Just as my teaching in the Summer Writers Colony was beginning on Monday, some friends and fellow writers and some former students gathered at a friend’s apartment in the Village to remember significant relationships in our lives. Prose writers and poets read from their own work; some read from the work of others, including Seamus Heaney, Jane Hirshfield, Jack Gilbert. One who could not be there in person sent a poem by May Swenson. Through the lines and paragraphs acknowledging loss ran glimmers and threads of clarity, humor, and, gratitude, not facile appreciation, but akin to what Robert Bly sees in James Wright’s late poems, his “poetry of complex gratitude” — a third act of intelligence, forgiveness, even extravagance after Acts I and II of claritas and the dark (for more, see Bly’s introduction to James Wright’s Selected Poems).

In 1996, for my father’s 71st birthday, my two sons, then 11 and 14, bought and sent to Papa, as they called him, a book entitled Grandpa, Tell Me Your Memories. 365 pages, each with a writing prompt at the top. This was years before I began to write or teach writing and years before their grandfather’s dementia crept in. We asked him to fill in one a day and return it on his 72nd birthday. He completed two-thirds of the pages through the one for August 4th and some years later returned it to us. In the book he returned, typed on note cards glued onto the pages are reminders of conversations we had and insights into things we never discussed as well as candor and enthusiasm that went beyond many of our hurried lives’ conversations.

He held onto the beauty and the good, when he could, through tough times. His response to the prompt. Describe a place you liked to go to be alone:

I never particularly enjoyed being alone, but lying in the grass in our “back field,” as we called it, gave me some satisfaction by way of dreaming of the future and trying to “overcome” the present. I found much inspiration in good poetry.…In some vicarious ways my thinking during those adolescent years in Cameron enabled me to keep my senses with me in horrible combat during the war. I often wonder what would have been my lot in life had I not been a front-line combat soldier. It colored my entire life after the age of 20.

How much he loved life. In reply to the prompt, Tell about seeing something you thought was very beautiful, he wrote:

Many things: budding trees and bushes in the spring, a rainbow after the rain, a shiny new car, the different shades of green in the woods right after the new leaves had come out in the spring, a new little calf just learning to walk, a growing vegetable garden when all the weeds and grass had been cleaned out of its rows, blooming flowers in the small flower garden tended by my mother between our house and Miss Annie Borst’s, the moon shining across the lake at Lakeview as my father and I were locking up the boat in the twilight after an afternoon of fishing, etc., etc.

Etcetera, etcetera. Indeed.

My father would, at times, slip in an almost melodic much obliged when thanking someone, an old rural Southern expression of thanks with obligation at its root, joy in being obligated, tied as by a ligament, to those who had shown kindness. The debt immense of endless gratitude, Milton wrote. The path between us direct, as at-hand as a to-do list. *See Tony Hoagland’s “The Word”.

      March 12, 1925 – May 8, 2013

Abundance.  a great plenty, overflowing fullness, ample sufficiency

The Well Rising

The well rising without a sound,

the spring on a hillside,

the plowshare brimming through deep ground

everywhere in the field –

The sharp swallows in their swerve

flaring and hesitating

hunting for the final curve

coming closer and closer –

The swallow heart from wing beat to wing beat

counseling decision, decision:

thunderous examples. I place my feet

with care in such a world.

William Stafford

It is April 2009. My father keeps asking, “Why is John with us?”  Sometimes he is talking about John McDiarmid, a friend of his from childhood; sometimes, I imagine he is talking about John, the disciple, or his book. My father lifts his eyebrows and opens his eyes a bit wider, and then his eyes turn away a bit as he searches for the word to pull together what he is trying to say.

We spend a long day together, eight hours.  I have had few eight-hour days with my father in my adult life. Once, in 1985, when one of my sons was a toddler, the other a newborn, my parents came for a visit and together my father and I plowed the over-large garden in which my husband and I had overinvested. At a garden center in a nearby New Jersey town, we bought a push plow – almost laughable to me now in its implicit intense manual labor, just as it is sweet in its simplicity. I think most people buy them in this country for decoration, lean them against a barn. What I would do to work alongside and buy time with my father.

In April 2009, we pass a long day in the car to and from the university hospital in Chapel Hill.  I am taking my father for a second opinion. Freddy Muldrow, a CNA at the seniors’ residence in Laurinburg where my parents live, rides with us. My father has been in the Special Care Unit for almost eight weeks. The UNC doctor, a specialist in certain forms of dementia, corroborates the Pinehurst physician’s diagnosis.

