On Elysia Lucinda Smith’s Unruly and Robin Becker’s The Black Bear Inside Me

This May I turned 70. I spend my time in three communities—the two in SW Florida and in Massachusetts not over-55 age-restricted, but in fact made up mostly of retirees. The third is in Maine, the state with the oldest median age in the nation. Since I don’t teach at UMB anymore, I rely on poets like Elysia Lucinda Smith to bring me news of the rude-girl universe. My ear was trained in the 20th century, and I depend on books like Unruly to unlock the lingo of women like Smith in the 21st –and on small presses like BlazeVOX, self-described publisher of “weird little books.”

As it turns out, with a nod to Robert Hass, all the new language is still about loss: loss of innocence, loss of faith, a painful loss of trust. Bristling with wit and attitude, Unruly totes up the harms and betrayals that whittle females into women. They begin with family, extend to the social world of high school and college and into a young adulthood that Smith is still in the process of negotiating.

In “To Whom it may concern,” Smith tells her mother, “I’m fucking wasteful. I burn/candles on hot, summer days/because I want as much as possible.” From Luke’s lips this could read as a brag, but Smith knows that in Lucinda’s mouth it could be heard as a confession: “Did you expect me, Mother//to have a mouth like you too:/as prim as a hat pin?” When Smith comes out as a lesbian to her father, he’s disappointed he won’t “be a Pawpaw/and I reassure him that my uterus/hadn’t fallen out”—a conversation that figures being female=being a vessel (“Monologue”). In “It’s Actually an Art,” one of Smith’s raw poems about sexual assault, she writes, “Do you want/to be seen for this, as this?/You don’t. You really don’t.” The art of losing, intensified by that adjective “really,” edits the speaker from her own reality. The estrangement continues in “Richard Didn’t Fuck Me Without My Permission,” as she writes, “I hate the word ‘victim’ because/it implies I had something to do/with this and I didn’t. I left my body…/…./I hovered above.” Unruly’s emotional temperature is high, fueled by rage; and sex is the fuse to the book’s detonations.

But Smith also writes about its joys. In “Sex! Sex! Sex!” a summer day “resonates/between legs or cups a hand/to the softest parts of you/whispering want want want.” In the heat, methane exhaust becomes “two long fingers caressing/the arched back of a trash can.” After “eons” of conversation imploring a neighbor to recycle, through her “whispered please in boardrooms,” and with her lectures “through tumblers of whiskey…//We are all in this together!” Smith concludes in “I am Sexual,” “I am also very busy masturbating listening to the morning/blue jay calls and Folgers coffee/because I am again and again aroused/to be alive.”

Interspersed with sly poems on witchcraft and spells are pencil drawings, photographs, and prints by artists described as “riot girls across the country.” They don’t illustrate the poems but add contrapuntal voices to the frank, caustic humor and pathos joining forces in Smith’s work. In every sense, Unruly lives up to the mischief of its brilliant title.

Poets like Elysia Lucinda Smith have scores of foremothers, and one of them is Robin Becker. At a gathering for Alice James Book’s 40th anniversary, a poet mentioned that the press was among the first, in the 1970s, to publish openly gay poetry by openly gay poets. Ron Schreiber was one, and Robin Becker was another. Decades later, Becker’s poems are a powerful testament to a life in poetry, diving into wrecks and delights, honing her craft, and perfecting a voice that accommodates the intimate with the global. Her deft poems never put a foot wrong.

The Black Bear Inside Me, Becker’s sixth collection from the Pitt Poetry Series, is dedicated to the memory of her longtime friends Maxine and Victor Kumin; the rural terrain of many poems evokes the Kumins’ New Hampshire farm. Like Kumin, Becker has a knack for finding the astonishing in the daily, whether in a freshly-mown field (“Clearing”), a newborn’s “simple, oblong yawn” (“Moment of Amazement”), or two dogs with a single bowl (“Two Dogs, One Wise”). It’s the young, “gentle purebred” who allows the “damaged” rescue to lick his bowl, “listening//with his nose and tail to a distant/music the beloved carry inside them” as love, Becker suggests, becomes the mother of wisdom.

Turn any page and you’ll find a poem ending with sagacity and insight. “Whitetail Spring” begins with some natural history, noting that a doe “will abandon a newborn camouflaged//motionless in the dappled grass/if she detects a human scent.” Becker resists touching the fawn’s “fearless silky side” since “not yet imprinted on her mother,” the fawn “will sometimes follow any large creature.” The pastoral, reminiscent of Frost, becomes a parable, as Becker sees how quickly a “sun-flecked afternoon” has “grown dangerous with human desire.”

The speaker in the title poem is a sow bear who eludes all “who think they want to see//my three cubs someone [Becker?]/said she spotted” and “who take the path down/and up the mowing//with baskets on their arms.” There’s a primal story compressed in that image, and in the bear’s understanding that she will be hunted, though the hunters “know they need us/who are so like them,” and “…without us,//adapted to scarcity and woodland/loss, they’re going down.” The poem describes two endangered ecologies—a material world of streams and woodlands, and the secret psychic spaces they represent—equally at risk. It’s in these wild places that the “want want want” of “human desire” smolders and burns. In their new books Becker and Smith, in distinct styles, map the hidden brush fires surrounding us.