The Best American Poetry

Taylor Worship, by Catherine R. Stimpson

 My sister  Mary called. "Elizabeth Taylor," she said.
         "Yes," I said.  
        "I'm sorry," she said.
        "I am, too," I said.
        "You must be mourning."
        "I am." 
        "You were obsessed with her," she said. 
        "I was," I said.

        I was? I  am---although my obsession is now reined in and harnessed.
After I saw Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet in 1944, I learned how grand  it felt to worship someone from afar. 

        I never wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor.  Worship is not about identification.  Her middle name, Rosemond, may have been close to mine, Rosalind, but even a besotted child knows that sharing four letters out of eight in a middle name leaves four letters unshared. 

        I may have had fantasies that she would appear in my little town and pop me into her car and take me to Hollywood to be her friend, but I never really wanted to be that close either. Worship is not about sharing a toothbrush.

        I wanted what I had: the wonder and curiosity and exhilaration and freedom to range widely that a giddy reverence provides. Elizabeth Taylor's life was larger than mine. It was distant from mine, but  it was close enough for it to warm  and open my imagination and my heart.  As a child, I could recite the names of her parents (Francis, Sara), of her brother (Howard), and of her chipmunk (Nibbles).  Later, I could rattle off the names  and characteristics of her first fiance and then of all her husbands.  Oh, yes, John Warner, he was a bit of a rest stop. Even without seeing them all, I can chatter on about the movies. 

        Like prayers, such recitations were a sign of my devotion. But a far greater sign is   the quality of my attention to her activities, rapt when I was young, dearly engaged when I was older. She was a goddess worthy of my solicitude. She had both beauty and talent. She used her talent well. She seemed to do what she pleased, but she never seemed snotty or mean. She had a good time on several continents, but she did good things as well. She had courage.  In National Velvet , she cut her hair and rode her horse to a championship.   She was loyal, generous, and brave. She never fudged things---or not that I could tell.   
        
        And, she had all those illnesses and injuries and addictions, but she was reborn again and again, rising up from rehab and hospital beds.  As divinities must be, she was capable of resurrection.  Unlike some divinities, she was bawdy and earthy. She could camp out unpretentiously. In 2002, she published a book, Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry. Such stones, such pearls. Hers was hardly a sand lot collection. The first picture shows her in profile---all gussied up.  In the second she is also in profile, starting to kiss a great-grandchild. And her hair?  It is in pink and blue rollers. 

        My realistic self is aware that she died on March 23, 2011, at the age of 79, in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.  Her publicist said the cause was complications of congestive heart failure. These are facts. However, I also know that she is off to fresh woods and pastures new, though they may be yachts and 4-star hotel rather than fields and sheep folds.  She dedicates the jewelry book to "my beloved Mike and Richard, the two greatest loves of my life. And to my children, without whom there would have been no life." So Mike and Richard will be there, and her friend Roddy McDowell, and favorite dogs, and her family when they are ready to roam to be with her. 

        I elided the truth in my conversation with my sister. I am gratefully remembering  "my" Elizabeth, whose presence enabled me to enter into the realms of worship, rather than mourning. Late yesterday afternoon, in such a spirit, I asked a young man in my office if worshipping Elizabeth Taylor were a generational matter. Were his circles as involved in her doings and being as mine?  "The chatter on Facebook is less than I might have expected," he said diplomatically.  I took this in, but I would never, never make book against the enduring face of Elizabeth Taylor. 

On the Senate Vote: Sisyphus Makes It Stick by Catharine Stimpson

 At 10:50 a.m.  on Saturday, December 18, my partner Liz and I stopped cutting cubes of cheddar for macaroni-and-cheese and turned on C-Span. The United States Senate was about to decide whether to move forward with legislation to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." We understood the procedure.  If 60 Senators chose to end debate, they could act on the bill.   Shutting up meant enabling the future. 

        But, first, the Senate had to decide about "The Dream Act." This morally impeccable piece of legislation would give undocumented immigrant children a pathway to citizenship if they  had conducted themselves properly--- served in the military or gone to college or made other contributions to the United States.  I thought ironically of the securely native born children I know who so far have not proved themselves capable of such feats.  By a vote of 55 to 41, the Senate said no.

