There are those artists who never have an unuttered thought. They feel compelled to reveal their most intimate feelings, their nastiest habits, and the messiest clutter of their personal lives. The caution light in their brain has gone out.
And then there's Bob Dylan. He hid behind an adopted name and contradictory, phony biographies until some of his real past was discovered. His brilliant songs seem simultaneously confessional and mysteries beyond our reach, meaning they fail to let us see him. His interviews are notorious jousts with journalists as he reveals, hints at, hides, lies, and attacks. Here he is, having just turned sixty-nine, and we know all about him except that part that is significant and revelatory.
When he was very young discovering what it meant to be a songwriter and singer and charting his future, Bob Dylan created a persona, a character, someone unlettered and untutored with a reflexive, natural grasp of language and a jukebox for a mind. He developed a singing voice that growled. He play-acted at being Woody Guthrie. He wasn't Robert Zimmerman, well-off middle class Jewish kid from, of all places, Hibbing, Minnesota. No, he was Bob Dylan, a man of the people who sprang spontaneously from nowhere, a traveling troubadour for the downtrodden.
The persona was very useful to him in many ways as he began his career. He could in his new identity feel part of the folk. Bob Dylan was a hobo, a rambler and a gambler, someone who knew hard times. Of course, Robert Zimmerman had no experience with such a life. But Bob Dylan, well he was different.
The Dylan who couldn't put two grammatically correct sentences together, who seemed on unfriendly terms with proper English, fooled some people who thought he was a simple rustic. That perception gave him an advantage over those who misjudged him.
His Bob Dylan mask allowed him to gauge people according to how they reacted to him as someone (seemingly) poor and uneducated. Later he could use the mask in anger to assert that people didn't understand him. The mask was a useful device to keep people at a distance.
The folk audiences he originally played for desperately sought authenticity. They wanted a young Woody Guthrie, an heir to Pete Seeger. And here was this young rebel whose vague origins and odd behavior and ever-present song allowed them to fill him in as they wished. They pictured the person they wanted behind the mask without ever being allowed to look at who was really there.
Dylan's persona let him keep the most precious part of himself private, behind the front of a kid on the run, abandoned by parents and society, someone who blew in with the wind. He wasn't Robert Zimmerman, college dropout. He was Bob Dylan, master folksinger, the man who knew, like Woody, that guitars don't lie, who knew words placed just right could lead people over pain, who burned with a fiery drive to sing truth to power.
Dylan's keeping part of himself permanently private has, to understate, worked for him. It's hard to imagine that he will change. Of course, his ongoing march toward an ever-closer eternity may cause some re-thinking. Does he want to be understood or does he want to go out a mystery?
For now, the Bob Dylan mask remains firmly in place.
I picked up an amazing chapbook by Sampson Starkweather at AWP in Denver way back in April called The Heart is Green from So Much Waiting. I only got around to reading it two weekends ago, and it was stunning. Daniel Magers' Immaculate Disciples Press in Brooklyn, NY produced this handmade book, and what can I say? From its poems to its layout, to its hand-sewn binding I was impressed! Each poem is titled with a roman numeral, and each poem roughly fits into the theme of the "super hero."
What I liked about these poems is that they're smart and yet also very near to the memories of our [we who grew up into the 1980s] now-fatal childhoods--the voice these poems are written in is familiar, casual, and smart. The co-mingling of the near--playing with toys, fifth grade, the way power was held in our imaginations as we played with our superheroes when we were kids, and the deflation of not holding any such superpowers any more...once we grow adult and reality sets in. My favorite poem is reproduced here (with permission of its author):
LXXIV
Invisibility is easy; if I
could have 1 super power
it would be fucking you, or maybe to be you, fucking me.
I’m speaking of own(h)ership,
the betweens and in-
sides, the 2 tiny indecisions of the thighs, the boundary of
to-know,
sacrilege, tougher than water, another thing to be broken.
