Archive for October, 2014

His best years were ahead of him.

I met Galway Kinnell – very briefly, alas – when I received a Cranbrook Writer’s Guild Scholarship in the late 1970s. Cranbrook is less than a mile down the same street from my family’s home, and I used to take walks to the Eliel Saarinen landmark – so it was odd to have a weekend retreat so close to my familiar haunts.

Not every man seems like his poems – it doesn’t take too much poetry writing to see that the “voice” that emerges in one’s poems can be startlingly unlike one’s own – but Kinnell did. I was hungry and lingered over the refreshments  before the opening event, alone in the large, wood-paneled room – I could have taken just one oatmeal cookie without anyone noticing. But Kinnell walked into the room at the moment, and he teased me about it, in a lightly flirtatious sort of way. He was handsome, genial, and overwhelmingly masculine – and I was indeed overwhelmed. Well, I was getting over someone, as I recall, and I wanted to be overwhelmed. For those few minutes, he was just the ticket.

Now, as everyone knows, the Pulitzer prizewinning poet died at his home in Sheffield, Vermont, of leukemia, on Tuesday, October 28, at the age of 87.

He was the poetry section of the event; I was the prose. So my workshop sessions were with British author Paul Scott of Jewel in the Crown fame – I wrote about that here. Nevertheless, I attended Kinnell’s readings over the weekend, and somewhere among my books (where is it?) I have the one I purchased at that time, his breakthrough The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World, published in 1960, and I was bowled over by the words as well as the man.

From the New York Times:

The poem is a 14-part work about Avenue C in Manhattan, a mother lode of inspiration for someone with Mr. Kinnell’s photographic eye and intuitive sense of other people’s lives. In these verses and on this street, Jews, blacks and Puerto Ricans walked in the spring sunlight, past the avenue’s mainstays at the time — the Downtown Talmud Torah, Blosztein’s Cutrate Bakery, Areceba Panataria Hispano, Nathan Kugler Chicken Store Fresh Killed Daily and others. The vendors’ carts clattered on the cobblestones. In the gathering shadows,

wiped-out lives — punks, lushes
Panhandlers, pushers, rumsoaks, all those
Who took it easy when they should have been out failing at something.

And after dark, the crone who sells newspapers on the street:

Rain or stars, every night
She is there, squatting on the orange crate,
Issuing out only in darkness, like the cucarachas
And dread nightmares in the chambers overhead.

I’ll always have Cranbrook.

His best years were ahead of him: “When his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1983, and a share of the National Book Award the same year, it amounted to a fresh appreciation of his best work over 25 years.”

“Serious or droll, Mr. Kinnell was an imposing figure at poetry readings, a big, muscular man with powers of retention that enabled him to recite long pieces from memory, his own and other writers’ as well. One time, he confessed in an interview with Saturday Review, he even mesmerized himself. ‘I just folded my arms on the lectern and fell asleep,’ he said. ‘I suppose the audience thought I had fallen into a poetic swoon.’”

It’s not entirely common for an obituary to have quite as much exuberance as this one. You might check it out here. It matches the man. At least as I remember him … on that afternoon when he seemed so full of life, teasing me about the cookie I never ate.

Can poetry matter? At a time when poetry is put on subway signs and the backs of buses, in a desperate attempt to show its relevancy to our times, I decided to vote with my feet. Or rather with my legs.

Okay, okay … I know it was a bit naff. But when I saw poet Molly Fisk‘s Facebook post about a woman in Israel who makes Emily Dickinson tights, I knew I had to have a pair. But given a choice among poems to choose … with myself as a sort of billboard… what could I do?

The international package arrived a few days ago from “Coline” in Netanya – elegantly wrapped and tied with a red ribbon. Black letters on dark gray tights, in a photo taken by my artiste daughter, Zoë Patrick. (Here’s the link for Coline’s magic tights – here.)

What did I choose? Who else but Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz! It’s poet Jane Hirshfield‘s favorite poem, and soon became one of mine – she reads and discusses the poem in the video below. Not the usual thing to have on one’s legs, admittedly but it’s a great poem for the middle-to-the-end of life, and a great poem as we roll into a California winter. So here’s what’s written on my legs (translation by Robert Hass):

Winter

The pungent smells of a California winter,
Grayness and rosiness, an almost transparent full moon.
I add logs to the fire, I drink and I ponder.

“In Ilawa,” the news item said, “at age 70
Died Aleksander Rymkiewicz, poet.”

He was the youngest in our group. I patronized him slightly,
Just as I patronized others for their inferior minds
Though they had many virtues I couldn’t touch.

And so I am here, approaching the end
Of the century and of my life. Proud of my strength
Yet embarrassed by the clearness of the view.

Avant-gardes mixed with blood.
The ashes of inconceivable arts.
An omnium-gatherum of chaos.

I passed judgment on that. Though marked myself.
This hasn’t been the age for the righteous and the decent.
I know what it means to beget monsters
And to recognize in them myself. …

Read the rest here. Or listen to Jane below:

It’s here! On Monday night, October 27, Stanford’s “Another Look” book club will take on Italo Calvino‘s twelve science-inspired fantasies, Cosmicomics, with moderator Robert Pogue Harrison, joined by panelists Tobias Wolff and Humble Moi. The event begins at 7:30 p.m. at the Stanford Humanities Center at 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus.

