Valerie Trueblood is now a
writer, and she was one of B.’s students. Amy Vladeck and Riva Freifeld and
“Miss Kaplan,” Ellen Kaplan, were all also students whom B. appears to have
been thinking of. Whether they
approve of having been immortalized in a Dream Song as a subject of B.’s
ruminations—can’t say. Trueblood wrote and asked why she was so “honored” in
one of his poems, so there’s that. He responded that he had seven readers of
his poetry and was hoping she’d be number eight. Actually, he had been thinking
of her a lot. I guess that’s okay. Sure, I think about my students all the
time, and more often than not I care about them. We cultivate relationships of
a particular kind with them, after all, and they’re beautiful and kind and
smart, many of them, just the kinds of people anyone likes to be around anyway.
He wrote letters to these students. By all accounts he was a dynamic and
inspiring teacher, so sure, that’s probably it. Were they, are they, embarrassed
by this? I wonder. I wonder if I might be.
Knowing what we know of the poet,
I harbor creepy suspicions about what the significance of naming these women,
his students at the time, was all about. Maybe that’s not fair and I should
leave it at that. But the poem is not without its humor. The body is foul,
cried God. I don’t buy that myself, except that the body certainly does have the
potential to lead to trouble, and I think that’s the point. Alcoholism is lots
of things; one of them is a physical dependence. Sex is lots of things, not all
of it physical, but that’s where it begins, or ends, all right.
“For many years I hid it from him
successfully”—so, what is the antecedent of “it” here? It’s not clear. Is it
the body, or is it freedom of soul? Whichever it is, God has it, up in the “spiritual” of space. Why the emphasis on
the “ritual” there? It’s open-ended, but I can’t help but turn to thoughts of
sex and desire, the ritual aspect of it all, but up with God in airless space
where it doesn’t get any play.
I think the point is that, look,
his thoughts of these students probably are shading into a closeted lust that
he’s not above opening the door on. Older, more decrepit than he used to be,
God took away that freedom of body/soul that he once loved to exercise, to his
shame and discredit, but what of that? That’s just grist for the poetic mill. At
least he lets these women off the hook. If God had bound up his lusty
excursions, in other words, incapacitated them, then God’s “declaring war” on
these young women amounts to a roundabout and absolute testament to their—what?
Innocence, purity, chastity? Something like that. Nice girls, in other words.
They’re all still alive and working and writing, I think. Probably with a valuable
collection of complicated memories of a teacher not shy about letting his
wounded humanity show in his poems. That last line about Miss Trueblood, though:
God shouldn’t have demanded of her, or imposed upon her, the virtuousness she
exhibits. It’s an oblique expression of hopeless desire. The line between
artistic courage and shameless exhibitionism isn’t always fixed.
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