        The Senators are not in a giving mood, I thought bleakly, but Pollyanna Kate reassured Liz that the sponsors of the legislation to repeal would never have brought it to the Senate floor if they feared defeat.  The risks of public failure were too big. The scene on the Senate floor, a surprisingly small space, looked cozy.  Men and women were in their uniforms---trim suits without one overt sign of gaudiness. They seemed to be chatting in a palsy way.

        Then a clerk began to read the roll. The American names fell crisply into her microphone.  Senator Coburn (of Oklahoma), Senator Collins (of Maine), Senator Cornyn (of Texas).  I had put my faith in Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman, who seemed to be the chief shepherds of the bill.  But Coburn and Cornyn?  These are my rulers? Liz and I were literally on the edge of our seats.  Liz began to tick off the "yea" votes on her fingers. When that crusty, conservative Ben Nelson from Nebraska registered a "Yea" vote, I thought, "We have it, we have it."  But Liz said she had counted only 57.  Where were the three more that were necessary?  But, according to the arcane protocol of the Senate, more votes drifted in. We stopped counting. We did not know how to keep track.  Then, even we got the final count: 63 to 33, an excess of yeas.  

        I wept. She wept.  I am still lingering in disbelief that this world is opening up, not cracking up.  This victory smelled so sweet. After 17 years,  Sisyphus had pushed the rock of justice to the top of the mountain and made it stick there amidst the clear, fresh winds of change. Sisyphus was not one figure, but a battalion, a division.  If I were to write thank-you notes, they would number in the thousands--from a private booted out of the military to the Secretary of Defense and his generals.  

        A friend wrote from Mexico that her gay friends thought American gays were crazy.  They were working so hard to get two things every sane person wanted to avoid: the military and marriage. I have never served in the military; I have never wanted to get married.  But, but, but...those witty Mexicans miss the point. In the United States, the military and marriage are the  two hardest, rockiest, iciest, and highest of the mountains that Sisyphus must climb. The social conservatives have claimed and named and guarded them. One peak has now yielded. 

        Then the macaroni-and-cheese had to get finished.  Family with children was coming to visit. Normalcy, with all its attendant craziness, was about to descend, and had to be fed.  I had never before made macaroni-and-cheese, and had to find a simple guideline so that I could implement my sudden, giggly desire to do so now.  To my surprise, my Mother's handwritten box of recipes lacked one.  But there, in the cookbook from my mandatory high school domestic science class, was my salvation. THE BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS cookbook. The  red-and-white checked covers were falling off, but the advice about food was far more sophisticated than I had remembered while still being manageable. I was in a space between Spam sandwiches and Spanish adventures in the molecular chemistry of cooking. 

        For an hour or two, until I remembered the hold up of the Dream Act, the America I love was in place: do the right thing, feed your family nutritiously, live and let live, and offer a home to people who have the courage to climb the most dangerous of mountains.              

A Spray of White Flowers (by Catharine R. Stimpson)

Pierrot and Peonies (c) Jane Freilicher

When I was a child,  we picked flowers from the garden on Mother's Day before we went to church.  If your mother was dead, you wore a small spray of white flowers.  If your mother was alive, you wore colored flowers, as bright as possible. White was for gratitude and grief; red and blue and pink and yellow were for gratitude.  When I grew up, I abandoned this custom along with my childhood address. But since my mother's death, at the age of 93, I have been unable to pass a single white flower or a plant on Mother's Day---even ones barricaded in a flower shop---without remembering her and summoning up her ghost.

-- Catharine R. Stimpson

Eruptions Distruptions [by Catharine Stimpson]

 

On Tuesday, April 20, I was  walking down the narrow footpath of Cambridge Grove, an ethnically mixed street in Hammersmith in West London. I was one of the many stranded and stalled in Western Europe because of the Plume of Ash emanating from that volcano in Iceland.

        A young white man came towards me, wearing black pants and jacket. When he was a few inches away, he turned towards me, opened his mouth, and let out a monstrous belch. The noise was worse than the smell, but I could catch a whiff of gas, beer, and garlic.

        I obeyed the New Yorker's first rule of the street.  Show nothing. Keep going. But my world was becoming one of eruptions. We can measure an eruption by its power to disrupt.

