Wednesday, March 5, 2014

homage to a north country poet– and some north country reflections

Somewhat belatedly, I want to add my voice to the rightful chorus of tribute to the late Maxine Kumin. She lived about an hour and a half to my southeast, and I knew and admired and greatly liked this marvelous woman for nigh on 40 years. 

To my mind, she was for at least that many decades the premier poet of upper New England (not to slight the likes of Ellen Voigt or Wesley McNair, each a giant, to be sure).  

This is scarcely to reduce Maxine's work to mere regionalism. She was regional only in the sense that Frost was: her gimlet eye for local detail and character –both human and beastly– provided her with a deeply rooted perspective on the world at large, including the political world, which in later years angered her enough to impel some truly feisty, and truly excellent, poems on the political realm.

One has to think of someone like Robert Penn Warren to indicate a writer who, like Maxine, turned out some of her very best work, which is to say something indeed, well into her eighties. (I give one example among scores just below.)

For my part, I shall miss Maxine– a lot; but the world of letters will feel her absence even more acutely.

RIP, great soul.


JACK

How pleasant the yellow butter
melting on white kernels, the meniscus
of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets

where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are
after shucking the garden's last Silver Queen
and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses

the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon:
our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28
which calibrates to 84 in people years

and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster
at 22. Every year, the end of summer
lazy and golden, invites grief and regret:

suddenly it's 1980, winter buffets us,
winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow
we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them,

a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait
lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it
the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his

hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others
who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes
he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.

That spring, in the bustle of grooming
and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go
to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following

fall she sold him down the river. I meant to
but never did go looking for him, to buy him back
and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table

my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons
the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order.
Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone

did you remember that one good winter?




***********************************************
What follows is a rumination that may itself seem rather lococentric, and yet, I hope, as with Maxine's work, that it raises issues –not that it resolves them at all– which can resonate all over our nation, even across the world at large.

 

My wife and I own a cabin in Maine. I bought it for $500 some forty years back, because its neighborhood is spectacular. The place sits, however, in the poorest county in the northeastern U.S. Since the economic meltdown of six years past, that poverty shows more plainly than ever: abandoned farms, houses, and even tarpaper shacks for sale, items of little value by the roadside, marked with scanty prices. On our way to the cabin in the dead of a polar vortex winter, I winced as always to pass a canted school bus next to route 6; I vaguely know the man who lives in it year-round.



During our stay, such desperation weighed on our minds, subtly chewing at our peace and coziness. I tried to solace myself by thinking I’d done some small good as president of a local land trust, whose mission is not simply to set aside forests and waters for conservation’s sake but also to provide some sustainable forestry jobs in a zone where employment of any kind is hard to come by. Still, a hellish lot of people are hungry in that county, a fair number of them breaking game laws by way of survival: while we were at our cabin, a whole family was arrested for killing a cow moose out of season. They had their reasons.



Maine is one of the three hungriest states in the nation, but Vermont is in the top ten too. Awareness of such statistics kept eating at us, perhaps especially because of the season’s bitter cold, and got me to thinking about people who pass through upper New England, perhaps to ski or for some picturesque wedding, and who imagine they behold a rural Eden. Unfortunately that view is not uncommon among many who live in the north country too. How frequently does one enter a restaurant or a B&B hereabouts and find some claim that the place recalls “a time when life was simple”?



When was that time? After all, the sort of poverty I’m reflecting on proved more or less commonplace in our region back in those allegedly simple times. One can find reference to it throughout the work of our first state poet, as I’ll indicate directly. A time when life was simple? It wasn’t back then, and for too many it’s not that now. The various food banks that many of us support are more than worthy institutions; but mustn’t we now and then wonder why they remain so vitally needful?



Those who construe the north country as a place of simple peace and comfort need to travel over the ridges and look on their other sides. I am no saint, no Mother Tersesa, but I have witnessed some grim struggles over there. I began as a tutor for Central Vermont Adult Basic Education, whose board I now chair, and I’ve seen the bitter complication of certain lives in such a capacity. Moreover, and perhaps strangely, even offensively, to some, my lifelong hunting enthusiasms, while not matters of survival, of course, have led me into the company of many for whom they were and are. Their perspective on the north country is a lot less quaint than the complacent one I refer to– and for understandable reasons.



A little detour: The Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, where the great author lived from 1915 to 1920, sponsors a resident poet every summer. In 1977, it was Robert Hass, who two decades later would be U.S. Poet Laureate. I went to visit Bob during his stay, and he repeated a story told to him by an elderly lady down the road from Frost’s house. The woman had long left Franconia, but she’d been born in the village, and had spent  summers helping her grandparents, who farmed the land abutting Frost’s. Early in Frost’s tenure, she and her grandfather were riding his wagon to town when they saw the poet sitting on his porch.



“Grandpa,” the little girl asked, “who’s that man who bought Joe Hebert’s farm?”



The old farmer replied, “That is the laziest, most good-for-nothing person who ever moved to Franconia. All he does is sit in that chair and write letters. Come winter, he’ll be down in the village and we’ll all be paying for him.”