Inside, we’re all made of laughter and exploded feathers—
in the 5th grade, Ms. Lawson pulled a crow from
my hair,
which, on being found out, thrashed and cried and explained
its fear of being an animal of white snow, of disappearing
into the blank endlessness of thinking, which is why I
scream
with a skull full of excrement and a wish to kiss
the livid throat, the crow that cries from being found.
Super heroes never had to deal
with ideas
like these, so it’s with this radio lodged in my neck
that I set my frequency to suffer, extract
in increments of night, any memory
until I’m alone with the would-be trees,
black forest of vespers and pure thought,
I resettle into someone else’s shadow
and in order to feel closer to you—
touch myself.
What does it mean to turn green? I can't help think of Superman and his kryptonite, but I'm sure some nerd would mention the Green Lantern, and some other references I was too busy playing "Barbie Whorehouse" to pick up on.... Heh heh! The final poem in The Heart is Green finishes on an evocation of the rain muse, i guess: "Rain, sing me into this ocean." And there, it ends with what can only be transformation [drown? die? blank page? growing up?]-- hell, what's the difference?
Thank you Sampson, for writing such an exciting, spellbinding chapbook! The Heart is Green from So Much Waiting is available here.: http://immaculatedisciples.blogspot.com/ . Hurry now. There were only 150 printed!
First, my thanks to site editors Stacey and David for this opportunity... I have to confess that in the past I've been wary of "blog" as a verb (I blog, you blog, everyone blogs... It sounds suspiciously like "blablabla" or "blah" or "blech"), but after years now of watching people figure out what a blog is or can be, I think ultimately, like any medium, it all depends on who's speaking through it. I've been a reader of this blog (among others) and enjoyed the range of voices and bright bits of art, ephemera, poems it collects... So now: I blog, I will blog, I will have blogged... We shall see.
I'd like to start with a little investigation I conducted into a Borges verse and its translation or mistranslation. Traduttore or tradittore? You be the judge...
Here is the poem. This is a translation by renowned translator, poet and former New Yorker writer Alastair Reid, which appears in the Selected Poems edited by Alexander Coleman. It's the definitive source for Borges' poetry in English, and probably the only volume you're likely to find in your local bookstore, chain or other...
The Just
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished. He who is grateful for the existence of music. He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology. Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess. The potter, contemplating a color and a form. The typographer who set this page well, though it may not please him. A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto. He who strokes a sleeping animal. He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him. He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson. He who prefers others to be right. These people, unaware, are saving the world.
What does this poem do?
I think most would agree that the last line unlocks it. That's why I was shocked (yes, shocked!) by the word "unaware". I believe the last line in Spanish is quite different, in effect making this translation a different poem altogether. Let's take a look...
If you missed David's reading at the Russian Samovar, here's a great Bill Hayward film of David's poem "Hymn to Man" It's haunting and full of mystery.
This week we welcome Megin Jimenez as our guest blogger. Megin was born in Venezuela and grew up in
Denver. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, LIT, La Petite
Zine, Redivider and Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics. A
graduate of the New School Writing Program, she co-hosts the Monday
Night Poetry series at KGB Bar. She works as a translator at the United
Nations and lives in Brooklyn.
Abandon, what I did when you touched me that winter with an ungloved hand. Ache, the heal of broken things: bones, disappointments. Allegories of Love, Fragonard’s babycolored paintings, Ovid’s pursuers and storied looms, his Atalanta her golden balls. The longing to know how things become what they weren’t always. of Death, skulls, as in depictions of the penitent Magdalene. What should knowing we’ll die elicit? What does salvation have to do with being safe? Angelbones, you alone have them. Where the wings came off. Where the wings belong. Apartments, Brooklyn, its winding stair reminding me of Yeats: “all men rise to greatness by..” A bicycle chained there. South Dakota, we gave your son the only bedroom, woke early to salted baguette and snow. Salt Lake City, a porch ghost, a view of the valley’s glittering grid, my sister, your poor broken friend, we grilled squid on the Smokey Joe. Tripod. Carpet. Halloween. Laramie, a basement, a stoveless kitchen, toaster-roasted eggplant, baseboard heat and sex in woolen socks. Rome, 5B, stone floors, white kitchen, white as the madness I felt there, a bed that was twin beds held together with so much duct tape, always suggesting itself as metaphor; Anger, yours, with your father maybe, me maybe. mine, with you for finding expression of it towards my family instead; there are other ways of telling the story of our two angers, entwined like bodies in the act of love. But in this one I am not a villain. Anne Carson, the “Short Talks” from Plainwater, poolside in Greece during an Easter Parade, clanking in doorways for ouzo and bread; The Autobiography of Red, in which Geryon understood that people need acts of attention from each other. Attention (see also: Anne Carson) “Geryon understood that people need acts of attention from each other.”
