watches movies. I’ve seen (with half my brain) every Disney flick more times than is advisable, and they’ve infiltrated my poems (as in “Crueler than Disney” and “The Middle-Aged Mermaid”). Sometimes fairy tales (“The Miller’s Daughter”), cartoons (“Looney Tunes”), or funny things my kid says trigger poems as well (“Spell” and “Champagne and Pull-ups”).

Who knows what teenagerdom will bring. What poems of mayhem. Then, in eight short years, my son will be off to college, and I’ll have the house to myself. His bedroom will be my study. (I’m working now, as usual, at the dining room table with the computer in a corner and piles of papers everywhere. I never entertain.) I’ll be able to travel again, if I’m still alive and mobile. I’ll be able to give readings whenever I want, if anybody wants to hear me. Maybe I’ll finally get better at sending my work out. I’ll have all the time and quiet in the world. And, God, I will miss him.

Like a lump of clay on a potter’s wheel, I am centered by my love for my son, and every shape I make rises out of this.

—from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

Barbara Louise Ungar has published three books of poetry: Thrift, before motherhood; The Origin of the Milky Way, about motherhood; and Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life, about becoming a single mother. She is a professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, where she teaches literature and writing.
(www.pw.org/content/barbara_louise_ungar)

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May 6, 2014

“Dead Letters” by Barbara Louise UngarPosted by

Barbara Louise Ungar

DEAD LETTERS

I get letters for the dead. They blow
out of the mailbox and into the snow.

I find them encrusted in drifts
or rippled and faded in spring,

addressed to an old man
I loved. Phillip,

lover of horses, I’m sorry
she ploughed your garden under.

I would have tended it.
Every envelope with your name

I rip open (forbidden
and uncanny) I hope

bears the message
you are somewhere—

I would forward them.

—from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

[download audio]

__________

Barbara Louise Ungar: “I have published three books of poetry about motherhood and about becoming a single mother.” (webpage)

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March 30, 2011

CHARLOTTE BRONTË, YOU RUINED MY LIFE by Barbara Louise UngarPosted by

Review by Marcie Newton Charlotte Bronte, You Ruined My Life by Barbara Louise Ungar

CHARLOTTE BRONTË, YOU RUINED MY LIFE
by Barbara Louise Ungar

The Word Works
P. O. Box 42164,
Washington DC 20015
ISBN 978-0-915380-79-4
2011, 80 pp., $15.00
wordworksbooks.org

When I first picked up Barbara Ungar’s glorious book of poems, I asked myself, “What on earth did Charlotte do to ruin your life?” I soon found out―“Reader, I married him.” In this highly accessible book, Jane’s and the poet-heroine’s destinies interlock—experiences shared and sealed—and the nature of the situation is revealed: the doomed attachment to the “brooding” and “dark brute” of a man, a powerhouse that will chew you up and spit you out like a dog “that worries its bone.”

In Dante-esque fashion, I accompany the poet-heroine on her allegorical journey as we plunge into the depths of marital-hell, come up for air in an uncertain purgatory, and finally move toward a paradisial vision of love. From a variety of erudite perspectives that Ungar clothes in wit and a glittering array of poetic forms, we brave the dark storms of the divorce trajectory.

Thematically, what is particularly striking about these poems is the paradoxical relationship between imprisonment and freedom, motifs that Ungar expertly interweaves as she holds up the visionary torch for all women in their search for identity, love, and belonging. The book’s namesake poem, “Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life,” epitomizes the idea of a woman finding herself whipped up in smoldering flames one instant and simmering the next. It is an uncertain future the poet-heroine faces, governed by indecision and deception, which is poignantly driven by the prospect of freedom, conflicting with the need to covet adamantine chains of love that leave the heart torn:

               … Nearing fifty and divorce, I weep

as Orson Welles plays Rochester, those lines
I’d waited all my life to hear—

                                                    As if
I had a string under my left rib,
inextricably knotted to yours . . .

and if we had to part, that cord
would be snapt; and I should take to
bleeding inwardly.

I cannot help but notice in this heart-wrenching scene undertones of sardonic humor at the female plight, characteristic of Ungar’s style: The poet-heroine weeps at Welles’ masculine (but pathetic) act, and his heart-“string” manipulates her like a marionette, which offers the reader a unique and masterfully constructed juxtaposition of images that correspond to the poet-heroine’s conflict.

