THE RECENT WIDOW CONSIDERS THE ALPHABET"

A poem by Barbara Crooker

You get the idea from the title itself: Barbara Crooker's "THE RECENT WIDOW CONSIDERS THE ALPHABET" is going to be a poem that minds its ABCs.

That is, it's going to be an abecedarian poem, of one sort or another. And, like much of what the prolific and award-winning Crooker has written in the past two years, it's going to be about the illness and death of her husband, Richard Crooker, and her own painful experience.

“This is all I’m writing about these days,” she said, after a period in which she wrote little. “But returning to writing makes me feel like I’m creating my own little path back.”

If the subject matter of Crooker’s recent writing is the inescapable one of loss, however, the form any poem will take may not be clear-cut at the outset. The million-word  Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics describes hundreds of poetic forms from which a poet may choose, ranging from those that are most familiar to contemporary American poetry readers to exotic constructions from throughout the world and reaching across literary history. And, of course, each poet is free to invent their own forms and conventions whenever they sit down to write a poem.

With "THE RECENT WIDOW CONSIDERS THE ALPHABET" Crooker might have chosen to write a more familiar formal poem such as a villanelle or a sestina. Or, as she also considered, she might have built her poem as a monorhyme poem, in which each line ends with the same sound. 

In opting to write an abecedarian (a poem in which each line or stanza or sentence begins with a successive letter of an alphabet, as with A to Z in English), and embedding it in a prose poem, Crooker was drawing on an ancient tradition, but adding some innovative touches of her own.

The idea of tethering a poem to an alphabet is at least as old as the Bible. In Psalm 111, for example, the 22 lines of the poem begin with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in succession. Psalm 119 is structured with even more complexity, divided into 22 sections with each section (and the lines within it) beginning with a Hebrew letter and moving through the alphabet in order.

In this century and the last one, there are any number of poets who have done something similar, either in abecedarian poems or their close cousins, acrostic poems. The list includes Lewis Carroll, John Ciardi, W.D. Snodgrass, Mary Jo Bang, James Tipton, and Harryette Mullen, among many others, frequently with some innovative adaptations.

That’s true of Crooker’s poem, too. Most notably, her decision to unspool the alphabet one sentence at a time within a prose poem is, at the very least, an uncommon one. 

She began, she said, by creating a “word bank,” although the words she banked turned out to be “not the ones I actually used.” Instead, the zealous of her early ruminations ended up as zero, and her answer for the vexing question of what to do with “X” became expand, rather than except. To “mix things up” a bit more in the flow of the poem, she chose to make “Y” stand for the second-person pronoun you (You have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.), a decision that, I think, grounds the poem, otherwise describing a third-person she (The recent widow), firmly in the tragic circumstances it springs from.
Here is the poem:

THE RECENT WIDOW CONSIDERS THE ALPHABET

Accept.  She has begun to accept what happened.  Because there’s no way she can ever change it.  Can we step in the same river twice? asked Heraclitus.  Despite the hard facts, she wishes she could get a rewind, go back to last January, the first rehab.  Even though the stroke had already done its damage.  Feeble.  Gone:  his balance, his eyesight, the use of his right hand and leg.  He didn’t give up. Instead, he tried to use the walker.  Just keep swimming, he told himself, like Dory. Listen to the therapists for cues.  Memorize the number of steps to the bathroom. Never quit, even though it’s hopeless. Outside, winter receded. Palliative care followed by hospice.  Quietly, his breath grew feathery.  Right in front of her, it ceased. Solo. That’s how she’s navigating now.  Understanding that he won’t come back. Value every day you had together, she tells herself, though they’re starting to fade. Wish on every falling star though it does no good.  Expand your heart. You have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.  Zero in on love.

Originally published in SALT.

Barbara Crooker's poems have appeared in magazines such as The Sun, The Hollins Critic, The Christian Science Monitor, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, America and anthologies such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Penguin), Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press), and Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press). She is the recipient of the Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the "April Is the Cruelest Month" Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing's Y2K competition, the Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, twenty residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; two residencies at the Moulin a Nef, Auvillar, France; and two residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. A sixty-one time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and seven time nominee for Best of the Net, she was a 1997 Grammy Awards Finalist for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me--The Best is Yet to Be (Papier Mache Press). Her books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, which came out from Word Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; More (C&R Press, 2010); Gold (Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock, in their Poeima Poetry Series, 2013); Small Rain (Virtual Artists Collective, 2014); Selected Poems, (FutureCycle Press, 2015); Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017); The Book of Kells (Cascade Books, 2018, winner of the Best Poetry Book 2018 from Poetry by the Sea); and Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), which was long listed for the Julie Suk Award. Her poetry has been read on the BBC, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac, by US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith on The Slowdown podcast, and in Ted Kooser's column, American Life in Poetry. She has been an invited reader in the Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress; the Halle aux Grains, Auvillar, France; the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival; Poetry @ Roundtop; the SoCal Poetry Festival; the Festival of Faith and Writing; The Scissortail Poetry Festival; Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium; Poetry by the Sea; and many other venues. Recently, she received an award for outstanding ekphrastic achievement, a body of ekphrastic work in and outside of the journal The Ekphrastic Review. One of her poems won The Pandemic Poetry Contest, sponsored by Garrison Keillor.