When my mother was in grammar school, she was expected to memorize poetry, and then to recite it in front of class and at school events.

Learning poems by heart was important to Mother. A bookish girl, the daughter of Italian immigrants, she discovered poetry in a paper mill village in far northern New York State, during the years that encompassed the latter part of The Great Depression and World War II. Young Loretta--she preferred "Lorrie"--became a champion reciter, although her secret dream was to be a movie star.

On finding herself a stay-at-home mom with five young children--here the scene shifts to the suburbia of the 1960s--reciting poetry to her brood became a means of entertainment and escape, not only for Mother but for us. The notion of poetry as an oral tradition, as a living performance, was as much a part of Mother's gift as the words themselves.

The poems that Mother knew were a mixture of works from the canon and poems that have slipped utterly out of time and fashion. She taught us "Casey at the Bat" complete with the pantomime of a baseball game. When she (and we) recited: "The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate / he pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate" we assumed the furious batter's stance, smacking our imaginary bats and glaring at the imaginary pitcher. We learned to change voices in the middle of a poem, too: Mother's "Strike one!" and "Strike two!" were rendered in perfect umpire-ese.

But Mother also excelled at the quieter poems (what some might call the "real" poems). I learned to hear the hush-hush rhythm of falling snow in Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," as well as the melancholy notes of what Mother and I agree to this day is a suicidal despair. "Whose woods these are, I think I know"--when I place the emphasis on "think," I bring the poem and myself to a new place.

And in Countee Cullen's "Incident," the poem that was my first lesson on racism, both poet and reciter assume the memory and voice of a child. The epithet on which the poem pivots--that terrible, irrevocable word, here sneered to one little boy from another--still stings.

Every day, lines from the poems that Mother taught me come into my head, unbidden. "I saw the whole of Baltimore / From May until December; / Of all the things that happened there / That's all that I remember." "The only other sound's the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake."

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks...

I had Mother in mind when I was writing the following poem from Under the Kaufmann's Clock:

The Death of Duse

The Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) was the most celebrated stage actress of her time, with the exception of Sarah Bernhardt, her great rival.

Blackened sills like swaths of crepe
on the windows of the Hotel Schenley.
This room is her final creation. Born
on an Italian train, and speeding in public
ever since. So much is provisional.

A coliseum looms across the street,
baseball park named for a general.
At her age, to consent to play America,
this frigid Pittsburgh, in cruelest April…

She will take all bows from bed.
White hair melts into rented pillows.
A crowd is gathering. On the table,
a closed book. Underneath, silver
oxygen tanks, lethal as bombs.

The stage swells with love, hate.
Sarah Bernhardt—swagger, dyed
red curls—cradles a lewd coffin
in those damned translucent arms.

D’Annunzio—traitor who swore
he adored them both—waves a script
she refuses to read, no matter
how he pleads. And poor Mattino,
her journalist—still so young.

She forgives him the death of their child.
But no tears for anyone.

She is on the other side of the curtain
watching the lights come up—
choked, choked with longing
for someone’s life to begin.
Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh

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