Yesterday on Facebook I wished a Michael Peich a happy birthday. He is the cofounder (along with Dana Gioia) of the West Chester University Poetry Conference, as well as founder of Aralia Press– I wrote about the conference, and Mike, fourteen years ago in the pages of Philadelphia Magazine here.  Frank Wilson over at Books Inq. says he is “pretty sure” that it’s still the largest annual poetry conference in the U.S. I have no reason to doubt his word. But I have no firsthand way to observe it, either. I attended several in the early years – but soon the June dates coincided with the high school and then college graduations of kids and stepkids, so I lost the habit of making the East Coast trek. Frank has an advantage – he lives in Philadelphia. So I’m stealing these poems on Books Inq. as a kind of revenge.

Several of the West Chester poets sent poetic greetings to Mike on his 70th, and three of them have been in these pages already: Dana, of course, but also David Mason and A.M. Juster (in fact, West Chester probably where I got that short volume of his Petrarch translations, which I discussed on Petrarch’s birthday here). Joshua Wren, by the way, is the founder of the brand new Wiseblood Books.

Frank intends to run more commemorative poems later – so check out his blog over here.  It’s a good habit to get into, if you don’t scan Books, Inq. regularly already. Meanwhile, evidence of my theft:

.

FOR MICHAEL PEICH ON HIS 70th BIRTHDAY

May 18, 2014

Gnarliest of trees, this apple now
Sports withered fruit along its bough,
Drooping sideways, sere and gaunt—
Hardly the symbol that you want.

Now of your threescore years and ten,
Seventy will not come again,
And take from seventy springs that sum . . .
Well, on this subject, let’s play dumb.

But since you’re now on borrowed time,
you’re spending someone else’s dime,
So hang around the bars and gab,
And let your heirs pick up the tab.

.                                             – Dana Gioia

Gnarly? Withered? Drooping? Sere?
No, No, my dear!
Let no such imagery from Gioia
Even begin to annoy ya!

Trust, instead, to Rhina,
Whose eyesight’s keener,
Though it’s an old codger’s:
She says you’re gorgeous!

.                                       – Rhina Espaillat

Mike Peich
Doesn’t much like
A bad Cabernet or weak Pinot —
And he’s not afraid to tell you so.

.                                         –  David Rothman

Had not Mike helped design our book
the thing wouldn’t have garnered a second look
But there is no “had not,” you see
and – what’s more – he offered advice for free
Now that I know he’s on borrowed time,
spending someone else’s dime,
I wish he’d spend mine!
So Pinot, Cabernet, you name the type
I’ll send it with thanks near o’er ripe
Seventy times seven bottles to give
Hoping seventy times seven eternities you’ll live

.                                              – Joshua Wren

Mike Peich still has his fastball at his age
and throws that inside heat like Satchel Paige.
Our formal phenom is still on his game;
the Phillies’ closer cannot say the same.

.                                              – A. M. Juster

Mike Peich
Took a vast hike
Down to the wine cellar.
He is quite the feller.

Peich, Mike?
What’s not to like?
You tellin’ me
The bastard’s seventy?

Dianne’s old man
Made a big plan.
So what’s so baffling
About God’s laughling?

Old man Peich
Made a lucky strike.
I know it by dint
Of I seen it in print.

 .                                          –  David Mason

Sylvia Plath reportedly went ballistic when someone marked books in any way whatsoever.  I, myself, have been known to lightly pencil brackets or little stars in the margin with a very soft #2 – and sometimes a single word, such as “Phooey!” But take a look at what David Foster Wallace did to James Joyce‘s Ulysses.  (Hat tip Cal Doyle; this is making the rounds on Tumblr.)

Update:  We’ve been had!  The photo was posted on the respectable Housing Works Bookstore in NYC here – so we weren’t alone in thinking it was legit, even though the words aren’t readable on the page. However, several people, including Christine in the comments section below, and on a Facebook comment thread on our friend Mikhail Iossel‘s page, have identified the text as Lee Server‘s biography of Robert Mitchum, Baby I Don’t Care. The words “Robert Mitchum” are in the lefthand page header, and the chapter heading “Phantom Years” on the right. The plot thickens: why would anyone feel the need to annotate a biography of movie star so heavily?  As one Facebook commenter noted, David Foster Wallace’s obsessiveness about his writing, his writing about his writing, and others’ writing about his writing is well known. But Mitchum? Said another commenter:  “I’m sure many writers could confess that Robert Mitchum was a bigger influence on them than Joyce.”

