Stephen Vincent, in response to my entry on Sylvia Plath [Entry 06: “Sylvia Plath’s Collage”], sent a poem by little-known California poet Laura Ulewicz. Ulewicz, who was born in Detroit, spent the early 60s in the U.K., where she met Plath, returned to San Francisco in the late 60s, then lived in Locke, Calif., where she died in 2007. Vincent is editing a selection of her work. His note follows the first section of the poem (which is set in Detroit). Of particular interest to me is the narrative/sentence interface, between confessionalism and the New Sentence:

from Nightmares to Be Born

I. Reality

Elizabeth Barrett hunched up in a book
While the foxes in my head ran round a tree
The foxes in my head ran round a tree
Under the ether. The nurses joked together,
“Freud at five.” Everyone (my father
And mother) disapproved. Baba, I cried
Because they’d bury the foxes that were so happy.
I hid the foxes alive inside my crying.

The Brontë sisters—But my own real friends.
Detroit a sex machine. Joey
And I, thirteen, peddling into Duns Scotus.*
Trees. Sanctuary for birds, God.
But then she was racing, racing. The boys put a stick
In my spokes. Falling I hit them. Hit them old
As the naked man in the basement who pumped his head
And lied. Oh, if I should grow up Beatrice.

Traviata, Bergman—But my own
Real friends. Barbara of the pock-marked
Face who always went swimming nude. The skin
Of her body was smooth. Betty with death in her purse
And a fear of sleep in her mind. She’d pick men up
And struggle no. Dreaming is how she lived;
A hurt family that hurt her
Was what she made. Celia. Camping with Celia
We’d watch how her six-fingered hands shivered.
Twelve minnows in the stream. She’d dip
Her cellophane brassieres and tell us how
Her father had raped her when she was nine. Inge
Wrapped in an apron of religion against
Dachau. Joey who had a mind. The bulldozer
Driver. Lurching, his orange machine invaded
Our camp. How his laughter scattered our nakedness. [. . .]

Stephen writes: “I suspect you would have no reason to know the poet Laura Ulewicz. She had left San Francisco in about 1970 or so  to live out the rest of her days in Locke where she died in 2007. However, without over-dwelling on her story, she was a Polish American, second generation, born in Detroit to auto workers. I don’t know yet if she was an autodidact, or went to Wayne for possibly a short period. In any case she came to San Francisco in 1950, where she was involved with the Beat world, including an intense affair with Jack Gilbert, and was friends with Rexroth, A.G., etc. Gilbert’s first book is dedicated to her. In contradistinction to the Beats—and the early influence of that work—her own work changed into a more formal mode after a 1965-66 year of study and an affair with Stanley Kunitz at Univ. of Washington. He was ‘sitting in’ for Theodore Roethke, who I suspect was in the nuthouse. Laura was also hospitalized for a while after the break-up of her relationship with Gilbert—I believe. She then went to England and joined ‘The Group’—Edward Lucie Smith, George Macbeth, et al. She also knew Nathaniel Tarn, Anselm Hollo, and Plath, though not well. But certainly her work. While in London, Laura became known—giving readings, winning the Guinness Poetry Prize, and ultimately getting published in 1967—a chapbook from Turret Press (The Inheritance) which also published Zukofsky, Plath, and others. Unable to survive in England as what I would call a mid-century Bohemian woman, she returned to SF in 1965, when I first met her.

Ironically, after her return, a Penguin editor wanted to include her in what he thought was an innovative project. In that series of what I call 3fers—3 poets in one—he wanted to include Laura with Denise Levertov and Sylvia Plath. Six months later he wrote back to say that he could not get his fellow editors and marketing to support a book of three women. So goes history and the fate of a working-class woman without a trust fund and a refusal to cotton in the ways that have brought male support, financial and otherwise. She could be very feisty. Of course it would have helped if she had waited and rode the feminist revival. She published some more in magazines but never again a book and wrote and published  little after 1975. When she passed away I became the executor of her estate. I attach a longish poem, “Nightmares to Be Born”)  located in Detroit and no doubt, I suspect, influenced by the example of Plath. [. . .]”

* A seminary in Southfield, Mich.