Poetry of Clint Smith in "Counting Descent"

Before Clint Smith III was staff writer for The Atlantic, best-selling author, and go-to guest for public affairs media, he was a poet and a teacher. So he started his collection Counting Descent (Los Angeles: Write Bloody, 2016) with a poem titled "Something You Should Know," a teacher's clue that what follows is the key to everything else.

Smith wants us to know something he learned about himself as a kid cleaning cages in a pet shop. He identified with the hermit crab that would outgrow its skin and scurry to find another shell for protection. He learned not to depend on "anything beyond myself" ("Something You Should Know" 2).

He adds "Perhaps"

...that is why, even now, I want so desperately
to show you all my skin, but am more afraid
of meeting you, exposed, in open water.

While Smith often exposes tender skin in this collection, sometimes his subject is the shell: Words, novels, and poetry. Remembering how he won spelling-bees by outlining the letters in air with his fingers, he reflects that "words were the only / way I ever knew how to fight" against "those who would rather / make an outline out of me" ("How to Fight" 33). Does he mean a chalk outline of a body on pavement? Or does he mean those who instantly make assumptions when they see his skin?

He means both. Allusions to dead black bodies rise up in some poems on innocent subjects. Before he gets to a truly joyous celebration of girls at play, the poet promises "jumping rope" will not become "a metaphor / for dodging bullets," ("No More Elegies Today" 56). A toddler on a slide raising his hands in glee brings to mind raising hands under arrest ("Playground Elegy" 26). A fire hydrant, personified, cautions a black boy to remember how hydrants were weaponized in Birmingham, and how other people "open us / spilling" on the street ("what the fire hydrant said to the black boy" 20). Warnings mix with comfort in what other ordinary things "say" to a black boy: the ocean (10), cicadas (18), and a cathedral (69). Being pulled over by the police reminds him of swimming because "I don't remember the last time police / sirens didn't feel like gasping for air." ("For the Boys Who Never Learned How to Swim" 40, published four years before "I can't breathe" became a national slogan.) For Smith, at least, who was teaching where kids did come to class talking of shootings in their neighborhoods, a sense of the contingency of life is very close to the surface; because I rarely have that sense, it's something a reader like me needs to know to understand him.

How he can feel "outlined" by others' expectations comes out in "Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class."

If you are successful
it is because of affirmative action.
If you fail it is because
you were destined to. (27)

The kid will be expected to be an expert on Black History, a "hip hop lyricologist" and "presumed athlete."

Smith talks trash about his own athletic prowess when he writes "My jump shot be / all elbow and no wrist," "hard to look at," and "getting picked last by the other jump shots" ("My Jump Shot" 15). Smith has taught teens and inmates, and I'll remember fondly how this poem taught my seventh graders a lesson. When, reading aloud, we reached the lines, "My jump shot be / spending too much time in the library" and "getting asked to speak on behalf of the other jump shots," they knew we weren't in a gym anymore. A student smiled, "At the start the jump shot is about basketball, but by the end it's about what makes him him."

Smith's tenderness shows, with humor, in many poems of joy. He describes a young athlete's cleats digging in soil, "black / streaks airborne / cascading into the jubilant wake / of the child" ("The Boy and His Ball" 12). An elderly couple dances after dinner, even after the music stops ("When Maze and Frankie Beverly Come on in My House" 31). At an art museum, the poet's attention slips from an "impossibly beautiful" object to how in the morning he'll make pancakes for his impossibly beautiful partner still in bed -- "but maybe I'm getting / ahead of myself" and he snaps back to attention, not for long ("An Evening at the Louvre" 57). Even in a prison's classroom behind phalanxes of metal, concrete, mechanical doors and coils of barbed wire -- human guards subsumed in his description of the machinery of the place -- Smith describes the men with loving individual details and tells how each word they write for their families "provides the sort of freedom a parole board can never grant" ("Beyond This Place" 41).

Poems in this collection rarely look alike on the page. A block of print, a set of short stanzas, a dialogue of call-and-response, a numbered list: he's trying things out. Smith helped me to teach the kids that how you write enhances what you write.

Their favorite was "Chaos Theory." It's about the "butterfly effect," known to geeky fans of time-travel fiction as the premise that altering history changes everything that follows, even if it's just a change in the flight of a butterfly. The poet asks, "do you think / we would have met" (54)? He speculates, "maybe you would have been a tortoise and I would be a raspberry." That line broke down the kids' reserve. A student volunteered, "I know this is weird, but, I think it's a love poem." Yes! Once someone said that, all the other students were jumping in to show how everything else in the poem, even its breathless nonstop meandering form, added to the effect.

Smith's afraid of being profiled as a poet, too, afraid people reading him will "roll their eyes" at "another black poem" ("Queries of Unrest" 68). But his poems give this reader a wide range of experiences and feelings, some of which strike me as familiar and fun to recognize, and some of which are new to me; it's a good mix of what I love to know in a new way and what I should know.

I responded to Clint Smith's second collection of poetry, Above Ground. See My Dinner with Clint Smith.

Read my response to an article by Clint Smith, Bringing "That Slavery Thing" Out of the Archives (02/2021).

