Monica Ferrell on “At the Price Chopper”

On “At the Price Chopper”

Not in its first phase, but during the later days of the pandemic, the grocery store became a kind of public square, at least for me. It was almost the only place I left my house for, the only place where I encountered people who weren’t in my immediate family. Color, sound, and surprise entered my world through this single aperture. I should also say that I hate grocery stores. I dread them. As a mother of two young children, endlessly preparing meals, fretting about ingredients and immunities, I found the weekly trip especially fraught. In part, this was because it seemed impossible to go to the supermarket and not confront mortality, one’s own and that of others. It doesn’t surprise me, then, that this poem set in my local grocery store in Bennington, Vermont, keeps returning to the subject of death—the deaths of soldiers in the army of Alexander the Great on their retreat from India through the bleak Gedrosian Desert; the death of my father, who passed away in late 2019; and my own death, still on the horizon, a looming inevitability. 

The poem takes off from an observation about a batch of Granny Smith apples offered for sale. For many years I’ve wanted to do something with a claim that Rilke makes in one of his letters: 

“Even for our grandparents a ‘house,’ a ‘well,’ a tower they were long accustomed to, yes, their very clothes, their coat, were infinitely more, infinitely more familiar: almost everything a receptacle in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are forcing their way over here, sham things, dummies of life…A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a vine there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hope and contemplation of our forefathers…Living things, things we lived which are conscious of us, are draining away and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things.” 

(To Witold von Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

When I first encountered this letter, I felt haunted and dismayed. What chance, as an American, could I have to access the living, conscious things he speaks of? In the one hundred years since Rilke wrote this letter, technology has only worsened the problem he laments. Ersatz, the virtual, the simulacrum: these stream into our lives daily through genetically-modified foods and AI chatbots, the microplastics that take up room in our bodies. The future promises to be all but overtaken by “sham things,” “dummies of life.” 

As I began writing, “At the Price Chopper” took shape in tercets, even in the earliest drafts; I find tercets sort of pointy and uncomfortable-feeling. They also, in my view, have a tendency to gallop onward. I remember reading somewhere that if a quatrain is stable, like a table with four legs, a tercet is what happens after one of those legs falls off—the form is continually moving. It also suggests to me a restless, frustrated, unresolved quality.

Though this poem initially got its start with the pandemic and with Rilke, for me it will always be “the Pez dispenser” poem. “At the Price Chopper” is the closest I’ve ever come to writing an elegy for my father. The few times I have given a public reading of the poem, I never get to that point in it without someone in the audience uncontrollably breaking out into laughter, and without myself starting to cry. I understand why folks laugh. The comparison between a dead father’s body and a Pez dispenser lacks gravitas. But I think the absurdity around the human body’s transformations is part of the point. When Hamlet holds up a skull, a memento mori, the moment is all the more piercing because Yorick was a jester. Absurdity seems to be written into the human condition, these circumstances in which we continue to cherish, worry and obsess over our own and one another’s temporary existences.