B
Binary, code, allows a computer to represent text – b is "000011110”. L-O-V-E too is a series of 1’s and 0’s where 0 means “off” and 1 means “on”. opposition, like presence-absence, male-female, love- innocence, love-hate, love-longing. star, two astronomical bodies orbiting each other so closely they’re lost in each other’s light, and appear as one. Bogota, city in the Andes surrounded by steep jungle. We did not fight in Bogota. Beaten gold. White sanctuary. We love the Mexican restaurant full of wooden stairs overlooking vast expanses of Modernist architecture, colonial plazaslit-up slums. La Candelaria is home to statues of ghosts, presence of absence. Carts sell hot corn. We passed a woman laying on the sidewalk, pregnant a second time – her belly swelled in half-globes around a dark scar like a peach around its deep groove. Storytellers ride the busses, shattered petals and piles of thorns and broad bruised leaves carpet the lot where a flower market teems in the day. Sushi joint. Iranian embassy. A row of buildings trimmed in tropical flowers and razor wire. Bookstore. We watched Bollywood dubbed into Spanish on the old-fashioned TV in your sublet apartment. Bollywood, where love is an exhuberant fantasy of song. Many stories stop before they end.
C
Chopin etude. Major keys seem to have to do with light, minor keys with shadows cast by Major keys. nocturne, an evocation of watchful owls, shimmer of satin and violins. Or of a woman at a desk with a glass of wine, trying to see through her own reflection in the window. prelude, an introduction to the silence that follows it. Comfort, erotic. (Example: Campion, “For when she comes where comfort is she never will say no.”) Compromise, I will get up early with you so long as there is coffee. Conversation about poems, you like “the sound of rice poured into a pan.” I like the bird who rings like a wetted wine-glass rim, and the bird who casts its shadow on the sea. I like poems, “held between two people, Lucky Pierre-style.” (See also: Frank O’Hara.) With Coleridge, when done reading “I rise as though in prayer.” Such poems gather everything into the now of the poem. I want to gather everything into the now of this poem, but I can’t. All is gloss (see also: Gloss). Coquette, you called me once. Coy, you called me. I am neither. I am all candor and anxiety. But whatever I am, I am all for you.
D, E
Deadwood, ringing with slot machines. We drank pear wine in a cheap motel. I said “you take me to awll the noicest places” in a funny voice because it wasn’t true yet and I didn’t care. You funny- voiced me back, “Whaddya want? They got ice machines, they got HBO, dial up some va-va-voom.” We laughed. We showered together and your peppermint soap gave me chills. Desire, a chord played deep in the bass of the body. It’s good to feel and to forget. Divorce, far from a way you thought you had of thinking of yourself. This story includes a divorce, which is how I come in. D.H. Lawrence (see also: Desire), tells us “no, no, it is the three strange angels – admit them, admit them!”
