The Best American Poetry

Plots and Sisters Part V [by M. J. Fitzgerald]

 (This is Part V of a five-part series. Read Part IV here. )

 

Even if the Will had been written in a moment of particular frustration and anger, and time had passed since 1907 when it was sent in the full haste of fury to Agnes; even if time had brought about a full healing of the husband, a fully realized relationship with a beloved first born, and a new home away from Nora; even if she knew she would carry her second pregnancy to a full term and had no expectation of dying, it was clear  from the 1911 letters to her sister Agnes,  that Anne did not want to be buried in Springfield, in the plot bought and owned by her mother-in-law.

“I want to be buried with my people, the Stuarts.” I thought it was the classic clash between mother and daughter-in-law.

But when I finally focused on the cemetery map, on the information about the plot that the St. Agnes Cemetery archivist had e-mailed me, I realized that there was another layer of conflict and tension between Anne and Nora, and Anne and other members of the Fitzgerald family: the Stuarts, not the Fitzgeralds, came from the more aristocratic end of town. The Fitzgeralds were nowhere near any kind of aristocracy hill, they were firmly in the reaches of a middle class that was just beginning to aspire to the professions. The Fitzgerald plot in Calvary showed a certain affluence, but without any influence on the social structure of the town, and in 1905, Springfield itself was a modest town rather than a bustling city. It was the capital of Illinois, but all industry and activity seemed to be focused on Chicago. A backwater, for a young woman raised in the greater capital of Albany, and the greater resort of Geneva, for a young woman who had tasted the kind of freedom and independence that life as an actress brings with it.

How much disapproval was Nora unable to hide?

The plot in Albany that held my grandmother was on ‘Founders Hill’; the Delehanty-Stuart family had been important enough in the mid 1850s to be one of a small and select group of families to contribute to the establishment of the Catholic Cemetery of St. Agnes, and had secured for themselves and their descendants a special corner of the land.

When my sister and I reached the cemetery and found the plot, it became even clearer. St. Agnes bore no resemblance at all to modest Calvary: the space was bigger, the monument was bigger, the placing of the monument was high up on a slope that allowed a full view of the landscape below; even the distance between the stone markers was greater. And there was the stone that bore my grandmother’s name: the only concession to the great love between my grandparents was that the stone proudly announced itself as that of Anne Stuart, wife of Robert Fitzgerald, 1878-1913. 

****

Close to that stone is the stone marking the place where Robert Emmett Fitzgerald’s only sister, Marie, is buried. That was the other and longer lasting surprise of our visit. Marie married into the McHugh Stuart branch of the Delahanty-Stuart family. She married a cousin of Anne’s on her father’s side and bore two children.  

When Anne died, however, she was a young woman of twenty-four, still unmarried, and she too had embraced an acting career. I did not realize all this until I returned to the Beinecke to continue searching and researching, and came across the letter Marie Fitzgerald wrote to Agnes Stuart on March 30, 1913, in which she describes in full detail the ordeal and the slow dying of Anne after giving birth to Monty.

 

“…I called up Mother [Nora] to ask about everyone – and she told me we had a new nephew born the day before – that both her and Anne were doing nicely – next day Monday – I had no word.

Tuesday I telephoned…again and Mother said Anne hadn’t felt so well but she believed it nothing serious…

Thursday a short note from Bob saying she was not getting along so well…when I got there on Sunday I was horrified to find that they were afraid our dear Anne was not going to live…

All Monday afternoon we stayed at the hospital…five o’clock she began to sink…at nearly twenty minutes to eight she slipped away…To tell you all the details would be endless – poor Bob how his heart is broken…

I went myself and got her the sweetest white mill dress all hand embroidered with darling little insets of duchess lace…lovely little satin underslip – then another lovely French lingerie princess slip – and her undergarments – dear little white kid pumps and silk stockings…

We had a lovely soft couch casket for her to lie on…Father Hickey said the Mass…we left on the 11.45 Alton Limited for Chicago then the Lake Shore to Albany…

your uncle Billy – Bob – Art and I went with our dear one – to take her back among her own people – to her beloved Albany…They laid her next to her dear mother and father…such a beautiful spot near her hills and the lovely Hudson she so loved….” 

 

This letter was written in blue ink on five sheets of folded paper headed with the name of The Stratford Hotel in Chicago. On the second, third, and fifth front of the folded sheets there are splatters that look as though left from dried out drops of water on the blue ink: tears. Agnes’ tears.

It is clear from this letter that in 1913 there was a telephone in Nora’s house, and that Marie called her mother regularly. Why didn’t they call Agnes so she could rush to the bedside of her only sister? Could she not have made it by train from California during the days when the Fitzgeralds knew Anne was seriously sick, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday even? Even the Friday?

 I plundered the correspondence in search of information about Agnes: who was this woman whose tears have permanently smudged the ink with which her sister’s death is described, who had kept every scrap of the past that she was able to keep, to pass on to my father -- who had in his turn kept it to be archived in the boxes I was looking at in greater wonderment every day?

 From my father’s regular birthday letters, I discovered that Agnes’ birthday was in February, but not the day. I discovered that she had enlisted in the Navy in October 1918, and was discharged in November 1919. I learned that she worked for the Veterans Administration office in DC as a ledger accountant, although not when she started working for them, nor exactly when she left and retired on permanent disability. All I could piece together was that she was no longer working there when the US entered the War in 1941.

The reason Aunt Agnes was in California when Anne died in March of 1913 was that she had pelvic tuberculosis and had been operated on, and presumably was unable to make the long train trip to her sister in Springfield and with her sister’s body to Albany: I came across this fact in a report from the Medical Board of the Veterans Administration in 1935, that lists a whole range of ailments from which she suffered:  “Pelvic examination revealed…the history of pelvic tuberculosis in which surgery was performed….” She wrote about it to my father:

“…it is one of Nature’s greatest ironies that I was deprived by TB from ever having (a baby). Born a strong baby, I was filled with TB germs by my wet nurse…the medics didn’t know enough to screen such nurses before giving them a healthy baby to nurse…” (April 1951, letter from Agnes to Robert). 

In her last birthday letters to my father, on October 8 1969, she reiterated and amplified the story, writing as though she was beginning an autobiography:

“…I was born in a fine home, on the best part of our best residential street – State Street, a short block and a half from a beautiful park, and tragedy was given me early – a strong healthy baby, mother could not nurse me, didn’t want nor expect me – and there were no formulas in those days, so Kate Fardy, a wet nurse, who died of TB shortly after leaving us, filled me with TB germs with my first drop of milk, and they developed before I graduated….”

 I calculated from keeping track of infrequent mentions, that Agnes was born in 1888, the same year as her sister-in-law Marie Fitzgerald, the girl who was seventeen and still living at home when Anne married her oldest brother and joined the Fitzgerald Springfield household, the young woman who composed the letter to Agnes after her sister died, the only Fitzgerald buried in the Stuart plot at the cemetery in Albany.

Agnes was ten years younger than Anne. Her mother was thirty-eight when she gave birth to her.

 “…but my greater grief in life is towards my mother…who did not want me. She did not expect another child, and I was distinctly unwelcome. Everything was Anne until she went out to Springfield one winter, and when she returned to Albany, my mother apologized to me and said she had never realized what an unselfish and kind daughter I had been to her. So I can only feel sorry that her last days were conscience stricken about me. She walked on the roof at St. Peter’s (hospital) where I was at one time, and asked me to forgive her, which of course I did and have…” (undated letter from Agnes to Robert Fitzgerald).

 

“…she had not initiative, no mind or will of her own, she was dominated all her life by others thru her fears and scruples. She married my father against not only Grandfather’s advice, but her mother’s wishes…because he threatened to go to the devil if she didn’t and she was afraid she would be responsible for the loss of his soul. She abominated the sexual life, and was torn between feeling of sinfulness in living with him, and her fear of the responsibility if she didn’t…” (undated letter from Agnes to Robert Fitzgerald).

*****

I have only one photograph of the Stuart family in my possession (above), and I finally pause to really look at it.

The family of four is standing at the foot of entrance stairs on what looks like the gravel driveway of a large house, looking into the camera. From the clothes, it is clear that the photograph is from the turn of the twentieth century: the two women, Anna Montague and Anne Stuart, are wearing white dresses that no longer have the rich elaborations and stultifying constrictions of Victorian apparatus for women, but are not yet the elegant clothes of the Edwardian period. The time must be around 1902 or 1903, and that tallies with the age of the girl Agnes, who is standing next to her poised sister, holding her hand or grasping at the bouquet of flowers Anne is holding -- but it is difficult to see what she is in fact holding, and the bouquet could resolve itself into a lap dog of some kind in a better resolution. The father, Thomas, is in shirtsleeves, more informally dressed than the rest of the family. He is holding a treat for the bull terrier in front of him, whose tail can almost be seen wagging.

Agnes is no older than thirteen, and her stance perhaps speaks merely to the gawkiness of prepubescent girlhood, although knowing she developed tuberculosis of the pelvis, I read it quite differently, and see in the forward thrust of the hip, in the slight twist of the hip, in the skinny shins, a whole future of discomfort and unease.

She is frowning against the sunlight, and the more revealing and illuminating detail to me is that she looks remarkably like her white haired mother. Anna Montague Stuart is standing on the far right, closest to the steps; her arms are held firmly against her sides, her hands are tightly clasped in front of the dark belt of her light dress, and the same frown has deepened into a permanent furrow on her forehead. 

 Among Agnes’ correspondence are her instructions for burial, written in 1967: she wants to be cremated, with no ceremony of any kind, and she wants her ashes to be scattered over the plot that has been allocated to her as an enlisted member of the US Navy. She is the only one of her generation who requests cremation. She does not consider burial in the Delehanty-Stuart plot at St.Agnes Cemetery, where her people are, where her sister is.

Poem: "The Documents" by Terence Winch

In celebration of American Archives Month, the National Archives has partnered with the Academy of American Poets to present original poems inspired by the holdings of the National Archives.

Plots and Sisters Part IV [by M. J. Fitzgerald]

One more academic year rushed past in the blur of regular demands on time and attention. During it, I made arrangements for a longer stint of 10 days with my father’s papers, and arrangements to visit St.Agnes cemetery in Albany: my sister and I would make a weekend of it, drive up to Albany from Boston, explore a little more the Stuart-Montague branch of the family.

This time at the library I arranged to look into boxes from “Series I: Family Correspondence,” and with the first folders I was absorbed by my father’s boyhood. His father had kept his son’s letters to him: there were undated and dated letters from Rockhaven on Rhode Island, where it seems he had spent active summers of middle childhood in the company of his grandmother, swimming and playing tennis. In one letter it is clear that father and son had discussed the possibility of Robert playing golf at the nearest golf club, probably with the intention of expanding the social circle of peers for the new teenager. My thirteen-year-old father wrote:

“…Grandmother is going in for the first time today. She is feeling very well. The golf course is at Westerly, and the charge is $1.50 a day, so don’t send the clubs” (July 24, 1924).

There were letters from Culver Military Academy in Indiana where my father spent the summer months between the ages of 15 and 18: 

“…boxing is going very well. I go about three minutes with somebody who will give me a battle, and then work on the bags and the rope skipping the rest of the time…” (undated, 1925 from the writing, which is still a similar immature hand to the 1924 letter).

 These folders also stored letters from his father, Robert Emmett, to my father, including some undated ones that were written when my father was very young, when my grandfather called him Bobety-Bobety, and Fitzie.

“…Father is pretty lonesome tonight so that he thought he would write a little letter to his partner and say ‘Hello’! I hope you come home soon ‘Fitzie’ because I want to kiss you and put you to bed. Tell Aunt Agnes she must write out the little prayer you say, so that I’ll know it. Good night and God bless you. A big hug and a kiss from Father.”

On the back of this letter, Robert Emmett wrote a postscript to his sister-in-law Agnes, which dates the letter a little more precisely to sometime between the death of his wife and the death of Monty, when my father was between the age of three and eight:

 “…yes, Agnes, Anne would have loved that house you are in. The absence of ‘drapes’ alone would be restful and satisfying to her, and wouldn’t she have adored those children of hers. It doesn’t seem right that she, of all mothers, should have been taken away.”

The detail of the satisfaction at the absence of drapes brought the unknown  grandmother suddenly alive to me -- so that is from whom I inherited my own dislike of any covering to windows that prevents the light and air from coming through, I thought. I considered for the first time the stultifying and claustrophobic interior décor of houses at this time, and for the first time wondered at the possibility of Robert Emmett and Anne Fitzgerald having had to live behind ‘drapes,’ and the reasons they might have had to: was their home so close to the neighbors that privacy dictated such protection?

