Played with Bird, Part 2

Two more living musicians who played with Charlie Parker: Oscar Peterson and Hank Jones.

Jazz and Opera

Paul Tomasko, a neighbor, and a fine singer of operetta and theater music, came by to show Opus 40 to a friend, a musician from New Orleans. The musician’s name was Chris Saunder, and he was Al Hirt's piano player for ten years, and then worked with Pete Fountain. These aren’t artists I’d rush out to hear, but you don't get gigs like that without being very good. Chris also turned out to be a very nice guy, and we passed about an hour in conversation about music, which is one of the best ways to spend an hour.

Here’s one of the things he said that struck me. He was talking about the contribution of Italian musicians like Nick LaRocca to early jazz. He asserted that the Italians brought syncopation to jazz, and that it came from their cultural background listening to opera.

Well, I’m not so sure. Most people think that those early LaRocca recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band don't swing the way jazz should, and they're mostly right. Most people credit the polyrhythms of West Africa for the syncopation that so much of jazz is built on, and they’re mostly right too, as are those who point out that you don’t need syncopation in order to swing.

But the more you listen, the more you learn. There’s a lot of racial territoriality in American music, neither side willing to concede much to the other. And that can get in the way. The 20^th Century, the American Century in music, gave the world one of its greatest artistic flowerings, and it owes its greatness to, as much as anything else, its mongrel nature. Whenever cultures and sounds and styles have butted up against each other, it has enriched the mix. So…opera as a godfather to jazz syncopation? I love it. To me, it’s one more affirmation of the greatness of our American music.

Ars Poetica

My ars poetica can be seen at the online journal Ars Poetica.

Work is Love Made Visible

This from the PoetryEtc listserv, where a novice poet who's been making some significant breakthroughs in her work, and has reached that necessary and powerful stage of being excited by process, not statement, wrote:

Wasn't there a famous writer that used to cut their work up, throw it in the air and then reassemble it - or have I been dreaming?

I think I might try this method myself next!

My response:


Burroughs did it, and most famously Bryon Gysin (1916-1986 - I had no idea he'd lived that long. The reason why Bryon Gysin is not more famous may tell you something about the limits of this method.

To me, these things are all tools, not an end in themselves. Cutting and throwing can be good...if it works for you. Reassembling, perhaps, even better. But for me that would still be a first step.

If you've looked at my website, you've seen it's off of a home base -- www.opus40.org. There are some pictures of Opus 40 on the site, though they don't really do it justice. But it's a magnificent work of art -- a 6 1/2 - acre stone sculpture. The sculptor was my stepfather, Harvey Fite, and he spent 37 years creating it, stone by stone, moving all the stones himself, by hand and with hand-powered tools -- winches and booms and chisels.

So I grew up seeing this amazing creation taking place in my back yard. And what I learned from Harvey, perhaps more than anything else, is that art comes from work. Norman Maclean put this really well, in A River Runs Through It. Speaking of the father, McLean wrote "He believed that all good things in life come by grace, and grace comes by art, and art does not come easy." Or for another take on this: A few years ago our family donated a piece of Harvey's, a stone carving, to Bard College, where he had taught for 30 years. There was a little ceremony, and they made up a little program for the event, and they asked me if Harvey had a favorite quotation that they could put on it. I called my brother and asked him, "Do you have any problem in using a note from a writer who is these days considered hopelessly kitschy and declasse?" He said, "Of course not -- you're talking about Kahlil Gibran, right?" I was, and the quote that Harvey loved from The Prophet was "Work is love made visible."

So I learned that art comes from the making. It's what comes after you throw the words up in the air, or after you collage them. That's what makes Patti Marshock's essay so valuable -- she talks about that work. Not just the translating back and forth, not just the collaging, but what you build out of that raw material. Harvey worked in tons of stone, and he worked it, and reworked it, the way you have to work and rework a line of poetry. Last weekend was the Saugerties Artists Studio Tour, and one of the artists in the group is me, so one of the studios was mine (and I sold five pieces! Yay!), and during the course of the afternoon, a few people stopped by who remembered Harvey, and remembered seeing him work (he died in 1976). "You'd see what he was doing, and they you'd come back a few weeks later, and it would be totally different! You'd ask 'what happened, Harvey?' and he'd say, 'Oh, I didn't like the curve of that wall.'"