        That small one from a surly young man's mouth disrupted nothing---except for my momentary peace of mind on a leafy English street in spring. That immense one from Eyjafjallajokull, which sounds like a name in an Icelandic saga, disrupted global systems and hundreds of thousands of lives. 

        When air travel finally began to resume in England on the Wednesday, no-one  knew when a symptom of disruption might check in. Thanks to the help of friends,  nagging and nagging the airlines, I got a reservation for Wednesday night, April 21. 
        
        Boarding pass in hand, I appeared at the gate. "But you're not on this flight," a puzzled and polite agent said. I was asked to wait with a clutter of baby strollers that also had to be loaded on. A few minutes later, an equally polite agent said that their computers had been erupting with errors for hours, They were checking people in and then making them disappear. I was not to worry. I would get on.  My baggage would get on.  "A hard day for you," I said. "You have no idea, Ma'am," he replied. "You have no idea."

        My hotel bristled with glitches as well.  My rational self tells me that it was badly built and that glitches revealed systemic weaknesses.  My irrational self thought of eruptions and the subsequent disruptions going viral. The television screen would go blank. Two fire alarms went off within the week I was there. The second was at 5:30 a.m. Guests streamed down from nine floors to stone patios.  Some of them were fully dressed as if they went to bed prepared for disaster. Two Japanese women were wearing masks. Two young Chinese girls huddled within shimmering, silvery, space age, fire resistant blankets.  Be prepared, be prepared. I could smell toast and bacon. A cook, in a chef's hat, smoked a cigarette near a shrub.  When I checked out, I asked about the alarms. "Oh," the clerk said, "the second one, this morning, was a real fire in the kitchen." Was my chef the guilty party?  Or were the stoves as badly wired as my TV?

        The Plume of Ash has shrunk.  More flights have resumed. In Europe, the eruptions now also come from the vocal guardians of travel and communications in the public and private sector. In the future, we will smell many more of their emissions of wind as people avoid and shift responsibility for a possible over-reaction to the Plume of Ash. The Wednesday headline in The Guardian was, "Heathrow opens---and now recriminations start to fly." A subhead followed, "BA (British Aviation) chief attacks government."

        Yet, as I talked to people who were stranded and as I listened to people in the airport,  I heard none of this. People were paging home.  Their cell phones were connected to residential numbers.  "I don't know how long this is going to be, but I want to come home," was a common refrain outside of the airport.  "I am coming home," was a common refrain inside the airport.  Yes, destructive eruptions can happen in the home, but they feel like our own. "Home": the point of stability from which we depart and to which we avidly return.

        Because the Plume of Ash fouled up my schedule, I could go to a play in one of those slightly musty theaters around Leicester Square in which the greatness of British theater tests and sustains itself.  I chose George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, an eruption of stage craft that violated late Victorian conventions.

        The actress playing Mrs. Warren was a bit too "mimsy," a phrase from a British actor friend of mine. The sets were clunky, miring Shaw's language and conflicts of character in a stodgy realism. The play is still radical, still fiery, and, I realized, it is about the meanings of home. Mrs. Warren's profession is to manage houses of prostitution---which she does successfully. Her job has been her escape from poverty to affluence. She fantasizes that she and her daughter, a Cambridge graduate who knows nothing of her mother's livelihood, will eventually settle down together as mother and daughter.  Her ruthless business partner wishes to marry the daughter, sire a child, and leave all his money to his new family. And the daughter, as tough as both mother and would-be-husband, leaves them all to create her own home.

        If I discerned a common prayer during this volcanic time, it was that one's home might be strong and sane enough to offer some protection against street kid hostility, the fragility of human systems, and the eruptions of the elements.

Oh, to be in England now that April's there . . . [by Catharine Stimpson]

On April 14, getting on a crowded flight for London, I was obsessively if sweetly chanting to myself, "I will be in England now that April's there."

We landed at Heathrow on the morning of April 15, little knowing that we were on one of the last flights permitted to arrive.  When I phoned a friend to say hello, he was surprised to hear from me. "Katie," he said, "you shouldn't be here. All of the air space in Britain is shut down."

I am now among the stranded and the stalled. Like most travelers, I do not know when I will get out.  I am sharing fantasies with others in my affinity group.  Can we get to France, even though the ferries and the
Eurostar beneath the English Channel are completely sold out?  Then, can we drive or get a train to Madrid or Lisbon, and fly  out from there?  What about the ferry from England to Bilboa?

