Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Last week’s Word Cloud was about Tracy K. Smith, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, and a previous winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. This year’s Pulitzer Prize in Poetry winner, Frank Bidart, was also mentioned.

Sadly, Frank Bidart is proof that it is entirely possible in the U.S. to be honored with over a dozen major poetry awards, from the Bollingen Prize to the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Awards, and still be unknown to almost all of your fellow Americans.

Frank Bidart (1939 – ) was born in Bakersfield, California, and had dreams of being an actor or director. But as an undergraduate at the University of California-Riverside, he read Ezra Pound’s Cantos. In a 1983 interview, he explains how the Cantos changed his view of poetry: “They were tremendously liberating in the way that they say that anything can be gotten into a poem, that it doesn’t have to change its essential identity to enter the poem — if you can create a structure that is large enough or strong enough, anything can retain its own identity and find its place there.”  From UC-Riverside, he went to Harvard, but struggled with classes, and wrote reams of poetry he recalls as “terrible . . . simple-minded and banal.” But he also studied with Robert Lowell,  Elizabeth Bishop, and beginning in 1962, with Reuben Brower.

In 1972, he became an English professor at Wellesley College, and also taught at Brandeis.  He submitted his work to Richard Howard, the editor of a poetry series at the small independent publishing house, G. Braziller. Braziller released his first book, Golden State, in 1973.  By this time, he was working on subjects that were far from simple-minded and banal, including monologues written in the voices of difficult and disturbing characters, which are now his best-known poems.

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His second collection, The Book of the Body, has several characters struggling to overcome physical or emotional adversity, including an amputee, and the woman in this poem. “Ellen West” was the name given to his anorexic patient by Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger in “Der Fall Ellen West” translated by Werner M. Mendel and Joseph Lyons in 1958. This is the first section of Frank Bidart’s lengthy poem, which alternates between her thoughts and comments, and the doctor’s notes.

Ellen West

I love sweets,—
. . . . . . . . . . . . heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream …

But my true self
is thin, all profile

and effortless gestures, the sort of blond
elegant girl whose
body is the image of her soul.

—My doctors tell me I must give up
this ideal;
. . . . . . . . . . . but I
WILL NOT … cannot.

Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.”

But he is a fool. He married
meat, and thought it was a wife.

.            .            .

Why am I a girl?

I ask my doctors, and they tell me they
don’t know, that it is just “given.”

But it has such
implications—;
. . . . . . . . . . . . and sometimes,
I even feel like a girl.

.            .            .

Now, at the beginning of Ellen’s thirty-second year, her physical condition has deteriorated still further. Her use of laxatives increases beyond measure. Every evening she takes sixty to seventy tablets of a laxative, with the result that she suffers tortured vomiting at night and violent diarrhea by day, often accompanied by a weakness of the heart. She has thinned down to a skeleton, and weighs only 92 pounds.

.            .            .

About five years ago, I was in a restaurant,
eating alone
. . . . . . . . . . . with a book. I was
not married, and often did that …

—I’d turn down
dinner invitations, so I could eat alone;

I’d allow myself two pieces of bread, with
butter, at the beginning, and three scoops of
vanilla ice cream, at the end,—

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . sitting there alone
with a book, both in the book
and out of it, waited on, idly
watching people,—

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . when an attractive young man
and woman, both elegantly dressed,
sat next to me.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . She was beautiful—;

with sharp, clear features, a good
bone structure—;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . if she took her make-up off
in front of you, rubbing cold cream
again and again across her skin, she still would be
beautiful—
. . . . . . . . more beautiful.

And he,—
. . . . . . I couldn’t remember when I had seen a man
so attractive. I didn’t know why. He was almost

a male version
. . . . . . . . . . . . of her,—

I had the sudden, mad notion that I
wanted to be his lover …

—Were they married?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . were they lovers?

They didn’t wear wedding rings.

Their behavior was circumspect. They discussed
politics. They didn’t touch …

—How could I discover?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .Then, when the first course
arrived, I noticed the way

each held his fork out for the other

to taste what he had ordered …

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  They did this
again and again, with pleased looks, indulgent
smiles, for each course,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  more than once for each dish—;
much too much for just friends …

—Their behavior somehow sickened me;

the way each gladly
put the food the other had offered into his mouth—;

I knew what they were. I knew they slept together.

An immense depression came over me …

—I knew I could never
with such ease allow another to put food into my mouth:

happily myself put food into another’s mouth—;

I knew that to become a wife I would have to give up my ideal.

excerpt from “Ellen West” from Golden State, © 1973 by Frank Bidart – G. Braziller

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