Christal
Cooper
*Article
With Excerpts – 2,902 Words
All
excerpts have been given copyright privilege by Re’Lynn Hansen and White Pine
Press
Re’Lynn
Hansen’s
To Some Women I Have Known:
Exploring Memory,
Memoir, Meaning
& Death in Poetry
To Some Women I Have Known, published by White
Pine Press in April of 2015, is Re’Lynn Hansen’s first full- length poetry
collection.
Hansen, who is Associate Professor in the
Creative Writing Department of Columbia College in Chicago, breaks the rules
and so eloquently by crossing the boundaries of form in poetry: it is not limited to traditional form, but in
memoir, essay, narrative, research and news reporting.
To Some Women I Have Known takes the reader on an
emotional, spiritual, and mental journey, leaving the reader at a loss for
breath, the reader’s heart beating so wildly it feels like the reader has two hearts
instead of one.
This collection explores the questions that
every individual faces: What is
meaning? What is happiness? What is death? And what role does memoir, memory, and
meaning play in our quest to find the answer to the first two questions and
conquer the latter?
In her quest for these answers Hansen finds
comfort in the women in her life. These
women are the main focus in To Some Women I Have Known.
The first poem from this collection Hansen wrote
is “From Where I Stand on the Steps of the Romanesque Church” where she
attended her brother’s wedding and experienced a hyperawareness – living in a
specific moment and how that same specific moment is already dying.
“This happened at my brother’s wedding, on a
beautiful day, as I was standing on the steps of the church watching everyone
arrive in their tuxes and formals. And
even as I was living it, or trying to live it, I was already remembering how
singular and beautiful and great it was, and how I would remember it. I stood there aware that my grandmother, who
was arriving, was dying of cancer, and I went into
the act of remembering that moment already” (from an interview with Re’Lynn
Hansen, Sept 2015).
From Where I Stand
on the Steps of the Romanesque Church
Weddings seem unreal to me, and so it seems
that I am not here, but only that I remember I was here. I’m already remembering how I stand on the
steps of the Romanesque church and look at the vines growing gracefully on the
building across the street and how the Cadillacs turn into the parking lot –
which seems an old thing – to have Cadillacs arcing along the shaded vine-wall
of the church parking lot. What era was
that? And I am already remembering how I
will remember it. Providing it might be
something worth remembering. That it
might be something. Tony Lamont, an old
friend of Aunt Ag’s, is getting the wheelchair from the trunk of the Cadillac. He wears the painted-pony cowboy boots for
Aunt Aug, who still flirts with the man she went skiing with in Aspen thirty
years ago. My younger cousins, two girls
sixteen and eighteen, who will never be sixteen and eighteen, again, each go to
help my grandmother and slowly settle her into the chair. The linen dress of my grandmother is now
pressed into the chair and pulled out at the sides, like the wings of a moth
caught in the daytime screen. My cousins
close in around the woman in the wheelchair, each touching her shoulder
lightly. My aunt has her own moment to
shimmer as the sun dapples the street and plays upon the ice-blue gown pooled
briefly at her feet like water. The
girls wear ruffled dresses that swish as they walk. They look both ways before crossing the
street under the elms. I am already
remembering the orange and yellow dresses flashing light in the open
canopy. Aunt Ag, and Tony, the two
girls, and the grandmother in the wheelchair come toward me where I stand on
the steps of the Romanesque church.
This
hyperawareness is felt in all of the poems where, even as a 12-year old girl,
Hansen understands the preciousness of the moment.
In “One Night a Girl Appeared to Me” 12-year
old Hansen has just moved from Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, to the city,
where she lives in a Victorian neighborhood and finds herself fascinated by the
neighborhood girl and the helicopter pad at the end of her block.
“As a twelve year old, I thought I found ‘truth’
just sitting in my bedroom, writing poems.
My parents were creative people.
My father liked to draw; my mother painted. Their actual professions were as investors in
real estate. Even in that arena they
were creative thinkers. I didn’t grow up
around books, but they bought me the books that I wanted. My parents are great entertainers and socializers,
and at every party they’d have me read a poem.
They’d hush and shush everyone and actually get them to listen. I’d have this frozen audience standing there
with their martini glasses and double malts.
But I think they did listen, and I developed this broad idea of audience
as a consequence” (from an interview with Re’Lynn Hansen, 2015).
It is the first poem, “The Ghost Horse,” that the reader is introduced to Re’Lynn, who is
the audience, and June, who is the active participant. Both women are on their quest to find out
what the meaning of life is.
