LONELY WOMEN MAKE GOOD LOVERS
by Keetje Kuipers
BOA Editions Ltd. 96 pages, $35.
AS THE VOICE of a poet, Keetje Kuipers appears, if not as multitudes, then as multiples. An alter ego is always hovering beside her. In “With Garbo in Palm Springs,” she and the Hollywood icon “sit on the edge of the bed/ watching my wife sleep … and my daughter, too.” But Garbo gets bored, so they “go outside to smoke/ her cigarettes, to lean our backs against the white/ adobe walls, and kiss for as long as it takes.” As long as it takes for what? We’ll never know because they run off and go for a swim in the nude. What do we make of this encounter? “If I say it’s a dream,” Kuipers tells us, “it will have no power. And if I say it’s real/ no one will ever believe me.” But what if we said it’s a poem. It would allow us to think of Garbo as a part of Kuiper’s self, a doppelganger perhaps, an alter ego whom she is learning to love as she loves her wife and daughter. It would allow us to think of experience in that in-between world that is the imagination.
Kuiper’s poems almost always address a person, but often the addressee is left unidentified. But even when she addresses her daughter or her wife, she is talking to the part of herself that remains elusive, alluring, and out of reach. “The Wound” is a fascinatingly elusive poem that begins in winter, when the dog swallowed a needle and a cedar was taken down. The poem then jumps to the time “When I went to the garden where the poet/ had drowned and asked the groundkeeper/ to show me the place—the exact place—/ he looked me in the eye and shook his head.” Kuiper’s notes at the back do not identify what’s going on. But the epigraph to “The Wound” is by Theodore Roethke, and Kuipers is visiting the site where Roethke died of a heart attack while swimming in a friend’s pool, a pool later filled in and transformed into a Zen rock garden, part of what now is Bloedel Reserve (which had been a private home in Roethke’s time).
The poem wants an exactitude that it cannot find. It then it turns to address her child as a way of grounding itself: “You, child, were learning the four phases of plant/ regeneration, and wanted to explain to me the way/ evergreens bud.” Addressing a child as “child’ is rather formal and literary, and it took me aback. But the child could easily be Kuipers herself. The poem ends: “You always hated it/ when I let you tell me something I already know.” The wound of the title appears to be the injury of silently accepting knowledge that one already knows. And so we return to the Roethke epigraph at the top of the poem where he urges poets to go to the depths, where they will discover something they didn’t know. Kuipers seems to be daring herself to avoid the obvious, to do the dangerous work involved in writing poetry. Readers think that poets understand their own poems, but often poets are as surprised as anyone by what comes out.
One more example: In “Spa Days,” Kuipers recalls the kind of care required for heterosexual life—the shaving, the moisturizing, the preparation of her body for the male gaze. “I didn’t hate those days, or the men I then took/ to bed, though I was always trying to fuck my way/ toward the woman I believed was hidden/ inside each of them.” The men she was attracted to were not simply males; there was a woman in them that she was hoping to bring to the surface. At the same time, whether she knew it or not, she was hoping to bring into being the woman she wanted all along. As she learns in “The Magician at the Woodpile”—where, after cremating all the “dicks” she ever met, “The dicks I took in my mouth. The dicks/ that didn’t ask permission. The dicks I loved/ and the dicks I never really knew”—the conflagration doesn’t end with punishment or suffering. She “expected to hear screams” coming from the blaze, but what she gets is warmth and a glow on “everything but my face/ suddenly in darkness like I’m performing a magic trick, like the magic trick is me.” She becomes the magician, and the magician brings Kuipers into being like a rabbit from a hat.
This is Keetje Kuipers’ fourth book of poetry. Let us hope that she continues to be a magician, maintaining the dialog between her various selves and her shifting worlds with such grace, complexity, and beauty.
______________________________________________________________
David Bergman is the poetry editor of this magazine.
