Linda Pastan

• Born: May 27, 1932
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: January 30, 2023
• Place of death: Chevy Chase, Maryland

Linda Pastan is known for her poetry, which addresses such subjects as family life, aging, death, and grief. She has published eleven collections of poetry and was the poet laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995. She has also written several essays, including the autobiographical essay “Roots,” which appeared in American Poets in 1976 (1976), a volume edited by William Heyen.

Achievements

Since the appearance of Linda Pastan’s first book, critics have praised the lucidity of her language, the freshness of her metaphors, and the consistency of her accomplishment. She has been appreciated as an artist of what she herself calls “dailiness”—contemporary domestic life. She has won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Maryland Arts Council grant. Her literary awards include Mademoiselle’s Dylan Thomas Poetry Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, the Bess Hokin Prize (1985), and the Maurice English Award (1986). Pastan served as poet laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995, and she was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for twenty years. PM/AM and Carnival Evening were finalists for the National Book Award, and The Imperfect Paradise was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Pastan also received the Charity Randall Citation (1995), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2003), and a Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award.

Biography

Linda Pastan was born Linda Olenic, the daughter of Jacob L. Olenic and Bess Schwartz Olenic. Her father, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was a surgeon, and Pastan married a molecular biologist, Ira Pastan, in 1953. She earned a BA from Radcliffe College in 1954, an MLS from Simmons College in 1955, and an MA from Brandeis University in 1957. Pastan, her husband, and their three children settled in the Maryland countryside, near Potomac.

Pastan has been poetry editor of the literary magazine Voyages, has lectured at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, and has taught graduate workshops in poetry at American University. From 1986 to 1989, Pastan served on the governing board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Although Pastan received recognition for her poetry while a student, winning Mademoiselle’s Dylan Thomas Award (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up), she did not work regularly on her poetry for ten years and did not publish a collection until 1971. Since that time, her books have appeared regularly, and she has received other prizes as well as critical praise in leading literary journals. Pastan has acknowledged the influence and support of the poet William Stafford and has been labeled a postconfessional poet, interested in sincerity as well as going beyond the personal.

Analysis

Like many American poets since Walt Whitman, Linda Pastan has made poetry from her experience, but she has been much less optimistic than the Whitman who wrote “Song of Myself” (1855), “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856), and “Passage to India” (1870). Starting with her first book, published when she was nearly forty, Pastan has seen the human individual as subject to such forces as genetics, mortality, gravity, climate, fate, and God. Not that the individual is powerless: In love, her characters can choose to be wise or foolish, passionate or subdued, faithful or not; and Pastan thinks highly of artistic and domestic accomplishments. Unlike Whitman, however, she never suggests that the individual can transcend mortal limits.

A survey of Pastan’s favorite metaphors suggests that most of their sources are autobiographical: her Jewish heritage, her childhood in New York City, her education and interest in literature, her medical knowledge stemming from her father’s and husband’s scientific interests, Greek and biblical mythology, a later interest in Asian culture, the flora and fauna of her adult life in the Maryland countryside, the behavior of her offspring and husband, and vacations near the ocean. However, to concentrate only on the origins of her imagery would be to ignore Pastan’s vision and craft.

Starting with her first book, she tried various means of shaping material into poems and of arranging poems into collections. The four parts of A Perfect Circle of Sun conform to the seasons. Aspects of Eve alludes to the biblical story of Eden, and in this book, Pastan relies more frequently on narratives, such as “Folk Tale” and “Short Story,” to present material in a more comprehensive, dramatic fashion. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s description of the process of mourning underlies The Five Stages of Grief, and Pastan continues the quest for Kubler-Ross’s final stage, acceptance, in Waiting for My Life and the new poems in PM/AM. The most compelling shaping principle in Pastan’s poetry, however, is mythology—especially the story of Adam and Eve, with its emphasis on the Fall (as in Aspects of Eve and The Imperfect Paradise), and the character of Penelope as depicted in Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), legendary for her patience and domesticity. It is important to stress that the relationship between such myths and Pastan’s own life is reciprocal: the myths help to frame her experience, but she also questions them, returning obsessively to meditate on their meaning and reinvent them—to tell them, that is, in her own way as a result of her experience.

