What interests me is how comfortable he is with his life and his writing. The article doesn't get into the details of his writing process but highlights how normal and demotic his life is in most ways, at least on Sundays.
"JUDY-DEPRIVED It’s Sunday, so I’m deprived of one of my great pleasures, which is to completely goof off by watching “Judge Judy.” I am absolutely fascinated by her, and I have been for years. But she’s not on on Sunday, so if I want to just completely go mindless, lately I’ll watch a football game, usually with the sound off.
REGIMEN Our living room is also our dining room, which is also our library, which is also my work space. So it’s very easy for me to glide from our dinner table right over to my desk. It’s only two steps. So I kind of find myself able to make a seamless transition from eating lunch to writing a poem or writing email or doing some research online. I’m not undisciplined, but I don’t set a formal structure for myself.
Photo
Notice, too, how normal, even everyday, his kitchen is.
As part of Black History Month, the "International Business Times" included a piece on the poet Langston Hughes, one of the most quotable poets. I would prefer him to be remembered as a poet, not as a black poet.
Every year since 1976, February has been nationally designated as a month to celebrate, honor and educate about black history in the United States. And every year, the month begins with Langston Hughes’ birthday.
Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a period beginning in the 1920s in New York City known for the large numbers of black writers who brought their talents to light. Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, went on to write poems, novels, plays, essays and children’s books celebrating African American culture, promoting equal rights and condemning racism. The quotes below are from some of his most famous writings, honoring what would have been his 115thbirthday Wednesday.
“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”
“I tire so of hearing people say, ‘Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day.’ I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.”
“The past has been a mint of blood and sorrow. That must not be true of tomorrow.”
“Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people – the beauty within themselves.”
“So since I’m still here livin’, I guess I will live on.I could’ve died for love--But for livin’ I was born.”
“I’m so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?”
“Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.”
“I’ve been scarred and battered. My hopes the wind done scattered. Snow has friz me, sun has baked me, looks like between ‘em they done tried to make me stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’ – but I don’t care! I’m still here!”
“I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.”
“A world I dream where black or white, whatever race you be, will share the bounties of the earth and every man is free.”
“I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”
The Current Assignment
Who did it? What was it like?
Gerard'spoems:
Bill’s Longtime Dying
1. Having heard that Bill was very ill and in hospital, 2. close to where we rented a cottage every summer, 3. vacationing and visiting with our home relatives, 4. we took the time to visit with our friends Doris and Bill 5. who had gone in for a regular visit with his doctor 6. who sent Bill to the Hospital because he was dying.
6. Serious illness arrives as a surprise. There’s dying 1. in the offing. Signs grew larger while in hospital. 5. His wife, Doris, held Bill’s hand while Bill’s doctor 2. gently examined his patient the last day of summer. 4. We were lucky to be close to where our friend, Bill, 3. was being held, pieta style, by his wife and relatives.
3. Bill and Doris were together, hands joined. His relatives 6 stood, shook their heads and left them to the dying. 4. Sons and their wives silently cried over their Bill. 1 Anticipating the moment of his relief from the hospital 2. Bill’s eyes went vacant as we imagined tomorrow’s summer 5. sky. His wife, suddenly, shuddered, cried out, “Doctor! “
5 The nurse outside the door ran in on the cry, “Doctor!” 3 She, full of anxiety, bypassed the sons and wife, his relatives 2 while those of us in the round walked out into the summer. 6 closing in the west to recite a prayer for the dying 1 Our grief gave way to those closest to Bill leaving the hospital 4 His wife’s spirit singing in the wind, “Because he was my Bill.” *
4 We suppose the death certificate was for William, not “Bill.” 5 We, his married neighbors at University, forgave the doctor 1 For the protocol naming of the patient at the hospital. 3 As for us, my wife and I, we left the grieving to his relatives, 6 And I drove to Connecticut, each of us with visions of dying. 2 A blazing, red sun, setting in a nest of clouds, closes on summer.
2. Some years later, retired, in a Florida nest of homes in summer, 4. Doris loses her mind out of loneliness, for having missed her Bill, 6. proving again that a broken heart can be the cause of one’s dying. 5. Bill had started in college working hard to avoid the doctor. 3. Doris had worked just as hard to please all of Bill’s relatives. 1. Doris died in Maine at a son’s home; Bill died in hospital.
2. We had met over a bottle of gin their first college summer. 4. A new couple with kids in our building. His name was Bill: 6. Doris, a Brit from Prestatyn# and Bill, a Yank always dying.
___________
* from “Showboat.” # Prestatyn, Wales
Sestina on a Changing Back Pasture
From the barn to the back pasture was less than a mile through an old orchard. My John Deere put-puts with the scythe up. The brim of my baseball cap hangs low to keep the morning bugs from blinding me, as I hang in my seat, one hand steering.
