I walked
around the house
in search
of chocolate.
(There must be
some chocolate
somewhere, right?)
No, I don’t think
it’s a sweet tooth
craving,
I just have
an excess
of dissonances
today.
Chocolate makes
dissonances
resolve.
(Or it doesn’t.)
Regardless,
somehow,
you feel
better.
(Or you don’t.)
Oh well,
At least,
you’ve tried.
Die Verwandlung
Or, one student’s adventures in higher yearning
May 6, 2018
To: Colleagues in the Writing Module
From: Jack Hexter
Many of you who have worked with Richard Treacy will be impressed by the progress he has made, as shown by his essay (below) on the take-home final (open-book, three hours).
Sigmund Freud asked, in evident exasperation, “What do women want?” Based on your understanding of at least three of the works we read this semester, how would you answer Freud’s question? Be sure to give a title to your essay.
What Women Want
by Richard H. Tracey
Some would say they want to get married and raise a family. Others want to “have it all.” I am not sure whether that is even possible, but it is the ideal pursued by some. I think the answer is more complicated than that.
It is hard to generalize about women, but I will try, because half of us are them, slightly more than a majority, and maybe even more than that according to demographic studies indicating that women live longer than men, and it is something like 50.2% versus 49.8% of the population. So technically it is possible that they could vote a woman president into office if they all stuck together.
When I think of Antigone, Major Barbara, The Death of Ivan Ilych, the Bible, and even Lucky Jim, looking for what they have in common, each woman is a unique individual, with an identity that sets them apart at the same time that they belong to a larger group, just like each of us who come from different backgrounds, and yet, as was mentioned in class, there is “unity in diversity” for despite our variegated pasts we share a “stake in humanity” by endeavoring to do the same little everyday things like brush our teeth, put on our clothes, and eat breakfast before we come to class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9 A.M. in Hartwick Hall.
Let me give an example. Of these various female characters. And what they want. Since that is the question. They all want to help. Antigone helps her brother, Barbara tries to help those whose souls need saving, Lady Britomart tries to help her family and herself, and Praskovya helps society by conforming with it. Also, Eve helps to fulfill human destiny by eating the apple, and Kurtz’s fiancée in Heart of Darkness wants to help the war effort in the Congo by honoring Kurtz and the sacrifices he made.
Thus, each of these four women leads an individual life, with individual desires that sets them apart. One desires the ordinary, one the extraordinary; one desires to save souls, and one wants to be the center of attention.
Yet they have one thing in common. Whatever they desire, each wants to succeed in that desire. And furthermore each goes to extremes to fulfill that desire. Praskovya ignores her husband’s death, Antigone hangs herself, Barbara accepts the entirely different philosophy of Undershaft, Eve bites into the apple and then brings it to Adam, not knowing what the consequences will be, and Margaret throws fits. Women, then, desire what she will, but always desires success.
Sadly there may come a time for each of them when enough has gone too far. But for whom could it be different?
Speaking personally, it is very hard to say what a woman wants. Freud would not have asked it if the answer was obvious. He would probably answer in terms of “sexual desire,” which I find hard to believe considering that sex is not necessarily overrated but is merely one facet of a life in which there are other aspects including quality of life issues (food, beer, having a pet, etc.), sports (football being the obvious example, but again this transcends gender, e.g. the U.S. women’s soccer team), politics (Hillary Clinton), and yes, even our studies, which may be the key to future success if affluence is the goal or if you want to get into law school, the Peace Corpse, or the foreign service, which has a test which I hear is a bitch.>>
For more of "Freud's Immortal Question," this link should direct you to The American Scholar (September 4, 2012).
In the Hollywood film of Carousel, Jacques d’Amboise—hemmed in on both sides by lines of dancers—suddenly takes off into a sequence of four precisely placed double air turns and then, reorganizing his focus, streams aloft into a leap, his legs beating before him as he sails. This is virtuoso ballet dancing, by any measure. However, it is a different kind of virtuosity than d’Amboise’s colleague, Edward Villella, displays as, say, Oberon in the film of Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Both men are performing classical steps with the same exactitude, but they aren’t performing them to the same effect. In his memoir, I Was A Dancer, d’Amboise makes it clear how much he admired his colleague’s dancing; Villella was at once his brother-in-arms and a nonpareil standard. And, in the twenty-four roles that Balanchine created for d’Amboise, not to speak of his casting and coaching of the latter in the title role of Apollo (for some devoted members of the NYCB audience, he was the definitive Balanchine Apollo), Balanchine made it clear how important d’Amboise was to him.
D’Amboise was a head taller than Villella, longer boned and less visibly muscled: The comparison might be a quarterback against a boxer. (Villella was an actual welterweight boxing champion at the New York Maritime Academy; he also lettered in baseball.) They both jumped high and landed with buoyancy, but Villella, with a more compact physique, put more torque into his preparations for jumping and turning. And although both men achieved brilliant batterie (the beating legs), it took the dancer with longer limbs a nanosecond more time to perform the opening and closing of his legs than it did his colleague. Villella’s beats, now legendary even on film where (as Villella’s greatest chronicler, the critic Arlene Croce, could have put it) they read as a blur, were slightly faster in fact, and the power of his movement made them register as much faster in effect. Villella’s feet also pointed more sharply than d’Amboise’s, making Villella’s beats seem extra-clear. There was something else. Villella performed classical allégro combinations with a phrasing that arrested their momentum at the height or most complex part of the step, giving a flashing photographic moment of stillness in the midst of motion that seemed almost unreal. (Among Balanchine’s ballerinas, Merrill Ashley achieved that effect, too.) Yet d’Amboise did not “stop” mid-stream that way; he showed the poses beautifully, but he displayed them in the course of the dance current. He didn’t enunciate them. And he didn’t show the sculptural power involved in initiating classical steps. He performed steps as conversational gestures, as elements in a larger song—and the song, with its unpredictable counts and uninflected climaxes, was written by George Gershwin for his good pal Fred Astaire, even when Gershwin was channeling the fantastical imagination of Fauré, the clinical intelligence of Stravinsky, the melodic raptures of Tchaikovsky, and even when his onstage figure was trying to learn to walk on the way to Parnassus or to catch a Sylph on the fly or to wrangle a Gypsy momentarily transforming herself from a lion to a lamb. I have always thought that Balanchine himself, who loved theatrical surprise and magic, either once danced or wanted to dance that way, perpetrating the illusion nightly, on union time, that the physical work of dancing could be shielded from the audience, as the entrances of his ballerinas are so often shielded from sight until, Presto!, there they be at center stage.
