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!

Pre-valedictory

This post comprises, by my computation, my third to last monthly column in statewide papers as Vermont Poet Laureate.  As before, I will be taking the summer off from such columns, and my successor will be named in November, this four-year tenure seeming to have gone by, like most things at my age, in a matter of days.

On the 28^th of May, I visited the Vermont Arts Council headquarters, where, with a group of peers, the process of choosing the next state poet began. I cannot, of course, comment on the proceedings, but I can indulge in some generalities, all of them connected to my somewhat melancholy recognition that this intriguing ride will soon be over for me.

Let me first applaud the intelligence, dedication, and good humor of the Arts Council staff, from director Alex Aldrich and program director Michele Bailey to everyone with whom I have dealt in that organization. Their very presence makes me proud to be a Vermonter, to live in a state where the arts play such a vital role not only in our economy but also in our daily lives. The Council’s initiative and responsiveness have more to do with all that than many may realize.

The same can emphatically be said of my fellows on the committee, each so obviously committed to getting this thing right, and taking the time necessary to achieve that end.

And yet, to speak again as a Vermont chauvinist, there surely will be no indisputably right choice. As I looked over the list of nominees, most of whom I know at least slightly, I was thrilled that our tiny state is home to so many gifted artists– and dismayed that we’ll be able to choose only one.

Virtually all of these authors were around at the time of my own appointment, which makes me surprised all over again that I should have been chosen in 2011– and humbled to know that I could scarcely have argued with any number of other selections. I will participate in the final vote with a mixture of satisfaction and frustration. With no false modesty, I can say that every nominee is him- or herself a Poet Laureate in some measure, for it is our collective effort to say things that are hard to say: it is that effort that keeps this cherished art alive here and elsewhere. After my time as state poet, I will never view a poem of my own as other than collaborative.

Speaking of collaboration, I’d never have dreamed that I would write text for the state’s first Cartoonist Laureate, the brilliant and gifted James Kochalka. We have just completed our third project. The Vermont Contemporary Music ensemble, having asked five of the state’s composers to write pieces in response to work of mine, performed two luminous concerts as a result. The fabulous young Philadelphia composer Joseph Hallman set my “Suite in Mudtime” to music performed by soprano and string quartet (in this case Vermont’s own 802 Quartet) at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

And of course, still speaking of collaboration, whatever my contribution to poetry’s health in Vermont may have been, it was merely an adjunct to the contributions not only of the great Mr. Frost but also of the poets appointed after the position was reinstated by Governor Kunin in 1988: Louise Gluck, Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Ruth Stone. That I should be part of that lineage frankly astounds me.

Yes, I feel lucky. And even more, I feel blessed. If I was surprised by the appointment, after these four years, I am scarcely surprised by how much I regret its ending. So I have been in retrospective mode for a spell now, thinking about all the other benefits –and I simply can’t name each one– that I have experienced in this handful of years.

One is the wit I have enjoyed. The first instance, in fact, transpired while I was still on the phone with Alex Aldrich, who had called with the news. I put the telephone to my chest and whispered “I’m the Poet Laureate!” My youngest daughter, still living at home in 2011, corrected me: “It’s pronounced low-rate.” But I have savored the funny remarks I have encountered at the community libraries, 115 at this writing, where I have given presentations on poetry. The proceedings at the three Montpelier spelling bees at which I have been the pronouncer and emcee have at times been downright hilarious. I could go on.

There is likewise the cordiality I have experienced at virtually every stop. (The one and only exception was an unhappy and unpleasant woman in the west of the state who actually interrupted my reading of a poem by standing up and averring, “That’s not poetry!” Her fellows, however, quickly shushed her.)

Librarians are heroes of mine anyhow, from excellent state librarian Martha Reid to all the librarians, in places tiny and grand and in between, in Vermont: to see the care each took with making these events successful enhanced my feelings in this regard, as did the welcome library patrons inevitably extended.

I was regaled with all manner of thank you gifts, from home-baked pies to chocolates to countless mugs (which for the most part I traitorously transported to our Maine cabin in the woods) to precious books to –perhaps my favorite—a salt dish carved from invasive buckthorn by one of the artisans at Bob and Becca Cummings’s wonderful Center for the Expressive Arts in Montgomery.

There were several instances of pathos as well, chief of which was a woman’s giving me a memorial card to her son, dead far too young, with an excerpt of my writing as its inscription. I trust she understood my tears.

But as I suspected would be the case when I decided on community libraries as my venues of choice, I was most taken by the intelligence of so-called “average” men and women in the crowds. I’m an Ivy League brat, but I learned well before I got to college that that league had no corner on brains and/or creativity. There’s a lot of smart people out there, whatever the nature of their formal education.

I met an inexcusably young man in Randolph who read my poems more penetratingly than I could ever do myself. I came upon a dairy farmer way up on the Quebec border who could recite –I quizzed him pretty thoroughly– every single poem in Robert Frost’s “Mountain Interval.”