It would therefore be inaccurate to suggest that Pastan has tucked her entire life into a pattern prescribed by any single myth. Instead, one should place mythological allusions into the more comprehensive “story”—the interplay of Pastan’s persona and the forces affecting her. “Persona” is an important concept: Pastan has acknowledged that her poems are not strictly or merely autobiography, calling “the poetic ’I’ . . . more like a fraternal than an identical twin.” What one finds in her poetry, then, is the tragic story of human limitation. She mentions many forces she cannot control. In “Last Will” (from A Fraction of Darkness), she acknowledges that her children’s only important inheritance is “in the genes,” and in “balancing act: for N.” (from The Imperfect Paradise), she portrays the generations as acrobats “hooked together// by nerve/ and DNA.” While hospitalized in “Accidents” (from The Imperfect Paradise), she senses future accidents “waiting to happen.” “On the Question of Free Will” (from The Imperfect Paradise), one of her meditations on the Eden story, questions human freedom, hinting that “God’s plan” may prevail.

Weather imagery

Her most frequent metaphor for human vulnerability is the weather. As she says in “Hurricane Watch” (from Aspects of Eve), “Some live in the storm’s eye only./ I rise and fall/ with the barometer,/ holding on for my life.” A Perfect Circle of Sun establishes the ambivalent vision of the annual cycle that applies to all of her work: Winter is both death and birth; the energy of spring can start growth or turn chaotic; summer, she says, is only winter in a “disguise of leaves”; and autumn is more a time for dirges than for harvest. Pastan’s habitual and resourceful use of the weather reflects her sense of mortality. In "Hurricane Watch," the persona inhabits “a storm cellar/ of flesh,” recalls “a blizzard of cells” in a microscope, and admits that “at times/ the hairs on my arm lift,/ as if in some incalculable wind.” Her pessimism is such that she says “I read my palm as though it were a weather map/ and keep a hurricane watch/ all year.” While fresh, lucid metaphors are essential to the success of this poem, Pastan’s characteristic use of short lines is worth noting here, suggesting her own tentativeness. However, in the preceding line, “Some live in the storm’s eye only,” she lets a sentence about others run unbroken to its end, suggesting their greater courage.

Tree imagery

As Pastan charts the seasons, she often refers to trees. In “Each Autumn” (from A Perfect Circle of Sun) she writes, “We put our leaves in order,/ raking, burning, acknowledging,/ the persistence of time.” In “After Agatha Christie” (from Aspects of Eve), she implies her skepticism of summer by calling a tree’s leaves “its false beard.” Leaves ready to fall in “Consolations” (from The Five Stages of Grief) are “scrolls bearing/ the old messages.” “There is an age when you are most yourself,” she remembers her father saying, and in “Something Above the Trees” (from The Imperfect Paradise), which is written in a Malaysian form called pantoum, she wonders, “Was it something about the trees that made him speak?” The nearly unpunctuated poem “Family Tree” (from The Imperfect Paradise) plays on the traditional ubi sunt theme by asking, “How many leaves/ has death undone . . . ?” Throughout this poem, Pastan chants the names of trees, and she finally declares that she will not drink to the New Year, in which her mother will die and her grandson be born. Instead, she broods on burned leaves’ telling “the long story/ of smoke.”

