New book

Vermont's new maverick publisher, Green Writers Press, has released my collection of mini-essays (the longest in the book is four pages, most about the length of the two that follow here).

Some of these pieces began as "translations" into prose of certain older poems that had never found their rhythms. I had an intuition –whether accurate or not is for others to judge– that those poems would do better if presented in the more supple format of prose.

Whatever the case, if these attract you, go to my web site, www.sydneylea.net, for ordering information.

Happy holidays!

Storytelling at the Res

Joe hopes he’s a good guy now, but by jollies he wasn’t a good one once. He says he even stole his own wife’s hairlong jewelry to pay off a deal.

I have to smile: hairlong.  

If you need a drink or drug, Joe continues, believe me, you’ll take what you got to take. Go ahead and rob your buddies or, like he just said, even your very own folks.   

Outside, cold rain is coming steadily, but it feels so warm indoors I’m afraid I’ll doze, even though I’m not exactly sleepy, and Joe’s story isn’t boring. Not at all.

There was a time he worked a big saw, he says, and the whole while plastered. It’s a wonder he never got himself or somebody wasted. There was a lot of days like that, and a lot in the joint too.  Once he broke a white cop’s arm with a tire iron. The cop and his pals didn’t like that, you can bet. 

Joe wears a raven feather in his hat, which he jokes about, telling how it shows he’s gotten better, because it sure isn’t no war bonnet. He tries to stay humble is what he’s saying, just that one feather. He prays all his war days are done for.  

Anybody else got something? he asks now. Everyone nods, but afterwards most just look shy and keep their mouths shut, except one guy in the room whose tribal name is See-Quickly, but people call him Jesse. He wears braids and has half an arm missing. He speaks up just enough to say he’s glad he’s out of prison. Again. I hear some scattered applause.   

They’s a bunch of other people not here, Joe says, some of them clean and sober for years. Then they disappear, and then you hear they’re locked up, or else dead.

What about you? Joe asks, looking at me, one of the few white guys.  What you got?

I try to say something, but it seems too hard to come up with anything but that I’m happy to be here, which I guess is true.   

No, no, don’t nobody feel on the spot, Joe continues, shaking his head, which makes his jowls shake too.  He’s just a guy himself with some habits. Like check out this gut– too many doughnuts.    

But doughnuts don’t make you lose it. I want to say that, because we are all in this place for being crazy once.  

You got something more, Jesse? Joe asks. Let’s hear about it. Once you put stuff right out in the open, see, that helps you get it out of your system.  You start in with that, then maybe you can get some healing.    

Jesse says, I don’t even own no hat, never mind some bonnet. I ain’t got shit.    

Joe calls that God’s will for now.     

So when I chopped off my arm at the mill, that was God working his ways on the res? Jesse asks Joe, but he isn’t pissed off; or anyhow he smiles.  

Joe knows Jesse didn’t mean anything bad. What happens, whatever it is, is what happens, he says. You might as well think there’s a reason for it. I mean, check around here. Joe nods his head at everyone in his seat. I look down at the floor when his eyes get to me. We’re supposed to be where we’re at.  I just call that a God deal, even when our asses get throwed in stir, maybe even if we’re killed. What do I know? I don’t know what God is, except He ain’t me. 

I wonder if what he says next might not just be right, and it could include me: we all went to different schools together. 

My trouble is, I want a story, and not just any story, but a knockout like Jesse’s. The fact that I keep looking for that sort of thing means maybe I’m not so much better than I was when I was using after all. I have to be a lunatic or just a fool to have wishes like that, to believe I haven’t been beat up enough to be interesting.

The blue tattoo on Jesse’s stub shows only the top halves of letters; I can’t make out the word they spell.

 

Surviving Romance

The world swelters, even at twilight on this August Sunday. My great love naps, her hair lank and humid across her forehead. The blunt protrusion of an empty wine bottle from last night’s party, which all day we have forgotten to clear away, bobs above the scratched rim of a bucket, its ice long gone liquid. How tempting it is for me to laze here too in the dank present.

It must be jelly, ‘cause jam don’t shake like that. Big Joe Turner’s figuration from my ancient turntable, the volume low, recalls not some erotic encounter but a dawn from years and years ago, which might seem to urge, Hurry back. I remember mornings then, the streets’ tar not yet a-shimmer with heat. Our family was passing two weeks in a rented seaside cottage.

Just a little boy, I’d race every day to the tide-washed beach to gather jellyfish, which lay bright as jewels in the sand– perfect, intact. I’d carry them home in a bucket, store them down-cellar until dark, then haul them up at about this very hour, stashing them under my bed. It made no sense, except that it did, to me.

