Poetry for Students

190 Poetry for Students

If you go south of Hollywood on LaBrea and

turn east on West 3rd Street, you will travel through

the heart of Hancock Park, an L.A. neighborhood

built in the 1920s to accommodate the needs of

non-Hollywood nabobs, like the Getty family. The

street passes by massive English Tudor mansions

with odd Spanish Colonial addenda, a beautiful golf

course and occasional LaLa Land eccentricities

(the mini-villa, for instance, with the 17 life-size

reproductions of Michelangelo’s David lining

the driveway). On this overcast May morning, the

jacaranda and magnolia trees are in full bloom

along the side streets.

Poet and novelist Carol Muske-Dukes lives in

the Windsor Square section of this neighborhood,

in a pied-a-terre that does not, as it happens, par-

ticularly allude to the reign of King Henry VIII or

the Spanish conquest of Granada. Her dogs clamor

at the gate when PW shows up, but become a

friendly welcoming committee when Muske-Dukes

appears.

This must be an eerie season for the writer. On

the bright side, her latest book, Life After Death

(Forecasts, Apr. 3), an elegantly written novel of

manners, will surely be well received this summer.

The story centers on a St. Paul, Minn., woman,

Boyd Schaeffer, whose 42-year-old husband, Rus-

sell, drops dead of a heart attack. She goes back

into medicine and starts an awkward romance with

a funeral home director. The book is full of mar-

velous throwaway pieces, prose poems of a sort.

Here’s Freddy, Boyd and Russell’s daughter, on the

playground with a book, after shooing away a play-

mate who smells:

Freddy returns to her consideration of the tree and

her letters, safe in her milieu. To her right, near the

aquarium, grim, asthmatic Felicia batters pegs into

holes, wheezing and grunting. They are all in place,

all the categories and predictable social types that

she will meet and remeet throughout her life. The

Aggressor throwing blocks, the Whiner sobbing in

his wet plast pants, the Seducers, he and she tossing

their curls, the Good Citizen preparing to report to

the Teacher.

Favorable criticism might cast a retrospective

glow of interest over Muske-Dukes’s two previous

novels, Dear Digby(Viking, 1989) and Saving St.

Germ(Viking, 1993), the last of which was a New

York TimesNotable Book of the year. Both were

published to critical acclaim, but neither achieved

more than modest popular success.

The dark side is hinted at in the novel’s dedi-

cation: “For David, who gave me constant love and

encouragement in writing this book since 1994 and

whom I lost on October 9, 2000.” “David” is David

Dukes, her husband, the actor who starred in tele-

vision (The Winds of War), theater (Bent) and film

(The First Deadly Sin). After Muske-Dukes had

completed the book, her husband unexpectedly suf-

fered a heart attack and died. It was a cruel coin-

cidence, an instance of what Thomas Hardy called

“satires of circumstance,” that Boyd’s fictional

trauma was visited on her author.

Muske-Dukes (who uses the simple “Muske”

for her poetry) has been a recognized figure in the

literary world since her first volume of poems,

Camouflage,came out from University of Pitts-

burgh Press in 1975. Since then her poetry has gar-

nered her major recognition in the poetry world and

the prizes and grants that go with it. She was at the

epicenter of the feminist surge in poetry in the ’70s

and ’80s. But her roots are in the tradition-bound

Great Plains.

Her grandfather was “a Separator Man / har-

vesting the wheat / in Wyndmere.” Wyndmere is a

town in North Dakota, where her mother’s family

still owns land. “Back in the Great Depression they

were land rich, but poor. My mother was a frus-

trated poet. She got a scholarship, but the family

couldn’t afford to have her go to college. So she

married my father and had a family, but she always

had a great store of poetry she’d memorized. I re-

member she would insert these asides into her bits,

like ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds—

put your dishes in the sink—admit impediments.’

I remember it would puzzle me coming upon these

poems and thinking, hey, where’s the part about

putting the dishes in the sink?”

More seriously, Muske-Dukes appreciates the

act of memorizing poetry, which used to be a stan-

dard element of the teaching curriculum, as a way

of “embodying the poem.” “Joseph Brodsky,” she

says, “who was teaching at Columbia when I was

also teaching there, used to have his graduate

Our Side

She was at the

epicenter of the feminist

surge in poetry in the ’70s

and ’80s. But her roots are

in the tradition-bound

Great Plains.”