Readings: Discovering a New-to-Me Poet

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Until I was prompted to look into his work further by this post on the very excellent blog of my dear friend Pentimento, I was familiar with Robert Hass only as the translator of some of the works of Czeslaw Milosz. Happily, Mr. Hass turns out to be a formidable poet in his own right (or “write” as John Lennon would have it.)


Here, as a tiny indication of what has elicited my admiration, is the first section of the poem “Sunrise” from Hass’s collection Praise:

Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables
and the beginnings of beauty. We have walked the city,
a flayed animal signifying death, a hybrid god
who sings in the desolation of filth and money
a song the heart is heavy to receive. We mourn
otherwise. Otherwise the ranked monochromes,
the death-teeth of that horizon, survive us
as we survive pleasure. What a small hope.
What a fierce small privacy of consolation.
What a dazzle of petals for the poor meat.

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Oh, to just once write a stanza that strong!
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Riffs: Some Beauty

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Here's a piece to expose all yez morons to a little cultcha:




HT: Pentimento
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Relationships: The Rewards of Linkage

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I often doubt that value of social-networking gizmos such as Facebook. I sometimes even wonder why I bother to blog. But every once in awhile something comes my way via Facebook, or descends upon me out of the blogosphere, that makes it all worthwhile.

Example: today I read this excellent short story by Donald Hall, a link to which was posted by Pentimento on her outstanding blog. In conjunction with that, yesterday I started reading the 1987 memoir And a Voice to Sing With by Joan Baez. I had purchased the book years ago at a public library used book sale, but had never gotten around to reading it. It took a conversation about the ‘sixties, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez that I had with Pentimento via Facebook to prod me into finding the book. I haven’t been disappointed. As it happens, I was privileged to briefly meet both Donald Hall and Joan Baez in Ann Arbor, back in the day (circa 1968), so the conjunction of these cyber-social interactions and the readings they’ve inspired constitute the kind of synchronicity of which I’ve written before.

Below is a passage from Hall’s short story that I found to be a particularly insightful comment on the human condition. I urge you to follow the link above and read the whole story. The passage is the reminiscence of an aging woman, who as a child had to cope with her discovery of her mother’s infidelity and the resultant changes in the dynamics of her family:

Surely I was changed forever. Life at the farm was calm, but I lived elsewhere in my fancy. I absented myself by reading stories, imagining myself a reckless heroine or a pathetic victim. Outside the house of fiction I was chronically restless. Nothing in life, I knew, was what it appeared to be. When I read a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I recognized the minister and his pious congregation who met at midnight in the woods to celebrate mass for the devil. I knew that by universal conspiracy we agreed to deny the secret wickedness of every human being. We needed, every hour, to understand that the fabric of routine covered unseen deceptions and enormities. We also needed to remember that the cloth must show no rips or tears, and that this covering was as real as anything. I admired the fabrics my father and mother wove, whatever might throb or coil underneath the cloth. [italic emphasis added]

Oh, what tangled webs we weave…
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The graphic is a self-portrait of Joan Baez as a young girl, lifted from her memoir.

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Riffs: It's Better To Burn Out

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For several hours I've been communicating with Pentimento via Facebook on the topic of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. This, then, is the appropriate sound track to that series of exchanges:



This song, so drenched in New York City images, has personal resonance. It is almost physically painful for me to listen to it now.

Speaking strictly for me, we both could've died then and there.
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Riffs: As Irish as Paddy's Pig

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Pentimento has put up a post featuring some beautiful Irish music, and in the comment box over there I've contributed a couple of others. And this has brought to mind this song that I love almost beyond all others. Once in while, far into a dark Bronx night, my friend Bobby Hackett would bring his guitar down from his mother's apartment down the block, and we would would sing--my drunken Irish friends and I--this song, the beer running down the fronts of our shirts, and the tears streaming down our cheeks. It was always in Huvanes that we sang this song--for some reason, never in the Glenside, my "home" pub. Listen to it, then. And if you can do it without emitting a sob, then there's something drastically wrong wit'yez:



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Rodak Recommends: Blogs of Note

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Since I don’t maintain a blogroll, it is incumbent upon me to direct attention from time to time to some of the sites that I visit on a daily basis. Blogs tend to come and go, but I have recently been finding all three of these to be most rewarding.

I am currently involved in engrossing and instructive discussions of Gnosticism in the comment boxes of Vox Nova here; of the Tea Parties at Journeys in Alterity here; and of Salinger and sainthood at Pentimento here.

Please, join in and help these bloggers set me straight.
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Update: Baseball fans are also encouraged to check out Graham Womack's site here.
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