I noted again the presence of Agnes, reader of the letters to his son, amanuensis for his young son’s letters to him. 

There was a photograph I had come across of a young woman in a field with the two boys (Image 10) roughly at the same age as they had been in the memorable photograph of them at the seashore, roughly from the same time that this letter had been written, and I now wondered whether the young woman was Agnes. I still did not know anything more about her: she was always present, and always on the periphery.

I knew from the catalogue of archived material that there were letters to her and from her in the “Family Correspondence,” but I thought there could be very little of interest: given what I knew of the stuffed envelopes my aunt Agnes sent to Italy, I imagined those folders filled with irrelevant accumulations of newspaper articles.  I turned to them reluctantly midway through the first week of research, thinking I’d skim through just before heading back up to Boston to meet my sister for our visit to the Catholic Cemetery in Albany.

When I got back from the weekend exploration, I thought, I’d look through the letters from his first wife, archived there among the personal correspondence. That would be fun, to peer into a marriage that had always been mysterious and had always beckoned.

                                               *****

From Anne Fitzgerald to Agnes Stuart:

 

“1202 South Seventh Street, Springfield, Ill. August First, 1907

I want to be buried with my own people, the Stuarts, in St.Agnes Cemetery, Albany, New York. I want no sermon nor address nor instruction, nor any ‘few words’ addressed to the people at my funeral – Just the Holy Mass. I want my husband Robert FitzGerald to keep any small belonging of mine he may want for Keepsake, but all the rest of my property, including my diamond ring and my wedding ring I want to give to my sister Agnes Elizabeth Stuart. The wedding ring is the one our grandmother Anne Montague wore and I want Agnes to be married with it. Whatever money I may have outside of my income from the estate of Anne Montague I want Agnes to have and to keep for her own personal use. In case I die before Mother and Father, I want Agnes to use whatever I leave to add to their comfort and pleasure.”  

I sat back in the chair, suddenly aware of my surroundings, the quiet of people absorbed in the recent and distant past. Wow. The Will was written on four pages of headed paper, from 1202 South Seventh Street, in the ‘fine swift angular hand’ my father had described as his mother’s in his memoir piece for The New Yorker. It was dated August 1, 1907, less than two years after Father Hickey blessed the couple’s wedding vows by sprinkling Holy Water shaken from a flower that was drying and hidden when these fierce words were being written.

  ‘I do not want any Fitzgerald to touch me or prepare my body for burial. I could not bear them to touch me or any of my things while I lived. Any of my belongings not wanted by my husband or my own family (the Stuarts) I expressly wish destroyed by burning. All this is my will and testament made this first day of August 1907, while in full possession of all my faculties.’

I read it again. I re-read it a third, and then a fourth time. I could not quite believe what I was reading. Where was the romantic heroine, sacrificing herself to her sick and bedridden beloved? I was completely taken aback, even through a surge of inescapable and delighted glee: there was the real plot for the story of my grandparents’ marriage. Not the sweet ideal of maple tree and pressed flowers, but this furious swift hand articulating dissatisfaction, dislike, even hatred for the family whose name I carried with such pride.

 

                                                   ***** 

By the time I was ready to leave for the weekend, I had seen that the Will was one of many letters from her sister that my great aunt Agnes had kept. They offer more than enough glimpses of the hardscrabble situation Anne was in after her marriage to my bedridden grandfather. I had never thought to dwell on the reality of it, all too content with the romantic and the idealized.

How did the couple live when there was no breadwinner? Not as I imagined, in a modest home with a white picket fence: they lived with his mother.

1202 South Seventh Street was Nora Linane Fitzgerald’s home. At least two of her five surviving children were still living at home: James, who was only thirteen in 1905 when Robert Emmett and Anne married under the maple tree, and Marie, who was seventeen. Edward was only twenty-two, so perhaps he too was still at home, trying to find his way. I had little to no information or knowledge of this brother. I knew that Robert Emmett was the oldest, and that the next brother, Arthur was twenty-six in 1910, and was establishing a legal practice in those years. But I could not be sure that even he was not living at home when this furious will was composed in full possession of all faculties.

Nora Fitzgerald ran a successful grocery store in Springfield. Nonetheless, she was supporting at least three of her children, and the wife of one of those children, who was seriously sick. The presence of the wife did mean that there was no need for a nurse for her son, but the extra finances of nursing and the boarding of a stranger – even if married to one of the family -- must have put a strain on everyone in the house.

In January 1911, a few months after the birth of my father, over three years after the injection of bismuth seemed to have resolved the tubercular sacro iliac joint and Robert Emmett was no longer bedridden, Anne writes to Agnes from 1202 South Seventh Street:

“…Bob is reading Law like a martyr, and we hope he’ll be ready for the February Exams, but of course do not count on it. He is growing used to the almost intolerable prospect of being a lawyer, though he assures me he never expects to be ‘happy’ again…”

 

Slowly, well over six years after their wedding, the couple is moving towards financial independence from Nora. There is a definite sense in this letter that Anne is the one determined to make Robert Emmett pursue some successful prospect and join the ranks of the gainfully employed now that there is no longer illness and invalidism: I can read in the tone of her letter that she has teased him, rolled her eyes at him – that underlined ‘intolerable’ (because it is the same word he uses years later to describe his pain in the letter to the insurance company, it makes me think that it is a direct quote from him), that ‘martyr,’ that ‘happy’ between inverted commas; I can read that his reluctance is the mocking act (they are actors, after all!) of a new father and a husband who has found a new lease in life, blessedly cured by the skillful use of an advanced  procedure, eager to provide for his family. 

But the setting is hard: in an undated letter from that same year, Anne writes:

“It is awfully hard to manage here the three of us in a room and no closet, no drawers or shelves truly it is still very trying. I still do all his washing, and the basin is so small I have to do it all in the bath tub, so I have a chronic back ache from bending.”

And in every letter, Anne mentions her mother-in-law, ‘the old lady’:

“…Agnes dearest, if you can, by hook or by crook, make enough money to be independent, do it, and don’t ever marry a man who can’t support you and if you have to give up the finest man in the world, do it rather than live with his family!” (April 1911)

“…if she will only go away, and I can only keep the two good servants we have now I can manage to get through the winter and the spring here. And I’d rather not move at all until I can move away from her, for she is the one big trial of my life! I am writing this in pencil because she has watered the only bottle of ink!...” (Sept 1911).

“Mrs F. is still with us, bronchitis and all, and I don’t believe she has the slightest intention of going away this winter…” (Jan 8, 1912).

 It is not until the letter of October 30, 1912 that Anne writes to her sister from a different address, 404 South Seventh Street. In this letter, she is five months pregnant with Monty, less than five months away from her death. My father is just two:

“…The Baby listened wide-eyed and solemn while I read him your letter, and then he kissed and folded it carefully – and put it in the waste paper basket! I rescued it, of course, and put it in the desk and use it as a reward when he refrains from asking for ‘Winter’ on the graphonola…Dearable dorable and I take great walks these days. He walked out to 1202 (to visit Grandmother, of course! So out of her house, but close enough for constant interaction between them) and back last week without any trouble and when I take the go-car I go much further than that with him. He says all of Humpty Dumpty, Hey Diddle Diddle, Jack and Jill and Sing a Song of Sixpence without a prompt which of course I think is wonderful….”

Ten Miscellaneous Takes on Doubt [by Alan Ziegler]

Take One: Do you sometimes get an inkling to write, only to stop yourself by thinking, Nah, it won’t be any good? The bad news: There is no answer to “Will it be good?” The good news: The very question is no good. Adopt Miles Davis’s attitude: “I never think about not being able to do anything. I just pick up my horn and play the hell out of it.”

Take Two: Doubt and failure are the artist’s companions; they should be recognized and overruled. For most, doubt never departs, and failure rarely stays away for long. Embrace them as allies. Doubt does not preclude success; consider this comment by John Steinbeck: “Although sometimes I have felt that I held fire in my hands and spread a page with shining—I have never lost the weight of clumsiness, of ignorance, of aching inability.” Indeed, the embrace of failure is often a prerequisite for success; as Gilbert Sorrentino said, “I am absolutely obsessed by the idea of failing miserably.”  

Take Three: Walker Percy wrote to Shelby Foote: “I’ve been in a long spell of accedie, anomie and aridity in which, unlike the saints who writhe under the assaults of devils, I simply get sleepy and doze off.” (Of course, no one truly in a state of accedie, anomie, and aridity could write this.)

Take Four: “Beset with technical difficulties and doubts,” Nabokov was carrying the first chapters of Lolita to the garden incinerator. Fortunately, his wife, Vera, stopped him. (I imagine her cajoling, “Vladimir! Don’t take out the garbage!”)

Take Five: The great actor Charles Laughton was plagued by self-doubt, especially during the 1937 filming of I, Claudius, which was never completed. Laughton would put his head in co-star Merle Oberon’s lap and weep, “I can’t find my character. I can’t find the man.” Years later, one of the actors lamented that Laughton “needed sun and got frost” from the director. Laughton shows enough flashes of brilliance in the surviving footage to make the case that much was lost because no one did for I, Claudius what Vera Nabokov would do for Lolita.

Take Six: I witnessed a conversation in the late 1960s between Allen Ginsberg and the painter Arnold Bittleman. Bittleman was describing how he would often paint deep into the night, look admiringly at his work, and go to bed convinced that he had created a great work of art—only to wake up and discover someone must have broken in and ruined his painting. Ginsberg replied that he used to feel that way, but now, even as he is writing, he’ll think: “This is the same old bleeeecchhh.”

Take Seven: John Berryman didn’t read reviews until he was thirty-five because “I had no skin on . . . I was afraid of being killed by some remark.” A better response might be to respond to offensiveness with offense. Robert Burns reacted to a critic with a rhapsodic, vitriolic screed, including: “thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms … thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences … thou executioner of construction … thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense.”

Take Eight: Francis Williams—who played trumpet with Duke Ellington—started out as a pianist in his hometown, Toledo. Williams thought he was pretty good until he met a local piano player who was so much better that Williams decided to change instruments: how could he succeed in the piano world if he wasn’t even the best in the neighborhood? Perhaps Williams made the right decision, but it was for the wrong reason: his neighbor in Toledo happened to be Art Tatum.

Take Nine: You not only need the wherewithal to start something, but also the will to keep going.I watched a master dance class taught by the choreographer Bella Lewitsky, during which she asked students to execute a series of steps from one end of the dance floor to the other. Whenever a student faltered and lapsed into a sheepish gait, Lewitsky would command, “Finish the line.”

Take Ten: Approach your writing with respectful fearlessness, and don’t take “Nah” for an answer.

        (adapted from The Writing Workshop Note Book)

Good Dogs (To Mr. Joseph Stevens) by Charles Baudelaire tr. Joseph T. Shipley

5th Ave & 9th St., October 22, 2014 (photo by Stacey Harwood)

Away with the academic muse! I have no business with that old prude. I invoke the familiar muse, the citizen, the boon companion, to aid me to sing to the good dogs, the poor dogs, the dirty dogs, those whom every one drives away, pestiferous and lousy, except the poor, whose associates they are, and the poet, who sees them with fraternal eye.

Fie upon the foppish dog, upon the coxcomb quadruped, Dane, King Charles, pugdog or lapdog, so enamoured of himself that he darts inconsiderately between the legs or on the knees of the visitor, as if he were certain of pleasing, wild as a youngster, foolish as a flirt, often surly and insolent as a servant! Fie especially upon those four-pawed serpents, idle and shivering, that are called greyhounds, and that do not harbor in their pointed muzzle enough scent to follow the track of a friend, nor in their flattened head enough intelligence to play at dominoes!

To the kennel with all these plaguy parasites!

Let them slink to the kennel stuffed and sulky! I sing the dirty dog, the poor dog, the homeless dog, the stroller dog, the dog buffoon, the dog whose instinct, like that of the poor, the gypsy and the mountebank, is marvellously sharpened by necessity, that excellent mother, that true patron of intelligence !

I sing the distressful dogs, be they those that wander, alone, in the winding gullies of the great cities or those who have said to the forsaken man, with blinking spiritual eyes: "Take me with you, and of two miseries we shall make a sort of joy!"

