Anne Porter: A Poet's Debut After 60 Years

Anne Porter, widow of the artist Fairfield Porter, mother of five, grandmother of six biological and five "courtesy" grandchildren, former majordomo of a big house in Southampton, and nurturer of stray poets and painters, burst suddenly upon the literary scene in 1994 as a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry after what seemed a life of mousy domesticity.

"This is a shocking book, for all its seeming diffidence, economy, and quietness," the poet David Shapiro wrote in his foreword to "An Altogether Different Language," her volume of 115 short poems gleaned from 60 years of writing in obscurity.

" 'We were built for heaven, like a boat,' she once said, and her poetry has both a childlike flow and a rugged confidence. . . . An American religious poet of stature, [she] reminds us that the idea of the holy is still possible for us."

At 84, Mrs. Porter seems as modest and sturdy as a small catboat herself. Ensconced in a cottage behind her big house on South Main Street, now owned by others, she had set out mugs and cookies on her kitchen table for a recent visitor.

From a wide clay pot on the flowered tablecloth, leaves of narcissus "flowed high and filled themselves with green," just as she had written; at their tips, "immaculate white flowers."

"Somebody remarked recently that someone's poetry was light, as in L-I-T-E," she said with a laugh. "I think mine is very lite: It has a low threshold that makes it easy to get into, and it's clear. I mostly work very hard revising it. The other day I felt like a figure skater practicing the same figure over and over again until it came out right."

Her language is plain to the point of homeliness, and yet polished as a skater's arabesque:

Our poems

Are like the wart-hogs

In the zoo

It's hard to say

Why there should be such creatures

But once our life gets into them

As sometimes happens

Our poems

Turn into living things

And there's no arguing

With living things

They are

The way they are. . .

And always they are improvident

And free

They keep

A kind of Sabbath. . .

They sing

In breaking waves

And rock like wooden cradles.

Childhood Poetry

"This is poetry of observation sustained by a rapt inner awareness," wrote Barbara Guest. Said John Ashbery: "Her work is timeless, or, in Emily Dickinson's beautiful phrase,

'toward eternity.' "

Like most artists, Mrs. Porter began doing her thing as a child; her book is dedicated in part to a great-uncle "who wrote down and illustrated my poems for me before I learned to write."

Nee Anne Channing, she is descended from the founder of Unitarianism, Channing William Ellery, and Edward Tyrell, father of the North American Review and an early leader of Transcendentalism.

These twin 19th-century religious and literary movements stressed reliance on intuition as the only way to apprehend a reality in which spiritual truths are embodied in natural facts, and believed in the essential unity of all things.

Aristocratic Ideas

"Trust thyself," was their motto, along with a caveat to dispense with "ornament in style."

The youngest of five children, Anne grew up in a town house in Boston. Her father was a partner in the old family law firm of Channing and Frothingham; she attended the elite Windsor School.

"My parents considered themselves to be aristocracy, marking on the curve of what was in Boston," she said. "They were lapsed Unitarians but good people. We lived with a lot of servants, dressed in black, who appeared, waited on us hand and foot, and disappeared."

"These mostly Irish immigrants had no last names, and we knew nothing about them. When I became a teenager, this began to trouble me."

God's Thin Places

Unlike most of us who feel an occasional flicker of compassion for the numbing toil of the motel maid or the subway-token clerk, Mrs. Porter was haunted by this anonymous underclass.

"God is in everything, especially the poor," she said. "A former chaplain of Harvard wrote that there are 'thin places' where you can get closer to God. He named the poor, minorities, outsiders, and the despised. He also named women."

After two years at Bryn Mawr, where things got "too cliquey -- no men, children, or old people; just us and books," Mrs. Porter moved back home with two of her sisters, and went to Radcliffe.

Emily Dickinson

"I was described as very antisocial. I took long walks alone. I'd started writing as a child, and it never occurred to me that I wasn't a poet, any more than it occurred to me that I wasn't a girl."

A stern taskmaster of her own work, she was "disgusted" by an early sonnet with a deficient rhyme scheme. She liked Shakespeare, read his plays aloud and memorized passages. "I stood on the balcony in front of our house and declaimed speeches, but only for about a year."

A great-uncle gave her a little white leather book with gold Indian pipes embossed on it: a first edition of poems by Emily Dickinson, "enchanting and exciting."

Through her sister's college roommate, the photographer Eliot Porter's fiance, she met her future husband when she was 16. "I'd heard he wanted to become a painter from neighbors who said that was strange because he had no talent. I decided I would like him."

In The '30s

She knew that ladies powdered their noses and, primping for their meeting, doused hers with talcum powder, the only kind at hand.

"Fairfield said later he remembered me as a little girl with a big white nose. He was the most totally unaffected man I've ever known; I was just glad there was such a person."

They were married in 1932 when she was 20 and he 24, and lived near Washington Square in New York City while he attended the Art Students League. She published her first poem in Poetry magazine two years later, and has had poems in the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

Rambling Household

Five children followed: Johnny, who was mentally handicapped and died at 46, Laurence, a professor of literature at Michigan State, Richard, who lives with her and is revising a book of essays, Katie, a pediatrician turned psychiatrist in Atlanta, and Liz, a social worker, who also is living with her while studying for a master's degree at Stony Brook.

The family moved to Southampton in 1949, Mr. Porter doing the house hunting and buying the big rambling one because it was near the ocean, and because the school at that time taught Latin.

"He thought that in this rich community the schools would be good, but they weren't that great. It was very hard for the kids because they were from another culture and their friends' mothers naturally were afraid to have their children visit my eccentric household."

Eccentric Household

"They wished their daddy drove a truck instead of shutting himself up in a studio and making our little girls wear sensible shoes. They suffered a great deal."

The Porter household included the poet James Schuyler, who came to visit after a breakdown and stayed for 11 years. Other poets - John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Mr. Shapiro - came and went, along with assorted writers and painters and their friends and lovers.

Amid the bustle of family and the flocking of semipermanent houseguests Mrs. Porter somehow stole time to write, and kept her eye on the God she wanted to know better.

"It wasn't easy to take up Catholicism. Atheism was very important to my in-laws, whom I loved, so I tried my best to be an atheist; it didn't work."

Conversion

"My family thought Catholics simply were not what people should be; my mother cried when I converted. Fairfield could be sarcastic, but basically he was supportive and very interested."

The saintly life and crusading work of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, were inspirational. Mrs. Porter said she wrote to Miss Day after deciding that "believing in God isn't something you just think about." Amazingly, Miss Day answered, recommending a priest in New York for instruction. After long thought, and a final acceptance that the best tenets of the church were compatible with her socialist soul, Mrs. Porter converted at 43.

She is now a secular Franciscan, attending mass every day, and working with the poor and disenfranchised.

"Like A Coral Reef"

"I'm much happier in the community now. At first I didn't know anybody except painters and writers, and only got to meet a limited range of people. But now I have dear local friends from all walks of life. I think the most important thing I've learned in recent years is that nobody is ordinary."

While Mrs. Porter doesn't know if she'll have a second book published, she just goes on writing poems "one after the other, like a coral reef."

Some are ecstatic songs of gratitude for God's creation, and some arduous litanies of the sorrows of the outcast. A mindful humility runs through them:

"Whatever harm I may have done

In all my life in all your wide creation

If I cannot repair it

I beg you to repair it. . . ."