Poetry and.... Thanksgiving

Today I am grateful for the life of a man I barely knew. 

Fausto, a member of my parish, passed away this week at the age of 82. I knew him a little, which is to say I knew him at 9:00 mass, where he was an usher, and I am a lector. When my family first began attending this mass, I formed an instant opinion of him as a gentle but disagreeable sort - a curmudgeon in the most commonly-held sense of the word. He moved slowly, rarely smiled, and gave the smallest nods in response to greetings.

As most people do, we always sit in or near the same place at our regular mass, and as I got to know the people around us - long-time parishioners all, many older than us - in the same demographic as Fausto - I began to notice the greetings, silent and subtle, that passed among them as he would pass at the end of the communion line. I don't know if i ever saw him smile, but I surely saw my fellow parishioners smile as he passed and nodded, passed and whispered.

When I started to lector, gathering with the ushers, priests, and other lay ministers before mass, and started to listen to Fausto in the company of other men of faith, I realized this was a man who complained about his tribulations from time to time, but rarely had a negative word toward anyone else. And when he permitted it to be seen, he had a smile that was impossible to return in kind.

After a while, I noticed him interacting with the alter servers - boys and girls of middle school age, the most likely group to shrink from an uninviting adult. Without fail, he was gracious and funny with them, and they with him.

And in those few conversations I had with him, I found a man of confidence and clarity, joyful and thankful, welcoming, and proud to serve in his role in our community.

Only today, after his passing, have I learned that he was educated as a lawyer, worked for 25 years in an industry parallel to my own, and shared his passion for the game as a 25-year soccer coach. The last I probably should have guessed from how his energy level rose when the World Cup came up....

I'm grateful for having known him and having received words of encouragement and praise from such a worldly soul. I'm also grateful for the chance he gave me, and continues to give me, to be aware of the evolution of my own attitudes and interactions through understanding my small relationship with him. I'm most grateful for his example, that of confidence and service, accomplishment and community.

Which brings me to my favorite Thanksgiving poem, offered with gratitude for your readership, for your finding something of value here, and for the chance to connect with you, to be a small part of your life, and to have you as a part of mine.

Te Deum
by Charles Reznikoff

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

(courtesy poets.org)

Happy Thanksgiving.

... and Response

There's a story I like to tell when I run into another native New Yorker away from the Big Apple. Shortly after college, being still active in campus theater and known to have a car, I was giving some undergrad members of the Stevens Dramatic Society (who knew me casually as "that older guy" who did Drood") a ride to a play. When my intended path along Route 46 was, shall we say, interrupted by an aggressive driver, I responded by stating my disapproval clearly and completely using the vocabulary I'd acquired during my months of driver education in the outer boroughs. With hand gestures.

And one of my young friends in the back seat immediately said "I didn't know you were from New York!"

Aside from confirming for the specific regional flair of dialectal Brooklynese, this tells me two things: that a specific mode of communication can provide an immediate, leveling, and intimate link, and that emotion - especially negative emotion - is a great font of energy from which to fuel said communication. What it doesn't tell me is that swearing at a guy in a beat-up Cherokee is great communication.

Or, in a more artful context, consider that while a visceral response may provoke a strong sense of identification, and that may be a powerfully felt and meaningful experience, that cannot be confused with great art. This idea pokes its head out a lot at open mikes, where people will present freshly-minted poems of protest and observation and receive timely attaboys and amens. Can be valuable, community-building, reinforcing. But it's usually not art. Not any more than a good standup comedy routine, anyway.

Consider the standups. Who are the great standup comedians today? There are a few that I'll stop and watch if I catch them flipping channels - Ron White, Kathleen Madigan, and Jeff Dunham among others*. I think they're terrific at their craft. And funny. And while I'll always stop and watch them, I'm not archiving their stuff to share it with my kids when they're old enough. Now, George Carlin, on the other hand... Carlin was political, vitriolic, and at times (almost) as dirty as some of the current crop. But his craft was honed at another level, one which made it timeless. The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television have all been said on television this year (four of them on "free" TV), but the routine still rings out with humor and purpose, and doesn't rely only on the shock value of the words - which is good because they don't have much of that commodity left.

I expect out poets to give the same effort when creating works of protest or witness. Not that the act of witness is not in itself important, but recognize that shock (disgust, disappointment...) is not enough; that there is crafting and distance required to apply Wordsworth's classic definition and make the witnessing into a poem. In Fooling with Words, Mark Doty admitted that many of his poems start when they "come tumbling of him", but that this isn't the poem; it's "a cry" which is refined through the physical crafting of language. Consider that when people turned to poetry in September 2001, they turned largely to a poem written in 1939; that suggests something about the works created in the years in between.

My own work crosses into witness infrequently, but when I head that way, it's usually later, when I've decided what I want to say, and whether it's something that I can say well. That last piece is important to me.

It's the value that the poet brings.



* - I'm also partial to an old Bob Newhart Button-Down Mind bit on Sirius!

