The passage of time and the replenishment of a small town’s population are evident in snapshots of the Memorial Day parade. Recollections from earlier parades, from the late 1980s or early 1990s, show a flatbed truck carrying several WWII and Korean War veterans; today, no vets on flatbeds. Last year, my poem Memorial Day was published by was Indolent Books in their What Rough Beast project.
Except for Love; New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall, was published on June 23rd, the first anniversary of his death at 89. Included in the anthology is my poem Afterparty.
Mr. Hall was a guest on the 2008 broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood, with Garrison Keillor, which I reviewed here. His January 2012 New Yorker essay Out the Window led to an acquaintance that included a series of visits with him at Eagle Pond Farm and his final reading and poetry talk at the University of New Hampshire in Nov. 2017.
The book is edited by Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, with an Introductory tribute by Wesley McNair, former Poet Laureate of Maine, and cover photo of Hall by Steven Ratiner. 10% of proceeds to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to honor Hall’s wife Jane Kenyon It can be ordered via this link.
We don’t bid our dead Godspeed to the afterlife
the way we did, in churches, where weeping echoes
off walls or gets absorbed by pipe organ blasts,
while incense spirals from an acolyte’s censer,
and the minister intones his woeful sound.
After we lowered our dearly departed into the ground,
back at the church hall there would be baked ham,
casseroles, and pies, supplied by neighbors and aunts.
Today, in function rooms, where event planners
have laid out aromatherapy diffusers and flowers,
we get right on with the afterparty and mingle,
nibbling fruit, veggies, and tiramisu, while a playlist,
synced to a slideshow, loops in the background.
Now, we wonder …
Will he ask bids
for a new pyramid,
or coldly evict, then
re-brand Grant’s Tomb?
No way would I have learned about the Oct. 6 concert at Hancock Shaker Village performed by Paul Muldoon, with Rogue Oliphant if I hadn’t escorted my sisters to the environs of Joe’s Diner, on the last day of their week at Oak and Spruce, Maggie’s timeshare. So, be kind to your sisters and good things will happen for you. (Cool video included with my report on the show, linked above)
It was an awesome show, and writing about it led me to details of Mr. Muldoon’s upcoming appearance at the heretofore unheard-of Sharon Springs Poetry Festival, founded last year by Muldoon, just in time for me to book a spot in a workshop led either by Muldoon or Billy Collins. Also appearing in a variety of roles are Anne Waldman and current US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (she and Collins named for two terms in that post). Happiest hard decision of my life: choosing one poem for the workshop!
Important to keep in mind that whatever poem I carry in is not as important as what I may learn about making poems from Muldoon/Collins and the ten other participants. I would love to talk with Mr. Collins about my poem The Living and the Dead, which is my response to his poem Winter, which I think I heard read by Garrison Keillor on the much-missed Writer’s Almanac.
At the time (of first hearing or reading), I was in the midst of about a year-long dilemma of how to attribute the phrase I got from Herman Melville’s Piazza Tales that are the basis or catalyst for my poem Pivot of Spring. I hadn’t figured out a way to proceed yet, then I’m stopped in my tracks when the penultimate line of Winter includes “the living and the dead,” which also closes James Joyce’s story The Dead. That assemblage of five utterly common words was put to such powerful effect by Joyce that, for me, the phrase would be forever Joyce-branded.
Where’s the attribution? If I had fretted so much about repurposing a Melville phrase, did Billy Collins, too? Honest to god, I came this close to asking Don Hall about it – and felt immediately like a teenaged squealer, busting my buddy or my sister, just to see them squirm!
My solution (months later) was to preface the poem with a mini-essay that put the poem into the context of how it occurred to me, which led me to think that I may be on to something, a prose and poetry hybrid, with the poem ineluctably following the prose, rather than the prose serving as an exegesis of the poem. The prose addresses, instead, how an odd phrase, from a 150 year old short story, can become embedded in someone’s imagination, only to assert itself years later, and spark an ordinary little poem.
I sent them both to Don, who replied in the best way possible. Besides saying something along the lines of “good for you, getting poems while walking – Frost and Stevens used to but I never did.” Alright, there’s a rush from being mentioned in the same breath as those two, even if he only was being polite. As for the poem itself, the Melville phrase amounting to two of six total lines, Don wrote, “I like about half the lines, the others would make me grumpy.” Of course I did not ask him to clarify which lines work.
(More after the festival)
Article updated Oct. 10, 2018, by Dave Conlin Read
Ed. note: Click the linked text for information about Paul Muldoon’s Sharon Springs Poetry Festival, Oct. 18-19.
Listening to a poet say his poems is an opportunity to glimpse words at work. Words were at play when Paul Muldoon with Rogue Oliphant held forth in the rectangular wooden barn upslope from the round stone one at Hancock Shaker Village, October 6, 2018.
Said to be “The most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War,*” Paul Muldoon dazzled the audience with a dizzying array of word play, while his “loose affiliation of composers and musicians” transformed the barn into a CBGB satellite. (*The Times Literary Supplement)
The amiable Muldoon speaks softly and slowly; his voice a good vehicle both for holding the audience’s attention and for carrying them to Ireland, home already to four Nobel Literature laureates, including Seamus Heaney, Muldoon’s college tutor.
Chris Harford, on guitar and vocals, was an apt foil for Muldoon; one resembled a staid professor while the other stayed true to rock star form. Muldoon would wander away from the mic for long stretches, sometimes after saying the lyric a cappella, then leaving the band to animate it – with ballsy bass lines, insistent drum taps, sick guitar solos and wailing fiddle licks.
On fiddle and guitar was David Mansfield, whom we first saw in concert when Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue played two shows in Springfield. Speaking of Dylan, here’s what the late poet Donald Hall told me about him getting the Nobel: “Curiously, when I read Bob Dylan on the page, the words make no sound! Poetry-sound is utterly different from music. When he sings them, I reckon that they make a good noise!…Phil Roth should have won the Nobel, and now he never will.”
I don’t mean to disparage Dylan, whose bandwagon I’ve been riding practically since it left the station – but, just like him, I know there’s a difference between a poem and a song. This project of Muldoon’s is worthy of widespread attention, because it is so much fun, with such great music, audiences may wind up falling in love with language itself. Then they’d become better listeners, they’d pay closer attention …
Funny thing about this concert is that it concluded with a song, Comeback, that describes the way the season at Tanglewood now opens: heavily-hyped shows by remnants of rock royalty – a sad spectacle often, but excusable when the royalties, too, have dried up.
Introducing it, Muldoon referred to The Who – competing remnants of which have played there the last two seasons, taking up the space and time that should be reserved for musicians with something new to say – as they themselves did when they dropped by five days before Woodstock!
The Irish Arts Center in NYC is the locale of Muldoon’s Picnic, which convenes on the second Monday of the month, featuring Rogue Oliphant and – as Chris Harford puts it, “Paul’s literary friends, like Salmon Rushdie and Joyce Carol Oates.”
Links:
Poems aimed toward the market are to be kept from the sort of view hereby afforded, much to my chagrin, so let’s put on a happy face and list titles of poems I’ve worked on recently. Whatever “recently” means!