Just under my bedroom’s floor, each night I’d hear my father rocking my mother in the bamboo glider. Soon, suddenly and mysteriously, their lively chatter subsided to indecipherable whispers. My crisp sheets wilted; cicadas droned; headlights circuited the walls.

While I slept, those parents drained my treasures into a canal beside the house. I wouldn’t learn they had done that until much later. It seems that the stench from the pail grew pretty awful by ten o’clock. They’d fill the bucket with water from that rank canal, explaining how jellyfish dissolve once they’re out of the sea.

An inexcusable lie, I suppose, but a dispiriting one. Every day, the same dreary routine: dissolution, vanished particularity. It all seemed tragic but unavoidable.

Since then, as for anyone, of course, experience has leached the glitter from other ruses as well. I have at times responded to all that with the same old disenchantment, as if most of what we men and women value will always trickle back to a native, general ocean. One assembles hopes or objects or affections or memories– and they all dissolve.

Yet some things are not so fugitive after all. I note the gray in my wife’s full hair, the slack of her jaw as she slumbers, and each appears a feature of the most beautiful creature I’ve ever imagined. Her length of limb and neck strike me as nigh miraculous.

My senses stir: a breeze comes in, stiffening from northwest now, and the day’s stifling vapor lifts. Outdoors, there is no miasma of mudflat, teeming canal, old fish; I hear no soporific hum of tires on pavement; I whiff the spice of evergreen, the deeper one of dark earth; the comical drone of a bullfrog reaches me from the pond.

I’d felt as though my very flesh were liquefied. Now, as that gathering wind caresses the curtains and my sweat dries, I stand and put a match to a candle on the table. Its slight flame leans inward. I imagine sharp stars. My love’s ring-gems glitter in the subtle light, as drops might on a window screen after rain. She seems a girl in such illumination; her eyes have that star-like glitter too, familiar and dear, as she wakes and smiles.

 

Remarks on David Rees Evans– and a new poem

Having lately been succeeded as my state's Poet Laureate by the excellent Chard de Niord, I am posting far less regularly here than once. But I will keep at it now and then for those who may be intrerested.

I'd like to comment first on the inauguration of David Rees Evans as the president of Southern Vermont College in Bennington. I had not known this impressive man prior to the ceremony last Friday, so was particularly honored that he asked me to read the title poem of my last collections, "I Was Thinking of Beauty," at the ceremony.

I am so glad to have been on hand for the most compelling inaugural speech I have ever heard.

Southern Vermont College is a small liberal arts institution, 65% of whose students are the first in their families to have gone on to post-secondary education. I had lunch with a number of undergraduates prior to Mr. Evans's investiture, and was impressed by their curiosity, ambition, and charm. The same for such of their teachers as I met. These qualities confirmed my view that the best students are the best students everywhere; they are not all to be found in the so-called selective places.

President Evans pointed out that these supposedly more elite colleges and universities have a way of educating their students to believe that their own successes are part of some natural order of things.
I know the justice of that argument, so to speak, from within, having attended such an  institution. And yet, by way of geography and of sharing hunting and fishing enthusiasms with many excellent people who never dreamed of higher education at all, I learned early on that the self-congratulation of privileged folks like me was not always deserved at all, that the social capital many of us inherited was the defining distinction between us and lots of hardworking, highly intelligent people, ones who often had skills as refined and crucial as any that we could boast. (Try fixing an electrical problem in your house, say, by way of your Ph.D. in art history.) Of course I can scarcely even sketch the president's argument in such short compass; but then again, I could not present it half so eloquently as he did anyhow.

I wish President Evans a long and productive tenure at SVC, a college that is striving to right some of the inequities I have hinted at.

************

In our house there is sadness that the older son of my wife's little sister is in a direc condition, owing to too many concussions. In his high school years, he was considered one of the best high school ice hockey players in the nation; however, before going on to college (and he'd have had his choice of many as a hockey recruit) he forswore the game, not least because one of his best friends and fellow players had been so badly brain-injured that ti took him an extended period even to be somewhat functional. Ironically enough, our nephew Danny finds himself in the same situation now. He is dropping perforce out of Colorado State, having suffered yet another concussion– in a neighborhood pickup game of all things, with small kids and geezers like me in the mix.

I was a hockey player myself, and have the missing upper teeth to prove it; but I was one of the lucky ones, escaping TBI in the course of my far less illustrious career. The following poem meditates on some of these matters:

         Clear and Cold

I don’t give a damn if that moon over our old valley

Looks twice the size of earth, if it crowds the sky,

Annihilating stars while I drive home unhappy

In a season after afternoons have died–

I will not write one word to praise this light,

Not with my nephew torqued in a hospital bed

By seizures after bashing his head on the ice

In a neighborhood shinny game, for the love of God,

Every college hockey coach in the nation

Had been looking at him with avaricious eyes.

