It amounts to something of an unplanned theme, but music–in one form or another–seems to unite this recent collection of poetry podcasts. Readings of my poems “When Summer Gathered,” “At Paul’s Mall,” “Jitterbug Waltz,” and “What But the Music” are now available right here.
(You can find LANE CHANGE, the book in which these poems appear, as either a paperback or an eBook on Amazon.)
Recently, I was reminded of an interview I did a couple of years ago for Sketchbook, an international journal. The interview was conducted by Sketchbook Contributing Editor Helen Bar-Lev (a wonderful poet as well).
Here’s that discussion from 2012.
“I am about to stop writing about my dead . . .”
Of course, that hasn’t happened. More than ten years after writing this poem, I have had more than enough reason to continue writing about “my dead,” both the long-gone who nevertheless remain powerful presences in my life, and the more recently departed, a number accelerating as I age. This poem had its beginnings in the hospice room of a longtime friend. . .
Filed under Poetry
Thanks to all of you who have made CHILD OF MY CHILD: POEMS AND STORIES FOR GRANDPARENTS an Amazon bestseller again this season!
“I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.”
–Jack Bowman
It was only a cheap, dogeared paperback on the clearance rack of a used book store in upstate New York, a mystery novel I had never heard of by a writer I didn’t know.
So, how could I resist?
For me, hours “squandered” in musty, old bookstores amid often unorganized stacks and shelves full of unimagined treasures and inexplicable junk alike are always hours well-spent. Not only have I discovered in that way any number of wonderful books that otherwise never would have landed in my hands (or my consciousness), but I’ve picked up more of what one friend used to call “literary junk food” than I probably should admit.
Especially the mysteries, my escapist books of choice.
And, sometimes, the mystery only deepens. That was the case with one book I picked up somewhere along the line, only to find several family photos tucked in the pages, hinting at untold stories.
And that was the case with that cheap, dogeared paperback I mentioned above. Besides the intended story, it turned out, some reader before me had scribbled some margin notes that raised questions of their own.
I don’t have a solution for that mystery, of course. But it did prompt me to write this poem:
Marginal Lives
For all we know, or can suspect,
these love lines aren’t worth the paper
they were printed on a dozen years ago—
when “Robert” underlined certain scenes
for “the sexiest trooper in New York”
and underscored their anticipated significance
in neatly inked notes drawn in the now-musty
margins of this paperback detective novel
we come across on the bargain rack
at the secondhand bookstore on Hamilton Street.
“All books this shelf twenty-five cents,”
the sign advises, neglecting to say
there are mysteries between these covers
that the author never contemplated
and we will never solve.
“Marginal Lives” appeared in Memoir (and) Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010
Copyright 2010, 2013 by Kenneth Salzmann
Filed under Poetry
After the late, acclaimed poet W.D. Snodgrass read in a literary series I ran in the late-1980s, he and I went out for dinner, and we talked about a lot of things that night.
How many Pulitzer Prize-winning poets does one small swath of rural New York State need (Hayden Carruth lived nearby and the two shopped in the same little stores)?
At what points do the performance of music and the performance of poetry meet? And diverge?
Why weren’t he and his brother on better terms?
How do you cook fish in a microwave?
He also talked about typewriters, or more accurately the unrealized potential of the newish word processors of the day to improve writing. Since word processors made editing/rewriting something like painless—no need to retype a whole page to insert a better word, say—there should be a marked improvement in the clarity and precision of writing. But was there?
He didn’t think so. Neither did he think microwave ovens had done much for cooking. Except for cooking fish, he said.
These days, of course, typewriters are being rediscovered by the hip (probably more for nostalgia’s sake than out of a quest for the perfect word). And I can’t help but remember that conversation with Snodgrass when I happen across an article like this one.
Filed under Poetry
Once, we had ample time to neglect a garden.
As sometimes happens, that line, those syllables, rattled around in my head for years before finding what seems to be a fitting home in a poem. For now, in any case.
Of course, along the way the line has tried to settle into any number of poems I ultimately discarded, unconvinced that they ‘worked’ in one way or another. In the end–if that is what the published version is–the poem grew ever shorter, more compact, and (I can hope) became a fitting vehicle for the insistent line that demanded it be written.
Planting the Hyacinth Bean Vines
Planting the hyacinth bean vines today
in compost it took us all season to make
from the insistent decay of daily lives rich
in unread newspapers, orange rinds,
eggshells, the cores of apples,
compliant twigs, fallen leaves,
one of us might have thought to say:
“Once we had ample time
to neglect a garden.”
When “Planting the Hyacinth Bean Vines” appeared in print in the wonderful journal Memoir (and), the reader who left a flattering comment on the magazine’s web site couldn’t have known how many years it took to pare a reluctant poem down to nine brief lines that just might merit such generous praise.
Here’s that comment: “Perfectly compressed metaphor. I’m filled with admiration.”
