Never Get Used to Derek Walcott's Poetry

Never get used to this begins Derek Walcott in a poem from The Bounty (1997). That could mean, "Wow, I never do get used to this" or, "Note to Self: never allow yourself to get used to this!" Walcott always means both/and not either/or.

This in context means both sunrise over the ocean viewed from the Caribbean island St. Lucia, where he was born, and the craft by which he explored that ocean -- craft meaning both a boat such as the one he sees on the horizon and the craft of writing poetry. Though he feels his gift fading out of this page and gently mocks the poetry of his younger self -- what did it know of death? Only what you had read of it -- he is grateful. He plays with phrases from Roman Catholic practice, the Ave Maria when he replaces ocean "waves" with Aves, the rosary in regard to the surf fingering its beads, and "Hail Mary full of grace" with hail heron and gull full of grace. Joking aside, he tells himself that he has come to his end praising and giving thanks. By the end of the poem, he's thinking of the same seascape at night, and the yachts studying their reflections in the water like black glass -- which suggests both literal boats and a peripatetic Nobel-prize-winner pondering his life.

This poem set off fireworks in the margins of my copy from Selected Poems (Edward Baugh, ed., 2007), where my pen made arcs, stars, and circles to mark all those both/ands and other features: the stately iambic pace; rhymes and other wordplay; his painter's eye for visual details; healthy self-deprecation; the horizon where, in numerous poems, he sees both his home when he's away and the world beyond when he's home; and gratitude that toes the edge of faith but never wades in. I wrote a note on the back flap that this one poem encapsulates what I've learned to enjoy in all of Walcott's work.

I wrote the same note about a dozen more of his poems, at least. In all my notes, I've been telling myself Never get used to -- and never forget:

• His visit to Arkansas, ca. 1986. Walking before sunrise from his hotel past a Confederate memorial, he is suddenly aware that police nearby would likely take interest in a large black man out at that hour. In the silence that falls when he enters the diner, A fork clicks / on its plate; a cough's rifle shot / shivers the chandeliered room. The allusions to a rifle and trigger bring an overtone of violence into a mundane scene, typical of how Walcott regularly layers metaphorical meaning over literal details. ("Arkansas Testament" 203)
• A belfry like the exclamation point at the end of a Swiss village (from The Prodigal 289)
• A hotel worker in Rome who also embodies Rome in herself:

  She stacks up the popes like towels in cathedral drawers;
  now in her stone kitchen, under the domes of onions,
  she slices a light, as thick as cheese, into epochs. (from Midsummer, II, 174)

• Coming home from the beach with his twin brother used to be such a thing! he remembers in The Prodigal (295): The body would be singing / with salt, the sunlight hummed through the skin and iced water was a gasping benediction
• A walk up a hill to a baptism at an Episcopal church in Laventile, Trinidad in a 1965 poem is also a journey through class and time. To go downhill from here, he writes, is to ascend in socio-economic class. Thinking of the Middle Passage through which all their ancestors arrived here, Walcott sees that the poor there are still clamped below their hatch, / breeding like felonies / whose lives revolve around prison, graveyard, church. Walcott mocks the pretensions of the Episcopalians who have given themselves whole-heartedly to the rites and ways of their old colonial overlords.
• The comedy of a middle-aged poet, world traveller, jostled on public transport by working-class people from the neighborhood where he grew up. He admires the beautiful young woman across the aisle as if he were painting her, calling her the light of the world. After a basket-laden old woman on the street yells at the driver, Pas quittez moi a terre, literally, don't leave me on this earth, Walcott rings changes on her phrase to the point of feeling guilty for having abandoned his people on this earth. Ready to weep, he exits the bus at his luxury hotel, only to be given another light in an act of kindness by the driver. ("The Light of the World" 184)
• Gentle assurance from beyond the grave to a family grieving for a child

  I am not young now, nor old, not a child, nor a bud

  snipped before it flowered, I am part of the muscle
  of a galloping lion, or a bird keeping low over

  dark canes; and what, in your sorrow, in our faces
  howling like statues, you call a goodbye

  is--I wish you would listen to me--a different welcome... ("For Adrian" 196).

Allegations of sexual harassment surfaced after Walcott's death in 2017. I'm not surprised: I don't sense that he took women seriously. Except for Walcott's mother, women do not have a voice in the poems I've read. They are described by their attractive parts. In contrast, Walcott writes long poems dedicated to his male friends, including Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney, in which he focuses on their writing, their ideas, their conversations, their virtues. Even Walcott's numerous wives are mentioned only with passing regret for his not caring enough for them.