These are fantasies.  What are the realities? Being in London in April, as the Plume of Ash drifts across the waters of the Atlantic and the land mass of Europe, is inexorably strange.  London is beautiful right now. The sun dapples the people relaxing in Leicester Square. The tulips and daffodils brighten the gardens around the exalting cathedral of St. Paul's. To read TIME OUT about cultural events is thrilling. Look up at the sky. No-one can see the Plume. Instead, you gaze at a delicate shade of blue with white, pink, and golden clouds. Feathery clouds. Everyday life is  more plume than ash.

Yet, escaping the invisible Plume is impossible.  People say the best maps on which to watch its motions, going East and South, is on the NEW YORK TIMES website.  Ah, said a man in the office on which I have a borrowed computer, the plume is nearing Madrid.  So much for the fantasy of Madrid as our new launching pad.  Waiting for the Tube, the London subway, one hears a stiff-upper-lip recorded announcement about all British airports being shut down because of the Plume. Do not take the Tube to Heathrow. The BBC features incisive, responsible, non-perky analyses of both the forthcoming elections here and the nature of volcanos and their expulsions. We now read about the airlines putting pressure on aviation authorities to relax the ban on air travel in Britain, to be more lenient.

This combination of April happiness and the Plume of Ash tests all our modern technologies. Planes cannot fly, despite being in good condition.  A volcano on a small island in the Northern Atlantic has beaten them.We trade stories about which websites of which airlines have crashed. My indispensable Blackberry flaunts its limitations, how hard it is to read applications, how tired one's thumbs gets trying to send messages and memos.

The combination also, yet again, tests our globalism. I came to London to chair a meeting of an advisory group for an international organization. Of course, several of our members could not get in.  If they had had to obtain a visa, their efforts were wasted. But we could Skype them in if we could manage the various time zones in which we were operating. The organization has its offices in Hammersmith in the West of London. I am being housed in Novotel West London, a hotel of 650 rooms and conference facilities, a decent enough chain with a global clientele, often families.  The staff is from nearly every country and seems to include a native language speaker for all of its diverse customers.  Despite our variations, our breakfast buffet is resolutely English: eggs, beans, bacon, toast, porridge, with some yoghurt from Normandy and some cold cuts and cheeses and croissants for the picky.

My personal conditions and circumstances, despite being stranded and stalled, are enviable.  I am not sleeping on a make-shift cot in the Munich airport. I have more than enough access to ATM machines, food, a historic and vibrant culture, the Technologies of Communication, and friends. I can wash out my clothes. No-one here expects the Novotel to have to dole out masks to protect our respiratory systems against the shards of Icelandic pumice and volcanic rock.  My colleagues at work are helping me with cancellations of appointments and re-arrangements. Everyone is understanding that I am in my beloved England and April's here, but I am not on a feckless, giddy holiday.

But that Plume, that Plume, is no spray of feathers in a dowager's tiara in a comedy of manners; no decoration on the helmet of a British guardsman. That Plume, the smoke from the fire within the earth,  is burning the global economy. The Plume, and the global winds, do their thing, and refuse to Skype us and reveal their intentions. And, if we were really stupid enough to believe that we were more or less immune from the ravages of nature, our stupidity has crashed along with our ever so global travel schedules.

Who is Amy Bishop [by Catharine R. Stimpson]

February 28, 2010- The figure of Amy Bishop haunts me. I fantasize covering her trial when it happens.

        "Who is she?" asked a graduate student and a law student  earlier this week.

        The question surprised me.  Bishop has gotten so much media attention, including my first blog about her. To recap:  On February 12, a biology professor at the University of Alabama/Huntsville who had been denied tenure, she took a pistol to a department meeting , killed three colleagues, and wounded three others. The New York Times has published two front-page articles and more. People Magazine had a  March 8 story, "Murder on Campus."  It may have been at the back of the book, but there it was----between the scary coverage of a minor celebrity gone missing at the Winter Olympic Games (since declared a suicide),  and the sweet  coverage of a  nice man who rehabs sneakers for poor kids.

