The Women Who Loved Elvis all their Lives

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The Women Who Loved Elvis all their Lives

FLEDA BROWN
2004

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
POEM TEXT
POEM SUMMARY
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

In the title poem of her 2004 collection, The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives, Fleda Brown explores contemporary culture's obsession with the idolized celebrity figures of music and film. Moving smoothly from one point of view to another, and pushing the limits of the imagination to allow the voice of a dead Elvis Presley to be heard, Brown reveals how one of the twentieth century's most indelible cultural icons can become a mirror in which a culture can review and reimagine its priorities, anxieties, and most troubling fissures. Balancing biographical, musical, and cultural focal points, Brown's “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives” transcends the prosaic details about “the King's” life or the legend of Graceland. The poem reaches instead toward a wider intellectual exploration of Elvis as icon and the face (and voice) of an entire generation. More specifically, this is a poem in which a generation collides with itself, as the man who became a symbol of a generation's passion and energy is portrayed shaking hands with Richard Nixon, a president most likely to be seen as the antithesis of that youthful vibrancy.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Brown was born in 1944 in Columbia, Missouri, but was raised in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she graduated from high school. She earned a B.A. in English in 1969 from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and spent the next six years teaching high school in the nearby town of Springdale. Brown returned to her alma mater in 1976 to earn an M.A. in English in 1976, followed by a Ph.D. in English in 1983. Her doctoral dissertation, “The Split Vision: Four Novels of William Dean Howells,” was completed while Brown was working as an instructor at the University of Delaware. She joined the faculty of Delaware as an assistant professor in 1986 and achieved full professor standing in 1995.

An accomplished creative and critical writer, Brown is widely published in such prominent literary magazines as the Southern Review, the Cortland Review, Ariel, and Kenyon Review. Her poems have been selected for inclusion in numerous anthologies, including Anhinga Anthology (2004) and All Shook Up: Collected Poems about Elvis. An active scholar as well as prolific poet, Brown has written about the works of Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, W. D. Howells, and British novelists Juanita Casey and Jennifer Johnston. She has also served as editor-in-chief for The Newsletter of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America (1981-1985) and as the associate managing editor of The Irish Renaissance Annual (1981-1983).

Brown has been recognized with a number of prominent literary awards, including the Felix Pollak Prize for her collection of poems Reunion (2007), the William Allen Creative Nonfiction Award in 2004 for her essay “Anatomy of a Seizure,” the First Annual Philip Levine Poetry Prize (University of California) in 2002, and Arkansas's major award, the Porter Fund Literary Prize, in 2001, given for a career that has produced an impressive and substantial body of work. She was also a finalist in the National Poetry Series Contest for her poetry sequence The Devil's Child (1999), winner of the Verna Emery Poetry Prize for Do Not Peel the Birches (1993), and recipient of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fishing With Blood (1988). The title poem of this latter collection was used by Kevin Putz as the text for his “Fishing With Blood”: Concerto for Soprano and Orchestra (1994), which was awarded the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) national award and the Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) national award for the best composition by a composer under the age of thirty.

Recognized for her wide-ranging intelligence and skill in balancing the popular with the literary, Brown was named the Poet Laureate of the State of Delaware in 2001, the first such state appointment in almost two decades. Three years later, her collection, The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives was released to critical acclaim. As of 2007, Brown, who retired from the University of Delaware, was a member of the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

POEM TEXT

She reads, of course, what he's doing, shaking
Nixon's hand,
dating this starlet or that, while he is faithful to
her
like a stone in her belly, like the actual love
child,
its bills and diapers. Once he had kissed her
and time had stood still, at least some point
seems to 5
remain back there as a place to return to, to
wait for.
What is she waiting for? He will not marry her,
nor will he
stop very often. Desireé will grow up to say her
father is dead.
Desireé will imagine him standing on a timeless
street,
hungry for his child. She will wait for him, not
in the original, 10
but in a gesture copied to whatever lover she
takes.
He will fracture and change to landscape, to the
Pope, maybe,
or President Kennedy, or to a pain that darkens
her eyes.
“Once,” she will say, as if she remembers,
and the memory will stick like a fishbone. She
knows 15
how easily she will comply when a man puts his
hand
on the back of her neck and gently steers her.
She knows how long she will wait for rescue,
how the world
will go on expanding outside. She will see her
mother's photo
of Elvis shaking hands with Nixon, the terrify-
ing conjunction. 20
A whole war with Asia will begin slowly,
in her lifetime, out of such irreconcilable urges.
The Pill will become available to the general
public,
starting up a new waiting in that other depth.
The egg will have to keep believing in its time-
less moment 25
of completion without any proof except in the
longing

of its own body. Maris will break Babe Ruth's
  record
while Orbison will have his first major hit with
“Only the Lonely,” trying his best to sound like
  Elvis.

