The Poetry Of Deeds

The MoveOn group, you know them, in-your-face progressive to the point of evangelism, periodically pummels my social media feed with soi-disant “awesome” and “moving” videos, in addition to graphs that sum it all up and posterized quotes from bygone Presidents. I kind of quit watching the videos after one clip proposed to stir my bowels of compassion with the spectacle of tears welling in Al Franken’s eyes (is this some sort of weeper showdown between him and Boehner, or what?), but some random instinct made me click on this one.

From teacher to performance artist: not that big a leap, now is it? Actually, here it says on his website that he is a goddam poet, and not only that but that he makes a living at it, which I guess includes going on stage with what I thought was just a bravura monologue. Whatever. At least he spent nine years in the classroom, which is about eight years, three hundred sixty-four days and twenty-three hours longer than I ever would at the absolute outside, a sobering thing to contemplate. I chose a poem on his site at random.

Tony Steinberg: Brave Seventh Grade Viking Warrior
by Taylor Mali

Have you ever seen a Viking ship made out of popsicle sticks
and balsa wood? Coils of brown thread for ropes,
sixteen oars made out of chopsticks, and a red and yellow sail
made from a ripped piece of a little baby brother’s footie pajamas?
I have.

He died with his sword in his hand and so went straight to heaven.

The Vikings often buried their bravest warriors in ships.
Or set them adrift and on fire, a floating island of flames,
the soul of the brave warrior rising slowly with the smoke.
In order to understand life in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages,
you must understand the construction of the Viking ship.

So here’s what I want the class to do:

I want you to build me a miniature Viking ship.
You have a month to complete this assignment.
You can use whatever materials you want,
but you must all work together.
Like warriors.

These are the projects that I’m known for as a history teacher.
Like the Greek Shield Project.
Or the Marshmallow Catapult Project.
Or the Medieval Castle of Chocolate Cake
(actually, that one was a disaster).
But there was the Egyptian Pyramid Project.
Have you ever seen a family of four
standing around a card table after dinner,
each one holding one triangular side
of a miniature cardboard Egyptian pyramid
until the glue finally dried?
I haven’t either, but Mrs. Steinberg said it took 90 minutes,
and even with the little brother on one side saying,

This is a stupid pyramid, Tony!
If I get Mr. Mali next year, my pyramid
will be designed in such a way that it will not necessitate
us standing here for 90 minutes while the glue dries!
And the Tony on the other side saying,
Shut up! Shut up, you idiot!
If you let go before the glue dries
I will disembowel you with your Sony PlayStation!
It was the best family time they’d spent together since Hanukkah.

He died with his sword in his hand and so went straight to heaven.

Mr. Mali, if that’s true,
that if you died with your sword in your hand
you would go straight to Valhalla,
then if you were, like, an old Viking
and you were about to die of old age,
could you keep your sword right by your bed
so if you ever felt, like, “I think I might die of old age!”
you could reach out and grab it?

If I were a Viking God, I don’t think I would fall for that.
But if I were an old Viking about to die of old age,
that’s exactly what I would do. You’re a genius.

He died with his sword in his hand and so went straight to heaven.

Tony Steinberg had been missing from school for six weeks
before we finally found out what was wrong.
And the 12 boys left whispered the name of the disease
as if you could catch it from saying it too loud.

We’d been warned. The Middle School Head had come to class
and said Tony was coming to school on Friday.
But he’s had a rough time.
The medication he’s taking has made all his hair fall out.
So nobody stare, nobody point, nobody laugh.

I always said I liked teaching in a private school
because I could talk about God
and not be breaking the law.
And I sure talk about God a lot.
Yes, in history, of course, that’s easy:
Even the Egyptian Pyramid Project
is essentially a spiritual exercise.
But how can you teach math and not believe in a God?

A God of perfect points and planes,
surrounded by right angles and arch angels of varying degrees.
Such a God would not give cancer to seventh grade boy;
wouldn’t make his hair fall out from the chemotherapy.
Totally bald in a jacket and tie on Friday morning—
and I don’t just mean Tony Steinberg—
not one single boy in my class had hair that day;
the other 12 had all shaved their heads in solidarity.
Have you ever seen 13 bald-headed seventh grade boys,
all pointing at each other, all staring, all laughing?

I have.

And it’s a beautiful sight.
And almost as striking as 12 boys
six weeks later—now with crew cuts—
on a Saturday morning,
standing outside the synagogue
with heads bowed, holding hands
and standing in a circle
around the smoldering remains
of a miniature Viking ship,
which they have set on fire,
the soul of the brave warrior
rising slowly with the smoke.

Mali. Taylor. “Tony Steinberg: Brave Seventh-­‐Grade Viking Warrior.” The Last Time As We Are. Nashville, TN: Write Bloody Publishing, 2009. Print. (ISBN: 978-­‐0-­‐9821488-­‐7-­‐7)

My heart was begging at every line for Mali to take it back and make it into a poem, a real poem, with cadence and assonance and alliteration — with what little effort you could have done that! I thought. Tell us in a way that makes the words nag at our inner ears, refuse to get out of our heads, sway us to music! — but I can imagine it, like the one he utters in the video, as a performance piece.

