Rooftop Poetry Club - Dr. Susan Leist

Dr. Susan Leist

Bio:
Dr. Susan Leist came to Buffalo State in 1991. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from West Virginia University and a doctorate from the University of Virginia. Her education and scholarship are wide-ranging. Her literary specialty is British medieval and Renaissance literature. Her pedagogical specialties are composition and other language arts. She currently is Director of the College Writing Program. She teaches in the honors Program and in the Intellectual Foundations Program. All four of her books are Scholarship of Teaching, since both rise out of materials she has created for her classrooms, whether those classrooms were filled with other faculty members or students. She also writes poetry and short stories.

Poems:

Uh, don’t tell me, do not tell me…

The face is familiar…no, not the face.

I’ve never glimpsed the face of change.

For Theseus, it was the shaking ground.

For me, no shaking, just that sick

Familiar certainty that comes

Untrammeled, clear as joy.

A rescue most despised, unsought.

I know, I know…I’ll come

To see its rightness, next year,

Tomorrow, next week. Just now

I want to pull the lifeguard under,

Kick Daddy in the gut,

Curse at the cop.

To be alive is to take risks.

Pain, they say, affirms life, too.

Theseus, I think, died at peace,

Well-schooled in the art of grim

Acceptance, a virtue quite becoming

To men burdened of the Gods,

As well as to womankind.

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men...Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another...
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relations of women to themselves. This surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
-John Berger. Ways of Seeing. 1977.

APPEARING

So there I was, 25,

Newly delivered of

The needed boy child.

Postpartumly depressed,

Shipped home to recover. I

Sat at the kitchen table

Looking through

Into my mother’s room.

Her in profile

As she drew eyebrows to go out.

She, not seeing herself seen,

Was not pleased

Seeing herself, 62.

As I watched, her

Whole being gathered into

Fierce determination

Against that mirror:

“I WON’T BE OLD!

I WON”T!”

Oh! To think about it now

Twenty-five years later

Makes me cry.

She was forever trapped

By that male surveyor in her.

The one who SAW her old,

Old!

She who had lived her life

As a beautiful woman.

Now old, so by definition

No longer beautiful.

No longer valuable,

Successful,

Effective,

Appreciated.

She NEVER lost awareness

Of herself as “vision”.

Hated increasingly

Sight of herself

In mirrors, but

Never

Could

Stop

Looking.

LOOKING

There are, I think, women

Who can teach about living.

Women not governed

By themselves as images

Looked at. Who

Only look at life

Free of their surveyor.

Having come to understand

Themselves as enough.

You can learn

How to live

From those women --

If you can find them.

SUBMISSION

I went by the Post
Office, a most plebian
Branch, to mail out
A manuscript, a sub-
Missive, to a highly
August professional
Journal, publication in
Which guarantees me
Advancement, dis-
Cretionary funds, AND
Daddy’s Approval. Whom
Should I spy just
Two folks ahead
In line? Why, the
Greatest Poet, most
Say, of my generation!
Robert Creeley, the
Lionized, looking just
Like the rest of
Us in jeans with a
Wooly sweater. I
Could not quite see
The addresses
On his parcels,
But
I am sure he was
Sending the MSS of
The next great
Poems in modern
Literature to THOSE
WHO PUBLISH ANY-
THING HE WRITES
OR
Maybe he was
Returning ill-
Fitting sweaters to
QVC. In
Either case, I feel
That I am covered.
Surely my submissive
Will be graced
By association. Surely
THEY will know
When THEY receive it,
That my submission was
Gloriously made just like
His, on the same
Day, from the same
Place. THEY will give
It grave attention as
Befits a sub-missive
From one who was nearby the Greatest
Poet, most agree, of
Our generation.