POEM SUMMARY

Stanza 1

“The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives” is a prose poem divided into two clearly marked stanzas. The first stanza introduces an apparently unnamed woman who follows Elvis's career through the media and newspaper reports that follow his every move. The “she” of the opening line of the poem serves a double role, used as both a representative of all the women who are fanatic fans of the King as well as standing in for one particular woman: Lucy de Barbin, who claimed that her daughter, Desireé, was fathered by Elvis. Though de Barbin is not actually named in the poem, Desireé is. Furthermore, the speaker in the poem seems to indicate that Desireé is her daughter, so it is reasonable to identify the poem's narrator as the fictional voice of de Barbin. Thus, as de Barbin's memories in this opening stanza oscillate between the intensely romantic (“Once he had kissed her / and time had stood still”) and the almost painfully prosaic (“bills and diapers”).

This opening stanza hinges on a question that “she” asks herself: “What is she waiting for?” Although never answered directly, the question lingers over the remaining lines of the stanza, which introduce Desireé as another of the women waiting for Elvis. Having never known her father, and with her own connection to him remaining a source of much controversy among Elvis fans, Desireé is as split in her reaction to Elvis as her mother. Imagining, on the one hand, that he carries with him a hunger for his child, she is, on the other hand, searching for him in the various men that inhabit the public sphere (President Kennedy and the Pope), and in her various lovers. As the stanza closes, readers are left with an impression of a woman (representative of all women) who lives in a fractured world shaped by “a pain that darkens her eyes.”

Stanza 2

The second stanza of “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives” opens with a particularly resonant word in the poem: “once.” This adverb marks the two directions that the second stanza takes. Most obviously, this is a stanza about the remembering of Elvis that comes to define the lives of the generic women from the poem's title. Remembering is a powerful narcotic for these women, allowing them to live a seemingly “timeless” life full of “longing” for Elvis.

But at the same time, “memory will stick like a fishbone” in the lives and imaginations of the women. Living in the past, these women are increasingly aware of “the terrifying conjunction” that the icon of Elvis presents in the poem's opening line. The world in which Elvis rose to prominence has long passed, despite the attempts of the women to arrest it. Elvis has shaken hands with Nixon, the “whole war with Asia” has changed American politics forever, and even the legendary baseball player Babe Ruth has been eclipsed in the record books by Roger Maris. The poem ends with a deep sense of forward motion, into a world of international conflict, sexual freedoms (“The Pill will become available to the general public”), and scandalizing politics that render Elvis's status as a cultural icon less and less relevant to all but the women who continue to cling to his image.

THEMES

The American Dream

For the generation that watched Elvis rise to prominence, the singer was a symbol of the postwar promise of the American Dream. Coined in the early 1930s, the term marked a significant break with the imaginative, political, and economic models of the Old World (Europe). Fueled by the emergence of American big business, the completion of a transcontinental railway, and the promise that came with an energized natural resource industry, the celebration of the “rags to riches” archetypal story became a persistent part of the culture. The belief that any American with a modicum of talent and a strong work ethic would be inevitably successful regardless of their origins was embodied by figures such as Elvis. The American Dream captured the collective imagination of an entire country, and writers have always been drawn to the anguish embodied by the clash between this belief and reality. This theme is most notably explored in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937), and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949).

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the American Dream faced some of its stiffest obstacles. The Great Depression, the growing pressures of racial discrimination, and the after-effects of two World Wars left many Americans feeling disenfranchised, cut off from the promise of the Dream. But with the economic prosperity of the postwar period, and with it the rise of suburban America and the emergence of Elvis, the Dream regained its energy. Improvements to home comfort and employment stability combined with a dramatic rise in personal income levels and an expansion of educational options became the hallmark of the modern version of the Dream.

Although the countercultural politics of the 1960s and subsequent decades led to the waning prominence of the American Dream as a wholly positive ideal, it has remained embedded in American culture as both a touchstone of hope and a source of deeply felt frustration.

The Cult of Celebrity

The cult of celebrity is a widespread popular interest in celebrities, like Elvis, who capture the collective fascination of a large portion of a community. This cult is driven, as in the case of Elvis, by publicity and exposure via the public media of the day (television, film, newspapers). The fascination with an individual celebrity moves beyond mere adoration toward a kind of secular worship and even to a full-blown fantasy in which the average person perceives an imagined intimacy with the celebrity. This false intimacy stems from the media deluge of images of celebrities and from reportage that divulges personal details about them.

