In early December Nancy Benac of the Associated Press phoned
me because she was working on a piece about the coming inauguration and she had
read "A Poetry-Free Presidency," which I wrote for Salon on January 19, 2001. Would Obama ask a
poet to deliver an ode for the occasion, as Kennedy and Clinton did, or would
he follow in Bush's footsteps and shun the practice? And if the former, whom
would he choose? This was days before the President-elect settled the debate
and tapped the poet Elizabeth Alexander for the inaugural ceremony. Yet there
remained much for an AP reporter to write about. What could a poet add to the occasion? How had
previous inaugural poets fared? Have American presidents in the past been
responsive to poetry?
In her excellent AP piece, Nancy Benac
mentioned that The Best American Poetry website blog was staging a
challenge for the best inaugural ode. Our rules were arcane enough to assure
that contestants would invest time and
thought into the project. To be eligible, a poem had to consist of four quatrains, had
to include at least three words from a prescribed list (honor, integrity,
faith, hope, change, power), and had to lift a line from "The Best
American Poetry 2008."Nearly fifty
poems came our way. All were read anonymously. Mark Strand, a former guest
editor of The Best American Poetry, served as judge and chose Gerald Greland's "This Is the Dream" as
the winner. R. S. Gwynn came in a strong second with "An Inaugural
Prayer." Valentina Gnup and Michael Schiavo took home third-place honors.
In a subsequent phone conversation, Nancy Benac asked me if
I would consider writing my own poem for the inauguration. She told me she was
asking an array of other poets -- among them Julia Alvarez, Billy Collins,
Bob Holman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gary Soto, and Alice Walker -- to try their hand at it.I love a challenge, so I said yes, and I
thought it only fair for my effort to comply with the rules we had established
for the BAP inaugural ode competition. A
week later, Bonny Ghosh of the Associated Press came to my apartment with
cameras and sound equipment and taped me reading my "Poem for Obama."
Ten of these inaugural poems have been posted here and in some cases
there's a video of the poet reciting his or her work.
I'm stealing the title of my blog today from Gerry Stern's great
poem/book of the same title. It's not simply because I love that book,
that poem, and that poet. It because my friend Christina Hutchins,
another of my favorite poets (and the Poet Laureate of Albany,
California) just texted me not long after she had finished readings
poems for the San Francisco Public Radio station KQED. I'd asked her to
let me know how it went when she'd finished, and Christina's text read:
"SO cool! the producer cried said he had forgotten how he NEEDS
poetry 2 be hearing it 2 be fully human being a poet's a lucky
thing." This seemed to me to reflect a couple of truths we all tend to
forget periodically -- "we," meaning not just those whose
contact with poems, poets, and poetry is sporardic and accidental, but
even those of us who live in the constant weathers of poetry -- perhaps
most of all, those of us who have chosen to draw poetry all around us in
our daily lives.
We need to recall the elemental importance and
urgency of poetry, the subtle nurture and the profound grace it allows
in our otherwise rudimentary and often punishing lives. And, as
Christina says, we need to remember how lucky we all are to able to do
what we do, to bring to language -- the language of our poems -- the
complexities of thought and passion, the tastes of words, and the
rhythmic verbal seductions of ideas and hopes. I know, a little
rapturous, but deal with it.
Since I began teaching more than
thiry years ago, an identical event has happend to me each year, often
two or three times in any given year. What happens is this: someone who
has called from the outside, meaning outside whatever school I am
teaching at (this has happened to me at Oberlin College, The Johns
Hopkins University, and at USC, where I presently teach), has been
routed to me because they have a poetry question, and I am the poet at
hand. The person asks me to help them try to locate a particular poem
they once read in high school or an early survey class in college, often
many years ago.These are not people who normally read poetry, or even
much literature at all, it often seems. They don't know the author or
the title of the poem, but they tell me what they do remember and,
because anthologies tend to replicate themselves like space aliens, I
can often tell them exactly the poem they are looking for.
After
this happened half a dozen times to me during my first year at Oberlin, I
began asking the callers why they were looking for their particular
poem, and the answer was always the same. They had recently lost someone
close to them -- a parent, a sibling, a daughter, a son -- and they
felt they needed to find this poem, this particular poem that they
rememebered from their past, often from a time deep in their past. Now,
it's important to remember that these poems that they were looking for
often had nothing to do with death. Yet in every case the callers had
this memory of having had a profound connection with a particular poem,
with the way the power and the language of the poem reflected for them
some exceptional experience, or emotion, or illumination within them.