        As a result, we know more and more about this newly public figure. She was proud of, even flaunted, her Harvard doctorate. She was distraught when she was denied tenure at Huntsville.  She and her husband, Jim Anderson, were Trekkies, an aspect of her interest in science fiction.  People wrote that he stayed home to care for their four children. And, she was a companion of violence.  In 1983, when  she was 21, she killed her brother with a shotgun. No charges were brought. Far less drastically, in 2002, she hit a woman in an International House of Pancakes who took the booster seat she wanted. She screamed at barking dogs. People's first line: "You crossed Amy Bishop at your peril."     

        Such vivid portraits of Bishop fit only too neatly into three stereotypes. She compels our attention because all three apply to her. The first, which can have its harmless charms, is that of academics as strange, nerds, indifferent to norms and forms.  A university student evaluation said disapprovingly of a professor, "He wears the same pants every day." The second  and third stereotypes mark the passage of the strange into the frightening. One is about the scientist, the proud proponent of reason, who unleashes irrational forces of destruction. The other is about women. Meant to engender and nurture life, they turn vicious, female pit bulls without lipstick. 

        Beyond press coverage and beneath stereotypes, who is Amy Bishop really. I wish I knew. I do gingerly map her onto other angry people ---both men and women---in academic life. They are always on the edge of hysteria and temper tantrums.   They exercise power by oscillating between threatening to jump over the edge and actually doing it. Bystanders and colleagues respond through placating gestures and through shrugging denials of the psychic violence around them.  How much did Bishop's family cover for her in this manner?

        The incessantly enraged are both far more overt and far less common than standard issue passive aggressives. They content themselves by projecting themselves as innocent victims of circumstances they have actually helped to create.  A trivial example: the man who complains widely that he was refused access to the gym.  He had never bothered to renew his free membership.

        My dismay in not knowing who Amy Bishop is really is more than the cliche-ridden  inability to know who anybody really is---be that anybody an intimate or a somebody with whom we connect through the illusory intimacy of modern communications. My dismay is the symptom of commingling fears: fear of impotence if a passive aggressive's self-serving narrative goes viral and finds wide acceptance; fear of participating in a cover-up of the behavior of the perpetually angry; and worst of all, fear that someone will "snap," that oddly  benign word for the eruption of violence, in my presence, in my subway car or faculty meeting.

Campus Dispatch [by Catharine Stimpson]

This was to be a genial post about snow and the city during Valentine days. 

Then death intervened.

On Friday, at a faculty meeting,  Amy Bishop murdered three of her colleagues in the Biology Department of the University of Alabama/Huntsville and badly wounded three others.

I learned about this homicidal violence the way one does these days: first a crawl at the bottom of a newscast, which noted her Harvard training as a neuroscientist. Apparently, the fact that a Ph.D. from a prestigious university would fatally ransack a human body with bullets can still shock us. Then TV elevated the murders to "Breaking News" and a "Developing Story" with law enforcement officers giving their sober press conferences.

Then The New York Times began to run its fact-filled stories.

Dr. Bishop left her pistol in a second-floor bathroom.Dr. Bishop is a wife, married to another scientist, James Anderson.  Dr. Bishop is a mother, with four children. Dr. Bishop and her husband have been responsible for some promising biotechnology inventions. Dr. Bishop,perhaps significantly, had been denied tenure and was appealing the decision.  Dr. Bishop was outspoken about university policies.  Dr. Bishop was considered a lousy teacher. The Times found colleagues who said she was  "a little quirky but no more so than most scientists." Dr. Bishop had fatally shot her brother in 1986 in Massachusetts but never charged with a crime.

I have stared at the pictures of Dr. Bishop after her arrest: a woman in a pink sweater, a heavy face, dark hair cut in a page boy with bangs, looking fierce and distraught in one photo, blank in another.  The pictures tell me nothing except that her appearance would be familiar on a campus. Murders, of course, are far less familiar on an American campus than frumpiness. Both sweetly and despairingly, we want campuses to be islands of civility and learning in a sea of disputations, blows, and ignorance.

However, I am rarely surprised by violence on a campus. The academic ideal of being an island of civility permits quirkiness to flourish---among all the disciplines. Unfortunately, more than quirkiness abounds. Every day I see wonderful, wonderful people at work, but I have also noted  a rudeness that self-righteousness justifies; indifference to the well-being of others; and the moral equivalent of manslaughter through reviews, tenure and promotion letters, memoranda, and gossip.