The rise of the cult of celebrity in the twentieth century is often seen as evidence of the apathy, spiritual weakness, and general dumbing down of contemporary culture. Indeed, there is an almost religious intensity to such a cult as the one that has formed around Elvis. There are the sacred places that cult members make pilgrimages to (Elvis's home, Graceland, and the site of Elvis's grave), sacred times for ritualized remembrance (thousands gather annually at Graceland during the week of August 16, the date of Elvis's death), and the sharing of relics (Elvis collectibles). All of these rituals closely resemble those of popular world religions. The story of Elvis's life is retold as a legend, which often takes great liberties with well-documented historical truth. For instance, Elvis did not take illegal drugs, though it is popularly believed that he did.

As Brown's poem underscores neatly, the modern world is one in which celebrities are as necessary as the ancient gods and saints.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is described as an intense longing for an idealized past. Originally appearing in the seventeenth-century, the word is a compound of two Greek words, nostos (returning home) and algos (pain or longing). Records of the experience of nostalgia are ancient and widespread, providing a major theme in myth and poetry from the Bible and Homer's Odyssey onwards.

Although it has come to take on relatively benign connotations in modern society, and has also become a powerful marketing tool, nostalgia was originally seen as a serious medical disorder that could cloud an individual's ability to function in the world. It is this lost meaning that imbues Brown's poem, as the women who love Elvis do so with such devotion and intensity as to get in the way of healthy interactions with the world and with other people. The women Brown describes are in a perpetual state of waiting. They are waiting for the moment when Elvis (or his ideals) will transport them back to a time or a sense of place in which they felt more important, more secure, more in control of their lives, more youthful, and more hopeful.

STYLE

Allusion

Allusion is a brief, and sometimes indirect, reference in a poem to a person, place, work of literature or art, or historical event or era, any of which might be real or fictitious (though allusions most often refer to the real). An allusion might appear in a poem as a direct quotation, as the passing mention of a character or setting, or as a phrase, word, or image borrowed from another work or writer. Brown's “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives,” for instance, becomes a catalogue of allusive references to people and events that mark the setting for this poem and establish its cultural density. In this sense, Brown's poem is about a culture in transition, as an allusion to one iconic figure (Elvis) must confront allusions to other, equally iconic men or events: the Pope, President John F. Kennedy, Babe Ruth, and the musician Roy Orbison. Set against the culturally meaningful figure of Elvis, is the accumulation of a network of equally powerful cultural icons that crisscross through the poem. The legend of Kennedy brushes against the legend of Babe Ruth; the legends (and tragic realities) of the Vietnam war collide with the escapist productions of Elvis and Orbison.

Allusions such as those that accumulate in Brown's poem can work to both the benefit and detriment of the work. Allusions imply a common knowledge between reader and writer, operating as a kind of complex delivery system of ideas or meaning. Accordingly, poets tend to make allusions simple and clear so that they might be easily understood. Most readers will at least have heard of the names Babe Ruth, Kennedy, and Nixon, for instance, which gives the poem a density of possible meanings (known as the allusion field). Entering into the allusive field of Brown's poem, for instance, a reader might begin to contemplate the similarities between Elvis and Babe Ruth, both of whom were men of voracious appetites, massive egos, and incredible popularity.

At the same time, allusions can lead to an interpretative difficulty. If an allusion is too dense and complex, if it is not readily identified by a reader, or if it does not fit naturally or elegantly into the framework of the poem, its potential meanings are lost and its power diminished. For instance, the allusions in “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives” are highly meaningful to those who were alive during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s;— when the people and events that are mentioned in the poem were very much a part of day-to-day life in America. For those born after the 1980's, however, the allusions in the poem are likely less effective.

Prose Poem

“The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives” is an example of a prose poem (sometimes called a proem), which means that it is written and printed in the more familiar rhythms and structures of prose rather than as more conventional poetic verse. What this means, most obviously, is that Brown's poem has a standardized right margin, familiar sentence form, and identifiable patterns of punctuation and syntax. It is a hybrid of forms (poetry combined with prose) that often leaves readers unsure as to what expectations to bring to the reading experience.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Research the history of rock and roll music in the United States. Make a timeline that traces the major shifts in the genre, the key songs or artists of each era, the role of teen idols, and the social issues that came to shape rock and roll.
Do some research into the music or life of your favorite recording artist. With this information in hand, write a series of poems that attempt to describe the art and artist you have selected.
Write a report about the subtleties and complexities of some of the political or social issues that are drawing attention in your community or country. What aspects of pop culture affect or address these issues?
Given that “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives” is interested in the intersection of high art (poetry) and popular culture (Elvis), consider the following interpretative exercise: Design and draw a comic-book style interpretation of this poem or any other poems from Brown's collection of the same name. Feel free to arrange and rearrange the fragments of the poem as you deem necessary or to represent them as they appear in the original text.