Emily, my sister, a wit and when asked what single thing she’d bring to a desert island, she said: “a yacht.” Like me, she fears to make mistakes. Epithet, Homeric, such as “swift-footed,” even when he’s sitting down, or perhaps “breaker of horses.” For women, “soft-braided” or “glancing.” I have some for you, tall man, with your angelbones and your poppyred birthmark and your soft, soft hands and all those songs you made. My myth-maker. My great dark man. Ex-, a prefix meaning “formerly and no more,” connoting renunciation, affixed to such nouns as lover and Catholic; not likely to be placed before certain other nouns, like sister or “breaker of horse” or bicycle. Eye (not to be confused with I), in the Middle Ages (as recounted by Andreas Capellanus) it was thought impossible to desire anything you’ve never seen, thus blind could not love. But there are other ways of paying attention. (See also: Attention)
* * *
Rebecca Lindenberg currently holds a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is completing a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. No Tell Motel first published this poem in February of this year. Rebecca wrote, "I wanted to give some of these poems a form that was more conceptual than metrical – hence “Love, a Footnote” and “Love, an Index” are both part of a series that uses scholarly apparatus to talk about passion, physicality, memory. I hope these forms will help reveal an underlying harmony between “eros” and “psyche,” two abstractions that sometimes seem superficially incompatible."
Word of Leslie Scalapino's death reached us today. She was a relentlessly experimental poet. A five-page poem of hers, "Jumping-jack Flash," was chosen by John Ashbery for the inaugural volume of The Best American Poetry in 1988. The poem, which initially appeared in Conjunctions, is notable for its emphatic use of dashes and elliptical logic to subvert its apparent narrative intentions:
the young woman -- hassling the old man,who'd been seated quietly -- her -- screaming in -- the movie theatre -- saying he was old -- hurting him
Editing Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), I included Leslie Scalapino's erotically-charged sequence "That They Were at the Beach," This is how the piece begins: "She heard the sounds of a couple having intercourse and then getting up they went into the shower so that she caught a sight of them naked before hearing the water running. The parts of their bodies which had been covered by clothes were those of leopards." The unadorned first sentence, the flatness of the prose, underscores the strangeness of the leopards, who turn up only at the very end of the second sentence, as if magically transported from the pages of a Kafka parable. The narrative becomes a kind of essay on sexual difference. "She had intercourse with the man who had the features and organs of a leopard and whom she had first seen with the group of men who lacked these characteristics."
Scalapino died yesterday. Although her published date of birth is variously 1947 or 1948, I am told that she was born in 1944. -- DL
Write a dream, lose a reader, so they say. I have a dream to report and it contains a lot of nudity. Would you keep reading for the promise of nudity? But without photos, only more or less descriptive text? What if the text contained enticing words like proud or well-formed or the very exciting word, wobble? I'm thinking about the Greenaway film Prospero's Books: "Knowing I lov'd my books he furnished me from mine own library volumes that I prize above my dukedom." The dream was a dukedom of books. Books and naked people (both genders, many ages), paper, wind, water and, somehow in a wet windy environment inimical to candles, candles. I won't record it here anymore, don't worry. Still reading? Here's a poem by Merrill about a dream. An old favorite. Try not to nod off! I hope you are enjoying your day.
Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry. In it, the sheets and towels of a life we were going to share, The milk-stiff bibs, the shroud, each rag to be ever Trampled or soiled, bled on or groped for blindly, Came swooning out of an enormous willow hamper Onto moon-marbly boards. We had just met. I watched From outer darkness. I had dressed myself in clothes Of a new fiber that never stains or wrinkles, never Wears thin. The opera house sparkled with tiers And tiers of eyes, like mine enlarged by belladonna, Trained inward. There I saw the cloud-clot, gust by gust, Form, and the lightning bite, and the roan mane unloosen. Fingers were running in panic over the flute's nine gates. Why did I flinch? I loved you. And in the downpour laughed To have us wrung white, gnarled together, one Topmost mordent of wisteria, As the lean tree burst into grief.
Ed. note: Watching Rob Shore's And Many More earlier this week reminded me of my all-time favorite literary passage about a birthday party, from E. L. Doctorow's World's Fair (Random House, 1985):
At that moment the doorbell rang, and in anticipation of my
first guest I wriggled out of my mother’s arms, slid my arched spine over her
knees, and landed on the floor under the table, and crouched there.“Aren’t you going to answer the door?” my
mother asked.But I had no intention of
doing that; I only wanted to hide.