In “Donatello’s Magdalene” (from A Fraction of Darkness), a fifteenth century wood sculpture of Mary Magdalene inspires one of Pastan’s most inventive and anguished tree metaphors. After describing the sculpture, Pastan asks how many of its branches were “stripped/ and nailed/ to make each crucifix?” In this case, by alluding to the suffering and death of Jesus, Pastan adds a religious or mythic factor to her usual symbolic equation of trees with mortality. In "In the Orchard," from her 2015 collection Insomnia, she uses trees to explore the theme of aging, asking "Why are these old, gnarled trees / so beautiful, while I am merely / old and gnarled?"

Sea imagery

The metaphors already discussed—weather and trees—play the roles, respectively, of agent and victim in Pastan’s story of human limitation; however, one natural metaphor—the sea—contains both roles. References to the sea enter her work in Aspects of Eve. Many later poems have coastal settings, usually with beaches, allowing Pastan to pit the individual against the awesome force of the ocean and introduce the impermanence of sand to characterize human life and relationships. Moreover, she often applies the verbs “to swim” and “to drown” to the human condition.

Pastan’s most sustained metaphoric use of the sea occurs in the final four poems in the section of The Imperfect Paradise subtitled “ Balancing Act.” In “A Walk Before Breakfast,” she dreams of an entire life like a vacation, “with the sea/ opening its chapters/ of water and light.” “The Ordinary Weather of Summer,” however, concludes pessimistically, with her imagining the last summer she and her husband will both be alive, when they walk up from the surf “on wobbly legs,” “shaking the water out of our blinded eyes.” “Erosion,” the last poem of the group, expresses both optimism and pessimism. “We are slowly/ undermined,” she declares, thinking of the slippage of sand, and adds, “The waves move their long row/ of scythes over the beach.” Nonetheless, the sea appears “Implacably lovely,” and the couple tries to stop the erosion. She has to admit, though, that “one day the sea will simply/ take us.” The final stanza contains the most rewarding metaphors. Pastan allows, “We are made of water anyway,” and says she has felt it “in the yielding/ of your flesh.” She also thinks of her husband as sand, “moving slowly, slowly/ from under me.”

Having acknowledged that the forces facing the individual are “implacable,” Pastan still places considerable emphasis on human endeavor and accomplishment. Her people raise families, sustain professions, initiate projects and hobbies, and love and hurt one another. In other words, though subject to the forces of creation, they are far from passive. Indeed, Pastan exerts herself metaphorically to depict human effectuality, even in the face of finally overpowering forces.

Art imagery

One reliable metaphor of human accomplishment, often implicit, is art. Many of Pastan’s poems have been inspired by works of art, and she frequently mentions her own reading and working at poems. One of her tenderest love poems, “Prosody 101” (from A Fraction of Darkness), uses poetry itself as a metaphor. She begins by noting that she was taught that surprise, not regularity, was essential to poetry. (By writing the poem in blank verse, an unusual choice for her, Pastan can let the metrical pattern create rhythmic surprises.) Then, after describing surprises brought on by the weather, she relates a situation in which her husband startles her. He has acted so much like “a cold front” that she expects she might leave him, but he unexpectedly laughs and picks her up, making her feel young and alive—making her realize, “So this is Poetry.”

Pastan has also dedicated a significant portion of her adult years to domestic concerns. In fact, the poems in the second part of Waiting for My Life depict her acceptance of “dailiness” as a vocation. In “Who Is It Accuses Us?” she angrily answers that domesticity is anything but safe. “You who risk no more than your own skins/ I tell you household Gods/ are jealous Gods,” she declares, thinking of how they poison one’s “secret wells/ with longing.” Her autobiographical essay “Roots,” in which she tells of postponing her career in poetry to raise her family, acknowledges the duties of home life as an important source of metaphor. She talks specifically of her identification with Penelope, Ulysses’ wife in the Odyssey, who told her importunate suitors that she would choose a husband to replace the long-absent Ulysses when she finished a tapestry. Each day she worked on it, and each night tore out that day’s work. Appropriately, throughout Pastan’s poems, one finds references to various types of needlecraft—lace, knitting, sewing—and two provocative meditations on the Penelope myth—“At the Loom” and “Rereading The Odyssey in Middle Age”—appear in The Imperfect Paradise.