With respect to d’Amboise’s skills and sensitivity as a partner, I’d like to quote the dance historian and critic Janet Light, a member of NYCB’s audience going back to the 1950s (and, as a child, a student at SAB). Since I only began to look at the company in the mid-1960s, I asked her for her longer-lived impression of d’Amboise’s stage relationship to his ballerinas. She wrote as follows:
“Remembering the irresistible Jacques d’Amboise, it’s the person onstage that lingers with me, rather than Jacques in any one ballet or role. I think it’s connected to how he partnered many of Balanchine’s important ballerinas. He could shift the focus of his own performance to his partner, and the dedication of his attentiveness let the audience know there was no place else he would rather be. He could hold his own with them all while remaining generous and true: Squiring the witty Tanaquil LeClerq in Western Symphony’s rousing Fourth Movement; tracing wondrously a luminous Allegra Kent’s loosened hair in the haunting Afternoon of a Faun; punctuating with his wide stance and arms thrown back Melissa Hayden’s steely arabesque balances in Stars and Stripes’ hold-your-breath Fifth Campaign. Jacques d’Amboise became a star but seemed onstage a real person, meeting the challenges of a great repertory that shaped him into an artist, and in turn, helped dance in America take flight.”
In his memoir, d’Amboise—frequently admired as a partner yet always extending praise—wrote: “I loved viewing Conrad Ludlow. . .and the poetry he brought to a pas de deux.”
Jacques d’Amboise was beloved by audiences and much-honored for his art as a dancer and choreographer. He was also central to his family, and he enjoyed the knowledge that his own children—two of the four became successful dancers—esteemed him for his art as well as for his affection. Even so, he wasn’t awarded a MacArthur Foundation (“Genius”) Fellowship in 1984, the year he retired from performing, for his stage achievements. He received it as a Dance Educator, the founder of the National Dance Institute. The laurel was given to d’Amboise, a high-school drop-out (at age fifteen, he left both SAB and academic studies to join NYCB) who had analyzed what dancing is beyond the lines and extreme poses and the superstructure of the steps with names. D’Amboise taught dance as full-bodied gesture, action, energy the dancer learns to regulate instantaneously (“Precision and exactness are steps toward truth.”), all in service of two principles: to teach individuals how to relate to one another through rules of engagement, also known as decorum and respect, and to transfer the civilization one’s generation inherited to the generation poised to receive it. He taught himself how to offer these core principles to children as small as infants and adults of all ages, traditions, and walks of life so that they understand them and, most wonderfully of all, want to inhabit them.
Poetry has been important to NDI’s teaching and the performances of its school children because d’Amboise cherished it; he also practiced writing it. D’Amboise’s memoir is peppered with references to poets—Yeats, Auden, Yevtushenko, Hafiz (the fourteenth-century Persian master of the ghazal). You can also see him in his poet’s mode while he’s teaching dance to small children affiliated with NDI in a 4’06” film, on Vimeo: Jacques d’Amboise—Whispering Poetry, one of eight film portraits that director Nick Davis made in 2016 as part of larger project, called “Eight over Eighty,” about productivity while aging. I actually saw d’Amboise teaching in person that way around that period in an elementary school in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, as part of another project that I was up to. Even in 2016, his spine was curled forward as he walked, and I winced to see him hobble only a short distance.
Nevertheless, once he was demonstrating to the students what he wanted them to learn about arts and civilization, he was in the zone—alive, highly energized, sparking with ideas and imagery in an electrifying example of basic cultural pedagogy for elementary school beginners.
The Nick Davis film captures that transformation in four minutes through editing. Suddenly, d’Amboise is quoting, almost perfectly, Robert Burns: “See how Maria leads the dance! She’s life itself. / I never saw a foot so nimble and so eloquent. And the sweet, whispering Poetry it makes / Shames the musicians.” Or, suddenly, he’s showing a boy how gesture evolves from language. Pointing one of his little fingers to his own temple, he says, “In here, there’s a dream.” He lets the finger drift away from his body. Then, we’re watching him with the boy. Taking one of the boy’s hands, he points its little finger gently toward the child’s temple, saying, “In here, there’s a dream. Take it out (he guides the child’s hand around to where the boy can see it), “look at it” (the boy focuses on the tip of the finger, all at once a girl in the center of a circle focuses on her finger), and then d’Amboise whispers “and sending it up,” and we see an entire class, each student raising both arms carefully, hands with palms up, while she lifts her gaze toward them: Presto! Port de bras with a difference. D’Amboise begins a small peroration on why New York dancers are the best. The diverse class is entirely spellbound.
“I’ve always been happy,” d’Amboise ended his memoir. I’m not sure I believe him, but if that was the story that he told himself to function as the magician who enraptured those children with dancing and poetry, then who cares?
Barbara Henning, Selfie Photo on 11-1-20 at 4.44 PM
_________________________________________________________
Here We Are
Off to the stationery store on Avenue A
to buy paper and metal bookends.
At least 58 people died in Europe
this week in a brutal cold wave,
plunging temperatures to 17 degrees
below zero. When I step inside,
I'm suddenly phlegmy and coughing.
Blood starts pouring out of my
left nostril. A funny old woman
hidden inside a blue hooded coat
darts out the door. Republicans
point at the millions of immigrant
workers pouring into the country.
Then I look in the mirror and see
a funny looking old woman
with her head wrapped
like a mummy and a tissue stuck
in her nose. King Tut's mummy
was recently removed from
the sarcophagus, and placed
in a climate-controlled box
to be displayed at a museum in Luxor.
My husband often had a bloody nose.
Maybe we'll find each other
in another life. When I think of
losing my children, I feel my body
crack into pieces. China's cracking
down on subversive meditating
disciples of the Dalai Lama.
Be thankful for now, Barbara.
Today. This minute. Here we are.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Barbara Henning is the author of four novels and eight collections of poetry, most recently a collection of poems, Digigram (United Artists Books 2020) and a novel, Just Like That (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). She is also the editor of Prompt Book: Experiments for Writing Poetry and Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil 2021), as well as The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins (BV) and Looking Up Harryette Mullen (Belladonna). She is Professor Emeritus at Long Island University in Brooklyn. [“Here We Are” from A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press, 2015) is used by permission; © 2021 by Barbara Henning.]
________________________________________________________________________________________________
In this Nov. 4, 2007 file photo, Egypt's antiquities chief Dr. Zahi Hawass, center, supervises the removal of the mummy of King Tutankhamun from his stone sarcophagus in his underground tomb in the famed Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt. © REUTERS / Ben Curtis
I am looking at the world globe with my father.
He points and says: “This is where you are.”
“What do you mean? I am here with you,”
I respond, not understanding.
Father laughs: “You are here, but you are also there.”
“You mean there is a tiny copy of me who lives there?”
“No, I mean here is there.”
