How has your June been, friends? I’ll be finishing the month at Oxford for my master’s in creative writing. At this residence I’ll receive feedback on my year one portfolio draft, and I can’t wait to dig deeper into my work.
Paris finally warmed up this week, and I enjoyed some long, lazy walks to the river and soaked up the city’s early summer energy. June is beautiful in the City of Light, and I am truly amazed and grateful to call it home.
This week I’d like to discuss Sharon Olds’s poem “Chamber Thicket” (2001). I recently offered an Olds collection to a friend and mentioned my obsession with this particular text in my twenties.
You can read the poem here in Poetry Magazine.
“Chamber Thicket” is both personal and epic. Its use of free verse, syntactic parallelism, and repetitions give it an American, Whitmanesque quality that I adore. Its subject, a woman feeling the flesh of her ancestry and the arrival of her husband, unfolds in stunning imagery of the wild and the domestic.
Unsurprisingly, I was also drawn to the poem for its reference to music. As a string quartet is playing, the speaker has a revelation about her place in her lineage and her approaching future. I believe Olds is referring to Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, one of his later, controversial works whose unsettling drama suits the speaker’s experience.
A fugue is polyphonic musical composition, involving several voices. Likewise, the speaker realizes that she is one in a web of voices from the past, present, and future. These include her parents, her grandparents, and her approaching husband:
when the Grösse Fugue was around us, under us,
over us, in us, I felt I was hearing
the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening
and grieving and scathing, along each other,
The poem reveals that seemingly distant places and people are closer than we think. While the scene takes place in a living room with hardwood floors and scented candles, Olds reminds us that these domesticated objects come from the wild. The perfume of the candles conjures the true material of the floor: trees from the woods like “ebony, spruce, poplar.”
Similarly, a strange man from the outside world, “a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching,” will eventually become a husband and part of a family.
The familiar comes from the foreign.
The word “fugue” comes from the Latin fuga, meaning “fleeing.” In the poem, the speaker almost encourages her husband to flee:
herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted
to warn him away, to call out to him
to go back whence he came, into some calmer life,
There is a sense of inevitability throughout the text, as though we are powerless to a greater force that is necessary to sustain life. We are trapped in a chamber, in a mess of growth, in a thicket—but this entrapment is what makes us “thick-alive.” The speaker ultimately embraces this, deciding not to deter her husband; she tells him to “hasten” as “his beauty was too moving” to her.
Like a fugue, “Chamber Thicket” can be heard in three parts. The speaker is first “at the feet of the string quartet,” in “their living room,” suggesting a passivity, as though she is simply an audience member to what is about to happen. Then, the “Grösse Fugue” plays, waking her from inertia. Finally, the speaker’s husband arrives, and she acts.
The second part, populated by the speaker’s birth-family, feels chaotic and dramatic with all its lists. Olds also uses wonderful line breaks:
scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that
woods of hating longing, and I knew
I just love the sequence “hating longing.”
This chaos ends when the “wandering dreaming” husband arrives, making the speaker realize she “wanted too much to not be alone, in the / covert, any more.”
She finds an individual with whom she can live her own life.
It’s unsurprising I was drawn to this poem in my twenties. The passage from one’s birth family to one’s own family is a difficult one. Olds reveals that they are connected—and that maybe music can help us realize this.
Salon friends, what are some of your favorite lines from “Chamber Thicket”? What do you make of its fugue reference?
Enjoy the start of July everyone, et à la prochaine !
Rachel