Alumna Poet Turns Life into Verse in 'Leaving'

Author: Becca Kaufman Staff Writer

As part of the Library Program in the Abernathy Room on Wednesday, Nov. 7, Sue Ellen Thompson read a selection of poems from her most recent publication, "The Leaving." A Middlebury alumna and a frequent attendee of the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference as a Robert Frost Fellow, Thompson has a rich and passionate relationship with the College and the small but intensely meaningful world she found from learning, growing and exploring here.

These memories and experiences from her days at Middlebury and at Bread Loaf are themes that continually arise in her new collection of poetry, but Thompson places them in the larger context of her life as a parent, a wife and a daughter. She uses poetry and language to develop the bigger meaning of the simple moments. She shows us how these glimpses into her life are similar to our own and that they are much more than fleeting expressions of the present, but rather an ongoing process of personal growth.

Subjects such as taking her daughter to college for the first time, returning home from Middlebury as an older woman and having her mother wash her clothes and building a second home at Texas Falls with her husband, capture those strange and special moments when the past and present come together. Homes, mothers, fathers, children, scents and food are Thompson's doors into the hidden rooms of our lives and in turn, her tools to express the ways in which we leave and return all at once.

One of the poems Thompson began with was the first of many devoted to her daughter, now a senior in college. "The Day She Leaves" describes the day Thompson and her husband drove her daughter to college for the first time. "I ride in the back seat of the station wagon/ crammed with stereo equipment and bedding…" Thompson writes, "My horizon/ is the stretched-out crew-neck of her t-shirt," while her daughter's horizon is her new city, her new college and her new parentless world. Thompson continues, "Then, / knowing it may be the final service I perform/ for her, I make the bed, folding hospital corners/ in crisp white linen service sheets…the quilt with pastel dinosaurs I used to pull/ up to her chin when she was nine."

As she prepares herself for her final goodbye hug, her perspective as a mother switches to that of a daughter, remembering her own last farewell to her parents: "I wanted them to/ stop, to come to me this one last time without/ my asking, so I could tear my woman's body/ from the frame of their embrace,/ so I could start my life without/ them…"

While the transition to college is perhaps the most tangible step for a child away from his parent's protection, Thompson explains that it was neither the first for her own daughter and neither the last for herself. Her poem "At Sixteen" describes with poignant humor Thompson's frustration with her daughter's adolescent need to rebel and separate herself, specifically through the medium of black clothes and heavy jewelry. "She doesn't know/," Thompson writes, "that she's taking me with her. Like the two/ black shirts she wears: One stays inside/ the other even as they are laundered." And in her poem "The Scholar's Life," she describes how her decision to date an African American in her latter years as an undergraduate at Middlebury caused a rift in her own relationship with her parents. In this poem she contrasts the freedoms of intellectual ("At twenty-one I carried the Inferno lightly/ at my hip…) and sexual ("All/ I knew was heaven; all I wanted/ was his long, dark body…") exploration with the restraints of her parents and of academia ("At graduation I sat mute between my parents/ in the moist gymnasium, their lined and worried faces bland/ with pride. Gowned in black, I stood/ when I was told to stand…").

From the birth of her child, to airplane flights with her husband, to watching her mother's favorite annual event, the Stanley Cup Finals, Thompson's poetry is about the layers of her life that she continues to unearth and to construct. As she writes in "Second Home," "I see the trees pulling back into themselves/ and I forgive him, because he doesn't know/ what it feels like to be shedding something, / because he doesn't know what I'll become."