That did not make any sense, so I never learned geography.
Ishion Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. A contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, he is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other prizes. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, he now directs the graduate writing program at Cornell University.
I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Hutchinson via email about how great poems, by their nature, console us while they also judge us severely. We also discussed the relationship between poetry and melody, the intersection of sound and meaning, and the necessity of becoming a “kindler” ― a fierce agitator against injustice, burning like kindle, always firmly fixed in the altruistic spirit of the root word kind.
Why do you write poems?
I write poems because it is my calling.
What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course?
In all those cases you’ve named, it’s the work of language to assert justice which is most pressing. Poetry is certainly central to that assertion, but whether in a gubernatorial way, to use a clumsy phrase, is at best questionable. What isn’t questionable is that the best poems give us consolation while, at the same time, they judge us severely. The way poems judge us is to demand that our capacity to imagine, which is to say our conscience, be more alive to the world and to never settle on a single view of it.
Still, I don't believe poetry tells “our present society” how to enact the things you’ve outlined.
What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?
If a poem is happening, then it is its own most radical thing, whether that poem might be the beautiful indignation of Robert Hayden’s miniature epic “The Middle Passage,” or the seemingly chaste lyric of Robert Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Dress” (you can imagine the poetic inventiveness that goes into just the word “liquefaction” to capture the movement of silk!). It takes courage to do such making.
But I believe it takes an even greater courage to come to such making. Consider, for instance, that right now in Belarus and Myanmar poets are being killed and jailed for doing their work, poets who might be just writing about the movement of silk or bearing witness to governmental tyranny: in both cases, they continue to find the courage to write poems of integrity. Poets the world over, in less extreme circumstances, struggle to do their work with as much integrity. Sometimes they fail. And yet they find the courage to write poems. So every resonate poem is a radical thing, and an act of courage.
Your work is often praised for its musicality, intensity, and nerve. Of your collection House of Lords and Commons, literary critic John Freeman writes, “What nerve and music his poems possess, how beautifully they chart the poet’s search.” The poet Ilya Kaminsky writes that “Hutchinson comes to us from the country called music, he stuns the reader with the sheer symphony of his sentences.” He goes on to remark on the “choral presence” of multiple tonalities within your poems. Poet Henri Cole writes that your “hammered language has a jazzy, classical, rough, painterly beauty.” It seems no reviewer can speak of your poetry without invoking music. What, in your opinion, is the relationship between poetry and melody? And what exists at the intersection of sound and meaning? Of language and art?
I’m always seeking in the melody of my poem what Pound calls melopoeia: which he defines, rather obliquely, as when “the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.” That the words are charged is what gives a poem its essential tension, and that charge is a definite resistance of the typical “sweet music” sense of melody which might not bear into account the fraught, ethical nature of words. I say “definite” then because the poem is a conscious act of interweaving unheard melodies embedded in words, so a hearer might hear what is not there in “their plain meaning.”
Actually, what’s not there but heard in those words are, I think, the “intersections” you referred to. In fact, these overlapping intersections make every poem an occasion of meaning. It’s in these intersections the reader of goodwill will find meaning on multiple registers. She will find herself there, too, magnified at a slightly elevated pitch.
In a lecture at the Newcastle Poetry Festival 2019, you explored Frederick Douglass’s legacy, and what the idea of legacy means, through a close reading of poems by W.E.B. Dubois and Robert Hayden—and ultimately, you invited us all to become “kindlers.” What does it mean to be a kindler, and why is such an endeavor meaningful and important?
The kindler idea I draw from a magnificent long poem by Frederick Douglass called, “The Tyrants’ Jubilee!,” from the line, “the fire thus kindled, may be kindled again” which became the title of my lecture. To be a kindler is to be someone involved deeply in the unfinished business of emancipation, to be the fierce-minded liberty lover Douglass was, to agitate in our moment against injustice, however construed. The agitation must be fierce, burning like kindle, but it must be fixed in the altruistic spirit of the root word kind.
Your most recent book of poems, House of Lords and Commons, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and was named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2016. Poet Susan Stewart describes the collection as “the pure line of poetry, shaped by [Hutchinson’s] sun-lit vision and music,” adding that, “House of Lords and Commons has been wrested from suffering and cruelty, irony and violence. And, in the end, it is an act of forgiveness.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection?
The collection was published five years ago, so it’s no longer so new. I like that you asked about ambitions, and what I recall, to give a very drastic summary, is my attempt to explore the different breaches of the relationship between civil polity and poetry. What that crack-up sounds like? As I was doing most of the listening from this country, many of the poems became about arranging the psychic pressures between home and abroad.
What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?
Really too many to name. The anthologies of those centuries, and not only in English, are my favorite to read. I return a lot to this stunning compilation of work from the pamphlet wars of the 17th—a favorite is Elizabeth Cellier’s Malice Defeated, a title I wish to steal one day. Milton is a constant, of course, especially his 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica. But of late I’ve been reading a lot of Milton’s younger contemporary, Lucy Hutchinson.
No way, again, a stable and short answer can be given to the question of what their work has awakened in me. I feel the raw alchemy of the intelligence and imagination of their fractious time working on my mind in the very syntax of their writing. Something gets transmuted, and usually whatever that it is, it has strong “relevance” to our contemporary moment. You need only to read, for instance, the first sentence of Milton’s Areopagitica to see what I mean.
What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?
I’m working on a collection of essays, due out next year. My Douglass lecture will be included, so I’m excited about that, the chance to get it right or as close to right as possible.
Alison C. Rollins' debut collection, Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), is one of the most spectacular first books I have ever read. The first poem I read from her, "Why Is We Americans," was published in Poetry magazine several years ago. The poem can be found in full here.
The following is an entry from a reading notebook that I keep, in which I respond to poems and passages of prose. Here is what I wrote about "Why Is We Americans" several years ago. If this interests you, pick up a copy of her amazing first book and prepare to be amazed.
Alison C. Rollins’ “Why Is We Americans” begins as a riff on a line (and title) from the late work of Amiri Baraka; Rollins extrapolates the Baraka line into an anaphora-patterned meditation on notions of national belonging particular to the African American experience. The poet interweaves images from canonical western literature (“Walden pond,” “Jesus,” “Whitman,” “Orpheus,” “Darwin”) with images from the African American church (“the Pastor’s chattering chicklets,” “Psalm 23,” “mouths / washed out with the blood of the lamb”), and allusions to jazz music (“Roach and Mingus at Birdland,” Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamned,” and the concluding couplet, which references Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and raises the specter of lynching in a powerful way). The poem is as triumphant as it is incantatory, elevating sometimes mundane and sometimes extraordinary tropes into a profound celebration of Blackness. The vibrant surprising diction and the regular deployment of AAVE syntax imbue the poem with an astonishing energy at every turn: “We is clubbin’ woolly mammoths/ upside the head, jammin’ fingers in / Darwin’s white beard”; lines like these drive the poem forward with their sonic textures while continuing a critique of the exploitative and oppressive practices that vertebrae American life and American history. I love this poem. I feel like I could live in it forever—the explosive musicality of it, the joy of it, the strangeness of it. It is everything I look for in a poem: it is canny and subversive in its metapoetic view of American literature and culture, and it is infused with a hard earned duende that renders it unforgettable.
