“Snap, crackle, pop!” I said, delighted.
My classmates either glared at me or turned their glazed eyes toward the window, where autumn had just started to announce itself with a spattering of red and yellow leaves.
The teacher thanked me, then asked me to sit down, please.
The class clown said, “Belch,” and everyone laughed. Except me. I was too busy to join in.
I GREW UP in a family that spoke Italian. In fact, most of the people in my neighborhood spoke Italian—black-clad women toting handmade baskets full of eggplants and tomatoes they’d grown, mustachioed men sitting at card tables on the sidewalk playing cards and smoking stogies. Our houses held two or three generations, our yards were gardens and orchards and chicken coops (no swing sets or tree houses), shrines to the Virgin Mary sat at the front door, and Italian filled the air. My great-grandmother spoke only Italian, no English. My grandmother spoke broken English. My mother and her siblings moved back and forth between the two languages, even when they were sitting around the kitchen table playing cards or gossiping. Usually they slipped into Italian when they didn’t want us kids to understand what they were saying, perhaps about scoundrel uncles or loose women.
We were forbidden from learning Italian because these three generations had suffered so much cruelty and prejudice for being immigrants. They were made fun of for the lunches they brought to school, the smell of garlic and onions that emanated from their kitchens, their olive skin and large noses and larger families. They were called “wops” and “guineas”; they were told they were greasy and dirty. No, the older generations decided, we were going to be spared all that. We were going to be American. So Italian floated around me like a pleasant fog, a kind of poetry, I realize now. The older cousins mastered the swearwords, and taught those to us. They felt delicious on my tongue, those foreign dirty words, forbidden.
Auntie Angie used to sit with me when I was little and read the stories I’d written. There were seven girls and three boys in my mother’s family, and Auntie Angie was the one who never had a daughter. Her son Stephen was the oldest of all the cousins, exactly ten years older than me, so that by the time I was in school he was off to college and then onto his life. Auntie Angie loved all her nieces, exotic birds in ruffled dresses.
One afternoon, when I was seven or eight, as I sat beside her at the enamel-topped kitchen table, she produced from the depths of her handbag a neatly folded newspaper clipping. She smoothed it out and told me to read it out loud.
“ ‘I never saw a Purple Cow,’ ” I read. “ ‘I never hope to see one. But I can tell you, anyhow, I’d rather see than be one!’ ”
Auntie Angie hooted with laughter. “This guy, Ogden Nash, he makes the best rhymes!”
Why this poem was in the newspaper, or how Auntie Angie had heard of Ogden Nash, I cannot say. What I do know is that reading that nonsense poem out loud, feeling the rhymes slide off my tongue, reaching the delightful ending—I’d rather see than be one!—was an experience that I still can’t describe, like the first time you ride your bike without training wheels or watch television in color instead of black and white. A world opened up.
Perhaps seeing my surprised expression, Auntie Angie said, “It’s a poem. It rhymes.”
Poem. Rhyme. Still a wonderful mystery even as I read it over and over, with Auntie Angie explaining that “cow” and “anyhow” rhyme.
Finally she went back into that bottomless handbag and retrieved a small lined notebook and Bic pen. “Here,” she said, “you write down some rhymes.”
I stared at the blank paper until Auntie Angie, muttering, “Jesus, let me start,” made columns with words at the top: “Hair.” “Car.” “Dog.” Not unlike the day years later when I understood onomatopoeia, I began to write, slowly at first and then with wild abandon. Words tumbled from my brain. I was rhyming!
Auntie Angie lit a fresh Pall Mall and checked my list from time to time, but mostly went back to talking with her sisters. Before she left, she turned to a fresh page in the notebook and said, “When I come back, find a rhyme for this word.” And in perfect block letters, she wrote: PURPLE.
For several agonizing days, I struggled unsuccessfully to find a word that rhymed with “purple.” Maybe she would forget, I hoped. Maybe she wouldn’t come back. Neither of these possibilities were even remotely likely to happen. Auntie Angie never forgot anything. And, like all of my aunts and uncles, she came to visit three or four or even five times a week. Sure enough, one afternoon I came home from school and there she was, Pall Mall dangling between her red-lipsticked lips.
“Well?” she asked almost immediately.
I swallowed hard and reluctantly admitted, “No word rhymes with purple.”
“Ha! That’s not what our friend Ogden Nash says!”
Years later I would learn that Ogden Nash hadn’t invented that nonsense rhyme. But at that moment, I hated him. And maybe even Auntie Angie.
“Maple surple rhymes with purple!” Auntie Angie said, and laughed good and hard.
I frowned. Maple surple wasn’t a thing or a word. But slowly I understood. Words and rhymes were fun. You could play with them, mix them up, turn them around, rearrange letters, make things up. Grinning, I climbed onto Auntie Angie’s lap. She dug into that giant handbag again, pulled out the notebook and pen, and told me to do some rhyming. Yes, I was back in love with Auntie Angie, but I was in love with something else too, something big and strange and thrilling: language.
FIRST THERE WAS onomatopoeia, and then there was simile—as blue as the sky, as blue as denim, blue like the morning, I wrote—and then metaphor and haiku and sonnets. Suddenly my world of prose was broken up and all I wanted to do was write poetry. We read “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” and “Richard Cory” and “The Road Not Taken.” We got extra credit for memorizing Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village.” How I loved sitting alone in my room, saying that poem aloud: Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain, / Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain . . .
It did not occur to me that somewhere in the library sat volumes of poetry. It seemed to me a precious thing, a poem, and I could not begin to imagine where poems resided. But one night as I played my favorite album, Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, it struck me that its eponymous song was actually a poem. Wasn’t darkness, my old friend personification? And words like silent raindrops fell a simile? The neon God a metaphor? I played the song over and over, a notebook in hand, teasing out its meaning. Then I turned my attention to I am a rock—metaphor! I am an island! When we had to write a paper on our favorite poet, my classmate Nancy wrote hers on Robert Frost and Steven wrote his on Edgar Allan Poe. But me, I wrote mine on Paul Simon.