"Nixon in China": My Favorite Opera

I recently devoured Michael Dobbs's book King Richard, a page-turner focused on 100 days between Nixon's triumphant landslide re-election and the day when he recognized that he had no control over the Watergate scandal that would lead to a vote to begin impeachment proceedings, followed quickly by resignation. I could not put the book down because of the weirdness of discovering just how incompetent Nixon and his minions were. Most telling is the way he kept repeating the mantra "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" that made him a political star during the House Un-American Activities investigation of Alger Hiss -- only to get enmeshed in cover-up activities himself. He was so deep in denial.

That said, I'm glad to have a reason to pull together all the different reflections I've made through the years on the opera Nixon in China by composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman, and director Peter Sellars. The piece is so important to me that I'm astounded that the title hasn't been prominent in my blog so far. Today, I make amends! I'm stringing together comments I've made about Nixon in other contexts. Links to the original articles are listed at the end.

Nixon and ArtMy friend John Davis, polymath and astute observer of everything, opined when the opera premiered that Nixon would long be a source for artists, while Reagan, Johnson, and most others never would be.

Why?  Davis suggested that, for a man so determined to control his own image, Nixon's inner conflicts and torments were always on view.  Nixon argued endlessly that he made all of his choices for the right reasons.  His good intentions make him tragic; his lack of self-awareness makes him comical.

I'll go out on a limb and say that the opera NIXON IN CHINA has become one of my favorite works of art in any medium. Here, I have special authority, because I was at the premiere. [I've since seen a very different-looking production by the Cincinnati Opera and a much grander remake of the original on the Live in HD Series at the Metropolitan Opera. SEE PHOTO]

In 1987, I drove the ten hours from Jackson MS to Houston TX to see the opera's world premiere. I admit that I got totally lost in the long bombastic scene with Nixon, Mao, Chou, Kissinger, and Mao's secretaries; that I was baffled (and bored) by the "ballet" in Act Two, and I had trouble staying awake in Act Three -- in which all the principals prepare for sleep after the final day of the summit, with six plain roll-a-beds, as if they're retiring to their cabin at summer camp.

As I walked among national TV crews and even literally ran into the entourage of the "kid wonder" director Peter Sellars, his orange hair standing straight up four inches -- I was thinking that the music was never less than pleasant, but I wasn't all that excited. I also couldn't decide what I thought about several places where the orchestra was reaching for big, ominous climaxes while the stage action was extremely banal, as when we watch Pat Nixon put on her hat and gloves for a day of touring. That seemed like bad staging to me.

Through recording and a PBS Great Performances video of that same performance, I grew to appreciate even those parts that baffled or bored me at the time. If I was baffled by Mao and his strident secretaries, well, so are Nixon and Kissinger. (Mao makes an oblique pronouncement and leaves Nixon -- the dogged student and striver all his life -- to interpret it as a statement of policy; Chou En Lai reassures Nixon: "It was a riddle, not a test.") If Madame Mao's propaganda ballet seemed to dissolve into chaos as Pat and Dick rush on stage to help the heroine with a glass of water -- well, I've learned to see this as an amusing theatrical trick that embodies the difference between Mao's hard doctrines about classes and systems and empathetic Americans' visceral response to personal stories.

The Cincinatti Opera's production made a backdrop from a bank of TV screens, and crowded the stage with replicas of those eerie hundreds of clay soldiers we've seen from China. Both added resonance to the wonderful opening of the opera. Adams's overture builds patterns over a rising a-minor scale; then a chorus of Chinese people in their Mao-fatigues sing incongruous phrases from his "Little Red Book" - "Respect women: it is their due...Close doors when you leave a house... roll up straw matting after use"

In 1987 and again on HD, the arrival of Airforce One is a delight. Adams's orchestra mimics the hum of an airplane engine; the chorus moves out of the way; the plane lands from the ceiling like an immense cardboard cut out; and Nixon and Pat appear at the open door waving--to rapturous applause and laughter.

Art and Americans Adams, Goodman, and their director Peter Sellars caught some criticism from Nixon haters for presenting Nixon at his height of success, using only resources pre-Watergate, putting verse in his mouth that represented him as he might have seen himself.  Thus, Nixon sings in his "News" aria,

On our flight over from Shanghai,
The countryside looked drab and gray.
"Bruegel," Pat said.  "'We came in peace for all mankind,'"
I said, and I was put in mind 
Of our Apollo astronauts, simply achieving a great human dream.
We live in an unsettled time.
Who are our enemies?  Who are our friends?

... As I look down the road, I know America is good at heart...
Shielding the globe from the flame-throwers of the mob.
                  
                               (quoted from memory - apologies if I miss some words)

There we have laconic Pat, Nixon's pretentions and his goofy inability to separate personal from public.  (Biographer Stephen Ambrose tells how Nixon, kneeling beside a woman injured by his motorcade, crowd and cameras watching, asked what she thought about tax policy!  That's the Nixon we have in the opera, wanting desperately to be good, apt to orate, unable to connect to Mao or even to Pat.

Since composer John Adams's falling-out with librettist Alice Goodman is pretty famous, dwelt upon in another book THE JOHN ADAMS READER, I was especially interested to see how Adams treats her with respect and appreciation. He writes,

She could move from character to character and from scene to scene, alternating between diplomatic pronouncement, philosophical rumination, raunchy aside, and poignant sentiment. And she did all this in concise verse couplets, exhibiting a talent and technique that has nearly vanished from American poetical practice. (136)

His citation of lines from Pat Nixon's aria "This is Prophetic" brought tears to my eyes, as he focused my attention on an aspect of the words that I hadn't seen so clearly before. Here are the lines that he quotes, as Pat Nixon piles image of America on image in the form of a prayer :

Let lonely drivers on the road
Pull over for a bite to eat,
Let the farmer switch on the light
Over the porch, let passersby
Look in at the large family
Around the table, let them pass.

