PEN SCRATCHING POETS, the newest book by children’s author Marilyn Wassmann, is an unusual volume: it collects poems written by generations of Wassmann’s family–nieces, nephews, and other relatives, all the way back to her grandmother, Ethel Tillotson Benjamin, who was born in 1882. “The Hitchcock and the Benjamin families,” Wassmann writes in her introduction, “have been in America for several generations. We’ve produced farmers, architects, musicians, and diplomats, and oh yes, a poet and/or an artist, now and then.” Wassmann’s aim is to highlight these occasional creators.
She does this unevenly. Some relatives are represented by only one or two poems; others, like Wassmann herself, contribute dozens. All the poems are formal–that is, they use rhyme and meter–except Sarah Scott, born in 1981, who has a few free verse entries. (Kevin Johnson even attempts a Shakespearean sonnet.) Some rely on clear, strong imagery, such as these lines from “To Duke”: “God borrowed the sun’s gold for your hair, / On your cheeks put the roses’ hue, / On your lip a sunbeam planted, / In your eyes He put Heaven’s blue.” Others are obscure, such as the exhortation in one to “Shun evil and all its fellows / And things that take to wings.” (So all birds are to be avoided?) It would have been useful if Wassmann had included biographical notes on all the authors, or at least a statement of how they’re related to her (that some of them are nieces and nephews came not from the book itself or Wassmann’s website but a little internet research). Also, she calls the last few pages an index, but they are not an index at all, merely an alphabetized title list without page references.
The most interesting entries are Ethel’s poems. Though written about timeless subjects–childhood, marriage, parenting, domesticity–they nevertheless evoke the era in which she lived, along with its social and medical anxieties. “To My Daughter” begins with “You’re the only one God gave to me / Though I’ve wanted another, mightily / Not to take your place—no never that,” which is beautiful but also hints at the harsh reality that a lot of children died young. Likewise, “My Gall Stones” suggests that the only option for Ethel is to just suffer (“Well it might be worse and worser / So I’ll just be glad you see, / That I’ve got the only gall stones / In this healthy family”), something no one now has to do thanks to laparoscopies, which were invented during her lifetime but only widely available years later.
PEN SCRATCHING POETS by Marilyn Wassmann is an uneven but charming collection of poems, most light, a few more serious, written by the author and generations of her relatives.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader