There is a special bond, some particular resonance, in the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, who stand on two different sides of life. They touch each other across the decades and connect from the margins. Almost a decade ago the poet Jason Shinder put together a surprising anthology of 20th-century American poems about grandparents entitled Eternal Light. It reminded me how many unlikely poems about parents and grandparents had found their way into modern and contemporary American poetry.
I'm struck by the fact that some of the homegrown American moderns defied T.S. Eliot's modernist credo about impersonality and wrote personal poems of intimate relationships. These poems are entirely without sentimentality. They aren't particularly sweet and have nothing in common with greeting cards. One thinks of William Carlos Williams's "The Last Words of My English Grandmother," which exists in two strikingly different versions, of Hart Crane's "My Grandmother's Love Letters," of Kenneth Patchen's "For the Mother of My Mother's Mother," and of Lorine Niedecker's deceptive little poem "Grandfather," which is really an ironic pretext for a lyric about the homemade art and craft of writing poetry.
Grandfather
Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade.
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense.
No layoff
from this
condensery.
It's notable that many poems about grandparents are really poems about lineage and history, about the quest for origins, about memory and forgetfulness. Some are unnerving and come with great shocks. Thus Jane Kenyon couldn't help but wonder, "If she loved me why did she say that/ two women would be grinding at the mill,/ that God would come out of the clouds/ when they were least expecting him,/ choose one to be with him in heaven/ and leave the other there alone?" ("Staying at Grandma's").
I like James Wright's sonnet "My Grandmother's Ghost"; Adrienne Rich's poem of foremothers, "Grandmothers"; Philip Levine's "Zaydee"; Lucille Clifton's "Daughters" ("woman, i am/ lucille, which stands for light,/ daughter of thelma, daughter/ of georgia, daughter of/ dazzling you"); and Garrett Kaoru Hongo's poem about how he got his middle name ("Issei: First-Generation Japanese American"). Poetry often gives us a rich complex of emotions -- say, joy mixed with nostalgia and grief, as in Li-Young Lee's poem "I Ask My Mother to Sing" from his first book, Rose (1986).
She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
