Poetry With That ‘Lived-in’ Feeling

It’s a typical night at the Digges digs in Amherst, Mass. Head-of-household Deborah is cleaning out a room in the basement with the aid of one son, two dogs and nine indoor cats.

She’s already worked a full day (commuting from Boston where she holds two teaching jobs), written verse, prepared meals and lugged loads of junk up the stairs. It is 10:40 p.m.

Is she tired?

A mere “no” would be insufficient. The woman sounds jubilant, exhilarated, ecstatic. How to explain the almost palpable joy that soars through the phone? Deborah Digges could probably do it best.

Once, on a bleak and frozen Boston day, she had contemplated an amazingly beautiful potted plant sent by a friend:

. . . my Amaryllis, my buffoon of a flower

your four white bullhorn blossoms like the sirens

in a stadium through which the dictator announces he’s in love.

Then he sends out across the land a proclamation--

there must be music, there must be stays of execution. . . .

That, from a book of Digges’ poetry out this month (“Rough Music,” Alfred A. Knopf), is a sample of the vigor with which she translates life into art.

It is a talent that has just won her the fourth annual Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award at the Claremont Graduate School, replete with a $50,000 prize, the largest in this country for a single work of poetry.

The award, presented Monday, so amazes Digges, 46, that she is “flooded with happiness” as she awakens these mornings, “when I realize it has really happened. To me.”

Sure, the prize money is welcome, especially since Digges is a single mother, one of whose sons is about to start college. She recently took a second teaching job, she says, to supplement her earnings as associate professor of English literature at Tufts University.

But let’s face it: She would write her poems--has written them throughout her adult life, starting at age 20 after the birth of her first child--even with no expectations of awards or honors.

She wrote them throughout her second pregnancy, and her first divorce, and her stint as a single-again grad student with two babies at the University of Iowa, and her remarriage (to poet Stan Plumly) and then through a second divorce.

Her first book of poetry wasn’t published until she was 36. But even that maiden voyage, “Vesper Sparrows,” won for her the prestigious Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. A second volume, in 1989, won the critics’ praise, as did a prose memoir, “Fugitive Spring,” published in 1991.

And now this.

“Astounding,” Digges tells her caller in a soliloquy about acceptance by her peers, not unlike Sally Field’s “You like me” speech at the 1985 Academy Awards show.

Field may have been ridiculed by Hollywood for her show of naked insecurity, but that’s the hallmark of a poet like Digges, who puts into words the emotions people normally fear to verbalize--the flashes of lust, longing, loss and insecurity that mark each life as we form attachments.

She writes what we normally intuit as thoughts conveyed “between the lines.” And she packs it all so tightly that in a 25-line poem like “Amaryllis,” for example, she touches on love, sex, death and, in the end once again, beauty. Of the flower now slightly wilted, she writes:

“You are the future bending to kiss the present like a sleeping child.”

*

Alice Quinn, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine and a member of the Claremont panel of judges, says that “Digges’ poems are among the most beautiful and moving of any being written by a poet of her generation.”

There were 442 eligible entries in the contest, says Jack Miles, chair of the panel of judges and director of the Claremont Graduate Humanities Center. “The consensus of the judges, all of whom had been following Digges’ career, is that in this new book she had broken through to an even higher level of excellence.”

Lucky for Digges that the award rules are so specific. Miles says the prize is “not intended to crown a long career, or to spotlight a new or emerging poet. The Kingsley Tufts award is specifically designated for a poet in the difficult middle [of a career] . . . a period that can go on for a very long time.”

Also honored Monday was Barbara Hamby, winner of the Discovery Award for emerging poets, for her book “Delirium” (University of North Texas Press, 1995).

*

Digges says she’s constantly surprised by things because “the life I’m living is nothing like I expected.” The sixth of 10 children, she was raised in the 1950s in a strictly religious, traditional family in an idyllic, small Missouri town.

“I thought I’d marry, have children” and be a homemaker, “exactly like the home economics texts we read in school.”

The Vietnam war changed everything.

“It got women to move around.” Married at 19 in 1969, she went with her husband to Texas for Air Force pilot training. Then to Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, “where we lived right off the runway.” They had a second child, and she finished her graduate degree at UC Riverside. But by the time her pilot husband came home for good, she was no longer the woman he had known. “We tried to go back to being together,” but everything had changed.

After the separation, she took the two children to the University of Iowa writer’s program, where she met the man who would become her second husband, although that marriage also was “a long-distance relationship,” which disintegrated in part due to physical distance.

“So in essence, I have raised my children alone,” she says. In that struggle to forge a meaningful life, and in the preordained anguish that occurs as lovers depart, as children grow up and separate from parents, as beloved household objects become frayed and useless, Digges looks back at her richly patterned life and turns it into poetry.

“Her poems come out of her experience with children, pets, husbands, even her favorite broom,” says poet, critic and publisher Daniel Halpern, who heads Ecco Press. “They are lived in.”

Digges agrees that it is the retrospective aspect of her life that carries her forward.

*

If poetry is fire, it can’t be written in the fire

but sometime after, written in ashes

along the frozen road

if it be written down at all.