Weeks 3 & 4: Epileptics, Feebleminded, and Magical Children

Two books in one for this post - Molly McCully Brown's The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, and Roald Dahl's Matilda.

First, a bit of background on these choices. Molly McCully Brown won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Award from Persea Books. I had submitted to this contest, perhaps in that same year even, though it may have been 2017. I did not win, obviously, though I was a "semi-finalist" for whatever that's worth. I happened to see this book on the library's new book shelf one day and picked it up solely for its intriguing title. That little award seal in the corner convinced me to take it home. It is a far better collection than the one I submitted and Brown deserves the win.

So, that seems understandable, but you may be wondering why the hell a grown ass, sophisticated (so I'd like to believe) poet is reading an old children's book like Matilda. Well, it wasn't exactly my choice, but I have this job where I teach reading classes online to gifted students, and the curriculum for this fall's course includes this book. I'd never read it before, but even if I had, I would've had to read it again to remember things and mark passages for relevance to the course assignments.

(the book covers - two girls, dreaming)

Anyway, turns out Matilda is a good read and weirdly correlated to The Virginia State Colony... For the unfamiliar, Matilda, our protagonist, is a profoundly precocious little girl (i.e. reading Faulkner at 4 years old) who also finds that she can use her extraordinary brain powers to do magic. Her family and all but the kindest teachers see her as a human aberration to be avoided and/or punished. In the end Matilda is, in the way of children's books generally, saved from her terrible family and the author implies that the rest of her life is lived in relative happiness.

Brown implies a bleaker ending for "extraordinary" children in the real world, through poems in the imagined voices of young women, girls really, held in the very real Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in the 1930s. Reading these poems, though, I get the feel that these women were anything but "feebleminded." I get, even, the feel of misunderstood genius, trapped in bodies, forms, ways of being, that the establishment doesn't understand and so locks away as a danger. In that way, these voices are like Matilda's. In the real world, though, happy endings aren't so easy to come by. In the final pages of Brown's book, we witness the "inmates" deal with being subject to unexplained and forced sterilization procedures. Fun times!

So, there's that. The content is enough to make this book worth reading. I rather love it when poets go beyond their own experience and bring a whole other world to life through poetry. Novelistic, perhaps. Alexandra Teague's The Wise and Foolish Builders does this (also Persea Books...hmmm...). The great and wonderful Anne Carson and her Red books too. I'm sure there are others. I want to read them, write them.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was something about the form and language of Brown's poems. She does this thing where the different voices in the book are represented by unique poetic forms. The epileptic, for example, speaks in fairly regular three-line stanzas, interrupted by stranger, almost ethereal, italicized three-line stanzas that break off to the right of the page as an epileptic episode might. The "insane" and "feebleminded" voice, on the other hand, speaks in fragments held together in long lines interrupted by spaces. This kind of formal reflection of content and tone totally gets me, every time.

Then there's this. These "Where you are" poems that frame and hold all the others at various points throughout the collection. They're in what you might call a narrator's voice, as distinct from the other voices in the collection. These two frame one section of the book. The words are the same, the lines different. Something has changed (in the narrator's, reader's perception) from the beginning to the end of that one section. This poet knows how to use the power of a line break.

On that note, back to Matilda for a minute. Roald Dahl's language is wonderfully vibrant and whimsical, with nary a hint of condescension or simplification for young readers. While the story is rather predictable to adult eyes and ears, the sprawling vocabulary and figurative language Dahl employs makes the book quite fun to read. I even read a couple chapters out loud to my 2.5 year old and he listened intently, enthralled, I'd like to think, with the language even if he wasn't completely following the story. Perhaps, in this way too, it is a precursor to more complex "adult" poetry.

#bookaweek