What
became clear to me was that these callers all recognized that, at that
present moment when they were calling me, they had no language that was
commensurate with their own grief, no words with which to express not
only to others but also to themselves the dimensions of their own loss
and suffering. They semed to believe that if they could only read again
this one particular poem that had so touched them, that had released in
them such powerful connections years before, that perhaps now they might
once again be able to connect some words, some language to the riot of
grieving they were experiencing. I don't even think this was a truly
conscious recognition of this fact; I always feel (and it continues to
happen to me) that these callers are intuitively seeking out what must
be for many of them one of the few times that they had been able to see
and feel language forged against experience.
It is at times like
those, talking to those callers, that I remember what a lucky thing it
is to be a poet. It is something we need to remind each other, as
Christina reminded me today, as well as ourselves.
(ed note: this post first appeared here on May 9, 2009 -- sdh)
(ed. note: This post originally appeared on December 21, 2009 and it's a perennial favorite. I share Michael O'Keefe's love of Barbara Stanwyck and especially Christmas in Connecticut. When you've had enough of gifts and food and family, this movie, and Stanwyck's amazing performance will get you back into the spirit. I watch it every year.)
---
For some A Christmas Carol, (Alistair Sim’s version please) is the definitive Christmas film. For others It’s A Wonderful Life holds the honor of best film to watch during the holidays. “Marry Christmas Bedford Falls! Marry
Christmas, Mr. Potter!” James Stewart bellows returning from a
parallel, yet horrible, reality to face charges for bank fraud in “the
real world,” whatever the hell that is. Both have the Christmas spirit for sure. But for me the films to watch at Christmas all star Barbara Stanwyck.
First there is the not very well known Remember the Night (left). Fred MacMurray and Stanwyck star in Preston Sturges’ screenplay. (No, they don’t plot the murder of her husband, though Stanwyck does play a shoplifter.)
In the interest of transparency I should mention it’s a romance, the
protagonists meet cute, overcome obstacles, fall in love, observe
traditional male and female roles (and I mean traditional for 1940) and
live in an America that may have only existed in the mind of Preston
Sturges and his contemporaries in Black and White Hollywood, USA. Oh yeah, transparency. I
should reveal that in the singular nature of my love life, I'm not
extraordinary nor remarkable. I’m single and stand alone. And my
proclivity to indulge in sentimental notions around Christmas makes my
opinion not only biased but most likely hooey, as they used to say in
1940.
As hokey as some of the sentiment is, and as obvious as the plot line of
a shoplifter bailed out and brought home to Wabash, Indiana by a
prosecutor for a heartwarming Christmas is, the film knocks me for a
loop every time.
The key and the heart of the film is Stanwyck. MacMurray’s
family is seen through her eyes, and their homespun values melt her
cynicism in moments that pierce what passes for my veneer of
sophistication.
Perhaps the fact that I’m approaching the age of fifty-five
and have little to show from my love life but a collection of
snapshots, cards and memories that linger but do not nourish should
disqualify me in the holiday movie round up. Or could it be that that same status should make me Chairman of the Christmas movie board? For the purposes of this blog let’s hope it’s the latter.
The two other films to look for are Christmas in Connecticut and Meet John Doe. Though the latter is not set at Christmas its climax takes place on Christmas Eve and that’s close enough for me.
In Christmas in Connecticut
(right) Stanwyck plays a columnist that has created a fantasy world of a
farm in the country, a loving husband and a handle on domestic details
that surpasses anything Martha Stewart ever cooked up. When
asked to take in a wounded Vet for Christmas by her publisher she
attempts to con them both but ends up falling for the Vet, played by
Dennis Morgan. The look in her eyes as she gives herself over to her longing is spectacular.
But her speech at the end of Meet John Doe, a wonderful Frank Capra film, where she begs Gary Cooper not to jump from roof of the City Hall, is the topper of them all. She’s
suckered Gary Cooper into playing ‘John Doe’ so that her ruse of
writing a John Doe column for a powerful paper won’t be uncovered.
Cooper plays along at first but when he realizes he’s been a stooge for a
power hungry Nazi-like bad guy, Edward Arnold, he tries to reveal the
scam but is thwarted in his attempt to do so.
