Wednesday, April 22, 2009

ROCKY DE VALERA & THE GRAVEDIGGERS ON THE PODGE & RODGE SHOW

I am not often at a loss for words, especially when it comes to my favorite Irish retro rock ’n’ roll band, Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers. But I’m pushed pretty close to speechlessness by their recent television appearance on RTÉ2’s The Podge and Rodge Show with glamorous “presenter” Caroline Morahan. Hard to imagine them performing “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies . . . but I guess that seeing is believing: ’nuff sed!

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

WHY LYRIC? . . .

Right around a year ago, I had the pleasure of introducing two Boston-based Irish poets to an audience of colleagues and students at UMass Boston in the Global Writing Series sponsored by our MFA Program in Creative Writing. I have known the work of these two poets—and have known both of them as friends—for quite a few years. But I am thinking of them now, in National Poetry Month, relative to an essay I read recently by esteemed literary critic Jonathan Culler: “Why Lyric?” Published in PMLA last year, this essay makes the case for restoring the reading of lyric poems . . . as lyric poems: that is, not as “narratives” that are telling a story, which seems to have become the pro forma way of reading lyrics, but as rich and subtle linguistic and formal constructs (and as “a moment's monument,” perhaps, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti describes a sonnet). As Culler observes: “If narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now—in the reader’s engagement with each line—and teachers and scholars should celebrate its singularity, its difference from narrative.”

So let the celebration of lyric begin with “Corpuscles,” a poem by Mary O’Donoghue from her second book, Among These Winters (Dedalus Press, 2007), that really does both require and reward “the reader’s engagement with each line.” A writer of award-winning fiction as well as poetry, Mary was born in County Clare in the west of Ireland. The author of an earlier volume of poems, Tulle, which was published in 2000, she teaches in the English Department of Babson College.

CORPUSCLES

The train journey is ten hours,
eight states, long. After I finish
my book, finish eavesdropping

on conversations (the sweet-spoken
southern lady who once used her hand-bag
to clobber a man with a hand-gun;

the woman who talks about her driveway,
her diet, how her husband brought four
lobsters home on her birthday,

and she ate one each day with butter;
I want to change seats and cuddle up
to her gusto), I think about your blood

test, how you’ll have the outcome by now.
How they chose the big lively vein
that twists vine-like down your arm,

then they plunged and drew like a sump.
That evening, drops of you pipetted,
a palette enough for a Georgia O’Keefe,

a grid of round red sweets. I have
never seen you bleed, not in the crime
scene way of “bleeding profusely,”

though one nose-bleed was satisfying,
patterning the pillow with flattened
poppies. Even the large gash on your thigh

had turned to nice chitin by the time
I saw it, and itched to prise off a rusty
flake for the pink of skin caught off guard.

And I make awkward boxer-fisted
prayers for your corpuscles, shallow-shaped
bowls, tiny rubber diaphragms.

We talk long-distance late that night. Your voice
is chirrupy, Guinnessy, curious about Virginia.
My heart unfists in one swift graceful systole.

No less than “Corpuscles,” but in a much different way, the title poem of Aidan Rooney’s Tightrope (Gallery Books, 2007) also demands readerly attentiveness to each line to learn both the “how” and the “why” of the domestic tension that can hide behind closed doors. A native of County Monaghan, Aidan has been out in the Boston area for around twenty years, teaching French and English at Thayer Academy in Braintree. His first book of poems, Day Release, was published in 2000. Tightrope was officially launched in Dublin on Holy Thursday of 2008.

TIGHTROPE

Both how, when I pulled the front door
this morning to let the sun in,
some night class of spinner had strung
from one jamb to the other
the flimsiest funicular
that, now a waft of light and air
enters to liven the dusty house,
passes lightning bands of silver
along its barely visible floss
as if to make sure all is clear,
and why, is just beyond us, unless
some huge jump needed to be taken.

Friday, April 10, 2009

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH . . . CONTINUED

“Words alone are certain good.” That is the tenth line in the first poem in William Butler Yeats’s Collected Poems. Pretty conspicuous. Words are also literally “the stuff of poetry.” Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to poems that draw to themselves a reader’s awareness of any and every poem being what W. H. Auden referred to so accurately as “a verbal contraption.” (Auden described his initial engagement with any poem thus: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?”)

Certainly that was part of what caught my eye in “Poem I Cannot Read Aloud,” included in Getting Lost in a City Like This, the hot-off-the-press volume of poems by Jack Anderson. A longtime NYC-based dance writer and critic, Anderson steps lightly with his theme here, yet his deftly-phrased and nicely-balanced free verse couplets (how this poem “works”) leave a satisfying imprint on this reader.

POEM I CANNOT READ ALOUD

There is this ancient word:
Caryatid.

I know what it means,
Am fascinated by its image:

A stoic noble marble maiden
Who props up a building with her head.

There are male caryatids, too.
(Parenthetical question:

What are they called?
Answer at the end of this poem.)

Ever since I first saw that word
I’ve never known how to pronounce it.

