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April 13, 2006

Books, Journals & More

A closer look: Maureen Passmore

In 1997, Maureen Passmore, then an undergraduate at Penn State, participated in a study abroad program to Ukraine, expanding on an interest originating in a class in Ukrainian culture and civilization. She found the Ukrainian people were still in recovery mode from the totalitarian Soviet Union, which had split up less than an decade earlier. Remnants of the Soviet regime included gulags turned into museums and parks with crumbled statues of Soviet icons.

“Everything that interested me when I was in Ukraine just dealt with that other way of life. When I grew up, they were still the U.S.S.R., so learning how people lived under that regime was totally fascinating to me,” says Passmore, a project coordinator in the Health Sciences academic affairs division. “By talking to people and learning about their experiences, it always came across how the government could imprison you just because you’re an artist.”

It took five years before Passmore began to transform those experiences into poems.

“I’m a big ruminator,” she jokes. “Actually, I kept journals, like always, and had a bunch of pictures to help invoke that same kind of environment. I wrote one poem and found that I had a billion more things to say.”

Even given the distance of years, these are poems that nonetheless are intended to retain the immediacy of the moment, she says.

…Men in fatigues demanded passports; one paused

at me and said, “You’ve a freckle in your eye,”

but I didn’t understand the word “freckle.”

I scrambled for my bag, and he laughed

at my quick movements. Another yelled,

“Documents or dollars,” and it’s almost funny,

but I’d never been so close to guns or men

whose mood controlled each second. The bus smelled

sour; we all stood unspeaking, not knowing what

to hand over, what would make their laughter end.

The Ukraine poems, along with a few that were inspired by experiences from a three-week trip to Lithuania in 2003, are collected in “Stranger Truths,” part of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Series published by Kent State University Press.

“I’m the stranger in all this,” she says. “I don’t claim any insight into Ukrainian character or history. I want to emphasize I’m no expert in any way, coming to it very much as a stranger, and I may not even have it right. But, for me, these are the truths I’ve found. It’s all about my own sense of strangeness in this land.”

Talk about the cool, rainy city instead of how hot

the execution chamber was, how we sidled

softly in slippers across its glass-encased floor but

still felt as if we were kicking up the dust of graves.

Decide how to explain that we paid to see misery,

to understand how fingernails are strong enough

to scratch names into concrete walls.

Poetry has been part of her creative life since about the sixth grade, Passmore says. “I know that sounds early, but that was my way of expressing myself. I was a very quiet child.”

However, she kept those expressions to herself until relatively recently, she says.

“Before I started my M.F.A. program at Bowling Green I had never shown anybody my poetry. I’d never taken a workshop before. In college, I was an English major and fiction was what I focused on. What I realized is that I would spend so many paragraphs talking in incredible detail. I didn’t like that. So when I wrote short stories, they were becoming shorter,” Passmore says. “I got more and more fascinated by being able to say something in really clean lines, and to say it as succinctly as possible, as clearly as possible. What I really love about poetry is that you can strip away everything. You don’t have to adhere to any kind of narration or plot — although some of my poems kind of do.”

Eventually, she convinced herself to submit some of the poems for publication. Her poems have been published in Sycamore Review and have won the Mississippi River Poetry Prize.

“When I’ve submitted my poems, it’s been: ‘I’ve looked at this for months, there’s nothing more to add, let’s see what someone else thinks about it.’ Sometimes they like it, sometimes they don’t.”

Passmore describes herself as a narrative poet, resistant to strict structure, who strives to keep her own persona out of her poems. Most of her poems are presented through the eyes of a character other than herself.

“Putting feelings in a character is more honest anyway, because I can’t really know what that experience felt like and, honestly, it’s still a way for me to hide. I like to be as far away as possible from the page,” she says.

“I also don’t write at all with any kind of political overtone,” Passmore says. “I’m not thinking: ‘I’m writing this poem because I want to make a statement about capitalism and democracy in Ukraine.’ I would not be qualified. I’m not Ukrainian, I’ve no ties, except I find the human experiences of how people were dealing with the U.S.S.R. very fascinating.”

In her poem “Bone Black,” for example, Passmore lives out the misery of confinement through the eyes of a prisoner:

“Fingernails gone, bitten down,

except the one I save to scrape

my name, Arunas, into the wall.

The first night here, they shut me

in a closet, the sweatstains melting

off the walls, closing around

me. They asked my name,

the spelling of it, for hours.

Naked, standing on an ice block

in a winter cell—high window-slits.

The sky is white, Simona, a cold

I could never color. Bury the brushes

in the barn; I told them your name.

Before sleep, my hands trace the water

of your hair on my pillow.

“When I visited that KGB museum, there were just so many physical reminders that so many people had been in this place, literally seeing things scratched in the wall, the stains of blood, all just so real that there was no way I could describe it other than through some other person’s eyes,” she says.

The single most difficult task in her poetry is finishing a poem, Passmore says. “Probably all writers struggle with this. I did learn in my M.F.A. program, at some point you have to deliver. You have to put it out there. You need someone to look at it, and give you an opinion about it.”

She was preparing to give a reading recently and her own work made her wince. “I was looking at my poems, and I started to cringe, and I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to tinker with this.’ In a way, I’m still living with them. I go back and sometimes I feel very differently about things. Getting done is very difficult. I think I’m somewhat obsessive about it,” she says.

But the satisfaction she derives from her poetry makes all the effort worthwhile, she maintains. “Just the feeling that you’ve said what you want to say, that in some way maybe you’ve been able to communicate something that is really hard to communicate and that maybe, just maybe, you got it right.”

—Peter Hart

The Fruit Woman

I begin to love the fruit

woman in the market

when she offers ozhina,

blackberries bursting

with globed oceans, treats she knows

I can pay for, but I return

daily for the possibility

of hearing oranzhevi

whisper around her teeth

as she plumps a bag full

of oranges. She doesn’t know

I drink only chorni chai for meals

instead of noodles-in-milk

in cracked cafeteria bowls

from the frowning attendant,

whose eyes flick down

to my shorts and bare legs,

who blesses my meal

with a Smachnoho

as if it’s one more

word for “American.”

After two days of “nothing to eat—

nema—” at the school,

the fruit woman nibbles

on the word zakooziti,

to share her secret

of what she’s saved for me,

hrooshi, a handful of apricots

tiny and light as newborn mice.

The sound of her words,

gifts silking between her lips,

makes a small meal of fruit

a ripe mouth of song.


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