I remember the first time I saw a Linda Pastan poem. It was at Adrienne Rich's archives at the Schlesinger Library, part of “The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.” (The awkward title is a vestige of the college Rich and Pastan went to, just a few years apart, which went on to live in spectral form after Harvard started admitting women, with the two only officially merging in 1999.) Among the papers are Rich’s letters home, which are equally dutiful in recounting her reading of the classics and her weekend dates with suitable Ivy League men, and powerful letters from readers, saying her writing was the first thing that made them face the truth of their lives. But even more than this I loved two things I found there. One was a little note someone had stuck to her windshield, saying that they'd filled her parking meter because surely her poems were worth saving her a ticket. The other was “Ethics,” by Pastan, who I'd never heard of before, and who died last month at 90.
Sometimes I tell my students to write about what irritates them, and that’s what Pastan does brilliantly here, beginning with the old saw about which is worth more a masterpiece or an old woman, and unravelling its premise (who decided children could or should decide such things) in a spool left at your feet. When she died I posted this poem and a friend responded with the another philosophical masterpiece “A Short History of Judaic Thought in the Twentieth Century” about which many, many drashes should be written.
The obituaries predictably talked about Pastan’s writing on “domestic themes,” “the ordinary,” or “the everyday” (as opposed to?) and I suppose that’s true. But I love ethics and a “Short History” for how they are both philosophically bold and completely unpretentious - they embody ideas as we actually experience them, as what it might mean to take them seriously. She brings this to the many poems she wrote about aging. When she wrote “Ethics,” in which the narrator calls herself an “old woman, or nearly so myself” she was not yet fifty; the majority of her books, across more than forty years were still to come. The theme of aging - and its many many stages - gets richer as the poems go on, layering the different ages one has been, the different vantage points and memories from which one looks.
As it happens, I was reading many of her later poems while I was helping my dad go through some of his things (and my mother’s things), and there were poems for that, about the Christmas cards that still come from classmates one never sees, as if in preparation for the next world. And in “The Future” the inevitable diminishment haunts with the repeated “when do we trade the future for the past?” and “I think each poem I write will be the last.” Except that it’s not just any repetition, it’s a villanelle, the demanding, rigorous form she did much with, so even as the poet claims to have “lost the lust for rhyme” the lines say otherwise. The diminishment also an enriching.
There's also a recurring note in Pastan about being the dutiful student, about trying to measure up. In the early poem "Marks" she imagines her family handing out grades on domestic duties; in "Final" she evokes how I often feel about never outgrowing good student syndrome: "I studied/so long/for my life/that this morning when I waken/to it as if for the first time/someone is already walking/down the aisle/collecting papers." The note has a different hue in the later poems. In "My Obituary," she imagined how many column inches she'd get, and whether they'd mention the awards she didn't get.
These lines seemed unbearable poignant to me not only in light of her death, but when I read that once, as a Radcliffe student, she'd beaten Sylvia Plath in a poetry contest. They were the same age, but Plath died almost a decade before Pastan published her first book. Like everyone, I loved Plath when I was young; not the romance of destruction so much as the fuck you of it all. You bastard, I’m too pure for you, eat men like air, all that. I remember stopping on the line "Dying, like everything is an art/I do it exceptionally well" though. Everything? The bravado there was hiding something. And that “exceptionally” - the good student haunts even here.
Pastan wrote a poem called “Why are your poems so dark” but it’s a different sort of darkness than Plath’s. In the late poem "Class Notes," she records the diminishment of her high school class, disappearing like soldiers gone to war, and remembers lining up and being picked last in gym before concluding "Maybe whoever is doing the choosing now/thinks that I would be no good at dying." I like poems about aging and I think sometimes their work is to help us get ready to die or die better but I also like the idea of being bad at death. So much better than being exceptionally good at it! Rest in Peace; may we all be so disfavored.
You can read lots of Pastan’s poems here and her last book, drawing from many of the later collections, is a nice introduction to her work.