Marotta:
Sitting at the Back of the Class

Whatever dark spectacles are unfolding in the world right now, one salient fact remains: April is National Poetry Month and you’ll do yourself a favor if you find a way to mark it.

Poets are like those kids who sit at the back of the class and alternate between blurting out exactly what they think and craning their necks to look out the schoolroom window at all the bouncy life in the street. They’re the truth-tellers, poets are; the rebels even.

You may not realize this about them. You may think of them as a timid and retiring, like seemingly-shy little Emily Dickinson with her plaintive introductory lines, "This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me." Ah, but if anyone was a bold spirit, Emily was, as this letter attests that she wrote to someone about her church-going New England family: "They are religious." she wryly observed, "and address an Eclipse every morning whom they call their Father."

Well, Robert Shaw is another such bold spirit. Recent winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, he has produced a new collection, "Solving for X," whose cover shows a mosquito, nose down and legs splayed, superimposed on our alphabet’s most mysterious letter.

I was as much drawn by this illustration as I was by the title, with its evocation of Math class. For it is Algebra that has us solving for X in our lives; good old Algebra that teaches us by various intricate steps to scoot over to one side of the equation everything we do know, so that the one thing we don’t, isolated on its own side of the equals sign, is coaxed into revealing its nature.

It’s what Shaw does too: he gets at the true nature of things by so exactly observing what he sees and then remarking on it, sometimes with palpable wistfulness but always with humor.

As the cover art suggests, there’s a tribute to the season’s first mosquito, whose "punctual siphoning" announces summer’s start.

So too, there is the elegant poem of the book’s title, which looks at x figuratively, as x’s place in any equation, but literally too—as in the crossed laces of our very shoes.

One poem I liked especially pokes gentle fun at euphemism, that speech that "candies the landscape," and prompts the speaker’s neighbors to petition the town for a change in the "DEAD END" sign at the opening of their street. Now, "suddenly gentrified," it says "NO OUTLET," instead, a phrase the speaker finds "vastly more depressing," "summoning images of some regrettable intestinal condition, or endless Sundays with in-laws."

You laugh out loud, reading these, even as you picture the wicked fun the poet must have had in writing them.

But let the part stand for the whole. Here is one complete poem about a thunderstorm, just to give you a taste:

Cloud-curtains, when they cracked,

Paid heed to earthly laws:

The flashier the act,

The wilder the applause.

Maybe it was the wit in all the poet’s lines and maybe it was the music. But I pulled this slender volume from the bookstore shelf, slid to the floor, and read the whole thing then and there, before bringing it home to read again—all in effort to solve for the X’s in my own life.

You do the math too, and try being like the poets this month. Sit as far as you can from the teacher and see for yourself how the world looks through that nice wide window near the back.

Terry can be found at either www.terrymarotta.com or tmarrotta@
attbi.com, while "Solving For X," by Professor Robert Burns Shaw of Mt. Holyoke College, can be found at Amazon.com and in better bookstores everywhere.