ABlog

I didn’t think I had to rush to read Bea Gates’s new poetry collection, Ten Minutes. After all, we’ve been friends for years, are in a poetry group together, and both teach in the Goddard MFA Writing Program. I was familiar with all of the poems, had seen many in earlier drafts, had heard most of them read publicly. When Bea sent me a copy, I admired its pleasingly offbeat shape (square, with a slim spine), beautifully subtle cover (a photograph of a bird on a snowy bough, framed and reframed in a way that suggests both the power of nature and its removal from our lives) and clean-as-a-whistle layout. I e-mailed congratulations and put it on The Pile of Unread Books for a few weeks.

One day recently, I picked it up on my way out of the house and read it on the Q train. I was amazed by how the arrangement of the book had become its own work of art, the contents of each separate piece refigured by its “conversation” with other pieces. The arrangement helped me understand the preoccupations of Bea’s work in a new and deeper way, particularly the theme of time suggested by the book’s title, taken from a poem about teaching poetry in a women’s prison. In that poem, “ten minutes” is the time it takes for everything to shift, for a narrow window of opportunity to slam shut, the sheer arbitrariness of an authoritarian system to reassert its death grip: the speaker, having arrived to share poetry with the incarcerated women, is summarily ejected due to some unexplained glitch in the system. The prison with its set procedures for lockdown is very real in the poem, but those “ten minutes” are also a figure for other windows slamming shut all over the world in the wake of 9/11—though the book’s opening with “Seeking Tenderness,” a daringly imaginative response to the homophobic lynching of Matthew Shepard, definitely establishes that the propensity for that denying violence has been with us a long time.

But perhaps I’m making the book sound programmatically political in a way that it isn’t: this book never separates out something called politics from all the rest of beautiful, suffering life. What touches and delights me most about seeing how Bea has placed the poems together is experiencing all the ways that she frames and reframes “history”—as something we are living through, that must be located in the now and in newsworthy events like the 2004 presidential election, but also as something deeply personal. There’s a radical democracy of both time and voice in her inclusion of a wonderful “found poem” from 19th century Maine, a letter to the editor of The Ellsworth American protesting against the planned building of a bridge on grounds of its effect on shipping; in the imagined voices of World War II sailors, among them an officer required to censor their letters home; in the contemporary vernacular voice of a long-lived New England woman: “I’m Muriel Stanhope/and I don’t mind being old.” And there’s the remembered youth of the poet-speaker in a series of prose poems that, more convincingly and vividly than any home movie, conjure the varieties of intimacy possible with a taciturn father, a brother who played “High Noon” with a catalogue-ordered “authentic Colt with the form-fit molded grip” and his sister as the fall guy. The book captures the eerie sense, strengthened in middle age, that the events of our early lives might have taken place a mere ten minutes ago. All of its voices, including those from last century and the one before that, are contemporary voices. I’m reminded of a line from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: “As long as you remember… then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.”

When I spoke to Bea about my delight in her choice and arrangement of poems, my feeling of understanding the work in a new way, she told me how carefully she’d done the arranging. “And I didn’t want any ‘relationship poems!’” she said when I asked about the fate of a particular piece I’d liked. (I know what she meant, but I had to smile--aren't they all “relationship poems"?) She was left with a bunch of excellent, finished poems that just didn’t quite belong in this particular volume. But isn’t that always the way, with poetry? The poem, as it grows, exacts the loving sacrifice of stellar lines and images that somehow didn’t contribute to the total effect.

Bea’s Ten Minutes is a whole, a meta-poem. To find out more (hint: ADD TO SHOPPING CART!) go to her blog at http://beatrixgates.blogspot.com.