But here he was whooping it up on school vacation

With guys my age and tottering kids on his side.

It doesn’t mean a thing, the stinking moon.

This child, a grown man now, has always been

The soul of sweetness. I couldn’t care less how huge

That fat lump of flotsam is. I’m thinking again

Of how one night, when his allergy to peanuts

Kicked in, the boy was loath to let anyone take him

To the oxygen tent and drugs at our backwoods clinic.

He hated to cause a bother. But he got taken.

The blue of his eyes seemed more vivid then for his fear–

Or ours. His hair shone gold as that ball up there.

And now these spasms, this pain, his parents’ despair.

I can’t rhapsodize on the moon, so candid and clear.

Poem in Honor of Vermont Arts Council's 50th Year

                                                    

 As it happens, my passing the torch as Vermont Poet Laureate to the gifted Chard deNiord is contemporaneous with the celebration of the VAC's existence for half a century. I will read the following poem on November 2, when, at the Vermont College of the Fine Arts in Montpelier, Chard is invested and a variety of governor's awards for excellence in the arts are presented. The Council has, of course, been deeply involved in all these matters.

It's been a joy and a privilege.

                                    Mixed Figures:

           A Salute to the Vermont Arts Council in its 50^th year

A certain girl once longed

                                                to dance, and likewise a boy.

She does, he does. There were women

                                                and men who ached to sing

or play or compose. They do.

                                                Writers and painters and sculptors

and actors all follow old urges.

                                                With every step or word 

or note or dab of color,

                                                each tap of a mallet, each weld,

our mountains record a thrill

                                                along their spines, a throb

that thrums as far to the east

                                                as the long tidal river and westward

to great Petonbowk, the lake

                                                we call Champlain. Our slopes

and intervals arrange

                                                themselves as a series of circles, 

each wider than one before,

                                                and at length as a single circle

around Derby Line and Dorset,

                                                Bondville, Bloomfield, Barre,

Cabot, Cuttingsville.

                                                St. Albans, Saxton’s River.

The rest.  How I mix my figures!

                                                I’m a man at greater loss

for persuasive words than ever ,

                                                seeking to render a force

beyond his skills at depiction.

                                                I jumble our commonwealth’s map,

muddle even the simplest forms,

                                                all that I yearn to capture

so vast and varied– the sounds,

                                                the phrasings, the light, the movement.

Yet my failings don’t really matter.

                                                As King Lear’s blind Duke said,

“I see it feelingly.”

                                                Don’t all of us feel and see it

in this room, this town, this state,

                                                that ineffable amalgam

of Vermonters’ multifold spirits,

                                                which surge through the artist’s existence?

And those who honor that artist–

                                                it’s every bit as alive 

in them. They come from every

                                                walk– every flight of life.

They glide silent into the voices

                                                of horn and string; they shine,

however unnoticed, in brilliance

                                                of marble or metal or pigment; 

their indiscernible steps

                                                enliven the steps of the dancers;

they mutely charge an author’s

                                                forays into expression,

all of us fired and braced

                                                by this crucial collaboration.

New book

 On November 12, I will launch my new book of essays, What's the Story? Reflections on a Life Grown Long, with a reading at the Phoenix Book Store in Burlington, Vermont.

The book is nothing if not eccentric, in that it consists of about seventy essays, the longest of which is four pages. Others, like the one below, tend to be in the one- or two-page category. If there is a binding concern in the collection it is this: to what degree does my version of "reality" conform to some other putative version? Clearly the incident I describe in "Short Sad Story," for instance, shows a disconnect in that regard, shows me behaving with inappropriate certainty to a circumstance that I didn't begin to understand.

Please buy the book at your local indie shop or from the Phoenix itself. I prefer avoiding amazon, though, having bought local, you might write a favorable amazon review if so inclined. To use Phoenix, go to http://www.phoenixbooks.biz/book/9780990973393

Short Sad Story

As he pushed open the door of room 116 at the Longhorn Motel, I noticed the stranger’s befuddled grin. “Oh, this is–” he mumbled, trailing off, backing out. I had hours to wait before I flew back east from Denver, so, seated at a chipped Formica table, I’d been trying, with small success, to rough out a piece of writing. As if it would help my efforts, I locked the door against further distractions, even benign ones like this petty mistake.