Where does the accent fall?
And is the “y” like “eye” or “ee”?

If I ever peeked at a dictionary once,
I forgot what it said,

And I never want
to look it up again.

O mysterious word, be like that maiden,
Stay always patient, stony, mute,

Dear word I must never learn to pronounce
For, should I do so, this poem will crumble,

This poem kept alive
Only by its silence.

So do not ever say
“Caryatid” in my hearing!

(Male caryatids are called atlantes.
Does anyone know how that word in pronounced?)

Jack Anderson’s tenth collection of poems, Getting Lost in a City Like This was sent my way by my friend and colleague Mark Pawlak, one of the founding (and continuing) editors of the book’s publisher, Hanging Loose Press.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

JOHN SCOFIELD AND THE PIETY STREET BAND . . . LIVE AT THE REGATTABAR

For me, the first surprise related to last night’s show at the Regattabar in Cambridge was that I was there. John Scofield and the Piety Street Band sold out all four of their Friday-Saturday weekend performances. Not the biggest fan of Scofield (I have only one of his albums on my iPod, and it’s not among my favorites), I had taken a pass on the first call from a friend organizing fellow guitarists for an outing to the gig. But when an extra ticket became available at almost the last minute, I decided there could be worse ways to spend an hour or so on a Saturday evening, so . . .

So . . . the third surprise was how much I enjoyed the second surprise, which was the type of music that Scofield and his band performed: a rousing 75-minute set of Gospel tunes. A legendary jazz guitarist, Scofield has obviously returned close to his bluesy roots, and he and his fellow Piety Street-ers (Jon Cleary on vocals and keyboards, George Porter, Jr. on bass and Ricky Fataar on drums) gave the packed house a truly engaging show. Apparently the band’s name derives from the name of the street where their recording studio is located in New Orleans . . . which is good to know because there was no pie-in-the-sky piousness to their playing: this was “roots” music, pure and simple—bluesy, funky, and rockin’. While there was no air of irreverence about the band’s performance of traditional Gospel songs (sung mostly by Cleary, whose terrific voice is matched by his awesome piano chops), the choice of music seemed mostly an excuse—a really good excuse—for Scofield and company to stretch out and play multiple variations on the blues.

The dominant musical inflection of the night, then, was unabashedly pentatonic . . . but just when Scofield appeared to have locked himself into that boxy groove, he would bedazzle the there-to-be-bedazzled audience—mostly middle-aged male guitar players by the cut of them (. . . or us!)—with a “How-did-he-do-that?” Houdini-like escape clause (or phrase) pulled from his well-stocked gig bag of jazz tricks. Given that Scofield and company could play such “roots” music in their sleep, the fourth surprise of the night was that there was nothing perfunctory about their performance: they were clearly “feeling it” . . . and so was the audience.

If I were a guessing man, I’d guess that seeing John Scofield and the Piety Street Band “live and in person” could be more “vital” than listening to their recently-released CD, Piety Street, with its cookie-cutter 5-minute versions of the songs that they gave extended treatment to last night. Still, I might just add that album to my iPod: that sort of music doesn’t get old . . .


Postscript (9:30 a.m.):
I just found on YouTube a really interesting documentary video about the making of the Piety Street album: check it out!

Friday, April 3, 2009

SOFT DAY . . .

Somewhere—I think on a bookshelf in my office—I have an anthology of contemporary (at the time) Irish writing that I added to my personal library way back in 1980. I have not looked at it in a while, but I thought of it today as I ventured out into what the Irish would surely call a “soft day” in Boston: a bit foggy with a light mist falling steadily and with a false hint of brightening behind the low overcast. A perfect day to cross the border into the People’s Republic of Cambridge for lunch at Grafton Street in Harvard Square with my friend and colleague Shaun O’Connell and our mutual friend Irish publisher and poet Peter Fallon, who happens to have been co-editor of that long-ago anthology . . . titled Soft Day.

I first met Peter in 1980 when I was in graduate school at the University of Notre Dame and he was out to America promoting that book: I have thus known him longer than I’ve known my wife! Over the years, we’ve crossed paths a half-dozen times or so—each time the occasion involving Peter stepping out of the impressive shadow cast by his primary literary identity as publisher of Gallery Books, the leading poetry press in Ireland for the past four decades, and stepping into the spotlight as a truly fine poet in his own right.

Mostly Peter is a poet of life on and around a family farm in the Irish midlands. “I think it exquisite,” he wrote in the title poem of his volume Winter Work (1983), “to stand in the yard, my feet on the ground, / in cowshit and horseshit and sheepshit.” Obviously, bucolic County Meath could hardly compete for headlines with the poetry of so many of his contemporaries engaging with the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland during that same period. Yet Peter continued to be true to his own small world, and the body of his poetry that has accumulated over several decades testifies to the quiet assertion he makes, relative to the Northern Troubles, in “My Care” (also from Winter Work):

All I ever wanted was
to make a safe house in the midlands.