"Whither go the dogs?" Nestor Roquepelan once said in an immortal leaflet which he has doubtless forgotten, and which I alone, and perhaps Saint-Beuve, recall today.

Where do the dogs go, you ask, heedless men? They go about their business.

Business engagements, affairs of love. Through the fog, through the snow, through the mire, under the biting dogstar, under the streaming rain, they come, they go, they hurry, they move along under carriages, excited by fleas, by passion, by duty or by need. Like us, they have risen bright and early, and they seek their livelihood or run to their pleasure.

There are some who sleep in a ruin in the suburbs and who come every day at a stated hour, to beg alms at the door of a Palais-Royal cook; others who run in troops, for more than five leagues, to partake of the repast which has been prepared for them through the charity of certain sexagenarian maids, whose unoccupied hearts are given over to beasts, since imbecile man wants them no more; others who,. . ., frantic with love, leave their province on certain days, to come to the city and romp for an hour with a handsome bitch, a little careless in her toilet, but proud and thankful. 

(excerpt from Good Dogs by Charles Baudelaire, tr. Joseph T. Shipley)

-- sdh

Plots and Sisters Part III [by M. J. Fitzgerald]

On the first visit to the Beinecke Library, I spent the few days I had in a rush of disorganized search rather than methodical research after I came across the headed paper that showed that my father had been to Springfield in the mid to late seventies.

The arrangement of material in boxes and folders was confusing to someone totally inexpert at research, and I moved between documents from the early years of the century -- a legal arrangement  (see right)between Robert Emmett, my grandfather, and his mother Nora Linane Fitzgerald, dated June 2^nd  1908 that struck me as strange, a death certificate for my grandmother Anne Stuart that I didn’t notice at the time was not an original, but a document reissued on June 15, 1944  (above) the  announcement in the Albany Argos that Anne, an actress with the  F.F. Proctor Stock Theatre Company, trained in the Sargent Dramatic School, was leaving for Springfield, Illinois to marry Robert Emmett Fitzgerald (Image 8).  A little later I was peering into a photograph of my youngest sister on her First Communion Day, in the garden of the large house outside Perugia and below the village of San Fortunato that my parents bought in 1961; then a clipping from an Italian newspaper dated 1971 about my twenty-two-year-old brother as a salesman of water beds, and then a photograph of my mother and three of my siblings as young adults in the attic studio where my father had labored on his translation of The Iliad for the six months that he was not teaching at Harvard every year during the sixties, quickly followed by the original marriage certificate between my father and mother from April 19, 1947.

It was all a jumble of disconnected fragments that merely added to my disorientation and fascinated confusion, until I came across notes from my grandfather to his children about their dead mother.

“Boys: Robert and Monty. This I think was a letter written to your mother at a time that I was very seriously ill (June before going to the Chicago Hospital) and was to be opened by her if anything happened to me. Anne never opened it.”

I loved the touch of rhetorical hesitation in that ‘I think’ and even more the  gesture in the final sentence, ‘Anne never opened it’, containing as it does the dramatic irony that not only did his beloved wife never have to read something from him after he died, but that instead she was the one to die before him. And although the undated scrap of paper was there in the folder, there was no actual letter: what happened to it? Did my father ever read it? Perhaps it was somewhere else in the archive, stored in another box, another folder.

******

From the letter to an insurance company found in the attic of the Reisch building that had housed the Fitzgerald legal practice, I now knew previously unknown details of the accident Robert Emmett had had in 1904: 

“During the summer of 1904 I was an actor spending the summer season in New York City. In early July or August of that year I was injured while a passenger on a Sixth Ave. Surface car...

The injury was slight and beyond a little stiffness for a day or so I paid no attention to it. During the autumn of that year while playing in New York my back began to give me some little trouble. I first noticed a stiffness when stooping over to wash and things of that character.

Gradually I became worse until I had to stop work, along during December…. I suffered intense pain and gradually my condition became intolerable…

During April or May of that year I returned to Springfield, Ill., which was my home.

I did not get any better and in July a small swelling appeared over my left hip. I then sent for Dr. John Ridlon, a specialist in the Chicago Savings Bank Bld., Chicago, Ill., who examined me and upon examination said that I had Tuberculosis of the Sacro Iliac joint, due he believed to the injury I received in New York and he ordered me to remain in bed until nature had altered the condition.”

Despite the intolerable pain, despite the fact that Robert Emmett was forced back home by illness just as he was establishing himself as an actor, despite the doctor’s prescription of bed rest, he and Anne Montague Stuart were married on September 12, 1905, as a second scrap of paper to his sons testifies:

“To Robert Stuart Fitzgerald and(?) Bernard Montague Fitzgerald

This is a marriage certificate of your Mother and Father. The dried flowers were used by Father Hickey to sprinkle Holy Water when he blessed us. We were married in a tent under a big maple tree on the south side of the house 1202 South 7^th Street Springfield. I was ill in bed at the time.”

These scrappy notes confirmed my romantic sense of my grandparents’ relationship: Anne had chosen to marry a bedridden man. A man whom she had to nurse.  A man with whom she did not get pregnant for over four years.  A chaste and virginal marriage for all that time? Or perhaps the marriage bed was an engagement in awkward love-making that would not cause more pain to the tubercular sacro iliac joint, and the careful avoidance of a pregnancy.  

Robert Emmett described his condition for the next three years in the letter to the insurance company:

“I remained in Springfield, in bed for a period of three years until the summer of 1908, then I went to Chicago to the North Chicago hospital as a patient of Dr. Emil G. Beck with Dr. Ridlon as a consulting specialist. Dr Beck had been lately advocating the injection of Bismeth paste in certain sinuses. He performed a slight operation, merely a puncture where fluctuations indicated the presence of puss and gave me several injections of his paste.

The soreness and tenderness around the hip and the joint infected, gradually left me. I was put into a plaster case and in October was able to leave the hospital in crutches. During the time that I was sick in Springfield and in the hospital I ran a temperature of 99 to 101 degrees with an occasional jump to 102. I suffered a great pain at any movements of my left leg.

After I left the Chicago Hospital in 1908 I recovered rapidly, but the illness left me with my left leg about one inch shorter than the other, and left the leg much thinner than the other one. I have since walked with crutches, tho I am able and do discard them in the house and in the office.” 

*****

In the essay “Light From The Bay Window” published in The New Yorker on December 1978 and included in The Third Kind of Knowledge, my father wrote:

“Poking around in my grandmother’s room one day I found in the big drawer of her writing desk a letter to her in my mother’s fine swift angular hand. The date must have been early in 1905, because in this letter my mother formally declared her attachment to my father and her wish to marry him. ‘I cannot live without Bob,’ said one of the sentences, and the force of that grownup passion startled and awed me.”

How could the body of this woman who had expressed such passion for this man, who had agreed to commit her life to him, be taken away from him in death and carted across the country to a plot in Albany?

As I drove away from New Haven at the end of the few days I was able to spend at the archives, up towards Rhode Island where my father is buried at Swan’s Point, I imagined the maple tree under which my grandparents were married.

Most of the leaves of the maple are still green, but the green is faintly filigreed with gold and ruby. The sun is still hot, and the katydids hum. I imagine my young grandfather as he is in the undated photographs of him lying in an iron framed bed. The bed has been wheeled out to the tree, and the young man can see the play of light through the leaves, and the play of light and leaves over the face of his bride when he turns to her during the shortened ceremony that does not include a Mass, but does include a blessing with the Holy Water sprinkled from the shaken flower Robert Emmett will be so careful to keep.  His bride stands on the right beside the bed so that he does not have to move and increase the pain to his left leg. Robert’s mother Nora and his brothers, Arthur, Edward and James, as well as his sister Marie are there. Surely the bride’s parents are also there. Surely her sister Agnes is there.

            I had to return to the Beinecke and search through the boxes for further revealing scraps of paper. I had to find a way to visit St.Agnes, the cemetery in Albany where my grandmother was buried, and look for clues among the tombstones that could explain why her remains were taken away from the young man whom she’d been nurse to before she could be wife, whom she had tended before she could tend to their child. Why was it that the cemetery in Albany had a stone bearing her name and her dates, May 5, 1878 – March 24, 1913, rather than the cemetery in Springfield?

The Plight of the Podium Negro [ by Charles Coe]

Pennsylvania Republican Governor Tom Corbett’s facing a tough battle for re-election; one poll has him trailing his Democratic challenger by up to 25 points. He’s had a particularly hard time attracting black voters, many of whom where outraged by his signing of a 2012 law, later overturned by a Pennsylvania judge’s ruling, that would have required voters to present a photo ID.

Corbett’s campaign team recently released a photograph they hoped would suggest that things were just hunky dory between him and the black community. The photo shows a low-key, friendly Corbett. Casually dressed in denim shirt, no tie, top button unbuttoned, talking to a small group of supporters. Standing behind the governor is a middle-aged black woman, gazing at him in adoration.

“See?” the photo implies. “Black people like Governor Corbett too! Because he understands the issues that are important to our African-American citizens.”

Just one problem: The shot’s a fake; the woman’s image was Photoshopped from a stock photo. As an African American I am totally outraged. It’s a matter of job security. I happen to be a member in good standing of the National Union of Podium Negroes, and I am extremely concerned about the impact this might have on my profession.

As you know, Podium Negroes are the black and brown faces you see in photographs of right-wing politicians at public events. Usually the politician’s at the podium with a group of supporters standing behind him—his wife and family, perhaps a veteran in uniform, a prominent athlete or entertainer and a Podium Negro or two (often the only brown faces in the room). And now the Corbett campaign’s threatening our livelihoods. If someone can just paste in fake photos of Podium Negroes, what happens to us? The real workers? And with computer-generated graphics, there’ll be nothing stopping them from pasting digitized Negroes into live events as well.

Few people realize how difficult and demanding our profession can be. We spend hours listening to country music at rallies and conventions. We eat countless plates of tuna-noodle casserole and Jell-O with little marshmallows at receptions. We stand with smiles glued in place while listening to politicians who sometimes sound like they’ve been using their heads as doorstops. We work hard, and we deserve our country’s appreciation and respect.

Our union is convening an emergency session of the management committee to address the challenge presented by Digital Podium Negroes. The Corbett campaign has fired the first shot; now we will respond. And I am confident we will enjoy the support of all fair-minded Americans who realize, as was so eloquently stated by a stalwart supporter of our profession, former President George W. Bush, “how hard it is to put food on your family.”

 

Charles Coe is author of two books of poetry:  “All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents” and “Picnic on the Moon,” both published by Leapfrog Press. His poetry has appeared in a number of literary reviews and anthologies, including Poesis, The Mom Egg, Solstice Literary Review, and Urban Nature. He is the winner of a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Charles’s poems have been set by a number of composers, including Beth Denisch, Julia Carey and Robert Moran. A short film based on his poem “Fortress” is currently in production by filmmaker Roberto Mighty. Charles is co-chair of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union, a labor union for freelance writers. He has been selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a “Boston Literary Light for 2014.” His novella, "Spin Cycles," has just been released by Gemma Media. I

 

Plots and Sisters Part II [by M. J. Fitzgerald]

(Find Part I of this series here.)

After I went to Springfield, and visited the Fitzgerald plot in Calvary cemetery, I re-read with a greater sense of a context, and with much closer attention, some of the memory pieces written by my father that came out in The New Yorker in the late seventies and were gathered in the posthumously published book The Third King of Knowledge.

Jim Huston sent me the never-before-seen letters discovered in the attic of the building that had housed my grandfather’s offices in the teens of the twentieth century, letters dictated by my five-year-old father to my great aunt Agnes from Rockhaven R.I, where the children vacationed, and a poignant never-seen-before photograph of the two small boys that had remained hidden in the attic of a building since 1916.

In time, I matured the intention of writing a personal account of my father’s life, and arranged to go to the Beinecke Library in New Haven, where my father’s papers are archived. I was floundering about how such an account could be written, whether it had any relevance in today’s fragmented literary and intellectual world, whether there was enough material to make into something that would honor my father and the times he lived in and contributed to, and I went to the research library for only a few days.

The librarians were helping me to rush through as many of the 132 archival boxes as I could in the time, with the idea of getting an over-view and perhaps returning at some other time with a greater focus.

I have no idea what I am looking for, I told them.