Again, I could extend my catalog until I ran out of space. Suffice it to say that what I valued most was how these non-specialists instinctively knew what the important questions were, and how they asked them not, as is too often the case in academic contexts, just to show how much they already knew themselves but in fact to elicit such information as I had means to offer.

And the important questions were and are often the most basic: who’s talking? to whom” where are we? why choose form X rather than form Y? If my poems couldn’t answer those questions, I suspected they needed further work (which quite a number of them got).

As I went on in my tenure, I came to leave more and more time for the Q & A portion, because I was most interested in and most instructed by that portion. To all of you who so brightly participated, my profoundest thanks.

Finally, I am grateful to the editors of the newspapers in which these columns have been published for four years now. They tolerated my opinions, and in many cases helped me to make them clearer. And to those who have contacted me, either in letters to the editor (again, one exception, but why dwell on that?) or personally, my thanks too. You have both encouraged me and kept me as honest as I know how to be.

May you all have wonderful summers.

Two New Poems

                           The Owl and I

Once the half-ass cross got burned on our lawn, my mother lit out

for the north to have me. My father was stationed in Gadsden, Alabama

Prior to World War II, commander of so-called Colored Troops,

And he’d invited a few of his men into the house, you see,

A radical thing back then and there in the heart of Jim-Crow Dixie.

So my mother fled giving birth down there, though I don’t have any idea

Why I’d think of this, which, near to her death, she spoke of so many years after.

Why now, on watching a barred owl coast to a hemlock gone dark at sunfall,

Everything else as well going dark around me here where I stand?

Once, at midnight, Mom thought she’d heard a whoop of human anguish

Outside, and wondered whether some soldier was being lynched. My father

Went out for a look but found nothing. My lifelong relations with my mother

Were vexed, I suspect today, in part because between us two

Lay a lot in common. Jews were crammed into cattle cars right then,

But for Dad and his troops, the evil in Europe yet lay months ahead.

Still, real or imagined, that cry of misery stuck with Mom, no matter

No signs of nearby violence turned up next morning. The company

Came en masse to mess: Shit on a Shingle, as the GIs said,

Dried beef on toast. So life went on, at least for a while– more or less.

It ought to bring comfort that I’m where I am, aging but safe, my clan

Constantly swelling as sons and daughters produce their sons and daughters,

And winter, so harsh this year, gives way at last to spring, with snowdrops

Glinting, the freshets making their evanescent cascades through woods.

I recall how my mother loved this season. Why, then, this lonesome mood?

It feels that I’m in some pitch-black tunnel and won’t get out again,

That this, as the saying goes, is it, and all I have at the end

–Of course there can’t be anything to it– is the sorrowful eight-note anthem

Of that lone owl, the sound just now having reached my vexed old head,

Though I’d be foolish to think that song was addressed to any human.

            Cavaliers

From up here, the valley looks soused

with spring, and whatever I see

seems a gift. Meanwhile, so help me, I wonder

why I never knew a thing

about cribbage. Not that it mattered,

just that back in the ward, my ghost of a roommate,

92 years old,

set up a game to play

with his daughter, who told him they could stay with it

till the Red Sox came on TV.

I gave a huff of relief,

not too loud, I hope, relieved

to know a change was coming

from all those idiot game shows,

the volume turned to headache pitch,

the old man’s droop-lobed ears

even weaker, I guess, than mine.

I lay there fettered: oxygen hose,

monitor, saline IV.

I’d had some chest pains that morning.

Three drawings of blood, all hours apart,

were apparently needed to prove

I’d suffered no incident.

And so, worse luck, I was going to be stuck

for a night with this poor old guy.

The daughter kept saying, “Be patient.”

He’d been in that room for over a month.

So the two of us watched the baseball,

the Sox getting by on breaks,

passed balls and bloops and walks, and squeaking

a victory out in the ninth.

We whooped until he coughed

so hard I rang my buzzer.

A nurse came in and frowned and pinned him.

He choked down a potion that killed

the hack, then fell asleep.

But all night he’d jerk awake and shout,

“Is anybody out there?”

How long can a man be patient?

I wasn’t one to say. I’d be gone

early the following morning,

my diagnosis: heartburn.

Sprung at last, I’ve taken this hike

up a hands-and-knees ridge to rejoice

in a healthy heart. Yes, the world

appears suffused with a sort of grace.

There’s the scent of melting snow,

muddy soil, wet duff.

Gray frogs chortle from vernal pools,

the freshets tinkle downhill,

woodpeckers rattle the air,

new growth festoons the tips of boughs,

and sky is far more vivid

than what we call sky-blue.

 So why on earth should I think about cribbage?

No matter. I wouldn’t set out

before I looked it up–

research, old-style, in a reference book.

Reading, I heard gurneys jangle,

a PA, alarms that signaled

sad souls trying to get up from beds

that they were meant to stay in.

I hear that clamor now,

even these miles and hours away. 

Cribbage seems to have been invented

by John Suckling, near-forgotten

seventeenth-century writer and peer,

said to be “carefree and witty,”

features of poets called the Cavaliers.