We were going to get a horse. The horse would give us meaning or a feeling
we didn’t have sitting in lecture halls during the day or waiting the tables at
night.
We would ride the horse from Illinois to
Colorado and meet people along the way who would also give us meaning.
Excerpt from “The Ghost Horse”
It is June that has the courage to climb
on the horse, and Hansen who has the courage to observe this pivotal
moment.
Then for a moment June looked like a god on a
horse, straight in the saddle. It was as
we had imagined ourselves – we who did not believe in god, but horses.
Excerpt from “The Ghost Horse”
In “Patty Hearst on the Prairie” Hansen is a 19
year old girl who has yet to apply for college, and is instead focused on death
– her friend Nikki’s mother is on her deathbed:
There was only the caretaker
ushering us to the corners of the bed.
There were chairs, but we stood.
Nikki was out.
Nikki is out? We
repeated to the caretaker.
There was that high school spike in our
voice. Didn’t she
know we had come to say goodbye to her mother?
We had come to affirm something.
All the curtains were pulled back from the
floor-to-ceiling windows,
A shimmering display around the bed.
I thought:
She was a daughter herself of someone.
Excerpt from “Patty Hearst on the Prairie”
The 19 year old Hansen is losing her
youth, her pure ideals, and is facing death.
To the young Hansen, one year after graduating
from high school, finding Patty Hearst would be an escape from the reality of
her day:
I had a book by Unamuno
but was looking for Patty Hearst
among the airport crowd
as I stared at the open skies and ledger
boards
listing destinations.
I listened to airport announcements
At any moment she would come, fronting the crowds
a ghost ship emerging
armed with submachine guns.
I closed my eyes
to see the essence
escaping me.
Excerpt from “Patty Hearst on the Prairie”
It took a variety of majors (accounting,
psychology, Spanish, English Literature, and Journalism) before Hansen finally settled
on a degree in Creative Writing. It was
during her days as a graduate student in Creative Writing at Columbia College
Chicago that she finally came to the realization that she was a writer.
“Everyone in my program
thought we were experiencing the intensity and inventing the DNA of a writing
program for the first time. We’d have
great, 2:00 a.m. arguments about Faulkner, Pound, Wright. I was passionate about Marguerite Duras’ “The
Lover” as I was about any real lover.
We’d hang out at our floppy grad school apartments and have impromptu
readings – then depart for a neighborhood dive bar” (from an interview with
Hansen 2015).
The question of death, and how to conquer
it in addition to what is meaning and happiness is answered in the last stanza
of the poem “25 Sightings of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker,” where Hansen surmises
that it is in our questioning that something we desire comes into being:
A
documentarian, making a movie about the bird, mentioned that there is less to
say about extinct woodpeckers than about your yearning to look for and even see
them, whether they are there or not.
Excerpt from “25 Sightings of the
Ivory-billed Woodpecker”
In the prose poem “Woman in a Coma Had Taken
Drug” Hansen and June are at a beach hotel in Guatemala when they read about
Karen Ann Quinlan, whom Hansen identifies with:
The lobby tables of the American hotels were
always strewn with American papers, tossed there by tourists who had had their
morning coffee and who were now out in hired taxis touring the
countryside. Nixon had resigned. The
Vietnam War had ended. The newspapers
were back to following people. All of
the stories outlined the life of Karen Ann Quinlan, the woman in a coma. The
story was this: she was twenty, about my
age, at the time, and she had been raised in a loving home which is exactly
where I thought I had been raised. But
it seemed lately, as some articles alluded, she had become obsessed about
becoming someone, about doing something challenging. She had quit her job, quit numerous
jobs. Since graduating high school she
had gained weight, then lost weight. She
was worried that she wouldn’t accomplish anything. Her boyfriend had broken up with her. She had lately experimented with drugs. Valium seemed to be her drug of choice.
Here’s where Karen and I differed: I much
preferred amphetamines.
Excerpt from “Woman in a Coma Had Taken Drug”
Both June and Hansen face their own mortality
with the news of Karen Ann Quinlan and a dying turtle that continues to be
washed ashore by the black Pacific beach.
After reading a newspaper article about Quinlan, the girls begin their
mission to search for the turtle, with hopes of bringing the sick turtle to a
turtle veterinarian. They are not able
to find the turtle, but Hansen is triumphant when she realizes there is one
thing she can do:
The most
important thing to me was to catalog it.