The story is amusing, but it speaks to a time –and maybe it was simpler in this one regard– when towns in our part of New England were obliged to provide for citizens who could not do so for themselves. In my own memory, Vermont had Overseers of the Poor, who were charged with seeing to this. There were also poor farms, the last dying in the 1960s, where the indigent could labor for sustenance. There is a famous, early-1800s court case involving a Vermont judge who owned an African-American slave. She’d toiled for him all her working life, but when she became old and disabled, the judge felt the town should look after her. He had to recuse himself from the final Supreme Court decision, which went his way, as I recall, because he was in fact Chief Justice (simpler times, you see).



Now I despise cartoon politics, left or right, the sort of rhetoric that offers pat, blanket solutions to major social problems like the one I describe. I’m not going to point any fingers in this column, and Lord knows that no poetry worth its salt would ever engage in simplism either, political or otherwise. But a poem like Frost’s own “An Old Man’s Winter Night” offers a dark comment on cavalier notions of Emersonian self-reliance among the indigent. I haven’t room to quote it here, but if you look it up, you will find the world’s loneliest poem.



What poetry can do, at least, is to remind us how our morals are taxed every day, if our eyes are open. Or it can open them. No, I have no right to play saint or sage, drawn like anyone as I am to comfort and to clan, and helpless as the next person to construe just societal solutions. But poetry, or at any rate poetry as keenly attentive as our first state poet’s, can remind us of an ongoing history, which still includes too much misery and want, and of our own inclination to dismiss or rationalize it for our own benefit.  We should at a minimum be asking questions of ourselves:

                           

                         Love and a Question



A Stranger came to the door at eve,

   And he spoke the bridegroom fair.

He bore a green-white stick in his hand,

   And, for all burden, care.

He asked with the eyes more than the lips

   For a shelter for the night,

And he turned and looked at the road afar

   Without a window light.



The bridegroom came forth into the porch

   With, ‘Let us look at the sky,

And question what of the night to be,

   Stranger, you and I.’

The woodbine leaves littered the yard,

   The woodbine berries were blue,

Autumn, yes, winter was in the wind;

   ‘Stranger, I wish I knew.’



Within, the bride in the dusk alone

   Bent over the open fire,

Her face rose-red with the glowing coal

   And the thought of the heart’s desire.

The bridegroom looked at the weary road,

   Yet saw but her within,

And wished her heart in a case of gold

   And pinned with a silver pin.



The bridegroom thought it little to give

   A dole of bread, a purse,

A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God,

   Or for the rich a curse;

But whether or not a man was asked

   To mar the love of two

By harboring woe in the bridal house,

   The bridegroom wished he knew.







How pleasant the yellow butter melting on white kernels, the meniscus of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are after shucking the garden's last Silver Queen and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon: our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28 which calibrates to 84 in people years and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster at 22. Every year, the end of summer lazy and golden, invites grief and regret: suddenly it's 1980, winter buffets us, winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them, a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters. That spring, in the bustle of grooming and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following fall she sold him down the river. I meant to but never did go looking for him, to buy him back and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order. Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone did you remember that one good winter? - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16926#sthash.YAOR2Ghd.dpuf
How pleasant the yellow butter melting on white kernels, the meniscus of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are after shucking the garden's last Silver Queen and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon: our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28 which calibrates to 84 in people years and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster at 22. Every year, the end of summer lazy and golden, invites grief and regret: suddenly it's 1980, winter buffets us, winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them, a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters. That spring, in the bustle of grooming and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following fall she sold him down the river. I meant to but never did go looking for him, to buy him back and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order. Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone did you remember that one good winter? - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16926#sthash.YAOR2Ghd.dpuf

Jack

  by Maxine Kumin
How pleasant the yellow butter
melting on white kernels, the meniscus
of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets

where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are
after shucking the garden's last Silver Queen
and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses

the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon:
our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28
which calibrates to 84 in people years

and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster 
at 22. Every year, the end of summer
lazy and golden, invites grief and regret:

suddenly it's 1980, winter buffets us, 
winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow
we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them,

a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait
lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it
the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his

hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others
who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes 
he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.

That spring, in the bustle of grooming
and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go
to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following 

fall she sold him down the river. I meant to
but never did go looking for him, to buy him back
and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table

my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons
the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order. 
Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone

did you remember that one good winter?
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16926#sthash.7N7qFGpM.dpuf

Jack

  by Maxine Kumin
How pleasant the yellow butter
melting on white kernels, the meniscus
of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets

where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are
after shucking the garden's last Silver Queen
and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses

the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon:
our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28
which calibrates to 84 in people years

and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster 
at 22. Every year, the end of summer
lazy and golden, invites grief and regret:

suddenly it's 1980, winter buffets us, 
winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow
we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them,

a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait
lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it
the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his

hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others
who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes 
he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.

That spring, in the bustle of grooming
and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go
to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following 

fall she sold him down the river. I meant to
but never did go looking for him, to buy him back
and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table

my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons
the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order. 
Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone

did you remember that one good winter?
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16926#sthash.7N7qFGpM.dpuf