… wrote dreamy enigmatic poetry, “elliptical” poetry a fellow poet called it. A steady eye for nature and a sense of poetic and thematic history kept her work from untethered surreality, as in this poem:
I was conceived in the cruelest month
in whatever spring California could muster.
A little rain — with some more likely.
And the buckeyes were they yet on the ground?
Damn my father’s smooth stone eyes,
other prevailing enticements and what Eliot called
the female stench. Damn the oaks,
their histrionics, struggling in the fog.
Spiderwebs lay in the grass, misted
and looking like misspent galaxies.
I cry into and out of this moment.
Pound told Eliot: strike this and this.
What was weak got dropped, and the poem
stood stronger without it.
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You see what she does in this brief lyric, which amounts to a brief for brief lyrics. She begins and ends with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a long poem but not too long, since Ezra Pound edited away “what was weak” in it. So this is first of all let’s say a comment on Christie’s own poetic philosophy, in which your slender lyric results from a “strengthening” process of winnowing down to what really matters, to only those images and observations that really carry substance.
This sounds quite positive, poetically and existentially – the strong poem emerges from principled and strategic winnowing, and the strong self emerges from a similar process of self-definition that takes place after one’s birth into undifferentiated being.
Yet the body of the poem – a series of reflections on her conception, and on her attitude toward having been given life – is darker. California’s spring is cruel because it is arid, not rainy; she herself represents, by implication, merely what her parents could “muster.” The early-blooming buckeye tree had maybe, at the time of her conception, already dropped its toxic beautiful fruit, a fruit compared to her father’s seductive toxic eyes (Damn my father’s smooth stone eyes), enticing her mother into sex. Her mother’s “female stench” – a phrase Pound successfully persuaded Eliot to drop from his poem – in turn enticed her father.
(And why was Pound against female stench? Because the entire passage of which it was a part was unsuccessfully derivative of Alexander Pope. Again the idea that poetically or existentially the imperative is to go forward – note the punning title of Christie’s poem – as a radically self-fashioned being.)
So damn him and damn her, mindlessly conceiving the poet; damn the two of them, their erotic “histrionics,” their “struggling in the fog.” Damn the death already implicit in his stone eyes and in her stench.
Stephen Dedalus, imagining his own conception, perceives the same mordant morbid fogbound struggle:
Wombed in sin darkness I was … made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler’s will.
And now the poet’s parents lie back, post-coital, still entwined, their world-projection misspent:
Spiderwebs lay in the grass, misted
and looking like misspent galaxies.
I cry into and out of this moment.
On the simplest level, the poet will ultimately cry forth from the womb out of this moment. But she is also damning the moment, crying into it, feeling herself to be, let’s say, the “misspent” product of a damnable coupling.
Pound told Eliot: strike this and this.
What was weak got dropped, and the poem
stood stronger without it.
These lines now have an uglier, better never to have been born, spin: The poet herself might well have been edited out by a “better craftsman” of the sort Pound represented.
In this reading, the brief lyric she has written amounts to an argument for, a reflection of, a brief or maybe even nonexistent life. This is Eliot’s Waste Land of rapes and abortions, stripped even of what Richard Ellmann calls the poem’s “neo-Christian hope.”