That's why it took me a long time to appreciate the Earthworks sculptors, to whose work Harvey's is often compared -- and I still don't appreciate a lot of them, but I've come to recognize the value of artists like Robert Smithson and Robert Morris. I had a hard time with art that's conceptual rather than organic, that's imposed on a space rather than developing from it.

There are other models in poetry for randomness, but controlled randomness. James Merrill wrote The Changing Light at Sandover based on messages he got from a Ouija board. Donald Justice used his "chance cards." Here's from an interview with Dana Gioia.

D.G.: Several poems in Departures were written using the element of chance. Can you describe how you started composing them?

Justice: As I recall, I got started not long after playing poker one night in Cincinnati with John Cage. Only I wanted to control chance, not submit to it. Chance has no taste. What I did was to make a card game out of the process of writing. I'd always loved card games anyhow, gambling in general. As well as I can recall now what I did, I made up three large decks of "vocabulary" cards--one deck each for nouns, verbs, and adjectives-and a smaller fourth deck of "syntax" cards, sentence forms with part-of speech blanks to be filled in. I would then shuffle and deal out a sequence of "syntax" cards, then shuffle the "vocabulary" cards in their turn and fill the syntactical blanks in. I would go through all this three times, allowing myself to go back and forth as I wished across the table of results, mixing them up to taste. It sounds silly enough, I suppose, and of course anyone could do it. But it seemed at the time to simulate, at least a little, the way the mind worked in writing. And there was enough choice left for the writer's sensibility to enter. I thought that was important.

D.G.: Why aid you stop writing poems according to this method?

Justice: The third set of chance cards I made produced nothing at all interesting. Well, I knew you couldn't win every hand.

Stonework and Earthworks

Two books to our attention recently, one new, one new to us. Suzaan Boettger visited Opus 40 recently, in the company of our old friend Tram Combs, and after a delightful afternoon, she sent us a copy of her book Earthworks, which gives a brief mention to Harvey and Opus 40 (Suzaan will be including more on Opus 40 in her next book). Earthworks is an important addition to any collection of books on the art of the late 20th Century. It told me a lot that I didn't know about the lives and backgrounds of the key figures in the Earhtworks movement, and gives a solid and thoughtful insight into the aesthetic underpinnings of the movement.

Stone Primer, by stonemason Charles McRaven, is a beautifully photographed coffee table book, and also an excellent book on building with stone. Opus 40 is one of the examples McRaven uses.

Idle Thought on Music

Has it ever struck anyone that in the era before 1960, no one making popular music of any sort thought of their work as having any lasting cultural or aesthetic importance, and they produced so many masterpieces that will live forever--and in the era after 1970, everyone making popular music thought of their work as having lasting cultural or aesthetic importance, and hardly any of it does?

Situations

In Episode 5, Bob marshals his forces in preparation for his campaign against campaign, and we find out about Blanche's gigolo.

RIP Max Roach

RIP Max Roach, great artist, Founding Father of bebop.

My most potent memory: I heard Max play in a club in New York in 1977. It was right after Paul Desmond had died, and Max did a tribute to him that he called "Five for Paul." It was an unaccompanied drum version of "Take Five," and it was mesmerizing.

Peter Jones and I were wondering, who's left now who played with Bird, or at least recorded with Bird? There aren’t many, but here are the names I came up with:

Roy Haynes
Dr. Billy Taylor

And here's a surprise. Not that he's still alive, but that he played with Bird:

Dave McKenna

Bird did an album with Woody Herman, something else I never knew, called Bird With the Herd, and McKenna was on the date.

Anyone got any more?

Saugerties Art Tour

The Saugerties Art Tour kicked off this rainy Friday evening with a group show opening at Opus 40's Gallery, and a first rate show it is. The studio tour itself takes place tomorrow and Sunday, and my studio in the Fite House at Opus 40 will be part of it.

Here are a couple of the artists featured:




































And here are a couple of new pieces of mine that will be on display at my studio:

Situations and Miles

In Situations 4, a vortex of forces begin to coalesce around Carlene's pilgrimage, Will The Major be drawn into Polly's plan to lead a revolution that will install Ross Perot as dictator?