‘How’s all you care?’ I’m asked.
‘Grand. And yours?’ I don’t repeat
my worry for my care, my country. When I go home
the animals are healthy, safe. There’s that.

There’s that, indeed. And in his most recent volume of poems, The Company of Horses (Gallery Books, 2007), Peter Fallon continues to work finely nuanced variations on the themes of place-centeredness that have defined his writing from the beginning. One poem that I really like from this new volume is “A Winter Solstice,” not just for Peter’s signature engagement with his familiar beloved place in north Meath—here heightened by his wonderful weaving and unweaving of the metaphorical and the literal in the language of the poem—but also for his signature music, those quiet yet certain end rhymes of lines 2, 4, and 6 in each stanza, their mathematical predictability subtly subverted by the poet’s deft management of irregular line length. Peter Fallon is not a prolific poet (this is his first full-length volume of new lyric poems since 1998). He thus makes every word and every line and every stanza count:

A WINTER SOLSTICE

A low sun leans across
the fields of County Meath
like thirty watts behind
a dirty blind. New year begins to breathe
new life into the ground.
The winter wheat begins to teethe.

The tarmac streams like precious ore
beside wrapped bales bright in the glare.
Crows shake like collies by a puddle
blooms of spray, and they declare—
a boy’s voice breaking in the throat
of morning—a prayer

that works to scour the slate
of unimaginable
hurt. We draw breath in the air—
its shapes are almost tangible—
and the breath and sweat of horses
makes a minor mist—beautiful.

And beautiful the light on water
as the age’s newly minted coin.
You’d be hard pressed from here
to tell a withered elm across the Boyne
from an ash that’s hibernating.
Past and present join

in the winter solstice.
The days will stretch and we survive
with losses, yes, and lessons too,
to reap the honey of the hive
of history. The yield of what is given
insists a choice—to live; to thrive.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH . . .

April 1st—and thus the start of National Poetry Month. No fooling . . . and no better time than now to begin to redress the utter absence of poetry from this blog. It’s not that I don’t read poetry (on pretty much a daily basis, no less): it’s more that I just haven’t come up for air much recently from my reading of prose, especially fiction.

But I might as well get this month off on the right foot (metrical and otherwise) with “shout outs” to a couple of poet-friends of mine who have shared their work with me in recent months. The first is Dorothy Shubow Nelson, who last Fall published her first book of poems, The Dream of the Sea. I took my time with this book, picking it up and putting it down, reading it forward and backward over a few weeks. Dorothy shows a real attentiveness to craft in her poems—they are satisfying and gratifying, one after another. But the one that I keep on returning to is actually the one that I just happened to read first, when I flipped open the book for the first time a few months ago:

HORN PLAYERS
Pine Street, Cambridge

Six horn players performed under
our window in the middle of the night

a dissonant modern composition
with unexpected harmonies.

The horns were old, tarnished, gray.
Were we being targeted or praised?

I read that the army was short on buglers—
they were playing reveille on tape.

There’s hunger here and lack of work
no shortage of horn players on this street.

I love the way that the poem “turns” away from its whimsical—almost surreal—opening six lines to hoist some serious thematic weight related to the troubling times that we live in: the painful recognition of both the need for and the shortage of military buglers in this time of high-casualty overseas war along with the compounding irony of the war-complicated economic woes so close to home. This one is a real keeper.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the launch of a fine new literary journal, Consequence, which is dedicated to publishing literary engagements with war in the 21st century. Dorothy has a poem in that inaugural issue of the journal, and so does Kevin Bowen, who is well-known for writing about the Vietnam war from his perspective as a veteran who served with the U.S. Army's 1st Air Cavalry Division in 1968-1969. Consequence is well worth looking into.

And so is Kevin’s latest gathering of poems, Thái Bình / Great Peace—a set of compelling lyrics culled from his various return visits to Vietnam over the past couple of decades. Of the many poems that gripped me in this chapbook, “In the Cu Chi Tourist Zone” is among the most powerful. Part of the reason is that I read it right around the time we read and discussed in my Understanding Literature course Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried,” which has a scene involving the network of tunnels that the U.S. soldiers had to deal with in Vietnam (and that scene inevitably reminds me of the movie Platoon, which captures so graphically the unspeakable stress and strain the soldiers experienced when they had to crawl into those tunnels to ensure they were empty before destroying them). But another reason this poem particularly struck me involves the way that it testifies to the ongoing-ness of the Vietnam war . . . the “collateral damage” that continues to be felt on both sides of the globe. One of the functions of poetry is to provide such testimony:

IN THE CU CHI TOURIST ZONE

After the tunnel crawl, the lecture on methods
of channeling smoke from the kitchens,
care of the wounded, the old woman tells
how she survived the Rome Plows,
listened from her spider hole to the soldiers’
footsteps overhead. But then, something
not in the script happens. The acrid scent
of tear gas drifts through the lean-to.
In a nearby field two boys run from a ditch,
behind them a rusting red fifty-five gallon drum
leaks pink powder down into a water-filled bomb crater.
Call it collateral damage, thirty years later again.