Lucy Brock Broido
You Simply Couldn't Miss Her---One of the infamous "Hair Poets"
Some decades ago, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts—in a rent controlled apartment, on a traffic island in Harvard Square. I was at the intersection of Bow, Arrow, and Mt. Auburn Streets. I felt both in and out of the poetry scene, although mostly out. My family struggled financially and there were no expectations placed on me except to marry a Jewish man and have children. So far, I’ve failed on both accounts.
Life as a poet was not something my parents could imagine for me, nor something I could really even imagine for myself. In Cambridge, in the 1990’s, if you were a poet you needed to be rich, brilliant, and most of all, if you were a woman, you needed to have ass-length hair.
Jorie Graham, Marie Howe, and Lucy Brock Broido: they were known as the hair poets. One favorite rumor was that when one of the women interviewed at Columbia for a tenure track position, the academic conducting the interview asked her what she could bring to the job which the other candidates couldn’t. The question came at the end of a day of many meetings, a teaching observation, and endless forced smiles. Before the poet could stop herself, she blurted out: hair. That week they made her an offer and yes, she took it.
But the poets’ reputations didn’t end with their beauty or brilliance. It was that supreme confidence that most intimidated me. Today we would call it “white privilege”, which it certainly was—Harvard undergraduate degrees (in some cases) paired with youth, beauty, hair and a supreme confidence deep in the hipsway and in their DNA.
Once, I saw Lucy Brock Broido read at M.I.T. draped in standout attire that hasn’t faded from my memory even 30 years later: a cream-colored form-fitting blouse with high collar and a soft grey jacket covering a short short skirt. Emily Dickinson meets Twiggy. Sitting in the audience, I estimated that the clothing, the boots and modest jewelry had to cost at least $1,000. In 1990, a bit more than my monthly salary.
But my favorite Cambridge story of Lucy, of this talented changeling of a poet came from a fellow poet who was in her Porter Square exercise class. Each week, Lucy would jump and whoop enthusiastically wearing nothing but a hot pink leotard and leggings. Her whoops were infectious and soon the entire class joined in.
No high end suit, no long forgotten words, no affectation at all—-just whoops and hollers and an hour of good sweat.
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On the door of the Grollier Poetry Bookshop at Plimpton Street, there was often a sign advertising Lucy’s “Master Poetry Class — Space Limited.” I studied that sign on several occasions never believing that I was “master” enough to take such a class. And why did a “master” need a poetry class? Most of all, where would I find a spare $800?
Recently, I’ve learned that several of my poet friends signed-up for those classes and loved them. Thirty years later, one poet still has her notebooks filled with Lucy’s quotes and ideas on poetry. Both poets (who took different classes) described them as “transformative” to how they approached their own work.
I can’t honestly say I would have been ready for Lucy at that time; I felt so uncertain of my own abilities, my own place in the world. Yet I loved knowing she was out there—not an easy poet, not an “accessible” poet. A poet that showed me beyond my self imposed limitations.
“No crush
Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.
Extinguish me from this.”
A Girl Ago
No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing
In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no
Buttering. No making small contusions on the page
But saying nothing no one has not said before.
No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs.
No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush
Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.
Extinguish me from this.
I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost
And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia,
Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above
And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky. No Dove.
There is no thou to speak of.
Carnivorous
I was lying loose from God. Strange is it not best
Beloved, in the New World, in this skinny life,
Intemperate with chance, my spirit quickens
For the fall’s estate. In India, the half
Hour is the hour, we were like that then—
Jammed wrong & wrong in the diurnal
Mangy chambers of our carnal
Hearts, the rose robes rustling loose as velvet
Curtains at the stage prow, passing
Into the strange salt air of an Indian
Ocean, hoarding kindling, heading
West with hours, later than we might
Have known, counting tins of meats & oil left,
If they should lose or last the night.