There is this deep tradition of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology running through American poetry. The project where a poet recognizes that an absolutely American scene can be drawn by just noticing the variety of personalities that fit. It celebrates individualism (which is supposedly what’s fundamentally American), and then it’s making this implicit statement about the pronoun “we” by twining together the collective narrative joining everyone. I was never that keen on the Masters, because reading it felt like a zany approach to sentimentalism. Like the poet kept trying to capture something different about each of these people, but the result was all these people merely celebrating what’s “different” about each of them. Like, for me, Masters’ book sounds more like a “this project would be so cool” without the poet acknowledging the formulas necessary to elaborate the project out.
That’s an inauspicious opening for reviewing Read’s book, But She Is Also Jane. Where Read casts a series of women to speak to what culture expects women to be doing with their lives. To be clear, by the second half of the book, whatever might have appeared analogous to Spoon River is more a participation in this long-standing trend in American poetry. Because Read isn’t capturing small town America, she is a woman in her middle age seeing the different versions of femininity. Who are these women in her life? What life did they lead, and what life can Read remember them having before they came to this moment together? It’s a project for understanding what femininity means. How does the cheerleader fit alongside the considerate math teacher fit alongside the aging woman whose private life feels distant from the feminine life she’d occupied. It’s like a long term meditation centered on a word like “frailty.” And when that meditation is related to women, it says something about humanity and age. And the set of qualities associated with that.
In the opening section, the poems are beholden to whatever truths might be held in those “frail” qualities. And also recognizing what seems unfair to presume about their connection to older women. Add to that that the poet herself, in her middle age, is finding a personal acquaintance to those qualities. And once the book has established these predictably conventional and surprisingly conventional versions of women, it shifts to the poet’s self-characterization. What roles does she feel she’s cast in now as, say, mother. Or female faculty member. What does her dream life, prompted by her concerns and life as a woman say about her. It’s like that moment in parents’ lives when they realize they occupy the role their parents occupied for themselves. And they think about what they thought of their parents as teenagers or children, and maybe that’s how their child thinks of them. What role does that occupy?
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.