Adams comments, "It was part of Alice's genius to be able to handle images of Americans -- so routinely abused in magazine and television advertising -- in a way that recaptured their virgin essence, making them, when Pat sings them, not cliches at all but statements of a deeply felt, unconflicted belief." I'm pretty sure that Adams and I reach different conclusions about politics and religion, but it's clear that, in this book and in his art, he speaks what I believe, that humanity is deeper than all our economics and policies and creeds.

Chou En Lai's toast (sung originally with a silvery yet warm tone by remarkable baritone Sanford Sylvan), is one of Adams' slow rides across a vast landscape, with text that mirrors his method: "We have begun to celebrate the different roads that led us to this mountain pass, this 'summit' where we stand. Look down, and see what we have undergone. Future and past lie far below, half visible..." This aria succeeds in a way that's like no other piece of music I know, sweeping us up in pulsing and colorful accompaniment, long lines of melody, and gradual build up to a vision of "paths we have not taken yet" where "innumerable grains of wheat salute the sky," and a toast to a time when our children's children will look back on this moment. I get chills thinking about it even now.

And to what end?

Alice Goodman and John Adams give Chou En-lai this line in Act Three, never answered, never developed: "And to what end?
From Thomas May's book THE JOHN ADAMS READER, I see that the collaborators did not work well together, and the librettist Alice Goodman was miffed most. But I give her a lot of the credit for what's right in this show. She tried, she said, to represent each character "as eloquently as possible" in the way that the character would want to be portrayed.

As a writer and composer myself, I'm inspired by these two ideas: Let the characters speak eloquently for themselves; give the music movement and shape like the landscapes we drive past.

Text adapted from...
• Musical Landscapes (07/2006)
• a reflection on John Adams' memoir Hallelujah Junction Thanks to and from John Adams (10/2008)
• Nixon's Voice (10/2015)]
• See other articles about John Adams and other composers who share a certain catch-all label at my page The Minimalist Zone
• See an article ostensibly about Santa Fe that's really about how I learned to love traditional operas, too.

"Summer of Soul" Revisited

"Beautiful!"

From the stage and from the audience, those remembering the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 for the documentary Summer of Soul often say how beautiful the crowd was and how it was beautiful to see so many black people together in one place enjoying themselves. A middle-aged guy lights up remembering how beautiful his 12-year-old self found singer Marilyn McCoo to be.

Footage shows spectators pressing up to the stage, stretching back to the top of a craggy rock in Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem (formerly Mt. Morris park). When Motown star David Ruffin sings "I've got a sweeter song than the birds in the trees," he shouts out to a young man perched on a high limb. We see young parents with infants and toddlers, clusters of pre-teen boys and pre-teen girls joking with each other, and more elderly residents, some in their church clothes, looking surprised to be delighted.

[PHOTO Collage from Summer of Soul, from the top: Crowd, Stevie Wonder, Fifth Dimension, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Sly Stone, Nina Simone]

"Beautiful" is not how I would have seen this crowd back then. I would have been alarmed. The only black adults I'd seen in real life stood behind counters or maintenance equipment. Aside from them and a few black performers on TV shows, my mental images of black neighborhoods came from the kinds of media depictions that director "Questlove" Thompson replays for us. Boarded-up shops, rubble, listless-looking black people hunched on stoops and hanging around corners, garbage overflowing, rioters setting fires and breaking glass after the King assassination the previous summer, and police trying to revive a young black man strung out on heroin.

But members of the crowd remember that Harlem wasn't like that. Yes, there were streets you avoided, but most of the people worked every day, loved their families, befriended their neighbors black and Latino. Questlove gives us alternative footage of neighbors gathered on stoops with instruments singing and dancing; kids engineering water games with intertwined hoses, smiling entrepeneurs with customers. Lin Miranda, former councilman, with his son the famous composer, remembers Harlem as a supportive, vibrant community. (I recently heard an interview with novelist James McBride about Harlem that same year, the setting for his novel Deacon King Kong.)

Crowd Touches Performers That's the Harlem we see at the festival, a crowd whose positive energy uplifted the performers. Today Marilyn McCoo admits to feeling trepidation before she stepped onstage with her group The Fifth Dimension, even though they'd had the best-selling single of the year. White consumers had made "Aquarius" a hit, but McCoo explains that the group was criticized for not sounding black enough. In the footage from that Sunday in 1969, when that Broadway song melds into a gospel chorus "Let the Sunshine In," a gospel veteran in the group growls and shouts encouragement to the crowd, bringing an upswell of enthusiasm and warmth. Watching the event today, McCoo tears up.

Gladys Knight was buoyed by the crowd. "That's really where it started," Knight says today as she watches her young self belt "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" while her cousins "the Pips" sing and dance in the background. She looks like a girl in prep school, but one of the commenters says Knight sounded like "the new queen of soul."

