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The poet Deborah Digges took her life this month, on April 10, by jumping from the top of a football stadium at the University of Massachusetts.
She was a woman who wrote about how exciting flight is. She also wrote about how scary it is to fall without a net. Her poems usually include objects traveling fast: dogs running headlong across the grass while rain pelts in an opposite diagonal, fake birds at a carnival that whiz round-and-round with a ravenous forgetfulness, clothes hung to dry, flapping madly in the air.
Birds and flight were probably Digges' guiding metaphors. She grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, one of ten siblings in a Southern Baptist family. She used to pick apples in the orchard beside their house, hanging in a precarious balance in the high branches. She also spent time as a teenager at her father's cancer clinic, taking care of the animals he used for research. She loved animals, with a keen sense of the thin partition that cuts wildness from death. Her first poetry collection was titled Vesper Sparrows; her most famous, Trapeze.
In her poem "Rough Music," she writes that she's been having repetitive dreams. She dreams that her ancestors are gathering around her, making music by beating pans and corrugated washtubs, "as if to wake you like blackbirds, though the birds/have long since fled, flown deep into the field." So people in this dream look like birds: They flap their lips and arms like mad, to wake her up for the day. She says she can't shut out this background demand of her dreams, so that "By evening, believe me, I'd give back everything,/throw open my closets, pull out my drawers.../full for the afterlife/[but] I'm trapped in the bell tower during wind,/or I'm the wind itself against the.../anarchical applause of leaves late autumns/in the topmost branches." She expresses a love of height along with a need to return to the lowest rung, the earth.
In a quieter poem, "Darwin's Finches," her mother sits by the fire, brushing her and her five sisters' hair. After pulling all that hair from the teeth of the brush, her mother weaves a birds' nest out of it, and hands it to her poet daughter. The dead hair resembles something like a bird's flight.
Death and birds commingle in much of her work. Flight, for Digges, is a chance to snap into life. In her poem "My Life's Calling," she writes about leaving a house behind and entering a new existence: "I am standing on a cliff/above the sea.../ No longer mine/to count the wrecks/...[a] storm to break the door." That cliff is high. The life below is dangerous with its shipwrecks, but appealing in how the sailors, who routinely cast from shore to shore, must experience it. There's a need to leave safety for whatever lies below the cliff. In "Trapeze," she writes, "The dying are such acrobats/... sailing like a pendulum between eternity /...balancing the air."
For these reasons and more, her own death had resonance. She jumped from the top of a football stadium. She must have hated the simple side of football. As she wrote in her poem "My Amaryllis," "This is the day the fat boy learns to take the jokes/...in a stadium.../there must be music, there must be stays of execution."
But she jumped not while men were playing football, but while women were practicing lacrosse--that game where the ball whizzes fast, snapped by wooden sticks, like tree branches refusing a bird. She had just this year composed a course for her students at Tufts called "The Architecture of the Imagination." There is, indeed, an architecture of the imagination which builds high until it goes too high. Humans like to build beyond the simple: They imagine tall buildings, ideal loves, idols who haunt their pasts. The power of our architecture is grand. It can create poetry, but it also fuels a hunger for the rung we don't yet have.
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"All characters-----not a view of the world.
Two blocks joined by a corridor.
Topics that may come in:
How her beauty is to be conveyed by the
impression that she makes on all these
people. One after another feeling it without
knowing exactly what she does to them...........
She feels the glow of sensation----& how they are
made up of all different things----(what
she has just done) & wishes for some bell to
strike & say this is it. It does strike.
She guards her moment."
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A friend of mine in Buffalo mentioned her death the other day - very sad.
Without knowing anything of Miss Digges's psychological history, the poems you quote seem to point to an obsession with flight or free fall. Perhaps she was building to a denouement like this.
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