And a poem, "With Miles," in issue 36 of http://www.cortlandreview.com/.

The Most Deserving Poet of All

This is from an exchange with Bob Berner, a lifelong friend from back in Iowa Workshop days, a fine poet himself and a tireless champion of poets and poetry. Among Bob's many other fine qulaities, he's never short of opinions, and never shy abput expressing them. He's also not to dig his heels ion and refuse to listen to other opinions. Bob wrote to me on the occasion of Charles Simic's being named Poet Laureate, not at all happy with the choice, and not happy, in general, with the fat cats of poetry getting fatter -- Simic winning the Laureateship on top of MacArthur grant.

I wrote back saying that actually, I was a Simic fan.

Bob:

Tad--Maybe I'm wrong about Simic [he would later delve into Simic further, and find much to admire]. If I read more recent stuff of his I might change my mind about him. I remember changing my mind about other poets, Creeley and Ashbery to be specific. I hated their early stuff and changed my mind after reading more recent work.
But I know in my bones I'm right about the money. Simic is no more worth $300,000 than any jock is worth the millions they get paid. Moreover, it's not exactly that Simic was on the verge of bankruptcy even before he got the MacArthur. He'd been nicely employed in academia for YEARS, thank you very much. Which brings me to my major complaint about the awarding of such big-money prizes: they always seem to go to people who Don't Need The Money. So, instead of giving a six figure award to someone who's been an assoc or full professor somewhere for 10 years, why the hell not give a series of $10,000 grants to people who Need The Money? That would at least take some of the day-to-day pressure off people struggling to pay their bills while they struggle to make it in the quality-lit game,
As to Simic's elevation to poet laureate, I don't know what other poets were under consideration, and I don't even know what the process is. Do members of the Academy of American Poets submit the names of candidates to a committee? Can you and I nominate someone? Can we name ourselves members of the Academy? Can we find out about how a poet laureate gets nominated/named by going to the Academy's website?
For me it's still a matter of Give The Money To Someone Who NEEDS It. Give the titles and honors to anyone you want, but don't give money to people who don't need it.

I didn't know how the Laureate got selected. I knew the selection was made by the Librarian of Congress, but I didn't know who he was, or how he made his selection. But I did know in my bones that Bob was wrong about the money. Actually, I knew no such thing. He's probably right about it. But I argued back anyway.

Me:

As far as the money is concerned, that doesn't upset me at all. I'm always glad to see any poet getting money. I suppose I believe in a kind of artistic Reaganomics, a rising tide lifts all boats. If a poet gets the high visibility of a MacArthur grant or a Poet Laureateship, it creates more visibility for poetry. Now, I do understand that this works about as well for poets as Reaganomics does for ordinary citizens, but the stakes are different. You're not talking about people's basic needs, like food and shelter, and as important as I think art is, the unequal distribution fo wealth to artists is not as important as the artificially engineered unequal distribution of wealth to everyone. If 95 percent of people who actually take note of Laureateships or MacArthur grants at all, only go so far as to Google Simic and read a poem or two by him, no one is really hurt, If a few of those people go so far as to go to a reading by Simic if he shows up in their town, all the better, and if a few of them decide they liked it, and go to hear readings by local poets, than that's great.

And Simic's paid his dues, like we all have.

Marvin Bell has had greater recognition, and made more money out of poetry, than you or I have. Now, you and I deserve more money and more recognition than we've gotten, but that doesn't mean Marvin deserves less. He deserves more. I'd like to see him get a MacArthur Grant or a Poet Laureateship. Hey, he's already been Poet Laureate of Iowa -- maybe that could be a stepping stone, like the Governorship for Mitt Romney? (OK, that's a bad example.)

And yeah, while I don't begrudge Simic or Strand their MacArthurs, I'd like to see a series of $10,000 grants to people who Need The Money, too. Maybe Poetry Magazine could use some of its millions to set them up. But...at least this is true for me...the only selection system I'd be really happy with is one where the criteria would include the most deserving poet of all...me!