Your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
-- by Charles Bukowski
Read more about Charles Bukowski here.
What you gonna do when you get out of jail?
I'm gonna have some fun
And what do you consider fun?
Fun, natural fun
The Genius of Love, Tom Tom Club
I got a thrill when the Atelier de Paris’ newsletter appeared in my inbox the other day.
“Thrill”?
Aren’t thrills reserved for moments of life, like the moment when I first touched the cool, dry hand of the – these days – pale, vaguely adipose, woman just behind me, limbs lopping deadlike off our blood-red Récamier?
The livelong day now, this woman hogs the whole of our empty ceiling with her disgruntled stare. The stare, I must say, in its hint of godlike irony, is a work of esthetic genius.
I get up, bend my face over hers so I can kiss her and she me.
We do. Tamed it may be, but a thrill is there, here and now. This is a moment: here and now. Of course, by the time I sit back down and she’s reverted to her esthetic state, we’ve both forgotten the thrill and the moment – it wouldn’t make evolutionary sense if we spent every blessed moment savoring the thrill of it.
God’s bones, we get little enough done as it is.
True science observes, anyhow, that moments are the twisted skeins of a life, the bosons of a thing of talking flesh. Smollett demonstrates that thrill is the invisible but sensible ether that jolts a life this way and also that and thus visibles the otherwise fleeting moment.
Four years ago now, the Circassian (artist-acrobat) Cécile Mont-Reynaud, whose high-wire performance as Fate thrice-personified in her performance La Fileuse (“Yarning”), proved all this beyond a doubt in front of the public library Romain Rolland in the eastern suburb of Romainville, now served by the number 11 line. Karine was there and, if you can get her attention, she’ll vouch for it from our blood-red Récamier, reading from the stippled whitewash of the naked ceiling.
“A medusa, a mop,” I wrote as Mont-Reynaud’s skeins visibled in the senible ether, “A fleeting moment, lampshade merry-go-round, a cocoon, a caterpillar turned weeping willow, a shower of rain, a pinata, a bird’s gilded golden cage, a trunk, an obstacle course of visibled bosons, a raging sea, a maypole, a ladder of knots or a knot of ladders, a spherical stair of golden hair... an uneasy plinth-cum-diving board to address the gods and reason men, slip knots, electric wires, cords and dis-chords, strands of muscle. Swing through string: What a thrill.”
There you have it.
Memory only makes it seem thrills make moments or vice versa. But thrill is a moment here and there and everywhere. And memory? Another subject.
So, I felt a thrill the moment I saw the Atelier’s newsletter in my in-box.
Not because choreographers’ Liz Santoro and Joanne Leighton figured there, although they do. But because I suddenly realized that the Atelier’s message – “No live performance”– has, after more than a year of crise sanitaire – has suddenly become the general one.
The simple negative thrills because until now, under the guise of a performer’s traditional declaration of loyalty to performance - “The show must go on!”, there’s been a lot of confusion and delusion about just what “live” performance is or can be.
Suddenly, whether because audiences came to understand why they go to the trouble of going to live in-personperformance or because producers realize that the live-and-in-person they mean can’t actually translate to pixels, the confusion seems to be over.
It has become pretty clear to everyone that “live performance” means “in-person performance” - the thrill of live performance is the moment of being there with creation and creators.
We should all keep the thrill of being there with in mind in the coming weeks and months. We may find ourselves arguing hard to keep on being there with – when there are so many “cheaper” alternatives.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Do’s and Don’t’s
Tony Bennett said it was Frank Sinatra who told him, "Steal from one person and it's plagiarism. Steal from everybody and it's research."
“Keep a strict eye
on eulogistic &
dyslogistic adjectives,”
Lewis (C.S.) advised
Tynan (Kenneth).
“They shd diagnose
(not merely blame)
& distinguish
(not merely praise).”
“Almost any noun is better
alone than chaperoned
if it is the right noun,
and very few can stand
two adjectives” --Pound
to Parker Tyler, ‘35--
“‘Unsettled dream’
is stronger than
‘unsettled white dream’.”
Precision and economy of language
are virtues this author recommends
when writing poems,
but finds difficult
to put into practice.
“It’s more important,”
Ornette Coleman once said,
“to play the correct
feeling
than the correct note.”
“Some of the time,"
to quote Chuck Close,
“you know you’re cooking;
the rest of the time,
you just do it.”
Or as the handbook
on improvisation
for church organ advises:
"Do not be afraid
of being wrong;
just be afraid of being
uninteresting."
________________________________________________________________________________________
Mark Pawlak is the author of nine poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies. His latest book is Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals (Hanging Loose). His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, and Polish. My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov, a memoir, is forthcoming in 2021 from MadHat Press.
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(1)
At times like this, I feel sorry for postal workers.
It must be very stressful to be one.
To always have to sort things out while thinking of viruses.
One can easily distinguish a postal worker who thinks of viruses from the one who doesn't.
Those who think wear gloves and masks. But most of them do not; most of them are young and careless.
At the beginning of the pandemic, an entire hotel in China that was converted into a hospital for coronavirus patients had collapsed suddenly, killing everyone inside.
How does a building suddenly collapse?
How does a human being?
What is the breaking point?
What is that something, usually insignificant in itself, that makes all the difference between life and death?
I think of Sylvia Plath.
How she returned to her dirty home (her housekeeper left), overwhelmed by unhappiness, with her two small children always in need of her care.
If she had returned to a spotlessly clean and welcoming house instead of a messy one full of dirty dishes and laundry, would she still have killed herself?
Perhaps, but maybe not then.
Maybe the breaking point would still hold a while longer.
(2)
Last year there was a postal worker who was overwhelmed by his responsibilities of daily deliveries of packages.
He just had too many parcels to deliver to too many houses and not enough time allotted to do so.
Even if he worked past his hours, he still could not manage all deliveries and be often scolded by his superiors for the delays.
At first, he kept undelivered packages in the trunk of his car in hopes of delivering them the next day, but the next day he would have a new bunch of boxes, and soon the trunk of his car was too full.
After a while, he gave up on the idea of being able to deliver everything, so he left all packages he could not deliver in a shed next to his house.
