Sentimental Education

by Tony Hoagland

And when we were eight, or nine,
our father took us back into the Alabama woods,
found a rotten log, and with his hunting knife

pried off a slab of bark
to show the hundred kinds of bugs and grubs
that we would have to eat in a time of war.

"The ones who will survive," he told us,
looking at us hard,
"are the ones who are willing to do anything."
Then he popped one of those pale slugs
into his mouth and started chewing.

And that was Lesson Number 4
in The Green Beret Book of Childrearing.

I looked at my pale, scrawny, knock-kneed, bug-eyed brother,
who was identical to me,
and saw that, in a world that ate the weak,
we didn't have a prayer,

and next thing I remember, I'm working for a living
at a boring job
that I'm afraid of losing,

with a wife whose lack of love for me
is like a lack of oxygen,
and this dead thing in my chest
that used to be my heart.

Oh, if he were alive, I would tell him, "Dad,
you were right! I ate a lot of stuff
far worse than bugs."

And I was eaten, I was eaten,
I was picked up
and chewed
and swallowed

down into the belly of the world.

"Sentimental Education" by Tony Hoagland, from Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. © Graywolf Press, 2010 . Reprinted with permission of the author.

Comment: Another poem I snagged from The Writer's Almanac. Sudeep took classes from Tony Hoagland and got to know him quite well in college. I never took a class with him in college, but I have read a bunch of his poetry and even saw him read here in Dallas. When I got him to sign my book, I told him about our G.W. and Sudeep connection and he said, "You're a long way from D.C." I don't know. It made me feel sad. He was right. It's odd where you find yourself 10 years later. It made me feel old and far way from those carefree days. At the time he was teaching at a university in Houston. I wonder if he is still there. I'm sure poets, especially ones who teach live a nomadic life. Anyway, I thought this poem was a good example of his work. He's so effortlessly funny and sympathetic as a narrator. His poems are always tinged with sadness and contradiction, but they feel honest. I love too the title of the book!

The Wreck of the Hesperus

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was the schooner Hesperus,

That sailed the wintry sea;

And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr,

To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,

Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,

That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,

His pipe was in his mouth,

And he watched how the veering flaw did blow

The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailòr,

Had sailed to the Spanish Main,

"I pray thee, put into yonder port,

For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,

And to-night no moon we see!"

The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,

And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,

A gale from the Northeast,

The snow fell hissing in the brine,

And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain

The vessel in its strength;

She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,

Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr,

And do not tremble so;

For I can weather the roughest gale

That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat

Against the stinging blast;

He cut a rope from a broken spar,

And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church-bells ring,

Oh say, what may it be?"

"'T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!" —

And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns,

Oh say, what may it be?"

"Some ship in distress, that cannot live

In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light,

Oh say, what may it be?"

But the father answered never a word,

A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,

With his face turned to the skies,

The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow

On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed

That savèd she might be;

And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave

On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,

Through the whistling sleet and snow,

Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept

Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between

A sound came from the land;

It was the sound of the trampling surf

On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,

She drifted a dreary wreck,

And a whooping billow swept the crew

Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves

Looked soft as carded wool,

But the cruel rocks, they gored her side

Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,

With the masts went by the board;

Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,

Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,

A fisherman stood aghast,

To see the form of a maiden fair,

Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,

The salt tears in her eyes;

And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,

On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,

In the midnight and the snow!

Christ save us all from a death like this,

On the reef of Norman's Woe!

Comment: I had to include this gem of a poem. The blog's namesake just keeps showing up in poem after poem. I love it! And another serendipitous discovery was I have known this poem practically my entire life. I just never knew the title. And do you know why I knew this poem? Alright, anyone who doesn't have a high tolerance for dorkiness better shut down their computers...this poem is featured in the Canadian cinema classic "Anne of Avonlea". For all of you lame asses, "Anne of Avonlea" is the sequel to the much beloved film adaptation of "Anne of Green Gables." Anne herself did not recite this poem. She has the great misfortune of having to read Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman" after an accomplished and much older actress recites "The Wreck of the Hesperus" at a poetry recital at the White Sands Hotel. Are there any other "Anne of Green Gables" fans out there? Are you feelin' me on this one? No? Okay, just forget I ever disclosed this about myself. Now I want to recite this poem and clutch my breast at the end. Get the smelling salts!

Breakage

by Mary Oliver

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light!