Triggered by homicidal wishes in “Why don’t they just drop dead,” which closes the first section, “Rosemary’s Divorce,” the poet-heroine feverishly plunges deeper into her own inferno in the mid-section “Ghost Bride,” with me in tow, heart pounding and fingers sweating. The poem “The Middle-Aged Mermaid” brings home the almost incurable drive towards self-deception, which is where the poet-heroine originally finds herself: “Beached here / dull as seaglass / I’m ground.” Washed-up on the cold stones of patriarchal mythology—psyche broken and battered—the poet-heroine doesn’t recognize “this hobbled creature” as she “limps down the marble stair at night / to soothe her bleeding soles in brine,” but she knows that “[o]ther women gave up / their tongues, their feet, their clits” and that they did so “for love / for love / always for love.”

Our poet-heroine is Jane, Bertha, Kathy, Lucretia, the Miller’s daughter; she is all women battered by love and its illusions, its social doctrines, and its patriarchal fairy-tale ideology. She is wrecked and feels cold in the harsh climate of the woman’s pitiful position, to then be imprisoned in “The Brank” with pinpoint historical accuracy:

A locking iron muzzle, metal mask, or cage,
hinged to enclose the head
  often of great weight …

                                      Some shaped like pigs’ heads
Some had asses’ ears
                                      and huge spectacles
                                                                                 Some,
a bell on a spring to draw jeers
                                                                Some, a chain—

Ungar’s recurring allusions to women brutally being bound correspond to the all too real atrocities and ongoing mutilations that women suffer in almost every culture. Ungar’s imaginative responses to these brutalities are intelligent, commanding, and electric as she faces the demon head-on, conjuring up her own mythical reality with an array of finely executed Dante-esque contrapasso punishments; these include a mighty force of tortured women on broomsticks, who reap their revenge as they “laugh at the little men / shrunken to worms / in our liver-spotted hands,” and zesty voodoo fantasies. In “Ghost Brides,” I am witness to murdered Chinese women who revisit their murderers (morbid events that symbolically relate to the Minghun tradition):

The brides lean in with ghastly lips,
devouring kisses, ride the men
relentlessly and laugh as hair and ribbons
of flesh peel off in foetid wind, come
in wave after wave of formaldehyde.

The men “lie paralyzed” by fear, and “in that dream-stupor where you need / to run but can’t move,” they can only “rise” to the occasion, “gibbering” as the murdered wives ride them, “panting / through their endless honeymoon.”

In the final section, “Mystical Therapy,” the poet-heroine lets go of these revenge fantasies and works on recovery, reaching a degree of self-realization about the dichotomous nature of her imprisonment in an uncertain reality. She oscillates between life and “chloroform” dreams to realize what Emily Brontë always knew and which summarizes the path this book has taken: “Only prison / makes you free, you whispered, / and I enlisted.” I am reminded of the tension between freedom and imprisonment, how it haunts our history, our dreams, indeed our very souls.

And yet there is hope and resolve—there is always hope in Ungar’s poetry, even in the darkest moments. To draw to a close what has been a magnificent phantasmagorical journey, Ungar eloquently brings this sense of hope to light in “Torch Song,” as she reflects upon how “I’ve been carrying a torch / for my self all these years / and didn’t know it.” She peers into her mind’s eye to find that she and Dante’s Beatrice are one and the same: a radiant, maternal, and loving guide. Our poet-heroine is a source of hope for all women who have been through hell and strive for that beautiful place of enlightenment: “Even if I never / see myself again, I can lie / back in the open palm of love.”

____________

Marcie Newton is currently a visiting professor in the English Dept. at The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY. She is also completing her doctorate at The University of Sheffield, entitled Paradoxical Notions of Transgressive Sexuality in the Modernist Autobiographical Novel. In her spare time, Marcie takes karate instruction and likes to hang out with her husband and two children. She can be contacted at: newtonm@nycap.rr.com.

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January 10, 2010

THE ORIGIN OF THE MILKY WAY by Barbara Louise UngarPosted by

Review by Michael MeyerhoferBarbara Louise Ungar

THE ORIGIN OF THE MILKY WAY
by Barbara Louise Ungar

Gival Press
PO Box 3812
Arlington, VA 22203
ISBN 978-1-928589-39-6
2007, 70 pp, $15.00
http://www.givalpress.com/

My apparent lack of a womb means I’ll likely never know what it’s like to bear a child (maybe not an altogether bad thing) but reading the lyrically-rich, often darkly witty poems of Barbara Louise Ungar’s The Origin of the Milky Way, I experienced that payoff of truly great poetry: identifying with feelings and experiences altogether different from one’s own. This book—Ungar’s second, and winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award—is a most welcome addition to the stage of modern verse.