Within departments and dormitories, little villages within the large city of a big university, people know each other well, unless they dwell with an oblivion to others that borders on and flows into neurosis. People know who is on edge, who is cruel, who is merely a curmudgeon. People know about the stresses of the tenure process, and who seems to be handling it well or not. The "shock" that gets expressed on campuses where violence occurs should not be over the fact of murder itself. It should be over our inability to tell who will merely "speak violence" and who will bring a weapon to a faculty meeting. I believe that our tolerance does permit vicious feelings to spill out with comparatively little harm.  Words are less harmless than sticks and stones. So folklore tells us. But our tolerance, like our devotion to academic criticism and research, does atrophy our capacity to tell who might actually murder or critically wound us. 

When I was making notes about snow and the city, I observed feet. Who was wearing sneakers, who boots? Whose pants were protected from slush, whose were wet and dragging in puddles of ice and water? The task, without lapsing into paranoia, is to ask whose feet might be carrying death towards us.

   Bill T. Jones has done it again.  Globally recognized as icon and genius, he might have taken up the artist’s equivalent of daily golf and residency in a comfy condo in a Sunshine State.  He might have lectured here, taught there (though only as a Distinguished Visitor), served as juror for prestigious prizes, and published his memoirs. The nomadic dance artist might have settled down.

    Not Bill T. Jones.  Once again, he has cast himself into the sea of risk---with its stony shores and crazy currents. He is one of the prime movers in bringing a new musical called Fela! to Broadway. Though in the Eugene O’Neill Theater, this is a radically different sort of Electra and Iceman. Jones is Fela!’s director and choreographer, co-author of its book, and one of the three who first conceptualized it.

            The risk? Will the mainstream Broadway audience, so content with productions that are at once lavish and conventional, buy into the bright colors and defiant energies of Fela!?  That “!” is the diacritical mark of the show’s intensity. The financial and psychic risk of Fela! is spread, like that of all Broadway shows, but at the end, as the audience buzzes and applauds, it is Jones, with his long arms and legs, who bounds onto the stage and dances with the actors.

            I predict Fela! will succeed, that its passion and urgency and skill will prove contagious. So I deeply hope. Fela Kuti was an African musician who helped to propel and drive the music of his continent into global culture. The play is set in the Lagos, Nigeriaof the late 1970s.  A vicious, corrupt military regime is in power. Post-colonialism has neither shaken off the past nor forged a better future. Fela, like his mother before him, is a prophet and architect of democracy. For that reason alone, the regime will torture them when it can and murder them if it can.

     Fela is performing in his nightclub, the Shrine, with his fellow musicians and dancers, among them his band of Queens. As the action on stage flows through the theater, as the choreography of the Queens oes muscularly and elegantly into the aisles, members of the audience become Shriners, patrons of the club and members of its aroused, shrewd community. Through song and dance and monologue, Fela is explaining why he is going to leave Nigeria that night. Yet, after a journey through his past and through the underworld to consult with his murdered mother, Fela reverses his decision. He stays and organizes a demonstration in honor of her and others of the righteous dead. He himself will die two decades later---at home in Nigeria

          Jones,  like the Fela he has imagined for us, is a singular individual. All icons and geniuses are. That is one reason why they earn such status. Without compromising the  individuality of each, Jones and Fela are companions, even brothers. They are cosmopolitans, but deeply rooted and grounded in a specific culture. They are courageously political, but yearningly spiritual. They believe gods and goddesses are there if we can but divine them. Both dancer and musician create resonant chords out of the political, the spiritual, and the aesthetic. Both can be caustic, angry, but they have humor and heart.

            Bill T. Jones is still here, swimming strongly in the sea of risk.  Praise and bless him.

     I long for a poet who can beat out some stanzas about November 3, 2009, in the United States, the day of an off-year, off-kilter election.  Some clumps and clusters of citizens went to the polls. The results that we know are as messy as the country itself.

