Prologue

I am revisiting/revising my 2005 book, The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets, for a new 2018 edition. Here is the new version of the opening poem.

PROLOGUE

A fountain pen,

     a yellow legal pad,

a cup of tea, a symphony —

these set the stage.

The empty page is one

     of an eternity of silences,

     the start of an infinite line

          of rambling letters.

The pen is ordinance,

     cannoning lines and dots

     onto the ruled pages.

This page is but a clearing,

     the tablet a wilderness.

     Guidelines are there,

          but they are not a map:

     the short line finds its measure,

     the long one cascading over.

Fall in — you’ll find

     no bottom, no sense

of beginnings and endings.

You’ll find yourself

in a Black Forest of poems.

Wolves lurk within —

     no compass

will help you navigate.

You may slip on a comma,

wind up alone and desolate

because a colon misled you.

Three dots will send you flying

into a waiting sink-hole.

Here is some danger,

yet some reward: poems

may change you forever.

I mean to change you forever.

It is too late to turn back.

I’ve got you, guest,

in my little book.

I will not leave you behind.

Here is my hand.

Read on!

New Year's Day

The meal is, shall we say,

     monochromatic:

in the cramped dining nook

with a hard-white beam

     of afternoon sun

chiaroscuro, bouncing off

white table-cloth, white china,

the white serving-platter

of pale roast pork,

the pearly-white of mashed spuds,

chalky pork gravy,

off-color rancid butter,

bread — white, of course,

no other, ever —

white paper napkins,

the pale complexions

of the right kind of people.

Stepfather presides

over a Swede Lutheran silence.

No one is permitted to speak,

save for pass-this-pass-that

and thank-you. The only sounds

are knife-scrapes and fork bites,

the shuffle of chairs

against the splintered floor,

the stifled winter cough.

Mother says nothing; beer

     has done its work.

Stepfather has no use

     for the two stepsons,

book-reading idlers and spawn

of the man he hated and replaced.

Still, as long as the child-support

checks came every month,

he’d have to feed them.

Nothing has any flavor.

White salt, passed round,

and added liberally,

helps not so much as pepper,

lots of it, and water aplenty.

Food cooked in hatred

can only be washed down,

     not eaten.

Ignoring the shouted order

to “excuse himself.”

the older boy gets up,

takes empty water-glass

to the kitchen sink,

and standing there,

he gazes into the sunlit nook,

at the dusty sunbeam

below the unlit chandelier,

from whose never-dusted

maze of dangling crystals,

descended

on pale white threads of silk

hundreds upon hundreds

of

tiny

white

baby

spiders

onto the white pork

the white bread

the white gravy

the white potatoes

the white tablecloth

the white paper napkins

onto the stern whiteness

of the Stepfather,

the passive Mother,

the little brother

gobbling away

at gravy-bread.

Does he tell them?

Or does he run outside

howling with laughter,

thanking the cosmos

for just desserts?

Poets in a Chelsea Brownstone

Hostess. I remember her hunched shadow

on the frosted glass

of the sliding French door,

as we poets read,

and the door slid silently,

just ever so much,

enough for the thin arm

and age-knobbed wrist

to enter, to place

on the refreshment table,

without one ice-clink sound,

the sweating-cool pitcher

of lemonade.

Most of the eager poets

assembled here,

tracking who-knows-what

on her parquet floor,

shuffling their papers and notebooks,

awaiting their turn to read,

did not know her name.

The elegant brownstone

they come to weekly

is just a place,

one among many that come and go

in The Village Voice listings,

places that tolerate

the disheveled artists,

word-crazed, impractical,

the ones who will never

earn a penny.

As I read in my turn,

she listened there

behind the veil of glass,

a listening that leaned

on every consonant I uttered,

a keen pre-echo

to every vowel.

Oh, she heard us.

We did not know her name,

or how the upstairs rooms lodged

a succession of broken souls,

her “causes,”

knew not that we’d been adopted, too.

One day, with a friend, I saw her,

emerging from the brownstone,

sun-walking Ninth Avenue,

behind some tugging hound

misfortune had doubtless thrust

upon her charity.

