Holly

March 27, 2021

When Barbara arrives at the old poet’s Victorian home on Ridge Road, red-cheeked and glowing from her two-mile bike ride, Marie Duchamp is sitting on the couch with Olivia. Marie looks worried. Olivia looks distressed. Barbara probably looks mystified because that’s how she feels. She can’t imagine what Olivia feels she needs to apologize for.

Marie is first to speak. “I encouraged her, and I took the envelope to Federal Express. So if you want to blame someone, blame me.”

“That’s nonsense,” Olivia says. “What I did was wrong. I just had no idea… and for all I know you will be pleased… but either way I had no right to do what I did without your permission. It was unconscionable.”

“I don’t get it,” Barbara says, unbuttoning her coat. “What did you do?”

The two women—one in the healthy prime of life, the other a shrunken doll-woman soon to be a centenarian—look at each other, then back at Barbara.

“The Penley Prize.” Olivia’s mouth is doing that trembly, inward-drawing thing that always makes Barbara think of an old-fashioned string purse.

“I don’t know what that is,” Barbara says, more mystified than ever.

“The full name is the Penley Prize for Younger Poets. It’s jointly sponsored by New York publishers known as the Big Five. I’m not surprised you don’t know of it because you are essentially self-taught and don’t read the writers’ magazines. Why would you, when there’s no paying market for poetry? But most English majors in the writing courses know about it, just as they know about the New Voices Award or the Young Lions Fiction Award. The Penley Prize is open for submissions each year on March first. They get thousands, and the response is rapid. Because most of the submissions are awful moon-and-June stuff, I suppose.”

Now Barbara understands. “You… what? Sent them some of my poems?”

Marie and Olivia share a glance. Barbara is young, but she knows guilt when she sees it.

“How many?”

“Seven,” Olivia says. “Short ones. The rules specify no more than two thousand words. I was just so impressed by your work… its anger… its terror… that…” She doesn’t seem to know how to continue.

Marie takes Olivia’s hand. “I encouraged her,” she says again.

They expect her to be angry, Barbara realizes. She’s not. A little shocked is all. She has kept her poetry secret not because she’s ashamed of it, or worried people will laugh (well… maybe a little), but because she’s afraid showing it to anyone other than Olivia would lessen the pressure she feels to write more. And there’s something else, or rather someone: Jerome. Although she’s actually been writing poems—mostly in her journal—since she was twelve, long before he started.

Then, in the last two or three years, something changed. There has been a mysterious jump not just in ability but in ambition. It makes her think of a documentary she saw about Bob Dylan. A folk singer from Greenwich Village in the sixties said, “He was just another guitar player trying to sound like Woody Guthrie. Then all at once he was Bob Dylan.”

It was like that. Maybe her brush with Brady Hartsfield had something to do with it, but she doesn’t believe that’s all. She thinks something—a previously dormant circuit in her brain—just fired up.

Meanwhile they’re looking at her, absurdly like a pair of middle school girls who have been caught smoking in the school bathroom, and she can’t have it.

“Olivia. Marie. Two girls in my class took naked selfies—for their boyfriends, I guess—and the pictures turned up on the Internet. That’s embarrassing. This? Not so much. Did you get a rejection letter? Is that what this is about? Can I see it?”

They exchange another of those looks. Olivia says, “The Penley judges compile a longlist of finalists. The number varies, but it’s always a very long list. Sometimes sixty, sometimes eighty, this year it’s ninety-five. Ridiculous to have so many, but… you are on it. Marie has the letter.”

There’s a single sheet of paper on the endtable next to where Marie sits. She hands it to Barbara. It’s fancy paper, heavy in her hand. At the top is an embossed seal featuring a quill pen and an inkpot. The addressee is Barbara Robinson, C/O Marie Duchamp, 70 Ridge Road.

“I’m surprised you’re not angry,” Olivia says. “And grateful that you’re not, of course. It was such a high-handed thing to do. Sometimes I think my brains have fallen out of my ass.”

Marie jumps in. “But I—”

“Encouraged her, I know,” Barbara murmurs. “It was high-handed, I guess, but I was the one who just turned up one day with my poems. That was high-handed, too.” Not exactly how it went down, and she barely hears herself, anyway. She’s scanning the letter.

It says the Penley Prize Committee is pleased to inform Ms. Barbara Robinson of 70 Ridge Road that she has been placed on the Penley Prize longlist, and if she wishes to be considered going forward, would she please submit a larger body of poems, no more than five thousand words in toto, by April 15th. No poems of “epic length,” please. There’s also a puff paragraph about previous winners of the Penley Prize. Barbara knows three of the names from her reading. No, four. It ends with congratulations “on your superior work.”

She puts the letter aside. “What’s the prize?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Olivia says. “More than many fine poets make from their poetry in their entire lifetime. But that isn’t the important part. A collection of the winner’s work is published, not by a small press but by one of the houses that participate. This year it’s Random House. The book always attracts notice. Last year’s winner appeared on TV with Oprah Winfrey.”

“Is there any chance I could…” Barbara stops. Even to say it feels like crazy-talk.