They suggested mildly that if I knew, it would make the retrieval of the boxes much easier. I had considered starting at Box 1 in the request for the first ten boxes, but prioritized “Series V: Personal,” “Series II: Writings,” and “Series IV: Financial and Legal,” for reasons that had to do mostly with my curiosity about my father’s first wife: as a teenager, I had been the one to discover that he had been married before his marriage to my mother, when I looked into a Who’s Who in his attic studio. I had experienced a wonderful and disorienting excitement as I rushed down the stairs to tell any of my five siblings who were around, and every time I had thought about it since, I had seen again the small print of ‘m. Eleanor Green,’ glowing and in relief, although I had no memory of the dates.

 The absence of any of the skills of the scholar and researcher were immediately apparent. I didn’t even have a notebook, I was yet incapable of knowing how the laptop I brought could help, and I had barely mastered the convenient digital camera I borrowed. 

On the very first day, rushing through the strangely organized material, I came across sheets of headed writing paper from the Springfield Illinois Hilton. In one of them, in my father’s elegant spidery hand, is a list of names, arranged in an attempt to remember the layout of the Fitzgerald plot in Calvary cemetery.

Jim Huston had told me that as a young librarian, he had had briefly seen my father when he had come to Springfield on some kind of research visit – he had been struck by the navy blue beret and the green book bag, so familiar to anyone on the campus at Harvard where my father was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, though new to Jim – but he had never talked to him, and he could not remember what inquiry he had made at the library. He could not remember the year or the season, but he thought it must have been in the late seventies, and I know it was not summer because my father was wearing the beret and not the panama he frequently wore against the heat.  When I asked him, Jim said that he did not know whether he had visited the cemetery. 

These three sheets of paper showed that my father did indeed visit Calvary, although there is no evidence that he went into the office and asked for a photocopy of the card showing the ownership of the plot as I did. At that time, photocopying itself was still a measured activity, done only when necessary.

Standing in front of those gravestone as a man approaching old age, did my father wonder why his mother was not there, as I had been wondering since my own visit?

******

I had never focused on my father’s official biography, and it wasn’t until a minor dispute arose with the Poetry Foundation, that my attention was drawn to a discrepancy. I had told them that my father was born in Springfield on October 12, 1910, and that had been posted as fact on the Poetry Foundation web site, along with a photograph I gave them. But some one contacted them to point out that every Who’s Who that listed my father’s biography agreed that he was born in Geneva, New York. 

The Foundation, however, trusted that a daughter would be the better authority.

It turns out the daughter had no authority at all, and was wrong: my father was indeed born in Geneva, New York, not in Springfield, Illinois, as is clearly shown in a copy of his birth certificate that I found among his archived papers when I made my first visit to the Beinecke Library.

Geneva, on Seneca Lake in the county of Ontario, where Anne Stuart Fitzgerald’s family lived, is still considered a vacationing resort, and once I realized that that was where my father was born, I wondered: my grandparents were married in Springfield and my grandfather’s legal practice was there. Why was Anne in Geneva? Did the young couple consider she would benefit from lake breezes, away from the high Mid-western humidity, and they came to stay with her parents as her pregnancy progressed? Perhaps they decided to stay east for the birth of the baby, among the familiar comforts of her childhood home, and then return and settle back to family life in Springfield. Or maybe he accompanied his pregnant wife to Seneca County and then returned to his job. It may not have been easy for him to leave behind his legal practice for any length of time.   Or Robert Emmett was still in precarious health and in need of more extended periods of rest.  As I speculated about domestic arrangements that would explain why my grandmother gave birth in New York State, Jim Huston sent me copies of family obituaries. Among them was the one for her from the Springfield State Journal on March 25, 1913.

Anne was not yet thirty-five when she died: wouldn’t  her parents have still been alive? Perhaps her mother and father could not make it to Springfield for the funeral and they decided to claim the body, and my grandfather was in a state of shock, did not realize what had happened until he found himself unable to visit her graveside. In the first years to come, to grieve and mourn, to ‘rage against the dying of the light’ -- though Dylan Thomas would not write those words for another forty years – her husband would repair to the local dive instead, to whisky and games of poker.

But there was no mention of parents in the obituary.  There was mention only of her sister who lived in California, although with no married name to account for this cross-country residence. What kind of profession or job would take a young woman there in 1913? I realized that I did not even know whether Agnes was younger or older than Anne. If she was younger, how much younger, and why so far away?  If she was older, she would be older than thirty-five, and if still unmarried, she would fit into the characterization of her I had carried with me since childhood, of the difficult and crabby old spinster aunt who seemed always to raise a faint eyebrow and a forbearing smile from my mother whenever mail came to the various rented houses we were living in, in Italy, regularly bringing thick buff colored envelopes stuffed with articles cut out from American newspapers, annotated all over in a large sprawling hand in the English I barely knew and could not read.

But Jim had also sent me transcripts of obituaries from the Albany Register of New York State, and when I turned to them, I learnt the startling fact that my grandmother’s mother died three days after Anne gave birth to my father,on October 15, 1910.

I immediately thought that Anne and Robert Emmett must have come to be with a dying mother, until I noticed that the obituary said  “Mrs Ann Montague Stuart, wife of Thomas A. Stuart, proprietor of the Carrollton Hotel, died this morning after an illness of but a few days’. So there was no lingering bad health that required an affectionate and concerned daughter to come back home during her pregnancy, leaving a husband behind; there is instead the sudden, the unexpected. What kind of illness would be so sudden and so quickly virulent? And even more importantly, how could the joyous birth of a first-born not be affected by this event?

Within two years of his wife’s death, in June 1912, Anne’s father, Thomas Stuart also died. The obituary says “Mrs Stuart died about a year ago and since then Mr. Stuart’s health has been gradually failing.”  What desolation is hidden behind that laconic description of failing health?

“The time of the funeral will be decided on the arrival of his daughters.”

Both Anne and Agnes were expected back for the funeral of their father. I had no idea where Agnes might have been coming from, and wondered whether she could have met Anne in Chicago. But I knew that my grandmother was a few weeks pregnant with my father’s brother Monty when she got on the train for the long trip from Springfield  for the funeral and burial of her father in Albany. Perhaps her husband escorted her.  Did baby Robert go with them, or was he left behind in the care of Nora, the Fitzgerald grandmother?  If the sisters had to linger east after the death of their father to put the family affairs in order, did Anne return to a toddler enraged by the apparent abandonment, as my mother told me I had been so enraged by her absence when my brother was born that I would not look at her for days? 

What effect did pregnancies and births bracketed by such crucial losses have on Anne? My father was living through the terrible twos that are so familiar to us in the closely explored and analyzed childhood of our time. Was the period so different that mourning itself was different, or did his mother’s double bereavement affect the baby and toddler, and begin so early to shape Robert’s personality?

Anne herself was less than a year away from her own death, from her removal from her son’s life as if by a razor, and from the trip by train in a casket from Illinois to the capital of New York State to be buried in the Stuart plot in St. Agnes, the Catholic Cemetery of Albany.

It is difficult not to be shocked by these multiple familial deaths in such a short span, three death in four years.  The only remaining member of the Stuart family was Agnes, Anne’s sister who at the time of her sister’s death lived in California. But I did not know whether she had already moved there when their mother died three years before or when their father died, or why she lived there. There is no mention of either sister coming to the funeral of their mother in her 1910 obituary. Anne was there, having just given birth. Agnes must have been there too.

Since the two obituaries from the Albany Register had been sent to me by Jim Huston and had not been among my father’s papers, I did not know whether my father ever knew that his maternal grandmother had died three days after he was born and that his maternal grandfather had died when his mother’s belly was barely swollen with baby Monty and he himself was not yet two, constantly on the move like all toddlers, up and down his mother’s lap, dashing and tilting headlong with peals of laughter into danger and adventure, trying language and being only understood by her.  

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Consider the Lobster. © Anna Cypra Oliver 2014. Oil on canvas 18"x20".

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"It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we that we cannot straightly think of one without the others," M.F.K. Fisher writes in the Art of Eating. The best food writing is not just about what's on the plate, but is, like all literature, also interested in language, psychology, and the most pressing issues of the day. The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food provides a forum for artists and academics to explore the intersections between food and family, the environment, politics, economics, social justice, and media.

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Plots and Sisters [by M. J. Fitzgerald]

Robert Fitzgerald

Before I launch into the posts, I want to thank The Best American Poetry Blog for giving me this opportunity, and I need to set the posts into the context of the research and writing I am doing about my father, the poet Robert Fitzgerald, whose translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad have been the most clearly recognized American verse translations of the great epic poems for the 20^th century. There have been other translations – Lattimore, Lombardi, Fagles to name just a few  – but his seem to have stood the test of time in a particular way. More than fifty years later, his translations are still frequently the ones assigned to high school students and undergraduates studying the classic in translation, and a significant swathe of the literary world has remained very aware of his work.

Success and recognition came to my father in the early to mid sixties: he was offered the prestigious position of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard in 1965, and he taught both there and at Yale until he retired after the publication in 1981 of his late great accomplishment, the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.

It is the backdrop to this success and recognition, that interests me most of all now, although when I began to think about writing a memoir, the main impulse was a desire to look into my own childhood.

Robert Fitzgerald (c) 1950s, Italy

I was the third in a clutch of six children, five of whom were born and under the age of five in 1953 when we left the United States for Italy, thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship and an advance from the publishers for the translation of The Odyssey. My parents thought we would spend one year there, but Italy turned out to be so much less expensive than the United States that my parents did not return until 1965, and the sixth child was born in Italy in 1955. I lived the twelve years between the age of three and the age of fourteen in Italy, going to Italian schools from kindergarten to seventh grade. I then went to boarding school and college in England. I never attended an American school, coming to the United States only for vacations and then for visits. My formative years as a writer were spent in England, and that is where my novels and stories were first published. I came and settled permanently in the United States after I accepted the position of Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota that I still hold.

As I thought about and sketched out my own memory pieces, however, I found myself growing more and more interested in exploring my father’s background, what had shaped him to become the man and the literary figure he became, the role he played in mid-twentieth century letters, and his friendships with some of its great literary figures – from Ezra Pound to Flannery O’Connor. Perhaps because my own background has been so European, this exploration has become a way for me to also understand and appreciate the more American side of my heritage as well as my literary inheritance.

I have been driven by what I have found among his papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. But my interest in his background started with a visit to Springfield, Illinois, and to the catholic cemetery where many of the Fitzgerald family were buried from the 1870s.

And this is where I start with the posts. I hope you will bear with me, because my original and rather sentimental question about a burial turned into an intriguing and much more complex study of family, class, and life and death in the first decades of the twentieth century. 

                                                    Plots and Sisters.

                                                                      I.

           
The Fitzgerald burial plot is a double just by the main gates, to the right of the office of Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, with one big salmon-colored rectangular slab of marble placed behind a dozen or so smaller tombstones. Though large, the salmon headstone is not monumental in any way, and is perfectly proportional to the surrounding stones. The names of my great-grandparents and their dates are inscribed in the long side of the rectangle. On the short right side are the dates of one of their sons who died in 1899 at the age of eighteen. Most of the smaller stones bear a name and that person’s dates, but three of them are inscribed simply and in large letters “Grandma”; “Mother”; “Papa.” In front of them is the stone that bears the name Fitzgerald and that shows the boundary of the plot.

            The two plots are not tightly packed, and when I stepped into the cemetery office to inquire, the clerk found index cards with the surname Fitzgerald that made clear that one lot of twelve spaces was bought by my great grandfather James and the second by my great-grandmother Nora.

            I was in a hurry. I had come to Springfield for a mere twenty-four hours, without even knowing why. It had just seemed absurd that for almost twenty years I should have lived within a day’s drive from where I knew that my father, Robert Fitzgerald, poet and translator, had been born a century ago, and not yet have been there. The final impetus had been given by the installation of a marker to honor him, organized by William Furry, the Director of the Illinois Historical Society and inspired by the suggestion made by the head reference librarian Jim Huston. I had not originally considered including the cemetery in my visit, but was already returning for the second time in less than two days.

        We had twenty minutes to spare in the last couple of hours before I had to start the long drive back, before we were to meet with the head librarian in the top floor of a building where earlier in the year a number of boxes had been found that contained files from my grandfather’s legal practice. Among the files of long forgotten cases, there were photographs of my father and his brother, as well as of people Jim and Curtis had not been able to identify, and letters from my great-aunt Agnes. These were letters that my father never saw, that had been hidden in the attic of this office building for ninety years.  From those found so far, Jim told me, it was clear that their mother’s sister Agnes took the two boys to the beach for an extended time during the summer of 1916: my father was not yet six, and his brother Monty was three. Their mother Anne had died of puerperal fever ten days after giving birth to Monty, on March 25, 1913.

