Salter, Mary Jo (1954 - )
A dedicated craftsman who knows how to use form like a jewelerÕs setting to display every facet of a word or phrase, Mary Jo Salter deftly reveals the universal in personal experiences and in objects and places. Often humorous and poignant at once, her poems have both an appealing humility and a sure-footed confidence.
Salter was born in Grand
Rapids, Michigan, in 1954, raised in Detroit and Baltimore, and educated at
Harvard, where she studied under Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop (she
and her husband-to-be Brad Leithauser took a workshop led by Bishop), and at
Cambridge University. Another formative relationship began for Salter in 1979,
when, working at The Atlantic Monthly, she impulsively wrote a Òfan letterÓ in reply to an unsolicited
manuscript from Amy Clampitt. Their correspondence and friendship lasted until
ClampittÕs death in 1994.
In reading SalterÕs
poems one sees a genuine pleasure in the surprising Òartful correspondencesÓ
(the phrase is from ÒDead LettersÓ) between things and ideas that are brought
to life by correlating sounds. Always sensitive to the nuances revealed when
the observerÕs expectations are jarred, she delights in the imprecise rhyme, in
the altered figure of speech, in juxtapositions of words that create a
provocative dissonance (like the painted-on Genovese shutters she describes in
ÒTrompe lÕOeilÓ(2003): Òpaint hung out to dry—/ shirttails flapping on a
friezeÓ). Her love of puns and double-meanings hints at the influence of the
work of JAMES MERRILL, to whom she pays homage in the poem ÒTankerÓ(2003),
which is a tanka about a sudden understanding of MerrillÕs own tanker/tanka pun
in his poem ÒFort LauderdaleÓ (ÒNo one but you would have made / a bonsai of a
bonsai.Ó). She surprises readers with ÒmisheardÓ lines (a Òlunging serviceÓ
promised on a moving airplane in ÒTwo PrayersÓ) and mis-seen images (a homeless
woman in ÒWhat Do Women Want?Ó(1994) whose Òflask of vodkaÓ is revealed to be
dishwashing soap: Òpoor thing – her dirty secret nothing worse / than the
dream of meals to wash up after.Ó). SalterÕs fluency with traditional forms
allows her to bend and reinvent formal poetry, with results that can be solemn
or playful.
SalterÕs extensive travels in Iceland, Japan and France have given rise to numerous poems in which travel, and the experience of foreignness, become metaphors for travel into different mentalities and perspectives. Craft, and art, are a strong presence in SalterÕs subject matter as well, and much of her work imagines the lives and preoccupations of artists and inventors, from a sidewalk chalk artist in ÒThe Rebirth of VenusÓ (1989) to Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Thomas Jefferson, to her own mother, a painter whose work, and early death from cancer, occasioned many of SalterÕs poems.
Salter exploits the familiar sounds and rhythms of formal
poetry to evoke particular moods or to create expectations, which she then
disturbs. She opens ÒChernobylÓ (1989), with a familiar, singsong convention
from childrenÕs storytelling: ÒOnce upon a time / the word alone was
scary.Ó The poemÕs plain
vocabulary, regular A-B-A-B rhymed lines, and use of feminine endings,
reverberate surprisingly against the poemÕs grim subject matter to remind us of
how quickly disasters become distant stories (ÒFear is harder to retain/ Than hope, or indifferenceÓ). In ÒElegies for Etsuko,Ó the suicide of
a young friend is treated in a series of poems with structures from villanelle
to free verse, creating a formal mirror of the many conflicting responses we
have to loss. But whether the subject matter is large (the September 11th
attacks) or small (ÒMy husband has a crush on Myrna LoyÓ), SalterÕs poems are
consistent in their open-minded, delicately observed details - even when taking
her own psychoanalysis as subject, she manages to avoid the confessional trap
of writing that is only personal. Her work,
always self-aware, is never selfish.
Domestic objects—a refrigerator magnet, the Christmas tree, her fatherÕs home movies—are treated with the same care as a painting by Titian. Uniquely masterful in her exaltation of the daily and the domestic, Salter perceives and expresses the important correlations among the most mundane objects and experiences with a seemingly effortless interpolation of poetic resonance into everyday life, formalizing the day-to-day as if to hint that that a grand scheme does indeed underpin all human experience.
(Adapted from The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and
Poetry. Greenwood Press, 2005)
Amy Glynn Greacen
San Francisco, CA