He hoped to deliver them one day when his daily load would be lighter, but such a day never came.
After a while, the shed was full of packages, and he had to keep the new ones in the garage.
He never opened the boxes.
In his mind, he never stole them, he just kept them for better delivery times.
It was not his fault that better times were slow in coming.
Nobody appreciated any of his past accomplishments (for he did make numerous safe and timely deliveries) when police discovered his shed and his garage full of packages belonging to other people.
He tried to argue that the packages didn't belong to anyone – they were still in transit on the way to their final destination, but some of them were in transit for over a year and, after all that time, were considered missing in action like lost soldiers.
(3)
Sometimes my poor head makes me feel like the trunk of this poor man's car with too many deliveries scheduled in too short a time, and I feel like giving up.
At night, I stare into all these packages in my head.
I try to imagine what lies within each.
I look at the names of people and imagine them as characters in my book.
Then the clock chimes and reminds me that it is too late for everything.
Too late even to try.
(4)
A dog doesn't know if something is too late.
Unless it's related to food.
Because, as far as a dog is concerned, food always comes too late and never too early.
(5)
Life is mostly unbearable. And full of wonders.
Partially, it is unbearable because it is full of wonders.
Just think of all the undelivered wonders the postal worker kept in his garage.
But many wonders would not fit into any packaging and can't be delivered because they are just too great.
Like the night when Venus and the moon were so close together, and we sat on the bench next to the ocean and felt so happy about the present moment that it also felt sad.
Great happiness is always sad because it overflows and spills into sadness; happy sadness because it is just too vast to stay happy.
The chorus of frogs after the storm is like that.
Also Gesualdo's music and the Montserrat cathedral – you almost hate it, it's so beautiful.
A good book feels like that: overflowing without beginning or ending, even without a middle, happening all at once and about everything and nothing in particular.
The only thing that separates a good book from nonexistence is its two covers: that's not much of protection from nothingness, not much at all.
I have been the poetry editor at DIALOGIST since 2016. Working with Michael Loruss, the founder and managing editor, over the past several years has been one of the great lights in my life in poetry. Together, we have published and promoted many challenging, beautiful, wild, and necessary poems.
I love every poem we publish, and I am always amazed by the quality of the submissions we receive. We’ve been publishing a poem a week since 2019. Here are links to 10 poems I can’t live without (listed in no particular order). Below each poem, I’ve provided a short note on what I love about it. An audio recording by the poet accompanies most of the poems.
Check these poems out and look at our archives here.
To all the poets we’ve published over the last five years, thank you for sending us such brilliant work.
1) “Brazo” by Darren Donate
Note: The poem includes some disturbing photographic images of an injury (the poem is about the poet’s father, whose arm was injured doing factory work). It's such an amazing poem, reminiscent of Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, in some aspects of its concrete/visual grammar. It’s an incredible poem about immigration, labor, family, and notions of national belonging.
2) “[Circumcise my heart, o genderqueer God.]” by Elana Lev Friedland
This heady sonnet, in direct dialogue with poems by John Donne and Meg Day, completely rends me every time I read it. This poem maps all types of kinships and identifications with a fluidity and grace that is unforgettable. I can’t wait until Friedland has a full-length collection.
3) “Your Quaint Conceit” by Alina Stefanescu
Roethke woke to sleep and took his waking slow. Stefanescu begins this poem: “I wake to cheap ontology.” What follows exhilarates and challenges. I’ve read Stefanescu’s poetry in other journals and when I see her name, I always know I’m going to love the poem I’m about to read. Consider the fifth stanza: “To appease is not apostrophe / but a rich bisque of climax, the cauldron / of yearn kept stirred.” See what I mean.
4) “Grief box” by Katie Richards
This long ambitious poem about motherhood, suburbia, and suicidal ideation, is imbued with the spirit of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. “Grief box” is a tour de force, a virtuoso performance that will haunt you.
5) “sermon” by Shaina Phenix
In this poem, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye collides with The Gospel According to Matthew to spectacular effect. Phenix explores the intersections between race, misogyny, and religion with great intelligence and with profound lyricism.
6) “POEM WRITTEN ON FATHER’S DAY” by Grace Q. Song
Song’s poem, equal parts thorn and salt, is a father-daughter poem I would put side by side with “Poem For My Father” by Toi Derricotte, “How Many Times” by Marie Howe, and “In Honor Of David Anderson Brooks, My Father” by Gwendolyn Brooks. When I think of father-daughter poems, I often think of Jason Shinder’s great anthology More Light: Father & Daughter Poems: A Twentieth-Century American Selection (Harvest Books, 1993). A twenty-first century anthology of the same kind would do well to include Song’s masterful poem.
7) “He Asked What Made My Brain Do That Thing Where I End Up On the Floor With The World Ending” by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick.
I love a long expository title, and Hardwick’s title is one of the most memorable ones I’ve ever encountered. This poem is a tornado, a night-blooming cereus in a greenhouse—ample, frenetic, interior as any a journeywork of stars.
8) “sunflowers: a myth, a painting” by Michelle Donahue
This textbox prose poem elides the phenomenological approaches of Gauguin and Van Gogh. It is achingly lovely, an ear to the earth. That other poet of sunflowers, William Blake, would approve.
9) “unpeeled” by Alli Cruz
This complicated, brilliantly written poem about sex, violence, misogyny, rape culture, and young adulthood should be required reading for every college freshman across the country. I look forward to reading great poems from Cruz for many years to come.
10) “COMPLETE” by Troy Varvel
Varvel’s powerhouse exploration of stuttering would make Robert Graves’ Claudius applaud. From its first line, “COMPLETE” explodes into alterior fluencies that affirm the beauty of the speaker at the poem’s center. The poem disavows normative speech patterns and offers up a searing and original music that always undoes me.
Vladimir Nabokov's poem about "Superman of the Funnies," written in June 1942, has surfaced and been published in London's Times Literary Supplement. Nabokov sent the poem to The New Yorker, whose poetry editor, Charles Pearce, rejected it, saying "Most of us [at the magazine] appear to feel that many of our readers wouldn't quite get it. And then, too, there is the problem you foresaw about the lines in the middleof the poem."
Nabokov had conceded that the poem, about the man of steel's explosive wedding night, might be "too risqué." -- DL
The Man of To-morrow’s Lament
I have to wear these glasses – otherwise,
when I caress her with my super-eyes,
her lungs and liver are too plainly seen
throbbing, like deep-sea creatures, in between
dim bones. Oh, I am sick of loitering here,
a banished trunk (like my namesake in “Lear”),
but when I switch to tights, still less I prize
my splendid torso, my tremendous thighs,
the dark-blue forelock on my narrow brow,
the heavy jaw; for I shall tell you now
my fatal limitation … not the pact
between the worlds of Fantasy and Fact
which makes me shun such an attractive spot
as Berchtesgaden, say; and also not
that little business of my draft; but worse:
a tragic misadjustment and a curse.