Stevie Wonder tells Questlove that he felt the crowd's presence and that the concert was a turning point. At 19, Stevie, formerly "Little Stevie," was already a seasoned performer. I loved his hit that summer, "Ma Cherie Amour," pleasantly arranged for Stevie's supple voice to soar between iterations of the sappy hook. At the festival, Stevie Wonder cuts loose from his pop hit "Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day" to play a wild keyboard improvisation. Soon, he would get full artistic control of his own music and record a micro-opera about poverty ("Living for the City") and and musical essays on faith and spirituality ("Superstition" and "Higher Ground"). While he plays, we get the sense that he's crossing into "higher ground" right there and then.

Successive Sundays focused on genres besides pop. We see and hear about blues, Latin American music, and gospel. Mavis of the Staples Family tells us how, sharing the festival stage with blues artists, she realized that her dad's guitar playing was as much blues as gospel. Subjects tell Questlove that the raised voices and trembling of gospel singing were release, something black people did among themselves free of judgmental white eyes.

I know this from the other side. I judged blues and gospel to be very alienating. I liked when black performers looked what I thought of as classy - the women had straight hair, the men wore formal outfits, everyone stayed cool in the sense of staying dry. I liked black artists who sang within the lines, as when The Fifth Dimension sang "Aquarius," but not when they let loose on "Let The Sunshine In." When the Edwin Hawkins Singers in church robes perform their hit from the time, "O Happy Day," I remember thinking back in 1969 how depressing they sounded. For people like me, Questlove explains to Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air (07/24/2021), a black musician learns early to project the message "We come in peace."

Festival Touches the CrowdQuestlove's selections from those six Sundays in 1969 conveys the message that the festival is also changing the crowd. Clips from the later weeks pick out examples of African motifs on clothes and accessories, dashikis, Afro hair on men and women, a general relaxation of the button-down fashions we saw earlier. We also see the Black Panther uniform, khaki and berets, as the group provided security for the concerts. (NYPD stepped in after the first Sunday turned out not to be a riot.) One of the attendees remembers how he and his buddies at the time had aspired to be singers with identical steps, identical suits. After they saw Sly and the Family Stone, he laughs, "no more identical suits."

The crowd is getting restless when Sly Stone saunters on stage. A witness describes it as a "two-tone" band that included a white guy on drums and both a black and a white woman on trumpet, all wearing their own stuff. In still photos from Sly's days leading a gospel choir, we see a slight young man, buttoned-down and baby-faced. But in 1969, his Afro is a corona, his sideburns give him a commanding look, his shirt is wide open to show his gold chains and sweat-gleaming chest, and in no time he gets the jostling, hooting crowd to clap and sing along.

He sings his hit "Everyday People" --

You love me you hate me
You know me and then
You can't figure out the bag I'm in
I am everyday people

I remember this hit from around third grade because it was funny to me how Sly set a lyric about prejudice to the playground chant "Ring Around the Rosie," which may have been my first taste of musical irony:

There is a yellow one that won't
Accept the black one
That won't accept the red one
That won't accept the white one

Different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and
Scooby dooby dooby
Ooh sha sha

Other verses mock prejudice towards race, class, and style. Sly has the crowd singing along.

In this last part of the documentary, Nina Simone seems to be the bad cop to Sly's sunny good cop. Magisterial in African robes, she strides on stage unsmiling, takes her seat at the piano, and slams chords on the keyboard. Her first number "Mr. Backlash" tells anyone uncomfortable with black gains in the civil rights era to get over it. "I'm gonna leave you with the backlash blues."

By the time Simone enters, Questlove has already given us a capsule history lesson of the civil rights years and backlash with clips of young Charlane Hunter-Gault being met with crowds of white students at the University of Georgia protesting her admission. We've heard Jesse Jackson's memories of King's assassination with clips from the time, and we've seen Boby Kennedy announce King's death -- then be gunned down himself weeks later.

Hunter-Gault has also explained the new significance of the word "black" in 1969, when there was a catch phrases "Black Power" and "Black is Beautiful." A demeaning term in 1960, by 1969 the word had come to connote pride, common heritage, solidarity. She wrote an eleven-page letter that convinced her editor at the New York Times to replace the word "negro" with "black" in a story of hers.

So we appreciate how Simone's performance of her song "Young, Gifted, and Black" uplifts her audience in 1969. Questlove chooses clips of young, hopeful, intent black people in the crowd listening to her song. Looking back, one of Questlove's subjects remembers that Simone sounded "somehow mournful and defiant at the same time."

Simone's final piece in the set is her band's instrumental improvisation while she prowls the stage declaiming someone else's poem from a typed page, "Are you ready?" i.e., to unite, to kill, to "destroy white things." It feels like she has crossed a line, and I bet she'd shoot back with examples of white groups crossing that same line with actions, not words, for 100 years.

But in the end, there was no violence and nothing to make headline news; the memory of the festival faded. The reels of the film sat in a basement for five decades.

What lasts? "It was the birth of 'black' as a brand," quipped David Brancaccio, host of NPR's Marketplace (07/21/2021). The new "Philadelphia sound" of soul supplanted Motown adding new black voices to radio; the movie Shaft in 1971 was the first to feature a sexy black action hero, ushering in an era of "blaxploitation" movies; we had a proliferation of TV shows featuring black stars ( Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and comedian Flip Wilson's show).

