Debra Weinstein received NYU’s Bobst Literary Award for Emerging Writers upon publication of her volume of poetry, Rodent Angel. She is also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for poetry and a New York State Foundation for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for Fiction. She has been in residence at both the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tikkun, and The Portable Lower East Side. She lives in Manhattan.


From the Hardcover edition.

What Is Poetry?

This is the story of how I came to momentary prominence in the world of poetry and, through a series of misunderstandings, destroyed my good name and became a nobody.

It was fall, my junior year.

Because I was eager and on scholarship, I was the student chosen to type the poems of the visiting professors. Because I was young, and maybe too hungry, they loved me the way my parents loved me.

What is poetry, I would ask myself, over and over, typing,

the sudden, half-chirped, pecked-hem of morning

or

my arthritic half-moon, far-reaching thought (?), spine (?)

And then in the margin, this note to me from the visiting professor, asking for advice on his poem: “Annabelle, which sounds better?” And I would think to myself, hmm, “far-reaching thought” or “far-reaching spine”? Hard to know.

I want to say that my own poetry suffered from being exposed to so much bad writing, but my own poetry was free of chirping, hems, thoughts, and spines. It would be more accurate to say that I suffered. I felt like the lowest member of the poetry food chain, the one who sits at the foot of the goddess simply because it’s the natural order of things.


When the visiting professors left, I got another assignment. I became the assistant to Professor Z. Professor Z.! Her book Flowers of Fate had just come out to critical acclaim—and made history as the first poetry book ever to land on a national bestseller list.

In the poetry world, Z. was part of an elite subculture—the celebrity poet. Conversations stopped when she entered a room. Z. was the face in a crowd that people looked for at the department’s weekly wine and cheese soirees. She held an endowed chair in creative writing.

And it was my destiny to be her undergraduate assistant.

I was in love with Z.’s astonishing poetry about nature. In her poems, beautiful, intelligent flowers ruled the world. Z. was a master of the turn of phrase, the startling association. She could transform a garden into a flower bed, a flower bed into a wedding bed. Flowers violated other flowers, and you actually believed it.

There was so much I wanted to learn from Z.

In a rare, quiet moment, I would be sitting in her office and, closing my steno pad, I would say, “I want to ask you a question about ‘unnatural world, whorled, begotten, petaled.’ Why did you choose those adjectives: ‘whorled, begotten, petaled’?” and Z. would lean forward, pause for a moment to absorb the question, and answer in a voice that told me how much my interest mattered to her.

At those times, I would learn something about how poems are made.

“In the poem ‘Unnatural World,’ I was thinking about prostitution, and knew I had to disguise that thought! When I said, ‘unnatural world, whorled, begotten, petaled,’ I was really thinking, ‘Unnatural world—whores begotten, peddled.’ Anyway, that was the idea that inspired that poem,” and then, without missing a beat, she smiled and added, “Annabelle, I need black ink for my fountain pen. I want the blackest ink you can find. Jet black, not midnight black, not shoeshine black. And don’t forget to get a handwritten receipt.”

That afternoon, in the stationery store, watching the clerk write out the receipt for Z.’s fountain pen ink, I began to understand that the life of poetry was not only about choosing words; it was also about shopping.





There were things I did for Z. which were actually favors for other people. I handled her correspondence, and if she adored people, she would send them poems, but these were often obscure poems, poems you could find only in small magazines.

I would think of this activity as the Great Poetry Hunt, and every time I got a note sending me on one, my heart would sink a little.

Annabelle,

I am looking for a poem by Yvonne Miller (?) in a journal that had a very short publication life, perhaps Poesis? Poet-Speak? I recall this line: “the lark singing twer-will, twer-will . . .”

Then I would be lost for hours in the library, among the towering stacks, with my sad slip of paper, trying to match a long sequence of letters and numbers to one of the nondescript blue bindings that made up the reference section of bound poetry journals. What is literature anyway, I wondered, looking at the students squeezed into their little cubicles. I will end up here too someday, unread, dust-coated; another lost document. And that’s only if I’m successful.