I’m young and bursting with prodigious sap,
and I’m in love like any healthy chap –
and I must throttle my dynamic heart
for marriage would be murder on my part,
an earthquake, wrecking on the night of nights
a woman’s life, some palmtrees, all the lights,
the big hotel, a smaller one next door
and half a dozen army trucks – or more.
But even if that blast of love should spare
her fragile frame – what children would she bear?
What monstrous babe, knocking the surgeon down,
would waddle out into the awestruck town?
When two years old he’d break the strongest chairs,
fall through the floor and terrorize the stairs;
at four, he’d dive into a well; at five,
explore a roaring furnace – and survive;
at eight, he’d ruin the longest railway line
by playing trains with real ones; and at nine,
release all my old enemies from jail,
and then I’d try to break his head – and fail.
So this is why, no matter where I fly,
red-cloaked, blue-hosed, across the yellow sky,
I feel no thrill in chasing thugs and thieves –
and gloomily broad-shouldered Kent retrieves
his coat and trousers from the garbage can
and tucks away the cloak of Superman;
and when she sighs – somewhere in Central Park
where my immense bronze statue looms – “Oh, Clark …
Isn’t he wonderful!?!”, I stare ahead
and long to be a normal guy instead.
Vladimir Nabokov
June 1942
Times Literary Supplement (March 2021)
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/superman-returns-poem-vladimir-nabokov-andrei-babikov/
see also the write-up in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/04/vladimir-nabokovs-superman-poem-published-for-the-first-time
"my namesake in Lear": Kent
When Denise Duhamel checked her spam folder for the first time in years, she found that so many women, mistaking her for a heterosexual man, had been leaving her messages. When she saw the subject heading “I LOVE SEX IN ALL ITS FORMS,” she immediately thought of her favorite poetry form, the “pantoum.” Here is a found pantoum from her new book Second Story (University of Pittsburgh Press).
“I LOVE SEX IN ALL ITS FORMS”
--Spam email from Mindy
Hi big guy. I’m lonely and wet.
Being in love—a blessing or a curse?
My boner brew will make you a better screw.
I just added three new naked photos.
Being in love—a blessing or a curse?
Text me. I guarantee we’ll have a blast!
I just added three new naked photos.
Want to hear me talk dirty in my luscious British accent?
Text me. I guarantee we’ll have a blast!
What should I do? I’m married but only want you!
Want to hear me talk dirty in my luscious British accent?
Need a hot date with a sexy lady?
What should I do? I’m married but only want you!
We don’t have to explain ourselves to anyone.
Need a hot date with a sexy lady?
I’m gorgeous and only 2.8 miles away.
We don’t have to explain ourselves to anyone.
Are you man enough to rock my world?
I’m gorgeous and only 2.8 miles away.
Here are some other girls you might like.
Are you man enough to rock my world?
I’ll prove to you we’re the perfect match.
Here are some other girls you might like.
Don’t forget to leave space in your life for me.
I’ll prove to you we’re the perfect match.
Are you available? Literally or metaphorically?
Don’t forget to leave space in your life for me.
It’s raining men, and I need one.
Are you available? Literally or metaphorically?
My boner brew will make you a better screw.
It’s raining men, and I need one.
Hi big guy. I’m lonely and dry.
This poem originally appeared in Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal at Washington College.
-- sdl
April 21 [1998]
"I’m a very average person,
and I think most people are.
I vote with the common man.
I have two kids, a boy and a girl.
Last Sunday I played golf with the boss.
Hey, it beats working.
I’m his wife. I may be brainless but
I’m her husband. I played golf with her
Last Sunday I played golf with the boss
and it was the first warm morning in May
and like every other moron driving a lawnmower
I’m their husband. I may be brainless but
I’m their wife. I’m their mother.
I have two kids, a boy and a girl,
and it was the first warm morning in May
and I think most people are
like every other moron driving a lawnmower.
I’m a very average person.
I vote with the common man.
Hey, it beats working.
-- from The Daily Mirror (2000), a selection of 150 poems written on the poem-a-day regimen. Cover art by Larry Rivers. Collage on top by Alan Ziegler and Stacey Harwood.
With Steph Curry swishing three-pointers into the bucket by the bucket, I was reminded of this piece from 2015, in which Tom Meschery said, "I can’t stop writing little haikus about Steph Curry," and thought it might be time for a rerun because more people should know about Meschery. If you don't have time for the whole piece, scroll down to his poem "Working Man." It's a stunner.
Bio Note #1: Tom Meschery was born in Manchuria and spent five childhood years in a Japanese internment camp. He received an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where his teachers included Mark Strand, Marvin Bell, and Helen Chasin. After Iowa, Tom ran a bookstore, taught for Poets in the Schools, and did physical labor before receiving his teaching credentials. He joined the faculty of Reno High School, where he taught Advanced Placement English and creative writing for 25 years; he also taught at Sierra College. Tom is the author of several books of poetry, including Nothing We Lose Can Be Replaced, Some Men, and Sweat: New and Selected Poems About Sports; he has also published the nonfiction Caught in the Pivot. In 2001 he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
Bio Note #2: Tom Meschery was born in Manchuria and spent five childhood years in a Japanese internment camp. He was an All-American basketball player in high school and college, and an NBA All Star. He played ten years, mostly for The Warriors (first in Philadelphia and then in San Francisco) and later for the Seattle Supersonics, appearing in two NBA Finals. His #31 has been retired by Saint Mary’s College (where his career rebounding record stood for 48 years), as has his #14 by the Warriors. Tom coached the Carolina Cougars and was the assistant coach for the Portland Trailblazers. In 2003 he was inducted into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame.
I’ve been fascinated by Tom Meschery since I heard about a former NBA star, whose name was often prefixed with “hard-nosed,” turning from personal fouls to personal poems. I started a list of “athletes who write poetry” for use with reluctant students when I toured high schools. Not long after my father died in 2001, I was moved and impressed by Tom’s poem “Working Man," in which he addresses his late father (more about this later). Over the years, I have read the poem to several of my Columbia classes, and one day a student said: “He was my high school English teacher!” Interesting.
Recently, I talked to Tom (while he was recovering from his second shoulder replacement surgery); this piece is based on that conversation and other sources (see note on bottom).