So, like many poets, he may not have lived up to his best work. I know little about Walcott beyond what's in the verses. Some of those got too specialized for me -- I couldn't make headway through Omeros, his Nobel-prize winning transposition of the Odyssey to the Caribbean of his childhood. Tiepelo's Hound, which is both a biography of a Renaissance painter and a memoir of his own artistic development, has great moments, but reading it was like solving a puzzle.

Even so, his precise language and rich layering of metaphor on reality serve largely to express praise and gratitude. As Robert Frost said about poetry in general, reading the poetry of Derek Walcott "is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget."

Trust No One in "Sulfur Springs," Cork O'Connor Series #16

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To keep his crime series fresh, author William Kent Krueger takes his detective Cork O'Connor somewhere new around every five novels. In other books, we've come to know Cork, his growing family, and his hometown of Aurora on the edge of the Ojibwe reservation. He's spent some time in Chicago, mountains out west, and north of the Canada border. But Krueger sometimes takes us deep into communities far from Aurora in Copper River (#6 in the series), in Northwest Angle (#11) and in one I've read most recently, Sulfur Springs (#16).

The precipitating action is a phone message to Rainy Bisonette, longtime lover of Cork, now his wife. Her son Peter out in Arizona leaves a garbled message through heavy static about someone named "Rodriguez," that he has "killed him," and "they'll be looking for me." He doesn't return urgent calls from his mother and Cork, so they board a plane for Arizona.

The town of Sulfur Springs is Aurora's opposite: oppressively hot and arid, on edge because of drug trade and illegal migration from the southern border. Nearly everyone who speaks to Cork tells him to "trust no one but family" in Sulfur Springs. Trust and doubt color the entire novel, leaving no one untouched, not even Rainy, whose previous marriage to a drug lord named Mondragon is news to Cork. Still, Krueger gives us rich description to show the beauty and danger of nature in this unfamiliar setting.

In this novel, Krueger develops further the theme of the ogichidaa, an Ojibwe word for the kind of person Cork is, a "guardian" for his people. Rainy's son Peter turns out to be one of these, a leader who is safeguarding migrants from both a rapacious drug gang and a racist vigilante group. Watching the relationship develop between Cork and Peter is a highlight of the novel, especially when Peter is involved in a confrontation between his natural father and his adopted one. When Cork tells him he's a part of Cork's life, now, Peter asks, "Like family?" "No, not like. Family." (276)

I come away from the novel with impressions of two strong scenes that parallel each other. In both scenes, Cork, Rainy, and her ex face a young man involved in the drug trade. In the second instance, it's the son of drug lord Rodriguez, a privileged young man shielded from consequences until the moment that Cork gets the drop on him. At the earlier instance, the young man is younger than 20, shares the name Pedro with Rainy's son, and sobs when Mondragon orders him shot. Rainy intervenes, and Cork tells us

I saw what Rainy saw, a kid way over his head in something that he regretted now because of the present consequences but that, if he survived and grew wise, he might regret later for all the right reasons. (171)

Later, Cork reflects on how he has often tried not to think of his opponents as human beings, to shield himself emotionally when having to use deadly force.

But Pedro had had a profound impact on me. He wasn't much younger than my own son, Stephen. He'd come from a small village, and God knows how he'd gotten himself mixed up with people like the Rodriguezes. Maybe those [other gang members killed in a shootout] were no different.... Every child is born a clean sheet of possibility, and no mother dreams of her beautiful baby ending up dead in an alley or rotting in the black of a forgotten mine. (175)

Krueger has always orchestrated his stories to reach suspenseful high-impact showdowns. This is no exception.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

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Theology for Breakfast: "Forward Day by Day" Nov-Dec 2022 | Jan 2023

Every morning I read the day's meditation on scripture in the quarterly Forward Day by Day, and every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

November 2022
English teacher Todd Hague of Tyler, TX began his meditations on All Saints Day with the confession that he experienced a lot of suffering in the preceding 12 months. With that in mind, I was drawn to comfort he finds in harsh sayings:

