Afterword to The Countess of Flatbroke

by Lillian Faderman

Mary Meriam’s poems are queer and quirky, funny and poignant, bold and brave. Her eponymous Countess of Flatbroke is a witty contrast to Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, who shadows these poems. Sidney—granddaughter of a duke; Renaissance mistress of a castle; celebrated by the likes of John Donne, Edmund Spenser, and George Herbert; one of those who “from birth to death [was] connected, pampered, lucky, rich”— had the wherewithal that permitted her to become the first British woman to enjoy literary repute. In Meriam’s tragic-comic poem, “The Bitter Side of Flatbroke,” the Countess of Flatbroke laments her own very different lot. Countess Flatbroke is engaged in “this constant jungle fight to get a sip/ of water, find a place to rest, too hot,/ too cold, too worried, hungry, lost, alone.” She feels deeply the deprivation of what Virginia Woolf characterized as the “500 pounds a year” that, along with “a room of one’s own,” was the sine qua non of a woman’s ability to write. Yet the poems in this collection belie the putative inimical effect of penury on poetry.

Meriam’s queer poems are sometimes bold strokes of subversive wit. In “Something Good” she affirms her lesbianism by appropriating the figure of Julie Andrews, a Hollywood icon of wholesomeness: The fantasy of waltzing with Julie Andrews “in her blue desire dress,” of losing her youthful self “inside of Julie’s sound of music,” melts the speaker’s confusion about her sexuality as “Julie guides my coming out.” Sometimes these poems are poignant, such as the “Earth” section of “Queer Elements” which depicts the familiar alienation of a youngster who does not yet know what it is that makes her different from others. And sometimes the scenes Meriam creates are just plain funny, as is the opening of the “Water” section of “Queer Elements” that presents a lecherous swimming coach instructing her student:

“You’ll swim a mile across the lake to pass
the test. I’ll row my boat beside you. Go.
Remove your bathing suit.” She’ll watch my ass.

Yet the poem moves from farce to beauty as the speaker loses herself in the pure sensuality of water, personified as an erotic “underwater woman.”

The humor in many of Meriam’s poems often gives way to stirring emotion. Her persona is something of a Pagliacci, most comical when she is most in pain. “Sometimes it takes a glass of milk to heal/ a soul that’s been reduced to shredded rags,” she flippantly declares in “Frozen Banana Milkshake Sonnet.” Meriam makes us understand this persona’s plight, her poignant knowledge that one must be brave and learn to survive—and we can’t help but admire the considerable wit and acute perceptions that emerge from that difficult knowledge.