Dating as far back as the Old Testament Psalms and renovated most influentially through the writing of the expatriate American writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), prose poems offer an opportunity to create an artistic hybrid that marries elegantly the power of clarity commonly associated with prose and the complexity of language and emotion usually reserved for lyric poetry. In the case of Brown's poem, which explores the collision between image and reality, a hybrid form is a natural choice for bringing together the power of the poetic (High Art) with the attraction to, and accessibility of, popular culture (Low Art).

Prose poems also present readers with a series of potentially meaningful incongruities or tensions. In this case, the tensions address the role of Elvis in contemporary culture. There is, for instance, the disorienting juxtaposition of Elvis and the Vietnam War, with its connotations of violence and chaos. Similarly, private responses to Elvis (from all the women who have loved him) are juxtaposed with the public and political responses to Elvis. Prose poems, in other words, are a natural choice for expressing what Brown calls “the terrifying conjunction” of images and ideas.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Nixon-Presley Meeting

The photo of Elvis shaking the hand of then president Richard Nixon alluded to in the poem actually took place on December 21, 1970. The meeting was initiated by Presley, who wrote the President a six-page letter requesting an opportunity to meet and share ideas about various issues that the singer believed still threatened to split the country along lines of Establishment and anti-Establishment politics. In his letter, Elvis took particular pride in noting that his position as an entertainer of near iconic status allowed him to move more or less freely across this ideological divide, a flexibility that allowed him to speak to people of all ages and all political backgrounds. Elvis's goal was also clearly stated in the letter: he wanted Nixon to secure for him credentials of Federal Agent at Large, a title that would allow the singer to contribute in meaningful ways to the well-being of the country as it fought, Elvis mentioned specifically, the increasingly problematic pressures associated with the rising drug culture.

When the two men did meet, Elvis arrived in full regalia, including a velvet cape, gold medallions, and thick silver-plated sunglasses. He also brought Nixon a gift in the form of a world War II Colt 45 pistol in a finely crafted wooden case, as well as a representative sampling of his personal collection of badges and police paraphernalia. The twenty-eight photographs taken at this encounter capture for posterity a symbolic meeting that to many people on both sides of the political spectrum remains almost incomprehensible. The image of the iconic King of rock and roll (a mere seven years away from an early death brought about from prescription drug abuse) shaking hands with the President (whose own legacy was about to be marred by the Watergate scandal) remains a particularly poignant symbol of both the promise and the disappointment of the American culture of the day.

Elvis and the 1970s

Given that “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives” emphasizes the cultural context of Elvis's rise to iconic status and subsequent fall from grace, it is important to understand the social and cultural environment of the 1970s. In North America, the arrival of the seventies signaled a number of important shifts in attitudes and politics that coalesced to mark a shift away from the social activism and cultural imperatives that defined the 1960s. Replacing social activism as the 1970s unfolded was an emphasis on pleasure and personal gain.

This shift also coincided loosely with Elvis's reemergence within American consciousness. Far removed from the pinnacle of the mania that accompanied his initial rise to fame in the mid-1950s, the 1970s Elvis was distanced both physically and politically from the radical talent who made television history with three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and whose crossover appeal was solidified with such early film successes as Love Me Tender (1956), Jailhouse Rock (1957), and King Creole (1958). The Elvis imagined in Brown's poem has, by 1970, found himself eclipsed musically by the 1960s rise to prominence of the bands of the British invasion (most notably The Beatles and the Rolling Stones) and by the psychedelic-rock music scene that included The Grateful Dead, Jeans Joplin, and The Doors.

More broadly, the seventies was a decade that was defined by Norman Lear's groundbreaking episodic television show All in the Family, which brought socially relevant issues to a diverse, mainstream audience every week. When the series premiered in 1971, American audiences heard words that had never been heard on television before, especially words relating to sexuality, race, class, and political attitudes. One of those issues was the oppressive economic recession that took hold of North America. The decade was plagued by a potent combination of low output, rising unemployment, and dramatic increases in the cost of consumer products that came to be known as stagflation, a compound word that joined the terms stagnation and inflation.

