Behind the Poem - … or Abundance
In this entry of Behind the Poem, we’ll look at a recent poem. Starting in March, I began a series: Photo of the Week and Poem of the Week. The rules for this series (check it out on Instagram) are simple. The photo can be any photo taken the calendar week before. The poem can be on any subject, but it must use the photo as the spark of inspiration.
Since starting that series, the poems have mostly been sonnet length or shorter. Keeping poems to one square picture card seems to work well with the Instagram platform, so I’ve tried making short, meaningful poems that evoke a story out of the photo of the week.
The photo of the week for the week of April 19th (pictured below), however, sparked my imagination after reading about the genesis of the statue in the photo. The statue is called Pomona or Abundance, and was sculpted by Karl Bitter in the year 1915. Here it is, taken with a long focal length, surrounded by the cherry trees of Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan. I was standing out front of the plaza hotel, northwest of the statue. The buildings in the background are on 58th street I believe.
In looking for the name of this statue, so I could begin writing this poem, I found that on Google Maps, it is called “Audrey Munson - Pomona or Abundance”. I assumed Audrey Munson was the sculptor, and decided to google her as a possible subject for the poem. However, she was in fact the model for Pomona.
She wasn’t just the model for Pomona however. Her likeness can be found on numerous statues all around the city (at least 40), and the circumstances of her life are both a bit heroic and a bit tragic. I decided to write a poem, an interrogative poem where the speaker asks questions, first to the goddess represented by the statue, then to the model whose likeness is the statue.
I begin the poem with a command to look around and count the blossoms on the cherry trees. Of course, counting each blossom would be absurd—the number must be enormous. I googled it, “How many blossoms are on a 30-foot tall cherry tree” and couldn’t find an answer, though I feel somebody, somewhere, has done a study. People study everything. None the less, since we know the number is large and, practically speaking, uncountable, I allowed the Goddess to answer with the word “Abundance”.
Look around, Pomona, at the blooming cherry trees.
Vertumnus, from the branches old, reveals himself.
Count the blossoms white, Pomona. Tell me
how many now surround you. Shout it to the sky.
“Abundance!”
I’m aware ‘Abundance’ isn’t usually a standalone word, it’s usually preceded by an article of some kind (an, the), but I thought having the Goddess shout it by itself, it might take on the qualities of a talisman or magical word. An interesting reference here is the character Vertumnus.
Vertumnus was Pomona’s husband according to Roman myth. Pomona was not at all interested in love, and just wanted to tend her garden. After refusing several proposals from different Gods, one God, Vertumnus, disguises himself as an old woman, and talks to Pomona about love, convincing her that it is worth it to take a husband. He begins to reveal his true nature (i. e., he’s really an eligible bachelor), and she decides to marry him. I have to wonder if the creator of the movie Tootsie was aware of this piece of ancient myth when they came up with that story.
The next couple of stanzas, I begin the first round of questions. I often like to start a poem by focusing in on a singular, specific place, incident, or person, and then I zoom out from there. In this poem, the event is the creation of the Pomona statue. What does an artist’s model do, and how can I make it sound interesting? The first is obvious, they hold a pose so an artist can make a copy. In my research, the posing lasts for twenty to thirty minutes, with rest breaks. To figure out the second part, I decided to focus on the difficulty it must be to hold such a kinetic pose for minutes on end. She’s not simply standing, she’s stepping up into a garden, carrying a basket awkwardly to one side while looking in the opposite direction. Imagining myself holding that pose puts an ache in several parts of my body.
Is there one for every second that she held your pose, Pomona?
caught stepping up into a hill-top orchard,
head twisting to the right to search for bee
or butterfly whose sudden color shocked
the edge of sight?
Is there enough to fill your basket which she held
(with muscles cramped and Bitter bones) still,
but on the verge of motion so the sculptor could
evince your perfect form—eternity
from a singular moment formed?
“Abundance!”
“Bitter bones” is my reference to the sculptor. All my unusual capitalizations in this poem are meant as specific references.
In the next few stanzas, I introduce more biographical elements. First off, as a young, single woman of great beauty, she received many marriage proposals. Similar to Pomona, she seemed uninterested in domestic life (she never did marry). Her parents divorced when she was young (very unusual in the 1890’s), and she along with her mother moved to New York City. Like many people who move to this city, she had big dreams of making it as an actress, gaining her own financial freedom.
She was spotted by a photographer while window shopping, who asked her to pose for some photos (around 1909), and then this photographer recommended her to various artist friends in his circle, which led her to her first nude modeling job for sculptor Isidore Konti. The sculpture he created was called the Three Graces, which featured three likenesses of her. She also posed for the statue “Civic Fame”, atop the Manhattan Municipal Building. At 25 feet tall, it is the 2nd tallest female statue in the city.
Are there some left over for every eye that fell in love with her?
a girl from broken home who moved
to New York City to make her life her own;
whose beauty cast her second tallest next
to Liberty (that which she long aspired);
whose grace was so abundant Konti
asked for three likenesses to grasp it?
“Abundance!”
In the next stanza, we see the fulfillment of her dream of becoming an actress. She was, in fact, the lead actress for four films, Inspiration, Purity, The Girl o’ Dreams, and Heedless Moths. Three of these are lost to time. Purity was rediscovered in 2004 in France, and may one day be publicly available again. In truth, her films were not critical darlings of their time, though the plot for Inspiration is interesting. It’s about a sculptor trying to relocate a model he worked with once long ago. It has a very fairy-tale sound to it.
