Ned Balbo's first poetry collection, Galileo's Banquet, received the 1998 Towson University Prize for Literature. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry, he is recipient of a 2001 residency in poetry from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Ekphrasis, the Quarterly, and elsewhere, and he has reviewed poetry for Verse, Parabola, and Pleiades.

The idea of a life in poetry and prose is, by definition, problematic. Life, for most of us, happens outside of writing, in the so-called "real world" where others press in upon us with their sum of love and grief, their demands and generosities, where events command attention and transform us. But, for writers, life and art are fused in ways often revealing, sometimes necessary, and, I'd argue, not entirely of our making. Take Georg Trakl, born in Salzburg, Austria in 1887, dead in November 1914. In Georg Trakl: A Profile, editor and critic Frank Graziano writes, "One can imagine Trakl's brief, intoxicated life as one that mortifies its flesh only to patch it with poems that bear an uncanny resemblance to scars." Here is one of those scars, a sonnet imperfectly translated, which I published a few years back in the journal Verse. It's called "Dream of Evil" (in German "Traum des Bosen").

          A gong's brown-golden tones fade, as a lover
          wakes up in the flicker of dark rooms,
          his cheek close to the window's fading flames.
          Sail, mast, and rope flash on the river.
         
          A monk, a pregnant woman in the crush
          of people--strummed guitars, red blouses shimmer.
          Chestnuts shrivel in the hot, gold glare;
          The sad pretension of the church looms harsh
         
          and black. From pale masks, a spirit of evil
          stares. A public square, now gray and dark, grows
          dreadful. On dim islands, whispers rise--
         
          Tonight, the lepers read conflicting signals
          in the flight of birds. Maybe each limb decays.
          In the park, a brother and sister's trembling eyes.

Even in my translation, the poem remains uncanny: "Ein Liebender," or lover, wakes in "schwarzen Zimmern," black rooms whose windows reflect fire while, along the docks outside, a crowd passes, monk and pregnant woman noted. A church looms, chestnuts roast, the day wanes, and the spirit of evil--"die Geist des Bosen"--stares out from pale faces that look like masks. Voices rise from nearby islands, lepers are baffled by omens read in bird-flight, while siblings regard each other anxiously: "In the park, a brother and sister's trembling eyes," or, in Trakl's own words, "Im Park erblicken zitternd sich Geschwister." The fourteen lines of Trakl's sonnet (my own metrical translation relies on slant rhyme) hold the whole unsettling journey from dockside room to fallen world, or worse; significantly, the last line offers a clue to what triggers the darkening mood. But what wound underlies this dream of evil?

We don't need to know much about the writer's life to catch the mood of Trakl's poem; still, in this case, biography is revealing. According to most accounts, Trakl was the son of an indifferent hardware magnate and an opium addict with a weakness for antiques, fifteen years her husband's junior; though affluent, neither parent showed much interest in the children (six altogether) though, from evidence within and outside Trakl's work, Georg and younger sister Grete showed great interest in each other. Too much, in fact: they were probably lovers, and if Trakl's own guilt and damaged psyche weren't enough, he, like his mother, ended up an addict, later a pharmacist by necessity, and, eventually, a suicide broken by the Great War's horrors. In context, Trakl's images becomes accessible in ways the poem alone cannot reveal--though no poet would say that poems require biography's support to work their effects on heart and mind. Still, I can think of few poems besides others by Trakl (or, maybe, Weldon Kees) that so fully evoke the dark mood in all its complex shadings without resorting to confession--that is, the overt disclosure of biography. In "Dream of Evil," the feelings are all there--in the lines, the images, the sonnet's controlled form--without mention of the facts of Trakl's life.