Even as we walked the beach I was thinking, I’ll remember this. June
said, I know you’re going to remember
this.
And then the El Mundo appeared, a white, low
castle in the darkness, the small neon sign flashing. The manager stood in the darkness on the
beach waving, the white sleeves of his jacket visible and rippling in the
moonlight, and telling us in Spanish what he had just heard – the turtle had
rescued itself and disappeared into the night.
Excerpt from “Woman in a Coma Had Taken Drug”
The next morning Hansen and June read that the
New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in Karen Ann’s favor and they would pull the
plug, and she would finally be able to die in peace. That same morning the black waters of the
Pacific Ocean flooded into the cinder-block hotel and the girls go to the
manager’s door for towels and rags:
I was still cataloging things, trying to pin
them down, trying to test each moment for intelligence, or for a heartbeat, or
for its affect upon me – and then wondering if similar things had affected
Karen Quinlan similarly. And I did
remember it, his words to us as the ocean was rushing in and settling its sands
on the linoleum floor. I told them, he said, just to leave the floor of sand.
Excerpt from “Woman in a Coma Had Taken Drug”
In “Lake Cumberland,” Hansen is now an
adult woman going to back to see a friend who suffers from schizophrenia, and faces the
extreme sadness that people change, and as a result, relationships can be lost:
In Chicago, where I first met her, where we
lived for a year, she was famous for being the model for a department store
that ran underwear ads in the weekend paper.
Then she worked for a steakhouse, and the manager, in some moment of
glad illumination, told her to run the bar,
mix drinks, have fun, just to be young.
It could be
I’ve conjured that image of her in the yellow
steakhouse shirt, running a couple of blocks in the rain with me because we
wanted suddenly to go and get drunk somewhere else.
It could be
Only the rain happened.
She lives now near Lake Cumberland because
she grew up there. Now, I knock on the
door. Now she runs a doggie daycare
business. Now I think of her hands and
wonder if they are the same.
Excerpt from “Lake Cumberland”
In “There’s a Shoe on Your Plate” Hansen is an adult
woman, her grandmother (who used to be a ballroom dancer) has died, and she
reflects on one of the last visits she had with her grandmother in the nursing
home, sitting on her bed, both looking out the window at the trees dancing:
Nor should I recall following the shape of
her hands as she moved them to mimic trees outside. Her arms titled like branches.
Nor remember the words she said – Look, the trees are dancing.
Nor should I recall that I looked at the
trees beyond the wired window, beyond the curb of the parking lot and noticed,
sure enough, one could say they were dancing.
Sometimes the branches swayed in pairs.
Sometimes they dipped and caught each other. For this she hugged herself.
Excerpt from “There’s a Shoe on Your Plate”
Soon two more people, the choreographer
with the shoe, and the orator join in with her grandmother in this trinity of
musical play:
I should not note that out in the hall across
from us, a man in a wheelchair had a tray of lunch in front of him and was
putting a shoe on his plate, and another man in a wheelchair across from him
was yelling. Don’t put your shoe on that plate.
Don’t put your shoe on that plate!
Nor should I further note that the first man
continued to arrange his shoe on his dinner plate. Taking a comb from his
pocket, he combed the laces carefully down each leathered side of the shoe and
pressed the tips of the laces into some lettuce, mayo, and tomato. The man who
had been yelling, now laughed and said, There’s
a shoe on your plate!
Excerpt from “There’s a Shoe on Your Plate”
It is the second to last stanza that Hansen
finally observes sadness and happiness mixed in with dementia and asks that
great question: is it possible to be
happy and face reality or must one
sacrifice one for the other?
And how ridiculous it would be to note this
momentary sadness, because no one there that day was sad. Certainly not the man arranging his shoe on
the plate, nor the grandmother staring out the wired window. And yet, there we were pinned – this
grandmother swaying, this granddaughter watching, this choreographer with a
shoe, while the other shouted, There’s a
shoe on your plate.
Excerpt from “There’s a Shoe on Your Plate”
The collection ends with “She Has Given Me a
Spectacle and I Have Given Her a Pear” about Hansen’s mother who is recovering
from hip surgery. Mother and daughter
are able to communicate with one another over a Neiman Marcus catalog and a
simple pear.
She thanks me again for the pear. It is
the best pear, she says. What is your secret with pears?
Again I tell her again how easy it is to do
the pear. It seems, sometimes I can
count the things between us. One is –
this narration on the pear.
You let them ripen, I say, and then cool them they day before serving.