A few minutes later, however, the knob began to rattle. I slid the bolt. “What’s the matter?” I snapped when I saw the same man standing there. “Can’t you read numbers? One-One-Six. That’s me, not you.” The other didn’t appear to hear. He leaned against the door with one shoulder, cradling an ill-sorted bunch of clothes in both hands.

“Get the hell out of here!” I snapped, because he started directly to lean against me. The interloper was a younger but smaller man than I. Putting  my forearms against his chest, I shoved him hard, so that he fell outside onto the lot’s asphalt, a plaid pajama top flying one way, a gravy-stained shirt the other, and a sock landing over both eyes like a flimsy blindfold. Even masked, his face wore that silly smile. It might have been a comical sight otherwise. I relocked my door.

My writing continued to go nowhere at all, so, in spite of the time gaping before me, I decided to repack my own clothes. Then I shaved, though I really didn’t need to. I couldn’t make those minor chores last long, however, and soon I headed for the lobby to grab a cup of coffee from the motel’s vending machine. On my way, I spotted the erratic fellow once more. He was up on his feet at the very spot where I’d bowled him over, his odd bundle of garments re-gathered, the smile still showing, though not directed at anyone or anything in particular, least of all at the one who’d shoved him.

I asked the desk clerk. “What the hell’s the story with that guy?”

“Seems like he’s lost,” the clerk answered. “I gave him the key to room 124, but he keeps tellin’ me he needs to get into 116.”

“My room,” I mused, obviously.

 “I figure he’s drunk as a skunk,” the clerk snarled, turning brusquely back to his affairs.

I went out for breakfast, dawdling for more than an hour over my meal and small talk with the sweet old waitress at a beanery called The Country Fare. When I returned to the Longhorn, I found the showroom-clean, white Ford 150 still parked in front of 116, but its owner was nowhere to be seen. I stepped into the motel lobby again.

“What became of our friend?” I asked. The clerk said he’d found him in some other room, not 116 but not 124 either, the room he’d been assigned. Apparently, all he could say was, “I’m waiting for my daughter.”

In the end, not knowing what else to do, the clerk had called the police. In due course, the cops summoned the EMTs.

I don’t know what happened after that, because I left for my flight, much earlier than I needed to. On the way to the airport in the rental car, seated by the gate, airborne, and all through the long drive northward to Vermont after touchdown, I couldn’t help feeling rotten about having heaved that guy onto his backside. I understood why guilt might bother me as it did; but I couldn’t quite sort out the other ways I felt. I tried to console myself, of course. How, after all, could I have known that the trespasser was not of sound mind?

Yet almost a year later, I still sense that same mix of guilt and whatever else may be. If anything, my trouble of spirit has strengthened, broadened, as if it may last me lifelong. Perhaps at least I can write about it. Maybe I have always written about it in some vague way. Whatever it is.

I remember arriving at our house that night, dog-tired in body and heart, and, right after supper with my wife, going up to bed; but a more powerful memory is of a dream I had some time toward dawn, in which that wonderful wife stood by me and the second of our three daughters before a bonfire we’d lit at the end of our woodlot road. A quiet bliss pervaded the vision, or rather a feeling like the peace that the apostle Paul describes, which passeth all understanding.

For a moment, still pretty much asleep, I guess, I arrived at the warming conclusion that such peace might actually remain in the world even after I left it, and that somehow it could be available to any person sufficiently needing it. Coming to, I felt desolate to recognize my fantasy as just that.

There had been times when I needed such peace for myself, and there would be other times to come. I knew as much. I hoped it would be accessible again, though I understood I couldn’t simply will it into being.

I didn’t think of the smiling man at the Longhorn right away, though shortly I realized I might have.

 

Why Poetry, of All Careers?

People have often asked me, of course, why I chose poetry as my principal vocation. I like to joke that it's all about money, women, and fame...which is, of course, just that: a joke. The best-selling poets in America would do well to attract more readers than a last-place major league baseball team might draw in late September of a hopeless season. 

So there have to be other motives. I could go on at length about these, but I'll try to distill my thoughts here.

I came to poetry late, not publishing my first collection until I was forty. Prior to that, I had striven to be a conventional academic, though from the start somehow, the whole effort felt a little misguided. I didn’t know why for some time.

In 1970, I was asked to teach a section of Dartmouth College’s first-ever creative writing course, not because of my credentials– I had none– but because the then chair of my department, a good guy indeed, imagined the gig would give me time to finish up my Ph.D. dissertation, as I had not yet done. This would not after all be a “real course,” he assured me, demanding neither class preparation nor any scrupulous commentary on the students’ work.

