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Connecting the Dots

September 1, 2010 | in Features,New,Poetry Prof.

by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof

Amos Oz opens his novel, Rhyming Life & Death, with the main character, The Author, telling us the most commonly asked questions. One of these is:

Do you constantly cross out and correct
or do you write straight out of your head?

“Connecting the dots” –– a metaphor for seeing the big picture. When you were little, perhaps like me, you enjoyed one of those puzzle books with numbered dots to connect. As you drew the lines from dot to dot, wasn’t it fun to see how quickly you could figure out what it was as the outline of the object was revealed? This month I profess a belief that those of us who were good at it were destined to become poets. I thought of this last month when I read the memoir Amos Oz (nee Klausner) wrote about his childhood in Jerusalem in the late 1940s and early 1950s, A Tale of Love and Darkness. When he was eight years old, he fell in love:

She swept me away, set in motion some kind of metronome that had not stirred before and has not stopped since…

The object of his devotion? His second grade teacher, Teacher Zelda. Here is one of the lessons she imparted:

If you want to draw a tree, just draw a few leaves. You don’t need to draw them all. If you draw a man, you don’t have to draw every hair.

Ah, but here came the challenge: in this she was not consistent. When little Amos brought Teacher Zelda poems he had written…

One time she would say that at such and such a place I had written too much, while another time she would say that actually I should have written a little more. But how do you tell? I am still looking for an answer to this day…

Those of us who write poetry share that life-long challenge. As I revise my poems, I tend to do more crossing out than adding in. How about you? Also, second-grader Amos Klausner learned early on the mystery of how words work together:

I loved the way Teacher Zelda placed one word next to another. Sometimes she would put an ordinary, everyday word next to another word that also was quite ordinary, all of a sudden, simply because they were next to each other, two ordinary words that did not normally stand next to each other, a sort of electric spark jumped between them and took my breath away.

In his memoir, Oz tells us that later in life he learned that Teacher Zelda was also Poet Zelda, that her poems had been published in literary supplements and magazines, and even back in his second grade had then enjoyed a modest reputation among small circles of poetry lovers. He also found out that Teacher Zelda was a Miss Schneersohn who was related to a famous dynasty of Hasidic rabbis and who married a Rabbi Chayim Mishkowsky two years after Amos left her second grade classroom. In 1977 she won Tel Aviv’s annual Bialik Prize for Literature, a prize Amos Oz won in 1986. Known simply as Zelda, she died in 1984 at age 69.

Now, might I connect a few of my own dots? I went looking on the Internet for poems by Zelda and learned that her poems have been translated from Hebrew into English by professor and poet Marcia Falk. Now that name sounded familiar. I pulled off my shelf my copy of Faith & Doubt: An Anthology of Poems edited by Patrice Vecchione. There on page 60, one of my favorite poems, “Last Apple,” by Malka Heifetz Tussman, translated from Yiddish into English by Marcia Falk! Two dots connected: Zelda and Tussman. But, really three dots. Marcia Falk performs a one-woman show, Three Women Poets: A Talk and Reading, in which she presents her own poetry alongside poems by the other two women. Here she gives us a dramatic reading in the original languages as well as in her own English translations, and highlights their approaches to nature, love, solitude, and spirituality [www.marciafalk.com]

How to sign off this month? My effort to write not too much, not too little. My haiku effort to put one ordinary word next to another.

rise and shine
hyacinths and biscuits
breakfast fare

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It’s Been Ten Years

August 1, 2010 | in Features,New,Poetry Prof.

by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof

There are moments in our existence,
spots of time that, with distinct preeminence,
retain a renovating virtue.

Williams Wordsworth, Prelude

Wordsworth began to write a poem when he was 28 years old to track the growth of his mind. He worked on it until his death at age 80 and it was not published until three months after his death. His wife gave it the title Prelude.

You and I have experienced many of these moments, haven’t we? Unlike the great poet, we might not make the commitment to record these. But, we can choose to bring ‘em to mind and hold dear. Let me share a set of these moments that occurred ten years ago. One moment, of course, leads to another. I begin with one moment reading the Salt Lake Tribune. July 10, 2000. A downtown art gallery will hold a show for Andrew Christensen, age 19, diagnosed with Ewings sarcoma at age 17.

