I was missing English one day, American, really,
with its pill-popping Hungarian goulash of everything
from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, because British English
is not the same, if the paperback dictionary
I bought at Brentano’s on the Avenue de l’Opera
is any indication, too cultured by half. Oh, the English
know their dahlias, but what about doowop, donuts,
Dick Tracy, Tricky Dick? With their elegant Oxfordian
accents, how could they understand my yearning for the hotrod,
hotdog, hot flash vocabulary of the U. S. of A.,
the fragmented fandango of Dagwood’s everyday flattening
of Mr. Beasley on the sidewalk, fetuses floating
on billboards, drive-by monster hip-hop stereos shaking
the windows of my dining room like a 7.5 earthquake,
Ebonics, Spanglish, “you know” used as comma and period,
the inability of 90% of the population to get the past perfect:
I have went, I have saw, I have tooken Jesus into my heart,
the battle cry of the Bible Belt, but no one uses
the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions,
in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says,
“Dude, wake up,” and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie
mummy, “Whoa, I was toasted.” Yes, ma’am,
I miss the mongrel plentitude of American English, its fall-guy,
rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,
the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,
boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya
with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo
to the ubiquitous Valley Girl’s like-like stuttering,
shopaholic rant. I miss its quotidian beauty, its querulous
back-biting righteous indignation, its preening rotgut
flag-waving cowardice. Suffering Succotash, sputters
Sylvester the Cat; sine die, say the pork-bellied legislators
of the swamps and plains. I miss all those guys, their Tweety-bird
resilience, their Doris Day optimism, the candid unguent
of utter unhappiness on every channel, the midnight televangelist
euphoric stew, the junk mail, voice mail vernacular.
On every boulevard and rue I miss the Tarzan cry of Johnny
Weismueller, Johnny Cash, Johnny B. Goode,
and all the smart-talking, gum-snapping hard-girl dialogue,
finger-popping x-rated street talk, sports babble,
Cheetoes, Cheerios, chili dog diatribes. Yeah, I miss them all,
sitting here on my sidewalk throne sipping champagne
verses lined up like hearses, metaphors juking, nouns zipping
in my head like Corvettes on Dexadrine, French verbs
slitting my throat, yearning for James Dean to jump my curb.
on the solstice, december 21, 2011
We’re right at the edge of what friends in the southern hemisphere call the summer solstice and what we in the northern call the winter solstice. Hard to believe it’s been ten years now for the ritual of sending these messages twice a year to friends and colleagues all over the world.
It’s not a coincidence that so many civilizations have rituals – both sacred and secular – around the June and December solstices. For me, this ritual combines the timeless (sharing of words) and the immediate (sent via email), often with a fascinating interplay. This lovely tension somehow echoes any of a number of busy streets in Tokyo where a tiny, centuries-old Buddhist temple sits next to an ultra-modern skyscraper, equal (but vastly different) companions.
Choosing the poems is always a serendipitous process, grazing through poetry books, anthologies, and web sites until a pattern reveals itself. This time the movement is from darkness to light, in forests, with birds, in and around differing perceptions of reality and time.
From ‘The Prelude’, by US poet Matthew Zapruder
Come to the edge
the edge beckoned softly. Take
this cup full of darkness and stay as long
as you want and maybe a little longer.
From the Chinese poet Wu Wei, translated by Kenneth Rexroth
Deep in the mountain wilderness
Where nobody ever comes
Only once in a great while
Something like the sound of a far-off voice.
The low rays of the sun
Slip through the dark forest,
And gleam again on the shadowy moss.
From ‘Moment’, by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh (nature as theater and a brook and birds as actors)
Everything’s in its place and in polite agreement.
in the valley a little brook cast as a little brook.
A path in the role of a path from always to ever.
Woods disguised as woods alive without end,
and above them birds in flight play birds in flight.
The moment reigns as far as the eye can reach,
One of those earthly moments
invited to linger.
‘The New Song’, by US poet WS Merwin (would that we all could say so much in so few words and with so little (read: none) punctuation)
For some time I thought there was time
and there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it for the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then
there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song
With warmest best wishes to you and your family for the holiday season and a new year where all of us have time to linger (as long as we want and longer); to hear voices in a silent forest; where the only roles played are the true ones; where there’s space and time to hear the new song; and even, if we’re very lucky, sing one ourselves.
christopher hitchens, 1949-2011
writer, public intellectual, and iconoclast christopher hitchens has passed away, from esophogeal cancer.
up to the end, he was an avowed, unrepentant atheist who previously wrote a book called ‘god is not great, how religion poisons everything’ this is perhaps why someone wrote that the cancer was god’s punishment for his blasphemy and hoped he rotted in hell. with typical wry humor, hitchens wonders why not a lightning bolt? he does note. though, that when physicist neils bohr hung a horseshoe over his door, he explained to his friends shocked by this pathetic superstition: “apparently it works whether you believe in it or not”.
