The Bad Secret (review)

For poets as for prose writers, there are taker-outers and putterinners. Less is more, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Thomas Wolfe, implying that Wolfe could stand to eliminate a good many of his sentences. By association, I think of Keats's advice to Shelley, "Load every rift of your subject with ore," and more than a century later W. C. Williams's advice to a young poet, "Don't hammer things down with a maul . . . just let it touch the subject." Are "load every rift" and "just let it touch"—or taker-outers and putter-inners—mutually exclusive? This is a rhetorical question that leads me to Judith Harris's The Bad Secret.

In her best poems, Harris offers a rich metaphoric ore while remaining spare in her methods and in the pacing of her lines. Her subjects themselves are not astonishing; they often have to do with what has been a modern and contemporary mode: memory and what it calls up with mother, father, sisters, and those seemingly innocent episodes that for the poet are pregnant with more than are dreamt of in the minds of mere mortals. The mode often feels worn out to me, this going back and back to prospect for epiphany. "Weave a circle round him thrice / For he on honey-dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of paradise." After so many years of this, it's hard to bring off these poems with freshness, though if it's done, they can be tremendously evocative—not for their originality but for "what oft was said but ne'er so well expressed." These remarks are to help characterize Harris's poetry—they are no backhanded compliment.

Her poems are compelling because of the way diction and imagery work to clarify feeling—even if you don't believe that poems reflect feelings but create them in the process of writing—in the most exacting ways. Precision is the word I keep thinking of.

I've heard Harris read from The Bad Secret twice, once at Catholic University and then at the Library of Congress. In her opening remarks and between poems, she referred to the darkness of many of them apologetically, in case they should bring us down or depress us. Such remarks divert us from the poems as poems. They are not downers—quite the opposite! Listening to them and then reading The Bad Secret, I felt exhilaration. Maybe I come to them with the ear of a mournful Jew who has a high threshold for depression. After all these are poems—they are not Treblinka or Baghdad or Darfur or any of a hundred brutal places. The subjects may be dark: the self's wounds, departure, sorrow, death. But the poems hold up their dark subjects to the light of language that is often fresh in imagery and diction.

Think of blues music and how we can feel the grief and sorrow riving into us and be grateful for, if not in thrall, holding on for comfort and pleasures simultaneously. And why? Well, who can really explain the exquisite grief of Billie Holliday's "Strange Fruit," to give one lone example.

In trying to get at or understand the distinctiveness of Harris's voice, I tried a small editing exercise on one of them, "Still Waltz." Here's my edited version.

Against an empty skyThe elm is feathered with gold.On the dark avenue, people pass.

Through the lit windows,Empty stairwells and still pianos.Sparrows. The moon. Solitude.

In the winter to comeThe earth will turn its cheekAnd bear up against the cold.

My reduction is a fair Sung- or Tang-like poem. Now here's the poem as it appears in The Bad Secret (which not so incidentally is a beautiful book from Louisiana State University Press in its design and cover art, a complement, and compliment, to the poetry.)

Against an empty skyThe elm is feathered with goldlike some apparent wing.On the dark avenue, people pass,lifting their collars.

Through the lit windows,Empty...