And the actual pyre, of popsicle sticks and footie pajama scraps? That was a deed of poetry, deserving of honor. The original class project whiffs more than a little of that old Vikings movie with Ernest Borgnine (who dies sword in hand) and Kirk Douglas (who recedes from the camera’s eye laid out in his ship amidst licking flames). I think of Baldr, dying young and beautiful, betrayed rather than offered a fair fight; burned in his boat (so Snorri tells us) only after a giantess was found to heave the great craft off its rollers and out onto the water.

But that probably is matter for AP classes in sophomore year. We live in an Iron Age when craft and sullen art seem to have leaked out of poetry and not much is left beyond passion and choice of subject. I’m not sure if we’re looking at poetry or revival preaching here; maybe a good teacher embraces a little of both. Still, if we get a story and a deed in which meanings and metaphors are hammered together till the heart staggers a little with them — a task the poem’s language itself ought to do — we are half way home, I guess. The image will stick with me for a while, and I don’t even like kids. That’s something.

Read Full Post »

The Best Cat In The World

Every cat that you ever have is the best cat in the world.

Beezler Boy, found creeping matted and starved out of a sewer drain seventeen years ago, is probably about eighteen this year. His arthritis flared up so badly in late ’07 that I thought we were going to have to let him go, but I crossed paths with an acupuncturist who made a very reasonable arrangement to come around and stick him full of needles at intervals, and he is back to jumping up in the easy chair, though he lets himself down more gingerly, because he’s just about completely blind.

Getting down involves an intermediate step to a small cat condo, you know the things, carpet covered cylinders too small for a big old Mainie like Beez. If his forepaw doesn’t detect the top of the cylinder when he wants to debark from the chair, he feels around, and if I see that happening I move it where he can find it.

He’s stiff and he can’t see, but he seeks out his sunbeam with perfect delight, and sits patiently by his dish when humans have been too busy to notice its emptiness. His grooming is haphazard, and he tolerates my trimming of the occasional belly dreadlock pretty well.You can sometimes see his pupils contracting in bright midday light, but mostly, he progresses around the house with a stately measured gait, so that when he walks head-on into something — it only happens occasionally — he doesn’t do it too hard. When he collides with a table leg or chair corner that he hasn’t calculated for, he just shakes his head and corrects course, uncomplaining.

And we humans raise such a fuss and stew when our newspaper is in the bushes, for instance, or the traffic light is slow to change!

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
–Walt Whitman, 1819-1892

Read Full Post »

Masturbation Without Discipline

There, I bet I’ve guaranteed myself 1000 hits that have nothing to do with what’s on my mind here, which is why does so much modern poetry fall into the category of the post title and why do people pretend it doesn’t?

I get this charming little e-mail called the Writer’s Almanac from National Public Radio, containing curiosa about writers and literature and a daily whop of poetry, most of it contemporary. Every now and then we do get cannonaded by, say, the forge and fire-blast of John Donne. Coleridge, who used that phrase to describe Donne’s poetry, also described it as “meaning’s press and screw,” which tends to make a modern reader sit up, but at least neither of these two gutsy writers was just jerking off.

But somewhere since, oh, Eliot, poetry seems to have deteriorated into an exercise in self-discovery. I have fingers! I have toes! It’s like watching the poet compose his own personal baby book. Today he smiled at daddy! Call all the relatives! Here’s today’s almanac special, and I recognize the name of Kenneth Rexroth as supposedly “important”:

Quietly

Lying here quietly beside you,
My cheek against your firm, quiet thighs,
The calm music of Boccherini
Washing over us in the quiet,
As the sun leaves the housetops and goes
Out over the Pacific, quiet—
So quiet the sun moves beyond us,
So quiet as the sun always goes,
So quiet, our bodies, worn with the
Times and penances of love, our
Brains curled, quiet in their shells, dormant,
Our hearts slow, quiet, reliable
In their interlocked rhythms, the pulse
In your thigh caressing my cheek. Quiet.

I give points for  literate sentences — some people publishing in these our times can’t even do that — but really, what we have here is a ladle of prose broken up into lines of a length visually acceptable as verse. It’s a pretty little portrait of an intimate moment, I guess, though I don’t  see why I should spend any more time on it than on anyone else’s intimate moment; in fact, I almost feel like saying “cover up that lady’s thigh, bud, sorry I walked in on you.” Or was that what he was after?

Once in a while someone manages to get beyond the daily and personal to say something important or clever enough that everyone should hear it, but even then, I’m reading a string of nicely composed sentences without any special form or pattern; from where I sit, it seems that in university departments and poetry cafes across the country, earnest folk without a serious work ethic are seeking praise for playing with themselves.

What happened to the chanting rhythms that rock us down into the unconscious where the big waves are born? What happened to the massed sounds of alliteration and the homecoming of a good rhyme? I’ll even take an assonance, or an “assy-thingummy” as an annoyed schoolboy says in one of C. S. Lewis’ tales (Lewis, himself apt with a verse, can get away with that kind of thing).

Goddammit, people! I don’t care that you had a sensitive little feeling that you can’t  be bothered to hammer into a real verse because you’re in such a hurry for everyone to come around and look at it like it was baby’s new tooth! Tell me about something that isn’t all about you and your suburban anomie, tell me about something the size of the world. Knock me over, ravish me, make me sway back and forth repeating your words with tears on my cheeks. Auden could do it, Yeats could do it, even an old jingo bastard like Kipling could do it, so what is wrong with you? Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

Read Full Post »