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Inspirations

MAKING A POEM: Eva Salzman

Interviewed by Kate Clanchy

Brooklyn Bridge

(designed by Roebling and finished by his daughter-in-law Emily)

This one’s mine: not a nail-less Bridge of Sighs
nor a stage, where enemies or film crews shoot
but trembling on a net of ‘wheres’ and ‘whys,’
part Asses’ Bridge, part Al-Sirat, less Iron Brute,

more hunkering church, grown from Gothic grey,
its cables spun from spiders bred in books.
That dark harp was made for me to play.
And however dark, I couldn’t help but look

at ever darker slights, their height and girth
stringing me high above the traffic’s hum.
I was harnessed by a yoke of fear, from birth,
less myself while adding to that sum –

the way the architect’s now ailing daughter
laid her father’s body, right across the water.

I’m obsessed with bridges…

…- bridges, boats and water turn up all the time in my work. Brooklyn Bridge, though, is a sort of double icon: it is an iconic image of a bridge, and it’s an iconic image personally for me. I grew up in Brooklyn Heights, and driving over that bridge – the rattle of the wheels, the whine of the traffic – that was the background score to childhood unhappiness.

I was researching a novel…

…when I found the bridge’s story. It was originally designed by Roebling, but he died when his foot was crushed between a ferry and a pier. Then his son was so severely afflicted by the bends, which he got from working underwater on the deep-water piles – the caissons – that he was wheelchair-bound. Supposedly, the son oversaw the finishing of the bridge from his window, but, in practice, it was his wife Emily, who taught herself maths and engineering, who took over the business, all of it. Extraordinary.

The poem was provoked…

…when I was reading with Greg Delanty at the Ledbury Festival. He started reading a poem about Brooklyn – and he’s Irish! ‘The nerve of him,’ I thought – ‘the noive,’ as we say in Brooklyn. I felt – ‘Hey, that’s mine!’ I was also drawn to the Bridge as a subject because I am afraid of it – it is the site of a deep, enduring childhood fear: I am unable to walk under it. And I know that risky subjects often offer the highest creative yield.

It starts on a defiant note…

…rejecting other bridges: Venice’s Bridge of Sighs, where the condemned walk to execution; Al-Sirat, the bridge leading to Paradise in Muslim mythology, a bridge over mid-Hell, no wider than a sword. The Asses’ Bridge, Pons Asinorum, is actually a proposition of Euclid’s, meaning stumbling block rather than bridge – I was thinking of Emily, learning her math.

There’s an important parallel…

…between the structures of the poem and the bridge. The poem is a sonnet, architectural and tightly strung, like the bridge. Some poems seem naturally, organically, to be sonnets, and this was one of them. I didn’t have to strain for rhyme, draft and redraft. It found its form.

The church and those spiders…

…are literary images. The bridges are becoming bookish, as I did as a child under the guidance of my bookseller grandmother. Brooklyn Bridge has figured in other poems of course, and that’s why I reuse an image by New York poet Hart Crane – the harp. I’m claiming my right to this big literary instrument, but the creative process is tied into fear.

The darkness of the third stanza…

… is the link to the image of Emily in the last couplet, acknowledging her achievement and the personal price of it in the same moment. I was startled when I realized I was going to end on that note, that stark double rhyme. but the poem is about cost, in the end. The cost of achievements. The cost of building that bridge to Emily. The cost, to me, of writing the poem.

EVA SALZMAN was brought up in Brooklyn and Long Island, USA, but has lived in the UK since 1985. Her latest collection, Double Crossing: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 2004) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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