Images of closets, hallways, televisions, and entire houses also pervade Pastan’s writing. Not surprisingly, kitchens supply some of the most compelling domestic metaphors. In “Soup” (from The Five Stages of Grief), an angry persona likens her life to an “icebox . . . full/ of the homelier vegetables.” A mellower view develops in “Meditation by the Stove” (from Waiting for My Life), a poem that harkens to the traditional use of a kitchen fire to symbolize nurturing (as in many fairy tales, such as the Cinderella stories). Amid the baking of bread and looking after children, the persona acknowledges the disruptive presence of passion, but commits herself to domestic responsibility: “I have banked the fires of my body/ into a small domestic flame for others/ to warm their hands on for a while.”

Finally, though, she is fed up with her family’s judgments of her household abilities, as shown in Pastan’s widely anthologized “Marks” (from The Five Stages of Grief), in which the wife and mother describes her husband giving her “. . . an A/ for last night’s supper,/ an incomplete for my ironing,/ a B plus in bed.” Her son says she is an average mother but that she could improve if she put her mind to it. Her daughter “. . . believes/ in Pass/Fail and tells me/ I pass. . . .” The wife and mother confides to the reader, “Wait ’til they learn/ I’m dropping out.”

Although there are references to her father’s work as a surgeon, particularly in “A Tourist at Ellis Island” (from Queen of a Rainy Country), in which it is discovered that the “. . . surgeon father/ Jack, of the silk ties/ and trimmed mustache” is actually Jankel Olenik, who “thrust” his daughter “. . . into the new world/ scrubbed clean of peasant dirt” and never told her his history, the primary male occupation in Pastan’s poems is gardening—a passion belonging to her husband, which resonates with the story of the Garden of Eden. Pastan is alert to forsythias, locusts, lady slippers, bloodroot, milkweed, trillium, dandelions, onions, corn, and bees, as well as the work involved in tending plants.

Her fine six-sonnet sequence “The Imperfect Paradise” contains the fullest portrayal of the gardener—devoted to spring, naming “everything in sight.” The gardener’s endeavors are such that he can seem godlike, destroying trees so that flowers flourish and carting off trapped squirrels so that birds can have the seed intended for them. Toward such activity, Pastan’s persona is often antagonistic, yet she also relates the fruits of her husband’s labor to stages in life, such as the “camellias blowsy with middle age” in “Prosody 101” that she notices while remembering how she was taught that it was not the ”. . . strict iambic line goose-stepping/ over the page . . .” that mattered most “. . . but the variations/ in that line and the tension it produced/ on the ear by the surprise of difference.” She does not understand exactly until years later, ready to say goodbye to her husband “for good,” when he walks in, laughs, and lifts her up in his arms, as if she “. . . were lacy with spring/ instead of middle-aged like the camellias.” “So this is Poetry,” she thought.

In the “Absence of Wings” (from A Fraction of Darkness), she portrays the gardener as her warden, holding her in his “maze of hawthorn and yew.” Now that her children have grown, her father has died, and her writing of poems seems near an end, she wanders to a place where snow and flowers alternate. Still longing, she is like the mythical Daedalus before he invented the wax-and-feather wings that enabled him and his son Icarus to escape the power of King Midas: “The horizon is the thread/ I must tie to my wrist” “as I come/ to the vine-scrolled gatepost/ of the labyrinth.”

Travel imagery

A final major metaphor of human endeavor—travel—is also ambiguous. More often than not, movement implies potentiality. Pastan writes of morning being “parked/ outside my window” in “Final” (from The Five Stages of Grief), and in “To a Daughter Leaving Home” (from The Imperfect Paradise), a girl’s first tentative bicycle rides represent her maturation. Absence of movement represents failure. In “Waiting For My Life,” for instance, the persona regrets her lack of initiative. She has stood at bus stops waiting for her life “to start,” and even when she makes her way onto a bus, she has no sense of direction or purpose.

