She lived, breathed, made poems

By Elizabeth McFarland

Preface by Daniel Hoffman

Orchises. 63 pp. $14.95

If any periodical is identified with poetry in this country, it is the magazine called Poetry, founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, and still flourishing. T.S. Eliot's first professionally published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," appeared there. Among the poets whose work has graced its pages are Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks - one could go on and on and end up compiling a who's who of modern poetry in America.

But Poetry has never boasted much of a circulation. Even now it's only around 30,000. Hardly in the same league as the Ladies' Home Journal.

Ladies' Home Journal? What's that got to do with poetry?

Not much now - nothing, in fact - but during the 1950s the LHJ, at the time based right here in Philadelphia, treated about six million households a week to the work of some of the best poets of the day, including the aforementioned Marianne Moore, as well as W.H. Auden, Richard Eberhart, John Ciardi, Maxine Kumin, Randall Jarrell and William Stafford.

The person behind that was Elizabeth McFarland, who, except for a brief period when she and her family relocated to France, was poetry editor of the Ladies' Home Journal from 1948 to 1961. Which is why, on Dec. 25, 2005, the New York Times Magazine featured McFarland (1922-2005) among the 100 notable people who had died that year.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Daniel Hoffman, who was married to Elizabeth McFarland for 57 years, has assembled a collection of his late wife's poems that provides a conclusive explanation as to why she was such a good poetry editor: It turns out she was a pretty good poet herself.

She seems to have found her voice at a very early age. I didn't read Hoffman's preface to

Over the Summer Water

until I read the poems, but I was not surprised when he singled out for comment the very first of them, called "Myself," which was written, he says, when McFarland was only 19:

I have stood so long in this place

I have lost account of my face.

I have stared so hard at this tree

I am grown blossomy.

In my branches, words

Bicker like birds.

Hoffman draws attention, rightly, to the subtle use of rhyme and alliteration, but what struck me most about it was its knowing, visionary quality, its success at making palpable how the observer and the observed can become one.

McFarland had an exquisite ear, and some of her poems read almost like folk songs. Take, for instance, "Flower Market, Rittenhouse Square":

All dressed in new linen,

The girls of the Square

Are bare-kneed

And fair-kneed

And young as their hair

That shines like shook

ribbon -

Like doubloons of gold.

And offers

Rich coffers

Where flowers are sold.

Some of McFarland's poems were published in Ladies' Home Journal, but she seems to have been content to practice her vocation mostly privately. As Hoffman notes, her romantic sensibility wasn't given to either metaphysical conundrums or confessional effusions, which formed the poles of poetic fashion during most of her life.

It was fashion's loss. As songwriter Jule Styne once said, "It's easy to be clever, but the really clever thing is to be simple." It is also distinctly

not

easy. The simplicity of McFarland's verse reveals, very subtly, a singular personality, someone for whom a poem is not primarily a literary artifact, but rather a necessary utterance, without which a given experience would not be quite complete, setting the experience to a music made entirely of words:

O the rowantree lifts there

Rich embroidery wild

Like a sample of Paradise

By an antique child

Who has opened a box

Made of sweet grass and             fern,

And whose scarlet

heartberry

Must evermore burn.

To read this book is to encounter a person for whom the act of writing poetry derived from a mode of being. That is why the poems live and what makes them so inimitable.