Presley attempted to reestablish himself in this radically changing cultural environment, beginning with his 1968 televised comeback special. This hugely successful show served as a springboard to a series of sold-out live performances in Las Vegas

and other major American cities. Thus began what has come to be known as the jumpsuit era of Elvis's career—a period of immense commercial success balanced negatively by deep, and ultimately tragic, artistic and personal problems. By the mid-1970s, Elvis was grossly overweight, losing his personal battle with prescription drugs (though he publicly denounced hard drug use), and plagued by reviews that regularly labeled his performances as mediocre, disappointing, and lackluster.

As the decadence and decay of the seventies came to a close, so too did the life and legend of the King. He died on August 16, 1977, while on sabbatical at his Memphis mansion, Graceland. Only forty-two years old and weighing well over three hundred pounds, he reportedly fell victim to a cardiac arrhythmia brought on by a volatile cocktail of more than a dozen drugs. As Brown points out in “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives,” the death of the King marked the “irreconcilable urges” to see in the piteous passing of the jump-suited icon a “timeless moment,” the end of cultural innocence, youthful dreams, and political idealism.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Writing in the journal World Literature Today, Fred Dings begins his review of Brown's The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives collection with a simple assertion. This is, he begins, “a wonderful book” that evokes “the particular pathos of an era and the lives lived within it. The emotional truth of this writing,” he continues, “is never humid in its intimacy, but it is affecting in its delicacy and restraint, nevertheless.” Mary Kaiser, reviewing Brown's Do Not Peel the Birches in World Literature in Review: English, also gives a favorable appraisal in the same vein. In contrast to most contemporary poets who are heavy-handed in their engagement with popular culture, Kaiser argues, Brown has developed a poetic voice that operates most elegantly “in the interface between private reflection and public discourse.”

Grace Cavalieri, reviewing The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives for the Montserrat Review, is quick to emphasize that “you don't have to be an Elvis enthusiast to love this book and place it on the shelf with your favorites.” Written in a language that says “exactly what it means, and means what it says,” Cavalieri continues, the poems of Brown's collection stay “in our minds like a song we sing under our breath that always tells the truth.”

CRITICISM

Klay Dyer

Dyer holds a Ph.D. in English literature and has published extensively on fiction, poetry, film, and television. He is also a freelance university teacher, writer, and educational consultant. In this essay, he discusses “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives” as a commentary on the death of the American Dream, or the belief in sustainable prosperity and cultural revitalization. Dyer also notes that “the women” of Brown's poem refuse to accept or acknowledge this figurative death through their fixation on Elvis.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Other works by Brown will prove rewarding to readers of contemporary poetry, especially her collection Fishing with Blood (1988). Also adapted into a concerto, this is a provocative series of portraits that explores family dynamics.
Will Clemens's collection All Shook Up: Collected Poems About Elvis (2001) includes forty-nine Elvis poems, most of which were written after his death in 1977. Brown's “Elvis Reads ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’” can be read alongside contributions from such notable writers as Charles Bukowski, Lucille Clifton, and Joyce Carol Oates. Ranging from sonnets and blank verse poems to free verse, these poems are at once a celebration of an immense and tragically wasted talent as well as a lament for a lost innocence that speaks to individuals and a generation alike.
For a novel-length exploration of the spiritual and emotional malaise of post-war suburban America, Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides, is a provocative read. Set in the 1970s, the novel recounts the stories surrounding the suicides of the five Lisbon sisters and the impact their decisions have on a seemingly happy community forced to make sense of the deaths. Director Sofia Coppola adapted this novel into a critically acclaimed movie of the same title in 1999.
For readers interested more generally in books that explore music as a theme and metaphor, Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (1995) is an entertaining novel about the romantic and philosophic struggles of a vintage record store owner in London.

As Arthur Miller made tragically clear in his seminal play Death of a Salesman (1949), the American Dream did not seem to be coming true very often as the United States entered into the second half of the twentieth century. The Dream to which Miller's Willie Loman so often alludes is built on the unquestioned assumption that, with the maturation of post-World War II economy and culture, America would emerge into a new environment of sustainable prosperity and social advancement. Paradoxically, and despite the achievement of a higher standard of living in the post-war era, the much-anticipated better life remained an ever-elusive goal for a generation driven forward increasingly by the pressures of what Brown describes as “bills and diapers.”

Defining itself increasingly by the ebb and flow of the Dream itself, post-war American culture became a kind of social and cultural desert defined by conformity. The 1950s was a decade characterized by the development of suburban communities that utterly lack the potential for the cultural and spiritual awakening implied in the American Dream. Tellingly, the residents of these post-war suburban communities rarely, if ever, see their lifestyle as spiritually vacant or overtly homogenous and manufactured. As Brown's enquiry into the imaginations of “the women who loved Elvis” underscores, suburbia has become defined primarily by the mass-marketed ideas of middle-class family values and carefully packaged nostalgia. Emerging as the iconic symbol of this spiritually and creatively vacant culture is Elvis, the one-time King of rock and roll, shaking the hand of a scandal-ridden president who is himself about to become the symbol of political decay.