At the beginning of the day, my father calls me by his nickname for me and asks me what I’ve been reading and when I say I’ve been reading Wallace Stevens, he says “you know all of our lives would have been more”…he cannot find the words…he moves his hand palm down horizontally through space…”we would have had many fewer bumps if we had read more Wallace Stevens.”

I nod in agreement and see that my nodding brings him some relief, as it does me.

~~

Most of the days I was fortunate to spend with my father over the decades were abundantly full of words. And this week, remembering his life, was full of words – of kindness, appreciation, hope, faith, and love.

This morning I read again William Stafford’s “The Well Rising” as I did at the end of that day in April 2009 when we made the trip to the hospital in Chapel Hill. The swallow swerves, flares, hesitates, hunts, comes closer, its heart from wing beat to wing beat/counseling decision, decision:/thunderous examples. I place my feet/with care in such a world.

So much more to say.

For Fayetteville Observer op-ed pieces about Leighton McKeithen’s life, see columns by  Denny Shaffer and Bill Kirby.

In Gutai Art, the human spirit and matter shake

hands with each other while keeping their distance.

Matter never compromises itself with the spirit;

the spirit never dominates matter. When matter

remains intact and exposes its characteristics, it

starts telling a story and even cries out.

YOSHIHARA Jiro,

“Gutai Art Manifesto,” 1956

In the Trance

A pretty anarchist said to me
It’s not that a great love happens
What happened became your great love

Her echo had an ancient glow & so
proved buoyant for my little craft

I left the world & felt a world

The bee loading its gloves with powder
The albatross wanting one thing from the sea

Nothing can wreck our boat said she

& when the water felt the glacier
The future held a present tense
The present held a future without cease

– Brenda Hillman. Practical Water. 2009. also in American Poet. Vol. 44, Spring 2013

note, passed to superman

sweet jesus superman,
if i had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choirboy clark
can stand around
listening to stories
but not you, not with
metropolis to save
and every crook in town
filthy with kryptonite.
lord, man of steel
i understand the cape,
the leggings, the whole
ball of wax.
you can trust me,
there is no planet stranger
than the one i’m from.

– Lucille Clifton, The Book of Light, 1993 also in Seriously Funny. University of Georgia Press. 2010

Last Words, Some Words

And in my remaining time
let me explain that my
wobbly tender yolk
hardens, if left in boiling
water past three minutes,
that pride and carelessness
are defects not defenses,
that everything I need
to tell you languishes
within these final lines:
trust the gentle flow of
universal intelligence –
and please buy my book.

– Sarah Sarai, Emily Dickinson’s Coconut Face, 2013. See link for her 2009 The Future is Happy.

Street, at the Metropolitan Museum, an exhibit that features an hour-long video by James Nares edited from 16 hours he shot in September 2011 from a car moving through the streets of New York, is built on looking local. (The Photographer.  Jacob  Lawrence. 1942, above, is from the exhibit) . Nares has scored the film to the 12-string guitar music of Thurston Moore and incorporated into the exhibit two rooms of objects from the museum’s collection. The slow-motion film is more purely beautiful than I had anticipated and the collection of objects in the adjoining rooms more intensely evocative.

Before and during my visit, I wondered how New York-centric the work would be, perhaps must be, and I was reading William Carlos Williams. (A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists)

in contact with the local conditions which confront us…[and] in the perfection of that contact is the beginning not only of the concept of art among us but the key to the technique also. – Contact. I, 1920.

art is the product of a certain sort of living contact that can be made to live…in no other way. 

–William Carlos Williams,  A Letter to the Editors of  The Freeman, 1920

Street seems to arise from that “living contact with local conditions” crucially and powerfully rendered, and at the same time, for me, became more “multi-local” the longer I stayed. Rue Mouffetard, Montgomery, Alabama, an unnamed Western (America) street among the assembled art from the collection began this movement out in place as the collected artifacts did in time.

Among the assembled objects in Street are renderings of hands, feet, faces, streets, wheels, axles, soles of shoes, accessible before, after, and in between the colorful, continuously running film footage in the darkened center room. Particularly moving are the fragments and the abstracts — the marble foot in sandal, the marble hand holding an object, the ancient Egyptian hand carved in limestone, and Franz Kline’s “Study for Flanders”.