The warm day reddened

her parlor-pale face.

My friend tells me,

“That’s Mrs. Tanner, you know.

That’s Auntie Mame!”

A Clarinet Wonder

Something weird and wonderful, Romantic and yet modern. The New York Philharmonic's composer-in-residence in 2010 was Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg. Hear his amazing Clarinet Concerto. Alas, the CD is out of print and the record company (Ondine) does not sell MP3 downloads either. I think it's even harder to be a contemporary composer than to be a contemporary poet.

Rachmaninoff Had Big Hands

Rachmaninoff and Humor do not seem to be two words that could share the same sentence. This video, titled "Rachmaninoff Had Big Hands" will thrill all classical music fans, especially those who once thought they could play the great C-Sharp Minor Prelude, until they saw the chords.  

Teddy Tahu Rhodes

Amazing baritone — Teddy Tahu Rhodes — made a breakthrough appearance on the 2010 Saturday live HD broadcast of "Carmen," filling in for an ailing Toreador. 

Here's also a YouTube clip of Teddy, also nicknamed "the baritone with abs," singing the great solo from Handel's Messiah, "The Trumpet Shall Sound."  

The Most Gothic Spot in Pittsburgh

I've been visiting Pittsburgh's cemeteries for two years now, but I have not seen every ravine and hillside that houses tombs and mausoleums. This week I found the best so far: a round, Gothic mausoleum that looks like a set for Poe's "Ulalume." It's in Allegheny Cemetery near the Bloomfield entrance. 

Moments of the Sublime

Breakthrough moments in human consciousness. Plotinus describes achieving oneness with nature/God/the Sublime (substitute your own overarching noun): "He was one himself then, with no distinction in him either in relation to himself or anything else; for there was no movement in him, and he had no emotion, no desire for anything else when he had made the ascent, no reason or thought; his own self was not there for him, if we should say even this. He was as if carried away or possessed by a god, in a quiet solitude, in the stillness of his being turning away to nothing and not busy about himself, altogether at rest and having become a kind of rest." My first moment like this was experienced at night, leaning against a great maple tree in Edinboro graveyard, after I had entered into the very essence of the tree itself (imagining myself as it, not me as one looking at it) .... another time in Providence late at night in the woods as a family of raccoons and I sat regarding the stars ... a few times, not enough times, in a lifetime. To attempt to describe such moments, and to give them value in everyday life, is a poet's life's work.

My Annotated Edition of Sorley, the Lost WWI Poet

The revised second edition of the poetry of Charles Hamilton Sorley is now available from Poet's Press/Yogh & Thorn Books. Robert Graves called Sorley one of the three best poets killed in World War I. Shot by a German sniper in the Battle of Loos, Charles Sorley died at age 20, leaving behind enough poems for a slender volume published by his father in 1915: Marlborough and Other Poems. Several of Sorley's poems have been featured in countless war anthologies, but the poet's complete work was kept in print only until 1932. There was a reprint sometime in the 1980s and then Sorley seems to have been forgotten again. Sorley's nature poems, inspired by English naturalist Richard Jefferies (the British Thoreau), depict the haunted landscape of the Wiltshire Downs, from the days of Roman-occupied Britain to Sorley's own time.
As a student at Cambridge, young Sorley was steeped in the classics; he then traveled to Germany to study and was in school there when the War broke out. He was arrested and sent home by the German government, and within days of returning to England, Sorley enlisted. The last set of his poems, written in the battlefield, contain both stark soundings of death, but also a kernel of wisdom and tolerance, as when he addresses a poem to the Germans he cannot bring himself to hate.
Perhaps the most poignant poem is one he sent home retelling a key scene from Homer's Odyssey and then assuring his friend that he, too, ten years hence, would be telling his own war stories by the fire. Three months later, Sorley was dead. His last poem, a blistering war sonnet, was sent home to his father in his kit. Sorley's body was never found.
This volume includes passages from letters, selected by Sorley's father as illustrative of the themes of the poems in the book. To make this volume more accessible to today's readers (and to students), I have annotated both the poems and the letters, making clear the numerous classical and Biblical allusion that would have been well-known to Sorley's contemporaries. Some 1903 photos of the Wiltshire landscape have also been added, taken from an edition of Jefferies nature writing.
The book was completely re-typeset from the 1932 edition, using typefaces from the World War I era. The book also includes an annotated checklist of the critical reception of Sorley's work from 1915 through 1973, by Larry Uffelman; a biographical sketch of the poet written by his mother for the 1919 Letters of Charles Sorley; additional letters; and juvenilia. This second edition has a longer introduction, covering biographical and scholarly sources about Sorley that were not available to me when the first edition came out in 2010.

