Psalms of the Dining Room
Lauren Schmidt
Psalms of The Dining Room
Copyright © 2011 Lauren Schmidt. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Wipf & Stock
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199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
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ISBN 13: 978-1-61097-427-1
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-6990-2
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.
To Josie,
For imagining The Dining Room
Foreword
The poetry of Lauren Schmidt does what poetry should do: make the invisible visible, indelibly, unforgettably. If ever a collection of poems embodied Whitman’s dictum to speak for “the rights of them the others are down upon,” this is it.
The poet worked for several years as a volunteer at The Dining Room in Eugene, Oregon, a free meals program (what used to be called a “soup kitchen”) sponsored by Food for Lane County. Their motto was “Dining With Dignity,” and indeed those who dined there—the poor, the unemployed, the physically and mentally disabled, veterans, the homeless—suffer from an acute, and sometimes lethal, deprivation of dignity in their daily lives.
The poems inspired by the experience of working with this community—in The Dining Room and beyond—humanize the dehumanized, compelling us to see what we do not see and hear what we do not hear, to gaze upon the “ugly” until it becomes beautiful, to re-imagine, re-invent and repair the world.
These are poems of lament, praise, and thanksgiving; thus, they are truly psalms, and belong to that Biblical tradition. They also belong to the tradition of poets who have rolled up their sleeves to work to among the damned, and have written from that perspective. Think of Whitman, laboring in the Civil War hospitals of Washington, D.C., and his poem, “The Wound-Dresser;” or Theodore Deppe, employed as a psychiatric nurse working with adolescents in Willimantic, Connecticut, and his poem, “Admission, Children’s Unit,” or Rafael Campo, a doctor in the emergency rooms of Boston, and his sonnet cycle, “Ten Patients and Another.”
According to The Eugene Weekly, on the winter evening of January 25th, 2007, a survey of the homeless counted 2,296 souls in the shelters and on the streets of that city. The number is an abstraction, easily skipped by the mind’s eye; the poet must translate that abstraction into something tangibly human. The collective voice of the homeless rises from the gutter in, “The Men Who Grow From Curbs”:
Our spines are made of streetlights.
We sweat a stew of soot and grease.
Our Labradors starve in leaves.
We are the keepers of forgotten things:
coffee mugs from Christmas, Rudolph’s
shiny head, handle made of antlers.
The Marilyn Monroe candlestick.
The Yosemite bison magnet.
The badminton racket bent like a busted nose.
The poem remembers, in jeweled detail, “the keepers of forgotten things,” themselves forgotten. Treated like trash, they treat the trash like gold.
The poet does not impose the artificial light of dignity on the subject; rather, she finds the natural light of dignity within the subject, the luminosity of even the most wounded faces. Beneath the Jefferson Street Bridge in Eugene, we have this scene as rendered with delicate brush strokes of language in the poem, “One Week After Christmas”:
On a patch of grass, once green,
beneath an overpass of sky,
off a ramp of Interstate 105,
three men steady a tree. Dead
at its ends, branches angled
from rest on the side of the road
where it was discovered, then dragged
here to stand . . .
This ceremony subverts our expectations, stripping the Christmas scene of the usual mercantile sentimentality, demonstrating that human beings can create a home—and meaningful rituals—anywhere:
. . . Not
kids sleighing, mouths open
in glee; not mothers baking,
fathers praying near a manger;
not a snowman; not a choo-choo train;
but three men standing back
to admire their tree: its branches
looped with Caution tape,
foil fangled for its star.
A series of poems addresses the murder of a homeless man, Herbert “Pac-Man” Bishop, a patron of The Dining Room. “As I Roll Silverware” is dedicated to Bishop, who was beaten and left to die with twenty-three separate rib fractures:
there beneath the Jefferson Street Bridge,
where he lived, beneath the Jefferson Street Bridge,
trying to sleep beneath the bridge.
The poem recalls the names of the other nameless ones who pass through The Dining Room every day, too many of them as endangered as Herbert Bishop. There is a refrain that keeps the beat of lamentation and remembrance, based on the rhythm of rolling the silverware for the evening meal:
Wrap. Roll. Stack it.
Wrap. Roll. Stack it . . .
In the quietest hour, before the first meal is served,
I bundle the evening’s silverware,
and practice all their names.
Yet there are also hymns of celebration. “Far from Butter” praises, in language both tactile
