Also a Poet

 

The first line of Also a Poet by Ada Calhoun is

My childhood home was a top-floor walk-up in Lower Manhattan.

If you are interested in poetry, Frank O'Hara, the Bohemian lifestyle of Greenwich village of the 1960s, then I recommend the book. 

One of the things I enjoy about Calhoun's book is that it is partly about coming to terms with childhood memories, but it is also about how she thinks about those memories very differently now that she is an adult. For example, here is a passage where she thinks about how different the lives of her mother and father were, despite the fact that they had many of the exact same experiences.

Listening to this call, which I am probably the only person to ever hear since it was recorded, I think of how reliant he’s always been on my mother. He was fifteen minutes from home but still had to call her. I can’t hear her end of the call, but I can imagine her reassuring him, calming him, encouraging him. 

Where would my father have been without her? She cooked his meals, raised his daughter, cleaned his house, kept their social calendar, and most years made more money than he did at the same time. She rearranged the furniture, set out flowers, rotated in holiday decorations. She did it all very well. The best hosts make everything, from the couch’s slipcovers to the meringue dessert, seem like no trouble at all. 

She’s always had a gift for painting, and sometimes she’d get out her basket of acrylic paints and cover trays, walls, and lampshades with intricate floral patterns. But no one ever took it seriously. Once when I encouraged her to make more space for herself in the apartment, she said she was fine with her little table by the window in the living room, where she also balanced their checkbook and paid their bills. 

Why was he still considered the head of the household? Why was he the genius who needed all that time and space? You don’t see many women baffled about why history lacks more women artists or novelists or stand-up comics. How dare anyone say that an entire group of people aren’t funny if for millennia they aren’t allowed to try writing jokes until they’ve done all your laundry, cooked all your food, and put your children to bed? 

My friend Abbott says women who want to create anything need to train themselves to be 10 percent more narcissistic. You need the extra edge of not caring, of self-assurance, of giving yourself permission to take up space. If your whole life you’re told by the world to be quiet, to be small, to be pleasing, how do you override all those messages and go a different way? I read male memoirists with thousands of pages of stories and thoughts, and I don’t know how they do it. And I wonder if I want to be like that or if I’m just intoxicated by how free they seem to feel.

 I’ve spent decades hitting my assigned word counts and quoting other people at length, standing back from the text so as not to get in the way of my research. But where has that gotten me? My father’s the star. I’m the good girl. 

Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz—a poet of my generation and fellow graduate of PS 41—once told me that the age requirement for drinking on St. Marks Place was “confidence.” Maybe that’s the age requirement for everything.

Is the difference between male and female accomplishment really just a matter of confidence?