... and Purpose

I had the privilege of performing for the regulars at Noble Coffee Roasters last week. It was a fine night (not just because of a terrific piece of rum cake, though that didn't hurt), and a remarkable one for a couple of reasons.

First, I found the place when even my GPS was confused.

But seriously, folk. The thing that remained with me as I was driving away was the incredible diversity in the room, evidenced by the open mic. We had the political and the pastoral, memoirs of 1934 and remembrances from the under-30 crowd. On the (longer than it needed to be*) ride home, I had a chance to reflect on some of the work I heard during the open mic and think about the different intents the poets brought to their work, and what it means for the craft behind that work.

One of the first poets, an older gentleman, series regular and long-time writer, started with "some October poems". These nice seasonal poems were observations on the time of year, referencing "orange" and "trees" (or the like) frequently. This poet's presentation was all of (rhyming) couplets and were very short. The editor of a local magazine read a poem by an "old-feeling" under-30 poet that was filled with long, complicated sentence and peppered with internal rhyme, using a lot of repetition. The poems had little in common in vocabulary or form, but shared an acute awareness of the relationship between their intent and their form.

All writers make form decisions with every word we type. These poets reminded me of the importance of conscious selection of structure to support the purpose of their poems.

Yes, I said purpose. The truth is, all art has purpose. Even if that purpose is to capture an idea only for your own review later, there is an intent in every act of artistic creation. And the assignment of structure to its presentation is deeply integrated with intent. Some intents lend themselves to nursery rhyme verse; some to multilungual exposition. And you know when you've gotten it right, and when it's wrong.

Understanding this visceral response to the connection of form and purpose in a poem can help with other forms of communication. In my career as a technical professional, I have frequently had to prepare engineering content for consumption by audiences ranging from grammar-schoolers to experts in their field; in some ways, this is navigating the spectrum from Ogden Nash to Ezra Pound. With Nash, it's a danger not to see the craft, when what you're seeing is careful presentation with a particular audience in mind. With Pound (at least the later cantos), one unskilled in the art could easily become overwhelmed and see only chaos on the page, when what's there is thoughtful in the extreme with an expectation of similar extreme thoughtfulness on the part of the reader. Neither is better or worse - both are designed with the form they require or accompligh their task.


Einstein said that things should be as simple as they need to be, but no simpler. This elegance of design,  the idea that if something seems too complicated there's a good chance it is not suitable for its task, is something we look for routinely as engineers, and sometimes have trouble communicating. Poetry may be the vehicle to bridge this understanding gap.


Poetry has design. Design has purpose. Makes sense to me.


*Note to self: Just because you can see the Wendy's doesn't mean you can get to the Wendy's from this exit. And Bear Mountain is scary in the dark, even with the GPS

... and Remembering

Today is about remembering. Many people far more eloquent than I will speak at length about the tragedy of the attacks on our country. We all have our memories from that day: those who lost friends and family, those who witnessed the events up close, those far away who watched with the helplessness of a mute on the wrong side of the glass. My own memories are that of the almost 2,000 people at my office campus leaving our desks, gathering in conference rooms to watch the news feeds that started showing up on all our video equipment, about hundreds of people heading to our loading platforms - we're a medical device company - and loading trucks to send across the river into Manhattan. It's interesting that no matter how great the event, all remembering is a local, personal act.

Do you recall how quickly Auden's "September 1, 1939" started being quoted in columns and appearing on websites? How quickly old and new poems began to appear everywhere, as people attempted to find ways to say what they couldn't otherwise say. Many poets have spoken about poetry as a vehicle for "saying the unsayable", whether it be on tragedies of a personal sort that would never be known without a brave poet's voice or those of the kind of 9/11/01 or 9/1/39, or any of a number or other horrific days that require the distance and craft of the artist to present them in a comprehensible way.

Poetry is of course, not uniquely able to convey the layers of an event; even a short look at Picasso's Guernica tells us that. But poetry may be able to do a few things differently than other art forms:

Primarily, it permits a juxtaposition of images with an immediacy and pacing that other art forms don't. Visual arts (like Guernica) hit us all at once, movies (and plays, and novels) bring us along at the rate the director has chosen. But a poem (often) strikes us with a complete visual on the page, and provides aural or linguistic beauty that begins to unfold immediately and as long and as fast as we care to take it in.

Second, it allows a deeply personal interaction without sacrificing a view of the entirety. In Auden's poem (and Yeats' "Easter 1916" which it reflects in structure and tone), we leap into a helicopter trip down through history (Thucydides even makes a brief appearance) from the most local of observations ("I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street..."). After the trip through the eons, Auden brings us home to the the individual ("All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie..."). In this way poetry is most unique among the art forms, as it permits the reader to (choose to) assume completely the perspective of the narrator by speaking the poem. An actor in role takes on a part of the memory, but not the whole

Third, the poem uniquely packages hope with recollection. The choice to connect hope to a tragic memory is the poet's choice, of course, but the call to action, the voluble pronouncement of what can be done in response, or of what has already happened, is most real and most direct in the narrative poem. We can speak the poet's words and find ourselves carried along just by the act of saying them. We can be moved by an act of remembering, by a capture memory that was not even our own.

