A Note on Teresa White’s Gardenias for a Beast

Robert Bohm

 

When I think of poetry, I think of the unexpected.  Not unexpected as in the use of purposefully shocking imagery or soap-opera-ish surprise endings, but rather in the sense that the author is able to reveal, through her or his work, the mundane in such a way that the reader experiences it not as mundane but as something fresh seen for the first time. 

To say that poet Teresa White does this is an understatement.  Not only does she do it, she does it with less artifice and more transparency than many of those recognized academically as the nation’s leading poets. 

Ms. White is the real thing.  She has mastered the tactic of using the simplest language to evoke topics ranging from the brutal to the gentle to the ostensibly undramatic to the psychologically complex.  Her book, Gardenias for a Beast (Two Steps Publishing Co., Minnesota, 2007), is proof of this. 

White’s poem “Letter to a Loan Officer” is a case in point.  Its beginning,

Dear Mr. Simmons,
your rules are so strict,

is so casual, so without literary ploys, that it almost seems unmediated by any strong poetic values.  But this is far from the case, as the very next line --

we all have to cheat to survive

-- shows.  In context, this line, coming as it does on the heels of White’s apparently pedestrian opening, catches us off guard with its change of tone, a change which suggests the narrator possesses a more combative attitude than initially expected.  By introducing the idea that cheating is a necessary method of survival, and by doing this with a minimalist line of predominantly one-syllable words, White establishes two things simultaneously:  (1) no matter how simple her language, her simplicity is never simple and (2) she’s at home with nonconformist thinking. 

All this becomes clearer as the poem continues to evolve, telling the story (through the letter-writer’s voice) of the “guy across the street” who’s down on his luck but wants to start his own woodcarving business because he’s an excellent whittler, one who

can cut an eagle into wood

with talons so real,
he already knows
you won’t help him.

These are killer lines, all the more jarring because stated flatly, without fanfare.  Their implication -- i.e., that true talent/insight is intrinsically at odds with convention and therefore marginalizes the possessors of such characteristics -- moves the poem in a grim direction that depicts the stark contrast between the woodcarver’s focus and pent-up creativity on the one side and the forces that will crush him without a second thought on the other.

White’s narrator brings the letter to a close by stating -- not very hopefully -- that she’d like the loan officer to look favorably on the woodcarver’s plight: 

All he owns is that knife

and a mountain of oak
struggling to fly. 

The image of the hardwood forest waiting for the woodcarver to transform it into sculpted birds is, given the poem’s trajectory, a perfect image of lost potential, of creativity’s ultimate failure (in this instance) to transform a place of darkness (the forest) into a place of liberation.  The image also relates back to the eagle sculpted by the woodcarver at the poem’s beginning.  The fact that this eagle had “talons so real” doomed its creator to be looked upon suspiciously by the official who had control over his life.  Whatever those talons imply in the poem -- e.g., the sculptor’s inner rage, the intensity of the sculptor’s assessment of the real, the sculptor’s refusal to sentimentalize -- it turns the loan officer against him.  The woodcarver’s uncompromising commitment to his skills is more likely to result in ruin than liberation, the poem suggests. 

But with the author herself such ruin has been avoided, at least in part.  White’s  talent has found form in words that are now published in her second full-length book.  But as with her poems, there’s been nothing artificial or ostentatious about the book’s arrival.  Not a young poet, she’s been laboring in isolation for decades.  On the basis of the quality of the book’s poems, my guess is that this isolation has seasoned her, toughened her.  She obviously knows life, understands herself, and prefers not to posture.  Her poems give off the feel of having been constructed by someone who’s been around the block more than once.  Playing poker, finding a dead frog, the mundane moments of a happy marriage, being raped, a starving Sudanese family, gardening, feeling a breakdown coming on, going to the movies, war, there’s no subject from which White recoils -- she’s capable of writing about anything and does so with a spartan lyricism so pared down to the bone that it itself becomes part of her message, teaching us how vulnerable our quest for meaning is when we strip off whatever protective padding we favor and nakedly face the world. 

As I wrote above, Ms. White is the real thing.  Too bad that in America we spend so much time, in the arts as elsewhere, escaping from reality.  White is one of those poets who can help to bring us back.