I attend and meet the artist, a young man attached to an IV pole – a morphine drip – and wearing an Oxygen mask. I also meet his hospice nurse who, when she learns that I work with first year medical students to broaden their education beyond the basic sciences, tells me that Andrew’s tumors has spread to his chest, that prognosis was not good, and that the aim now was for pain management. She wonders if, perhaps, Andrew would like to tell his story to my medical students.

I speak directly to Andrew: “Will you come teach my medical students what they need to know when care, not cure, is the agenda?”

“Yes, he tells me. But, come to my home and interview me. I’ll never make it to your class.”

I go to his home on August 7. I ask questions and he talks. He is very specific about what I was to say. Here are some of his words he tells me to me to tell the medical students in the class scheduled for September 1: “You need to recognize how temporary everything is, including the most expensive thing you bought and care for, to your relationships, to your health.”

My wife, Elaine, and I are invited to the Christensen home on Sunday evening, August 27. At the front door, Andrew’s father, Mark, steps outside and warns us that “Andrew is no longer Andrew.” He gives us the option of not coming in if we would feel uncomfortable.

We enter and sit in Andrew’s bedroom with his father, mother, sister, and grandmother and we read a book of poems we had brought as a gift, a copy of Without by Donald Hall. Don wrote this book in memory of his wife, Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia at age 47 in 1995. He had been my guest the previous week, reading to the medical students his poems of love and loss. Don inscribed this copy of his book to Andrew. We also brought to read a copy of Jane Kenyon’s poem, “Let Evening Come.”

Andrew’s awareness of his surroundings, I must say, are tenuous at best. Still, Elaine and I are aware of the love and dignity in that small, crowded room and all present share faith that Andrew, at some level, also is aware of that as Jane’s poem and some of Don’s are read.

Mark calls me Tuesday morning. Andrew has died Monday evening with his family there. Thursday I teach the class, just as planned. Andrew’s final words, as I convey to the medical students, and, now to you, are these:

You can never, ever, go wrong, asking a cancer patient, “What is this like for you?”

It does not take a diagnosis of cancer for this question to make a difference, does it? Can you and I ask a loved one, a friend, or even a new acquaintance facing any challenge in life: “What is this like for you?”

I was reminded of all this when I read ” I Missed my Moment,” by Polish poet Tadeusz Dabrowski, in the 2010 May-June American Poetry Review. To paraphrase, he asks,

I missed my moment… How could I fail to miss it…? When, where? Or maybe it missed me… vanished over the horizon and is waiting.

Come, let us not miss the moment. Come, let us read poetry. And remember.

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Oh, Life Could be a Dream, Shaboom, Sh-boom yada da da da da

July 1, 2010 | in Features,Poetry Prof.

by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof

In 1954, pop group Crew Cuts* gave it a shot. Ah, the Meaning of Life! Why are we here? Where are we going? Do I have to change planes in Atlanta? Poets weigh in. We can begin and end with Homer’s The Iliad:

Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead.

I am not going to take on the meaning of it all, but how about the meaning of poetry? This question was prompted by the letters to the editor the June issue of Poetry. In April, this magazine had printed explanations by poets along side their poems.

In the two-month lag time, we heard from two kinds of readers in their “letters to the editor.” In one group, there are thank you letters, as in, “opens new dimensions to the reader, at least to this reader,” “helped me enjoy (the poems),” “very helpful for those of us who are not professional poets,” “keep producing issues with the poets’ explanations,” and “absolutely loved the explanations.” One reader specifically appreciated the “possible meaning(s)” that were offered by the poets.”

Then we heard from the ingrates: total rejection of the notion that poets explaining the meaning of their poems was a step in the right direction. To wit, “It was a bit insulting to have it explained,” and “a distraction from the main event (reading the poem!).” One letter-writer, tongue-in-cheek, suggested that the magazine stop printing the poems: “Just print the explications and your readers can imagine the poems for themselves.”

