When the poet Barbara Louise Ungar heard that her collection The Origin of the Milky Way had won the 2006 Gival Press Poetry Award, her reaction was similar to how she felt six years earlier when told she was pregnant: “Heaven. I thought, I’m going to be happy for the rest of my life, because I got what I want.” Chronicled with honesty, wit, elegance, and verve in The Origin of the Milky Way, the experience of motherhood proved to be heaven and then some.
Ungar was a late arrival to motherhood. Author of the previous collection of poetry Thrift and a frequent reader at the Tinker Street Café when she lived in Woodstock in the 1990s, she’s currently a tenured professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany. Some years ago, she was told by a fertility clinic that hers was a “hopeless case.” After learning that the clinic’s diagnosis was premature, to say the least, Ungar described herself as “the most ecstatic pregnant woman ever.” The timing of her pregnancy could not have been more fortuitous, as it turned out. Having already taken a sabbatical to write, Ungar had the time to “spiral inwards” and truly meditate on the panorama of physical and emotional changes she underwent during pregnancy.
The results might be surprising, however, for anyone who imagines that The Origin of the Milky Way is a series of serene ruminations on the blessings of motherhood. Rather, a primal form of terror is part and parcel of Origin, which is divided into four sections. These sections—ranging from mythos-inflected “Annunciations” through the bluesy musings of “Fourth Trimester” and the edgy observations of “Feast,” where she comments on raising a child in a time of war—document the full process of pregnancy and the birth of her son Izaak, followed by the great afterwards of trying to write with an infant on the hip.
“The most frightening thing was the thought, I’ll never be alone again,” says Ungar of the prenatal period. Beyond fears of the actual childbirth, awareness of the child growing within her was also a form of becoming a “body in constant use.” This bodily unease is given wicked expression in the short poem “Quickening,” where the flutter from the growing fetus makes the mother aware, “There’s some / body else / in here / with you.” Such is the stuff of midnight creature features, though the newfound awareness of a child growing within isn’t all terrifying by any stretch. Lustrous wonder is given equal measure throughout Origin as well, as in the lovely “Prenatal Yoga” when Ungar reflects on advice from a stretching class: “Your spine is a river of light / the teacher says. / Let your heart bow / to your baby’s heart.”
Such casual artistry of language is part of what makes Origin such a compelling volume. Flowing throughout are images of water, liquidity, rivers, and oceans. Aside from the fact that Ungar’s water broke while swimming—given sublime treatment in the piece “Pool”—the title poem of The Origin of the Milky Way comes from a Tintoretto painting depicting the myth of Juno’s spilled breast milk forming the Milky Way. Asked about the veritable flood of watery images, Ungar seems surprised. “It wasn’t intentional. Of course, there’s amniotic fluid and all that, but that seems too simplistic an explanation. Maybe it’s because I associate physical affection from a parent from when my father held me in the water and taught me how to swim. Even though we are Jewish, being raised in Minnesota gave our family some of those old-fashioned Lutheran concerns for distance and propriety. I’m one of three sisters, and being taught to swim was one of the few times my father was able to show physical affection to us girls without being worried how it would appear.”
Her family impacted Origin in other ways as well. Ungar says that her mother, an avid reader, once complained that she wasn’t “intelligent enough to understand your poems” due to all the references to Greek legends and characters. Not words any poet wants to hear, and while the collection certainly contains myth-oriented pieces, Ungar says she kept her mother’s comment in mind while composing Origin. The collection reflects her concern, and her combination of plain spoken, at times rock’n’roll, sensibility with the mythic and philosophical makes for a well-rounded yet subtle narration. This is especially true in the “Fourth Trimester” section, where the struggles of dealing with an infant come to the fore. In the harrowing piece “Crying,” Ungar address the simultaneous weeping of mother and child: “This world hurts. If I wanted / to spare you, I should never / have brought you here. / Your crying flays me.”
The poem “Postpartum Blues” is just as powerful, beginning with a litany of maternal exhaustion: “I’ve had four hours of sleep. / My head aches. I slipped / on the ice & sprained my knee. / I’m reduced to formula in my coffee.” These blues conclude with a mordantly humorous reference to Sylvia Plath: “Multiply by two, / add a cheating love, then / frozen pipes: now you know / why Sylvia stuck her head in the oven.”
Asked about some of the ideas underlying “Postpartum Blues,” Ungar explains. “In everything I’ve read about Sylvia Plath, and that dreadful movie with Gwyneth Paltrow, where her infant and toddler simply appear as cute window dressing now and then, no one mentions that simply having one infant or toddler can drive the healthiest person to feeling suicidal, not to mention having two of them, and to be broke, in the middle of winter, and trying to write at the same time.” Faced with similar writing difficulties, Ungar taught herself to compose poems entirely in her head while caring for Izaak, and then “running to write everything down as soon as he took a nap.”
Adding to the difficulties of “spiraling down” is any new mother’s sleeplessness. “If you’re nursing, you’re up at two hour intervals around the clock, nursing for 45 minutes, then back to sleep, if you’re lucky, for an hour before being awakened again, with a diaper change each time. You quickly turn into Macbeth, or Lady Macbeth, from sleep deprivation, and this also affects the writing process.”
If writing The Origin of the Milky Way sounds difficult, the collection’s path toward publication was only slightly less arduous. Confident that she had a strong collection, Ungar focused almost entirely submitting the full manuscript to publishers than in sending individual pieces out to journals and magazines. The following succession of near misses might have broken any poet’s spirit. According to Ungar, over a period of three years, The Origin of the Milky Way was twice named a finalist at Marsh Hawk Press, received second place at Blue Light Press, and was a semi-finalist at Sarabande Books, the University of Wisconsin, Perugia Press, Elixir Press, and for the Anthony Hecht Prize with the Waywiser Press. Her first full-length collection, Thrift, underwent a similar ordeal, being named a contest finalist or semifinalist an astounding 23 times before finding a publisher. Prestigious close calls like these are enough to break any artist’s spirit, and Ungar admits that doubts began to creep in.
“I started to feel like I’d been cursed by a professor in grad school. A piece of mine got second place for an award, and the professor told me, ‘Get used to it. Whatever happens in grad school is the way it’ll be for the rest of your life.’” Thankfully, the professor was no more prescient than the fertility clinic, and as Ungar’s wonderful poem “Tanka” expresses, “It’s not labor./I can stand it.” Her endurance finally paid off when the editor of Gival Press called to let her know the collection had received Gival’s 2006 award with publication planned for late 2007. Proving that nothing succeeds like success, since then Origin has belatedly received first place at another contest, giving Ungar the rare pleasure for a poet to inform a publisher too late, already taken.
Ungar’s hoping to do as many readings as she can in support of The Origin of the Milky Way, but booking appearances and arranging travel isn’t easy with a young son either. Whatever the worries of being a parent and its impact on the artistic life, though, Barbara Ungar describes motherhood in terms as luminous as the collection itself. “I understand how women can become afraid their lives are eclipsed by having a child, but for me it’s been heaven. I’ve been to parties. I’ve been to movies. I’ve traveled around the world. I’ve done all that. This is what I want.”
Barbara Louise Ungar will read at the oodstock Poetry Society gathering on March 8 at 2pm at Woodstock Town Hall. For more information:wwww.woodstockpoetry.com or www.barbaraungar.com.
This article appears in February 2008.
