This Sunday night’s poet, Frank Bidart, grew up as a gay teen in the 1950s in Bakersfield, California; he didn’t come out until after his parents died. His poems are unusual, eschewing conventional verse, and even free verse, in favor of a prose-like style that depends on italics, CAPITALIZATION, and — like Emily Dickinson — idiosyncratic punctuation for its effect. His frequent topics are guilt and suffering, his poems are often written from a first-person perspective, his subjects range from the dancer Vaslav Nijinksy and the child-killer Herbert White to Heath Ledger’s Joker and the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini.
He had a tangled and fraught relationship with his mother, who divorced his father when Bidart was five. One of his best poems, “Confessional,” is based on his memories of her. Here’s the beginning of it (CW: (fictional) cruelty to animals):
Is she dead?
Yes, she is dead.
Did you forgive her?
No, I didn’t forgive her.
Did she forgive you?
No, she didn’t forgive me.
What did you have to forgive?
She was never mean, or willfully
cruel, or unloving.
When I was eleven, she converted to Christ—
she began to simplify her life, denied
herself, and said that she and I must struggle
“to divest ourselves
of the love of CREATED BEINGS,”—
and to help me to do that,
one day
she hanged my cat.
. . .
Bidart often quotes or alludes to classical or Christian sources. In a later section of “Confessional” Bidart adapts the famous scene from Saint Augustine’s Confessions in which Augustine and his mother Monica converse with each other a few days before her death, “leaning at that / window in Ostia, contemplating / what the saints’ possession of God was like.” Bidart contrasts their achievement of mutual transcendence with his own failure to connect with his mother: “We could not meet in nature,— / . . .AND ALL WE HAD WAS NATURE.”
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by Frank Bidart.
- Internet Archive:
- California Plush, by Frank Bidart, with an introduction by Richard Howard. Bidart’s first book of poetry, from 1973; it begins with his (in)famous first-person poem “Herbert White” (CW: child murder and necrophilia).
- The Sacrifice, by Frank Bidart. Bidart’s third book of poetry, from 1983, includes “Confessional” (page 34) and the long poem “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky.”
- Several of Bidart’s other books are available on the Internet Archive for readers with print disabilities.
- Bookshop.org:
- Half-Light: Collected Poems, 1965-2016, by Frank Bidart. This “complete poems” collection won both the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award for poetry.
- Other:
- The actor James Franco, a friend of Bidart, wrote and directed a short film Herbert White based on Bidart’s poem, with Michael Shannon as White. (It is not that explicit, but similar content warnings apply.) In the title poem of his own first book of poetry, Directing Herbert White (a copy of which is available on the Internet Archive), Franco reflects on the experience and his own impressions of Bidart.