I, too, have a sister in my life, and our relationship is fraught, though not to the extent of Georg and Grete's. One night in 1967, my parents, Carmine and Betty, drove from our house in Smithtown to Brentwood, a blue-collar suburb near the South Shore of Long Island. In the '60's, Brentwood's neighborhoods held few traces of its past as a utopian community known as Modern Times, but I do remember the trip along a dark Route 111, past the barn and silent horses, the Wagon Wheel Inn's orange-and-green neon ring. As you can see, unlike Trakl, I, too, share the disease of our times: an impulse toward self-disclosure unencumbered by discretion, the need to grip each listener with the force of an ancient mariner who tells the tale for his own benefit, not yours.

What I couldn't know that night is I was about to meet my sister, though I wouldn't know her as such for six more years. Indeed, I wouldn't find out till then I wasn't a Balbo at all but a child, through various subterfuges, never even adopted, a legal loose end left dangling to this day. But that night, Carmine and Betty drove down Prospect Avenue in a neighborhood where all the streets were named for streets in Brooklyn, to ensure that, in my childhood, I would get to meet my sister--later, they'd move to Brentwood so Kim and I could become friends and so the women, sharing the secret, could find comfort in each other. The collection Galileo's Banquet includes in a blank verse poem that recreates that night with benefit of hindsight, some unavoidable exposition, and a certain nostalgic haze.

A NEW START
          For Elizabeth; Brentwood, New York, 1967

"Wait here." You strode across the lawn, black salt-
And-pepper hair, black skirt, your high-heeled shoes
Stabbing the grass while I sat at the fence,
Split-rail beneath the maple. "Anyone home?"
You called out once again, as if by circling
Round the yard, weaving through shrub and rose-
Beds, tapping windows, you'd make them appear.
The sun beat down. This house would soon be ours
And so much would be solved when we moved in--
Old neighbors you'd pulled close too suddenly,
The long feuds afterward--all these erased
When we moved "one last time": a new start, maybe,
One more second chance...You passed the sign
Staked on the lawn, snapping aside a branch,
White birch left to grow wild, then disappeared
Around the house, dirt-brown split-level ranch
Two blocks from your new friend. And who was she,
"Aunt" Elfie who'd found you this house for sale--
Mother of Schatzi, freshly dyed flame-hair--
Pouring herself the drinks that you refused?
All night, shaking ourselves to rock 'n' roll,
Her daughter and I danced to old 45s
Down in that panelled basement while the men
Laughed over shots of whiskey, needle scraping
When we thumped too hard... Where were you now?
A bird, black silhouette, veered toward the power
Lines, grabbed hold of the clumped knot stretching toward
A stripped pole near the woods. A motor gunned,
And in the distance children's--strangers'--cries.
I didn't want to move, and yet I did--
If you were right, this time...I liked the daughter--
What would I have noticed? How she laughed
In shrieks, almost; how long you'd watched us both,
Till on the drive home you'd leaned close to say,
Quietly, to my father, it was good--
Good that we'd know each other growing up.
What could you mean? I pushed the thought away--
But on that day, mid-June, trapped in a yard
Flooded with light, breaking apart the seeds
That fluttered down, I heard your voice again
Greeting the car. You clasped the owner's hands
As she emerged, caught off-guard while the door
Thumped shut, her husband from the driver's side
Crossing to greet you as she stepped away
Stiffly. The closing loomed; more paperwork,
But why had we come really? To see friends--
Strangers we hardly knew--who'd disappear,
The deal complete, into their separate lives
As anyone but you would understand,
Smiling too widely, talking through their nods
And curt replies, praising your new best friend,
Her daughter, all the luck that brought you here,
Certain at last you'd find yourself betrayed
No longer, that you'd fled the past for good
Here in a world remade. You called my name--
But what if you were right?--and I obeyed.

A sibling is a version of the self, the same dice on a different roll, another set of possibilities. For Kim and me, that feeling runs still deeper, the consequence of choice and chance that placed us in different households. Kim was raised by Elfie and John Madsen, our paternal grandmother and step-grandfather; I was raised by Carmine and Betty, our maternal half-aunt and her husband. Growing up, Kim believed our father Don was her half-brother; I knew him as an uncle through marriage; for Kim, our mother Elaine was merely her brother's wife; for me, an aunt, Betty's half-sister. And so on, lines of descent hopelessly tangled, changing shape, later revised when Don and Elaine forced out the truth--that they were our true parents--the attempt to follow, always frustrating, maddeningly complex, as a listener's understanding fades the moment we've told our story. Anyone who wants to write at some point looks around and wonders whether to recount the raw material of his life: is my biography interesting? Would anyone care to read it? But through my teens and twenties, I faced the opposite problem: a family story so baroque no one could even follow it.

