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Wednesday, September 22, 2004 |
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I received a New York Review of Books in yesterday's mail and find a number of publishers congratulating our country's new poet laureate Ted Kooser (who, sir?), a retired vice president of the Lincoln Benefit Life Insurance Co. in Nebraska (cf. Wallace Stevens) and a professor of English. His photo is appealing--he resembles the old guy in Grant Wood's American Gothic, except he holds a coffee cup in place of a pitchfork--but the one poem of his I could find to read (in the University of Nebraska, Lincoln's full-page four-color congrat) (here's a fragment)-- ...a bat like a small black rag has been fluttering back and forth through the yard light all evening, harvesting the stars of tiny moths... They jerkily fly this way and that, but they can't escape this hungry little piece of darkness.... --leaves me feeling a little wistful. Although I am no D. H. Lawrence fan, I recall vividly lines from his cringing "Bat": ...Dark air-life looping Yet missing the pure loop ... A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight And serrated wings against the sky, Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light, And falling back. ... Bats! Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep; And disgustingly upside down. Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags And grinning in their sleep. Bats! ... I am a great admirer of Theodore Roethke: ... He loops in crazy figures half the night Among the trees that face the corner light. But when he brushes up against a screen, We are afraid of what our eyes have seen: For something is amiss or out of place When mice with wings can wear a human face. ("The Bat") And I can see that Kooser with his "yard light" and "small black rag" shares with these others a delight in commonplace imagery. But I can't imagine greeting his lines with the same glad welcome should they ever spring to mind. In this morning's random reading, I found this, by Paul Hoover, (b. 1946), in Postmodern American Poetry (Norton, 1994), which he edited: Poems We Can Understand If a monkey drives a car down a colonnade facing the sea and the palm trees to the left are tin we don't understand it. We want poems we can understand. We want a god to lead us, renaming the flowers and trees, color-coding the scene, doing bird calls for guests. We want poems we can understand, no sullen drunks making passes next to an armadillo, no complex nothingness amounting to a song, no running in and out of walls on the dry tongue of a mouse, no bludgeoness, no girl, no sea that moves with all deliberate speed, beside itself and blue as water, inside itself and still, no lizards on the table becoming absolute hands. We want poetry we can understand, the fingerprints on mother's dress, pain of martyrs, scientists. Please, no rabbit taking a rabbit out of a yellow hat, no tattooed back facing miles of desert, no wind. We don't understand it. At present, apparently, it is Kooser who is understood. *** I spoke on the phone with my godmother Jeanne Flowers last night on the occasion of her 85th birthday, or rather two days past the occasion, which fell on the 19th. Jeanne fostered me in so many ways, and remains my bastion and my inspiration, my model and my mom (let's face it). I forgive her for giving me my first Coca-cola when I was five (so vivid in memory, the heavy ice-cold 6-ounce bottle perfect in my hands, the surprise of the not-so-sweet taste, the outrageous fizz and bite that turned my mouth down at the corners and made me shake my head). My mother and I shared a house with Jeanne when I was 15 and she I took up the study of Tarot together. She pursued it the rest of her life as part of her overall psychic development. Now this very tiny woman has become so large with compassion and joy I believe she may live forever, because that's pretty much all it takes. So I am ever inspired by her example and as the years pass I seek more and more to emulate her. I've learned to send my loved ones little surprises in the mail, as she sent to me (still does), to let them know they're important to me. She has taught me how to give (one of life's most important lessons) and how to receive (another). I hope I become more adept at both with time and practice, and that one day they will come as naturally to me as they always have for Jeanne. She lives a peaceful, generous life in Phoenix, now, with Shelley, her husband of 34 years. I love them both very much.  1:52:46 PM  comment []
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