Back in the 1970s, a singer named Phoebe Snow wrote and performed a song called “Poetry Man.” Appropriately enough, it hit the Billboard charts in April of 1975.
I say “appropriately” because April is National Poetry Month. It was established in 1966 by the Academy of American Poets to remind us all that “poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters.”
It certainly played an integral role in my life.
This is because my mother, Evelyn Ann (Cornell) Krause, was a poet. She also wrote music. And her litmus test — before she’d dare to submit them for approval by her peers — was having either my sister or me read them. Out loud. Word. For. Word.
That last sentence is seared into my consciousness. How many times did I start reading — slowly to make sure I enunciated — her latest poem. Even then, I’d invariably trip over a word, whereupon she’d stop me and make me start over.
I have inherited this habit. If my wife is around when I’ve finished writing something, I have her read it. Out loud. Word. For. Word. I’m surprised we’re still married.
My mother played the piano — pretty well, actually — and would sit there and come up with these songs. They were old-fashioned torch songs that would have fit in the early 1950s, pre-Elvis. I could easily hear Rosemary Clooney or the McGuire sisters singing them. Or Ella. That would have been a huge compliment to my mother if I told her she wrote a song that Ella could have sung. She loved Ella Fitzgerald.
Of course, I was too cool and too stupid back then to tell her that. We all evolve as we get older, and we all embrace what we shunned when we thought we were so cool. Now, at my age, I hear those songs rattling around my head and I think they’re pretty good.
She made sure I learned them all so I could play them on the piano and my sister could sing them. We always promised we’d make a recording of all her songs for her, but of course we never did. There was always something that got in the way. So, the only thing I have now to remember those songs is my memory, 10 arthritic fingers and an out-of-tune piano.
Maybe when I retire, I’ll commit them to a recording.
It’s the same with her poems. When she started getting prolific with them, I was in college, where irregular meters and metaphors filled my day. And, as anyone who studied this can tell you, metaphors in poems tend to be personal, and aren’t always easy to interpret.
My mother eschewed modern poetry. She wanted meter, she wanted rhyme, and she wanted to be understood. Not dissected.
I, being cool, dismissed them as grammar-school stuff. Certainly not serious. I was used to the complexities of Thomas, Coleridge and Yeats, not three verses of iambic pentameter about our dog knocking over another flower pot.
But a funny thing happened. I began competing with my mother. I’d write poems and I’d write songs, just to prove I could do it. Nothing special about it. Right?
Wrong. There’s an art to writing simple poems with meter and rhyme. My mother had the touch. She could find the right words that fit the meter without those awkward phrasings you read in some poems.
She joined the Massachusetts State Poetry Society, whose president, Jeanette Maes, lives in Lynn. Every month, she would submit a poem to the group. In turn, the poems would be sent, round robin, for peer review. It was structured so that when the package with all the poems came in the mail, you could read the criticisms that the other poets contributed.
Generally, my mother fared well among these poets. Her simple style didn’t fit some tastes, but even the ones who preferred more complexity came to accept her style and compliment her work.
To say I got a newfound respect of my mother’s poetry is an understatement. Today, I sit in awe of how much she produced. When she died seven years ago, my sister and my niece made a printout of her poems, and it’s committed to their hard drives. We chose to print one of them on the back of the prayer card at her funeral, and I recited another one when I gave her eulogy.
My mother always said that someday, when she was gone, I’d read those poems and play those songs with “Tears. In. Your. Eyes.”
I haven’t attempted that yet.
Steve Krause can be reached at [email protected].
