Video Blues

“Video Blues” is a lyric poem in villanelle form by Mary Jo Salter published in her fourth poetry collection, A Kiss in Space (1999). Salter is the author of eight poetry collections, including National Book Critics Circle Award nominee Sunday Skaters (1994) and New York Times Notable Book of the Year Open Shutters (2003). Affiliated with the New Formalist poetic movement in the 1980s, Salter’s work often employs traditional poetic forms and revitalizes them with modernized content. This influence can be seen in the way “Video Blues” merges the musical blues tradition with the formal repeating structure of the villanelle while referencing classic Hollywood actresses.

Written in the first person, “Video Blues” portrays a female speaker lamenting the crushes her husband has on actresses Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, and Jean Arthur. The poem is written in five tercets and one quatrain, with the repeating lines “My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy” and “It makes some evenings harder to enjoy” (Lines 1, 3). Throughout the six stanzas, the poem moves through the various ways that these crushes are creating distance in the marriage and causing the speaker to also begin fantasizing about famous actor Cary Grant. Using the repetitive structure of the villanelle and elements of the blues tradition, Salter creates a speaker who is trapped in a relationship with a husband looking elsewhere for fulfillment.

Poet Biography

Mary Jo Salter was born in Michigan in 1954. At the age of nine, she moved with her family to Baltimore, Maryland, where she lived until the age of 18. Salter describes her relationship with poetry developing in those early years as an escape from “hear[ing] disputes between my parents” (Walch, Louis. “The City and the Writer: In Baltimore with Mary Jo Salter.” Words Without Borders, 2013). In 1976, Salter graduated from Harvard University, where she studied under the poet Elizabeth Bishop. She then went on to earn a graduate degree from Cambridge University in 1978 and an honorary doctorate of letters from Amherst College in 2010.

Salter was a notable figure in the New Formalist poetic movement of the 1980s, though she never formally identified as a member of the group. The New Formalists movement worked against the dominant free-verse style and prioritized writing under formal constraints such as meter and rhyme. Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), Salter’s first collection, solidified her association with the New Formalist movement, as it includes sonnets, villanelles, and other metrical, rhyming poems influenced by English literary history. Of form, Salter has said, “[F]or me, temperamentally, rhyme and meter are pleasing. They help me say what I want to say” (“Mary Jo Salter.” Poetry Foundation, 2010).

Salter is the author of eight poetry collections, most notably Unfinished Painting (1989), which was a Lamont Selection for the most distinguished second volume of poetry published that year; Sunday Skaters (1994), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and Open Shutters (2003), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has also written a play, Falling Bodies (2004); a children’s book, The Moon Comes Home (1989); and coedited The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Salter served as the vice president of the Poetry Society of America from 1995 to 2007 and is currently a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Poem Text

Salter, Mary Jo. “Video Blues.” 1999. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“Video Blues” portrays a marriage in distress with straightforward, conversational language. Written in first person, the poem opens with the speaker addressing the way her husband’s “crush” (Line 1) on several classic Hollywood actresses “makes some evenings harder to enjoy” (Line 3). In the first stanza, the speaker names only the 1940s star Myrna Loy as her husband’s romantic interest, but the list soon grows to include “Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, / [and] coy Jean Arthur” (Lines 7-8). The speaker confesses in the fourth stanza that she “can’t compete” (Line 11) with this list of glamorous actresses and then begins to wonder why she can’t also “have her dreamboats” (Line 13). In the sixth and final stanza, the speaker imagines how much she could “enjoy / two hours with Cary Grant as [her] own toy” (Lines 15-16) before acknowledging the improbability of ever meeting Cary Grant. The poem closes with the familiar two lines that have repeated throughout the poem: “My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, / which makes some evenings harder to enjoy” (Lines 18-19).