            But Anne was not buried in this plot. Her body was taken back to Albany, New York and buried there. Already the day before, on my first visit to the cemetery, during the first hours of learning so much about my father’s childhood, I had been struck by this fact: she was not buried in the Fitzgerald plot, where by then her father-in-law and three of her husband’s siblings as well as the grandparents were buried. Why? At breakfast that morning I talked it over with Bill and with Jim. Ferrying a body is not easy, I said. There were a number of hoops to jump through: the casket had to be lined in a special way, and pages of paper work had to be filled.

            Perhaps in 1913 little paperwork would have been necessary: Bill pointed out that caskets were frequent cargo, stored with luggage. There were even funeral cars on trains, he told me, where a number of caskets would have been picked up and dropped off at stations all across the country. 

            Whichever way I turned and spun the fact, it continued to strike me as strange. I had always understood that my father’s parents were devoted to each other. I had always known that Robert Emmett Fitzgerald and Anne Stuart had met ‘on the stage,’ children of a middle class solid enough to allow them to be well-educated, and to allow them the early indulgence of acting before my grandfather took up his legal practice. They were engaged a long time before they married, and married in 1905, five years before my father was born, little more than a year after Robert Emmett suffered the severe accident that I remembered, in the language of a child, as being ‘squashed between two tram cars,’ which put a definitive end to a career as an actor, and which would eventually develop into a tubercular hip.

        But at the time my father was born the hip had mended, or so everyone thought. I knew Robert Emmett shared a legal practice with his brother Arthur, and I imagined the family was all set to live the peaceful small town life on “aristocracy hill”, on the right side of the railroad tracks, a stone’s throw away from his and Arthur’s mother Nora, who after the death of her husband took over the running of the successful grocery business James had built up since the 1860s; and another long stone’s throw from where Frank Lloyd Wright had recently built a house for one of the wealthiest widows in town. My father Robert was born in October 1910, and by June 1912 Anne was pregnant again.

            “Of her death nothing rises from the dark” my father wrote in Animula, a poem from the 1930s. And indeed, how could anything be remembered by the child, who was more than six months away from his third birthday when his mother died? But what about his father, left a widower with a toddler and a baby, who had to move back home to the bustling and fussing housekeeping of his mother? In one of the essays he wrote in the 70s, my father did recall his father’s bouts of drinking between the time of his wife’s death and the death five years later of Monty, the son whose birth had caused the puerperal fever that took her from him.

            “…I am sent to fetch him from what I sense to be degrading company -- not very, in fact; only a few men playing poker in a shabby office downtown, with whiskey and syphon bottles beside them.” (A Third Kind of Knowledge, p.5)

        Neither father nor son seemed to question the distant and unvisited gravesite. I wondered whether my father’s sense of his mother’s absence ‘removed as by a razor’ could have been multiplied by the absence of a place of mourning, whether his father’s grief would not have found some miserable outlet in visiting her graveside. Are not cemeteries exactly that, places where mourners can carry out the life-long rites of bereavement? There is no benefit to the dead of a place of mourning. But for those living, destined to live afterwards permanently without them, it seemed to me that there is the constant comfort of knowing a stone marks their past existence, their present influence, their future memory.             

            My father mentions Calvary Cemetery in connection with the progression of his father’s illness which followed quickly his younger brother’s death at five, a victim of the 1918 influenza epidemic that raged around the world as the First World War was coming to an end:

            “A polished small coffin took the center of the parlor, and there the small boy lay, turned to pale wax, an utter stranger in his Eton collar. I do not remember what happened at the funeral Mass or what happened at Calvary Cemetery. One day not long afterward my father stayed home with a boil. Since it was not a boil but the sickness of the bone working outward, he never went back to his office, nor to any poker game, nor again to the church or cemetery….” (The Third Kind Of Knowledge, p.10)

        In subsequent years, on the regular walks my father took at his father’s insistence, perhaps he did sometimes turn and make his way there, just over two miles due north of 215 Jackson Street, to stand helplessly in front of the salmon-colored rectangle of stone that bore the name Bernard, the nickname Monty, and the pitiful span of years of his only brother. Surely he must have thought of his mother, as well. Could the razor of her absence have made an even deeper cut by the absence of stone and word, Anne Stuart, May 5 1878 -- March 24 1913?

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

"You Got It!" October 22, 6-8 p.m. Poets House: Celebrate Paul Violi's Selected Poems:

Please come help us celebrate the release of

Selected Poems by Paul Violi

published by Gingko Press,

Charles North and Tony Towle, Editors.

 Poets House

10 River Terrace (at Murray Street)

New York, NY 10282 (212-431-7920) 

October 22, 2014, 6 to 8 p.m. 

There will be refreshments, and books will be available.

M. J. Fitzgerald, Guest Author October 20-24

This week we welcome M.J.Fitzgerald as our guest author. M. J. is a fiction writer, and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. Her novels include Concertina and The Placing of Kings. Rope-Dancer is a short story collection. She has written for UK television, translated novels from Italian, and published essays and memoir pieces in anthologies and literary magazines. Her latest essay came out in Literary Imagination in summer 2014. 

Welcome, M.J.

In other news . . . 

Take a blogging intensive workshop with Managing Editor Stacey Harwood. Four Mondays beginning November 3. Details here. 

-- sdh

Visual / Poetry (Day 5) -- Poetry, painting, & chicken scratch

by guest blogger Karen Schiff               

My post today is the least pre-planned & the most thought-through of this week. This morning, I attended a demonstration of Chinese calligraphy (by contemporary ink & performance artist Zheng Lianjie), so I'm about to write about poetry-painting connections that are totally fresh...it's just chicken-scratch. And this evening, I attended an opening of Tairiku Teshima's "Symbolic Calligraphy," such as this 2006 painting of the character "Sui (Greenery)" at right
(which is rendered imagistically, with a loose hand, & large: 43 x 28-1/2 inches). Yet I've been thinking for many years about calligraphy, & its way of seamlessly integrating visual & verbal modes (to the degree that it doesn't even make sense to separate them into distinct "modes").  

Around 2005, in a class about Japanese Visual Culture,
I heard that a single spoken word in Japanese can mean writing, painting, or scratching -- these three concepts are homonyms.* I remember that the word was "kanji" (but internet research now leaves me dubious: apparently "kanji" can mean many more things than these words, & I don't see anything online about painting or scratching. I'd love to know more about this...). True: writing can be made by scratching lines into a wall (of a prison, for instance), or a stylus into a wax tablet (from classical through medieval times). An image can be made by scratching a needle into a metal plate (as in an etching), or a fingernail into fingerpaint (or any tool into any paint). And now that we've connected scratching-writing & scratching-painting, how can we connect writing-painting? In calligraphy. 

East Asian calligraphic traditions have certainly been rich areas for visual-verbal integration. A 1992 article about calligraphy, "Pictocentrism," written by Charles Shiro Inouye (who happened to teach that Japanese Visual Culture class, all those years later!), was formative in my thinking along these lines. But western calligraphy can be imagistic, too. In art school, I studied with Brody Neuenschwander, whose handwriting might be familiar to you from the big screen: he does calligraphy for Peter Greenaway's films. He creates tools & techniques that would allow Roman letters to become more visual. For instance, he bends pen nibs out of cola cans, to create splatter effects such as those in "Your Feelings Slip" (2008), at left. (When I go through the process of "decoding" the writing in this piece -- I cannot "read" it without working at it -- I see that its "subtle fire" is being conveyed by the colors & lines, as much as by the language & its capitalizations.)

This morning, Zheng Lianjie noted that the tools for Western calligraphy are not as flexible as those in Eastern traditions. The metal nib & the feather quill cannot change direction as easily as a pointed animal-hair brush. (I'm sure he does not know about Neuenschwander's cola-can nibs, which can move sideways more easily than standard metal nibs, but still...Zheng's observation holds.) Not only can the pointed brush pivot easily, but its stroke has a wide range of widths, no matter how long the hairs on the brush. These technical details may help to explain why Roman handwriting has not gotten as imagistic as in China & Japan: we're simply locked into the letters. Yet we also regard handwriting differently.

After Zheng Lianjie introduced several ideograms in terms of their meanings, I asked whether we also should be thinking about these not just in terms of legibility, but also as visual compositions -- attending to line quality & the overall visual arrangement of the lines in relation to each other. He said that we should definitely be thinking about our writings as paintings. His way of explaining this, though, wasn't in terms of the visual qualities I had been isolating. His definition of writing-as-painting was that we should be making our strokes while "going inside" to connect with the aspect(s) of ourselves that would find expression on the paper, so that we would be working on our "writing" the way we would work on a studio project...or the way we might create a poem. He insisted that even though we were officially beginners, our work was manifesting our individuality: just as we each had a way of moving, we each had a way of using the brush. Our ideograms were actually more fresh, authentic, & individual expressions, to his eye, than if we were more practiced. (He even encouraged us to sign & frame them!)

The Western analogue for this philosophy -- graphology -- is often considered quackery. Though it is perfectly ordinary for us to recognize each others' handwriting, we do not generally take seriously these visual qualities. Perhaps the difference is that graphology tries to diagnose specific character traits, while the kind of "individuality" Zheng Lianjie was talking about today was more holistic -- less reductive. Western "handwriting analysis" tends toward personality dissection, categorization, & desiccation; I also associate it with diagnosing criminality or deviance. In any case, I am uncomfortable with this binary opposition of the two writing styles, & the disparate ways of thinking about writing...so for the rest of this post I will seek middle ground.

First, I'll look to the work of another contemporary artist (& sometime colleague of Zheng Lianjie), Xu Bing. Before today, my admiration for Xu Bing's artwork centered around some projects with Chinese calligraphic nonsense. Because I don't speak or read Chinese, ideograms always look indecipherable to me, anyway...but Xu Bing takes them one step further. In a multi-year project, "Book  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from the Sky" (1987-1991), he created nonsense using familiar calligraphic strokes (see the printing woodblock carved here), so that a printed page would resemble Chinese writing but be utterly gibberish. Then he created an entire room full of these printed texts! (See right -- printed books are on the floor & on the walls, as well as suspended from the ceiling.) Another project was to write English letters in a Chinese calligraphic style, constructing an ideogram out of each word (see below). He calls this "Square Word Calligraphy" or "New English Calligraphy," & I find it fascinating... the calligrapher here has just written "Little Bo Peep."  We tried this out today, & I found how hard it was. Yet this was still an exercise in writing according to a form -- someone else's form.  How could language be written in a visual form that is not prescribed?

This small photo to the right, a snap from tonight's "Symbolic Calligraphy" opening, suggests another approach.  It's the character for "Country," but Tairiku Teshima makes the outer structure of the ideogram into a border, & thereby transforms the negative (white) space into a dynamic shape.  While the word can still be recognized & read (I can say this with conviction because it was one of the ideograms we worked with today), the piece looks & functions more like a painting.

How might this be possible in Roman lettering? (And why should we care?) Extending Neuenschwander's ideas about calligraphy farther, we could see all of our letters as the arts that they are -- each type style an entire territory (meaning that a type style condenses historical forms & ideological associations into the microcosm of a printed letter), & each penstroke a drawing. I think that this way of thinking about text could defamiliarize it so that we gain a degree of remove, a critical distance from texts whose aim is to persuade. (Including this one...) Sure, typography can also be used to persuade, but once you're hip to its tricks -- once you can see letters visually -- you're not as subject to typographic manipulation.

Now, that is what we could gain distance from.  What could we get closer to?  I'm thinking that seeing writing as an image could infuse all texts with an aesthetic register -- a visual poetry, you might say. At this historical moment, when we're reading standardized type styles all day on our devices, a bit of play in our assumptions about text could revivify the eyes (& the mind) with which we're processing all that data. (For a fun, new, typographical look at NYC, for instance, click <here>.) I've tried to enact a bit of that this week, by setting my blog in Times New Roman instead of the default Helvetica...& by using all of these ampersands. Now it's time for me to go back to my studio, where I make text even less readable -- or more visual -- than what I've been writing about here. (You're welcome to visit! Open Studios in my Brooklyn neighborhood are this weekend, & more info about my location is <here>.)

Many thanks to Stacey Harwood, for inviting me to blog for this week!