• The raging seas that cover the earth symbolize chaos in Sirach 43.23, but "the Lord places islands in it." Hague says friends and church can be "islands" in our lives.
• "Sometimes guilt is like a physical malady," Hague writes, and the nightmares in Revelation can help us stay awake (Rev 16.15) to "keep watch over our thoughts, intentions, and actions."
• Anyone unwilling to work should not eat is tough love from Paul (2 Thess 3.10-11) also proclaimed to the upper-class idlers at Jamestown. (For middle schoolers, I called it "the thesis sentence for America.") Hague finds its spiritual application:"when fulfillment comes too easily, it sours...Empty pleasures that require nothing of us fail to feed us."
• When Paul seems harsh, Hague remembers that "much of Paul's ministry involved breaking through old centers of tribalism and traditions." Hague admits, "I have very little in common with many people in my congregation... But we kneel at the same communion rail and confess our sins to the same Christ."
• Zebedee was probably dismayed when his sons James and John left him in his fishing boat literally holding the bag: there went all of his expectations for the future. Hague asks, "What expectations can you let die so that you might live more fully in Christ?"
• Psalm 102.2-4 expresses misery, My days drift by like smoke, but Hague offers an image from cowboy author Louis L'amour's book of poetry Smoke from this Altar. A lone figure sits at a campfire under the stars, smoke rising. For L'amour, it's an image of prayer.

December 2022After a career in marketing and communications, Sallie Schisler was called to ministry in southern Ohio. What stands out for me in her meditations are practical ways to tame demons in our personal lives.

Schisler remembers "The Devil made me do it," a catch phrase for comedian Flip Wilson. But "no one's laughing" when Satan enters Judas, who then betrays Jesus. Rage is one reaction to betrayal, but Psalm 37.9, appointed for that same day, reminds us, "rage... leads only to evil." Schisler recommends we get help with our feelings of anger and "set small goals" for dealing with our sense of powerlessness. (I'd just had a financial setback; a small goal to save just $60 a week helped me to regain a sense of security.)

The small blossoms on a fig tree are signs of the coming of spring, Jesus observes. Schisler reminds us how our "smallest actions" can be signs of God's love for others.

In a couple of scriptures, Schisler simply warns us that these aren't just stories of the past.

• 2 Peter 2.19 people are slaves to whatever masters them goes with the scientific conclusion that we're "wired" for addiction. Schisler cites addictions to work, shopping, and various substances, and I recognize myself and people close to me in that list.
• We can't take comfort in the fact that Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents was long ago: "There are many ways to kill our children," Schisler cautions.

January 2023 Elis Lui is the youth minister at Christ Church in Bronxville NY. She finds messages that appeal to youth and retirees alike.

New things I now declare (Is 42.9) puts Lui in mind of the "quirks and different perspectives" her church members "bring to the shared table." We're not to pretend we don't see those differences, but are to allow love to supersede them. Likewise, Eph 4.9 gives us Paul imprisoned telling us that "captivity is captive." We can't pretend not to suffer, she says, but pain and loss do not have to "define our lives."

Rabbis gave Lui some insights. When God asks Cain what's happened to Abel, Cain answers sarcastically, "Am I my brother's keeper?" One Rabbi said that all of scripture and the rabbinic tradition can be summed up in God's unspoken response: Yes, you are your brother's keeper. Another Rabbi told her that we should carry two slips of paper with us at all times, a different message on each: the world was created for me and I am but ashes and dust. "Wisdom," he told her, "is learning when to read which slip of paper."

Lui tells how she suddenly heard familiar scriptures in new ways. God shall give you your heart's desires (Ps 37.4) sounded to her like a promise to give her stuff; with a shift in emphasis, it means that God will let her know what her heart truly desires. That saying by Jesus that only those who do God's will are his brother and sister and mother sounded like he's disowning his family; Lui takes it as an opening to imagine God the Father as also God the Mother, the Sister, the Brother -- and she challenges us to begin our prayers to God from those different angles.

Lui recounts times when disciples do not recognize Jesus until he makes a small word or gesture: walking on water unrecognized, he tells them not to be afraid; mistaken for the gardener, he simply says Mary's name; at Emmaus, he breaks the bread to share it. Lui concludes,

Where might you be overlooking Jesus in your life? Saint Benedict reminds us to welcome every stranger as Christ himself. At every turn, it is a small intimate action that only Jesus would know that reveals God to us: the breaking of bread with our community, the quiet reassurance to take heart even in times of trouble, the quiet whisper of our own name.

