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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What is the purpose of the New Yorker Poetry Podcast?
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Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then, they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine. Today, my guest is Julia Alvarez.
She's the author of many novels, nonfiction books, children's books, and poetry collections, including, most recently, visitations. She's received a Hispanic Heritage Award, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, and, in 2013, a National Medal of Arts. She's also the subject of a PBS American Masters documentary. Julia, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Thank you, Kevin, for inviting me to the big table.
Well, you've been there a while. I'm just happy to join you. The first poem you've chosen to read is The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill by Judy Page Heitzman. What was it that drew you to this particular poem?
Well, I was in a fluster of trying among the many riches that the New Yorker has published to select a poem. And then I remembered this little poem that I've been very fond of. And this occasion gave me hope. the opportunity to revisit it. And I'm just fond of it. I used it a lot in my writing workshops because it was always a great writing prompt.
Everyone has a school, grammar school or high school memory. You had to sit there for eight hours and look a lot at at your environment and your teacher and your classmates. So a lot of it got stored in there. So it was a great writing prompt.
And also for my students that I knew were going to go on and be teachers, I thought, you know, we try to equip them with all kinds of smarts, but it's really the things that the students come back with are the least likely things that you never studied for. So I went and I discovered it was still there with all my teaching folders.
Why don't we listen to the poem? Here's Julia Alvarez reading The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill by Judy Page Heitzman.
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Chapter 3: Why did Julia Alvarez choose 'The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill'?
Yeah. especially in that Lawrence, which I know that city well, full of Dominicans, Lawrence, Mass, and New Bedford, where they had these textile mills.
That's right, yeah.
Many children were employed because they could crawl into the innards Of the big looms and so forth. And, you know, there was child labor. And so there's, they've been repurposed, many of them, into expensive condos, classes and so forth. So you're having, you know, you have that background. To even mention it sort of pushes too hard on every detail here.
But then you get to Mrs. Lawrence, and I mean, she's not into her teaching, but carved her nails? I mean, that's kind of like... Unusual and kind of a violent verb for what she's doing.
Sure.
And then even the timony outside that broke up the sky.
That's right.
Yep, and there's that mill, you know, pulled out with the title. And then, you know, we get to the kids crushing her up like cattle.
That's right.
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored in Judy Page Heitzman's poem?
I think it's faces, plural, of course, that you conjure up in just a few phrases. Faces I knew by heart, gauging her moods, the daily weather of her expressions, like a bankrupt farmer watching the rain clouds bank. I love that. These two uses of bank, bankrupt and banking physically. That's so beautiful.
And there's a kind of sense of play, but also in the service of something really serious, colored and covered up, brushed over, you know, almost kind of that notion of surfaces, but also that, are they hiding or, you know, the truth, or are they sort of ways of getting into the truth or guarding oneself, girding oneself to face the truth?
Oh, wonderful, to face the truth. Faces to face the truth. Right. I think that child's wondering about it is the poem's wondering, too. You know, what are these faces that we wear to greet the faces that we meet? Who are these faces that are part of the face? And for a child...
I mean, that absorption with the mother, the first person that is, you're looking at almost to know what to know in the world or who to be in the world or what to make in the world. And, you know, recalling those moments of childhood where, you know, I could just see in her face what kind of a day we were going to have as a father.
and daughter, or the tone in her voice, it didn't have to be spoken. And in the same dictatorship, things couldn't be spoken. And so you're acutely aware of how to present yourself, given what the circumstances are, the same way that I, as a child, would know what were my behavior parameters for the day, what would be locked in the closet, begging to be let out.
which is, you know, a very haunting image. But I think there's also that moment where the eye sees their own face cupped in their hands in the mirror. A really well done, you know, kudos, you're a brilliant writer at this. So to, in one image, sort of show the way that the face is being reflected, the self is, you know,
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Chapter 5: How does Julia Alvarez interpret the poem's tone and details?
imagining but also is going to grow up to share this face in some way and to share this mirror, memory's mirror, as you put it.
Yeah. It's also funny, a little anecdotal thing. You know, of course, people write you or I live in a small town, talk to you about your poem in The New Yorker, but I especially got comments from women of a certain generation, my generation, who remember I don't know if a young reader would know what a vanity is, maybe think of the abstraction.
But we all knew, they all had mothers that had those little vanities of one kind or another, those mirrors. So they're quite an image from our childhood, like tetherball and the vanities for... Yes, yes.
But I love the title. I mean, the title, Mommy at Her Vanity, both the sort of rhyme that's there and then also, of course, this idea of her being vain as well as the vanity that we know or maybe we don't know, but learn really quickly what it is. That three-paneled quality, it's kind of past, present, and future in some way as well.
There's something about that kind of trinity of images, which then expands more, you know, the eye sees the self, but then there's all these faces already slipping away to belong to the world. And that sense of sharing the mother with the world is very palpable. And then you get the sort of list, the litany of these faces. The daily weather, as we said.
But then this end of that, you know, and I'm struck by how this is really three long sentences, the whole poem. And this ending, I belong to myself alone. Yeah. How do you hear that now? I mean, that's both unspoken and spoken in a way.
Yeah, that's, even now when you read it, it gives me this heartfelt pang. There was this privacy and loneliness and this very socially mobile person that could move through the world and had all the power. That kind of...
touching bottom in yourself, which, you know, one of the reasons that I go to poems is that there are these moments where, I mean, we're with the poet that wrote the poem, but we feel like in that moment, I belong to myself alone. Thanks, Emily. Now you can go write your next poem. But right now, you know, this, I belong to myself alone. And there's a loneliness there.
Yes.
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