An even more frightening aspect of this metaphor lies in the fact that travel is not necessarily a matter of intention. The journey of life, especially progress toward death, is not merely one’s own doing. “They seemed to all take off/ at once,” Pastan writes in “Departures” (from A Fraction of Darkness), referring to the deaths of several female relatives. The second stanza of “The Accident” (from The Imperfect Paradise) may be the most eloquent passage on this theme. She imagines death as “an almost perfect ending”: the icy road leading to a lamppost, the post being “a hidden exit . . . where the past/ and the future collide/ in one barbarous flash/ and only the body/ is nothing,/ disappearing at last/ into certainty.”

Pastan also imagines traveling over unfamiliar landscapes, such as in “Dreaming of Rural America” (from Carnival Evening), describing how she wants to see the “. . . planes/ line up at their gates/ like cows at their stalls for milking” and “. . . enter the ticking heart/ of the country. . . .” In this idyllic farmland, she says, “. . . farmers have lost/ the knack of despair. . . .” They do not “breathe the diesel fumes of whiskey” or “. . . wield their leather belts/ to erase . . ./ the old stigmata of failure.” This nostalgia for an ideal or past that no longer exists extends to a longing for home to regain a sense of normality. In “After a Long Absence, I Return to a Site of Former Happiness” (from The Last Uncle), Pastan describes returning to her childhood home ten years after her mother’s death, only to find “the rose-encrusted fence/ had been stripped away . . . ,” showing that even as she changed into someone else, “. . . the world/ was changing too. . . .” Rather than comforting her, though, this reminder of mortality makes her decide, “if there’s a poem of affirmation here,/ a poem without bitterness or a shadow/ of self-pity, then someone else must write it.”

Bodily misfortune

Pastan’s discomfort with the fact that human efforts, regardless of their nature or immediate ends, lead finally to death makes her portrayal of the body highly distinctive. In “At the Gynecologist’s” (from A Perfect Circle of Sun), perhaps echoing Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (1965), Pastan characterizes herself in the stirrups of the examining table as “galloping towards death/ with flowers of ether in my hair.” The body is the focal point—even the battleground—in Pastan’s story of human limitation. There is little celebrating of sensuality in her poems, in fact little visual description. Rather, she focuses on callouses, cramps, anesthesia, infection, rashes, scars, bruises, bandages, migraine, root canal surgery, bypass surgery, mammograms, X rays, EKGs, sonograms, insomnia, and (not surprisingly) hypochondria. “Teeth” (from The Five Stages of Grief) emphasizes physical decline and collapse, characterizing teeth as “rows of crumbling/ headstones.”

In later poems, Pastan confronts her discomfort with her parents’ deaths, as in “Notes to My Mother” (from Carnival Evening), in which she describes her mother’s letters to her “forwarded to my dreams/ where you appear in snatches/ of the past, wearing/ appropriate clothes.” She reflects on the postcards she used to send her mother from camp, with their reassuring words, “Feeling fine, having a good time,” despite her homesickness. She describes herself as “still homesick eight years after/ you left me in my life for good.” Acknowledging that she learned to love the woman her mother became after a stroke, she admits that she “never quite forgave her/ for hiding my real mother.” She regrets not having thanked her mother “properly” despite being taught to always write thank-you notes. As she grows older, she says, “I try/ to draw the world in close/ as if it were a shawl you had crocheted for me,” and at the end of the poem, she imagines sleep gathering her in its arms, as a mother would to comfort a child.