 

This Monday at KGB: James Richardson + Star Black

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

James Richardson + Star Black

Monday, October 20, 2014

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Series founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30 pm

Admission is FREE

 

James Richardson is the author of several collections of poetry, criticism, and aphorisms, and has been awarded or nominated for some of the top awards in American literature, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has appeared in multiple editions of The Best American Poetry, and in publications including The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Slate.

 

 

 

 

Star Black is a photographer, poet, and artist. She has authored six collections of poetry and currently teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. She was recently published in The Paris Review and has written three books of sonnets, a collection of double sestinas, and a book of collaged free verse. Her poems have been anthologized in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, 110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11, and The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1880 to The Present. Her collages have been exhibited at Poets House and The Center for Book Arts, and published in One of a Kind: UniqueArtists Books by Pierre Menard Gallery.

 

Happy Hour with David Lehman and Leah Umansky: Poetry Reading at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House [by Danielle Elizabeth Chin]

Poet Deborah Landau has launched many impressive initiatives since taking over as director of the NYU Creative Writing Program. One of the most community-minded and enjoyable is the Friday Night Happy Hour series to which she invites notable authors to read in the elegant West Village town house that holds the program's offices. The readings commence at 5:00 pm, perfect for those who want a hit of the literary life, along with a glass of wine, before heading into the weekend. 

Last Friday, poets Leah Umansky, and our own David Lehman were NYU's featured readers. The warmly lit rooms, fireplace, modest hors d’oeuvres, wines, and books lined across a shelf in front of the window overlooking West 10^th Street made the poetry reading seem more like an intimate reception.

Umansky is host and curator of the COUPLET Reading Series and the author of Domestic Uncertainties (BlazeVox, 2013) and the Mad Men-inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014). She was named number seven of twenty-three “People Who Will Make You Care About Poetry in 2013” by Flavorwire.

James Ciano, the NYU graduate student who introduced Umansky, noted that in an interview with Coldfront magazine Umansky had said, “All my life, my poems were about what people would call ‘real’ things, but the fact that my latest poems are centered on television shows like Mad Men and Game of Thrones doesn’t make them any less ‘real.’  What is real about my poems is the emotion and the human experience. I’m a strong believer of admitting that I am inside every poem I write.”

Umansky began with poems from Domestic Uncertainties, her “memoir of my marriage and divorce.”

“Life is a verb,” she read. “And we all just dog-ear the moments that matter…scribbling our truth in the margins.”

“Past the memory, past the dream, always at war, always warring and warred,” it all matters, truthfully, when something threatens to conclude, concedes Umansky in the poem “The Marital Space.” “I’ll take it apart for you,” she continues. “The arms, the cushions, the seatbacks, the framework. I’ll also put it back together. Remember memory’s flexible. How we make ourselves isn’t coincidental; it’s consequential.”

Before reading from Don Dreams and I Dream, Umansky said, “I know there are some Mad Men fans in the house, especially David Lehman, so I’m reading some poems in honor of him." She looked at him and added, " I’m very happy to be reading with you.”

“You’ll like this poem.” Umansky read from her poem “Draper and the Jewess.” “Because we all fight for the underdog…She reminds him ofofof something pure, and of value and charm…She wants to love him, but he grows clingy and pale, recoiling from what she is: jewess…The Jewess does not get what she wants, but neither does the Don.”

Umansky takes the audience inside her poems, so we’re standing next to the narrator and Don, feeling as they do, punishable excitement and loneliness. 

“The common cure for breakfast isn’t Life,” Umansky reads from “Don Discovered America. “It’s a serving of good old-fashioned competition…Here’s a fact from Don: forty-five percent of people see the color blue as the same color. I want you to see what I see, my blue.”

The rhythmic swiftness of Umansky’s poems from her latest book captured the alluring nature of Draper, even for those who were not familiar with Mad Men.

To introduce the illustrious and prolific David Lehman, Monica Sok, a second-year graduate student of poetry at NYU, quoted John Hollander: Lehman "reminds us that putting aside childish things can be done only wisely and well by keeping in touch with them, and that American life is best understood and celebrated by those who are [...] both in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it.

Lehman captured the admiration of the audience as soon as he began reading new poems.

“If I were a Fascist / and you were a Republican, / would you marry me anyway?” begins “Blast from the Past,” eliciting spirited laughter from the audience. This take-off on "If I Were a Carpenter," the Tim Hardin song made popular in 1966 by Bobby Darin, continues with "If I were a rocket ship / and you were a galaxy, / would you tickle my underarms? / Could I drive your taxi? Would you give me an erection / if you were an electron / and I were a carpenter / instead of a proton? If I were a son of a bitch / and you were a lady, / would you let me scratch your itch, / would you have my baby?”

Lehman's translation from the French of Guillaume Apollinaire's “Hotel,” a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire, caused the audience to laugh in a way only a dear friend could. “My room’s the shape of a cage,” he said. “The sun crooks his arms through the bars, / but I who smoke to make mirages, / let the flame of day light my cigar. / I don’t want to work. I want to smoke.”

Lehman shared a few poems from a book he has been working on for twelve years called Poems in the Manner Of. “Poem in the Manner of Dorothy Parker” is one of those poems that would break even a tense situation.

“Dorothy Parker/…did not foresee,” Lehman read. “That spectacles would be-/ come fashion accessories./ ‘Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses.’/…in Washington Square Park/ I thought of…Miss Parker,/ and what she might say/ assessing the spectacles of our day: / ‘Even the nicest lasses/ Have tattoos on their asses.’” 

Lehman enlisted the audience’s help to title one of his poems. He was torn between “Poem in the Female Manner” and “I Married a Jerk.” One voice suggested he insert "or" and use both titles. To which Lehman deadpanned: "My next poem is “Poem in the Female Manner or I Married a Jerk.”

“When I lived in Newark and commuted to New York,” read Lehman. “I worked on a magazine called New Work and wrote a poem in the female manner to which I gave the title, ‘I married a jerk,’ because any woman married to me, would be able to make that claim.”

Lehman’s charm continued, even as he sang a few lines of an Irving Berlin song quoted in the poem “On Marilyn Monroe’s Birthday.” He concluded with two poems from his New and Selected Poems.  “Cento: The True Romantics” is a sonnet for which Lehman had “lifted each line from a Romantic poet.” Each line fit together seamlessly, though they had previously existed separately in the poems of Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Poe, Yeats, and Clare. Lehman’s sonnet doesn’t only demonstrate his knowledge of poetry from the Romantic era but also his love for it and talent for weaving new fabric from even the darkest lines. Lehman concluded with his translation of “Goethe’s Nightsong,” a poem his father had often recited in German with “a very strange look in his eyes.”

Lehman thanked the spectators for being attentive, though it was easy to be as he had charmed the audience from the start by inviting us into the diverse rooms of each of his poems. The audience laughed, wondered about girls who wore glasses, and tasted a bit of French and German poetry.   

In her introduction, Sok recalled what a resident at Coler-Goldwater Hospital named Mr. Reed had said after she read to him Lehman’s poem “When A Woman Loves A Man” (which has been anthologized and translated into other languages, including Chinese). Mr. Reed had thoughtfully said, “Well, when a man loves a woman, it means that she inspires him.”

“So in the same way,” Sok added. “when we love a poet, they inspire us too.”

Lehman and Umansky’s poems, an extension of their talents and of themselves, enticed the audience into the diverse worlds of their narrators. It was as if one by one, each narrator took our hands and danced us into each poem, assuring us that we would never have to do the same routine twice, unless we wanted to. 

You can listen to a podcast of this even here (scroll down). 

Yes You Can!

Details here.

Visual / Poetry (Day 4) -- Poets in the project rooms [by Karen Schiff]

 

Over the past year, I've noticed a trendlet (not even a real trend, yet) of galleries exhibiting poets & writers in their project rooms -- small, windowless rooms at the backs of the buildings.  I get a thrill when I anticipate visiting these shows: I love seeing how visual & verbal modes interact in these exhibitions. Sometimes a poet's words are composed in visually arresting ways; sometimes writers are creating collages out of writing; sometimes a poet's collages have no words at all. And so, what are they all saying?

Let's start with Dickinson, that cloaked keystone of American poetry's past century. Last fall, during The Drawing Center's "Drawing Time, Reading Time" exhibition (an uneven yet fascinating survey of artists using language in their work, even when no letters were visible), the Center's back gallery held a fascinating little sideshow: “Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches.” I say the show was "little" because the pieces in it were tiny: Emily Dickinson's handwriting scratched loosely over envelope scraps -- sometimes whole, & sometimes cut or torn to make them even smaller.  Here, I could imagine that her line lengths may well have been inflected by the spaces in which she wrote, much like I remember that some famous artist said in an interview that the paintings' sizes expanded when the family bought a bigger car. There was also the incredible immediacy of imagining her finding & using these bits of paper, & storing them in her desk...their smallness made them feel closer to her body because they could be so easily hidden in pockets or in books held in the hand. I don't know the entire history of these...shall I call them manuscripts, or artifacts? -- I haven't studied the deluxe compendium edited by Jen Bervin & Marta Werner, The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems. (Werner has reconsidered the term "envelope poem" as being too prescriptive; click <here> to read a Poetry Foundation interview where she explains her thinking.) These works add to the story of the "fascicles" of manuscripts that Dickinson bound together, in a simple suturing gesture that prefigures so many American women sewing the bindings of artists' books, a century later. (Or she carries on with a tradition of women working at anonymous positions, in book production industries.) In a New York Times review of The Gorgeous Nothings, art critic Holland Cotter asks, "Are they art? Sure. Why not?" & here I will restate the question: "Are they art? Sure. Why?" Because they are gorgeous.
In part, their visual appeal comes from off-handedness: Dickinson was pursuing a verbal goal, & this material medium was simply her launching pad. Yet the envelopes also look like lily pads, each with a color & quality of paper that seeps into the viewer-reader's experience of the poem-in-the-making. (And here, I'm thinking about the etymology of "poem" as a "made thing," which I wrote about on Day 1...)

The viewing experience gets both more & less complicated in the case of Robert Walser, whose tiny writings on envelopes look impossible to decipher. I wish I had taken more time to probe these works, which felt dense with thought. Here's a full image of one, & a detail of another:

                                                                    Robert Walser, "Microscript 215, October - November 1928," detail


Robert Walser, "Microscript 419, 1927-28," detail

Part of the draw (so to speak!) of these envelopes is that I definitely cannot read them. Though with Dickinson's envelopes I can flip back & forth between reading & looking, here I must see the writing as fields of visual pattern -- or, in the case of the detail on the right, I can look at the entire piece as a visual composition. Walser's micro-code contributes to this, plus the fact that I don't speak the German he was encoding. Plus, sometimes Walser was drawing lines in addition to inscribing linguistically coded marks. These works take on a mind-mapping quality, creating visual frameworks for inner cosmologies. Apparently, these were drafts for later works...but how different they appear from my own handwritten envelope notes, messily jotted while I'm on the phone, only to get lost in a pile of papers on the desk! (To gain inspiration from how both Dickinson & Walser write on envelopes, the exhibition's entire gorgeous catalogue is free online: click <here> to view.)

A few months after the Dickinson/Walser exhibition, another Dickinson-themed show opened in Chelsea: Janet Malcolm's "The Emily Dickinson Series" at Lori Bookstein Fine Art. While Malcolm is perhaps best known as a writer for The New Yorker, she has not only written poetry but she has made art for years.  And this exhibition is clearly based on poetry...its modestly scaled collages were mounted in the gallery's handsomely proportioned small room, diagonally opposite the entrance. This exhibition (the collage pictured here at left is topically entitled Language) also had a connection to the earlier one at The Drawing Center, in that Dickinson scholar-poet Marta Werner was again involved. Malcolm gathered the primary materials for her collages by writing to Werner in search of a copy of Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing, an older book of literary history that Werner had written. Werner still possessed one copy of the book, & she sent it to Malcolm. Sometimes I felt confused about which part of the exhibition was more important to Malcolm -- the correspondence & sympathetic connection with Werner, which was well documented in the show's accompanying literature, or the work of finding visual expression through the collages themselves. 

