Back to the Beginning

 Judy Kronenfeld


 

Surviving the Academic Teaching of Literature, and Discovering Writing Poetry Again in the early 1980s.

By Judy Kronenfeld


I was interested in writing from the time I was a child, living with my immigrant parents in the Bronx of Jewish, Irish and Italian relative newcomers to America. I kept an intermittent diary. Creative writing was occasionally “taught” in elementary school and junior high, leaning towards the two pretty adjectives before the noun doctrine (“fluffy pink clouds,” etc.), and I enjoyed it, if not entirely subscribing to its aesthetic. I wrote Shakespearian sonnets in high school under the guidance of a delightful and less doctrinaire English teacher at my Manhattan high school. I was on the staff of the school newspaper. I published poems frequently in my high school literary magazine. But, as I explain much more fully in my recently published memoir-in-essays-and-poems, Apartness (Inlandia Books, 2025), my poetry-writing went on a prolonged hiatus in college and graduate school, and for almost a decade afterwards, until, for a complex of reasons, I started again, thankfully, in the early 80s. 

One reason for the hiatus was surely that I had moved from the working class/lower middle class urban culture of my childhood to an elite Ivy college, Smith (that high school teacher whom I adored, was one of a handful of Black students at Smith in the 40s and she wanted me to go there, so, of course, I applied). I wasn’t entirely comfortable at Smith, although I did well; a large proportion of the women students came from much wealthier backgrounds and had professional parents of one sort or another. Another important reason was that the manner in which literature and poetry were taught, in the heyday of the New Criticism, seemed to value the cold and impersonal—poems that were written out of the desire to create a perfect artifact, rather than to express the complex and unruly truths of one’s experience. And besides, there were so few poems by women even mentioned—certainly not by first generation, minority women like myself. 

By the time I was in graduate school in English, and married to my Anthropology-student husband, also in grad school, not writing poetry had become a habit. And the historical, academic approach to literature, though captivating in many ways for me (and a balance to my text-centered college education in English), was even less likely to inspire poetry-writing than the New Criticism. In any case, it occupied all my neurons. The 70s were a decade of writing articles published in various academic journals, articles often trying to combine close textual reading with historical and cultural understandings and to ask questions about how we read and “do” criticism. They were also the decade in which our son and daughter were born, and of teaching literature at several different colleges, in non-permanent positions, trying to make our two-career academic family (my husband had a tenure-track appointment in Anthropology at UC Riverside) work out in California. Until, finally, super-frustrated, I interviewed nationally, and got a tenure-track job at Purdue in Indiana; this was after a woman in the English department, concerned with affirmative action, put my application back at #1, where it had originally been placed. The almost entirely male English faculty had apparently moved it much lower down on the list—because they were concerned about hiring a married woman with children, and one from California, yet! My husband took a leave at a precarious time (he was about to be up for tenure), and off we went. But, after a year there, and no appropriate positions showing up for him, he had to go back to California. Should I stay with the kids in West Lafayette? Should we separate the kids, send one back with him, while I kept the other? None of that seemed appealing. I resigned, fulfilling the expectations of the largely male faculty. It was an awful moment all around.
 
After I recovered from that moment (it took a while), I took the first baby steps toward writing a rather complex book of criticism that would eventually be published by Duke U.P.—King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Relation of Religion and Resistance (1998) and went back to teaching literature at UCR and UC-Irvine, when temporary positions were available. That critical book was my way of ultimately bidding farewell to criticism, giving that farewell all I had; I had many years to think about the way historicisms “old” and “new” could oversimplify literature and its relation to the culture and language from which it came. At the same time I was participating in an informal poetry-writing workshop at UCR open to the public and containing all levels of poets—which turned out to be a way to both write poetry and to practice the teaching of poetry-writing. Having been observed by faculty members who occasionally participated in this public workshop, I was invited to teach as a Lecturer in the then very limited Creative Writing Program, which eventually burgeoned into a full-fledged Department with a major; I taught from spring quarter 1984 (with the exception of five quarters in the second half of the 80s, when I still taught literature elsewhere) until I retired in 2009. 
To some degree, I think I taught myself how to write poetry by teaching it.  I read contemporary poets voraciously. “A Parent” was the second poem I published in a literary magazine, Blue Unicorn, in June, 1983, other than a handful I had previously placed in the UCR campus literary magazine, Mosaic. (Blue Unicorn is quite unusual; it has been published since 1977, and digital or print copies of all its issues are still available for purchase!) “A Parent” also appeared in my now long out of print first book, Shadow of Wings (Chagrin Falls, OH: Bellflower Press, 1991), as did all the poems I’m including here. 