The day
was momentous, but parties were mixed blessings.You got presents, all right—pick-up sticks,
or crayons, or flat boxes of modeling clay in many colored strips—but they were
the lesser presents of party admissions.And we all had to sit at the table with ridiculous pointed paper hats,
and paper plates and noisemakers and popping balloons and pretend to a joyful
delirium.In fact, a birthday party was
a satire on children directed by their mothers, who hovered about, distributing
Dixie Cups and glasses of milk while cooing in appreciation for the aesthetics
of the event, the way each child was dressed for itand so on; and who set us upon one another in
games of the most acute competition, so that we either cried in humiliation or
punched each other to inflict pain.
And it
was all done up in the impermanent materials of crepe paper, thin rubber and
tin, everything painted in the gaudy colors of lies.
And the
climax of the chaos, blowing out the candles on the cake, presented likely
possibility of public failure and a loss of luck in the event the thing was not
done well.In fact, I had a secret dread
of not being able to blow out the candles before they burned down to the icing.That meant death.Candles burning down to the end, as in my
grandmother’s tumblers of candles, which could not be tampered with once lit,
memorializedsomeone’s death.And the Friday-night Sabbath candles that she
lit with her hands covering her eyes, and a shawl over her head, suggested to
me her irremediable grief, a pantomime of the loss of sight that comes to the
dead under the earth.
So I
blew for my life, to have some tallow left for the following year.My small chest heaved and I was glad for my
mother’s head beside mine, adding to the gust, even though it would mean I had
not done the job the way one was supposed to, with aplomb.
You can read The Burnt Orange Heresy as either a murder mystery or a parable about the hoax element in modern art. Charles Willeford’s 1971 novel (which Carroll & Graf reissued in January 2000) gives satisfaction on both counts. It's an inverted detective story in the approved noir manner: the first-person narration takes us into the killer’s mind. Yet not until digesting most of the book does the fallible reader guess who is to be murdered and why. The plot centers on a painter named Jacques Debierue, avatar of “Nihilistic Surrealism,” whose most famous work is “No. One.”-- meaning both “number one” and “nobody.” Debierue, a European transplant, lives in Willeford country: Palm Beach, Florida. James Figueras, an art critic with his eye on the main chance, obtains an interview with the great recluse. To ingratiate himself with an influential collector, he agrees to steal one of Debieurue’s paintings. The catch is that there are no paintings to steal. Like a version of Mallarme as dreamed by Borges, Debierue is convinced his ideas are so far superior to any possible execution that in logical consequence he does not paint. Instead he has committed his life to the “unfulfilled preparation for painting.” He puts in his four hours daily, “ a slave to hope,” yet always refuses in the end to violate “the virgin canvas.” Figueras has no such compunction. After breaking into Debierue’s pristine studio and discovering there is nothing to pilfer, he sets fire to the place, counterfeits a painting by Deberieu, forges his signature, then writes the article that offers the definitive interpretation of works that never existed. In a curious way it is as if painter and writer have colluded to invent Debieurue’s “American period.”
Willeford, esteemed for his Hoke Moseley novels, weaves the aesthetic theory and the criminal mischief expertly together.The characters' names here are, well, hokey, sounding a false note of Nabokoviana, but
I have little else to complain about.The Burnt Orange Heresy is a rich enigma: a monument to “a qualified Nothing,” suggestive of “deep despair” on the one hand and total “dedication to artistic expression” on the other. It is noir not only in the sense of, say, Ad Reinhardt’s black-on-black canvases but also in the violent romantic sense of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past.
Poet Sharon Mesmer sends us this dispatch about poetry in an unlikely place:
How often does poetry make the front page of the Wall Street Journal?
Poetry by LIVING poets, I mean? Say what you will about flarf (if,
indeed, you've said anything), but it has legs. And pizza kitties.