In a Vanity Fair piece that was published only days before he died, Hitchens reaffirmed that he hoped to be fully conscious and awake as he passed away, “in order to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense… I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span,”
i admire the strength of character to not opt for an easy conversion, even at the end, and hitchens in the past empathized with voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies
prose and spies
Rereading one of my favorite books of all time, John LeCarre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. What a great writer. As only one example, describing Control, the head of the British Secret Service (AKA the Circus) as having a smile ‘as warm as a skull
Philip Pullman and ‘once upon a time’
On his website, he says
As a passionate believer in the democracy of reading, I don’t think it’s the task of the author of a book to tell the reader what it means.
The meaning of a story emerges in the meeting between the words on the page and the thoughts in the reader’s mind. So when people ask me what I meant by this story, or what was the message I was trying to convey in that one, I have to explain that I’m not going to explain.
Anyway, I’m not in the message business; I’m in the “Once upon a time” business.
Speaking of which, he also said
We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but ‘Once upon a time’ lasts forever.
on ghosts
pre-Halloween, a to-die-for stanza of the poem ‘unbidden’ by rae armantrout
The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.
solstice greetings, june 2011 (in a parallel universe, since it’s 9 days after)
Sent this out by email on June 20, a little slow hitting the blog-ette
It’s the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, winter in the southern, which means – guess what? - must be time for my biennial solstice email. Hard to believe this ritual has been going on for ten years: sending out some snippets of verse, a few hopefully appropriate thoughts, and greetings to friends and colleagues all over the world.
Have been thinking a lot recently about story, in the broadest sense. What are the stories we tell to our children and young people on the stage? what are the stories we tell about ourselves, about our dreams, about our history? What is the intersection of our narratives with our lives? Are stories – and the act of storytelling – an intrinsic part of our human DNA? Can we chart the origin of stories as we chart the origin of species with stories shared across cultures and across centuries? Do these deep and essential stories change? Where do these stories come from, both the ones we know and the ones we make up?
from Ars Poetica by Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
from Blue Dark by US poet Deborah Landau
the moon might rise and it might not
and if it brings a ghost light we will read beneath it
and if it returns to earth
we will listen for its phrases
and if I’m alone at the bedside table
I will have a ghost book to refer to
and when I lie back I’ll see its imprint
beneath my blood-red lids:
not lettered ink
but the clean page
from ‘His Master’s Voice’ by US poet Troy Jollimore
We have let our children grow tall
without teaching them the songs of the elders
The songs we ourselves used to chant
in the interminable, reverberating night
The songs we ourselves used to chant
side by side, hand in hand, as the stars gave violent
birth to stars
the songs we would sing
and sing and sing
to drive away the danger
from Parts of Speech, by South African poet Indrid de Kok
Why still believe stories can rise
with wings, on currents, as silver flares,
levitate unweighted by stones,
begin in pain and move towards grace,
aerating history with recovered breath?
With warmest best wishes to you and your families, with hopes that all of our lives are filled with open doors and clean pages, with stories that drive away dangers and rise on wings, like silver flares.
on what kids should or should not read
ran across this great quote from GK Chesterton
“Fairy Tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
60 playwrights, 1000 questions, whack-a-mole
Did a panel on theater for young audiences at the first Dramatists Guild Conference with my colleague and pal Michael Bobbitt. Was pleasantly surprised that the room was packed and pleased at the number of questions the writers had – far more than we could possibly have answered. Kind of like a whack-a-mole Q and A – each time we answered one question, another bunch popped up. Too little time, but a great energy in the room and really fun for us. My watchword for the day: just write a good story.
Sixty Playwrights, a Thousand Questions!
Did a panel on theater for young audiences at the first Dramatists Guild Conference with my colleague and pal Michael Bobbitt. Was pleasantly surprised that the room was packed and pleased at the number of questions the writers had – far more than we could possibly have answered. Kind of like a whack-a-mole Q and A – each time we answered one question, another bunch popped up. Too little time, but a great energy in the room and really fun for us. My watchword for the day: just write a good story.
