What The Butler Saw

I never got around to writing about my experience at Bennington College, Vermont, in June. Bennington is a college where you can get a degree in pretty much any arts subject, including dance, drama, literature and writing. Its creative writing MFA, run by TS Eliot fanatic Liam Rector, is very popular. My mother, a biographer, has been a visiting member of faculty at the MFA's summer term for a few years, and this year I was invited to join her to read from my book and talk about mothers and daughters who both write.

I could write so much about how idyllic the rural campus is, with its waving meadows of wildflowers in the total peace of the green mountains of Vermont, and how interesting I found all the kindly faculty and staff, but what I don't think I'll ever forget is how by living surrounded by people passionate about language and poetry for just five days affected me. Every night there were two readings of either poetry or prose, and the days were filled with workshops, lectures and, everywhere, constant discussion of words.

I didn't realise how heady this pure, poetic atmosphere was until my last night, when the American Poet Laureate Donald Hall gave his reading to a rapt, thrilled audience.

I don't know how old Mr Hall is, but he met TS Eliot as a young man, and his collected poems runs from 1946. I had never read anything he'd written, nor, as an ignorant Brit, had I heard of him till that day, but I guess I was expecting just another poetry reading.

The audience hushed, the grey-haired man, dressed casually in a baggy shirt and trousers, raised unusually twinkling eyes from the microphone.

'I thought a poem about poetry readings might be appropriate,' he smiled, and began.

To a Waterfowl

Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks
applauded you, my poems.
These are the women whose husbands I meet on airplanes,
who close their briefcases and ask, "What are you in?"
I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry,
and their eyes fill with anxiety, and with little tears.
"Oh, yeah?" they say, developing an interest in clouds.
"My wife, she likes that sort of thing? Hah-hah?
I guess maybe I'd better watch my grammar, huh?"
I leave them in airports, watching their grammar,

and take a limousine to the Women's Goodness Club
where I drink Harvey's Bristol Cream with their wives,
and eat chicken salad with capers, with little tomato wedges,
and I read them "The Erotic Crocodile," and "Eating You."
...
And what about you? You, laughing? You, in the bluejeans,
laughing at your mother who wears hats, and at your father
who rides airplanes with a briefcase watching his grammar?
Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents?
Not you, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you.


As he read the final lines, he was speaking directly to the young students laughing in the auditorium. Pointing, he said intimately to six of them in turn, 'Not you'.

There was a crescendo of laughter and foot-stamping applause. I found myself surprised by how much this man's poems had made me smile ruefully and feel closer to the audience around me.

The poems continued, each a masterpiece of intimacy, simplicity, honesty, humour and tenderness. It became clear to me that the poet's wife had died tragically, since many of the poems were grieving for her. Hall found it hard at times to keep the tears from his eyes and I found tears welling in my eyes too and in those of everyone around me as we listened and watched his painful pauses when grief apparently overwhelmed him. Then, this poem took my breath away:

Summer Kitchen

In June's high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

"It's ready now. Come on," she said.
"You light the candle."
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.


It was like he'd spoken thoughts out loud: just a simple wonder at life, and love. As the reading ended, everyone seemed tearful, overwhelmed and stirred full of emotion. Unable to face anyone with my tears welling so strongly, I went outside and sat alone on a swing in a big garden, overlooking a lake where frogs called to one another.

I couldn't stop crying, as if the days of being constantly read poetry, culminating in this final emotion-filled performance, had brought me to a massively heightened sensitivity. I felt supremely aware, strengthened, peaceful, intense, vulnerable and poetic, and I suddenly remembered how as a 14-16 year-old who wrote poetry, I had felt this way and then lost it somehow as an adult.

A middle aged woman in a long summer shift walked through the long grass towards me, and I really wished she wouldn't see me crying, because I was embarrassed and wanted to be alone. I knew she could see me crying, but instead of turning back, she kept approaching. When she reached me, she said: 'I know how you feel - I'm feeling it too.'

I dried my face, breathed deeply and smiled at her. Then we went to her house and had berries and cream and champagne.