The exhibit’s wall text arises from the conversations among James Nares and museum curators; one panel captures Berenice Abbott’s “voracious eye”.

Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city — that would be my favorite picture.I had read reviews and blurbs about the exhibit before going, extracted a list of nouns from what I’d read, scribbled them on a piece of paper, and took them with me.

As far as I can tell there are no formal lectures, tours or programs associated with the exhibit Street. The woman behind the counter at the gift booth nearest the exhibit said “no printed material on the exhibit,” when I asked, and added, “at the request of the artist.” I turn back to my list of nouns culled from reviews and blurbs – dreams, impressions, float, city, citizenship, people, time, bullet, hummingbirds, dynamism, gait, gesture, traces, signature, stamp, sign, wellspring, sight, impulse…

This past Monday, a fellow Southerner, a surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan, good-naturedly bemoaned New York City springtime and recounted a recent phone call with his mother in SC and his difficulty in answering honestly her question whether spring had arrived where her son lives. Having spent the preceding Saturday night strolling after dinner with my mother among the azaleas and dogwoods that line the railroad tracks in the center of Southern Pines, NC, I could sympathize. The surgeon of Southern origin and I settled on anemic – for spring so far in 2013 in New York City — and knew we’d keep looking for signs, intentionally looking.

Giacometti’s The Forest (Composition with Seven Figures and a Head) stands in one of the rooms of the exhibit Street.

In my mind, in the context of the entire exhibit, the Giacometti sculpture became the young cashier, soon to be mother of seven, who had been so pleasant at the grocery store in Phenix City, Alabama, three weeks earlier. The composition — connected but separate, parallel, rootedness — against the buoyant smile from behind the counter on a March Wednesday afternoon.

Resolution with regard to life or work, once glimpsed, turns over, and irresolution shows through. What do we pick up and carry away from that turning? Perhaps as receivers of art, we need the dislocation after the connection.

Next to the word impulse on my notes from the museum, I had copied the Latin from the wall text of a religious painting included in Street, Noli me tangere. “Don’t touch me, do not cling to me…not even if you recognize me.” A warning to pull back, acknowledge separateness — passionately. This is not not saying on the wall text, in the exhibit, in the experience, it is not silence or oppression or suppression, but irrefutable multiplicity in the midst of connection, and all that implies.

March 28-30 I will read at the Southern Literary Festival in Columbus, GA, along with Tim O’Brien, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Wilson, and Dan Albergotti.

Always we seemed perched on the brink of chaos.

But today there’s just sunlight and the baby’s

chatter, her wonder at the way light dances
on the wall. How lucky to be ignorant,
to greet joy without a trace of suspicion,
to take that first step without worrying what
comes trailing after, as night trails after day,
or winter summer, or confusion where all
seemed clear and each moment was its own reward.

from “Waking” by Stephen Dobyns, from Velocities. © Penguin, 1994.

Eugenio Montale. “The Second Life of Art” in The Second Life of Art. The Ecco Press: New York. 1982.

“a fragment of music or poetry, a page, a picture begin to live in the act of their creation but they complete their existence when they circulate, and it does not matter whether the circulation is vast or restricted; strictly speaking, the public can consist of one person, so long as that person is not the author himself…. one must not make the mistake of believing, however, that the appreciation or consumption, of a particular expressive moment or fragment must necessarily be virtually simultaneous with its presentation to us, in an immediate relationship of cause and effect.

…This second moment, of common consumption and even misunderstanding, is what interests me most in art. Paradoxically, one could say that music, painting and poetry begin to be understood when they are presented but they do not truly live if they lack the capacity to continue to exercise their powers beyond that moment… To enjoy a work of art or its moment, in short, is to discover it outside its context; only in that instant does the circle of understanding close and art become one with life as all the romantics dreamed.

I cannot see a line of indifferent mourners at a funeral or feel the Triestine bora blow without thinking of Italo Svevo’s Zeno; or look at certain modern merveilleuses without thinking of Modigliani or Matisse; I cannot contemplate certain caretaker’s or beggar’s children without having the Jewish baby of Medardo Rosso take shape in my mind; and I cannot think of certain strange animals – the zebra or the zebu – but the zoo of Paul Klee opens in me; I cannot meet certain persons – Clizia or Angela or…omissis omissis  – without seeing once again the mysterious faces of Piero and Mantegna or having a line of Manzoni (“era folgore l’aspetto”) flash in my memory; nor – on a somewhat less elevated plane – can I consider certain episodes in the eternal war between the devil and holy water without hearing in my heart the enveloping feline mewing of the aria of St Sulpice (as sung by Rosina Storchio).