Check out page 222.

Humble Moi makes a small appearance in the current issue of Warsaw-based Zeszyty Literackie, Poland’s preeminent literary journal, founded in 1982 by intellectual powerhouse Barbara Toruńczyk.  My article is in the “Notatki” section – “Litewskie archiwum Josifa Brodskiego.”  You may have read an earlier incarnation of the article in English here, which should give you a rough idea.

I’m in excellent company in this issue – it’s an honor to share pages with Julia Hartwig (we’ve written about her here and here and here), Natalia Gorbanevskaya (here) and Tomas Venclova (here and here and here), Adam Zagajewski (here and here and here) and Tomasz Różycki, a poet I met in New York City a few years ago, but haven’t had a chance to write about yet. In this issue, he’s translated Joseph Brodsky‘s “1 January 1965” into Polish. So I’m sharing the issue of my former mentor, as well. This poem, in particular, is a favorite – I have it taped up on a cupboard to memorize, but my thoughts have scattered like dandelion fluff this year. Also Jagiellonian scholar  Alexander Fiut and Znak editor Jerzy Illg in this issue.

Not my first appearance in the Polish media (see here), but I’m absolutely delighted this time, in particular, to connect with a Polish audience.

Especial thanks to novelist, essayist, deputy editor (and friend) Marek Zagańczyk.

It all comes together: Weston Gaylord and Jim Carpenter in “An Inspector Calls”

When I heard that Stanford Repertory Theater was about to present a new production of J.B. Priestley‘s “An Inspector Calls” (beginning May 15 and continuing to May 24), I rifled through several rooms of books to see if I could find my beat-up Penguin edition of the 1945 play. I vaguely remember having loaned the volume to … someone.  I would feel more moral indignation if a few of other people’s volumes hadn’t drifted into my own library. And that is precisely to the point. More on that later.

Come back. I miss you.

According to Director Rush Rehm, this particular play is “an ideal way to confront our community with the responsibilities of privilege, and to expose how wealth and privilege breed an abiding complacency. For all the so-called ‘liberal guilt,’ many of us refuse as a matter of course to admit the role we play in the injustice and suffering of others. Priestley’s play explores individual guilt, to be sure, but his most devastating critique lies in the systematic way privilege builds a wall with the wider world, and the consequences of our privilege on others.”

“I hope audiences are intrigued, surprised, moved, and ultimately motivated to think harder about the ethics of wealth and privilege. The play works a kind of magic built on mystery, and as we’re discovering in rehearsal, it explores real human behavior. The characters are anything but cardboard, and in their strategies of self-defense and denial, we see ourselves at work. It’s so timely, and so now, and (although set in England 100 years ago), it is so about us. Silicon Valley, Stanford, most of us will recognize a version of ourselves on stage.”

I was intrigued by the play when I first read it decades ago, but for another reason.  It’s one of Priestley’s “Time Plays,” influenced by writer P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) and the Irish aeronautical engineer J.W. Dunne (1875–1949), who (according to Wikipedia) “proposed that our experience of time as linear was an illusion brought about by human consciousness. He argued that past, present and future were continuous in a higher-dimensional reality and only experienced sequentially because of our mental perception of them. He went further, proposing an infinite regress of higher time dimensions inhabited by the conscious observer, which he called ‘serial time.'” The others plays in the Penguin edition that had Priestley’s portrait on the cover (see above left) were “Time and the Conways,” “I Have Been Here Before,” and “The Linden Tree.” There were others – “A Dangerous Corner,” “The Long Mirror,” “Johnson Over Jordan.”  In these plays, time suspends or reverses itself, repeats itself endlessly in a Nietzschean eternal recurrence, or else it stays forever in deep-sixed treasure chests that can be retrieved at will, or not. (If you have seen Groundhog Day, you get the general idea.)

It’s all still here. Now.

“My theory, partly, is that I consider him a religious man,” his son Tom Priestley told the Cambridge News, “although he wasn’t party to any particular faith. He believed there was another side to life beyond getting up, going to work and doing the shopping. And at a time when science was very much coming to the fore I think he find the theories about time gave him, let’s say, a new look at life.