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

*whelk: a common sea snail

Comment: Mary Oliver is a really extraordinary nature poet. She's not as flowery as lthe transcendentalists, but of course, she is influenced by them. She's not quite as dark (at least the little I've read of her) as Elizabeth Bishop, but nature holds the answers for her. She's a supreme observer like William Carlos Williams. When she writes, it's as if all the mysteries of life are in that "scallop full of moonlight". I wonder if I could ever look at nature in that way. I think about nature a lot because of K. He thinks about it all the time and stops to looks at the birds and insects and asks me questions about things I take for granted like eggs and nests. I wonder if I'll ever look at nature again like a child or Oliver does. What can I learn from observing the scene just outside my window?

Today

by Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.


Comment: Happy birthday to my dear friend, Eugenia. I have no idea what the weather is going to be like in San Francisco tomorrow but I hope it is like the spring day Collins has described. Or at least I hope your mood is like that spring day. I am ultra-bummed because in finding and reading this poem I realized that Billy Collins had given a reading in Dallas. In fact, at a venue not three minutes from my front door and I completely forgot. FORGOT, folks. That is the state of my brain. Oh, well. I'm always slightly disappointed at readings. They're very rarely what you think.

Wishing you sunshine, warm breezes and gardens bursting with peonies!

Quote of the day

"The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them."

— Maya Angelou


Comment: What do you think? True or not true? I tend to believe this, but then again what about second chances? What about a skewed or wrong impression?

Is contemporary literary fiction just a steaming heap of dung?

There is a thought-provoking review of "The Surrendered" by Chang-Rae Lee in the New Yorker this week (although it could be last week's because I tend to be a week behind). The first half of the review is a discussion of the conventions of contemporary literary fiction. How there is so much unnecessary description and attention to realism. How the emotions of the characters are so spelled out and explained. How despite the attention to real life details, the plots are often overly contrived and not true to life.

It made me feel really depressed about literary fiction. Like all the "good books" out there are really only Lifetime movies and nothing more. I understand the writer's point. Sometimes literary fiction does seem to blend and is more or less predictable in its degree of "literary"-ness to complicated plot ratio. But you can apply this to all forms. Geez, how many pieces of fruit can Cezanne paint? And Edward Hopper, enough already with the barren urban landscapes. We get it. Life is empty and quiet!

But is the only literature out the worth reading, non-linear, avant garde and hyper-intellectual? Basically the unreadable stuff? I guess it comes down to what you want out of a novel. And that's probably a personal list of demands.

For me, the difference is often the emotional response. I read Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn. Both examples of literary fiction that were critically and commercially successful. Both were good, but honestly, unremarkable for me. I wouldn't re-read either. And trust me, I am not dissing either of these authors. Their achievement is not lost on me. I could not write what they wrote. What they wrote took dedication, talent and imagination. But I wouldn't reread what they wrote.

And yet I could reread The Great Gatsby and Lolita over and over again. Probably the book I have reread the most is To Kill a Mockingbird. It's strange how there are those books you can reread again and again and get something new every time. These books are like old friends.

But there are plenty of esteemed writers I've never read like Cormac McCarthy or William Faulkner (I've never read anything by William Faulkner!!!). I guess what I'm saying is there is a lot of literary fiction that is unremarkable and kind of bland, but at the end of the day novels are just stories. They are not essays or meditations, they are stories. As much as Milan Kundera argues that there are no characters just ideas, it's not the "ideas" that make you weep at the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It's the characters and their universal plight and the brevity of life and the salvation and consolation of love.

So--I think--even using plain language, conventional plots, characters who resemble real life people, you can still write a great novel. One that will be beloved and reread over and over again. But they are not a dime a dozen and you probably have to read a lot to find the true gems.

In Blackwater Woods

by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

"In Blackwater Woods" by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

Comment: I've never read anything by Mary Oliver but I want to get to know her better. Her name keeps popping up. Her poems are often cited at our Sunday UU services. Then I was reading a column in a local magazine here by a Baptist minister who talked at length about the meaning of two of her poems. Now if a poet inspires and is cited by both a UU minister and a Baptist minister...you can't help but be curious. "In Blackwater Woods" was one of the poems the Baptist minister referred to. It's the last two stanzas that really grab you. And in terms of truth, I feel she pretty much sums it up. The things we love the most in life are mortal. We must hold on to them dearly while we can, but with the knowledge that the people we love can't stay with us forever nor can we can stay with them forever. It's so painful, but it's one of the few truths we have.