My Poetry Corner July 2023 features the poem “Broken Strings” from the poetry collection Awkward Grace: Poems (USA, 2019) by Mark Tulin, a poet, humorist, and short-story writer. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he attended the Pennsylvania State University where he studied psychotherapy, specializing in family and sex therapy. In 2012, after practicing for over thirty years as a marriage and family therapist, he moved to Santa Barbara, Southern California. Today, he lives with his second wife, Alice, in Long Beach.

An only child, Tulin began writing poems as a teenager to cope with asthma and a dysfunctional family. His father, a fruit store owner, was charming, sociable, and rational. His mother was an independent-minded schizophrenic who “talked to herself and rarely filtered her words.” Because of his mother, he studied psychology and became a psychotherapist. “If I couldn’t fix my parents, I might be able to heal a family of strangers,” says Tulin in his author bio on Medium.

While living in Santa Barbara, Tulin developed an empathy for the city’s homeless people and fascination with their survival skills. Always seeing people’s flaws too clearly, / I have the psychotherapist / disease, he confesses in his poem “Therapist Disease.” Their lives inspired his second chapbook of poetry, Awkward Grace, in which he gives voice to each character in the third- or first-person. Despite their flaws, the poet treats each persona with sensibility and compassion.

“I hate it when they are talked to like children, harassed by the police or shop owners, and how people assume that all of them use drugs,” Tulin says during his interview with Spillwords Press in December 2019.

The poetic persona in “Our Familiar Spot” uses the first-person plural: We line up at church doors… We forage for food… We avoid men / who step on our pride, / threaten to encage us / in homeless shelters, / restrict our movement / to the fringes of the city. // But we always come back / to our familiar spot / and we never run away….

In the cool of the early morning fog, before tenants wake up to give him their disapproving stares, the dumpster forager in “Bountiful Treasures” hopes to find something precious… that would give him an identity. // It doesn’t have to be brand new. The following excerpt include verses one and three of the six-verse poem:

He smiles when he opens the dumpster lid.
He admires all of its bountiful treasures,
rich with hidden secrets,
tokens and trinkets from childhood.

[…]

He pulls out a pen,
a child’s toy, an old wooden flute.
He places them in his cart,
a vehicle, a conduit for hope.

Avoided by people who view her as an outlaw, / a Ma Barker, a bandit queen / about to grab a gun, / start a fistfight, / pull the fire alarm, the woman in “Coffee Shop Desperado,” far from her home in North Carolina, / knows she’s a desperado; / used to it by now. The following excerpt include the first two verses of the six-verse poem:

She sits in the coffee shop
talking to herself,
arguing about things
no one understands.

Past conflicts
that have never been resolved
but still linger in her head.

The featured six-verse poem, “Broken Strings,” speaks of the poet’s conflicting relationship with his schizophrenic mother. The poet persona regrets that he did not love her as she had loved him. The two broken rackets are metaphors not only of his mother’s mental illness, but also their broken relationship. Perhaps, in bearing witness to the lives of the marginalized homeless people, the poet gains a deeper insight into his mother’s own struggle to live a normal life under the disapproving gaze of society.

Mom kept saying that there was nothing wrong
with the two rackets that had broken strings
in her closet.

She wanted us to play on the court together
just like she did with dad,
but I was always too busy.

[…]

I wouldn’t have acted so ashamed of her
or gotten angry
at her crazy words and behavior
or made fun of her chocolate cake
that lay crumbled on the kitchen table.

[…]

I would have realized then, 
as I do now,
there was never anything wrong
with the two rackets in the closet.

The imagery of the crumbled chocolate cake further suggests the mother’s inability to connect with her son, despite all her efforts to be a regular Mom.

To read the complete featured poem and learn more about the work of American Poet Mark Tulin, go to my Poetry Corner July 2023.