In the Muddle of the Night (Arroyo Seco Press 2021)
By Betsy Mars and Alan Walowitz
Review by Sharon Waller Knutson
When Alan Walowitz told me he wrote a poetry book, “In the Muddle of the Night,“ with Betsy Mars, I thought no way would a collaboration between these two opposites work. Sure both are wonderful wacky writers in their own way but how can a dog grooming divorcee on the West Coast and a married college professor on the East Coast make this long distance dance work.
Somehow, they did. I was moved to tears and laughter as the two swapped stories about their lives in this entrancing and entertaining dance of life.
Since Alan is male, a professor and older, I thought he would take the lead but it is Betsy who wrote the title poem and her words begin each section. Perhaps Alan s being a gentleman and letting Betsy go first but it is clearly a collaboration of equals. The book opens with Betsy and Alan telling in their own words how the collaboration came about.
Betsy’s Introduction
When I first encountered Alan Walowitz and his particular brand of poetry (which I have come to refer to as "Alancholy"), I recognized a kind of kindred spirit.
As our conversation deepened and evolved, we began at times to respond to each other's preoccupations and poetry with poetry of our own. Sometimes we found that we had written to the same subject matter - a silver lining to our Silver Birch connection - sometimes unintentionally, and at times deliberately writing to the same prompts.
Our dialogue has been a great source of comfort, learning, and growth for me. Alan has been a true and consistent friend, and I am honored that he wants to be formally associated with me here.
Within this book you'll find our respective takes on loss, fear of abandonment, mortality, and other less humorous subjects. I hope you'll enjoy and be heartened in spite of that.
Alan’s Introduction
The name Betsy Mars, a talented poet, used to turn up from time to time on my social media. When I saw her on Facebook and she said she was from Willimantic, CT, where I lived for a very memorable and formative year as a young man, I was intrigued. I friended her because I wanted to talk some Willimantic-talk. Alas, she told me, she was born there, but moved away at age 1, upon her father’s next academic move, and knew nothing much of the former Thread Capital of the U.S.A.
We kept talking, anyway, and discovered there’s much more to friendship than having lived in the same bedraggled town at different times in our lives. Now, two and a half years later, Betsy and I are close friends. Though we’re 3000 miles away from each other, most days we manage to be in touch via email or Messenger, occasionally on the phone, and a couple of times in-person. We talk some poetry, and about our families, and our lives—a happy and meaningful curriculum, it turns out. And now this book. Sometimes social media gets something right.
I was mesmerized as they each write a poem about different topics revealing something about themselves.
Here’s some sample poems:
Wound
Parallax View
with a line from Emily Dickinson
Betsy
There is a crescent moon scar where my four-year-old toe slipped
into the too-wide gap in the stainless steel bars of the fan on the floor,
and the waning evidence
of a lack of parental vigilance
where the fleshy part below my thumb was pinched in the clothes wringer.
Before science and law dictated the safest width and height, prescribed helmets,
made us fear the light,
we basted our skin with baby oil, poured flat beer on our hair, skated without elbow pads, learned to flee or fight.
When first failed loves made their mark, I begged for second chances.
When my father left
the marriage, my mother, me, I left without a glance. Stoic, just like him, untouched—
as I remain: a not admitting
of the wound, the sun, that waxing stain.
A Surgery
with a line from Emily Dickinson
Alan
The doctor says, It’s nothing new—, happens all the time to guys like you— your insides leaking out
from a hole in the wall
you’ve built and built quite well to keep everyone away.
Maybe this the chance to be more yourself, good enough to see right through
for what you are or, if you’re lucky, who.
Or, find out how to be whole again
if the memory of that—your time in the garden— isn’t so dim, so faraway
or on the vine and dying.
How about, a not-admitting-of-the-wound, I say? That sounds more like me, my medical friend, grown so wide as a door falling inside:
something a real poet could write— and even a carpenter—or critic—
wouldn’t want to nail it down so tight, so firm.
How about I buy a patch instead
to hide the hole, sort of temporal, vague
to keep me moving through what’s to come in case there’s something a guy like me who thought himself just passing through, might stumble on and learn
and then—too late—decide he wants to stay?
Parental
Home Work
Betsy
I found my father in the kitchen most evenings, whistling When the Saints Go Marching In
or singing along with The Barber of Seville
at the top of his lungs,
shedding every bit of the serious academic he wore to work each day.
His menu rotation: stuffed peppers, marinated flank steak with a side of tomatoes dressed with basil and a drizzle of oil.
Pork chops and applesauce—
a kind of fuck you to his Kosher upbringing.
Spaghetti sauce he taught me:
three bay leaves, a couple of splashes of wine. The pasta had to be al dente,
and I grew, enlarged with the responsibility of testing the steaming strand.
Then the crockpot arrived, and with it, chicken cacciatore, tender and falling off the bone.
On weekend mornings it might be pancakes in the shape of my initials,
or the scrambled eggs he showed me
how to perfect, pushing in solids from the side, bringing the uncooked liquid to the heat.
My Mother in the Kitchen
Alan
Yeah, it was the ‘50s, but nobody exactly tied her in her apron to the stove,
though it might have appeared so to a passerby— the way sometimes she didn’t move much at all, leaning hard against the corner of the range
to become just another moving part in a self-propelling machine,
where she—and there wasn’t much of her— could reach any of the four burners
with a shake of paprika or toss in half a cube of bullion and a cup of water she might have earlier
fetched from the sink, just in case.
She didn’t need to taste to know. The same way one look at me—
a frequent and lone passerby waiting for dinner, but content enough watching her—
and she’d feel my head for fever
or accuse me, and rightfully, of taking change from her purse, or schlepping from the pot when her back wasn’t turned,
or asking, don’t you have more homework to do? There was something in the way the sauce bubbled, or the chicken didn’t sit right in the pan
or the rice wasn’t sticky enough—and we liked it that way— that spoke to her in ways that never made the recipe,
but for the one she always carried in her head.
Read more about Betsy on this site:
https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2023/06/
Read more about Alan on this site:
https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2023/06/storyteller-of-week_23.html
Buy the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Muddle-Night-Betsy-Mars/dp/B08XZM47GR
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