A middle-aged black man, filmed as he watches the footage, says that it's "beautiful" as he remembered it. "I wasn't crazy!" he laughs. But he's also crying.

Why? The festival celebrated a kind of coming out after a year outstanding for contention, violence, and disappointment. Then it was forgotten. Now we have Summer of Soul in 2021 after 2020, another year for the record books.

I reacted, too, seeing how much I'd had to learn to appreciate the beauty of people very different from me in many ways. Of course, the movie shows how alike we are, too, how much we can all identify with. Summer of Soul gives me a feeling of starting over right, this time.

Happy Mary Magdalene Day (one day late)

[Mary Magdalene has things to say to us today even when we realize that we've confused her with other women. PHOTO: Yvonne Elliman as "Mary Magdalene" is anointing Ted Neeley as "Jesus" in the film of Jesus Christ Superstar, something M.M. didn't do in the gospels.]

The Church sets aside July 22 to honor the woman who mistook the risen Jesus for a gardener. It's a heart-stopping moment when he says simply, "Mary," and she recognizes the man she calls "Teacher." All four gospels agree that Mary Magdalene remained with Jesus at the crucifixion when his men shied away. All four gospels agree that she's the first person to proclaim the resurrection, for which she's sometimes called "the first apostle." Besides this, we're told that she's one of the women who supported Jesus and the apostles (Mark 15.40, Luke 8.3). Luke adds the intriguing note that "seven demons had gone out of her," by Jesus, we presume.

Historical Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene is not the adultress whom Jesus saved from stoning, Mary of Bethany who sat with Jesus while sister Martha worked in the kitchen, nor the woman who anointed Jesus's feet (unnamed in three gospels, identified in John's gospel as Mary of Bethany). Bart Ehrman, in Peter, Paul, & Mary Magdalene (a title aimed at Boomers) blames a sermon by Pope Gregory in 591 for mashing up different women into a kind of fantasy figure of a promiscuous woman who becomes a repentant servant to men. Ehrman pulls out the Mary Magdalene threads in the gospels and also digs into gnostic literature for numerous passages about her, including a Gospel of Mary.

Ehrman tells us what he infers about the historical woman Mary of Magdala. Historical references supported by archaeological digs suggest that her home town was a cosmopolitan center of leisure activities, like Las Vegas (198). Her "service" to Jesus and the apostles, like that of Joanna listed with her, appears to have been financial support. Whether Mary's wealth came from family, husband, or business, we can only speculate, but Ehrman shows how all three were possible back in the day. (Ehrman, Bart. Peter, Paul, & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.)

By the way, Ehrman emphasizes that the "sinful woman" who anoints Jesus in Luke is neither (1) a prostitute, nor (2) Mary Magdalene, who's introduced in the following chapter. "Sinful woman," in this context, Ehrman writes, could be someone who ate some shrimp (189).

Mary Magdalene Superstar

Setting all that aside, the hybrid Mary Magdalene still appeals to our imagination, even for those uncommitted to Christianity. Exhibit A, what comes first to my mind and Ehrman's when we hear her name, is the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Fifty years after I obsessed over that show, I can still quote from memory Rice's lyrics for the character Mary Magdalene:

I don't know how to love him
I don't see why he moves me
He's a man
He's just a man
And I've had so many men before
in very many ways:
He's just one more.

(OMG - what did my parents think as I sang this along with the 8-track tape in our family stereo?) The worldly woman who gives up her independence to serve an idealist, confused but inspired by a love that isn't carnal -- this is great stuff. It occurs to me that it was also in the zeitgeist ca. 1970, when the story was replicated by flower children and, in a bad way, by Patty Hearst.

[See two reflections on Lloyd Webber: The First Things That Come to Mind (02/2013) and a second look occasioned by his memoir Unmasked (06/2018)]

Modern Magdalene in Poetry Poet Marie Howe explores the hybrid Mary in her collection Magdalene (New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 2017). The book opens with a poem that I heard her read aloud. I'm not alone on the internet in calling this one of my favorite poems of all time. Here's what I blogged about it:

"Magdalene - The Seven Devils" [names] the seven devils that Jesus cast out of Mary Magdalene (Mk 16.9) as if it had happened today:  "The first was that I was very busy."  Other demons include,  "I was worried," and, "envy, disguised as compassion."  But, she goes on tangents and has to start over: "Ok the first was that I was so busy."  The more Howe's Mary Magdalene coiled back, the more tightly wound up in the poem I was, nodding and laughing at feelings I owned. (from Marie Howe: You Must Remember "This" 07/2017)

Its form expresses character and reinforces the content. I'd love to hear the poem recited aloud by a comic, either Tig Notaro's world-weary tone, or Rosie Perez's cheerful Brooklynese, or Dolly Parton's comforting drawl. The poem cries out to be read aloud, no matter who does it.

Other poems in the collection with "Magdalene" in the title seem to form a narrative arc, not necessarily connected to Jesus in Palestine. Magdalene "...on Romance," ": The Addict," "...and the Interior Life," with other poems that lack the Magdalene name, imagine a woman "always sorry / righteous and wrong" ("When I did Wrong" 31), "a door slammer and screamer" ("Magdalene on Romance" 34) addicted to this kind of relationship, who "likes Hell" because

The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then?

I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come.