In Yeats' "The Stolen Child," the faeries' summons is a song: "Come away, O human child!/To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." In those years before I finished Galileo's Banquet, I would have had to revise the line: "The world's more full of weeping than you, the audience, understands, than I, the writer, have skill to tell." It was as if Yeats' character had turned away from his human family only to find that the faeries, too, withheld their gifts. At any rate, the Balbos' friendship with the Madsens soon trailed off in conflicts fuelled by our new friends' alcoholism, as well as Betty's fear that, ignorant of our true origin, Kim and I would one day fall in love. (Betty viewed us through the lens of Depression-era melodrama). Ironically, through high school, my sister and I were hardly friends, the truths we shared awkward enough to drive us to polite detachment, an inclination that has changed, thankfully, in recent years.

Of Elizabeth Bishop, poet and critic Dana Gioia writes, "For some of us coming to maturity in the late sixties or seventies, Bishop's personal example deeply influenced our sense of what it meant to be a serious poet. This assertion may seem odd to those who remember how little was known about her life at that point, but her determined privacy was an essential part of her attraction" (from "The Example of Elizabeth Bishop," in the volume Can Poetry Matter?). By now the facts of Bishop's life are better known, thanks, in part, to an interview conducted by Elizabeth Spires (in Paris Review and the volume Poets at Work). There, Bishop described her child-self as "fearfully observant... You notice all kinds of things, but there's no way of putting them all together." At only eight months, the poet had lost her father, and she told Spires, "my mother went crazy when I was four or five years old." Thereafter, various relatives cared for Bishop--"they all felt so sorry...that they tried to do their very best"- until she was old enough for boarding school. A few years back, we learned still more of these early years' effects when Georgia Review published three never-before-seen poems; one of these, "A Drunkard," describes "a terrifying historical incident, the Great Salem Fire, from the perspective of a three-year-old child. The fire took place on 25 June 1914 ...[and] devastated 252 acres, destroyed 1,800 buildings, and rendered 15,000 people homeless....More significantly, it alludes frankly to Bishop's lifelong problem with alcohol--an admission made nowhere in her published work--and explores feelings of guilt and anger toward her mother more directly than anything she published." (The words are those of critic Thomas Travisano in the same issue.) Bishop's poem begins with characteristic detachment:

          When I was three, I watched the Salem fire.
          It burned all night (or then I thought it did)
          and I stood in my crib & watched it burn.
          The sky was bright red; everything was red
          out on the lawn, my mother's white dress looked
          rose-red; my white enameled crib was red
          and my hands holding to its rods--
          the brass knobs holding specks of fire--
         
Here we find, as in Trakl's "Dream," another fire glimpsed from a room, as Bishop beholds a world plunged into conflagration; yet Bishop's poem, unlike Trakl's, is the product of an ordered mind:

          I felt not fear but amazement, maybe
          my infancy's chief emotion.
          People were playing hoses on the roofs
          of the summer cottages on Marblehead Neck;
          the red sky was filled with flying motes,
          cinders and coals, and bigger things, burnt black.
         
The next day, "clouds of smoke" still visible, the beach is filled with "strange objects [that] seemed to have blown across the water:/lifted by that terrible heat, through the red sky?"; but when Bishop lifts up one of these, "a woman's long black cotton/stocking," her mother reprimands her, "Put that down!" We all recognize this moment: the shame of having broken some taboo never explained, the child's flush of rage at her own lack of understanding and for the surprise attack of a parent's scolding. Still, we as readers (and Bishop as writer) see the mother's point of view: her daughter may have just picked up the stocking of a corpse. It is an image charged with terror: the mother's sight of her own child touching what's touched the dead (so intimately, as well), the daughter handling death itself, innocent of the gravity of her act. The moment the poem selects is poignant: two years later, Bishop's mother would suffer a final breakdown to begin what would become lifelong institutionalization. This painful memory, then, is one of only a precious few, culled from an age when memory itself is fragmented, imperfect.