Manchuria to the NBA
Thomas Nicholas Meschery was born Tomislav Nikolayevich Mescheryakov. His father was a hereditary officer in Admiral Kolchak’s Army. His mother was the daughter of Vladimir Nicholayavich, who participated in Kornilov’s failed coup against Kerensky: “My grandpa was put under arrest in the Winter Palace. Together with Nicholas II.” Tom’s mother was related to the poet Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (second cousin to Leo).
Tom’s parents met, in exile, in Manchuria, and Tom was born in 1938. In 1939, Tom’s father went ahead to San Francisco; his mother was to follow with Tom and his sister when they obtained the necessary papers. They were awaiting voyage on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Mescheryakovs were placed in a Tokyo-area internment camp for women and children, where “there was no suffering” and they were fed well. Towards the end of the war, the guards gave them the rejects from intercepted Red Cross packages (lots of spam).
They finally made it to San Francisco. In “A Small Embrace,” Tom writes in his mother’s voice addressing him; the poem ends:
a voice kept yelling over the loudspeaker: citizens to the left,
stateless to the right. A band was playing something cheerful.
You pointed to the wrong father. I to the wrong husband.
Tom’s weak English was mitigated by his size and athletic prowess. He became a star basketball player at Lowell High School, where he developed his game in a modest facility that was “full of shadows” with a corduroy floor and wood backboards.
[from] Lowell High
Our coach, who was as old as the building,
Taunted and inspired us, swore and cajoled us,
He taught us to play without frills.
We became red brick and corduroy
And learned to see through shadows.
Tom went on to be a two-time All-American at St. Mary’s College, and was drafted in the first round by the Philadelphia Warriors. On March 2, 1962, in a game played in Hershey Pennsylvania, Wilt Chamberlain and Tom combined for 116 points in a 169-147 victory over the Knicks. Wilt scored 100. The game was not televised, but Tom wrote a poem about it.
[from] The 100 Point Game
That night through the fourth quarter
in that mad scramble for history
we all passed the ball the full length
of the court to Wilt, straight and high
into the dark around the rafters
Tom played for 10 seasons, averaging 12.7 points and 8.6 rebounds. His stat line in Game 7 of the Eastern Division finals is particularly impressive: 48 minutes, 32 points, 11 rebounds, 2 assists, and only 3 personal fouls.
The NBA to Iowa
Tom's first collection, Over the Rim, was published while he was an active player, and the cartoon on the back of his 1970-71 playing card is captioned “Tom is a writer of poetry.”
But, Tom says, his reading had been confined to earlier Russian and British and classic American verse, and the poems in Over the Rim were “ordinary” and “didn’t test limits or push parameters.” This began to change at a poker game. "Mark Strand was teaching at the University of Washington while I was playing for the Sonics, and I met him at a poker game run by a couple of professors.” Strand invited Tom to sit in on his class when the team was in town, and he got his “first exposure to contemporary American poetry.”
Meschery and Strand became good friends and, while Tom was coaching Carolina, the two met for dinner when the Cougars were in town to play the Nets. Tom complained about his coaching job (he titled a poem "Why I Was a Terrible Coach"), and Strand advised, “Well, if you hate it that much get the hell out of there.” He told Tom he’d write a recommendation for Iowa. In Tom’s subsequent book about his coaching year, Caught in the Pivot, he writes, “Mark told us about the number of poets who are frustrated jocks. Here I am a jock who’s a frustrated poet.”
Tom was accepted and quit his job. He and his then-wife (the novelist Joanne Meschery) packed up with their three small children and moved to Iowa, where he had “two great years. I just loved it. From then on I just couldn’t stop writing poetry.” But the transition wasn’t easy. “For the first six months I was pretty timid, I sneaked around and sat in the back of the workshops. I felt very unsure of myself.” The turning point came when he studied with Helen Chasin. “She was the first one who really said, ‘You’re not too bad you can do this, don’t hesitate to talk.’” Tom “became more confident, experimental, she gave me a bunch of poets to read and said imitate.” Classmate Michael Waters remembers, “Tom was without pretensions, itself remarkable in the Workshop, and generous with his praise."
The Mad Russian and the Sweet and Generous Man
As a basketball player, Tom Meschery was known as the Mad Russian. One game, Tom tried to stay out of trouble by swearing in Russian, but eventually a referee called him for a technical based on his “intonation.” Tom’s on-court anger often went beyond words. He told an interviewer, “If I was elbowed I elbowed twice.” Former teammate Al Attles says, “His eyes would start rolling around in his head if somebody did something to him on the floor and he’d lose it …”
In the Moment
The whistle blows
and I am caught
between curbing my anger
or hitting the player
who just fouled me.
Oh, what the hell, I say.
But the hostility remained on the court. During Tom’s rookie year, Tom Heinsohn of the Celtics bloodied his eye with a right cross. After the game, they ran into each other in the tavern below Boston Garden, drank some beers, and wound up talking about painting: “[Heinsohn] said he painted in the Wyeth School.” Tom wasn’t always the smartest fighter. While playing for Golden State, he tried to punch his former teammate and close friend Chamberlain (then with the Lakers). Tom recalls, “It was cartoonish. I couldn’t reach him— he was holding my head.”
[from] Tom Heinsohn
Today I write poems and admire the back-light
in Wyeth’s painting of the yellow dog sunning himself
in the window and think that the violence
we made together was the work of artists
Iowa classmate Michael Ryan says about Tom, “His heart and spirit and sheer gusto were as big as he was. And that's saying something. What a sweet and generous man.” When Kyle Smith—now the head coach of the Columbia University Lions—was an assistant at Saint Mary’s, he got to know Tom first through his presence that “loomed in the folklore of the alums as his jersey hung in the rafters. He was known as the ‘Mad Russian.’ Once I met the man, I do not think there could have been a more inappropriate nickname. Far from Mad, Tom Meschery is a prince of a human being who once physically touched people on the court who touched the hearts of his students and loved ones. I am sure the Christian Brothers who educated him at Saint Mary's would be so proud to see someone who has embodied the Lasallian spirit of the school motto ‘enter to learn, leave to serve.’”
The modern game is much calmer, due in part to every moment being televised and players protecting huge salaries.
After Meditating
(for Phil Jackson)
I return to your book, Sacred Hoops
and I think, perhaps you’ve discovered
the secret to the modern game,
the centered-self each player can achieve
with right-breathing, as if the soul
were a tight muscle in need of stretching.
Team mantras, spiritual championships.
If only I’d known
I didn’t have to throw that elbow
at LaRusso or stalk Chet Walker
to his locker room, spoiling for a fight,
or take a swing at Wilt,
while my breathless teammates
feared for my life.
All I had to do was breathe
my way out of anger.
Lungs instead of fists.