Lori Bookstein's project room has also hosted collage exhibitions by poet Mark Strand, who studied Fine Art at Yale in the 1950s. His assemblages of hand-colored pieces of paper pulp, which Strand creates at the Dieu Donné paper mill, have opened the Fall season both last year & this year. (He has also shown with the gallery before.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                               Mark Strand collages, both "Untitled"

At first I thought the collages were composed with such elegance that they were too genteel. Even small bits of surprising color seemed carefully arranged to raise not-unpleasant tensions & then resolve them into polite visual harmonies. This was an artist who had clearly absorbed his Bauhaus-inspired training. (And the collages were so even, in terms of their visual mastery, that I found it hard to pick two to include here.) Could I see beyond the work's evident refinement, toward something more than formal excellence? It took me three visits, but Yes. I was tempted to look at the pieces of paper in Strand's collages the way I think about the swatches in some of my own: as analogues for the "sorts" of type in letterpress printing, packed together into a chase. But Strand's rambling compositions (including some proto-landscapes), & the variety of shapes & sizes in his torn & cut paper pieces, didn't have the strictness or rectilinearity to justify (!) a connection with printing. Besides, I would have found that solution unsatisfactory -- imposing the framework of letters would be grasping for low-hanging fruit.

Eventually, I saw something more fitting: competing energies contained within each piece. I mean both each piece of art, & each piece of paper: Strand's pulpy swatches had all kinds of movement in them, & these movements set up tensions when they were arranged next to each other. Also, the borders of the cut & torn edges contained the internal movements of each swatch. Altogether, the sequence (from small bit to entire field) of movements, borders, juxtaposed energies between paper pieces, & finally overall compositional elegance established a deeply satisifying alternating rhythm of wildness; containment; contrast; resolution. In this back-&-forth movement, I finally glimpsed the sense of humor that I appreciate in Strand's poetry. The collages wink at you from within a Stoic's richly (dis)passionate frame. 

 

 

My Father and I Look Around and Back from the Empire State Building Observation Deck; 1989 [by Alan Ziegler]

(Note: My father, Matthew Ziegler, who died in 2001, was born on October 14, 1920. In honor of his birthday, this piece (from the working draft of Based on True Life: A Memoir in Pieces) recounts a visit we made to the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building in 1989. The dialogue is a composite of several conversations we had during that period.)

            My father is claustrophobic. He hardly ever has to be in an enclosed space—except airplanes, but he loves to fly, connecting more to the open sky than to the confinement of the cabin. For a pick-me-up, instead of going to a bar, sometimes he drives to the airport and watches planes take off. He calls it “sniffing the planes.”

            Since my mother died, my father occasionally takes the Long Island Railroad and meets me at Penn Station. We have an early lunch at a coffee shop named Andrews on 35th Street, where the waiters and waitresses are nice, even if they rarely get my father’s toast dark the way he asks for it. It’s enough that occasionally one will ask, “Is it dark enough for you?” He got upset with a new waitress because she didn’t seem to care when he pointed out how light the toast was. When we asked for the check, we realized she hardly spoke English. My father left a big tip.

            After lunch we walk through Macy’s and look at VCRs. My father has been shopping for a VCR for a year. By the time the one he’s had his eye on goes on sale, a new model with new features has arrived, and he figures he’ll wait until the new one goes on sale. Finally I buy him one for Christmas, and after a few phone calls to me for tech support, he tells me he doesn’t know how he lived without it.

            Usually I am the one who buys something at Macy’s: a sweater, or some aftershave with the free gift of a duffel bag or soccer ball. Occasionally I want something more extravagant—a portable CD player or an electronic organizer, anything new on the market—but I don’t purchase it until after I put my father on the train.

            From Macy’s we walk the streets, window shopping, father and son flâneurs, and wind up at the food plaza on the top floor of the new A&S. We look out over Father & Son Shoes on Sixth Avenue as we sip coffee for an hour or so, until he catches the last train before the peak rush hour fare kicks in and competition is fiercer for a seat. I can never get much out of him about his past. Mostly we talk about sports and television, and we occasionally spar a few rounds on politics, which sometimes gets out of hand but always ends with a hug before he gets on the train.

            One crystallized early spring day, we stop outside of Madison Square Garden to listen to a middle-aged trombone player and his preteen, banjo-playing, tap dancing son. A Suit with a walkie-talkie confers with them and points toward the edge of Madison Square Garden’s property.

            “Why is he kicking them out? Doesn’t he have anything better to do?” I say to my father.

            I gear up for a contretemps on corporate autonomy versus free expression—with my father taking the corporate side even though he’s worn a blue collar all his life—but he replies “They weren’t hurting anybody” as the father and son pack up their instruments.

            Buoyed by our rare solidarity against the system, I suggest something I’ve been wanting to do for months: “Let’s get away from it all and go to the top of the Empire State building.”

            “I was there yesterday,” my father says, his stock answer when he doesn’t want  something. (“You want to try my calamari?” “Nah, I had some yesterday.”) I am forty-two, as old as my father was when I was eighteen, which was when my father stopped calling my shots. Now it is time for the child to be father to the man. “We’ll be closer to the airplanes,” I persist, and take his arm.

            As soon as we enter the elevator, I realize I have made a cruel mistake. I’ve been picturing the living room-size elevator at the World Trade Center, forgetting that the Empire State Building’s elevator is the size of a large closet. Before I can ask my father if he wants to leave, tourists pack in with shopping bags and cameras. The only way not to make physical contact with a stranger is to stand absolutely straight.

            My father and I are at attention, pinned to the back, as the doors close. Above the door are lights for each floor up to “20,” with the next light indicating the 86^th floor observation deck. A minute after “20” winks at us, my father mutters something; instead of asking him to repeat it, I pretend I didn’t hear him.

            When we exit, my father says, “It was a little rough there for a while. I couldn’t tell if we were moving.” Unsaid is that we will soon have to get back into that elevator.

            I have been doing biofeedback exercises, aimed at reducing the body’s anxiety arousal by breathing deeply and slowly. I explain this to my father and demonstrate how to breathe from the diaphragm, narrating: “Hold your stomach and feel it move as you breathe in for a count of four; hold your breath for one count, and let it out for another count of four as you feel your diaphragm contract. Hold for a count and repeat.”

            “You know,” I add, “when I was in elementary school, a nurse came to teach us how to brush our teeth—‘be sure to spit out, otherwise you just move the germs around’—but no one taught us how to breathe. And wouldn’t you say that’s elementary?”

            My father seems distracted as I talk to him, probably thinking about the return elevator trip. He is not one to go for faddish solutions, so I mention that the Chinese knew about breathing thousands of years ago, but I don’t press the issue. For now, we are at the top. “See, it’s like being in a plane,” I say, “circling the city.”

            We walk around the deck, and as we pass the elevator, I try to distract him by pointing to the Upper West Side and saying, “Hey, look, you can see my house from here.” We circle again.

            As the time gets closer to the last off-peak train, neither of us makes a move to leave. He points toward Brooklyn and says, “There’s the Brooklyn Bridge. Your mother and I drove over that bridge on our first date.”

            My father and I have talked about my mother’s illness and his loneliness, and even a little about their marriage, but never about their courtship. He continues:

            Yeah, we were going to the Strand to hear Eddie Duchen. Your mother had this big straw hat, which she never put on. I remember it next to her on the seat as we went over the bridge, she held on to the brim. Bridges scared the hell out of her. I didn’t know it then. Turned out her sister forced that silly hat on her, which she couldn’t bring herself to wear and would be stuck carrying all night.

            My poor mother: feeling her chest constrict as they drove over the Brooklyn Bridge, unable to share her panic on a first date, knowing that the bridge would have to be crossed again. Then I remember my mother telling me about the time my father and she were driving home from Manhattan and they got caught in a traffic gridlock as they were about to enter the Midtown Tunnel. My father had a panic attack (though he didn’t know what to call it) and left the car. He scurried through the stalled traffic and my mother drove home alone. An hour after she got home, he showed up, having taken the Long Island Railroad.

            She was also going out with my friend Sam Hoffman, and she couldn’t choose so she stopped seeing both of us. One day I saw her on the street and she looks at me and says, “I made a mistake.”

            That was it. That was the rest of my life.

            I realize I couldn’t have planned a better way to get my father to talk to me; silence is the path to the elevator. I ply him with questions about his bank-robber father, the club he belonged to as a teenager, his cross-country trip on the cusp of World War II, the bar he owned. My head overloads with material I want to remember.

            Your grandfather was in Sing Sing when I was little, but when I went to visit they told me it was the “hospital.” Later it was “college.” By the time I was ten, I knew where he was. By that time I was taking care of myself and your grandmother.

            The dog—Scrappy—got into some chicken bones and we took him to the vet, who pronounced him fine. When I came home from school the next day, the dog was dead. I carried him seven blocks and buried him in the park so your grandmother wouldn’t have to see him.

            Yeah, visiting your father in prison—it wasn’t your norm. I was always ashamed of the whole bit. But remember now, even though they did have weapons on them, it was the gentleman’s part of the industry. They were the clean men of the business: You never robbed anybody personally. It was not a home; it was businesses that were covered by insurance. You didn’t stick anybody up. They had a regular crew, then they’d pick up other guys as they needed them. You must see Asphalt Jungle—that will show you how it was.

            The time they put in—it took a lot of surveillance and time, months could go into it before they did something. If they’d put all that planning and scheming and brains into something legit, they probably could have made more money.

            One of your grandfather’s scams involved a midget named Boots. He and Boots would go to a fancy bar in Manhattan and argue about the details of a race they were fixing, exactly how the midget would engineer his fellow jockeys. When someone got curious, they offered to share the fix in exchange for a few bucks.

            He knew them all. Introduced me to Lepke once at Detention, just said, “Lepke, I want you to meet my son.”

            Once we’re walking and he points out a nice looking woman: “You see her, one of the best pickpockets in the business.” The payoff is, he comes home one day, he was riding the train, and he says, “You wouldn’t believe it I had my wallet picked. I never knew it. I got taken.” He couldn’t get over it. “They got it and I don’t know how.” It always bothered him.

            My father will want to stay up here for hours, filibustering with his life story. Looking down at the distant oval of Madison Square Garden (where once I got dizzy climbing up to seats in the top row), I feel a surge of panic. What if an overwhelming urge to jump comes over me? I’ve never been tempted before, but people have been known to “snap,” and that sounds sudden and unexpected.

            Breathe. I put my hand on my stomach and start counting to myself. I feel better, almost giddy with my newfound skill, though embarrassed at my silly fear of snapping.  Now that I think about it—I would have to snap badly enough to climb the spiked fence without coming to my senses. I confront Madison Square Garden below as if staring down a bully.

            “Tell me about East New York when you were growing up.”

            Oh, I can picture them all:

            There was Lenny – he’d sit on the stoop all evening and late into the night during the summer because his hay fever was so bad and his wheezing and sneezing drove everyone nuts. He could sing, and finally got in with the crowd by singing tenor on the street corner. One of the other kids rode on the handlebar of Lenny’s bicycle and a car ran into them. Lenny just got banged up but the other kid was killed. Word got around that Lenny had a sneezing attack. From then on, whenever anyone from the dead kid’s family saw Lenny, they’d spit on the ground near his feet.

            And Tommy. He was eight pounds overweight for the Navy, which was the safest service to join during the war. He went on a diet to lose the weight so he could enlist with the other guys, but they wouldn’t take him. He tied one on and they went looking for him. He was sitting out on the curb in front of his old pool room, he was just sitting in front of the pool room at two a.m. He was drafted into the Army three or four months later. The first time he went out on a mission….he never made it.

            We started the club on Bradford Street, Fraternal Fellows. We had about sixteen kinds of cards made up. Joe was in the club; my friend Nicky from Glenmore Avenue days; Sam Hoffman— the one who used to go with Mommy. We had this guy we called Big Boy. And there was a guy we called “Mr. Tops— he used to stand out in the middle of the street and just start to spin around. Mishegas. Like one guy who collected keys, he was always asking for your old keys. Then he’d go to a dance or something and give them to the bandleader—“Hey, I found these.” The bandleader would hold them up and ask who lost them. We’d all laugh at everyone checking their pockets. 

            Hesh was a short little rotund guy who found it very difficult to get girls to go out with him—not that he didn’t love to go out with the girls—so one time they pulled a cruel trick on him. He hears all this moaning from the back room and they told him they had a girl in there and he’s next. When he goes in, there are two of the guys simulating. If he had a gun he would have killed everybody. One time there was a girl in the crowd that put out. Everybody else knew her as this sweet little thing but she would go with a crowd of guys, no money, she just did it for the love of doing it. She said, “There’s only one guy I won’t put out for. Hesh.”