“Very unlikely,” Olivia says. “But should you be shortlisted, attention would be paid. The chances that your collection would be published by a small press would be fairly high. The only question is whether or not you want to proceed. You certainly have enough poems for the longlist submission, and if you continue to write I’m sure you’d have enough for a book.”

There’s no question about what she wants, now that a few of the poems have been seen by strangers and been met with approval; the question is how to go about it. She says, “I really would have let you submit, you know. If you had asked me. Like the song says, a girl can dream.”

Olivia’s cheeks go rose-pink. Barbara might not have believed the old poet had enough circulation to blush, given her powered-down state, but apparently she does. “It was very wrong,” she repeats. “I had Marie use her name on the envelope because mine would have been recognized and I didn’t want to put my thumb on the scales, so to speak. I thought you might get a few words of encouragement. That was all I hoped for.”

Words of encouragement you would have shown me, Barbara thinks, and then you would have been in the same uncomfortable position of having shared my poems without my permission… only with less to show for it than this amazing letter.

She smiles. “You two didn’t think this out very well, did you?”

“No,” Marie says. “We just… your poems…”

“You’ve also read them, I take it?”

Marie’s blush is much stronger than Olivia’s. “All of them. They are wonderful.”

“Although you still have far to go,” Olivia quickly adds.

Barbara reads the letter over more closely. Her surprise is giving way to a new emotion. It takes her a second to recognize what it is. She’s thrilled.

“We should send the poems,” she says. “Might as well grab for the brass ring. You’ll help me pick them out, Olivia, won’t you?”

The old poet smiles, mostly with relief. Barbara had no idea they thought she might be such a diva. That they did is sort of cool. “That would be my pleasure. The key, I believe, is your poem ‘Faces Change,’ with its sense of horror and dislocation. There are a number of poems that share that leitmotif, that questioning of identity and reality. Those are the strongest.”

“It has to be a secret for now. Just between the three of us. Because of my brother. He’s supposed to be the writer in the family, and I’m pretty sure his book about our great-grandfather is going to be published. I told you about it, right?”

“Yes,” Olivia says.

“If he does get it published, and if he gets good money for it—his agent says he might—I can talk about this. If I should make the shortlist, that is. If I don’t, he never has to know. Okay?”

“Would he really be jealous?” Marie asks. “Of poetry?”

“No.” Barbara doesn’t even have to think about it. “J doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body. He’d be happy for me. But he’s been working so hard on this book, I don’t think the words come as easy for him as they sometimes do for me, and I won’t steal any of his spotlight. I love him too much to do that, even a little bit.” She hands the letter back to Marie. “This letter stays here. But I’m glad you did what you did.”

“You are generous,” Olivia says. “Other than in their work, poets rarely are. Marie, what would you think about the three of us splitting a can of Foster’s Lager, if only to celebrate the fact that we’re still friends?”

“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” Marie says, getting up. “But that’s another secret we three have to keep.” She tilts her head to Olivia. “From her doctor.”

She leaves for the kitchen. Barbara says, “You’re the generous one, Olivia. I’m glad to have you for a friend as well as a teacher.”

“Thank you. I must have done something right, because some providence saved the best student for last.”

It’s Barbara’s turn to blush, not with shame but with happiness.

“Tell me what you’re reading,” Olivia says. School is in session.

“You suggested the beats, so that’s who I’m reading. I got an anthology at the college bookstore. Ginsberg, Snyder, Corso, Ed Dorn… I love him… Lawrence Ferlinghetti… is he still alive?”

“Died a month ago. He was older than I am. I want you to read some prose, if you’re game. It may help you. James Dickey to start with. You know his poems, and there’s a famous novel, Deliverance—”

“I saw the movie. Men going down a river in canoes.”

“Yes, but don’t read that one. Read To the White Sea. Lesser known, but I think better. For your purposes. I want you to read at least one Cormac McCarthy novel, All the Pretty Horses or Suttree. Will you do that?”

“All right.” Although she’s reluctant to leave the beats behind, with their mixture of innocence and cynicism. “I’m actually reading prose now. That book you told me about, The Forgotten City, by Jorge Castro. I like it.”

Marie comes back with three glasses and an enormous can of Foster’s on a tray.

“I suppose Jorge finally went to South America,” Olivia says. “He used to talk about going back to his roots, which was bullshit. He spoke Spanish like a native but he was born in Peoria and raised there. I think he was ashamed of that. Did I tell you I saw him shortly before he disappeared? Running. He always ran at night, to the park and back again. Even in the rain, and it was raining that night. I suppose he must have been planning to leave even then. I certainly never saw him again, but I remember because I was writing a poem and it turned out to be a good one.” She sighs. “Freddy Martin—his partner—was devastated. Freddy left shortly after, I think to look for Jorge. The love of his life. Came back broken-hearted and with a monkey on his back. Stayed six months and then left again. The Wicked Witch of the West said it best. What a world, what a world!”

“Enough of sadness,” Marie says, pouring. “Let’s drink to good times and great expectations.”

“Good times only,” Olivia says. “Leave the future out of it. The only person unhappier than a writer whose expectations aren’t fulfilled is one whose dreams come true.”

Barbara laughs. “I’ll take your word for it.”

They clink glasses and drink.