    By now even the most myopic of observers can list the signs of the mess.  Maine mauls gay  marriage. But Houston puts a lesbian into a run-off for mayor. New York elects a Democrat to Congress from a traditionally Republican district that the Limbaughers and Palinettes have staked out as a reserve of conservative purity. But Virginia and New Jersey put the swords of democracy on the shoulders of Republicans and dub them governor.  The cocks of the Grand Old Party gloat and crow. Boy, oh, boy, some whisper, the election of 2009, not boring old health care, is Obama's Waterloo. New York City almost says that its mayoralty cannot be bought, not even by a man as able as Michael Bloomberg.  But City Council seats go to Democrats by majorities so gallingly large that one fears for democracy.

    What poet can travel from oil-rigged sea to old-rigged sea to capture the mess?  What poet can balance the grief of real economic loss and the sour anger  of the teabaggers who fear loss? What poet can satirize the public preening and the posturing of the suits and pants suits in the media or public forums? And what poet can dig out the mumbling excuses of the romantic followers of Obama in 2008 who seem not to have managed to trip the light fantastic to the polls in 2009?     My vote: an Alexander Pope with a well of democratic yearnings.

My neighbor in the elevator was giddy with excitement on Monday, November 2. He was on his way to Philadelphia. His family had tickets for the 5th game of the World Series between the Phillies and the Yankees. He was going to join a crowd enthralled with the fact of being at the game. The Phillie supporters would wave their white towels to create an energy flow for their champions. He, though normally an ironic man, would cheer and cheer for his Yankees.

Lucky him? Most fans would say yes.

I love sports and take sides, often rabidly. Watching Roger Federer get beaten in the 2009 US Open made me feel sick. So did the Yankee loss on Monday night.

However, give me a bleacher of my own far away from the huge modern sports dome.  The first time I saw such a swollen structure I thought, in disgust, “This is a shopping mall.” My bleacher of choice can be in a small, old arena. The toilets may stink. The hotdogs may be lukewarm. But the fans will sit together in egalitarian simplicity.

Or, my bleacher of choice can be a chair or a bed in front of the TV.

Of course the cameras control what I can see. They decide how often I will watch Chase Utley, the current Philadelphia Home Run King, lean back in his dugout, hair slicked back, face thickly handsome, as happy as a lion who has just made a kill. Better to submit to a camera’s gaze than to a huge scoreboard pounding at me and exhorting me to scream and cheer when my team does well, and to follow the bouncing ads.

Whatever the exact site of a bleacher of my own, let me shout at my own pace, despair at my own pace, pound the glove of my soul at my own pace, pray at my own pace.

The real test of the fan is not how we behave in the crowd but how we behave when we have no witnesses to our fierce loyalties.

Go, Yankees.  And Roger Federer, return in all your glory.

Here's My Last Guest Blog Hanging on the Screen [by Catharine R. Stimpson]

   Bill T. Jones has done it again.  Globally recognized as icon and genius, he might have taken up the artist’s equivalent of daily golf and residency in a comfy condo in a Sunshine State.  He might have lectured here, taught there (though only as a Distinguished Visitor), served as juror for prestigious prizes, and published his memoirs. The nomadic dance artist might have settled down.

    Not Bill T. Jones.  Once again, he has cast himself into the sea of risk---with its stony shores and crazy currents. He is one of the prime movers in bringing a new musical called Fela! to Broadway. Though in the Eugene O’Neill Theater, this is a radically different sort of Electra and Iceman. Jones is Fela!’s director and choreographer, co-author of its book, and one of the three who first conceptualized it.

            The risk? Will the mainstream Broadway audience, so content with productions that are at once lavish and conventional, buy into the bright colors and defiant energies of Fela!?  That “!” is the diacritical mark of the show’s intensity. The financial and psychic risk of Fela! is spread, like that of all Broadway shows, but at the end, as the audience buzzes and applauds, it is Jones, with his long arms and legs, who bounds onto the stage and dances with the actors.

            I predict Fela! will succeed, that its passion and urgency and skill will prove contagious. So I deeply hope. Fela Kuti was an African musician who helped to propel and drive the music of his continent into global culture. The play is set in the Lagos, Nigeriaof the late 1970s.  A vicious, corrupt military regime is in power. Post-colonialism has neither shaken off the past nor forged a better future. Fela, like his mother before him, is a prophet and architect of democracy. For that reason alone, the regime will torture them when it can and murder them if it can.