What more could I ask for?
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
–Paul Valery
Seven or eight years ago, I received a letter from a longtime friend, a remarkable woman who first came into my life more than four decades ago as my 12th grade English teacher. The letter told a story, one that speaks volumes about the power of art to touch us deeply, unexpectedly, even inexplicably.
The setting is the highly regarded Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Phyllis Levitt, the retired teacher whose story it is, went on what she assumed would be a pleasant but routine cultural outing.
That’s pretty much what it was, she wrote afterwards. Until she turned a corner and one painting stopped her in her tracks.
She wrote that an unexpected wave of emotion immediately overcame her. She found herself bursting into tears, even before she was near enough to see the roughly 28×36-inch oil painting clearly.
She couldn’t say why she reacted that way, or where that extreme emotion came from. She was reluctant to embrace the easy, mystical explanations that might have come to mind when she moved closer to the painting and realized what she was seeing:
“Wheat Fields at Auvers Under Clouded Sky” was painted in July 1890, making it one of the last works created by Vincent Van Gogh. He committed suicide that same month.
Of course, one way to understand all this is that Phyllis had somehow tuned in directly to Van Gogh’s emotional state when he painted the picture. But there’s another way of thinking about it.
The popular image of Van Gogh is that he was a “mad genius,” and that both his life and his art were consumed by his madness. The reality is he was a disciplined artist with a mastery of color, composition and paint.
Looked at the second way, the emotional intensity of his work was anything but a byproduct of a troubled mind. It was the intended impact of a skilled artist whose vision was matched in every regard by his command of his craft.
In its own way, I think, that explanation of the power of the painting is every bit as “magical” as the first. What do you think? When was the last time you saw or heard a work of creative genius not with your eyes or ears, but in your marrow?
“I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say, ‘He feels deeply, he feels tenderly.’”
–Vincent van Gogh
Filed under Art and artists
CHILD OF MY CHILD was born in April, 2009, along with its flesh and blood twin, Josephine, 7 pounds, 6 ounces upon arrival.
In truth, we didn’t quite know at the time that a book had been born.
All of our attention was focused instead on one small child who had just reshaped our lives and changed our identities in ways we are still discovering. But it was inevitable that, sooner or later, we would look for a literary response to Josie’s life-changing presence, given our own backgrounds and sensibilities.
For me, Josie’s birth brought the seemingly straightforward passage into grandparenthood. That joy, however, was necessarily tempered by the awareness that her Grandmother Diana, my wife of nearly thirty years, did not live to see our only child become a father. For Sandi, who is now my wife, Josie brought joy as well, along with a flood of questions about the place she would have in Josie’s life as a step-grandmother.
We realized then that being a grandparent in the 21st century brings both timeless joys and sometimes harrowing challenges. Families fracture and recombine, often muddying traditional roles. For some, becoming a grandparent also means becoming a caretaker again.
For some, becoming a grandparent is an insistent call to look themselves or their own children in the face and take account. For others, not being a grandparent is a kind of loss. For many, that grandchild arrives bundled in equal parts hope and fear, because the baby’s parents may have struggled with substance abuse, financial or legal problems, or other demons. Sometimes, people become grandparents, but only learn that fact years later, as one poem here explores.
And, perhaps for all, the arrival of a new generation brings undeniable evidence of aging and mortality. That may be a particularly tough pill to swallow for the millions of Baby Boomers who have aged into this new role (and sometimes bristle at taking on traditional grandparent names).
When we decided to create this anthology and began soliciting contributions, Sandi and I suspected that some of these issues and concerns would be reflected and examined in the work we would receive. The mountain of submissions we received, however, brought many unexpected stories, too—along with much more excellent material than we possibly could use in a single volume. In assembling the collection, we have been blessed to have the always wise, sometimes surprising, sometimes challenging, prose and poetry of more than five dozen highly accomplished writers as our building material.
We are grateful to each of them and proud to include their work in CHILD OF MY CHILD.
That title, by the way, is borrowed from a wonderfully resonant image offered up, in slightly different forms, by two contributors to this volume: Barbara Evers and Karen Neuberg. It is both a powerful image in its own right and a fitting umbrella for the wide range of experience and emotion contained in this book.
A BRIEF NOTE TO JOSEPHINE, FROM DIANA
Kenneth Salzmann
Take this quilt and let it blanket you,
in comfort and in loss.
It was stitched just for you
six generations ago.
Ever since, these colorful threads
have run through the lives
of daughters, then mothers,
then grandmothers, then daughters.
Take this quilt and one day
spread it over your own children
and over their children,
in comfort and in loss.
Everything is changing, and will.
But these ancient threads are holding fast.
Filed under Art and artists, Poetry
This article from the Jerusalem Post provides background on Voices Israel and Reuben Rose, whose name is honored in the annual poetry contest I was privileged to judge this year.
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