And yet in teaching that course (I use the verb loosely), I felt the return of an old itch to write, one I’d experienced in my undergrad days, when I composed quite a number of short stories. None of these was created for a course, because there were no writing courses in the early 60s where I went to school either. In the interest of economy, I won’t go into my reasons for responding to that impulse by choosing poetry over fiction. Suffice it to say that I did so choose, and though I have written a novel and five collections of personal essays since, poetry has remained my chief métier.

A different and less good-guy department chair eventually came to me and indicated that, although my rep as a teacher was pretty good, Dartmouth had now become a publish-or-perish institution. When I noted that my first poetry collection was under contract, this fellow, not quite concealing his smirk, suggested that, just as creative writing was not a “real” course, a book of poems did not constitute “real” publication.

I’d finished my dissertation by then. In it, I’d sought to ape the suddenly voguish theoretical posture. For such a reason, it remained an obscure screed, even to its author, whose inclinations were and are, non-, even anti-theoretical. I decided nonetheless to mine the paper for a few scholarly articles (at that time, one didn’t have to compose books to meet the publishing requisite), but on reconsidering my own prose, I felt something very like nausea. I recall saying right out loud, “This is not what I want to do when I grow up.” I resolved to go on writing verse and to let the chips fall where they might.

I was denied tenure at Dartmouth, but was quickly hired at Middlebury, which had something of a history of writer-professors. This was a better fit. But no matter: the real question was, why should scholarship have seemed a pursuit ill-suited to me? I’ve thought the matter over many times. It was not because I felt contempt for scholarly enterprise; indeed, I still value the training I got in world literature, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. And I have published a book of essays that –although I hope it’s devoid of jargon and hyper-annotativeness– might legitimately be called a work of scholarship.

No, my choice of poetry had to do with the fact that it more nearly answered to my own mental tendencies. Whereas scholarship, even in its often impenetrable post-modernist avatars, still ultimately depends upon premise and conclusion, upon the dialectical approach, the realm of lyric poetry –at least for me– is roughly described by Carl Jung when he speaks of true psychology as the domain “always ... of either-and-or.” That is, lyric can keep multiple perspectives alive within one frame without seeming merely to be a muddle. Perhaps this is what Keats meant when he famously spoke of Negative Capability, the capacity to live with “mysteries, uncertainties and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Negative Capability, so understood, enables me to indulge what another great poet –T.S. Eliot– called the “necessary laziness” of the poet. To use a reductive buzz phrase, it is a right-brain enterprise. To relax the muscular, either/or approach to experience is to open oneself to unanticipated  possibilities, and to let them come as they will.

And to let them come in all their fullness. It may be cliché to say that lyric captures the intensity of certain moments, but so it does for me. This is true, I think, even if the moment that catches my attention never eventuates in a written poem. I know I sound a bit fogeyish to say so (I am in my 70s, and have a right), but the fact that most of anyone’s moments are ephemeral and diffuse seems the more evident in the age of Twitter and (the very word speaks volumes) of the Selfie. For me, the lyric impulse allows me to see certain “deeper” moments, to concentrate them in what I hope, however vainly or justly, may be memorable language. Among the very deepest of those moments in my own experience, for eloquent example, are the witnessing of the births of five children. The plethora of responses to such events could never be catalogued nor exhausted, but one can go farther toward rendering their impact –or so I believe– via the language of poetry than by any other mode of discourse.

Lightning scarcely strikes every day. If it did, I’d write 365 poems a year. But that it might strike at any moment makes me feel alive and attentive, makes me open to all manner of novelty, if I can adequately ignore mundane distractions (and of course I can’t; who does?). It feels that such newness is always available out there, no matter I have been recording my responses for more than four decades now. Until I take the long sleep, I’ll believe that something fresh may be right around the bend.

I have a new book of personal essays, which will be launched on November 9 at the Phoenix Bookstore in Burlington, Vermont. It is more than a little eccentric, consisting of more than sixty short-short pieces, the longest of which runs to four pages, most running one or two. It is called What's the Story? Reflections on a Life Grown Long, and will be published by Vermont's own excellent new house, Green Writers Press (not that there is anything particularly "green" sbout this volume).

My excellent rep Dez Peeples has a media kit with more information at http://www.desmondpeeples.com/client-media/

Hope your summer has been as good as my own!

 

vacation time

The blog will be on vacation with its author until late August. My vacation is not all leisurely. If you want to see what I will be devoting my efforts to, go to downeastlakes.org. The land trust over which I preside is within sight of closing a deal on the final 22,000 acres of a project that, together with our prior conservation efforts and those of other conservation and government entities abutting us, will protect an area that is the size of Zion and Yosemite put together. That is saying something in the northeast!

My part in all this will, I think, be the most significant thing I did in my time on earth.

Have a great summer!