Then nothing did, and no one.
("Magdalene: The Addict" 36)

From this bottom of the arc, she climbs up in steps that are other poems. Mary Magdalene may not have been the woman nearly stoned, but Howe goes there, anyway. "Magdalene: The Woman Taken in Adultery" imagines the near-death experience; "Next Day" she returns to the scene of the events described in the John 8, "free of the pretense of family now" that her husband and male relations had been ready to kill her -- to see the man who "scribbled in the dust" standing nearby (40).

Perspectives on the rest of the Gospel story follow in the collection: "The Teacher," "The Disciples," "Magdalene on Gethsemane," "Calvary." In "Magdalene Afterwards," the voice that once had seven devils now speaks for many women, with children, without, in heels, in a wheelchair, all "still hungry for I don't know what" "but "sometimes a joy pours through me" (51). Later, in a second poem called "The Teacher," it seems that several teachers are rolled into one who could be the one Magdalene called "Teacher," but her conclusion works regardless:

Can we love without greed? Without wanting to be first?

Everyone wanted to pour his wine, to sit near him at the table.

Me too. Until he was dead.

Then he was with me all the time. (69-70)

Among these "Magdalene" poems are many other poems not directly related. Several concern a fun mother-daughter relationship. The mother suggests, if they're reincarnated, "Next time, you be the mother" (73). "No way Jose" the daughter responds. A slice of life called "Delivery" is a gift -- a man late on a snowy night trudges up flights of stairs past Christmas decorations to deliver packages, and when she asks him about his Jamaican accent, he gives her "a smile so radiant" that she's "a young woman again" remembering "the sweetness of men I've loved" (88).

Next Mary Magdalene Day, let's remember to pour the wine and read Marie Howe's poetry aloud.

[My short essay Out of Ordinary Time (11/2019) includes appreciation for Howe's collection The Kingdom of Ordinary Time]

Theology for Breakfast: Kitchen Reverential

My kitchen was my church during COVID; the Feb-Apr '21 issue of Forward Day by Day suggests how a healthy church should be like a kitchen.

Church is like a kitchen, writes Ellis Reyes Montes for a devotion in March. In the kitchen, his family makes meals, decisions, and stories that contain generations of memory. He writes that, in church,

We gather to remember the stories of faith: of Jesus, of the faithful figures in the Bible, of our congregation. We also gather to share communion, a spiritual meal that has been provided to us through tradition, prayer, and blessing. (Forward Day by Day March 7, 2021)

During COVID, the kitchen was where I taught my seventh grade classes and met both my Education for Ministry cohort and church Vestry. On Sundays, when Atlanta's Episcopal churches were closed, the laptop livestreamed services on the kitchen counter while I cleaned house. I paused to respond "Amen" and "also with you." While the priest prepared the bread and wine, I prepared my lunch. Now I still read Forward Day by Day at my kitchen table every morning with coffee, Bible, and prayer book, with Brandy curled up at my feet.

Articles that struck me reading Forward this past spring concerned worship that I can do alone in my kitchen; other articles in the same issue of Forward remind me why collective worship matters. Pieces for February were by Julie Bowers, special ed teacher in Tucson. Montes wrote for March from his experiences as musician, writer, and lifelong Episcopalian in Houston. Fr. Scott Gunn, Executive Director of Forward, wrote pieces for April.

Alone in the Kitchen "Trust is like a muscle" that can be strengthened with exercise, writes Bowers. Elsewhere she quotes novelist-theologian Frederick Buechner's observation that you shall love the Lord with all your heart eventually becomes "less a command than a promise." I hope so.

Montes, a gardener, sees more than I've seen in Psalm 72.6, "God is like rain." Rain does more good than watering plants, as by "[turning] debris into fertilizer, signaling the seeds to germinate, and encouraging fungi to help with the growing process." Humid air nourishes the plants under the eaves of a roof. "Even when we build barriers," Montes concludes, "God breaks them down and showers us with blessings."

Gunn points out that Satan can't wedge himself between Jesus and God because Jesus had armed himself with Scripture, as I do every day at the kitchen table.

With the Church Gunn hears people say they don't need "organized religion" because they can "find God in a sunset." Why isn't that good enough? Gunn's first answer is that Jesus and his followers do spend a great deal of time going to the synagogue. Gunn admits that he sometimes doesn't feel like going, but "I never regret going to church." I agree. Just this past weekend, the weather forecast gave me good reason to skip church, but I re-arranged my plans to attend anyway. It did me good, and I did a few other people good by being there. Gunn's bottom line is, "We Christians need each other, and we need to hear the message proclaimed."

Montes admits feeling vulnerable at church, being young, Latino, and gay. But he notes how Jesus doesn't dwell on points of difference when he speaks with the woman at the well -- female, foreigner, adulterer. Church should be like that, Montes writes. With his kitchen analogy, he concludes, "At its core, the house of God is where we strengthen our faith."

About being with others in the kitchen, Frederick Buechner wrote

I sometimes think that all the major dramas of my life have taken place in kitchens, and maybe that's because in kitchens there's always something else to fall back on if the going gets tough, like cooking or eating or doing the dishes. And maybe that's the real drama after all -- just keeping yourself alive day after day and cleaning up afterwards. (Buechner. The Book of Bebb. New York: Atheneum, 1984. P. 363.)