Note that I don’t say that art, and particularly music and poetry, must be easily mnemonic or memorable….What I do say is that any expression at all which has had a miraculous, liberating effect on someone – an effect of liberation and of understanding the world – has attained its goal and achieved form.

…effects of this kind occur at a distance and are unpredictable. From time to time a great artist like Proust, obsessed by the “petite phrase” of Vinteuil (is he Franck or Gabriel Faure?) can construct a whole world out of one memory, organize it, and bring it to its own particular modus vivendi; but we do not have to go so far for art to intrude on us and continue an absurd, incalculable existence within us. Nor would I say that the second life of art is related to the objective vitality or importance of the art itself. One can face death for a noble cause whistling “Funiculi funicula”; one can remember a line of Catullus entering an austere cathedral or pursue a profane desire associating it with a Handel aria full of religious unction; one can be thunderstruck by a caryatid of the Erechtheion while waiting in line to pay one’s taxes, or recall a line of Poliziano even in days of insanity and slaughter. Everything is uncertain, nothing is necessary in the world of artistic refractions; the only necessary thing is that these refractions be made possible, sooner or later.

Modern artists (I don’t mean all of them) who, through natural impotence or fear of walking down already-traveled streets or out of a misguided respect for the ineffability of life, refuse to give it a form; those who deliberately exclude every pleasant sound from music, every figurative element from painting, every syntactical progression from the written word, condemn themselves to this: to not circulating, not existing for anyone. Since there is no possibility for a great communion between the public and the artist, they also reject the ultimate possibility of social significance which an art born of life always has: to return to life, to serve man, to say something for him. They work like beavers, gnawing at the visible, driven by an automatic impulse or an obscure need for an outlet or the need to build themselves a dark, ever darker, ever more hidden shelter. But they will never save themselves if they lack the courage to come into the light again and look other men in the eye; they will not save themselves if, coming as they have from the street and not out of the museums, they do not have the courage to speak words that can go back into the street again.

…thinking of those being transferred in the middle of the night by ambulance from NYU Medical Center, and those working to take care of them.

…of all the quieter stories of the kindness and helpfulness of ordinary heroes that will come to us in the next few days.

Aren’t there annunciations

of one sort or another

in most lives?

– Denise Levertov

How do I justify spending time writing?  comes so often I might say constantly from talented students — mostly younger ones pressed to earn money and build lives, and mostly older ones wanting to make sense, to understand, sometimes to offer back, usually with a more immediate sense of time running out.

I know my father is okay with being dead. I watched my father carefully over a lifetime; he believes firmly in God and eternity.  I just wish he didn’t have so much dying to do.

I hop a train to Newark to hear poets and manage to hear six and return home to read more. Thomas Lux on the shelf leads me to Thomas Lynch and next to Eavan Boland, I find John Brehm. Politics and death takes me to these poets as does confidence their work will take me on beyond.

Rilke in a letter to Anita Forrer, Feb 14, 1920

…Since that day, I know with absolute certainty that even the worst turn of events, that even despair is only abundance, that it is an onslaught of our being that could be forced in the opposite direction with one single decision of the heart. Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation. 

A friend who makes movies and writes poetry and directs plays invites me to see Argo. It is riveting and important, every scene vibrant as experienced and in memory. Entertainment and purpose, meaning, significance, message. Entertain is from Old French, entretenir, to hold between. The title of a book in one of my stacks is – What to Do Between Life and Death. It treats important matters, including amusement. Once in Tourettes sur Loup, a shopkeeper, with whom I exchanged glances after a tourist was enraged at being unintentionally hosed down by a man cleaning the cobblestones, whispered to me, “il faut bien rigoler.”

(laughing is necessary).

Adrienne Rich, in “As if your life depended on it”:

You must read, and write, as if your life depended on it. 

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and, simultaneously, to allow what you’re reading to pierce the routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled…

To write as if your life depended on it: to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public words you have dredged, sieved up from dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence — words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.