Dear Henry,

Thank you so much for your letter. Your new poems are breathless! Especially “Truck Driving South”—bold, punchy, acerbic. A trip to the microfiche room to scrutinize The Journal of Poetry Concordance led me to that poem by Yvonne Miller “The Lark.” Do you know it? Miller’s approach is similar to yours. Both of you have an uncanny ability to accentuate the stillness . . .

And then this handwritten note to me,

Annabelle,

For this letter to Henry Mann, please dry some rose petals and put them in the envelope, mail letter in padded envelope, mark hand cancel please.

I wrote back,

Done! But I wonder about “accentuate the stillness.” Perhaps articulate is a better word?

I was lucky to have her, but she was also lucky to have me.

Then another note:

Annabelle,

Please call Mrs. Van Elder and see if there is anything you can do for her.

“Mrs. Van Elder, my name is Annabelle, and I am Professor Z.’s assistant.”

“Oh, yes, dear, how lovely of you to phone.”

“She wanted to know if there was anything you needed—”

“Oh, yes, dear, Z. mentioned that you might call . . .”

Then I would be taking down Mrs. Van Elder’s list.

Prescription cat food

Black sealing wax

Someone to read “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

I, of course, was that someone. She liked the W. B. Yeats poem read in a whisper. “Please, dear,” she would say, “softer, softer.” And eventually I learned these lines by heart:

Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Who was Mrs. Van Elder to Z.? The flower poet didn’t offer, but I knew the name. Mrs. Van Elder was a renowned reviewer of poetry books, reputed to be the meanest literary critic alive. In her younger days, she could bring a poet to prominence or ruin with a single adjective.

But to me Mrs. Van Elder was a short gray-haired woman in a yellow housedress; a frail woman like my grandmother, happy to have company on a lonely afternoon.

Z. had told me to be useful during my visits, to ask Mrs. Van Elder if there was anything she might need help with.

Mrs. Van Elder said she would like a cup of tea, but she had lost all her spoons. Would I go into the kitchen and find her a spoon? Being so young and so smart, I could probably see things that she couldn’t.

“Mrs. Van Elder,” I said, “I’ll bet your spoons are hidden underneath all these dishes.” I pointed to her sink, where dirty plates and bowls and mugs were piled high.

I said, “Would you like me to do your dishes?”

Mrs. Van Elder held her hand over her heart. She was so overcome with gratitude that she could barely speak. And would I mind also polishing her teakettle? It was tarnished to a sticky bronze. Then she told me to remember that, when boiling water, I must never let the kettle shriek. She had a cat with a nervous condition.

And so it became my Tuesday afternoon ritual, tea and poetry with Mrs. Van Elder once the dishes were out of the way.

It was a dark, airless apartment that smelled like decaying apples.

She had an ancient Remington Noiseless typewriter on her dining room table. I imagined Mrs. Van Elder in her prime composing one of her famous reviews; the torrent of metal keys that would come to signify the death of another writer.

But these days, rheumatoid arthritis made typing a simple thank-you note an ordeal. Rubbing her gnarled fingers, she said it would probably take her all afternoon to type one letter, because she had forgotten to take her pills.

When I said, “Mrs. Van Elder, I can type the letter for you,” she told me that I was a dream come true.

To Mr. Michael Leeds Administrator of the Hortense Berg First Book Prize

Dear Mr. Leeds,

Though I am honored to have been asked to judge the Hortense Berg First Book Prize for Lyric Poetry, I write to say I find no manuscript worthy of this honor. Having known Hortense as a colleague and friend, I believe it would be an insult to her fine memory to award any of the five shameless manuscripts you sent me this distinction. Each one is worse than the next, and ignorant of the fine musical tradition that is poetry.

Sincerely, Miriam Van Elder





I took my weekly visits to Mrs. Van Elder in stride, believing that if I proved myself dependable—if I did all my assignments well and without complaint—Z. might give me something really interesting to do.

Then came the prize. I was asked to go to New York City’s public gardens to catalog flowers. Now I was Z.’s research assistant on my knees examining a flower, writing a brief description, and sketching the flower in a notebook. Z. gave me a box of one hundred colored pencils so I could be exact in the shade of my renderings.

“Annabelle,” she had asked, “have you ever read Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Professions for Women’?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve only read A Room of One’s Own.”

“Well, it’s 1931 a...