If Pastan’s concern lay only with perpetuating her youth or physical beauty, however, her poetry would lack its tragic dimension. Her real interest is moral, her preoccupation with bodily misfortune a reflection of her worry about her own failures. Her views are far from absurdist: She recognizes and values accomplishment. Her persona admits to “a nature always asking/ for the worst” and laments her “sins,” “all my old faults,” and various missed opportunities. However, amid threatening forces, people can live admirable, even heroic lives. The often-praised early poem “Emily Dickinson” (from A Perfect Circle of the Sun), which links health and morality, praises Dickinson not for eccentricity but for “the sheer sanity/ of vision, the serious mischief/ of language, the economy of pain.”

Human limitation

In Pastan’s tragic story of human limitation, not only does the body journey toward death, but the self, as she says in “Low Tide” (from A Fraction of Darkness), is “the passionate guest/ who would inhabit this flesh,” an entity—call it “soul”—eventually separate from the body. With age, medical charts become one’s “only autobiography,” she says in “Clinic” (from A Fraction of Darkness). The human individual exists subject to forces—natural and perhaps supernatural—that surpass one’s ability to control. Weather and the sea represent such forces, and trees reflect the individual’s position in relation to them. An individual, however, has the freedom—or curse, if one recalls the Fall in Genesis—to exert the self in significant ways. Thus, according to Pastan, people travel until, to quote “Clinic,” “we stop/ being part of our bodies/ and start simply/ to inhabit them,” as “Caroline” (from The Five Stages of Grief) does, wearing “her coming death/ as gracefully/ as if it were a coat/ she’d learned to sew./ When it grew cold enough/ she’d simply button it/ and go.” The image of this poem mimics Caroline’s self-containment: Readers can almost see her disappearing as she buttons her coat.

Poetry, then, is the preservative and fixative in the flux of time and in a world that “wounds us/ with its beauty; as if it knew/ we had to leave it soon” (“In a Northern Country,” from An Early Afterlife). Each Pastan poem is a spray of words and images drying before the colors further fade. Her poems have a decorum, a sense of quiet, about them, but many suggest that hidden riots are about to break out, that each shedding oak or elm might suddenly become a Maypole. Such is the spirit of the title poem of Carnival Evening. In the long run, the distinction between dusk and festival diminishes, perhaps disappears. Pastan describes her fascination with the power of words as well as her frustration at their unwillingness to cooperate. “This Enchanted Forest” (from Carnival Evening) reimagines fairy tales as places where poetry lives; Pastan claims Rumpelstiltskin as her muse and associates Snow White with “the snow as pure/ as an empty page.” She imagines the pea under the princess’s bed as “the small, hard/ lump of an extra syllable” and “a row/ of pages perfectly/ sized and metaphored,” similar to the shoemaker’s shop run by elves. Instead of Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs, she leaves, she says, “a trail of poems/ behind me as I go.” However, she is not seeking immortality and knows “most endings/ are unhappy.” She feels her “own fiery one/ is approaching so fast” that all she can try to do is “set it to music.” In fact, this search for the right words is an obsession, as described in “Voices” (from The Five Stages of Grief), in which the poet admits driving through a stop sign because she was thinking about line breaks, longing for the gift of Midas, when “everything we touch turns/ to a poem—when the spell is on.” “One way or another,” she says, “you burn for it.”

Bibliography

Franklin, Benjamin V. “Theme and Structure in Linda Pastan’s Poetry.” Poet Lore 75 (Winter, 1981): 234-241.

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Pastan, Linda. "The Looming Dark: An Interview with Linda Pastan." Interview by Alex Dueben. The Paris Review, 6 Jan. 2016, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/01/06/the-looming-dark-an-interview-with-linda-pastan/. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.

Pastan, Linda. “’Whatever Is at Hand’: A Conversation with Linda Pastan.” Interview by Stan Sanvel Rubin. In The Post-confessionals: Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, Judith Kitchen, and Rubin. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989.

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Upton, Lee. “Mortal Ordeals.” Review of The Father, by Sharon Olds, and Heroes in Disguise, by Linda Pastan. Belles Lettres 8, no. 1 (Fall, 1992): 30.