The impetus to let poets explain the meaning of their poems also is shared by another pillar of the po-biz establishment, American Poetry Review. There poets are offered a “The Poet on the Poem” column to accompany their poetry. In the May-June issue, Polish poet Tadeusz Dabrowski wrote that he declined to explain his poetry because he agreed with fellow Polish poet Rozwicz who declared, “I write so that I don’t have to speak.” Dabrowski added that his poems are not “homework assignments.” Here I am reminded of my high school English teacher, Miss Terry, who asked us what we thought the poet meant by his poem, “The Road Not Taken,” as if Robert Frost was not sure, but needed us to explain it to him.

Here is a twist. While I rail against teachers who put front and center the “What does it mean?” question, maybe poets do not always know what they mean. A poet I greatly admire, David Young, in “Landscape with Bees,” [At the Window] wrote this stanza:

Each poem’s not exactly what
you mean
because, of course,
you don’t
quite even know —

What do I profess? Explication along side the poem? Put me down for “No Thank You.” I believe that Dabrowski’s “Readers, don’t ask; Poets don’t tell” policy is the way to go. He wrote that “meaning” of a poem is written into it “as the wind-tossed crown of a tree is written into its seed.”

Let’s leave the last word to Archibald MacLeish (from Ars Poetica) :

A poem should not mean
But be

post scriptum: After I finished this essay, I was perusing the poetry section of a local used bookshop and came across a little item I just had to buy: The Flight of the Hawk, a limited edition monograph published to inaugurate the opening of Tor House to the public on October 6, 1979. [Readers of my 1st of the month feature may know by now that I am a volunteer docent at this stone house built for poet Robinson Jeffers in 1919. Jeffers apprenticed himself to the stonemason and subsequently built the 40 foot Hawk Tower by himself.] The author of this booklet, Alfred E. Smith, a neighbor and friend of Jeffers, wrote that he was appalled by library shelves full of books purporting to analyze what the Poet of Tor House “really meant.”

* Click on link to listen: Sh-boom by The Crew Cuts.

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The Beat Goes… Going, Going, Gone!

June 1, 2010 | in Features,Poetry Prof.

Last Month: Heartbeat – why do you miss…?
This Month: The Beat Goes… Going, Going, Gone!

by Neal Whitman, “Poetry Prof”

In Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Eliot Weinberger takes a short Chinese poem and offers… yep, you guessed it… 19 versions of it. The poem in question was written by Wang Wei over 1200 years ago, a master poet in an age known for its poetry, the Tang Dynasty. Wang Wei, who lived from circa 700 to 761, was also a painter and calligrapher. The title most commonly used for this poem is “Deer Park.” Some time ago, I loved reading a library copy of the Weinberger book and now treasure a gift copy from poet-pals I first got to know when they visited the Robinson Jeffers Tor House in Carmel, California, where I am a volunteer docent. [As a bonus, the book arrived with a feather from their parrot, Edward.]

My favorite Wang Wei translation in this book is by Gary Snyder who offers no title and, unlike almost all the others in this book, does not render it in four lines:

Empty mountains:
no one to be seen.
Yet –– here ––
human sounds and echoes.
Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods:
Again shining
on the green moss, above.

Snyder brings this advantage to his approach: he knows his mountains. Shelved next to my “19 Ways” book is his Mountains and Rivers Without End. This book is composed of 39 pieces written between 1956 and 1996. It is hard to categorize this book. It is a set of poems, but I prefer to think of it, in totality, as poetical rather than as poetry. When he was given the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize in Japan in 2004, he explained that, although he did not consider himself a haiku poet, he was attempting to use a haiku aesthetic in “Mountains and Rivers” to talk about natural landscape and stories about the whole planet. Though influenced by many poetic traditions, he said that the influence of Japanese haiku and Chinese classical poetry was deepest.

Last month I exchanged e-mail with Mr. Snyder, who is a very gracious man. But, I did get a spanking. I put in the subject heading of my second e-mail, “and the beat goes on.” He responded:

“Incidentally for over 30 years now, when interviewed by reporters, I have said, “You must absolutely NOT use the phrase, the beat goes on, in your article or in a headline. We are all sick of it.”

Got it!

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