            Right around the corner, belonging to another club, was this fighter called Bummy Davis—you could look him up. They also had a guy who went to Hollywood and became a big shot producer. He used to play poker with us. One night, he had four of a kind and the pot kept getting bigger. I had a straight flush. I don’t care how much money he’s made in Hollywood, I bet you he still remembers that hand.

            In 1940, my father and a friend from the club bought a car and drove cross country. He was nineteen. I ask him how it happened.

            Just talking, kid-talk, you sat around and did a lot of dreaming: one day we’re gonna go. And we did it. We took off. We had a big eighty or ninety dollars. We paid about thirty-five dollars for the car. The very first night we got to Blairsville, Pennsylvania, and slept in the car along the side of the road.

            We stayed with relatives in Chicago, and the “Y” in Reno, Salt Lake City,  Hollywood. We got lots of autographs: Mary Astor, George Raft, Rosalind Russell, Greer Garson, Robert Young, Eddie Albert, Freddie Bartholomew.

            One of the gang back home made this giant map of the U.S. and put it on the wall at Jack’s bicycle shop. They pinned our postcards on the places we sent them from, and everyone came by and checked on our progress. Forty years later I run into a guy at the track who recognized me from the old neighborhood. He remembered the map. We were gears back then.

            It is getting cold, and my father says, “Let’s go inside.” A guy has a machine that flattens pennies into Empire State Building souvenirs. It costs a dollar, and, despite the price, my father lets me buy one for each of us without saying, “Nah, I got one yesterday.” He insists on supplying the pennies. The guy punches holes in them, and we add them to our key chains. I ask about the bar he owned right after he got married.

            The Montauk Tavern. My partner was Bright Eyes, we got the money from my father. Bright Eyes was always taking his pulse while looking at his watch, feeling his chest. Hypochondriac, always thought he was going to die.

            “What happened to him?”

            He died of a heart attack.

            We both laugh.

            We had a free lunch counter on the horseshoe bar. Ferranti was a drunken chef with a handlebar moustache who couldn’t hold a job but made the best sauce you ever tasted. We let him sleep in the back and threw him three pennies each day to buy “Il Progresso.” This Irish guy Brady was always the first customer on Saturday morning. Never saw him any other time.

            One New Years Eve we wanted to stay open past three a.m., and your grandfather told me I had to go to the precinct, give the captain an envelope with a Christmas present. I get in to see the Captain, tell him the name of the bar, and put the envelope on the table: “A little something for your family.” He stares at me, cold, and says, “Son, if that’s what I think it is you better just pick it up and walk away.” I could have crawled out.

            A week later he comes into the bar, I’m afraid to even offer him a free drink. He says he’s been thinking, that it’s not fair to his children if I want to do something for them, and asks if the envelope still has his name on it. I never even opened it. I give it to him and he wishes me a Merry Christmas, adjusts his hat, and leaves. Your grandfather comes in a couple of minutes later and says, “What was the old captain doing here?” “What do you mean old captain?” “He got transferred someplace up in the Bronx.”

            Always through the years, there were your grandfather’s cronies come to the house and hung around. Charlie Irish, Blackie (a ladies man, I don’t know who passed him up, an enforcer, very deadly—you’ve got to have persuaders in every business, that was the game and when you got into the game you knew that was the price you had to pay); Dummy Taylor (I remember him cleaning fish), Big Joe the Pollock, Georgie Kalivas had a pushed-in nose. Pete Koback— he did a lot of jobs with your grandfather. He might have even been your godfather—who held you that day, who held you? There was Abe from the Garment District, if you had a  problem he’d say, “Okay, I’ll take care of it.” Quiet, nattily dressed, heavyset man, not fat, big in stature, very impressive, spoke very softly. We had lunch at one of those side restaurants, and the red carpet was dragged out for him.

            I tell him how exciting all this is to me.

            There were some rough times. Your grandfather was away once and he left money behind. Your grandmother was seeing one of his cronies. When he got out he found out about it and the money was gone. He went into a rage and the result was she tried to kill herself. Took some pills. I got worried about her and went to the apartment but it was locked and I didn’t have the key. I just started trying every key I had and one of them fit and I got her to the hospital. I still don’t know how that happened, how I had a key that fit.

            I used to see him do something that I never knew what he was doing. Maybe at that time it was a form of a drug. He used a little burner. I don’t know what you do when you burn something. He used to do that in the bedroom. He did drink more than your average. He could hold it. He always had a bottle. He was always taking a shot.

            The FBI came by after we got married—you know the kind, government men, business types with the shirts and ties like they just got out of college. They showed me pictures. I knew every picture. But I was very vague with my answers. When I had the milk route they came to the place and the boss says, “Hey, Matt, they were asking questions about you.”

            I remember one horrible snowstorm when he had the milk route and he didn’t come home till late the next night.

             It might have been '58. They predicted a big storm so I left the house at eleven p.m. It took me until seven in the morning to get to the place, load a truck, and get near the route. Nothing is plowed, everything is knee high. Cars and trucks stuck. I stop at a little restaurant—a diner type place—the Phoenix. What am I gonna do now? Kid sits next to me and he’s having coffee. “You wanna make ten bucks,” I ask and he says, “Yeah, doing what?” “Help me out delivering milk.” “Okay, c’mon let’s go.”

            I had to work out of sequence of what I would normally do. This kid was good. We split up on each block. I rang the customers’ bells so they’ll know the milk is out there. They said, “What the hell are you doing here, are you crazy?” We got three quarters of the way through, and it’s seven o’clock at night. We stopped for doughnuts and coffee and ate in the truck. I told him, “Take as much milk as you can carry.”

            I walked in the house it was eleven p.m.—twenty-four hours straight, and I’m talking work, walking knee deep in snow with a case of milk, running up flights of stairs palming two bottles in each hand. I had to pay for all the milk, so I probably didn’t make anything.

            “Why did you do it?

             Why did I do it? Why do you climb the mountain?

            Rush hour has come and gone. Through the dark, amidst the glitter, are the places my father has been talking about.

            I guess I’ve been yapping a lot.

            I remind him that when I used to come home for the weekend from college he'd hardly say a word to me.

            I have a confession. I used to wish you wouldn’t come home because I’d feel so empty when you left.  On Sunday, I’d sit in the living room, by the window, as the sun went down and you got farther away. Your mother would say, “Why don’t you put the light on?”

            We finally enter the elevator. Again we get pressed to the back. We stare at the “20,” waiting for it to glow as if searching for a beacon. It feels like the elevator really has stalled this time. “Uh oh,” a Japanese tourist says, and his companions laugh.
            I avoid my father’s eyes, not wanting to witness his moment of panic, but I panic, unable to flee, afraid I will faint (though I have never fainted). I start doing my deep breathing but can’t break the cycle. I imagine myself screaming and my father screaming and the tourists laughing.

            Out of the corner of my eye I see my father’s hand on his stomach, moving slowly up and down, his lips moving slightly with the count.

            The light for the twentieth floor comes on. We’ve been moving all along.

            As we get out of the elevator, my father says:

            That kid from the snowstorm – he’s probably still telling that story.

Visual / Poetry (Day 3) -- Words that must somehow be un-said

by guest blogger Karen Schiff                

The New School's room 510,
at 66 West 12th Street, was an unexpectedly perfect place for last month's conversation between Edward Hirsch &
David Lehman. Though the two were scheduled to discuss Hirsch's new reference work, 
A Poet's Glossary, the occasion coincided with the publication
of Hirsch's latest book of poetry, Gabriel. You can see a write-up of the event elsewhere on this blog (click <here> to read the post). In that account, as well as in a recent New Yorker article about Gabriel, Hirsch is quoted on the difficulties of writing about a life challenge so devastating that I'm finding it hard even to type any words for it here. So, revving up resolve & writing most plainly: Hirsch's son, his only child, Gabriel, died unexpectedly in 2011, at age 22, when a party drug he maybe didn't anticipate mixed with physiological conditions he certainly couldn't control.

How I wish those words weren't true, or that by un-saying them I could rewind reality & bring the dead back to life. Lehman & Hirsch agreed ruefully that the poem they most wanted not to write was an elegy for offspring. And Hirsch looked like he had been through the gates of hell. I had last seen him in 2008, at a reading he had given in DC, & I wondered if he had survived cancer in the interim. But mortality delivered a somatic shock in a different guise.

I had gone to the event with a secret plan, built on a conversation I'd had with Hirsch after his 2008 reading. Back then, I had hoped he would read his poem, "The Horizontal Line (Homage to Agnes Martin)," because I admire Martin's work. When he didn't read it that night, I confessed to having considered sending him my request, by e-mail before the reading, & he enthusiastically encouraged me to do so some other time. He'd be happy to put that poem on the set list. So before the New School reading, I e-mailed him my request, with a reminder about the 2008 conversation. Hirsch replied with the amiable suggestion that I ask during the Q&A about ekphrasis, so he'd be able to talk about Agnes Martin in an answer still tied to the context of his glossary of poetical terms. Sounded great! I agreed.

But Gabriel blew in. ("Unbolt the doors / Fling open the gates / Here he comes") As soon I heard Hirsch speak about the impossibility of finding a form in which to write about his vivid & inimitable son, now gone...details of ekphrasis & even the implacability of Martin felt moot. Hirsch's eventual arrival at a flexible form of three-line stanzas, with short lines & no punctuation so the emotion could turn on a dime (to evoke the "Mr. Impulsive" aspect of Gabriel's personality), didn't feel like an arrival at all, but rather a taking up residence in a dynamo of (e)motion.  Thank goodness there was no Q&A. 

Instead of formulating my coded question about ekphrasis, I started to think about Hirsch's struggle to articulate the unimaginable (or the unarticulable). And as I gazed around the room, I saw artworks that looked like potent ruminations on the same theme. Behind Hirsch & Lehman I recognized a Cy Twombly, from his phase of "scribbling on blackboards." (This was Untitled -- an apt title! -- a 1971 silkscreen from Cy Twombly's On the Bowery portfolio -- see detail, above.) On the far wall was a series of lined drawings by Sol LeWitt, like so many empty notebook pages. (These were were four etchings from the 1973 Sol LeWitt portfolio, Straight, Not Straight, and Broken Lines and All their Combinations -- details, farther below.) Scrawl & silent anticipation: are these works not about the discontents of language? Here are the walls I saw from my seat (I took snaps of the empty room, later):

Cy Twombly, "Untitled"

Sol LeWitt, "Straight, Not Straight, and Broken Lines and All their Combinations"

What can each of these artists reveal about the challenge of articulating something beyond articulation?

Twombly is hot on a trail, chasing something down the line again & again. Agitation is electric in the contrast of black & white lines, & in the vigor of the circular marks that have no meaning. That is, no denotation, no connotation, no notation at all...they are all O. "O" for the moan of not being able to say. "O" for the endless line of that infinitely circling letter (I'm thinking of John Cage's repeated enso drawings); "O" for the zero of what we can actually conclude about Twombly's intention. This work both invites & denies access to its maker's conundrum: let me tell you the story of my inability to tell.

LeWitt, by contrast, has figured something out, found a cool remove. He may even be a little amused by the problem, which now isn't necessarily about expression but is about strategies for expression. "All their combinations." I don't know if these four etchings are the only ones in the portfolio, but here are close-ups of their line patterns, in order from left to right: 

      
                 Not Straight                                         Broken                                   Not Straight / Broken                               Straight

Though these lines were planned in advance, they are not dully or overly rational. We still see the skittering hand, the vulnerability to error. What is inexpressible is perhaps the extent of variety itself. LeWitt tries to catalogue categories of the infinite, while Twombly dives into its excessiveness.  Whose art falls in the middle?  I think of Hanne Darboven's calculated non-scripts, or Mary McDonnell's clotted arteries of blood-red lines (both, like Twombly's, "Untitled").  

Hanne Darboven, "Untitled"
                                                                                Mary McDonnell, "Untitled"

And what of Hirsch? While many commentators talk about his strategy's resemblance to Dante's terza rima (fitting for such a hellish journey), there are no schematic rhymes here. Rather, I hear something of Twombly's repeated O, in the truncated rhythm of the thought that cannot be sustained. When I listen to Hirsch read from these poems, & I zone out slightly -- in much the same mode in which I looked around room 510 last month -- I can hear underneath the words, to where each capsule sounds like a brief keening. Allen Ginsberg recommended composing lines according to the length of the breath, & Hirsch reminds us: sometimes we pant.