In Memoriam: Molly Brodak
Every year, we at THR like to acknowledge Molly Brodak’s work and the incredible impact she made on the writing community. We prioritize and honor her lessons, her kindness, her intelligence and the way she touched so many lives through her writing. This year, we reached out to Nick Sturm to republish an essay he originally provided to The Volta, and he has kindly obliged us.
Molly’s Books
Not all Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me—
—Emily[1]
Since March I have been slowly reading Molly’s copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, something I have not done before. It’s the 1960 Little, Brown edition, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. The eleventh printing. A sturdy and drab off-grey hardcover with a black and gold embossed spine. 770 pages. I think of it as a beautiful book, mass-produced out of a slightly different material world. At dinners with Molly and Blake, I remember it standing out among Molly’s bookshelves, which lined the long wall in the dining room. I deeply admired Molly’s taste in arranging the small, vital sections of her space. A particular portion of the living room wall. The kitchen nook. She shed a lot of presence into these arrangements: the googly eyes she put on a cooper whisk; There’s Nothing Wrong With Love under flowering magical horses; flourishing jade set behind old glass; yellow being pulled down against crystal and green. You can see her there. A scribbled red Belle by the pantry; François Gérard’s “Cupid and Psyche” held on the fridge with a plumbing magnet; at our dinners, always flowers; and the note on the bathroom mirror: “It begins now.” Knowing Molly meant, among so many other things—love, a searing remark, encouragement—being in proximity to her guarded interiority, the trace of a world that was not for you. Secrecy and so much intelligence. It’s part of her writing, too. It’s not for you. But in her space, which was just as private and sharp, so clearly imagined and full of thinking, one could feel a little closer to Molly. At least it felt that way to me. You got to hang out in her attention. She was so marvelous. She was so formidable. Her large, glowing copy of The Complete Poems.
Everyone’s world is weird.
A one-off.
No one picks up an old book,
points,
and says yes,
exactly
—Molly[2]
After Molly’s death, a few of us spent the following weeks packing and cleaning the house. Before anything could be moved, I took pictures on my phone of Molly’s bookshelves. It felt stupid and small in the scale of what had happened. I also felt a brutal urgency to preserve this cross-section of Molly’s attention. The order of titles we’d sat together with, that I’d looked at every so often through flowers. Tomas Transtromer’s The Great Enigma next to Mary Ruefle’s Trances of The Blast. Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses next to a lush purple copy of Flowers of Evil. Sylvia Plath’s Crossing the Water turned out slightly against Anne Carson’s Antigonick. Brandon Shimoda’s The Girl Without Arms pressed against the black end. I took a picture of the things hanging on the fridge. I took a picture of the plants on the bathroom windowsill. I told myself I was making a small archive. It was something to cling to. Everyone was doing or weeping or taking care of something. What I could do was cry and tend to Molly’s things, which would also mean disassembling them, sorting them, closing off, and throwing away. I tried to make a record of some of those things. It meant something to remember where she placed them last.
Death sets a Thing significant
—Emily[3]
An important thing about Molly’s books is that she didn’t write in the margins, leave notes, ask questions, or underline. There are absolutely no marginalia at all. Her compact, bird-like script, which she used to record recipes, write addresses, is absent. What she did is leave the smallest dog-eared pages, a few corners quietly turned down. I need to emphasize how careful, consistent, and small the dog ears are. They’re almost unnoticeable in some books. Like an accident of the pages’ proximity. There are no absent-minded, inelegant folds. In this way, they resemble Molly’s handwriting: practiced, deliberate, small. “One survival technique is to get small,” Molly writes in Bandit. Looking at the pile of Molly’s books next to me—I have absorbed this pile into my life—I’m imagining the process of making these annotations. You’d pinch the corner and gently pin your thumb while turning your index finger, slipped behind the page’s upper edge, down against the page you’re marking. I am thinking how I am never so careful in this way. Her copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson is the most annotated of her books. There are dozens of folds, so many that the thickness of the book is enlarged at the top, slightly bowing out the front and back boards. There’s a lot of Molly’s attention there. In other books, just a few folds. Only “Parisian Dream” is marked in Flowers of Evil. Only “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” and “The Last Words of My English Grandmother” in William Carlos Williams’s New Directions Selected Poems. Her copy, the 1949 edition, is a discard from Wayne State University Libraries in Detroit, where Molly is from. There are a couple of exceptions. Her copy of H.D.’s Collected Poems, 1912-1944 is marked with three purple-pink tabs. Her copy of Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragments, If Not, Winter, has a single blue sticky note in it. I remember pulling it from the shelf during those first few days after when every detail about every thing seemed to reflect or embody or amplify what had happened.
