Contributor’s Marginalia: James Davis May on “Woman, 41, with a History of Alzheimer’s on Both Sides of Her Family” by Maggie Smith

When I was in graduate school and he was my professor, Tony Hoagland sometimes held his office hours at a Pei Wei on Waugh Drive in Houston. He’d set up shop at a four-top. On his side of the table, he’d stack sheaves of Xeroxed handouts, these delightful Franken-copies of various poems from various books that he had found interesting—though maybe not always good. I never saw him make these, but they reminded me, in a charming way, of ransom notes. Instead of cutting out and assembling random words from magazines into sentences, Tony copied and spliced different poems together to make something that was half argument, half observation. More than anything, he was trying to get his students to read, and read a lot. That he opted to hold his office hours in a restaurant chain instead of, say, one of the trendy fair-trade coffee shops, of which there were no shortage in Houston, says something about Tony and his beliefs about poetry’s connection to the contemporary world, but that’s not what this memory’s about—or at least it’s not why I’m remembering it right now.

On one visit, he read one of my poems and praised it, mildly, for how it put two unlike situations together and let them “hit off each other on the page.” This was a long time ago, and while I’ve forgotten the poem that was surely worth forgetting, I remember his insight: “A poem,” he said, “can be like one of those contraptions on a CEO’s desk” and he made his hands into fists and had one hit the other, causing it to swing upwards and then back down so it hit the one that hit it. He was talking about Newton’s Cradle, a line of swinging metal spheres that illustrates properties of momentum and how it’s conducted—more than anything, though, these gadgets look and sound cool.

Tony’s metaphor, of course, is about metaphor, its pleasures, how we enjoy the energy it creates and seems to perpetuate. Our minds bounce from tenor to vehicle and back again, mulling them over, yes, but more than anything delighting in the motion the poet’s mind has made.

An exemplary demonstration of this motion is Maggie Smith’s “Woman, 41, with a History of Alzheimer’s on Both Sides of Her Family.” Smith’s utilitarian title allows her to cut right to poem’s subject, the speaker’s worries that not only will she, too, have Alzheimer’s, but that it may be here already:

Every night before bed, I lock
the front door, but in the morning
I can’t find those metal teeth,
those brassy mountains,

those little saws that lock it
from the outside.

Though the premise is frightening, the poem’s work is thrilling, as it confronts as dangerous a subject as a poem can confront—the loss of language—and turns that potential loss against itself. Unable to find the conventional name of the thing she literally lost, the speaker renames it: “those metal teeth, / those brassy mountains.” (How lovely is it, by the way, that the line forms itself into iambs as it gets closer to naming: “those METal TEETH / those BRASsy MOUNTains,” as if the poem itself is snapping its fingers, trying to remember.) From here, the speaker confesses to sometimes startling awake to what she thinks are intruders in her house but are really the sounds of her own breathing. This is the first sphere, and Smith has pulled it back and let it go.

Now for the second sphere. The poem, we learn, is an address to the speaker’s ex-lover, a move that charges an already precarious poem with even more risk, the risk of intimacy. Here the speaker recounts a night in her “brief life together” with the ex-lover in which they sneaked into their neighbor’s house and “took nothing, / only rearranged the furniture.” “When they came home,” Smith writes, “and found everything wrong, / they must have sworn / something was missing.” The poem implies that the paranoia the speaker imagines the neighbors felt is like the paranoia she now feels towards her own mind. Things are different, the thinking goes in both situations, so something must be missing.

Earlier, I said that the poem turns the potential loss of language against itself; not only could the speaker not remember the word keys, she couldn’t remember “where / inside [she] set the memory.” In a very Coleridgean move (“I’m worried I’ve lost my imaginative powers, so I’m going to write a poem like ‘Dejection: An Ode’ about it”), the poem proves that the speaker’s associative powers are very much intact by naming what her worries over Alzheimer’s are like. So the poem click-clacks us back and forth between the two situations in a way that’s not just pleasing but mesmerizing.