“It suddenly seemed a different way of explaining things. And again, I think bearing in mind the horror of his experiences during the First World War, and his affection for the Edwardian time, if you believe that time is not just a straight line that passes, then the good times are still there.” That, anyway, is part of the idea behind Time and the Conways.

Priestley considered himself a socialist and a man of the people, and I suspect he might have gone for an interpretation of  An Inspector Calls that focuses on privilege and deep pockets. But I think wealth merely serves as an avenue to agency – a sort of magnifying glass for everything in you already. People with more agency generally have more power to do good or evil. That’s why Shakespeare usually wrote about kings and not about shoemakers or chicken-pluckers. The “evils” committed by the Edwardian North Midlands family in this play include a furtive affair, the unfair dismissal of a worker, a nasty snub, snapping at a sales clerk – can any of us claim to be wholly innocent of any permutation of these?  Not, from what I’ve seen at Stanford – or anywhere else. It’s so easy to project these human failings onto the evil “Other.”

I have the same reservations with the well-heeled protesters of the Occupy Movement. The real question is not what the “Other” should be doing to help, however just that might be, but what have I, personally, done to relieve human suffering? Not by making angry posts on Facebook or indulging in coffee-break rants – but with my own handy-pandies?  And that is something Rush Rehm and I had a memorable conversation about, oh, about 7 years ago. (I remember reading once that rock star Michelle Philips made sammies for the homeless in Los Angeles. Now that’s a mensch.) We could all afford to walk a bit more humbly in the world … and speaking for myself, I have a lot to be humble about.

It’s not a matter of letting heartless zillionaires off any hook, but rather the simple recognition that I have a much greater control over my own choices than I do over the choices of other people – and that my heart could use a little work, too. And focusing one’s rage and, frankly, hatred on the “Other” can so often be a self-righteous mask for that 4-letter word I’ve written about before: envy. I find that the rich resent the über-rich more than the poor do. I live in a city where houses sell for between $1 and $2 million, where 20- and 30-something Silicon Valley billionaires ride $20,000 bikes. And yet the anger towards the über-rich seems more passionate here than in the Latino districts of nearby Redwood City. Someone wrote on a friend’s Facebook thread yesterday, “Once the technology has been perfected and everything can be accomplished by robots and the resources are in their grubby hands, the 1% will leave us all high and dry.” Well, here we are. This is the place where that technology comes from.

In these “time plays,” Priestley offers us a little foray into time. Let me offer one into space. Check out where you own income puts you on the worldwide scale – here.  Shocker: you’re probably in the top 1%.

A few days ago we challenged Marguerite Duras’s handling of the facts in a long post “But, but, but … did it really happen?” A few days earlier than that, we announced the May 12 “Another Look” book club event celebrating the author’s centenary with a discussion of her short, iconic classic, The Lover.  But The Lover wasn’t the only autobiographical novel she wrote. The Sea Wall (1950) is another. The earlier book, which takes place in Indochina of the 1920s, tells of her mother’s desperate fight against the sea. Tricked by the local administrators into purchasing a useless concession of land with her life’s savings, the mother builds a sea wall to prevent the annual monsoon from flooding the land – but the wall is swept away with the first rains.  In Laure Adler’s Marguerite Duras: A Life, the biographer describes one unintended consequence of the widow’s hopeless struggle. Duras is greatly admired in Vietnam:

“Even today in Ho Chi Minh City learned old Vietnamese men will speak to you of Marguerite’s book The Sea Wall with their eyes full of tears. They’re moved not so much by the mother’s despair as by the passion with which Marguerite pays tribute to the men who died in the blistering heat, cutting and laying roads through the swamps for France. The men were chained together. Ordered to work them till they dropped, military leaders, veterans of the French colonial army, rounded up and oversaw political prisoners and poor peasants dying of starvation. Numerous testimonies speak of having seen groups of them dragging dead bodies around. This orally transmitted historical fact has never been properly recorded. Marguerite paid tribute to these unsung heroes who gave their lives for France. There are students in Vietnam today who still tremble with gratitude towards Marguerite Duras. She was the only one to speak of the children of the plain who the moment they were born were condemned to die of hunger, cholera or dysentery. ‘The children simply went back to the land like wild mountain mangoes, like the little monkeys from the mouth of the lagoon.’”