From "You Are There" To We are Here

First on radio and then on T.V. the program You Are There ran from 1947 to 1957. It depicted moments in history as if they were happening in our day with Walter Cronkite reporting. The reenactment by John Cassavetes as Plato at the death of Socrates was high drama as was Rod Steiger at the first performance of Romeo and Juliet.

Today, I feel as if I am living in 1930’s Germany. The rise of Hitler is being repeated, American style. Alternately deranged, criminal and clownish the would-be dictator is likely to occupy the Oval after first leading a barely unsuccessful armed coup d’etat three years ago. I no longer wonder what allowed the Fuhrer to seize power in a country with such a cultural heritage.

What Walter Cronkite would say, I think I know. We have allowed a dumbing-down for decades and now we are an Idiocracy with no sense of history or civics and a dearth of critical thinking. We are a congregation of the lost.

Ignorance has become a virtue. Not only ignorance as in a confederacy of dunces but also ignorance as in ignoring. Hitler’s socio-pathology finds its equivalence in Donald’s narcissistic megalomania. Yet we dismiss his stated aims as President, his dismantling of our democracy, and alliance with a mob of thugs. Pay no attention, his supporters tell us when he calls his enemies vermin and he vows revenge by jailing or even executing them. (according to his former Attorney General. Barr)

Even on the left, young people’s passions and moral outrage have been aroused about injustice on the Israeli side (and rightly so) while throwing a blind eye at homophobic Hamas which debases women and feeds on a squandering of human life, on the other. Our youth is chewing on a bone thrown by a burglar as he ransacks this house, this American democracy. Fascism is at our door and they are denouncing the party whose precepts allow them to protest. Let history note their animus toward Biden only serves to help elect Trump.

Fraud, deceit, misogyny, no problem, say his followers. In Nazi Germany, as here and now, certain forces thought they could use him to further their agenda, from Bible-thumpers to the corporate elite. Let him rant with his third-grade vocabulary, be it a toothbrush mustache or orange hair. By 1940 it was clear who was using whom. When America wakes up we won’t be America.

There was another radio program called The Shadow. He knew what evil lurks in the hearts of men. That beast has now been uncaged. The would-be dictator has legitimized the racism, antisemitism and criminal behavior that once only lurked.

Get me Cronkite on line one.

My Journey With Poetry In Brief

As I look back through the haze at the early influencers of my poetry, I come up with three names. The first discouraged me from ever writing again. The second was so wrong he led me to discover myself and the third opened the possibility of what a poem could be.

In 1975 I found myself in a small group of notable poets in a workshop led by a Central American poet named Alvaro Cardona Hine. He was a translator and a distinguished poet with a finely-honed critical faculty. I was in way over my head. Any pretensions I may have had were to be squelched. After about a year I quit. I was told that I had come a long way but had still not written a poem.

Alvaro’s idea was that a poem cannot be willed. One must wait till it comes, unsummoned. That shut me up for three years. I think he was partially right. Images do arrive along with unforeseen connections but the original impulse can be cerebral even if it doesn’t leave a trace.

In 1978 or ’79 I was at a ten-day poetry gathering which featured Gary Snyder. Stealing the words of Confucius he advised us wannabe poets that we must first learn the names of trees. Again, I was miffed. I didn’t know a maple from a sycamore. Trees were for climbing or carving. Some were home plate or the goal line.

Snyder’s words help me define who I wasn’t. He was a mountain man. I didn’t know bear shit from dog shit. I was a street urchin and I declared myself a poet of the big city. Snyder was wrong. We’re not writing a glossary. We are writing our lives and the power of our observations and imagination. My manifesto is to be authentic and allow that voice to find expression.

It was at this time that I also discovered the work of Philip Levine. His subject was the assembly line of automakers in Detroit. He included oil stains and grease along with the daily grind of the workers. He opened the possibilities for where a poem can go.

If he could write about his working life in a conversational voice, I might find a way into the humdrum of pharmacy. I might even find words to speak about my estrangement from the natural world which ultimately leads to a way in.

How prose dares to call itself poetry is a mysterious process. An image appears with language that sings to me. It has tendrils with connectivity. It invites leaps. It meanders sometimes losing the original triggering point. The lines gather into a cadence so that each word has to be earned. Spacing distinguishes it from prose on the page and when read aloud. It comes with urgency and concision. It is not a bulletin or just heightened rhetoric. And it is more than what Gore Vidal said when he snipped that poetry is carefully ruined prose. Not so, a poem can alter perception. As W. C. Williams said, men die every day for lack of that heightened sensibility.