A line from Gal 4.9 about coming to know God [and] to be known by God recognizes that we are works in process. By coincidence, I read that just after I'd run across an analogy by crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (friend of C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien), who sees similarity between God's relationship to us and her relationship to the characters in her novels: they exist solely by and through her, yet her intentions for them change as they develop through their stories. Lui writes a reassurance that must be especially welcome to adolescents, "God delights when we grow and change into more of who we were created to be."

"Assassins" on Target

When a production of Assassins hits its target, it sometimes kills the applause. How do you clap when you're cringing?

In the 1990 musical by book writer John Weidman and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the characters are drawn from history, all the misfits who've aimed guns at U.S.Presidents from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. Their delusions make us laugh, but their earnest self-justifications can make us profoundly uncomfortable.

After a pause to show that the assassins' methods and views are not necessarily those of the audience, we cheered this past weekend at the Jennie Anderson Theatre in Marietta GA to tell the actors and musicians how we appreciated the expressive pitch-perfect voices, flawless performance of music that demanded precision, and commitment to playing characters who could easily have been presented as caricatures.

L-R: Byck, Guiteau, Fromme, Zangara, Booth, Oswald, Czolgosz, Moore, Hinckley

The cast made strong impressions:

• Michael Joshua Williams in a grimy Santa suit as unemployed tire salesman Samuel Byck in tears because he can't tell from the media what is true anymore;
• Lukas Chaviano as Charles Guiteau, with a warm smile and tireless optimism right up to the moment he faces the noose -- and then summons the will to accept that, too;
• Cameron Scofield as hippie Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Jessica Miesel as scatterbrained suburban housewife Sarah Jane Moore, abandoned by everyone else, bonding with each other over Charles Manson;
• Chase Sumner as college dropout John Hinckley, Jr., taunted by Fromme for never having a girl friend and joining her in a soft-rock duet addressed to their idols (Jodie Foster and Manson);
• Claudio Pestana as immigrant ditch-digger Giuseppi Zangara who "never had no chance" and doesn't care about his target "so long as it's king";
• Marcus Hopkins-Turner as factory worker Leon Czolgosz, dignified, lonely, brooding on the injustice of his position;
• Jordan Patrick as hapless Lee Harvey Oswald, with his soft admission, "yes," all he wants is for someone to care about him (even if it's hatred they feel); and
• Craig Smith as John Wilkes Booth, lamenting in the score's most beautiful musical passage "the country is not what it was / when there's blood in the clover" a few measures before he sings the score's ugliest lyric.

As quasi-emcees, Ithica Tell gave her rich low voice to the "Proprietor" in the opening song, and cheerful "Balladeer" Skyler Brown looked genuinely stricken when his optimistic paean to the American Dream is overwhelmed by "Another National Anthem" for "the ones who can't get in to the ballpark."

This was a "concert version" that didn't have, and didn't need, a set. Director Clifton Guterman made a striking and meaningful backdrop from a vast American flag on which images of the assassins' targets were projected. Under the flag, the orchestra sat in full view upstage of most of the action. Around a central platform just large enough to bear 11 actors, a semicircle of chairs gave the assassins a place to watch each others' scenes. In a nice touch, director Clifton Guterman suited each chair to the character and their time: an ornate white rattan chair for Booth, a 70s easy chair from the Hinckley family basement, and even an airplane seat for Byck, who planned to hijack a jet to drop on Richard Nixon's White House.

The effect of the assassins rising from their chairs to join Oswald on that platform was creepy enough to make me catch my breath, and yet it felt like what the whole show was heading to: the misfits who couldn't connect to anyone in their lives connect to each other through Oswald's assassination of Kennedy. Booth calls it "the real conspiracy."

The orchestra, conducted by Holt McCarley, sounded bigger than they were and better than I've heard outside of New York. As Sondheim often interweaves different musics for different characters to tell their stories (e.g., a Sousa march for American tourists plays parallel to a tarantella for the Italian assassin Zangara), it was fun to watch McCarley corral all the moving pieces through tempo changes to reach climactic points together -- gunshots, an electrocution, a hanging. Being able to see the orchestra was a plus.

Because this production didn't include supporting actors, assassins variously doubled as a soldier, a reporter, and bystanders. Without an actress to play Emma Goldman, this production cut the scene at a train station where Czolgosz offers to carry luggage for the socialist orator. Perceiving how the man is lonely and ashamed of his scars from his work in a furnace, she touches his face and tells him that his scars make him beautiful. It's the only tender moment in the script, and I missed it.