Situations

In this week's episode of Situations on Fieralingue, Childe Roland to the hotel comes, The Major falls deeper under the evil spell of Tisha, and Mary Jo and Julia go on a road trip to Nashville, but don't quite make it. Don't miss it! And look for the wholesale theft of "The Ballad of Thunder Road" (Robert Mitchum's, not Springsteen's.

Thanks to Lee and Patrick Walker

Lee Walker, who for the last several years has been Opus 40's everything - plant manager, caretaker, fixer of anything and everything that needed fixing, and also the compiler of a complete list of Opus 40's needs for a grant proposal we have recently submitted, has moved to Georgia. He's damn near irreplaceable here, and we'll miss his friendship as well as his help. Thank you, Lee.

With him has gone his son and my grandson, Patrick. Before he left, Patrick set up a server for us so that we can host our own website. He'll be able to continue to maintain the server by remote control from Atlanta, but we'll miss him more than I can say.

John R. Tunis, Leadbelly, Howard Koch

What authors or books influenced you most? People are discussing this on the NewPo list, and I sat down to write about my biggest influences. Pretty soon, I realized this was getting too long for a post to a listserv, in spite of the fact that there are only three names on it. It's also probably irrelevant to a poetry list, since none of these are poets. I'll think about poet-influences next. Here are the three.


1. The baseball novels of John R. Tunis. In Tunis' novels, like The Kid From Tomkinsville, I first became aware of a writer behind the words -- I could feel someone writing it, injecting his own passion and personality into the story. I remember telling my mother one day when I was maybe 11 or 12, and had never particularly thought about growing up to be a writer, "When I grow up to be a writer, and people ask me about the greatest influence on my writing career, I'm going to say John R. Tunis. Although I didn't realize it at the tme, he was also teaching me my first lesson in telling a great, fast-paced story with vivid memorable characters, that also had a message. Tunis didn't bludgeon you with the message. In Keystone Kids, the main driving force of the novel is baseball, young shortstop Spike Russell being named player-manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and trying to guide his team to the pennant. but the missing ingredient is a catcher, and the Dodgers bring up a talented kid from the minors -- talented and Jewish. Spike has to deal with prejudice from teammates (this was written four years before Jackie Robinson), anti-Semitism from fans and sportswriters, and his own total lack of experience in reaching out to another culture. This is from memory, over 50 years ago. I did pick up a copy of the The Kid Comes Back at a yard sale recently, and it still held my interest. Great baseball stuff, and again, more. Roy Tucker, The Kid From Tomkinsville, now a major league veteran, enlists to fight in World War II, is injured in combat, and has to find the courage (and ultimately, a chiropractor) to get him through the injury and back to help the Dodgers in their stretch run. But before that, he's shot down in France, rescued by a Resistance group that seems more than little Communist, and Roy has to battle his own middle-American prejudice to accept these people who are saving his life. Then, he has to face the culture shock and resistance that all returning GIs must face, in that war and every other -- what Kipling talks about in "Tommy Atkins."

I realized how deep Tunis was still ingrained in me when I started to write a children's sports book for my grandson Josh, in which he and his friend go back in time and meet Pele. And I realized I was beiong drawn to do what Tunis did -- tell an exciting sports story, but never forget that it's also about something more.






2. Leadbelly, for the reasons mentioned in my last post. He first taught me about compression of words, about the power of what's left out, about saying more with less. I found Leadbelly when Probably "In the Pines" was the first song to hit me that way -- the girl whose tragedy we only glimpse, but we feel the immensity of it behind the stark, sparse words. It was only years later, when I began teaching Leadbelly's lyrics, that an important part of her tragedy hit me -- why she's lost her home, why she had to sleep in the pines. She lives in company housing in a company town, and the company takes back the house when her husband is killed in an on-the-job accident.

It was when I started teaching him, all those years later, when I put together my Literature of the Blues course, that I realized how powerful his influence still was, and had been for all of my writing life. Ashbery only provided a continuation of that influence, but more on that when I get to the list of poet-influences.