To order from Amazon: http://a.co/eoNmWt7

African Americans and the Classics

It has been fashionable for a long time to trash the classics -- the history, prose and poetry of Greece and Rome specifically. Yet the founders of the United States could almost all read Latin, and many read Greek as well, and they knew Greek and Roman history inside out. From this they learned what democracy is, and how republics rise and fall. There would be no United States had not a group of British Colonials in America fancied themselves as new Athenians and new Romans.
When African captives escaped from slavery, or, later, were freed, they knew that two things were vital to them: literacy, and the vote. Many former slaves craved the very classical knowledge that empowered the white man, and some used the wisdom of the classics in the further argument for their rights. It's more common to imagine these former slaves reading the Bible, but they craved -- and some got -- the education in the classics that white man wanted them not to have.
Finally, there's an important book about this, on a theme that is dear to me -- re-establishing the importance of the classics in American history. My friends who teach American literature or history will want to read this book. Other friends of a classical or historical bent will find it illuminating. Please ask your library to buy it. I'm sorry it's so expensive -- academic titles are criminally priced -- so you might need to have your library get it via interlibrary loan from another library that buys these kinds of books.

See Book on Amazon 

Beverly Sills in "The Turk in Italy"

One of the happiest, happiest nights in the opera house ever was seeing Beverly Sills in Rossini's "The Turk in Italy," a sequel to his "Italian Girl in Algiers." Its empowered heroine defies her husband and makes a fool of an amorous Turkish pasha. This version is in English, in a hysterical translation by Andrew Porter. Jokes, gags and memorable lines abound, such as her aria threatening, "I'll take lovers by the hundreds, yes, a new one every night!" Lines like that you never forget. The work was never recorded, but there was a TV broadcast, and here it is, at last, copied from a VHS tape. Sit yourself down and have a romp with this joyous sex comedy. I wish Fellini had made a film of this opera!

Dvorak's Gloomy Seventh Symphony

The Carnegie Mellon Symphony Orchestra played Dvorak's Symphony No 7 in D Minor. Here is the full concerto from September 17, 2017. These programs are open to the public and are played in the historic Carnegie Music Hall. An outstanding program.

The program opens with the lively Carnival Overture, also by Dvorak, then continued with Chausson's Poeme for Violin and Orchestra. The Seventh Symphony is the second half of the program.

A Polka for Elephants, A Masque for Isabella d'Este

As the Carnegie Melon Wind Ensemble began their concert last night, one elderly audience member got up and fled in consternation at the raucous sounds coming from the stage. It was Stravinsky's "Circus Polka for a Young Elephant," a brief polka that Stravinsky actually composed for a circus. It includes a hysterical quote from Schubert's "March Militaire." The rest of this program shows a large array of CMU's wind and brass students playing some remarkable music. Renaldo Hahn's voluptuous neo-Renaissance piece for an imagined pageant at the court of Isabella d'Este; a lark for trumpet and trombone with full band; and a gorgeous rhapsody for solo flute and large band. CMU streams live from their concerts and here is the whole thing. This is a great demonstration of how vibrant the literature is for wind and brass bands, and how great these students are. The performance begins about 1:40 in, and after the intentionally honking and barking elephant music passes, it is smooth sailing. Enjoy! And remember, if you move to Pittsburgh, all this can be yours, for free!