Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Susan Elizabeth Howe (1949 – ) uses her middle name attempting avoid being confused with the other poet named Susan Howe (1937 – ), who is better known, and being older, has won more awards. Having a fairly common name can be an advantage for a writer because readers know how to pronounce it, and the name seems familiar even the first time they see it. But it can also lead to endless confusion when a writer has the same or a very similar name to someone already known, especially in the same field.  When your name can also be confused with Elizabeth Howe (1635-1692), who was one of the women tried and executed during the Salem Witch Trials, it must really get frustrating.

So Susan Elizabeth Howe had both an advantage and a problem when she started publishing her work. The more established Susan Howe was born in Boston, while Susan Elizabeth Howe was born in Utah. They are very different poets. And of course Elizabeth Howe is long dead, and if she ever wrote poetry, none of it has survived.

Susan Elizabeth Howe described her childhood in a March 2018 Segullah interview:

“I was the oldest of eight children and had considerable responsibility in caring for my five brothers and two sisters. I thought of myself as the assistant parent; they thought of me as bossy (moi—bossy??). We lived in a rural area near what is now the Timpanogos Temple on an acre lot and learned to work raising apricots, peaches, apples, a big garden of beans, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and squash, not to mention two pigs a season, a calf, goats, and pigeons. I spent a lot of time outdoors and reveled in the beauty of the Wasatch Mountains above and Utah valley below us. That created my love of the natural world, often a subject of my poems. And I always read lots of books, although they were the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, not literary classics . . . I didn’t realize I wanted to be a writer until the end of my college days.”

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While they weren’t mentioned in her interview, this poem has details that make me think her family also tried raising turkeys.

“A Large, American Gallinaceous Bird”

(Merriam-Webster)

Think of the turkeys in the turkey sheds,
Barbie-dumb, by which I do not mean
silent.  Cacophony was invented
to describe their singing, ca-ca-ca-cophony,
which they warble daily at breakfast,
six a.m.

A turkey relishes
Its fellows, sits on their heads
In affection or terror, the two turkeys feelings,
Groupspeak blocking more complex thought.
But not pleasure – corns and oats in the mash,
sun at the water trough, an afternoon
bath of dust. Death is a confusion,
but so is the sky, which turns liquid and falls,
the splash on the head or wattle
a great surprise. Beaks open, they peer up
into wonder worth choking over.

Dim in the back of the brain
they remember a stir called flight,
but their breasts are too heavy,
their feathers unnaturally pale. And thin,
accounting for the pathetic display
of the males. No matter – no sex.
They come from the incubator, breeding
institutional. No wonder they trill
down answers to questions unasked, greet
guests with what sounds like the welcome
pitiful,  pitiful,  pitiful.

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