The cast shortage did give the actors the opportunity to play sympathetic characters for a song late in the show, "Something Just Broke." Sondheim interweaves stories from everyday Americans across the decades who recall where they were when they learned "the President's been shot." They didn't have to like the President to agree that "Something just spoke, / something I wish I hadn't heard."

The line acquired new resonance with the January 6 insurrection. I wish it hadn't.

Earlier Posts about Assassins
[See my Sondheim page for curated links to my articles about the composer, his craft, his colleagues, and his shows. I wrote about Joe Mantello's production of Assassins in 2004 with Neil Patrick Harris as both "Balladeer" and "Oswald." After seeing several productions around Atlanta, I wrote in 2012 how low budgets and even vocal weakness don't diminish the show's emotional impact. See Sondheim Mini-Festival in Atlanta.]

Books 14 and 15 in the Cork O'Connor Series: Deep "Canyon"

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For books 14 and 15 of the series featuring detective Cork O'Connor, author William Kent Krueger dreamed up two of his most memorable openings. These two books also give us two halves of one arc in a crisis for the hero Cork, whose loved ones observe to each other that he has lost something essential. The friends and family who support him through his trouble grow both in number and in depth.

Windigo Island Readers of the series know from Ojibwe tradition that the cannibal spirit called a "windigo" will call the name of its next victim in the wind, and that the only way to defeat a windigo is to become one.

This novel opens with Native boys in their early teens who canoe to Windigo Island for a daring stunt. As a long-time middle school teacher, I can attest to Krueger's accuracy and sympathy depicting this age: we're fully on the boys' side when the weather turns suddenly and the wind calls out one name. Then they see the creature.

Chapter two involves the detective and his grown daughter Jenny in the search for two missing Native girls in their teens. As the trail leads quickly into the business of child trafficking led by a brute named Windigo, Cork's anger grows until, some chapters later, he is becoming what he opposes. Cork gave up firearms earlier in the series, but here he aims a gun at a man's old dog. A new character, Daniel English, tells Jenny, "Something [in Cork] died there." It's a relief that Krueger shifts away from Cork to tell the story through Jenny's perceptions.

Krueger alludes many times to a tribal adage, that two wolves battle inside all of us, Love and Fear: the one we feed will win. In Windigo Island, there's a lot to fear -- powerful men with guns, flame, explosions -- but the fear of disappointing a loved one is strongest.

Manitou Canyon Krueger frontloads this story with foreboding. A band of Natives, including a woman, a tall man, and a teenaged boy with a rifle encamp above a secluded lake. The boy learns that the name of his target is Cork O'Connor. He sights the shoreline, and the woman behind him whispers "Bang."

In the pages that follow, Krueger sets Cork on a hunt for a millionaire engineer, once Cork's friend in childhood, missing from a fishing trip on that same lake.

Visions, important to the Ojibwe traditions of Cork's family, deepen the dread. Cork's memories of failures and fatalities in Novembers of other years make this November "cruelest" month. His loved ones sense that he has changed. His son Stephen comes home early from a vision quest because he has such a strong sense of danger enveloping his father. And a new character, Leah, still angry after five decades that the Ojibwe healer Henry Meloux rejected her, now comes to him for help, terrified from her waking dream: hundreds of fish with human faces, gasping, drowning. 

Stephen and Cork come to recognitions about their roles in life as healer and guardian, respectively.

While this novel goes to dark places, there are buds of hope along the way that open as in time-lapse photography to make this novel a bouquet of reconciliation and gratitude. How many detective novels have ever left me feeling that way? I can't think of one.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

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Tom Wayman Works: Poems 1973-1993

In "What Good Poems are For," a man in his 50s reads one of Tom Wayman's works to strangers in a bar because the poem was about work he did, what he knew about, / written by somebody like himself ("What Good Poems are For," Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993). The poem could've been any number of Wayman's works that come at industry from different angles.

In "The Factory Hour" (68), the poet depicts the work day as a voyage on the blue tide of the early morning sun. The workers share experiences of car pools, the grey plastic lunch bucket and safety boots. Walking in through the asphalt yard / we enter the hull of the vessel for a voyage marked by the sounds of machines, the drone of the PA system, and short breaks. We're immersed in the sounds and feeling of the journey.