Writing workshops are non-contact endeavors (physically), but Tom recalls that at Iowa “a fight erupted in our kitchen” between a concrete poet and a traditional poet during a poker party. “Raymond Carver broke the fight up.” Michael Waters said it was the only time he saw Tom angry: “Tom had placed a huge glass bowl filled with scoops of Baskin-Robbins ice cream—all their flavors—on his dining room table, and the ice cream slowly melted into a deep rainbow sludge while folks stood around outside, calming down, wondering if the party would continue. I always remember that ice cream when I think of Tom.”
The Court to the Desk
After Iowa, Tom tried coaching again, this time as the assistant to Portland’s player-coach Lenny Wilkins, a former teammate (#18, below). Bill Walton (#32) was also on the team. At the time, the FBI was searching for Patty Hearst—the kidnapped heiress who helped rob a bank—and Bill Walton had been questioned by the FBI (there was no connection). Michael Waters recalls that Tom would “invite me to games, let me stay with him in his hotel room, and beg me not to make jokes about Patty Hearst hiding in his bathroom.”
When Wilkins lost his coaching job, Tom left the game. He had a “hard transition from professional sports. Ran a bookstore for three years, painted houses, rock work.” To pick up a little extra money, Tom “got hooked up with the poets in the schools—a week gig here and there, elementary, middle, high school, take over an English class. I just loved it. I really liked high school kids. They were on the verge of being mature, at the same time they were still wonderfully naïve, full of piss and vinegar.”
Tom earned his teaching credentials at the University of Nevada, and, while waiting for a teaching position, he spent six months coaching in Africa, where he had made previous trips for the USIA during his playing days.
Republic of the Congo
Entering the airport, the soldier
guarding the passport booth
can’t be more than fifteen years old.
He’s holding a rifle at port arms
a cigarette dangling from his lips.
Above him, a banner in red print reads:
A Bas Les Americains! Down with Americans!
"Don’t worry,” the Embassy man says,
“They don’t mean basketball players.”
Given Tom’s subsequent success as a teacher, one might expect him to have developed a love for coaching, but his competitive fire had no outlet on the bench, especially when his players didn’t approach the game with the same intensity he had. “The blindness that I have felt so often when I become enraged was beginning to cloud my eyes,” he wrote in Caught in the Pivot. Before one game, he “tried something different. I walked into the locker room and told the players to discuss the game among themselves and to come out when they were ready to play.” This didn’t turn into a transformational moment when all the swearing and cajoling take hold. Instead, “They came out all right and we got bombed…”
Teaching high school English provided Tom with an “intensity of experience” without the warfare. He has said, “In basketball you always have to be on. I think that's also true as a teacher. Every day is like a new game. The game starts at 8 in the morning and the final buzzer rings at 2:10.”
Tom was known for his tough exams and generosity of spirit. “It was the advice for life, beyond English, that was by far the greatest gift Tom gave me,” posted one student on Rate My Teachers, and another wrote, “I like all the poems we read, he's really flexible too he puts his big leg up on his desk while he's standing it’s cool.”
Now retired, Tom says, “I miss them terribly.” He kept seating charts and is “pondering putting together a project to find out what happened to 20 or 30 kids.”
Tom and His Father
[from] Reasons to Teach
…And my father, old immigrant,
believer in misery, could not believe
they did pay good money for a game, for work
you didn’t hate and come home weak from drudgery.
“Sport.” The word flew from his mouth like spit.
Tom and his father had a strained relationship and, after Tom was drafted in the first round by the Warriors, “he just said to me, ‘What kind of work is this for a man?’” His father died while Tom was serving a stint in the Army and he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. “That always stayed with me. I always carried my father around in me, so I wasn’t surprised that when I started to write about myself as a basketball player that it translated very quickly into a poem about my father.”
Working Man
I admit sleeping in late at the Hilton,
ordering room service, handing out
big tips while your kind of men
were opening their lunch buckets.
You would have scolded me:
"Что это за работа для человека?"
“What kind of work is this for a man?"
Old immigrant, I admit all of this
too late. You died before I could explain
sportswriters call me a journeyman.
They write I roll up my sleeves
and go to work. They use words
like hammer and muscle to describe me.
For three straight years on the job
my nose collapsed. My knees ached
and I could never talk myself out of less
than two injuries at a time. Father,
you would have been proud of me:
I labored in the company of large men.
An earlier version of the poem ends with “I labored in the company of tall men,” but Tom changed it because “When you think of Chamberlain and Moses Malone, they weren’t just tall they were really large,” as was his father.
Tom didn’t let his father impede his basketball career, and he gives him credit for instilling in him a love of poetry. “In my childhood I learned many verses by heart. My father liked the old poetry which had to be beautiful, with rhythm and rhyme. He did not accept either Mayakovski or Esenin. For us, the Russians, poetry is a part of our soul. My father, a huge and strong soldier, recited verses for me and there were tears in his eyes.”
There’s no way of knowing if Tom’s father would have come to appreciate his son laboring in the company of large men, but Tom is certain he’d be impressed with Tom’s induction into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. “He'd be pleased with his son.”
Tom Now
Tom lives in Sacramento with his wife, the painter Melanie Marchant Meschery, and he maintains a blog called Meschery's Musings on Sports, Literature and Life. He is also writing fiction, including a series of young adult novels about basketball. Tom had “kind of drifted away” from basketball when he was “teaching hard,” but has reconnected with the sport due to the combination of having more time in retirement and the welcome from Warriors owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber. The team won the NBA championship last Spring, and Tom rode in the Victory parade ("I can’t stop writing little haikus about Steph Curry").
Tom has also rekindled his friendship with Robert Hass (former U.S. Poet Laureate), who was an undergraduate classmate at Saint Mary’s. The two recently read together at their alma mater. According to one account, “Throughout the evening, the respect the two men felt for each other was evident.” Hass told “a story about a memorable college soiree where Meschery was seen hanging out of an upper-floor window in Dante Hall reciting” Rimbaud.
Hass has written about Tom’s poetry: “My only regret is that William Carlos Williams isn’t alive to read it or for me to read it to him. One of the things he wanted was a poetry like a clean jab, straight through, all force and grace…”
For an image that would have delighted WCW, let’s go back to "The 100 Point Game." Tom, Wilt, and their co-workers are headed home, when Tom sees a fellow working man at the end of his shift.
Later, on the bus driving back to Philly
I watched a farmer in a horse and buggy
trotting through dark Amish countryside
following the brief light of his lantern home.
Note: Most of the material in this piece comes from my conversation with Tom Meschery. Other sources include: Russian language Sport-Express (translated into English), Bob Lemke blog, NBA.com, SFGate, Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, Saint Mary's College. Nothing We Lose Can Be Replaced, Some Men, and Sweat: New and Selected Poems About Sports were published by Black Rock Press.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
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