Gunn shares a couple of stories about dramas in church. He regrets a vicious letter he once wrote to a church leader:

I wrote ...thinking I was bearing light, holding up some imagined standard. In fact, I was still in darkness. Thanks be to God that Jesus loves us even when we're jerks. And thanks be to God that the leader to whom I wrote was in the light and ready to share it. (April 13, 2021)

In another church, Gunn became aware after a few months had passed that one of the parishioners had once committed "a fairly horrible crime." Asked about how the church accepted this person, another parishioner echoed Jesus in Luke 5.32, asking Gunn who could need church more than they do?

Bowers remembers a mother whose grown son died of a drug overdose. For the funeral, the mother displayed photos of her son in the narthex of the church where attendees would see them on the way into the service: "sweet, swaddled infant, beaming toddler on daddy's shoulders, joyful sports team member, proud high school graduate" (Feb. 2, 2021). Like photos stuck on the kitchen refrigerator, these memories reminded everyone that her son's story was more than its sad ending.

I'm reminded of funerals that started or ended with gatherings in the kitchen. A funeral for my young student Chris ended in his parents' kitchen with trays of food for guests who celebrated the young man's memory. Then I remember when my cousin had succumbed to AIDS, how we all waited with Aunt Blanche in the kitchen while the cars lined up for the drive to the cemetery. All dressed up in black, coffee and snacks on hand, my cousins, their children, and two grandmothers stood or sat watching The Price is Right. The millionaire grandmother yelled at the screen, "I could get that twenty percent cheaper!" We all laughed; then it was time, and the tears started.

Do kitchens show up in Scripture? Mama's boy Jacob mixes stew in the kitchen while his brother Esau outdoors works up an appetite; a poor widow makes miraculous bread for the prophet Elijah; Martha is in the kitchen complaining while Mary attends to Jesus in the next room; the apostles holed in an upper room broil some fish for the resurrected Jesus. That's not a lot of kitchen in scripture, but the idea of church as a place of nourishment, shared activity, and learning to work through the dramas -- that's something to remember.

[Read more about theologian Frederick Buechner's fantastic, insightful, inspiring, and funny novels about the Reverend Leo Bebb in my blogpost Comedy, Fairy Tale, Tragedy: My Favorite Fiction (01/2010)]

[See my page Theology for Breakfast for several years' reflections on outstanding ideas in Forward Day by Day.]

Dementia Diary: Singing and Dancing at the Doctor's

When I told Mom she has jury duty, she remarked with a laugh, "They're not going to want me!" But I couldn't get her to sign the waiver. I positioned the pen in her hand, but she was puzzled and increasingly frustrated trying to figure out what the object in her hand had to do with the line I'd indicated on the form.

During the year of COVID quarantine when I saw Mom very little and always at a distance, her mind was forgetting how to walk, how to say what she wants to say, how to lift a glass of wine to her lips, and how much she used to like wine. Driving to restaurants for brunch the way we used to do pre-pandemic seems to be out of the question, now.

But at the eye doctor's office this afternoon, waiting between various tests and procedures, she remembered key words from songs on Pandora's "Sinatra Radio" station. I crooned, and she held my hand and sometimes kissed it, as Frank and I joined in on Come Fly With Me, Fly Me to the Moon, The Best is Yet to Come, I Only Have Eyes for You, The Tender Trap, plus At Last by Etta James, and They Can't Take That Away From Me by Ella and Louis.

Getting her from the wheelchair to the car presented a challenge. Happily, a couple of technicians from the doctor's office gave me advice. One of them was in the parking lot to talk me through the process:

• Lock the wheel chair alongside the car.
• Standing in the open door, bend down to let her encircle her arms around my neck -- like dancing!
• Grab her around the waist, tugging on pants if needed.
• Dance her around 'til her back faces the carseat, and let her sit.

We're at the stage that the neurologist warned us about in 2012. "She's at the beginning of the second stage of dementia, now. In the third stage, she'll forget how to walk, talk, swallow, and, eventually, to breathe." I'm treasuring this time while I may.

[Below: Mom confronts watermelon at the July 4th picnic. She went from "What is this?" to "MM-good!"]

Cycling America, Virtually: Santa Fe, New Mexico

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366 miles to Santa Fe's Festival Opera House In twelve days on trails around Atlanta, I've pedaled the distance from Arizona to Santa Fe for my virtual tour of places I've lived and loved. To keep up my tradition of riding my age in miles each birthday, I rode 60 miles Tuesday and added two miles to my short ride today.

My connection to Santa Fe is limited to having once priced a week at the famous opera festival some years ago. I hate travel and used to be bored by classic operas, so even considering a trip to Santa Fe was an indication of how important opera had become for me.

My love of the classic repertoire started during act one of Turandot. I remember thinking, "I don't care that the story is stupid; I love it anyway!" Within a few years, the Metropolitan Opera began its "Live in HD" series of broadcasts to theatres, and my mentor Frank Boggs made sure I went to see all the classics with him over several years. [See Remembering Frank Boggs (04/2021)] Later, I was joined by my friends Susan and Suzanne.

My blogposts about operas are only a fraction of what I've enjoyed. I wish I'd written about Girl of the Golden West, Tosca, Macbeth, Boris Gudonov, everything I've ever seen by Donizetti, Peter Grimes, and many others that slip my mind now. I enjoy re-reading my accounts of operas I saw years ago.