One of the co-workers named by the PA gets his own poem on the next page of Wayman's collection, a paean to the experience of the iron itself, dormant for eons before it's pulled into the light and transformed miraculously to bolts with purpose ("Neil Watt's Poem" 70). Playful in its personification and language (the iron proclaims We are ore), the poem conveys awe, admiration, and pride. In another poem, one worker's steady beat draws all the men into a joyful jam/dance. The foreman goes away shaking his head ("Industrial Music" 100).

The foreman is a bad guy, or at least incompetent, in many of Wayman's poems. The foreman harangues his workers to go faster, but when they team up to finish ahead of schedule -- showing how superfluous he is -- he obstructs them ("Asphalt Hours, Asphalt Air" 155). The foreman at the sugar silo who's supposed to monitor safety from uptop is MIA while men deep in the silo risk their lives ("One Lump or Two" 201). When Wayman, just hired, asks to be trained for his dangerous new job, the foreman says only, "Nothing to worry about... Can you start tomorrow?" ("Wayman in the Workforce: Actively Seeking Employment" 66). The foreman in "Factory Time" is so polite on Friday afternoon, long cheques dripping out of his hands (102).

Why should the foreman earn more than the ones who exhaust their bodies all day? "Socialism" in Canada wasn't such a dirty word in the 1970s the way it has been in the US, but Wayman still doesn't hammer us with Marx. Some of these poems did wear me down, ones that seem like documentaries, in which Wayman gives distinctive voices to many men and women on the workforce. I prefer the playfulness in "Paper, Scissors, Stone" (192), which makes a children's game of figuring the worth of work:

An executive's salary for working with paper
beats the wage in a metal shop operating shears
which beats what a gardener earns arranging stone.

But the pay for a surgeon's use of scissors
is larger than that of a heavy equipment driver removing stone
which in turn beats a secretary's cheque for handling paper.

Wayman figures everyone should be paid the same for their time. Sixteen years earlier, figuring how hourly expenses squeeze hourly wages every hour of the day, Wayman gives us this delightful vision of harmony and justice:

...every bright season, chemical workers
in the factory of the leaf
effortlessly, without wages, and with everything they want
change sunshine and water into a living thing ("It is Seven O'clock" 41).

So Wayman's poems give us trees and sunshine, too, with friendship, love, and whimsy.

He has a dialogue with his poor tired body: "You go to work if you're so keen," / it says. "Me, I'm going back to sleep." ("Routines" 72). He empathizes with "The Feet," so important during the day, but made to lie down naked / in a part of the bed no one visits... with nothing to do, crossed like a blind horse putting his head over the neck of another blind horse (145).

He plays with personification: Some unfamiliar people who call to him from a bar say they're his needs, including talkative Friendship, a guy with hard hat and hammer named Shelter, and the unnamed woman who smiles every time he looks her way. Wayman asks, Shouldn't there be someone here named, uh, New Stereo? ("Meeting Needs" 178). Things get uncomfortable when he asks about "the Major," as in, Major Social Change. His "Kitchen Poem" is both a cooking lesson and an allegory for global inequities (106). [This inspired my poem On Track.]

Wayman comes up to the edge of scorn when he's dealing with consumer culture, but he doesn't forget the humanity of the misguided. Each object in a suburban home "whispers" its four numbers all day long -- purchase date, price, savings, and present worth -- until the woman of the house goes berserk ("Saturday Afternoon in Suburban Richmond" 109). After he tells us that a particular family's TV is like a grandmother, he carries that idea through the day so vividly that it's not a screen I picture in the corner of the family room, but a little old lady talking to herself ("Grandmother" 114). The chatter of radios and the whining of tourists intrude on the reverence of trees gathered at a mountain like worshipers at a cathedral ("The Banffiad: The Silence That is Like a Song" 49).

The title poem of the collection, "Have I Missed Anything?" is Wayman's greatest hit. He gives a special page to it on his website. It was a meme before there were memes, circulated by FAX, posted to professors' office doors, passed around teachers' lounges, often attributed to "Anonymous." It's all the snarky things that come to a teacher's mind when a student returning from absence asks that question.

My gateway to Wayman was "What Good Poems Are For" (1986) from Christian Wiman's anthology Home. Wayman imagines that a poem is like a potted plant on a sunlit windowsill in a lake by a cabin, a decoration you might not notice -- but you'd notice its absence. As I've been writing poems all year, I can identify with Wayman's experience:

Only those who work on the plant
know how slowly it grows
and changes, almost dies from its own causes
or neglect, or how other plants
can be started from this one... (131).