Ironically, it is the presence of an “expanding” world that energizes Brown's poem. Despite their determined efforts to live perpetually in a “timeless moment” on “a timeless street,” the women of the poem gently steer themselves away from “the terrifying conjunction” that was caught forever in the photo of Elvis and Nixon. For Brown's women, Elvis remains forever a dashing young sex symbol “dating this starlet or that” and a creative force that every artist of the day would do “his best to sound like.” These women, as Brown suggests, live their lives under the constant control of the past-tense adverb “once.” The word is used to indicate that the women live in a kind of Dream that captures an ideal—one that was the case at some point in the past but that is no longer relevant in a changing world. Indeed, staring at the now-iconic photograph of the King and the President, the women cannot deny that however deeply locked in past images they might allow themselves to be, they cannot stop the “irreconcilable urges” of a culture in transition. In the collective memory of Brown's women, the promises of “once” stick “like a fishbone,” sit “like a stone in [the] belly,” and linger like “a pain that darkens [their] eyes.”

Having risen to prominence as an entertainer, Elvis has been reimagined by Brown's women as a kind of cultural visionary and as an iconic symbol of the youthful hopefulness of a by-gone era. He is a symbol of a time before the Dream was forced to confront the images returning from the “whole war with Asia” that began “slowly” but left a bloody stain across an entire generation. The image of his youthful gyrations and powerful voice become for these women a defining moment of their lives, a symbol of a feeling that they allow to “fracture and change” in order that it might be adapted to suit the landscape in which they now find themselves. The transformations are profound and sadly misguided as Elvis the singer morphs into “the Pope” and then again into “President Kennedy,” both of whom are figures that represent salvation.

Trapped in a post-war world that is, according to the Dream, supposed to nurture and protect them, Brown's women find themselves imprisoned within the hesitations of their own faith. Unable and unwilling to move forward into a world that acknowledges the decay of Elvis's significance as a cultural icon, they live as if “time had stood still” and are perpetually hopeful that there exists “some point” that remains “back there,” and is “a place to return to.” In this sense, “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives” can be read alongside T. S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), the seminal modernist poem that speaks profoundly to the pressures brought to bear on a life that is lived in terror and in hesitation.

Elvis the singer, frozen in photographic time, is silent in the poem. Nevertheless, having turned away from the “urges” of the world around them, the women attempt to isolate his supposedly visionary promise in their own almost obsessive “love” for the “once” youthful Elvis. But by the 1970s, when the photo of Elvis and Nixon was taken, Elvis had reentered mainstream culture as an exceptionally fat man who represented the materialistic repurposing of a comparatively innocent era. Leaving their longing and waiting forever unanswered, the women are drawn almost hypnotically to their own reimagining of Elvis and his ‘golden age’ as a rock-and-roll icon. Tellingly, this determined revisioning pulls them toward a confrontation with “the terrifying conjunction” that Elvis has become. Put another way, by trying to live in the glow of the “once” great Elvis, the women unwittingly bring the promise of the past into stark relief against the realities of the present. Just as Elvis, the revitalized megastar of the postwar era, ends his life in a nightmare of gluttony and decadence, the Dream of an almost Edenic postwar prosperity slides towards “whole war” (Vietnam), “the other depth” of a post-Pill sexual revolution, and the rise of new rock-and-roll icons such as Roy Orbison.

As the opening stanza of the poem unfolds, Brown's women are forced to ask themselves a very difficult and intensely reflexive question: “What [are they] waiting for?” Despite the profundity of this question, the women remain static. The most evocative of Brown's women, Desireé, Elvis's illegitimate daughter with Lucy de Barbin, spends her life wondering if her father loves her, wondering if he is “hungry” to spend time with the child he might never have known exists, and waiting “for him, not in the original, but in the gesture copied to whatever lover she takes.” Whereas the other women implied in Brown's poem might imagine an intimate connection with Elvis, Desireé's imagined intimacy is far more visceral and poignant.

