My Poetry Corner October 2023 features the poem “Treasure” from the poetry collection Even When We Sleep (USA, 2022) by Marilyn Kallet, a poet, writer, and educator. She served two terms as Knoxville Poet Laureate from June 2018 to July 2020. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection.

Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Marilyn grew up in New York as a child. She attended Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, where she earned a B.A. in English and French in 1968. She also attended Sorbonne Université in Paris, France, where she received a degree in Cours de Civilisation (1967). Later, she received her M.A. (1976) and her Ph.D. (1978) in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

In her poem, “Returns,” Kallet tells us about leaving Montgomery as a child (p. 103-104):

You know my story, how
we got kicked out of Montgomery—
in my father’s version, it
was always “a miscarriage of justice,” as if justice was a bloody
baby. The big corps came after Daddy.
His watches were outselling Swiss brands,
American Merchandising must close down.
We had to scram, or the D.A. would toss
Grandma Stella in jail.

Kallet is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Tennessee, where she taught for 37 years until her retirement in 2018. From 2009 to 2018, she also hosted poetry workshops and residencies for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Auvillar, France.

As a nineteen-year-old Jewish American student in Paris, she recalls in “No One” that her American schooling had not prepared her for French anti-Semitism. She learns that in September 1941, Parisians were on high alert / for sneaky Jews, and given cue cards with tips on how to recognize a Jew. We learn in the third stanza (p. 115):

The first I heard of this
was at the dinner table in Paris,
Avenue du Parc Montsouris, 1966,
when Monsieur M. laughed about the day
the Paris police arrived at his factory
“and took away the Jews.”
I was nineteen, a student boarder,
kept my mouth shut, except to eat.  

“The main research project of my adult life has been about the Holocaust, and how that history connected to my family in Southwest Germany,” Kallet said during her interview with Shelby Rae Stringfield of Flyway Journal in December 2017. “The subject found me. My mother left a photo of herself with two elderly gentlemen, with the note: “The Nazis got the others.” What others? I went to the Holocaust Museum library in 2003 and started my research.”

Kallet’s latest and eighth collection of poetry, Even When We Sleep, was written during the pandemic (2020-2021). Inspiration came from hearing American cellist Yo-Yo Ma perform “Songs of Comfort” on PBS. It was March 18, 2020. He explained that at the start of the pandemic, he composed one song each day and encouraged others to do the same. Thereafter, she began writing a “comfort song” each day, keeping the project going for several months.

In her interview with Christal Rice Cooper for Art & Humanity Magazine, Kallet said, “the process of writing a daily song comforted me, deeply. I couldn’t control the pandemic, but I could control the space of the page.”

Housebound with her husband Lou, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee, Kallet opens the collection with sassy love poems, takes us to Paris, celebrates the unsung, and confronts anti-Semitism at home and abroad, ending with love and hope.

In “Housebound,” she describes her husband as my mage, my wand, / my weaver / of spells (p. 32). In her conversation with a hawk about her Seventh Grade snubs and loves in “Dismissed,” she reaffirms her love for Lou: Reader, every day / I marry / only / him. / One / long-burning / fire, one (p. 76).

The featured poem, “Treasure,” is from the third chapter “Sing the Unsung,” featuring the natural life around her that went under-appreciated before the lockdown: ragweed, mushrooms, blue jay, dogwood bark and buds, lichen, spiderwort, cucumber magnolia leaf, backyard possum, and more. In the four-stanza poem, “Treasure,” Kallet praises the fallen gold leaves of the prunus serotina tree, commonly called black cherry (pp. 96-97), untouched by the pandemic:

I search for one gold leaf—
not the kind men
crave, but a silken
teardrop, loose
leaf wish—yours,
young black cherry,
prunus serotina.
You know nothing of
human misery.

Though the leaf is cut off from the parent plant, it is not trapped in the ignorance and controversy Americans face during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yours is not
the willful
“epistemology of ignorance,”
not a history of
bad choices and one
red-face
raging stump.
You don’t crave
words—just
sun, rain,
wind in your
leaves, and
you have all you
need. I read you,
soft and clear. 

In the final two stanzas, the poet notes that the fallen leaf harms no one or seeks to enrich itself. You’re a slip of hope, / gold gleam / amid grass.

To read the complete featured poem and learn more about the work of American Poet Marilyn Kallet, go to my Poetry Corner October 2023.