3. Howard Koch. Howard died in 1995, and I was honored to be asked to give one of the eulogies for him. Because Howard had been mentor and role model to all of those of my generation who grew up in the 50s and 60s, I made myself their voice, and collected stories and reminiscences from them. Here's one from my brother Jonathan, who recalled hearing the name of producer Howard W. Koch in connection with some current movie or other, and asking Noelle Gillmor (a name for another reminiscence), "Is Howard W. Koch the same as our Howard Koch?" Noelle replied, "The relationship between our Howard Koch and Howard W. Koch is roughly the same as the relationship between Jesus Christ and Jesus H. Christ."

But I digress, not for the first time. What I did say, for myself, at Howard's memorial, was that I knew Howard was a great man before I knew he was a great writer. I knew him for his kindness, his intelligence, his integrity, his keen and piercing insights into politics, society, and hypocrisy. So those were my first lessons in writing from Howard, and they're still among the most important that I've ever learned.

Later, I found out about Casablanca, and Sergeant York, and The Sea Hawk. And then I was probably 18, or maybe older, and already serious about becoming a writer. That's when I learned my other lesson from Howard -- that truth can have a heart, and a soul. That if something is romantic, and wonderful, and uplifting, that doesn't negate its truth -- it creates its own special kind of truth.

And there you have it.

John Ashbery

Happy 80th birthday to John Ashbery, titan of contemporary poetry and sometime Hudson valley resident. Edward Byrne's blog has a great tribute to Ashbery, so I'll direct you there. And here's my Ashbery page.

In Case You're Worried About Getting Older and Losing Your Edge

Thomas Hardy was in his mid-70s when he wrote this.

During Wind and Rain

They sing their dearest songs--
He, she, all of them - yea,
Treble and tenor and bass.
          And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
          Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss--
Elders and juniors - aye,
Making the pathways neat
          And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat....
          Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!

They are blithely breakfasting all--
Men and maidens - yea,
Under the summer tree,
          With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee....
Ah, no; the years O!
          And the rotten rose is ripped from the wall.

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them - aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
          On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
          Down their carved names the raindrop plows.

Well, That's Another Fine Isolated Verisimilitude Youve Gotten Us Into

In The End of the Mind: The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Gluck, DeSales Harrison credits Larkin with "pledg[ing] allegiance to the rhetoric of verisimilitude." By this he means that Larkin's

obligation is to preserve, to keep the experience "from oblivion for its own sake." This is the positive aspect of the obligation, the obligation to do something. There is a negative aspect as well, an obligation not to do something else.The poet can do no more than preserve. He cannot, Larkin implies, elevate, extrapolate, mythologize, etherealize, or transcendentalize.

Odd to define "negative" as "an obligation not to do something else." and then directly follow it with a reference to Keats. If Harrison is extrapolating from Larkin's obligation, he's extrapolating pretty far away from Keats' Negative Capability.

But Harrison is pretty much on the other side of the fence from me -- as it seems everyone else is. He puts the inability to remain content with half-knowledge on the same shelf as irritable searching after fact and reason, and says that "one reaches for those at the expense of the 'fine isolated verismilitude.'"

Franklin R. Rogers, in Painting and Poetry: Form, Metaphor, and the Language of Literature, also says that Coleridge's need for total knowledge renders him incapable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts.

And I suppose there's something to these gentlemen's point. Negative Capability isn't incapability, which Coleridge apparently has. But that fine isolated verisimilitude still bothers me. Where's the Negative Incapability in letting an isolated verisimiltude, however fine, go by? Who's to say you have to irritably reach out grab every isolated verisimiltude that comes along?

This verisimilitude is isolated. If one grabs it too quickly, one loses the chance to find out if it will resonate with other verisimilitudes, maybe even some truths. "Verisimilitude" to me is still a counterfeit, something that has the appearance of truth.

Penetralia, the Verisimilar, and Sookie

I'm not sure that being taught to live in doubt and uncertainty is a significant social function, any more than Saturday morning cartoons where the villain gets blown up have an educational function in teaching kids right from wrong.

But I'm all in favor of a certain amount of doubt and uncertainty. As Keats said,

...at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason--Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.

This is probably a better guide to poetry than to a social contract, but it's as good a guide to poetry as one can ask for, and you hardly need me to point that out. It's the second half of it that has always intrigued me, the part about Coleridge. I had always interpreted that to mean that Coleridge was uniquely capable of remaining in in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason -- I guess that would make him uniquely . That he would not accept an isolated verisimilitude -- which I defined as something that has the appearance of truth, but not necessarily the substance. That rather than be content with half knowledge, he could maintain his equilibrium longer in doubt and uncertainty.