Abandoned by all those he’s touched across the country he decides to
keep John Doe’s promise to throw himself from the roof of City Hall on
Christmas Eve to protest man’s inhumanity to man. What he doesn’t know is that Stanwyck, Arnold and his cronies, and some loyal supporters are there waiting for him. Sick with the flu, and desperate to stop the suicide Stanwyck throws herself into his arms and begs him not do to it. The depth of her plea is staggering and when she calls him “Darling” I fall to pieces every time.
In short: If Barbara Stanwyck’s character from any of these films walked
into my life I’d sweep her off her Black and White feet and never give
the bright and shiny world a second glance.
I’ll be home and alone for Christmas this year but Barbara Stanwyck, with a little help from her friends, will give me hope. And that’s gift enough for me.
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.
I'm from Texas, live in New York, and am currently wintering in Louisiana. I haven't the slightest clue what Boxing Day is. I never asked my Canadian former roommate and my English violinist-friend says it has to do with helping the less fortunate and "boxing" up charitable donations the day after Christmas. I choose to picture a voluntary, boozy, postprandial family slugfest celebrating making it through Christmas without incident. I'm pretty sure we're both wrong. Anyways, happy bank holiday to all my friends in the Commonwealth! (And happy first day of Kwanzaa, too!)
I just want to get this thought out of the way: I am not a writer. (I feel so much better now!) Therefore, gentle reader, go easy and know how intimidated I am at this moment. I'm in no way issuing an apology for what may spew forth, but I think context is important. Truthfully, I'm not foreign to this community of writers, but my only experience is with dead ones. Lyricists and librettists of decades and centuries past. My image of writers usually includes a quill pen and candlelight. Are there any last holdouts in today's writing community? Old school blotters and ink-stained fingers?
More than the drama and costumes and wigs and make-up, what's interesting to me about being a singer of opera is, regardless of technological aides (digital recording devices offering immediate aural and visual feedback, etc), voices are trained today in essentially the same manner as voices a century or two ago. The finer points could be argued, no doubt, but in broad terms, there aren't too many ways for a human voice to be heard over an orchestra without amplification. The musculature hasn't changed, we haven't seen laryngeal evolution of any kind. We are still dependent on our body's acoustical resonant amplifiers and a very complex coordination of neurons and muscles to compete sucessfully with strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion. I think it's pretty damn cool actually. Sometimes it's technique that keeps me coming back for more and not the stage theatrics.
A confession - I'm not very prepared this week, having succumbed, as usual, the holiday insanity. Today I've got cookies, wrapping, and cleaning on the agenda, and, what with the rest of the holiday preparation, I just haven't had the time to think up something brilliant, moving, and appropriate for this week's post.
So instead, I'd like to share my all-time favorite Christmas poem. (I tried to get Black Jack and the sheep to pose for an illustration, but they were more interested in breakfast than art this morning.) This is a poem specifically about Christmas, but to everyone of whatever faith, or questioning, or none at all, blessings this holiday season and for the New Year.
"The Oxen" by Thomas Hardy
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. "Now they are all on their knees," An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, "Come; see the oxen kneel,
"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know," I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.
(ed note: This post originally appeared on December 23, 2008)
Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) continues to inspire conflicting feelings and opinions. John Nemo, writing in The Dictionary of Irish Literature, puts it this way: “His followers, a varied but vocal group, speak of him admiringly as an important force in Irish letters, second only to Yeats. His detractors, fewer in number but every bit as vocal, dismiss him as a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered peasant who disrupted rather than advanced the development of modern literature.” As a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered peasant myself, I will take my place among Kavanagh’s followers.
One of his most ardent admirers was my old friend James Liddy, an Irish poet who spent most of his adult life as a professor at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee until his death in 2008. Many years ago (in the ‘70s sometime), James sent me a copy of an Irish journal called The Lace Curtain, which included his “Open Letter to the Young about Patrick Kavanagh.” Describing Kavanagh’s work (and, really, his own as well), Liddy writes, “Or there is a poetry in which real ideas from living come at us. This kind can be direct statement with a reference behind to the story of what happened to the poet. It relies on the mind staying alive, on the man making the statement keeping his emotional intelligence alive.”
Kavanagh brings that emotional intelligence, I think, to “A Christmas Childhood,” a poem one encounters regularly this time of year in Irish circles on both sides of the Atlantic. As an Irish accordion player, I relish the mention of his father’s melodeon (pronounced melojin), which is a single-row button accordion.
