Lucie Brock-Broido, becoming her admirers

“He became his admirers,” wrote W. H. Auden in his elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” describing the day the Yeats died. Some part of Yeats, in other words, continued to exist so long as people admired—read, discussed, inspired others to read—his poems. 

Lucie Brock-Broido became her admirers on March 6, 2018. In her case, that group consisted mainly of fellow poets. Brock-Broido did not do the sorts of things that gain poets admirers among the large reading public that does not read much poetry. She did not write a novel, or a memoir, or essays for Harpersor the New York Review of Books; she did not take any conspicuous positions on public questions or serve as spokesperson for a cause; she did not even win a major award, although she was short-listed regularly. She devoted herself to writing poetry and to teaching (her students are an important sub-set of her admirers).

Devoted to the writing of poetry though she was, Brock-Broido was not prolific. She published four collections during her lifetime, just a fraction of the production of John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, or Jorie Graham. Those four books may nonetheless be enough to generate admiration for a long time to come. They contain hardly a poem—hardly a line—of less than the first intensity, and moreover they seem all by themselves to constitute a completed arc: the youthful  dazzle and confidence of A Hunger (1988), the flowering of mature ambition in The Master Letters (1995), the more difficult, more personal austerity of Trouble in Mind (2004), and finally Stay, Illusion (2013), a work of power and authority, though of a peculiar kind, the kind of power or authority that questions its own premises.

The title, itself suggestive of power and authority, comes from Hamlet. The imperative, spoken by Horatio to the departing ghost of Hamlet's father, both declares the ghost to be unreal and assumes it can be arrested by a command. But if the ghost is not real, how can it obey a command? Does it recognize any authority? Does it have power over even its own actions?

In the play, we soon learn that the ghost has commands of its own, acts that it desires to see performed. But it cannot perform them itself. It must rely on agents to act on its behalf, and moreover, it must rely on their love.  "If ever thou didst thy father love," the ghost tells Hamlet, "avenge his foul and most unnatural murder." The ghost has, as it were, become his admirers.

The ghost in this respect evokes poetry itself, somehow powerful even though, as Auden went on to remark in his Yeats elegy, it "makes nothing happen." Re-reading Stay, Illusion now, it seems  uncannily to be already addressing the poet's passing. Brock-Broido's poems were always aware of mortality, certainly, and the elegiac was one of her characteristic modes; what is new here is a sense of being at the bar of judgment. "Who was I--" one poem begins, a poem whose title, "Selected Poem," alludes to one way that poems find admirers (as the title of another, "Uncollected Poem," alludes to the phenomenon of a poet's admirers seeing into print work that the poet may not have wished to publish).

"I cringe to think I stood for nothing," we read in one poem. "For whom left am I first?" asks another. Charges are levelled; someone has failed to use to its fullest what she was given: "How dare you come home from your factory / Of autumns, your slaughterhouse, weathered /And incurious, with your hair bound / Loosely, not making use / Of every single part of the horse/ that was given you," we read in "Contributor's Note," and "Lucid Interval" chides, "Don't be so fanciful. If you'd add those mustard-family / vegetables to the pot roast / It would feed so many more"--as if Brock-Broido were telling herself that if she had been a little more down-to-earth, her work would have been read on Writers’ Almanac. Nonetheless, "Non-Fiction Poem" declares that the poet can take pride in her body of work: "Have I ever—even once—been disingenuous, not told you / Of the truth and nothing but."

As in Hamlet's most famous speech, the idea of an afterlife bobs up. "One thing. One thing. One thing. / Tell me there is / a meadow, afterward," one poem states, even while another suggests that what we have here should suffice: "My heart's desire would be only to desire, but not to grasp. / And not by yonder blessed celestial anything I swear." "Extreme Wisteria" is a kind of résumé for an unnamed "her" who, we are told, "Believed, despite all evidence, / In afterlife, looked helplessly for corroborating evidence of such." 

Brock-Broido now knows whatever there is to know about the general afterlife. About the more particular afterlife of a poet, that is in the custody of her admirers, a group any reader who genuinely cares for poetry should consider joining.