The risk of being cloying and cliched is more present in the poem of recollection than in other forms, I suppose, but that's a discussion of craft for another day. Other media can provoke insight, or outrage, or meaning, but when done well, there is an affirmation, a commitment possible in the remembrance poem that is unavailable in other arts. Auden closes with

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

We remember today with the commitment that poetry can provide.

Poetry and.... Teaching.

As school starts again I think back upon the great teachers I have had and what has made them great. Sure, there's compassion and a desire for service. Without casting any disrespect upon these essential attributes, I'm learning toward something else today; I don't know about you, but I've known a number of people who are compassionate, great with kids, intent upon serving others, and/or devoted to making the world a better place. Many of them have been good teachers. But that's not what's separated the best.

When you think about it, what really distinguishes great teachers? I think it's the ability to make connections between the material and other things - maybe its application, maybe some analogous concept that helps the student establish a connection with that material. Like the grammar school teacher who can make fractions visible objects for a child who doesn't like math. Or the Bible teacher who hooks an adventure-seeking boy with the wars of the Old Testament and leads him out through the Gospels. How about a science teacher who discusses Stranger in Strange Land and the qualities of a good sausage-and-peppers sandwich in (almost) equal increments to keep a room filled with high school boys interested in corrosion* chemistry? I'm fortunate to have known all these people - they taught me or people close to me - and I think they have something in common. They're all poets.

At least one of them would raise an eyebrow for that comparison, but I think it holds. What do we do as poets? In successful, well-crafted poems, we establish connections - metaphors - that make visible something that might not otherwise be visible. It needn't be truth, it needn't definitive, but needs to be memorable and it needs stay with the reader, to create a desire to take in more. I'm sitting here remembering the tools my AP chemistry teacher used 30 years ago, not for their great scientific insight - 20 years of practice has taught me a great deal more than I learned there - but for how they kicked open a door for me that I leaped through joyfully, and how I've spent my life recalling his lessons. Even when I don't know that there's anything more for me to mine. But still I go back. And find something worth remembering again.

This is another place I go when people tell me they don't "get" poetry. For those who don't like or appreciate the surprise of making new connections, I rely on craft, or allusion, or something "intellectual." But for those who teach, as their career or as their vocation, as a part-time effort or as a part of their larger job, I say the poetic and the learning moment are the same. I invite you to join me there.






- hint it's pronounced KAT-eye-on, not KAY-shun.

Poetry and.... The Storm

Here in the northeast, Hurricane Irene is harassing us with overlapping waves of calm and pounding force. Sporting events have been cancelled and the Stop-and-Shops have been out of milk for 18 hours. Many people have retreated into their homes with days of water and prepared foods, and aren't expecting to have anynything asked of them for days. Almost (or by now, maybe more than) 10,000 flights out of area airports have been cancelled. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

But Jayne Jaudon Ferrer at Your Daily Poem tried to find us a hurricane metaphor and came up empty. My library may not be comprehensive, but it similarly let me down as I searched for something to present here as a place where poetry had come to rest up against the coming threat. And I finally realized my mistake.

While we're exhibiting some similar behaviors in the face of the storm, what we're really doing is projecting our unique fears upon it, allowing it to distract us from something we would otherwise be fearing. Or for those who are refusing to yield, refusing to leave their homes, are doing the same - standing up to the storm because it's something they can stand up to.

Poetry operates at the place between what you want to say and what you can say. At times, it says the unsayable. At times, it starts with what is said and works back to how the need to say it was created. In both cases, it tried to surprise us, even as we put the pen to paper, with what we come to believe when we read it.

Which is what happened to me here. I'll leave it up for a while. At least until the storm ends.

The waters have receded. Poem has been deleted.

Poetry and.... Information Technology

My friend Joe, a man has who traveled the line between art and technology at least as frequently as I have, recently forwarded this from CNN contributor Bob Greene:


Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal selects the writer each week for a terrific column called "Five Best." The premise is simple: One man or woman who is an expert in a given field is asked to recommend and write brief reviews of five books he or she loves that were published any time in history. The column turns that culture of newness, of hotness, on its head, with great results. Readers of the column, Rabinowitz told me, eagerly seek out the books in libraries or in used bookstores. She said that she tells each week's writer of the column not to worry whether or not readers have ever heard of the books; she instructs them: "The more obscure, the better."

Greene reminds us in his column that there are millions of titles available for free in the collective libraries of the world, and we shouldn't allow a culture that believes "new" = "good" (read: "iPhone v2304.x") to turn us off that subject.

I'll go him one further. Technology, with a little help from its friends, can make those millions of titles available for us. One such example is Project Gutenberg, which came to my aid this weekend by making available the works of a 16th-century Italian epic poet whose name popped up in other research I was pursuing. As much as I lament at times that communications technology has affected the basic elements of life, this access, combined with the converstation starter that is Wikipedia, if of great use to a poet who is writing his way into places in which he is not an expert.