The poem introduces us to the thrumming imagination of a six-year-old Irish farmboy, ca. 1910, who is perfectly in tune with the magical world around him.
A Christmas Childhood
by Patrick Kavanagh
I
One side of the potato-pits was white with frost— How wonderful that was, how wonderful! And when we put our ears to the paling-post The music that came out was magical.
The light between the ricks of hay and straw Was a hole in Heaven's gable. An apple tree With its December-glinting fruit we saw— O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me
To eat the knowledge that grew in clay And death the germ within it! Now and then I can remember something of the gay Garden that was childhood's. Again
The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place, A green stone lying sideways in a ditch Or any common sight the transfigured face Of a beauty that the world did not touch.
II
My father played the melodeon Outside at our gate; There were stars in the morning east And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodeon called To Lennons and Callans. As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside the cow-house my mother Made the music of milking; The light of her stable-lamp was a star And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.
A water-hen screeched in the bog, Mass-going feet Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes, Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters On the grey stone, In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland, The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over Cassidy's hanging hill, I looked and three whin bushes rode across The horizon. The Three Wise Kings.
An old man passing said: ‘Can’t he make it talk’— The melodeon. I hid in the doorway And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post With my penknife’s big blade. There was a little one for cutting tobacco, And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodeon, My mother milked the cows, And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.
At his wedding in April 1967; Kavanagh died in November of that year.
One final note: Kavanagh’s best-known poem is probably “On Raglan Road,” which was written to the tune of an old march called “The Dawning of the Day.” Many singers have recorded the song since the ‘60s, including Van Morrison and Sinead O’Connor.
(ed note: This post originally appeared on December 21, 2011)
(This post first appeared on July 18, 2011. -- sdh )
Last week, my wife and I snuck away into the mountains. I packed only one book. The plan was to read the land—penstemon, aster, Indian paintbrush, lupin, aspen, lodgepole, spruce—and come back to the books and e-mails and blogs after a few days completely offline.
But in the lodge where we stayed two nights, the sign for the “Library” caught my eye, and I couldn’t resist a quick inventory of the shelves.
In retrospect, it makes sense: the lodge is kind of a toney place, and the library is stacked by or for the toney sorts who frequent it (this was my first time, and it’s hard to imagine when I’ll have the money to come back). The books fell into four categories: business books (art of the deal etc), mystery/intrigue novels (Tom Clancy et al), children’s books, and accidents. The business books took up most of the three-shelf library. The accidents were comprised by To Kill A Mockingbird, a book about Copernicus, and a Peterson’s Field Guide to stars and constellations—and I imagined these being left by elderly guests.
There was not a single book of poetry, nor a book that contained a poem—and though this was not a surprise, I thought about leaving behind the copy of Wind in a Box I’d brought along or the recent issue of New South I found in the car when we were unpacking, but I wanted to keep these books, and in general I’m averse to leaving behind or even giving away a book.
Still, the idea has stuck with me, like any number of YouTube clips in which an author installs his or her own book on the shelves of a Barnes and Noble.
Here, it seems to me—however much anyone would say it’s just about getting seen—that this guerrilla placement, moraying on the sharks of distribution, is basically a way inserting oneself into some representation of authority or taste. To place one’s book this way—especially a title published by a smaller, independent press, or even a self-published title—is to make a statement about the book’s worth, even if it gives the particular bookstore too much credit. (Does anyone do this at The Strand?)
Inserting a book into the lodge library would not exactly be the same thing, but I think my impulse responds to some of the same desires—to see what is most valuable to me represented in some index of power—though it may also be implicated in my assessment of the lodge’s hospitality, my asking whether the place had everything I might need to be comfortable.
If I go back, if I leave a book there, will it be an act of valuation? Will it be a gesture, however likely to be lost or erased, to the next poet who stays there?
*
What would I leave behind?
On the drive down the other day, I thought about shipping the lodge a box of back issues of Copper Nickel—after all, the lodge has all these wonderful wooden buffalo carvings that would be nicely rhymed by the Copper Nickel logo—or sending them a gift subscription to Kenyon Review (on whose blog I’ve been thinking about books lately) or finding at my office the stack of duplicate and orphaned copies of books I often teach.
Though I wonder what the staff of the lodge would actually do with a box of poetry books if they have a library completely bereft of them in the first place?