The apples are greenish. With the right hand on steering, I glance at early birds that gulp bugs loving the near pasture. Small birds skim along with aerobatic pleasure while blinding Their prey—small, insects loving an old, untended orchard. These small birds fly key patterns imbedded in their low, pea-sized brains where altitudes are low and up.
The sun slowly streams through the clouds, low on the eastern horizon where river birds, steering north, fly in distributed formations, moving up to older riverbeds where dams renew a pasture, and old, dead apple trees sign a lifeless orchard. Where cows once ambled, tails swishing, blinding.
Insects that voraciously aim for the target anus, blinding To the core those that crash. I move my scythe to “low.” Engage the scissors to mow through the orchard, Make a cut toward the edge, squinting while steering around old stumps in this retired orchard-pasture, mow the edge, twice, before I bring the cutting blade up.
Sixty years later, a campus map in hand, I found the way up the old pasture road, now paved, into a sun’s ray, blinding my view across the way of the re- imagined, orchard-pasture of memory and saw a momentary view of academic, high-low buildings—dormitories, imaginative landscapes steering me through what I believed was my field, my orchard.
Rotaries and “intelligent” landscaping favor vehicular blinding at night by sports cars and buses where the old dead pasture once knelt to my old, put-put John Deer, the scythe low to catch rodents or deer gone to ground, hoping to pop up when the scissor noise of the blade passed over the orchard grass and opened the field of rotten apples to nose steering
I search the years when I, alone, roamed the pasture over ground of “fallens” that worms inside ate into, steering their way down corridors, as in tunnels , blinding.
And mine
Sestina for Kent State
Of course from Saigon we cannot see the smoke of the rifles at Kent State where Chas fears the loss of Susan who he knows would rise to march against our war and wave her sign against the phalanx that looms, locked and loaded, for lovers that wander
in rebellion across a campus while real soldiers wander in search of North Vietnamese troops that disappear like smoke when we, those real soldiers, locked and loaded, loom, dirty and ragged in a war where loss seems the only option despite the flag we wave and salute when the Captain calls us to rise.
When the students die Chas and I swear we will no longer rise. We are tired, beaten, do not want to wander in jungle and swamp where the only sound is the wave of rice shoots whispering to the enemy and the only smoke is from the cigarettes we drag on when, at a loss, we feel the cold of nearby graves loom.
Yet, we do march again as if some black loom weaves us into fabric that can only rise to cloak in darkness the coming loss before we ever again are free to wander in anything but the fog of grim smoke that spreads from Saigon back to Susan’s campus in a wave
that chills our hearts, turns them off as we weave our bloody ways against troops that refuse to loom in fronts we can confront. They steal away. And so we smoke our grass and smoke their huts, listen to the cries rise, watch our wretched victims wander in their fields in a life they can only lose.
Susan does write Chas. She does not lose her life but feels the wave break and lets herself for hours wander the mourning campus until at the loom of dawn, on a rise above that little killing field where smoke
speaks of loss that looms, feels that wave in her throat rise, recalls the dread day when Chas wanders off in the smoke.
Unpublished work Copyright 2016 Emerson Gilmore
The Next Assignment
I would like everyone to bring in a sheaf of poems (10, 15, 20?) for an experiment that I think is great but that I have never had success with. We will have a conversation of poems. Someone will read and then someone will volunteer a poem to answer/respond to the first. Then another and another until we have spent 90 minutes reading and commenting and doing whatever poets do when they read together. For this one meeting you can bring in one or two of your favorite poems by others to include, if you wish. Just keep them reasonably short; an excerpt from "Howl" (O victory forget your underwear we're free) rather than the whole thing. Be sure that at least one of your poems is new, preferably two.
The Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday, February 16, 2017
Other Jabber
You may not be aware that Google has a cultural institute website. I was surprised by it, its depth. Of note today is that this is James Joyce's birthday (1882, I think) and the site has a photo presentation of Dublin in the days when Joyce was writing Dubliners. It is worth a long look, both the photos and the site in general. Of course, I checked out Walt Whitman and found a lot of interest to me.
Here is the link: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/gRa4m70L You will find it heavy on art and photography.
Response to assignment: "Someone will read and then someone will volunteer a poem to answer/respond to the first.'"
ReplyDeleteThe catch is one of time. How much time would it reasonably take to find a poem that might approximate a suitable response to the selected poem?
Someone in attendance selects and reads a poem = the first to find a suitable response reads the selected poem. Isn't that the rub?
Here's a test:
I have selected a short poem from The Black Fly Review, 1992
:
Desert Threnody
The dry sand wind in blowing.
I have despaired of being called
by my accustomed name.
A house at the desert-edge
fills slowly with the wind borne grit.
The sun glares red:
all birds are fled.
I have despaired of being called
by my accustomed name.
The dry sand wind is blowing.
Want to play?
G
Note, the author of the cited poem [above] is June Hopper Hymas. G
ReplyDeleteThanks for the blog; it's a welcomed interlocutor; although I wish for more interlocution.
ReplyDelete