Not surprisingly, Brown's women turn away from the underlying truths about Elvis, including his obesity, drug abuse, and failing talent. In the end, even the death of the King will fail to illuminate the shadowy appeal of the Dreams that shape this poem: of Elvis as perpetual King, of the 1950s as the perpetual golden age of prosperity, and of the power of an icon to mediate the real pressures of a real life. The culture of Brown's women is evolving in a way they deem unhealthy, fracturing from the political and economic realities of that moment and slipping into what they perceive as a much darker ethos of alienation, anomie, and angst. Sequestering themselves in the private spaces of their homes and encountering their world only through their visions and revisions of Elvis, these women withdraw themselves from the intricacies and questions of their own time, a withdrawal that leads ultimately to disappointment and decay. Their lives, like the word “once,” define their refusal to understand the world around them, a denial that essentially stems from an inability to accept the death of the American Dream.

Source: Klay Dyer, Critical Essay on “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008.

Grace Cavalieri

In the following review, Cavalieri discusses the cultural elements that serve as the foundation of Brown's collection The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives. These include not only the music of Elvis Presley and of rock and roll in general, but also the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, the cold war with the Soviet Union, and the space race. Cavalieri praises the poems in this collection for their specificity of time and place.

You don't have to be an Elvis enthusiast to love this book and place it on the shelf with your favorites, for the poetry doesn't sound like anything else you've read. The concept of anecdote sets it in motion but the way story becomes poem, for one thing, is through its philosophical underpinnings. In the case of The Women Who Loved Elvis … it is imagined memory that comes from the depth of experience—growing up in the 50's and 60's with Sputnik, Kruschev, Nixon as antithesis to another world where the beat of rock and roll is the real centrality, and where life gets its first true meanings.

Elvis may have been considered A WRONG ONE by parents who presumed knowledge of what their children should love. These poems are about the idols for which we developed a deep passion—obsession because someone was setting lyrics to what was happening inside us. This was the time for each of us where we tried and failed to understand our feelings and suddenly heard the first sounds we had not heard before. The power given Elvis was in a way like giving your own thoughts power when there was no one to tell about this tumult, if indeed we knew what to call it.

The History of Rock and Roll started right where you were at the time. Fleda Brown writes poems peppered with irony. As wistful as the flowering of youth may be, here is the steady adult eye watching all that is long-gone-and-remembered with empathy and authority. Technical proficiency is the way fractious worlds move back and forth across time to create structure. If you want to know what a poet can be, take a look at this book, which is set in scenes and rooms with characters and never loses its viewpoints. We are shown clearly what to see.

“I Escape With My Mother In The Desoto” (pg. 36) is a narration I like very much. Here's stanza one:

Listen, it will be all right. I'll drive. Goodby
Maxwell Street, we'll say as if we had a
   secret
emergency, goodby Bendix spindryer, goodby
petticoats on the line dripping liquid starch …

The marvel of poetry! In a quatrain, we have character, event, plot, and situation. Should I say cultural history? And do we need to be told the time line?

The last stanza of the six, harks back to the recent past:

…
knees pulled up on the brand clean chenille
    bedspread.
We are going through Ladies Home Journals
    and you
are a beauty queen, safe in your vault of
    clichés,
safe from having to explain anything you
    mean.

Nowhere in these poems will you get language that does not say exactly what it means, and means what it says. This is why we trust Fleda Brown, and will go where she takes us.

The best of poets are dramatists. This means they start with character. “Priscilla Presley, 1962” (pg. 27)

She is grateful for how
the little world of Graceland
holds her in, teaches her to give up
the small self to the universal good.
She is watching him for clues,
what moves he responds to.
She learned at fifteen to keep her mind
ahead of his. She dyed her hair black,
like his. She is aware of a feeling
of constant swooning, as if she were
on her knees, and after she complains
about Anita, or Ann-Margret, the sheets
still warm from one of them, she is
literally on her knees, begging him
to stop raging, stop throwing lamps
and chairs and not to send her back
to Germany …

The long narrative ends with this:

…
After that, the whole gang,
she and the Memphis boys, go out
on the lawn, to watch the King
light his cigar, fly his toy plane.

If the person offstage is often the most important, we know all we need to know about Elvis; and in 36 lines the entirety of their relationship.

The last poem in the book is “The Meditation Garden” (pg. 65) from section IV GRACELAND.

…
Didn't I believe Whitman when he said
 
“look for me beneath the soles of your feet?
Didn't I believe my former husband
who said “I'll haunt you forever”? But one
positive note: I've kept singing the old
 
songs in my lousy voice until they don't
even recognize themselves. And who's
to say who's right, with all the cover
versions since? Whose song
 
would you say “Blue Suede Shoes” is,
for instance, Carl Perkins's or Elvis's?