A Parent

Running from the terrors of the unnamed dark
my child, raising the alarm, Nightmare!
climbs into my bed, as I once climbed
into my parents,’ nosing into 
the burrow warmth of their bodies, of their
breaths and armpits, rank and sweet in sleep.

His memory is so fine for the details
summoned by my cajoling words. The beast
that sat on him moves its great limbs and
lumbers off. But in the inner spaces 
of those names, so drowsy, resolute, and
arbitrary, I hear its shallow breath.

The doors, the hall, resume their usual shapes,
the moon from his room's window's just a moon.
When pulled back into sleep, I dream his dream.

The third poem I placed in a literary magazine was “The Husband’s Moment,” published in The Third Eye in 1984 (and that magazine, out of Buffalo, is now defunct). 

The Husband's Moment

Tenderness comes on you like a shaft of light
you walk through, accidental as windfall
apples--as if one you've been eyeing
has fallen from the tree, though they all
look the same to me, gifts I never
gave. Now you've taken it,
now you look down, smiling.
You can barely speak. You lift your face;
it strains with something that crowds
your lips and won't come out. It billows up
between us as you hug me, a big
awkward thing like a baby, grabbing
at his embracing parents' knees,
and I want to help you get it out,
or push it away, I'm not sure which.
But it's as private as beatitude,
and I stand in an unlit corner.
So I hug you
carefully, as if you were huge
in pregnancy, and I wait
for the light to pass over,
as sleepless children watch
the beams of passing cars rotate
and veer off, like blades
of great fans, turned
by a nameless wind,
on the ceilings of their rooms.

“My Immigrant Mother Transplanted” was the 12th poem I published in a literary magazine other than UCR’s Mosaic (after a run of publications in Blue Unicorn, Hiram Poetry Review, Negative Capability and other magazines in 1984-85 that were very encouraging). It appeared in the Spring issue of Shirim: A Jewish Poetry Journal, in 1986. Shirim is still publishing in print. I can remember taking an early version of this poem to the first private poetry group I belonged to, and how thrilled I was that it really seemed to reach my poetry-writing friends.

My Immigrant Mother Transplanted

She always seemed at home
in the city. Pushcarts bloomed
in the alleys, black flakes
spiraled down from chimneys
eloquently as snow. She waded
fearlessly into the litter
of subway toilets, she shooed it away
like a mongrel; out of her purse
came ready Kleenex
and consecration of the seat
She watched the seasons
on a single fenced tree.

Now we take her to the Sierras,
offer her nature close up.
On the way, she praises mountains,
Tyrolean forests,
where flowers grow at regular intervals,
and the grass is as clean
as the sidewalks of Salt Lake.
She sniffs the idea of the air
in the air-conditioned car.
When we stop she takes a polite breath,
Ah mountain air—refreshing.
And when we suggest the quarter-mile stroll,
easy, pine-forested, cool,
she walks quickly,
as she used to in dark alleys,
pulling her shawl around her,
in the yellow dust of pines.

Not a poem I would have been comfortable submitting to the snooty poetry magazine at Smith back in my super class-conscious days!

When I look back on these early poems, I sometimes feel I had such a large store of images to work with, images from my earlier life just waiting to occur to me, to be used. I sometimes feel jealous of my younger self! One of the reasons I have loved writing ekphrastic poems in recent years is that looking at paintings or photos can provide a new store of imagery, or evoke surprising memories with their own store of sensory appeal.