The article's title comes from a poem by flarf poet Rodney Koeneke. Why
the reporter didn't attribute the phrase to Rodney is a mystery, but
hey -- it's poetry in the Wall Street Journal. It's FLARF poetry in the
Wall Street Journal. The piece mentions a few flarf poets by name, and
features a drawing of Gary Sullivan, and the online version includes an
entire poem by me, from my collection "Annoying Diabetic B----." Yes,
that's how they ran the title. I know, I know: baby steps.
Okay, here's the first installment of a season-long look at my vegetable garden. After a week of solid work (thank God for my nice neighbor with his tractor, who plowed up the sod for me), this is what I've got. Doesn't look like much, does it? But things are happening underground - I hope so, anyway. I've planted tomatoes (five varieties), sweet peppers (seven varieties), eggplant (two varieties), zucchini, yellow summer squash, string beans, cucumbers, cilantro, basil, rosemary, parsley, oregano, and dill. Also, sunflowers (the ginormous kind), zinnias, and snapdragons for a cutting garden. As things progress, I'll post more pictures.
On another note of country living, we were putting up a ceiling fan in my office, a little room off the living room that used to be a porch. Rick poked his head up into the ceiling and saw this in the rafters. It's about 20 inches around. Fortunately, it appears to be unoccupied.
Abandon, Attack, Big Ringing It, Bonk, Broom Wagon, Domestique, Grupetto, Tubular, Velo, Wheel Sucker, Lead Out, Paceline, Popped. Blown, Had it, Knackered, Stuffed, Squirrel, Velo, Wheel Sucker!
Bike racing terminology! I don’t understand a word of it! Ciao Tutti! Hello from Italy. Sports Desk is back for a second season and we are broadcasting live from Civitella di Ranieri in Italy where yours truly is working on poems, essays, gaining weight and writing about all manner of Italian sports. Look at our office!
I haven’t been to Italy since I was sixteen years old and I haven’t really ridden a bike since I was twelve and had an unfortunate encounter with a car and a ditch. Does that stop me from loving bike racing? It does not. Do I understand the minutiae of bike racing? I do not.
But these 6 weeks are about learning. Everything. Learning how to live with 15 remarkable artists in a castle (easy). Learning how to step away from the administrative work of the day to day and believe one is worthy of the gift of a castle and a turret with sunlight and blood oranges and a snoring owl in the eaves and time to make your art (harder). Learning how to ask for directions, cheese, a kilo of gelato, the most perfect pork sandwich, guidance, more wine, less wine, envelopes, you name it. I’m a kid again. I’m a kid in a castle. Just like Maurizio’s son who’s playing outside as I type this.
If I ever wanted a chance to learn about bike racing I couldn’t ask for a better opportunity than right now in Italy. I know lots of you are getting hungry for the World Cup (we’ll get there) but from May 8-30th Italy has its eyes on an army of cyclists who started in the Netherlands and are making their way to Verona. Giro D’Italia! The name alone feels good in your body. Most of us who don’t know squat about racing just know about the Tour de France. The Giro has been around since 1909 and, along with the Tour and the Vuelta a España, is part of the Triple Crown of cycling. As opposed to the Tour de France’s famous yellow leader’s jersey the Giro goes pink in honor of La Gazzetta dello Sports whose pages are pink. It’s a gorgeous thing, that jersey. When the helicopters fly overhead to film the Giro you just see all that green of the hillsides and all those bodies and then just this lone pink jersey making its way through the pack.
But what does it mean? Like a sonnet or a villanelle or the famous saganaki recipe your grandmother gave you it’s easy for the thing to just seem like a list of rules and phrases that don’t add up to much. It can feel like some other language you can sort of understand but don’t have access to.
Well. Yesterday the Giro D’Italia rode past the home of Robert Browning as they made their way towards Monte Grappa. This is one of the most grueling stages of the race, a slow ascent to the summit, which sits 5823 feet above sea level. When you get to the summit you come to a giant monument of white stone, part of which is a mausoleum that holds the bones of 23,000 Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops who fought and died there in 1917. The bones of the Italian troops are buried on the south side so they face Italy. Among the Austro-Hungarian dead there is a soldier named Peter Pan.