Excerpt from “She Has Given Me a Spectacle
and I Have Given Her a Pear”
The one thing all of these poems have in common
besides memoir is nature, a haven for Hansen in her poetry, and a
responsibility she feels she owes to her readers.
“I am trying to create that world that is as momentary as
nature itself. Hence, at the wedding
scene there are “dresses flashing in the light of the open (tree) canopy.” I tend to use the senses, to write about
color – that old lover who wore the “Yellow steakhouse shirts,”
and still had that “halo of hair.” Writing this way, using color and smells, the
senses, allows for an immersive experience.
When I read I want to encounter more than just words, and more than tidy
cleverness, and more than well-explained themes. I’d like writing to lead to a real sense of
seeing the world, be it awful or lovely, through someone else’s eyes. As audience, I want to be more immersed the
way the writer was when he/she experienced it.
And as writer, I want to recall the phenomenal world for my
audience. It’s a tall order. I hope I achieved it in To Some Women I Have Known.”
Photograph
Description and Copyright Information
Photos
1, 21, 34, 37, and 40
Re’Lynn
Hansen
Copyright
granted by Re’Lynn Hansen
Photos
2, 7, 27, 32, and 35
Jacket
cover of To Some Women I Have Known
Photo
3a
Web
logo photo for Marie Alexander Series web page
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
3b
Web
logo photo for White Pine Press web page
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
4
Columbia
College
Attributed
to Re’Lynn Hansen
Copyright
granted by Re’Lynn Hansen
Photo
5
Two Hearts Beating As
One
Attributed
to Kari J Young
Copyright
granted by Kari J Young
Photo
6
Sappho Praying to
Aphrodite, After Margaritas
Attributed
to Chadwick & Spector
Photo
8
Notre
Dame de Chicago, built in Romanesque Revive Style
Attributed
to Andrew Jameson
CCASA 3.0 Unported
Photo
9
Wedding
Ceremony in the Chancel of Stanford Memorial Church, built in the Romanesque
Form
CC
By 2.0
Photo
10
Steps
to the Keep of Corisbrough Castle England
Attributed
to Richard Croft
CCBY
SA 2.0
Photo
11
The
Victorian Anne Queen House Ernest Hemmingway was born in
Oak
Park, Illinois
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
12
The Girl Writing in The
Pet Finch
Attributed
to Henriette Brown
Public
Domain
Photo
13
The End Of Dinner
Attributed
to Jules Alexandre Grun in 1913
Public
Domain
Photo
14
Whistlejacket
Attributed
to George Stubbs in 1762
National
Gallery of London
Public
Domain
Photo
15
Lady Godiva
Attributed
to John Collier in 1897
Herbert
Art Gallery & Museum
Public
Domain
Photo
17
At the Death Bed
Attributed
to Samal Joensen Mikines in 1940
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
18
Patty
Hearst graduation photo
Public
Domain
Photo
19
Miguel
de Unamuno
1925
Public
Domain
Photo
20
Patty
Hearst as Tania, after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Public
Domain
Photo
22a
William
Faulkner
Public
Domain
Photo
22b
Ezra
Pound
Public
Domain
Photo
22c
Richard
Wright
Public
Domain
Photo
22d
Marguerite
Duras
Public
Domain
Photo
22e
Jacket
cover of The Lover
Public
Domain
Photo
23
Chapbook
jacket cover 25 Sightings of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Photo
24
First
photograph ever taken of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Attributed
to Doc Allen
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
25
Karen
Ann Quinlan’s high school graduation photo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
26
Newsweek cover featuring Karen
Ann Quinlan
November
1975 issue
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
28
The Turtle
Attributed
to Christal Rice Cooper
Copyright
granted Christal Rice Cooper
Photo
29
Timeline
of Karen Ann Quinlan’s New Jersey Court decision
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
30
Scenic
view near Re’Lynn Hansen’s Michigan home
Attributed
to Re’Lynn Hansen
Copyright
granted by Re’Lynn Hansen
Photo
31
View
of Lake Cumberland, Kentucky from the Wolf Creed Damn
Public
Domain
Photo
33
Scenic
view of trees
Attributed
to Re’Lynn Hansen
Copyright
granted by Re’Lynn Hansen
Photo
38
Three Pears
Oil
on canvas in 1878-1879
Attributed
to Paul Cezanne
Public
Domain
Photo
39
Neiman
Marcus cover
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
41.
Re’Lynn
(left) with her partner Doreen
Copyright
granted by Re’Lynn Hansen
