Poem of the Week | July 06, 2020
Heather Treseler “The Lucie Odes”
This week’s poem of the week is the 2019 Jeffrey E. Smith Prize-winning “The Lucie Odes,” by Heather Treseler.
The Lucie Odes
For Lucie Nell Beaudet (1960-2018)
Author’s Note
I wrote “The Lucie Odes” in the ten months following the death of a woman I loved. I took, as models, poems by Adrienne Rich, Frank Bidart, Michael S. Harper, and Dana Levin, who, in their unflinching intimacy, also attend to the person as a historical subject, as what Charles Olson termed a “complex of occasions.” When I met Lucie Beaudet at Washington University in 2007, she had survived almost unspeakable violence to become a respected professional, an electron microscopist employed by the medical school. She had received her training from the late Dr. Vernon Fischer of St. Louis University, himself a childhood survivor of the Shoah, who, childless, regarded Lucie as his daughter.
What Lucie had experienced of rural poverty and extreme violence she transmuted into a life lived with independence, clarity, and intellectual hunger. She buttressed her knowledge of the world with Dante and Melville, evolutionary biology and political history. While there is no way to sing a beloved back into being, to summon presence from absence or transcendence from nonbelief, the poem was a way to continue a conversation that spanned a decade and to confirm her life as she had departed from it: clear-sighted and alone.
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