There was no Giro D’Italia that year. The race was stopped during both WWI and WWII. During WWII Fausto Coppi, a 5 time Giro winner and arguably the greatest cyclist in the history of the race, was taken prisoner and held in a POW camp in North Africa. Len Levesley, a British cyclist, recounted Coppi giving him a haircut in the camp:
I should think it took me all of a full second to realise who it was. He looked fine, he looked slim, and having been in the desert, he looked tanned. I'd only seen him in cycling magazines but I knew instantly who he was. So he cut away at my hair and I tried to have a conversation with him, but he didn't speak English and I don't speak Italian. But we managed one or two words and I got over to him that I did some club racing. And I gave him a bar of chocolate that I had with me and he was grateful for that and that was the end of it.*
I remember when I was in high school my French teacher telling us that we had no idea what it was like to live in a country where everywhere you looked there was still the physical reminder of war. I could argue that the wounds of the Civil War are still very much open but I know what he meant and he was right. During yesterday’s stage the cyclists passed shell craters and trenches and places where the bones of soldiers are still being unearthed. I can’t imagine it. It’s another language. It’s hard for me to even find the words.
I’ve been to Italy once before. In the summer of my sixteenth year. My friend Amy invited me to come with her to Italy and I was so excited and also pretty nervous. I’d never traveled without my grandparents before and though I was at a school full of worldly kids and tried to seem worldly myself, the fact was I was from a small town and didn’t really know much about anything outside of books and the world I’d made up in my head. And the minute we got to Italy I got robbed. Right there in the tunnel between the airport and the train station. My passport, my money, my Travelers checks. I was too in shock to even fall apart. But I knew it was bad and I just wanted to go home.
And then the most amazing things happened. The policeman sat me down and sang, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” We decided to take the train to Siena where we were supposed to end up and on that train we met Ali Ali who just happened to work at a restaurant on the Campo in Siena and told us to come to dinner. After dinner we were sitting on the steps of some building and a man came up and said, “Are you considering suicide?” Which I wasn’t but only because I probably figured I’d screw that up too. The man’s name was Adriano. He was a truffle farmer and ended up being our guide and angel through the rest of that time. Ali Ali had other friends who’d come to Italy from Palestine and each night they’d walk me home and make sure I got in the gate safely. I saw art like I’d never seen in my life. I ate food and laughed and felt all kinds of love. I went to Florence and got a new passport and watched Amy and learned how to be a little bit worldly. I relied on the kindness of strangers and gained confidence in myself. I learned a little Italian because the people were so kind and were always willing to help.
There’s this term in cycling. Peloton. It means, “platoon.” It’s the heart of competitive cycling because it’s the pack that dictates the speed of the race. When you see it from above it’s kind of like looking at birds flying south. Riders in the peloton change position to conserve energy. Teammates will help their leader out by trying to dictate the speed of the peloton, often sacrificing themselves so their he can get in better position. Teams will often block the rest of the peloton at the end of a race so their sprinter can get to the finish line first. One of the most beautiful things I ever read was how Lance Armstrong’s team rode close enough to him that he wouldn’t get wet when the rain started falling. When I went through a tough patch a few years back I kept a picture of him in my wallet. I’d wake up on those terrible mornings and say to myself, “Who’s your peloton today?” And I’d whisper my friends’ names and imagine them covering me. These next weeks we’ll learn about Italian sports together. And we’ll have help from some special guests who know a lot more than I do and have already been helping me more than I can say. Ciao from the left turret. I'm looking forward
* Fellowship of Cycling Old Timers. Vol 154.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi writes the Sports Desk column for The Best American Poetry blog. Her second book of poems is Apocalyptic Swing. She owes the good fortune of getting to write from an Italian castle to the remarkable Civitella di Ranieri Foundation (http://www.civitella.org/)
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