The first poem, “Embryology,” begins with these beautifully reflective lines: “Could it just be hormones, / this euphoria / as if someone rubbed petals / of opium poppy all over…” Interestingly, and perhaps what I like best about Ungar’s poetry, is that this description might just as easily apply to other acts of creation—say, to writing a successful poem, an act which for Ungar seems as natural as childbirth.

What hooked me, though, was the poem, “Riddle,” in which Ungar reflects on her unborn son: “There’s a penis deep inside me, / getting bigger every day. / I’m growing balls / & big teats at once.” What’s great about this poem is that it disarms you with its quirky humor then delivers knockout lines like: “I’ve got a pair / of hearts…. One womb, one way / in & out—the hard strait / he’ll have to take.” In this relatively short poem, Ungar successfully shifts from the oddity of having another living being growing inside her to the literal and metaphorical agony of separation. I also love the use of the word strait with its connotations of vying elements, of earth and water as neighboring opposites.

The anxiety of mothers (especially expectant mothers) is surely something that men, let alone men without children, can never fully hope to understand. However, I was deeply moved by the dark humor and intense worry present in “Dream at Twenty-three Weeks.” In this poem, the narrator gives birth to “a talking frog” that falls apart despite the narrator’s best efforts to love and care for it, prompting the narrator to think in dream-state: “What a terrible mother I am.” This poem has its real world compliment in “Prepartum Blues,” which begins: “I miss you / and you’re not even born yet.”

Another admirable quality of this book is its stylistic variations. Too often, poets write poems that all look virtually identical on the page. Not so with Ungar. Some have the short, breathy lines reminiscent of the shorter works of William Carlos Williams. Others (like “Blanche’s Tale”) have a longer, more narrative format that plays with dropped lines and italics. While this is chiefly a book about pregnancy and motherhood, there’s rich variation within that subject, as well. In “Prenatal Yoga,” the narrator ironically notes that the prenatal yoga teacher is the only woman in the room without two hearts. In “Transference,” Ungar writes of women who “…fall in love / with their obstetrician” whose “…small hands travel where no / others do… / while your husband turns away.”

One of the best, most ingenious poems here is “Izaak Laughing,” written to the poet’s son (now a toddler). The poem details the horrors described in the daily newspaper then goes on to say:

You pull yesterday’s horrors from the rack,
shred them, stuff some in your mouth
and work like cud. You sit
so beautifully, upright and plumb,
smiling young Buddha
who eats all suffering.

Given that “Izaak” comes from the Hebrew word for laughter (a fact noted in the beginning of the poem), “Izaak Laughing” can be seen as the melding of at least two major world religions, not to mention the acknowledgement of world suffering and, on a more personal level, the narrator’s honest, deeply human need for consolation—a consolation that comes in the form of her child doing what children do best. The loving humor of this poem belies its underlying motif of redemption from destruction. Ungar is a poet who successfully navigates the provocative waters of honesty and emotion without giving in to cliché and over-sentimentality—something too many contemporary poets are afraid to even try.

Another favorite of mine, “Why There Aren’t More Poems About Toddlers,” humorously describes similar child-wrought havoc:

…while you shower
he microwaves potholders, salts the teapot,
peppers the sofa, pours milk on rugs;
because he’s magnetized by knives
scissors water & electricity.

What seems at first to be just a funny, anxiety-tinged poem about a mother trying to find time to write while simultaneously keeping her child from destroying the house and/or himself (a common experience, say my writer-friends with children) then takes this heart-wrenching turn:

…with luck, he will leave
for school and break your heart.
And still you’ll wonder, where
did it all go?

What’s interesting and masterful about this poem is not just its seamless emotional turns but how the pronoun in the last line can be applied equally to all manner of things, from the writer’s inspiration (and writing supplies) to the actual havoc wrought by the toddler, which the narrator might one day grow to miss.

Although the poems of The Origin of the Milky Way all center on a similar theme, this book is a melting pot (or is salad the new, prevailing metaphor these days?) of many different emotions and insights, a labor of love in the truest sense. I’m glad to recommend these lyrical brave, often witty narratives to everyone, and I count myself lucky to have this thoroughly dog-eared volume on my shelf.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books. His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals. He can be contacted at: mrmeyerhofer@bsu.edu.

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