The stanza after that, I try to summarize this first half of the poem, zooming in on a cherry blossom as I zoom in to ‘every copy of her face’. For those unfamiliar, a pedicel is the stem that holds an individual blossom to a larger inflorescence. An anther is the pollen bearing part of a stamen, the filament is the long tube the anther hangs on. Each cherry blossom sports numerous anthers.
How about for every frame of celluloid now lost?
where she, as leading actor, wore not a stitch (a first
for Hollywood) playing Inspiration for every sculptor?
How about a pedicel for every pedestal that holds her;
a blossom for each naked body that first was her, still, breathing;
for every copy of her face an anther on its filament?
“Abundance! Abundance!”
The reference to ‘a first for Hollywood’ is very specific. She’s believed to be the first named leading actress to appear nude in a Hollywood film.
Here I change the person I am speaking too. (Or maybe, I start speaking to the real person behind the graven image). I try to help indicate this change by indenting the first line of this stanza similar to the opening. The poem also begins its tragic turn. Her films were often censored in theaters across the country, and it was a great topic of controversy.
To further add to this source of stress in her life, in 1919, she was living in a boarding house in Manhattan, when the Doctor who owned the house, a 65-year old man (she would have been 28), murdered his wife to make a spot for her. He was arrested and committed suicide before ever telling his part of the story. At least part of the public blamed her, as if she led him on. According to her, she never had any romantic interactions or intentions with this man. This is one subject whose truth is lost to time.
Oh Miss Manhattan look at all the cherries now
vertumnal white and proud. Did you in your Pomonal beauty
stand as proud when public scorn surrounded you
for trying to make life with naked charm in public view?
But how you withered under double wrath when one
of so many of your suitors, his wife, eliminated
to make a way for you. What scandal touched you though
you were innocent of any wrong.
But why start speaking to Audrey Munson and not continue talking to the Goddess here? I guess because I am no longer speaking to merely the inspirational part of her life (Gods and Goddesses were always meant to be inspirational in some sense), but the very real, flawed, human part of her life.
Fun little semantics tidbit here. The God Vertumnus (a god of spring), has been made into an eponymous adjective (vertumnal), a rarely used word meaning spring-like. I decided to mirror that by turning Pomona (a god of plenty) into Pomonal (abundant). This also helps graft Audrey and her statue together as one unit.
This next stanza addresses the darkest part of her life, her attempted suicide. Following the censorship of her movies, the scandal involving the doctor, another unsuccessful movie and scandal, she became a persona non grata in Hollywood. She also seemed to have aged out of the modeling business (she turned 30 in 1921). She, along with her mother, moved to a small town in upstate New York, and she decided to swallow a solution of mercury bi-chloride in 1922.
Look around, Miss Munson, at Grand Army Plaza.
Is the Purity of white enough to shroud
the shame and scorn of censorship
so undeserved that flooded you until
you tried to drown in mercury bi-chloride?
Of course, her tale goes on from this event. And the true ending is a bit heart rending. Another nine years passes. Her mother and her live upstate and make ends meet working in factories and other low wage jobs. Her mother, getting older, commits her to an asylum at the age of forty (1931). The asylum tests her, and even though she doesn’t test as suffering from any known clinical mental disorder, they accept her anyway. She would live in the asylum for sixty five years. I don’t know if this was against her will, or if she accepted it as a safe place to live that would feed her. I do know that sixty-five years in a single building is unimaginable for me.
What heart would not—on hearing how your tale ends—ache?
When history is written down, who remembers the
Anonymous Face whose gaze we walk beneath;
the artists’ model whose name disappears
faster than their beauty fades;
the girl who bravely charted her own path,
committed by the scorn of the world,
the scorn of the world forgetting,
into an upstate anonymous asylum?
Is there a blossom, Audrey, for every day of the sixty-five years
you spent in Ogdensburg?
Did the nurses and the other patients believe
that you were the Pan-Goddess of Manhattan?
Or was it merely tall tales by then?
The ‘Anonymous Face’ is capitalized as it is a paraphrase from an article she wrote in the late 1910’s. I try to summarize the first part of her life here. The pre-asylum life when she was still young and full of dreams and ambition, and then I give the ending.
Ogdensburg is a small city on the border between New York and Canada.
One has to wonder, as time passed while she was in the asylum, if her former life, as an actress and model, started to become a dream in her memory, not something she really, actively lived through. She was nearly totally forgotten to history and even to her family (she didn’t receive a visitor for decades, until a distant relation visited in the 1980’s). I really wonder if she remembered those lived experiences when she became a centenarian.
Could you remember in 1996
that other lifetime lived? Did you think
about it as you died for real this time,
aged one-hundred and four?
This final stanza tries its best to conclude the poem. There is a lot more public interest in her life this century; numerous articles on the internet; programs at various art museums. Her family even gave her grave a proper tombstone in 2016. I merge Pomona with Audrey Munson in this stanza. Pomona is no longer a separate character in this poem, it is ‘your Pomona’.
This year marks one-hundred thirty since your birth.
Look around your Pomona, Audrey Munson, at the blossoms white.
Manhattan now remembers you, the public talks of you once more.
Thanksgiving, from the cherry trees, reveals itself.
Count the petals as they fall.
“Abundance! Abundance! Abundance!”
An interesting note, I avoid, throughout the poem, using Audrey Munson’s full name until this very last stanza. It’s a bit of a ‘reveal’ for the reader. Taking her from the mythical (Pomona, Miss Manhattan) to a known person (Miss Munson, Audrey Munson).
I finish the poem off with three repeats of ‘Abundance!’. Humans like things in threes for some reason. Miss Manhattan, since I didn’t explain it, was one name coined for her around 1913 by an article in The Sun. She wasn’t just a model, some call her America’s first supermodel.