• Adams Doctor Atomic staged two ways (11/2008); Nixon in China, "My Favorite Opera" (07/2021)
• Aucoin Eurydice (23/2021) composer Matthew Aucoin, libretto Sarah Ruhl. Great first act.
• Baroque Pastiche Enchanted Island (02/2012)
• Bates The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs (05/2022) composer Mason Bates, libretto Mark Campbell
• Blanchard Two very moving operas by Terence Blanchard, first black composer to be staged by the Met: Fire Shut Up in My Bones, libretto Kasi Lemmons, and Champion [to be posted soon]
• Britten The Turn of the Screw (04/2013)
• Brady Edalat Square (04/2007) student-written production at Emory, moving and distinctive
• Donizetti Daughter of the Regiment (04/2008); In the second half of an essay about "tearing up" for America, I wonder why Donizetti's charming comedy made me cry
• Dun The First Emperor (01/2007) "banishes the critics"
• Gershwin Porgy and Bess (03/2011)
• Glass Akhnaten (12/2019), Kepler (06/2012), Waiting for the Barbarians (07/2008), Satyagraha live at the Met!
• Handel Giulio Cesare (05/2013), a reflection on opera "in its adolescence"
• Heggie Dead Man Walking (02/2019) and Three Decembers (05/2015), including (for the latter) a conversation with the composer and librettist
• Leoncavallo Pagliacci paired with Orff's Carmina Burana: I call it "the elevation of claptrap" (10/2006)
• Massenet Thais (12/2008), "Body and Soul"
• Mozart Marriage of Figaro (05/2008) -- compared to the first Iron Man movie
• Muhly Marnie (11/2018) I marvel at how good our species is getting at the musical theatre thing
• Nyman The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (04/2008) "Nothing Minimal about It"
• Poulenc The Human Voice plus Rossini and LaChiusa (11/2006), a reflection on the special charms of opera
• Puccini Madame Butterfly (03/2009) about the HD Met broadcast, continues to be one of my biggest hits, Il Trittico (04/2007) includes the single greatest change of scenery in my theatre experience
• Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin from the Met (10/2013) and in Atlanta, the first time I saw it (03/2007)
• Rossini The Barber of Seville (11/2006) reflects on how the comedy can exist in the same world as terrorists in Iraq
• Strauss Rosenkavalier (01/2010) is about how the opera treats time, and it's one of my personal bests; Salome (10/2008) weighs the opera's horror against Sweeney Todd
• Verdi Falstaff (12/2013), "Life is Good"; Otello (10/2012), and a reflection on Aida and other Verdi works in Learning to Love Verdi: Transcending his Time (03/2010)

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.

Cycling America, Virtually: Monument Valley, Arizona

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643 miles to Monument Valley AZ In time for July 4th, I've reached the goal I set 30 days ago to ride 643 miles on bike trails around Atlanta, which is the distance from L.A. to Monument Valley, AZ. The site of John Wayne's 1956 movie The Searchers makes a good place and Independence Day makes a good time to pause my virtual tour of the US and dismount for a photo with one of the most familiar American icons of the 20th century.

For The Searchers, director John Ford made Monument Valley an awesome canvas for his drama. The first shot of the movie takes us through a door from darkness of a cabin into the stark sunlit desert; the final shot closes a door on both the epic scenery and the epic, as Wayne walks off into the distance. Ford takes us into caves, down the sides of steep dunes, and up on mesas. In one striking scene, a line of white horsemen become aware they're being shadowed by a line of Comanche warriors on the ridge in the distance.

Being a favorite of my friend Susan, The Searchers gives me a personal connection to the location. I've watched it now, and can see much to appreciate. John Wayne's character Ethan Edwards, a confederate veteran just home from the war, and Henry Brandon's character Chief Cicatriz (or "Scar"), are both on missions of revenge. The emotional kick in the gut from the senseless massacre of an Anglo family early in the story -- only the little daughter Debbie is taken prisoner -- is balanced by Union soldiers' senseless slaughter of Comanche women and children. We've seen one of the Comanche victims before, a good-natured woman who mistakenly understood that she had been made the wife of young Martin, Ethan's adoptive nephew. That's been played for laughs, but when they discover her slaughtered, Ethan covers her face gently and Martin sheds tears.

Edwards has authority, wit, and undeniable charisma; but Martin Pawley, played by Jeffrey Hunter, has all of my sympathy. Throughout the movie, Ethan treats Martin badly for no good reason. Critic Roger Ebert draws attention to Ethan's contempt for his nephew as a "half-breed" who is "one-eighth Comanche." It took me until the middle of the movie -- because I didn't believe what I was hearing -- to realize that the two men have opposing objectives: Martin wants to rescue his adopted sister Debbie, while Ethan plans to execute her for honor's sake. White girls taken back from Comanches are "no longer white," Ethan says. He presumes that she's one of Cicatriz's concubines. None of that matters to Martin, who faces down his uncle's loaded gun, a posse of rangers, and Cicatriz himself to bring his sister back home.

That Martin also plays a juvenile fool in a romantic comedy subplot unfortunately undercuts the gravitas of his performance. So in one scene, he's bravely jumping in front of a gun to protect his sister; minutes later, he's biting the leg of a redneck guitarist to laughs and catcalls. It's pretty hard to reconcile the two strains of the movie.

I'd rather remember the movie for its dramatic main plot and, of course, the beauty of Monument Valley.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.