I don’t know what to do
two states of mind in me
—Sappho[4]
I read Molly’s copy of A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector. It’s an advanced readers’ copy, uncorrected proof. I’m not sure she read it. Or else, just no folds. Lispector is obsessed with the word “topaz” in A Breath of Life. I marked all of its repetitions. It echoed, with a difference, all of the jade things that were Molly’s: jade cups, jade plates, jade bowls, jade salt and pepper shakers, jade flowerpots, jade cake stands. It is not incorrect to call the cabinet where Molly kept the jade things a shrine. It’s also not correct at all. A collected wash of warm green.
[H]ow will the first springtime be after my death?
—Clarice[5]
Reading Molly’s copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, you can’t always be sure which poem she’s marked. There are sometimes three poems on a page, sometimes parts of others. Her annotations leave some ambiguity in her attention. When I read it—a few pages here and there, sometimes an hour to drift across it—I feel I’m both reading and watching. I don’t know or care when the “major” anthologized Dickinson poems will appear in the sequence. “Dickinson” is sort of floating. All is ephemeral. It’s Molly’s copy. When there’s a question of which poem she intended to mark, I’m not trying to guess. Some page corners have been folded and just as carefully unfolded. These are also a kind of annotation. Changing her mind, or not. I keep some notes as I watch. I like the lines that are funny, weird, a little bent: “Lest I should be old fashioned / I’ll put a trinket on”; “Necromancer! Landlord! / Who are these below?”; “Lift the Flesh door—”; “I can murmur broken”; “A Smaller Purple grows—”; “He—must pass the Crystal Angle.” There’s also the tangled pain wedged between: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”; “That after Horror—that ‘twas us—”; “I am not used to Hope—”; “What care the Dead for Summer?” I have about half of the book still to read, in some way, following her. “You cannot solder an Abyss / With Air.” I keep pointing, Yes, exactly, which is right, and isn’t.
If anybody’s friend be dead
It’s sharpest of the theme
—Emily[6]
Reading the poems in Molly’s two remaining manuscripts, The Cipher and Folk Physics, it’s hard for the lens not to be this: My friend is dead. “A vacancy that simply exists,” Molly writes. Or: “The brute center part / of an iridescent moth.” These seem similar. What I am trying to say is that it feels irreducibly fucked up and right reading Molly’s poems. Both books are wrought, excruciating, clean, mocking, full of color, uncompromising. She made these little philosophical pills. They hurt. “I am not good at the truth. // It doesn’t / elate me // like it does / good people,” she writes in “Good At It.” “I imagined // loving. // I used all // of myself up // in imagining,” she writes in “Conversation.” After Molly died I kept thinking, Is this what happens after someone dies? I still don’t know. It is what happened. That’s where we are. We have her last two books of poetry—one of which, The Cipher, is forthcoming from Pleiades Press this fall—and ten years of these and other poems, all of which are going to her archive at Emory University’s Rose Library. Against all that, Molly’s bright refusal. A sticker from the High Museum left on the kitchen counter. A black and white picture of waves. Daffodils on the small table. Molly’s bright refusal.
At least I have the flowers of myself,
And my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;
and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;
before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.
—H.D.[7]
There is a book of Molly’s that does have her writing in it, one of those great old Dostoyevsky paperbacks, cheap and brittle. Inside the torn front cover, she’s written in black ink:
if lost please
return to
molly brodak
immediately.
[1] Poem 348, “[I dreaded that first Robin, so,]”
[2] “Species,” from Molly Brodak’s forthcoming book The Cipher (Pleiades Press, October 2020)
[3] Poem 360, “[Death sets a Thing significant]”
[4] Fragment 51 in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho translated by Anne Carson
[5] From A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector
[6] Poem 509, “[If anybody’s friend be dead]”
[7] From “Eurydice” in The God, 1913-1917 in H.D. Collected Poems
Nick Sturm is a Lecturer in English at Georgia State University and Visiting Faculty in Creative Writing at Emory University. His scholarship has appeared with The Poetry Foundation, The Brooklyn Rail, ASAP/J, Jacket2, and elsewhere, including recent essays on Jim Brodey, Alice Notley, and Lorenzo Thomas. With Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan, he is co-editor of Get the Money!: Selected Prose by Ted Berrigan, forthcoming from City Lights Publishers (2022), and editor of Early Works by Alice Notley forthcoming from Fonograf Editions (2023). More information about his scholarly and archival work can be traced at his blog Crystal Set.