Bishop's poem resolves with self-revelation and retreat:

          But since that night, that day, that reprimand
          I have suffered from abnormal thirst--
          I swear it's true--and by the age
          of twenty or twenty-one I had begun
          to drink, & drink--I can't get enough
          and, as you must have noticed,
          I'm half-drunk now...
         
          And all I'm telling you may be a lie...
         
If so, what kind of lie? The "lie" inherent in our attempts to reconstruct the past? The imperfections and gaps of memory, the vagaries of "interpretation"? And if a drunkard's words, after all, aren't always reliable, so, too, are they known for speaking truths.

I was fortunate to hear, in the last months of her life, Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar College, her alma mater. She sat in Cushing Hall, occasionally smoking, reading and speaking gently before faculty and students. I can't imagine her reading "A Drunkard," yet she had felt compelled to write it: what we must write, and what we must publish, are matters to consider separately. Anything we write, to some degree, reveals our lives, consciously or not, by inclusion or evasion. A critic decades later may seek to redress the writer's error: today, we value any insight into Elizabeth Bishop's work, and "A Drunkard" seems a lost treasure calling out for rescue. Besides, in our media- and publicity-driven culture, Bishop's stance seems almost quaint. Today, we withhold secrets only long enough to expose them; no public figure dares presume the right to a private life, and we have to assume our own secrets will one day face exposure, so much so that we announce them before our adversaries can: the better to guide disclosure, the better to control the "spin."

Yet this is not a bad thing. What passed for privacy years ago, with its command to mute our voices, was often used to silence us, to sustain the power of the strong: to silence women, suppress our children, or our neighbors. We were told to turn away, to shut out what we witnessed: the consequences of segregation, the dangers of the workplace, corruption of the environment, the violence in our own homes. And if the power to expose no longer holds much impact, jaded as we've become by all we've heard or seen, so much the better (at least in literary matters): as mere shock loses its force, the form and content of what we offer regain primary importance. The impulse, emotional or aesthetic, that compels us to disclose must offer something worthy of the telling.

Former Maryland poet laureate, short story writer, and celebrated woman of letters Josephine Jacobsen has asked questions that could serve as the epigraph to this talk: "What do I remember, and what is worth remembering? It is important to know the difference. Too often what persists most sharply is something small and intense, while large changes stay merely as cumbersome facts." In the same essay, Jacobsen later observes, "It may seem odd that, in looking back, I have spent so much time on the first twenty-five years of my life; but I realized some time ago that it was these formative years which set in motion everything else: who I was, where I came from, what I wanted. The rest is the development of that seed" (Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Vol. 18).

I'd like to close by reading "Freedomland," a short essay on the historic amusement park which stood for four years in the Bronx in the early '60's. In it, I recall my adoptive parents from the vantage of the same age at which Bishop recalls her mother; some of you here today knew my father Carmine whom I lost earlier this year. (Betty died in 1977.) Unlike Bishop or Trakl, I was fortunate in my parents; and I say "fortunate" quite literally: any number of accidents might have placed me in other hands, as in my sister's case over a year before my birth. One risk adopted children face is the temptation to define themselves too long as son or daughter, to feel their identity inextricable from their circumstances of birth. In one respect, this is inevitable: who we are is a troubled question, and the anxieties that surround our doubts resurface in times of change. Yet all of us, adopted or not, must put history in its place, which doesn't mean we should speak or act as if the past could vanish. My own work's deepest impulse is a need to preserve that past, to hear, once again, those voices that might otherwise be lost. For this writer, then, the way to Freedomland is backward, through memory and reclamation, and forward, also, toward the future, with all that we would rescue carried with us.