Catching up with 30 more years of Wayman's work, I have work to do.

The Bike in the Piazza: Venice

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Scott Smoot on a bike in Venice, virtually

Since November 8, I've biked 130 miles on trails around Atlanta. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from Milano to 38 miles west of Venice. With inclement biking weather, I've completed the remaining 38 miles swimming at the West Cobb County Aquatic Center. Let's pretend that I swam the canals.

In the photo, I'm in St. Mark's Square, known to locals as Piazza San Marco. Glass barriers have kept out most of the flood waters. At the far end of the square stands the basilica of San Marco, the white building topped by crosses and cupolas.

When Mom and Dad took me along for a visit to Italy in January 1991, demonstrators protested in the piazza. Bombing had just begun in the first Gulf War. Something else that had just begun was CNN, which we could view each night in our hotel.

My strongest emotional connection to this place, however, is music for worship in the basilica composed in 1610 by Claudio Monteverdi, a local musician. Because choirs of singers and instruments at San Marco faced each other in balconies across the nave, Monteverdi often wrote antiphonal pieces for one side to echo the other.

I was still new to the Episcopal Church when a wonderful 2-LP recording of his Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin) came out around 1984. Director Andrew Parrott restored the chanting of the worship service with Monteverdi's music. The Episcopal liturgy helped me to appreciate this Catholic liturgy. I played the album during Saturday afternoons, which I had made my Sabbath (Sundays I was always busy with choir and preparations for class Monday).

Something else I love about the Vespers is Monteverdi's eclectic mix of styles. Plainchant calls us to worship; then comes a grand brass fanfare (from THE first opera, his Orfeo) with chorus singing homophonically -- a first, when composers thought in terms of counterpoint, not chords. Some of it is dance music; "Surge Amica" from the Song of Solomon is a love song by soloist with lute. The mix of styles appealed to me, much the same way that Leonard Bernstein's Mass (11/2013) had done. I emulated both when I studied composition with Dr. James Sclater (11/2015) beginning in 1987.

My title for this blogpost alludes to a wonderful musical by Adam Guettel which I write about in A Little "Light" Music (01/2008).

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Sasha Sagan on the Richness of Ritual

"I was taught to be skeptical, not cynical," Sasha Sagan told an interviewer on NPR this past week. 

She comes from parents famous for their writing and video presentations of a secular, scientific, and humane world view. Her mother Ann Druyan produced Cosmos, the documentary series that made the late Carl Sagan's voice and image familiar nationwide. Sasha Sagan's book For Small Creatures Such as We was the subject of the interview. In her book, she offers the insight that rituals enrich our lives, whether or not we believe in God. 

 Here are a few notes I made after I heard the interview:

• "Every ritual is a portal to another way of being." I can see that, as I experience both the scripted rituals of the Prayer Book and the habitual rituals involved in dog care, friendship, and daily routines -- actions that bond me to another, re-center my thinking, or prepare me to make an effort.
• Knowing that the universe is so huge and we are of so little matter to it makes us more significant, more of a miracle just by our chance existence.
• Her mother's favorite toast at Thanksgiving is, "You don't need to know whom to thank for you to feel thankful."
• Her interviewer mentioned how seeing the moon is a "special event" for her little daughter; Sasha jumped on that as a perfect example of an attitude that she would cultivate.
• Mathematicians have proven that we all breathe in atoms that were breathed out by everyone who ever lived. Simply deep breathing, then, becomes a ritual of connection to all those in history whom we honor, and to all whom we have loved and see no longer.
• The kinds of rituals she has in mind needn't be contrived or solemn. During the early days of COVID, she (or the interviewer?) made a ritual of wiping little hands with the "potion" that sanitized her fingers that had shared the playground with runny-nosed friends. A family she knows will howl at the moon before bedtime. A cab driver eavesdropping on a young couple anxious about their future, told them to lighten up and just sing their ABCs, which they've done every week ever since.

Ritual, I know, can be a control valve that lessens anxiety, a reminder of past joys, a re-adjustment of perspective. My faith is sustained by ritual. Part of that faith is the assurance that God's spirit is working in each of us, whether we know it or not, and the urge to pray or praise is the work of the Spirit in us.