     Fela is performing in his nightclub, the Shrine, with his fellow musicians and dancers, among them his band of Queens. As the action on stage flows through the theater, as the choreography of the Queens oes muscularly and elegantly into the aisles, members of the audience become Shriners, patrons of the club and members of its aroused, shrewd community. Through song and dance and monologue, Fela is explaining why he is going to leave Nigeria that night. Yet, after a journey through his past and through the underworld to consult with his murdered mother, Fela reverses his decision. He stays and organizes a demonstration in honor of her and others of the righteous dead. He himself will die two decades later---at home in Nigeria

          Jones,  like the Fela he has imagined for us, is a singular individual. All icons and geniuses are. That is one reason why they earn such status. Without compromising the  individuality of each, Jones and Fela are companions, even brothers. They are cosmopolitans, but deeply rooted and grounded in a specific culture. They are courageously political, but yearningly spiritual. They believe gods and goddesses are there if we can but divine them. Both dancer and musician create resonant chords out of the political, the spiritual, and the aesthetic. Both can be caustic, angry, but they have humor and heart.

            Bill T. Jones is still here, swimming strongly in the sea of risk.  Praise and bless him.

Wanted: A Poet for 11/3/09 [by Catharine Stimpson]

     I long for a poet who can beat out some stanzas about November 3, 2009, in the United States, the day of an off-year, off-kilter election.  Some clumps and clusters of citizens went to the polls. The results that we know are as messy as the country itself.

    By now even the most myopic of observers can list the signs of the mess.  Maine mauls gay  marriage. But Houston puts a lesbian into a run-off for mayor. New York elects a Democrat to Congress from a traditionally Republican district that the Limbaughers and Palinettes have staked out as a reserve of conservative purity. But Virginia and New Jersey put the swords of democracy on the shoulders of Republicans and dub them governor.  The cocks of the Grand Old Party gloat and crow. Boy, oh, boy, some whisper, the election of 2009, not boring old health care, is Obama's Waterloo. New York City almost says that its mayoralty cannot be bought, not even by a man as able as Michael Bloomberg.  But City Council seats go to Democrats by majorities so gallingly large that one fears for democracy.

    What poet can travel from oil-rigged sea to old-rigged sea to capture the mess?  What poet can balance the grief of real economic loss and the sour anger  of the teabaggers who fear loss? What poet can satirize the public preening and the posturing of the suits and pants suits in the media or public forums? And what poet can dig out the mumbling excuses of the romantic followers of Obama in 2008 who seem not to have managed to trip the light fantastic to the polls in 2009?     My vote: an Alexander Pope with a well of democratic yearnings.

A Bleacher of One's Own [by Catharine Stimpson]

My neighbor in the elevator was giddy with excitement on Monday, November 2. He was on his way to Philadelphia. His family had tickets for the 5th game of the World Series between the Phillies and the Yankees. He was going to join a crowd enthralled with the fact of being at the game. The Phillie supporters would wave their white towels to create an energy flow for their champions. He, though normally an ironic man, would cheer and cheer for his Yankees.

Lucky him? Most fans would say yes.

I love sports and take sides, often rabidly. Watching Roger Federer get beaten in the 2009 US Open made me feel sick. So did the Yankee loss on Monday night.

However, give me a bleacher of my own far away from the huge modern sports dome.  The first time I saw such a swollen structure I thought, in disgust, “This is a shopping mall.” My bleacher of choice can be in a small, old arena. The toilets may stink. The hotdogs may be lukewarm. But the fans will sit together in egalitarian simplicity.

Or, my bleacher of choice can be a chair or a bed in front of the TV.

Of course the cameras control what I can see. They decide how often I will watch Chase Utley, the current Philadelphia Home Run King, lean back in his dugout, hair slicked back, face thickly handsome, as happy as a lion who has just made a kill. Better to submit to a camera’s gaze than to a huge scoreboard pounding at me and exhorting me to scream and cheer when my team does well, and to follow the bouncing ads.

Whatever the exact site of a bleacher of my own, let me shout at my own pace, despair at my own pace, pound the glove of my soul at my own pace, pray at my own pace.

The real test of the fan is not how we behave in the crowd but how we behave when we have no witnesses to our fierce loyalties.

Go, Yankees.  And Roger Federer, return in all your glory.