What a marvelous ending. When a writer has such personality as this, she can drag all the hard stuff of human consciousness through—in the name of another—a star perhaps—a celebrity—a sex god, and come out singing. Not by mere chronology nor memory do we make such patterns—poetry that stays in our minds like a song we sing under our breath that always tells the truth.

Source: Grace Cavalieri, Review of The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives, in Montserrat Review, 2005-2006, 2 pp.

Fred Dings

In the following essay, Dings comments on the relationship between high art and popular art that Brown investigates in The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives. Among the poems that reflect on this issue is “Elvis Reads the Wild Swans at Coole,” which features Elvis reading aloud a poem by Yeats. Dings also discusses the “delicacy and restraint” present in the poems in this collection.

Fleda Brown's verse collection. The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives is a wonderful book. These poems, written from various points of view (including Elvis's), evoke in their aggregate the particular pathos of an era and the lives lived within it. The emotional truth of this writing is never humid in its intimacy, but it is affecting in its delicacy and restraint, nevertheless. So many contemporary poems seem to invoke pop-culture iconography in order to borrow an ethos or pedigree not otherwise present in the poem or to demonstrate the facility and widely ranging arcane and hip knowledge of its author (as in much of the poetry of Albert Goldbarth); these poems, in striking contrast, quietly and powerfully explore the inner sensibility of the private lives from which they speak without opportunism, condescension, cloying sentimentality, or sham nobility.

Readers will also discover within these poems an unasserting, quiet consideration of the relationship of high art and popular, the Apollonian and Dionysian, the metaphysical and the physical. The second poem, a sestina, seems to ask by its form alone if there are points of confluence. Nowhere, however, is this better treated than in the poem “Elvis Reads the Wild Swans at Coole,” an intricate proposition announced by the title itself. Here, Elvis is asked to read the famous Yeats poem aloud “to see what a Hunk-a Hunk-a Burnin' Love could do to expose the other, more subtle, longings.” By the end of the uncomfortable and awkward reading of the poem, Elvis is “flying off the end of it, trying to swagger, / one hand in his pocket, bravely cocking an eyebrow, // off into the wilds where the girls are screaming, wanting / his babies, no questions asked, ah yes, the subtle grass / of the wilds, and the drum-beat of the human heart.” See what I mean?

Source: Fred Dings, Review of The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives, in World Literature Today, Vol. 79, No. 2, May-August 2005, p. 88.

Janis Flint-Ferguson

In the following review, Flint-Ferguson offers a general assessment of the collection. The critic notes that the pieces “are not poems about those rooms in Graceland or about Elvis's life as much as they are poems about the icon of Elvis Presley.”

Obviously, this collection of poems is organized around the impact and influence of Elvis Presley. Each poem recounts biographical, musical, and cultural images of the phenomenon that was Elvis and sets them within snippets of the time period in which he lived. So along with the familiar details of Elvis and Priscilla, Elvis and his mother, Elvis and the Army, are references to Teflon, transistor radios, Ed Sullivan, Sputnik, the pill, Nixon, and the death of Princess Di. None of this follows a strict chronological ordering, but it begins with Elvis in the Sun Records studio and loosely follows through the details of his life from observers' perspectives. Featured prominently as the last section of the book is a tour of Graceland through the thoughts of fans as they tour the “Living Room,” “Elvis's Bedroom,” “Lisa Marie's Favorite Chair,” “The Jungle Room,” and “The Meditation Garden.”

These are not poems about those rooms in Graceland or about Elvis's life as much as they are poems about the icon of Elvis Presley: voices recounting how Elvis was a part of their own lives whether through his music, his TV image or his physical presence. “Ho hum, I thought the songs / were for me” says one persona looking over the famed Trophy Room. The poems raise the issue of what popular culture says about what we value while they recount the images of a man rather than the man himself.

Source: Janis Flint-Ferguson, Review of The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives, in Kliatt, Vol. 38, No. 5, September 2004, pp. 38-39.

SOURCES

Brode, Douglas, Elvis Cinema and Popular Culture, McFarland, 2006.

Brown, Fleda, “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives,” in The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004, p. 26.

Cavalieri, Grace, Review of The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives, 2005-2006, in the Montserrat Review, http://www.themontserratreview.com/bookreviews/elvis.html (accessed March 30, 2007).

Dings, Fred, Review of The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives, in World Literature Today, Vol. 79, No. 2, May-August 2005, p. 88.

Kaiser, Mary, Review of Do Not Peel the Birches, in World Literature in Review: English, Vol. 68, No. 2, Spring 1994.

Lytle, Mark Hamilton, America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era From Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Marcus, Greil, Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives, Henry Holt & Co., 2000.