 

Remembering My Mother

My mother was a woman of the century. Literally. Her birthday was January 1^st, 1900. The date itself is auspicious and a bit suspicious. I’ve heard that many immigrants choose that date as a way of disowning their past and claiming an American heritage. Of course, that would have been an erasure on the part of my grandparents.

The reason I even question her date of birth is because she played loose with her age along the way. In the 1930 census she claimed to be twenty-seven. Be that as it may she lived in the lower eastside of Manhattan with six brothers and got her education in the university of the mean streets. Life was combat among the pushcarts and tenements. As the decades went by no one had told her there was no war. Truce had been declared but not for my mother. Her life’s journey of eighty-eight years was a chronicle of an awkward assimilation while, at the same time, proclaiming a disidentification with the Old World. 

She lived as if haggling was for life itself.  My mother was ever on the lookout for a thumb on the scale or a rotten apple slipped into her bag. To get to her butcher she passed three others because she believed Murray the chicken plucker saved the best cuts just for her. I remember his blood-stained apron, that sawdust floor and the hanging flypaper.

While she was in the trenches in this extended skirmish with shopkeepers and the superintendent of our four-story walk-up, my father was the voice of tranquility. Through her blurts of aggravation I came away with a vocabulary of Yiddish curse words. She cursed the grocer, the landlord, the fascists and she cursed God for God knows what.

Though my dad worked long hours and was often absent in my tableau of childhood, he pacified the household. It was his temperament that was to be my inheritance. His soft voice prevailed over her loud complaints.

Beneath her pugnacity was the vulnerable little girl, teased by six brothers, who grew into a fearful woman. Those wounds were scarred over and her skin grew tough. She did mellow in her twilight years even as her trepidations became more evident.

Look. at those magnolias I called out on our last drive through  the prettiest street with the prettiest homes. Just keep your eyes on the road, she replied from the back seat where she did all her driving. My mother had a particular terror of trucks which she seemed to regard as assassins.

Her unease in this world denied her so much of the gardens and good life during her near century. I never saw her laugh. This Mother’s Day I want to celebrate her for her love which I somehow never doubted and recognize all the joy and awe she may have  missed in her daily struggles. 

I'd like to believe she had her own inner life I wasn't privy to. Maybe she even heard the mermaids sing.

 

Peggy's Poetry

Today is Peggy’s birthday. She died in 2021 at the age of 100 years, 100 days. I thought to celebrate her today with some poems she wrote in her last few years. She was still in her prime.

She published three books of poetry in her last four years. The first are love poems expressing the immensity of our love. The poem set in Prague is her imagining from a simple postcard I had found. The final poem is taken from her book about movies.

I had intended to go through each book picking out lines here and there. I never got past page two.

Excerpts from Two Is A Sacred Number  (age 96)

 

In the flourish of each day’s evolution

nights shine, illumined, to welcome this enormity

even as we sleep.

Our love lives in a cup

of double yesterday

in diamond disbelief.

 

Your hand on the open book

Its intimate otherness

rouse lingonberry mornings

and scaloppini nights.

From Exact Approximation (age 97)

 

Almost Vermeer, Prague

 

In the half-light of a window

she scrapes potatoes.

A bucket and a bowl

bear testament.

Silence hovers, black and white.

Longing pulls, a quivering

String without a name.

She wants what can’t fall off the edge,

What rises from the bone.

If it should rain, the view

refuses to be music.

Pass your plate, she says

As desire turns to grace.

 

This Work

 

…. She tells him now in the kitchen light

How the cellar bulges its walls with dried roots,

How her tangled hair in bed at night

wires her to his dreams, his father’s ax

against the juniper, where she can’t reach,

where he can’t bleed

it into sound.

The stripped-down sacrifice of trees.

Better In The Dark   (age 97)

 

Justine

,,,,, Hot, the world is hot

and everything appears disguised.  Wooden boxes

lettered sewing machines,  hold automatic rifles.

Holiness hangs, a dry rag in the desert. The young man

surrenders to the married woman, ignores

the shattered glass, four oval mirrors

A masquerade. a bacchanal in velvet red.

The woman, once dressed in white, now shifts to black.

This may be what it seems. Would the camera lie?