Saturday, March 24, 2012

Happy Birthday to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born on March 24, 1919

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The first two poets I read and loved were Edna St. Vincent Millay and Emily Dickinson; I'd bought, in paperback, a volume's worth of each at the little newsstand/book rack that stood in the hallway outside the Mess Hall at Camp Muenchweiler in Germany.  I don't remember exactly in which other book I came across "Sometime During Eternity ..." by Lawrence Ferlinghetti; probably in a paperback anthology of "beat" writing which I also bought in the hallway.

I was blown away by the iconoclasm as well as the shape of the poem; the synapses in my mind did some push-ups and some jumping jacks; its horizon expanded; the images of crucifixion I'd looked upon at Sacred Heart Church on so many forlorn Sunday mornings throughout my growing-up years now had a different, if no less pitiful, cast to them.



Sometime during eternity
             some guys show up   
and one of them
            who shows up real late
                        is a kind of carpenter   
      from some square-type place
                        like Galilee
          and he starts wailing
                        and claiming he is hip
          to who made heaven
                             and earth
                        and that the cat
         who really laid it on us
                        is his Dad


          And moreover
             he adds
                It’s all writ down
                on some scroll-type parchments   
          which some henchmen
                leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres   
                a long time ago
                    and which you won’t even find   
         for a coupla thousand years or so
                         or at least for
      nineteen hundred and fortyseven
                         of them
                  to be exact
                         and even then
         nobody really believes them
                               or me
                                         for that matter
          You’re hot
                    they tell him
          And they cool him


          They stretch him on the Tree to cool


               And everybody after that
                       is always making models   
                       of this Tree
                             with Him hung up   
          and always crooning His name
                      and calling Him to come down   
                      and sit in
                             on their combo
                      as if he is the king cat
                             who’s got to blow   
                      or they can’t quite make it


        Only he don’t come down
                                   from His Tree
          Him just hang there
                                  on His Tree
          looking real Petered out
                                   and real cool
                                           and also
                 according to a roundup
                                   of late world news   
             from the usual unreliable sources
                                   real dead

                         -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Besides being a great poet, Ferlinghetti is also notable for having co-founded one of the world's most famous bookstores, City Lights in San Francisco.  If I've been to San Francisco seven or eight times then I've been to City Lights seven or eight times, sometimes with a cigarette dangling from my lips.


Ferlinghetti can step out of the bookstore, walk a few paces to Jack Kerouac Alley, and contemplate a memorial that has been set in his honor.


Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Amos Oz

Amos Oz

A co-worker friend in Michigan in the sixties, Joyce Grey, a reed-thin red-head, charmed me when she expressed that she'd been "low sick". I'd not heard the phrase before. That's what I've been the last 3 days ... sore throat, congestion, no pep ... low sick. But I was lucky: a few days earlier I'd spotted a new book by Israeli Amos Oz in the Wellfleet Library. Scenes from Village Life is 182 pages of perfection, and it made yesterday immensely more worth living through.


Oz's autobiography A Tale of Love and Darkness, which I read a few years back, is, along with Andre Aciman's Out of Egypt, Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, and Edward Said's Out of Place, (all autobiographies) among my all-time favorite books.


Saturday, March 10, 2012

Upcoming: March Madness: Thrills! Excitement! Drama! Heart-Tugs!





Bobby Hurley guarding Danny Hurley







Not nice, I know, but I always tell Abby that one of the main purposes of sports is that it allows one to hate harmlessly.
This is one of my favorite pictures of high drama. Bobby Hurley, the older, played for the Duke Blue Devils; his kid brother, Danny, for Seton Hall; they are the sons of the legendary coach of St. Anthony High school in Jersey City, Bob Hurley Sr.

Seton Hall and Duke met in the Sweet Sixteen on March 26, 1992. Bobby Hurley had a great coach at Duke, Michael William "Mike" Krzyzewski. Danny had an asshole, P.J. Carlesimo, known as an "unrepentant screamer" as his coach. Duke won 81-69, and went on to win the championship, which they'd also won the year before.

Danny, troubled throughout his young life trying without success to be as good as his older brother, later had an emotional breakdown and quit college.  Bobby Hurley was all set for a stellar professional career with the Sacramento Kings when he was terribly injured in a vehicle accident.

I love the Hurley boys and the drama of their lives. They're not boys any longer, of course. Danny is head coach at Division 1 Wagner College; Bobby is one of his assistants.

I know from personal observation that Mike Krzyzewski is a nice man. On Nov. 20, 1988, Abby and I, up early, were drinking coffee in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in Springfield, having watched Duke play Kentucky the day before.  Elevator doors opened and out stepped a single guy: Krzyzewski. I watched him cross the lobby and ask the receptionist for directions to the nearest Catholic church.  And I thought: What a sweet guy, getting up early so he can get to Mass just like his parents taught him to do!

Carlesimo went on to coach the Golden State Warriors. In March of 1997 an angry Latrell Sprewell, angered at his coach's criticism of his passes, chocked Carlesimo on the sidelines for something like 15 seconds. I happened to be watching that game though I rarely watch the pros, and I was thinking, "Kill him! Kill him! Kill him for Danny!"

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Happy Birthday Elizabeth Barrett Browning - March 6, 1806 – June 29, 1861

When Elizabeth Barrett's "Poems" came out in 1844, another London poet named Robert Browning wrote her a piece of admiring fan mail. "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett." He loved the "fresh strange music" and "the affluent language" and "the exquisite pathos" and the "true new brave thought of her poems.


After some time, and much against the wishes of her father, Elizabeth became Mrs. Robert Browning. The lovers happily headed for Italy. After four miscarriages Elizabeth, at the age of 43, gave her husband a son named Pen.


The following, my favorite, is the first of forty-four sonnets in her collection Sonnets from the Portuguese ... a long, beautifully crafted love letter to her husband.


I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me.  Straightway I was ’ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,—
“Guess now who holds thee!”—“Death,” I said, But, there,
The silver answer rang, “Not Death, but Love.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in her husband's arms at the age of 55. Robert Browning wrote that she died "smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl's. Her last word was "beautiful". She is buried in the English Cemetery in Florence.