A Bit Player
A dorm in Happy Valley. Solo room,
door closed: a nineteen-year-old’s cozy womb.
Our heroine Helen, in a cloistered daze—
studying, yes, but reading was her craze.
On loan from Pattee, classic texts piled high;
also, used paperbacks she’d scraped to buy.
She was devouring all of literature.
Although the very picture of demure,
her inmost self defied the outer world.
This was in ’68. Around her whorled
the stench of “pot,” Marcuse’s New Left lore,
huge protests held against the Asian war.
From Dostoevsky’s Devils she had learned
how nihilism spreads, and she discerned
that certain “leaders” seemed Stavrogin-like,
diabolic as they hogged the mic,
a modern version of Pied Piper’s charm,
spawning in naïve students psychic harm.
She’d graduated early to escape.
Now ’69’s barbarities took shape.
Idealist SDS began to morph
to Weathermen, its rhetoric to dwarf
the platitudes of Hayden, open violence
its call: to organize, promptly commence
a Marxist revolution—earliest stage,
Chicago demonstration “Days of Rage.”
By sheerest fluke, she played a minor role.
Adrift, she idled, desolate in soul.
She traveled to Hyde Park to see again
Barbara, Babs for short, a high-school friend,
(more glamorous, adventurous than she,
the chichi feminist she longed to be.)
Babs’ digs were in a crumbling Greystone manse,
the Gilded Age’s tall and wide expanse.
Her roommate: frizzy hair engulfed her head,
“red-diaper baby,” anarch views homebred.
The friends conversed, shared secrets until ten.
Babs claimed her room while Helen settled on
the sofa in the living room to sleep.
She wondered how she’d ever take life’s leap.
Always she read, in every space or nook.
Women in Love was Helen’s current book.
She turned the pages, quaffed the sisters’ tale.
Her own life seemed so paltry and so pale.
Suddenly noisy stomps, the doorbell rung.
The wild roommate appeared, unkempt, unstrung.
She lifted up the latch, and through the door,
a surge of helmets, riot gear, uproar.
Babs soon emerged. “What’s this commotion? Stop!”
“Oh, it’s OK, they need a place to flop.
Tomorrow is our big day in the Park.
Our power’s in the street. They’ll hear us bark.”
Babs had no say. This rabid motley band
had found a sheltered perch on which to land.
Before her eyes, rebellion’s slippery slope.
All night, these drop-ins talked Marx: smoking dope,
raiding the fridge, creating young men’s mess.
Poor Helen watched and listened in distress.
Suppose police had tracked them? She’d be caught
and thrown in jail—somehow she really ought
to leave. But how? She overheard their scheme,
surreal, like Dostoevsky’s fever dream.
At dawn, these ardent radicals cleared out.
October’s louche display of fist and shout.
As time has passed, in Helen’s deepest heart,
reflections on her tiny walk-on part.
Which character would Hugo cast her as
in such a fiction as his great Les Mis?
She’s fitted not for manning barricades,
but scribbling sonnets to win accolades.
Historians write accounts of ruthless men
yet genuine truth remains beyond their ken.
It is our broody poets who can see
God’s covert shaping of eternity.
Notes
The Happy Valley: the Pennsylvania State University at
University Park, PA. The main library is Pattee.
SDS: acronym for the Students for a Democratic Society, whose spokesman Tom Hayden was married briefly to Jane Fonda. A violent offshoot, the Weather Underground (Weathermen) became significant in American history. Leaders William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn were influential in electing Barack Obama to the USA presidency in 2008 and 2012.
Hayden: In 1962, Hayden drafted the Port Huron statement, a broad critique of the USA political and social system for its failure to achieve international peace and economic justice.
Hyde Park: a residential area adjacent to the University of Chicago. In the 1960’s, luxurious Greystone townhomes had fallen into disrepair and were rented to students.
Chichi feminism: “Second-wave” feminism gained a significant following in the mid -1960s. Figures such as Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett and Simone Beuavior gave the movement an aura of glamor.
Mary Jane Myers resides in Springfield, Illinois. She is a retired JD/CPA tax specialist. Her debut short story collection Curious Affairs was published by Paul Dry Books in 2018.
Mary Jane, this is an amazing first-person tale of the 1960’s that is spun so accurately and haunts the soul. Also of significant note is the creative rhyme scheme and enjambment employed in writing this story.
Roy
Thank you for your kind comments. This poem is an experiment in using heroic couplets to narrate a story. Not so easy to write, but I’ll keep working!
Most sincerely
Mary Jane
Mary Jane, you tell where and how Days of Rage demonstrators flopped for a few hours on a single night. As I was reading, two advantages of verse over a prose memento leaped out at me. Readability and distinctive character. Your chosen style contributes these things. It is clear and comprehensible, with excellent order of syntax and logic, while it employs then-and-now current vocabulary to shade in several personalities. It is a detailed slice-of-life from the thoughtful Helen, who is both heroine and bit player. A few notes are necessary, but otherwise the piece presents the simplest drama for any reader. Nothing happens, yet with Helen we see a miniscule portion of “God’s covert shaping of eternity,” that is, both history and destiny. That’s a marvelous concluding line of credit to the poet.
Action “news events” are continually happening and everlastingly being interpreted. Yours calls attention to itself by its smallness. All the players on the world’s stage need to eat and sleep every day. The small things of “genuine truth” you write about are happening today with anti-law enforcement activists; often, they’re sleeping in refuges within the environs of academia. I live there. I remember a recruitment attempt by the SDS back in the days of your poem. Yesterday I got a phone message saying ICE would arrive in 15 minutes. Don’t know from whom and it didn’t happen. Your “genuine truth” allows me to reflect about all our imaginations expanding throughout these days, as Helen’s did in your poem. The poem documents a day and moves this reader far beyond!
Dear Margaret
Thank you for your kind comments. I have experimented with several methods (in both prose and poetry) to present this particular narrative. It is gratifying to know that heroic couplets work effectively to convey the story. The poet also has the flexibility to interweave epigrams to gesture toward possible “morals” of the tale. Note: in order to educate my ear, and to internalize the meter’s rhythm, I immersed myself in the heroic couplets of Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander.”
History is fascinating, isn’t it? The news industry reports sensational events because that’s what sells. Historians dig through news accounts to shape a “through line.” (That arc, of course, is often shaped by the historians’ biases, though they claim to be neutral.) Historians often miss entirely the “small things” that are the stuff of our lives. As you so eloquently point out, “nothing happens,” yet everything important is happening. The great masters of fiction and poetry “explain ourselves to ourselves” and that’s why it’s crucial to engage with them.
Sincerely
Mary Jane
This is a top-drawer poem on so many levels. Sometimes the wording and the syntactic connections seem a bit bizarre, and that is exactly why this is an excellent work, both groundbreaking and foundational. Reading this piece is as close as I ever want to come to skydiving.
Dear C.B.
Apologies for my late acknowledgement of your comment. Thank you for your kind remarks. I like to take chances in my poetry compositions. Otherwise, I’m a complete scaredy-cat. I avoid getting on even the mildest roller coasters!
Most sincerely
Mary Jane