Award-winning author Tobias Wolff, who founded the group three years ago, said that the book club is Stanford’s “gift to the community.” Hence, the Another Look book club  is open to all members of the public, as well as Stanford’s students, staff, and faculty. Not only can everyone attend, but we positively want you to come to our first event in the third season. The event is free, but come early, because seats are available on a first-come basis.

We’ve written about the Calvino event already here and here and here. There’s even more at the Another Look website here.  The only missing piece right now is you. Join us!

When I saw her Kraków, with poet Julia Hartwig (at right) – in May 2011

An embarrassingly long time ago, someone from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute’s online magazine, Culture.pl, wrote to bring my attention to a recent post about Wisława Szymborska and her “9 Secret Sides” – I’ve written about the poet here and here, but not much since. I liked this story about getting the Nobel Prize, though I’m not sure how “secret” it is. In Kraków, I spoke to the friend, Michał Rusinek, who “cut the cord,” literally, after the announcement was made, severing her endlessly ringing telephone line with a pair of scissors. Anyway, from the website:

“Szymborska was notoriously private and rarely gave interviews. It is thus not surprising that she met the sudden global recognition thrust upon her with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 with great hesitancy, calling it the ‘Stockholm Tragedy.’  Szymborska was at a writers’ retreat in the Polish mountain town of Zakopane when the prize was announced and initially refused to take calls with the news, preferring to instead finish her lunch privately.  It was only after a number of calls – including one from her friend and colleague Czesław Miłosz – that she agreed to speak to the press.  By the end of that day, however, she’d had enough and retreated to place even more remote, where she hoped she would not be found by reporters.

“Though the majority of media coverage of the prize feature quotations from her colleagues, rather than from Szymborska herself, she was, of course, center stage at the awarding of the prize.  She admitted to Miłosz that ‘the most difficult thing will be to write a speech.  I will be writing it for a month.  I don’t know what I will be talking about, but I will talk about you.’  In the end she delivered one of the shortest Nobel Lectures to date, the beautiful The Poet and the World.“

With “love and imagination”

She didn’t mention him in the speech, actually, but it’s a good Nobel talk nevertheless (translated by the incomparable Stanisław Barańczak over here). I picked this passage out, in particular, on today’s rereading:

“I’ve mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It’s not that they’ve never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It’s just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don’t understand yourself.

“When I’m asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question, too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’

“There aren’t many such people. Most of the earth’s inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn’t pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven’t got even that much, however loveless and boring – this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there’s no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.”

I may not be a Nobel poet – but let’s raise a glass in thanks from those of us (Humble Moi included) who get to do our jobs with love and imagination. It’s always a privilege. I never forget it. Now let me get back to my work…

Dana, Lori, and a very tall Frog King

I wrote about the new children’s opera, Three Feathers, a week or two ago here. Since then, the collaboration of composer Lori Laitman and librettist (and friend) Dana Gioia made its world premiere on October 17 at the new Moss Arts Center in Blacksburg, Virginia. I haven’t been able to find an actual review online, but I did find an October 14 article in The Huffington Post here. An excerpt:

“‘We wanted to have a strong story that appealed to both kids and adults,’ Mr. Gioia explains in an email: ‘There’s nothing better than Grimm’s Fairy Tales for compelling plots and memorable characters that quietly speak to our deepest fears, fantasies, and desires. At the heart of Grimm’s best tales is a young person’s quest to find love and meaning in a world that seems scary and chaotic. Lori and I chose The Three Feathers because it was a great story that almost no one in America knew. Disney or Broadway had never touched it…And who can resist an underground world ruled by a giant Frog King?’

“Lori Laitman adds, ‘There’s also an upperworld with three princesses: Dora, the heroine, sings a soul-searching aria, ‘Just Once,’ and there’s an aria for the shopaholic Gilda and one for the athletic, bossy Tilda. While there are similarities in the lyrics for these princesses, I wanted to create distinct character differences in the music so each one had her own motif. When they return you can instantly tell which princess it is because of what’s happening in the orchestra.’

“‘Also, since there are three children’s choruses,’ Ms. Laitman says, ‘we wanted to have bats, rats, and frogs, the denizens of the underworld. The opera has a very large cast, and all the kids sing except for a few supernumeraries. Here’s where my prior experience was helpful, because I’d written the oratorio Vedem for a boys choir. And when you’re constructing musical lines for children you have to keep in mind that their ranges are different [from adults], and you have to create music they can learn that is instantly memorable to them.’

“Given the whimsical tone of the text, Dana Gioia chose to write all the songs and choruses in rhyme. ‘That’s what kids want, and so do adults, even if they won’t admit it. Our opera needed to be both fun and at times mysterious. Comic opera needs rhymes and magic naturally lends itself to rhyming spells. Oddly, writing a rhyming libretto nowadays is slightly avant-garde. Most of the new libretti I see are in free verse.'”