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Molly Fisk makes poems of the things people would rather die than tell you. Reading her poems is often like starting down a path in May only to find yourself surrounded by December disclosures. Perhaps enclosures is the better word, because her poems close around you. You’re busy savoring her observations of her surroundings until that moment when they’ve dropped away and you’re standing in that holy of holies, the mysterium of a fellow being’s life. Not that these are confessional poems—not in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Lowell—but rather that Fisk has brought you to the realization that everything is a facet of the same jewel. The priests of biblical Israel used to enter the inner sanctum of the temple in Jerusalem bound by a cord anchored in the world outside so that they wouldn’t fall into the abyss of the unknowable. This may explain why confessional poets frighten us. We’ve all seen enough of that abyss to know it’s not where we can bear to go, but Molly Fisk writes poems that reassure us that a certain fragrance, beauty and light mark the trail. We can travel to her most dread experiences— incest inflicted on her by her father and grandfather—and come back to where we began with gifts in hand, not just taint that we’re in a panic to scrub off. And so in this sense her poems—at least those in her book, Listening to Winter (HeydayBooks.com)—are vessels in which we have performed ablutions preparatory to walking on. We have bathed in light. The way a poet comes to poetry, that first impulse, can tell us a great deal about her poetry. If the misery and bafflement of adolescence has given rise to a poet’s first utterance, we can usually track her journey into adulthood, which may come later than one might think. The adult brain doesn’t really mature until our twenties.
Molly Fisk came to the writing of poetry at age 35. She had already been a businesswoman in Boston, a banker in Chicago. She was writing analyses of the Canadian timber industry for a bank before she wrote a line of poetry. She had a wealth of experience to bring to bear on her first lines of poetry. She had something to say. She wasn’t trying to grope her way into adulthood, however much poetry is a useful searchlight. She was used to getting across her ideas as if her livelihood depended on it, because it did, so she didn’t romance obscurantism as so many young poets do, usually because they don’t want to be caught dead saying what they mean or meaning what they say. And that should be no indictment of them, because so many of us, like Molly Fisk, enter adulthood toting a dreadful sack of secrets, sometimes not even knowing what’s in the sack.
Poets know a great deal about recovered memory. While the psychiatric and legal communities argue about it, poets know it’s part of their stock in trade. What is more important to them than questions of its validity is the way memories pour back into our consciousness. Fisk had worked for a year with a psychotherapist in high school, and then another year in college, and then again four years later. But none of this hard introspection triggered the memories that imbue her poems with authority. Her family’s terrible betrayal of her flooded back into her adult head only after spending six years in Al-Anon, the organization for the families and friends of alcoholics, and returning to childhood smells, sounds and sights. If you haven’t experienced this theft of innocence you can’t imagine the lengths to which a victim will go to cover it up, to become a coconspirator with the perpetrators.
Readers who have studied James Joyce will remember that books have been written about his uses of olfactory sensation. Most of us rummaging through old attics and barns have encountered the odors of ghosts welcome and unwelcome. It’s one thing to find a ghost—it’s another thing to entertain one.
This is how she describes her first encounter with the ghosts of her tortured past:
 I had my first memories in late November 1990, just after Thanksgiving. A conversation at the dinner table with my family members is what I think opened the door: one of my in-laws who think that this is how a poem should sound, as if it arrived whole, but most us believe poems are built brick by brick, line by line, with an occasional stroke of inspiration. And if you won’t take her word for it, just read the poem; it’s like a nickel-brick façade, you can’t find the mortar. She writes the kind of poems you’re moved to run your fingers over. You think there’s been a conspiracy with the typographer to conceal the interstices. She sometimes writes a poem on a bank deposit envelope, pulling her car over to a shoulder to write. 
Fisk has a hunch poetry plays a sub rosa role in our lives rather like our fantasies: we don’t own up to them, but they‘re part of the governance of our being. This means that on the one hand poetry is never going to make a dent in the publishing industry’s marketing budget, but on the other hand poetry slams and performance poetry in general are wildly popular, to say nothing of the fact that rap and all manner of lyrics are poetry. So when we call it poetry and wrap it up like a book, it’s not so popular, but when we call it by other names it has a huge vogue. Nothing unusual about that. Whenever a genre wears its own uniform it’s unlikely to be as successful as when it wears mufti.