I have since found out that this not the accepted reading of these famous lines. The accepted reading is that Keats was criticizing Coleridge.

Here's Dan Simmons on the subject:

A lesser poet like Coleridge, Keats goes on to explain, “would let go by a fine isolated versimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery,” because a lesser poet (or novelist, or filmmaker, or visual artist) insists on – well, actually has no other choice -- impressing his own limited interpretation on reality.

Thomas McFarland, in The Masks of Keats: The Endeavor of a Poet, talks about "the charge [Keats] makes against [Coleridge], and I know these people are better Keats scholars than I am, and know more about the relationship between Keats and Coleridge at this point in their lives. When you get right down to it, I didn't even know that "penetralium" isn't a real word, in either English or Latin.

But I still like my reading of it. I'd better, since I've based my aesthetic on trying as much as possible to let fine isolated verisimiltudes go by. If they've escaped from the penetralium of mystery, then they're no longer one with that mystery or part of that penetralium, and I'd agree with Heisenberg here. If you catch one on the wing and measure it, you'll never measure all of it, and you'll alter it by the catching of it.

I looked up "verisimiltude." Merriam Webster Online says it's "the quality or state of being verisimilar," which I find a trifle odd, in that "verisimiltude" is a word I've actually heard or seen in a real context (I mean other than Keats), but "verisimilar" is a total unknown. Anyway, "verisimilar" means "having the appearance of truth : probable," which is pretty much what I thought. The penetralium is where the truth remains unreachable, like the Grail. The verisimilitudes that escape from it only have it's appearance.

Anyway, here's what my muse, Sookie, has to say about it.

SOOKIE’S PENETRALIUM

Yesterday
Sookie let a fine
isolated
verisimilitude
slide right by

I was not too pleased
it left a wake
of clear light
it might have come from the
penetralium

of mystery
and I could have used it
isn’t that
her job? But there’s no
use fighting it

Sookie only believes
in her own
penetralium
which she lets me
near on rare occasions

never all
the way in but it’s
what I’ve got
Sookie’s speed rack brand of
half knowledge

First Saturdays with Krista

My opening/poetry reading at the Kingston First Saturday Art Walk was yesterday. I didn't use Lowell or Brancusi, but I did put up a few Poetry Portraits (Billy Collins, H.D., Sylvia Plath, and Carolyn Forche) along with two pages from my illustrated "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." The rest were -- are, you can still go see it? -- the usual gang of nudes and animals.

Alternative Books in Kingston is maybe not the ideal place to showcase one's art. The wall space is about two feet up near the ceiling. but it does have a charm all its own. There is virtually no walking space among the overflowing boxes of collected but not yet sorted out books. In the back room, they had set up a bunch of couches and easy chairs -- perfect for an audience of about ten people, which was actually optimistic.

Dr. Henriquez, the proprietor, had also scheduled a singer/songwriter for the same time, so I arrived with a certain amount of puzzlement. About 15 minutes after I had sorted out the poems I was going to read from the ones I wasn't, the singer/songwriter came in. Her name was Krista Weaver, and she combined a sort of Rocky Mountain High blonde and sunny energy with an East Coast sense of purpose. Two attributes I have in short supply. We introduced ourselves, and Dr. Henriquez wandered in, said "Well, I'll let the two of you work it out," and wandered back out.

While we were waiting to start, she took a quick look through one of my books, and said "I can't relate," Which got things off to a good start. Not that I expect people, especially singer/songwriters who sing the innermost secrets of their heart, to relate to what I write. Since I never sing the innermost secrets of my heart, on the theory that they'd bore me to death, so why should I expect them to have a different effect on anyone else? I said, "That's OK, my poems are on the outside edge of anyone being able to relate to them."

Of course, given how rotten my hearing is, she could well have said "I can relate."

A question I had cause to pause and consider, as the evening went on.

Anyhow...there we were, and what we were going to do next had been left to us. So I asked - "Well, what are we going to do? Who should go first?"

