A Close Reading of Suzanne Frischkorn's "Dear America"
I don't have answers, friends. I have poems. I have community. You're welcome to both.
Like so often this century, I had hoped for a different outcome. I crawled into bed last night around 10:30pm Eastern time and read for a while before falling asleep, having reasoned that I’d done all I could to influence the outcome of the election. I’ve been re-reading a book called Our Noise by Jeff Gomez; it was published in 1995 and is set in a small Virginia town that has a small but active indie rock scene. In other words, it’s very much a Gen X kind of novel, and since I’ve started working on my own Gen X kind of novel, I’ve been thinking of this as research. I learned just now by Googling Jeff Gomez that it’s the first of “a number of interconnected novels” that he wrote during the ‘90s, which of course piqued my interest in the others despite his own lack of enthusiasm for them. Someday soon I’ll do a Substack post on the micro-genre that I think of as “Gen X lovable losers,” a group that proliferated in film, fiction, and song during the brief cultural heyday of the Xers.
But not today. Today, that would feel self-indulgent and borderline nostalgic, and as we know from the marginalia in one of those landmark Gen X novels, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, nostalgia is a weapon.
No, today I want to spend time with a poem by Suzanne Frischkorn that comes from her most recent book, Whipsaw. Suzanne will be reading with E. Hughes on Monday, November 18, 2024 at 7:30pm Eastern on Zoom, and I hope you’ll be there. You can register easily at bit.ly/WTUINov2024.
It should be pretty clear why I landed on this poem for today’s close reading:
Dear America
It's time to teach my daughter how to shoot an arrow
How to use a knife
How to hit the center of a target
It's bloody work, but she should know
It's time to teach her how to win a debate
While applying lipstick without a mirror
And how to hold her keys between her fingers in a parking lot
It's time for her to hit the weight room
Join the cross-country team
Cast a spell, literally and figuratively
And it's time for her to develop telekinesis and clairvoyance
It's time she knows to never leave her drink unattended
Never drink on an empty stomach
Never drink before her period
And maybe what I mean to say is—never drink alcohol period
It's time to learn that one day she might switch grocery stores
Because a guy on staff there gives her the creeps
And even if it's less convenient to travel across town
It's always best to trust her intuition
It's time to teach her that when a grown man stares at her
New breasts, she is not the one who should feel ashamed
America, she's her mother's daughter
She's got this It’s hard to remember now whether it was ever stated to me by anyone in an official or quasi-official capacity, but when I arrived at Providence College in the fall of 1993, the prevailing wisdom was that women shouldn’t walk alone across campus after dark. Setting aside the obvious paternalism of that statement (this was, after all, a Catholic college that still observes parietals — meaning that members of the opposite sex have to be out of one’s dorm room by midnight on weeknights and 2am on weekends), what it meant for me in practice was a lot of late-night strolls through the parklike darkness of PC’s well-manicured paths, strolls in which the outbound leg would be to accompany either a friend of mine, a friend of my roommate’s, or (most frequently during my sophomore year) a mutual friend of mine and Skippy’s. (Skippy was my RA that year, as well as a dear friend. He’ll be mentioned again in that promised future post about Gen X and lovable losers — though you shouldn’t assume he’s a loser.)
I bring this up because one of the frequent topics of conversation on those late-night walks was the risk and the reality of undesired contact from men, ranging from comments and leers to physical assault. I say “conversation,” but in truth I didn’t do much talking on those walks, instead mostly listening to these women telling me something I hadn’t understood before and couldn’t have imagined as a sheltered suburban teenager: every one of them had stories (yes, plural) about being on the receiving end of male attention in ways that were demeaning and degrading and dehumanizing. It shouldn’t have been a surprise for me, but it took me an embarrassingly long time to recognize that the way my mother raised me to always look women in the eye (rather than staring at their breasts) and to not speak over women in conversation (and, in fact, to listen to them) had everything to do with her own experiences as a woman. That her insistence on me watching Anita Hill’s testimony during the Clarence Thomas hearings with her was a way of showing me what power imbalances women face and how important it is for me to be aware of the way my behavior and my choices have effects far beyond my person.
If my mother had daughters instead of sons, I suspect she would’ve been a lot like the speaker in Suzanne’s poem: fierce, devoted, supportive, and trusting in her daughter to be capable of caring for herself in a world that is demonstrably hostile towards her.
The litany of situations in the poem each carry with them a different level of threat; not all of them are explicit and physical (“It’s time to teach her how to win a debate / While applying lipstick without a mirror” reminds me of the old line about Ginger Rogers being able to do everything Fred Astaire could, except backwards and in heels), but each of them is distinctly and clearly a threat to the overall wellbeing of the speaker’s daughter.
This poem’s atemwende, its “breathturn” (to borrow a term from Paul Celan) comes in the following lines:
It's time she knows to never leave her drink unattended
Never drink on an empty stomach
Never drink before her period
And maybe what I mean to say is—never drink alcohol period
In these four lines, what I feel is the subtext of these lessons being learned by the speaker in the years before she had a daughter — and the enormous and immense protective instinct that moves her to try to prevent anything like this from being visited upon someone she loves.
The lines that follow feel even more personal to me than the ones that came before; the emphasis again here is not on the more generalized experiences of taking self-defense classes or working out or learning to work magic or become clairvoyant and telekinetic. It’s focused in the physical experience of being embodied as a woman in the world, going grocery shopping alone and encountering a creep — and also in being a teenage girl whose developing body is objectified by a grown man. There’s a sense of vulnerability here that isn’t present in the beginning of the poem. As I read it, it feels like the stakes get higher as the poem goes on; the reality of how vulnerable women are in our society hits home.
But the poem doesn’t end there. Instead, it does what women have so often had to do, and it changes the narrative: that vulnerability has been acknowledged, but so too is the fact that the mother/speaker has survived, and she knows her daughter will, too: “America, she’s her mother’s daughter / She’s got this”
That, in a time of uncertainty, with darkness closing in from seemingly all sides, is no small comfort.
I hope you’ll join us on November 18 for What The Universe Is: Suzanne Frischkorn and E. Hughes. We need poems and we need community, now and in the days ahead. Register at bit.ly/WTUINov2024.
Thanks for reading.