When D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov wrote their notorious books about rampant desire the ensuing falderal purported to be about taboo. The more the idea was talked about, the more people wanted to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Tropic of Cancer or Lolita, but real taboo is hidden deeper, so deep that the society that titillated itself about those books is far less inclined to talk about two of the world’s dirtiest little secrets, that child abuse and alcoholism are pervasive and account for much of the destructive behavior in the world. We witness prime ministers, presidents, generalissimos and clerics acting like school-yard bullies because alcoholism or childhood abuse or both have locked them up in the prisons of their adolescence. But so pervasive is human experience of these dread diseases that we would rather distract ourselves with celebrity worship and shallow controversies about homosexuality and other red herrings of the day. So how then did Molly Fisk, knowing perfectly well that when the issue of child abuse is raised we tend to behave as if the person who raises it smells bad, decide to address it in her poetry? She started where we all would have to start and where some of us, perhaps even most of us, remain stuck—the feeling that something is wrong.
It’s a bit like the feeling that someone is watching you but when you turn around no one is there. Sometimes we try to deal with it, and that’s usually when some Pollyanna says, Everybody feels a little blue now and then, or, Into each life a little rain must fall, or, You just have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and soldier on. People who say such things are not to be trusted. They have an agenda— probably to keep the lid on their own demons.
But how did sensing that something was wrong feel? Was it a kind of emptiness, a blackness, a panic? Fisk describes it this way: It wasn't any of those feelings—not panic, or fear or lackness—I just felt stymied and couldn't figure out why someone as nice as I was, as smart, as clear-headed, wouldn't be able to keep a relationship going or figure out what kind of work to do. It was a certain amount of naïveté, perhaps, as I saw everyone around me (what I thought was everyone, any way) settling down and having these lives that I couldn't seem to build for myself. I did lots of different jobs, went from one boyfriend to another, and was always overtaken by restlessness and the feeling that something I couldn't identify was wrong.
When you've repressed memories, you are carrying a burden, but it really doesn't feel like one, because it's so buried. Your behavior can show it—not being able to settle down—but I was actually pretty OK in college—I did a lot of work, maybe it's partly that I had been a good student all my life and schoolwork was my refuge already, so having more of it in college wasn't a bad thing, it was what I was used to. I also rowed in college, and that took a lot of time and physical energy, so it distracted me from thinking about my restlessness.
How did she make it through Radcliffe, a famously demanding school, carrying such a psychic burden? She says she competed in rowing and buried herself in her studies. The feeling that something
was wrong would have to wait for a catalyst. That was to be Mary Oliver, whose book of poems, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. In Oliver she saw a way at first to talk to herself about what she had suffered and then to sing about it. Child abuse and the abuse of women was receiving long-due attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Fisk edited The Healing Woman in the San Francisco Bay area for about five years. She connected with it by submitting a few poems.
But by the late 1990s cliché drew its pall over the subjects. Once she had read Oliver’s work she decided on more psychotherapy. She was in her early thirties when she felt she could address her childhood traumas in poems. Her father had died when she was twenty-nine. Her mother died six years ago, having briefly acknowledged the incest she had failed to protect her daughter from, but then recanting.
While it was Mary Oliver who revealed to her the role of poetry in plumbing fearful depths, the poet Dorianne Laux actually taught her the craft. For four years in in the seafront town of Petaluma, California, Fisk studied poetry in Laux’s living room. Laux now teaches at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Today Molly Fisk (MollyFisk.com) lives in Nevada City in the California gold country.
She wasn’t aware when she moved there that Gary Snyder, one of America’s most widely read poets, lives there. They have since become friends. She teaches poetry, like her mentor, in her living room, and at the University of California at Davis, and at PoetryBootCamp.com. In the last three years some 450 people from all over the world have joined her online at The Poetry Boot Camp to study the craft. They write one poem a day for six days, corresponding with their teacher about each poem. There’s surprising intimacy in the method. If it’s true we wouldn’t write down many of the things we say, it’s also true that on the world wide web we often write down the things we wouldn’t say.
Most of Fisk’s living room students are over 40. Her oldest student is 88, a member of her cancer survivor writing class at a local hospital. Survivorship is a leitmotif for Fisk. She knows the world is peopled with survivors and that the headlines that inflame us are often rooted in the abuses we have survived. But are we survivors merely because we’re still alive or are we survivors only when we have consciously come to terms with the root causes of dysfunction? And when are we dysfunctional? When we can no longer hold down a job, whether it’s on a loading dock or in the White House? Or when we accept that the dark abuses we suffered stood in the way of growing up and held us captive in the darkest corners of our childhood—and that we are just bluffing our way through our lives?
You may not find answers in Molly Fisk’s poems, but you will certainly find your way to the right questions, and you will find it a blessing that it’s such a lyrical way.
by Djelloul Marbrook
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