She said -- "I thought maybe we'd alternate -- you read a poem and then I'll sing a song that somehow relates to it."

I thought, Well, since she can't relate to my poetry, this will be a bit of a challenge, but I said "Sure, let's try it."

So 5 o'clock came and no one was there. Except for Pat (Krista had asked what the secret of a 20-year marriage was, and I told her for my part, it was simple. I was just as crazy in love with Pat still, as the day were married.)

I said, "Shall we wait a little longer?"

She said, "No, let's start."

This was another odd idea. I'd never considered reading to an audience of no one, but what the heck. So I led off with a poem. I wish I could remember which one. But in any event, she listened carefully, thought for a moment, and began a song (all the songs she sang were her own) that was an uncannily perfect commentary on my poem.

I'd done something similar to this once before. I was reading at a Saugerties art gallery with Nancy Willard, and the setup, instead of the usual chairs to the side of a lectern, was a couch in the front of the room. Nancy suggested that we do a kind of tag-team reading, answering each other back and forth. It was a magical evening, as befits a joint reading with our premiere North American magical realist, and we really did keep the ball in flight for the whole evening, each finding poems that would echo the other. We each completely changed our normal rhythm and pacing, and actually changed our repertoire -- both of us found ourselves going to poems we hadn't planned to read, or that we never read.

This evening with Krista was a little different. It wasn't so much like tennis as skeet shooting. I fired a poem up, she followed it and bagged in flight,

Which she did. Every time. I found myself varying my pace as a good skeet launcher should, sending up a poem that might be easy to connect to, then a poem that I couldn't imagine how she could lock in on.

I remember one -- I said, "This might seem like an easy subject, because it's about a girl with a guitar, but maybe not..."

WEEKEND

When she stopped
making chords angled like
compound fractures
bone shards protruding
from ripped skin

and spun notes like long strips
of gauze dipped in
vaseline she had
left her first
husband and the guy with

the cigarette
burns on his hollow
body Gretsch
which he left behind but
she never played

but took with her to
a cabin
in the Catskills along
with a box of
hollow point bullets

the weekend
of her second wedding
katydids sang
only five more weeks
of summer

She bagged that one, with a song that had music and guns, joy and pain.

She bagged them all. She was great. We left vowing to stay in touch and do it again, and I sincerely hope we will. Anyway, here's Krista's home page, and here's a link to some of the regular Wednesday and alternate Saturday singer/songwriter jams that she hosts in Red Hook, and that I will certainly be dropping in on, -- and a complete list of her local gigs.

Delving Into the Penetralium

Jeff Newberry posts on the NewPo list, the following definition of poetry (NewPo is big on "what poetry is?", which is actually one of the things I like about it), and Anny Ballardini has collected a wealth of definitions on her Fieralingue website:

" . . . one of poetry's chief aims is to illumine the walls of mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable. I think poetry ought to be taught not as an engine of meaning but as an opportunity to learn to live in doubt and uncertainty, as a means of claiming indeterminacy. Our species is deeply defined by its great surges of reason, but I think it high time we return to elemental awe and wonder."

--Major Jackson, "Does Poetry Have a Social Function," Poetry, January 2007

I'm not sure I think poetry should be taught any one way. I kinda like it as an engine of meaning, but of course, it's also an engine of ambiguity, so none of the meanings fired up by its internal combustion are going to be definitive, and one can continue sputtering along in doubt and uncertainty.

I was going to continue this blog entry on Keats' thoughts about doubt and uncertainty, but that last metaphor reminds me of this wonderful poem by my great mentor, Donald Finkel, so I think I'll close with it and save Keats and the penetralium for next time:

Concerning the Transmission

You might say the same of poetry:
you've sunk too much in it
to quit now, driving
good hours after bad
too much of you wound
round the wires and the hoses.

You might stop addressing
this absence beside you,
cursing through the intricate
cities, singing in high passes,
tooling down freeways,
minding the numbers,
ears pricked for oracular
tappings, limping past fields
of sullen junkers, eyeholes crawling
with nettle and goldenrod.

If you let go now, the bearings
will scream from their orbits,
the rocker arms clang in their cylinders
and the needles return to their various zeroes,
as if your hands had never clenched
this sweaty wheel.