*
I’m packing up to move, for a few months, across the country. I’m going to pack an “extra” book or two in the spare-tire well, to plant in just such a place—if not in a hotel or lodge library, then maybe in some public library, maybe even in my home town, which I’ll pass through in a few weeks.
*
A list of titles that might be appropriate to install in the cities and towns I’ll pass through soon (and so, a kind of mix tape for the road):
Denver, Colorado: John Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out
Hays, Kansas: Larissa Szporluk, Isolato
Kansas City, Missouri: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Gospel of Barbecue
Columbia, Missouri: Hadara Bar-Nadav, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight
Dostoevski's natal chart reveals him to be a Scorpio with Sagittarius rising. This is scary enough, but his moon is in Gemini, so watch out! Born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Dostoesvki suffered from epilelptic fits (see The Idiot) but did well in his examinations though he loathed mathematics. On Shakespeare's birthday in 1849, Dostoevski was arrested for belonging to a group of crazy liberal loudmouth intellectuals. He was sent to Siberia. sentenced to be executed, and faced a firing squad in the freezing rain. But it turned out to be a mock execution and Dostoevski went back to his cell the shape and size of a coffin convinced that it is better and wiser to be a saintly fool in Siberia than to pimp for his sister in St. Petersburg. Released in 1854, he wrote "Crime and Punishment" in a hurry because he needed the money to cover his gambling debts. He was a compulsive gambler.
From analyzing Dostoevski's astrological profile, you can safely arrive at several conclusions. His favorite songs would have been "I Fall in Love Too Easily" (Sinatra version 1940s) and "He's a Rebel" (rock song from early 1960s). The prophetic nature of his writings, including "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Notes from Underground," doom him to be a Cassandra without honor in his native land. Yet his fame eclipses that of all other Russian authors with one exception. A palm reader held his hand and looked into his searing eyes. You will achieve immortality, she said. But you will die in your sixtieth year. He obliged her on February 9, 1881.
Dostoevski's birth pattern -- a full house, with only one empty chamber -- is replicated exactly on the second day of August 1914. Had this fact been understood correctly, World War I might have been averted! The celestial mechanics of Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto intimate that Dostoevski would die on the same day as the end of the war, and indeed, the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, which would have been the novelist's ninety-seventh birthday. But it t would have come more four years earlier if in the prison of his days the free man had learned to praise. The fault lay not in our stars but in ourselves. The German minister smoked a Turkish cigarette in a jade holder. "Nothing ever happens in Brussels," he shrugged.
On that day, in graveyards in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, in Latvia and Estonia, school children in tatters stood shouting, "Hooray for the Karamazovs!"
Correspondence The New Republic 1220 19th Street, NW Washington, DC 20036
To the Editors:
I bet you're getting lots of
letters correcting you for attributing Our Town -- rather than On the
Town and Wonderful Town -- to Leonard Bernstein. I, however, want to
compliment you on this creative misprint. It opens up all sorts of happy
possibilities: Conrad as the author of Lucky Jim, for example, and
Shakespeare as the author of The Hamlet, not to mention The Sound and
the Fury. On the other hand, some errors simply can't be blamed on the
printer. If Henry Louis Gates really thinks that Shakespeare wrote "My
love is like a red, red rose" [as reported in TNR, November 12,
1990], he is in for a surprise. I won't tell him what it is, but he can find
out for himself by checking out the pages devoted to Robert Burns in the Norton
Anthology of English Literature.
"Philosophy? Cela suffit!" [2] Said the man Named de Man. [3] J. Hillis Miller:
J. Phyllis Diller. [4]
1. Geoffrey Hartman's term in
Saving the Text. An alternative spelling, Derrida(da)ism,
subversively reveals the Russian yes within the demotic term for
father.
2. The Saussurean difference
between Kant and cant is blurred, deferred, and reinscribed in a
Derridean display of differance.
3. A neglected trope, the
paradigmatic palindrome deconstructs itself into a reversed binary opposition
that terminates in an undecidable aporia, as when a pedestrian gets
stuck in a revolving door (de Man's image).
4. Miller on deconstruction:
"It suggests the image of a child taking apart his father's watch,
reducing it back to useless parts, beyond any reconstitution." Diller on phallogocentrism:
"It recalls the printer's error that closed up the space between the
second and third words of the sentence the pen is mightier than the sword."
