At the Poetry Reading: Classical vs. Romantic—to be sung to Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”

In olden poems a glimpse of prosing
Left something that led to reposing.
Now, God knows,
Prose really goes.

Good poets who once knew singing words
Now only use reciting words,
Writing prose.
Prose really goes

If workshop talk you like,
If M.F.A. refs you like,
If Romantic deaths you like,
If only imagery you like,
Or me not interested you like,
Why, nobody will oppose.

When the only thing close to lyrics
That can bring us close to hysterics,
Is written by SNL jingle-os,
Anything’s prose.

When journal entries of narcissism
Are rearranged poetic catechism,
Then I suppose,
Prose really goes.

Poetry has gone mad today,
The bad is good today,
Hacks are back today,
Metaphors on crack today,
Line means little today,
Emote is to fiddle today
And that’s how it goes.

In Middle Ages, clever scribes and sages
Even sang of plagues that rages
And kept Chaucer on his toes,
Now, everything’s prose.

When Shakespeare wrote for Queen Elizabeth
John Donne also avoided any shibboleth,
And that just shows,
Pros don’t write prose.

Michelangelo was a great stanzancer
While he was a sculpture depantser,
And he fed to the coals,
Everything prose.

When John Milton wrote macho metered verse,
Dante lyricized lost folk in the hearse.
Now, God knows,
Everything’s prose.

When Irish poets sang their verse au gratin,
Their lyrical fields were anything but rotten.
Now, God knows.
Prose goes.

Just think of those poetry slams you’ve got,
And those hams you’ve got
And the Ph.Ds you should have got
To understand lines of what’s hot
In those little mags you’ve got
The New Yorker schlocks out as bot
Like mini Cheerios.

I know I’m not a great Romancer,
And of this cancer I have no answer
That I can propose,
In Classical prose.

With his greatest of all minds, Trump recently announced the building of the border wall in Colorado, a state which we all know borders Mexico.

Having formerly lived in Colorado, I can attest to Colorado’s being a border state. When fishing the South Platte and other border rivers, I saw the results of the hordes of immigrant “bad guys” crossing Colorado rivers into the U.S. They changed the ecosystems. Suddenly I was catching gay “rainbow” trout, those LGBTQ lesbian/gay/bisexual trout queers. There were big “browns” who surely came in from south of the border. Worse, the violent gangster “cutthroats.”

Fortunately, Trump helped me navigate this new migrant fishing in his seminal book, The Art of the Reel. So knowledgeable is his great fishing mind, that in most fishing circles he is now called The Great Leader. He can converse for hours on monofilament, steel, and braided leaders. It is said he ghost wrote the Sports Afield article, “Grab “Em by the Tippet.”

Over the years, I have been a church wanderer, attending Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic, Mennonite, Seventh Day Adventist and Assembly of God services where people spoke in tongues, writhed on the floor, and were pitched backwards to either be healed or have Satan driven from them. Count a few Sunday schools and summer bible camps, and a lot of baptisms, weddings, and funerals in the mix too. It’s all been very informative.

My education also included seeing churches from a different angle. When I attended a Methodist college as an undergraduate, some of my older classmates on our floor in the dorm served as circuit riders or substitute ministers for small congregations across southern Iowa. They shared how they prepared their sermons, which needed to be different for the differing needs of each congregation. This gave me insight from the minister’s point of view.

In graduate school, I needed money to pay for my education. A Lutheran friend put in the good word for me, and I became janitor at the biggest Lutheran church west of the Mississippi. Needless to say, it was a race to keep up with all the different events taking place at the church each day. (Wedding rice in the sanctuary was the bane of my existence.) Not only did the experience provide an inner view of the working of the church, it gave me more insight into what ministers confronted daily. Often, troubled homeless people and others wandered in off the street demanding to see the minister. Often they were considering suicide. The first person they normally encountered was the janitor. So the minister and I formed a bond regarding how to handle these walk-ins, who expected the minister to solve all their problems 24/7, night and day. Others just needed a listener. How the minister ever slept uninterrupted, I’ll never know. As I said before, very instructive.

While in graduate school, the African Literature class taught by an African taught me much about African religions, and the effects of missionaries. Later I taught various African students from different areas of Africa. Eye-opening.

Before the advent of Ancestry.com for genealogical research, I found it necessary to travel to Salt Lake City to work with members of the Church of Latter Day Saints at their Family History Library. While there, I took the LDS tour of the facilities and walked through what seemed the endless string of just married brides and grooms in Temple Square. I was amazed at how far back my relatives had been “sealed” long after their deaths.

After I established my career, my best friend and colleague followed Zen Buddhism. He introduced me to the Zen garden he built at his home for meditation. We practiced Zen as much as possible to survive the rigors of teaching. Students in our classes represented most of the world religions and cults, everything from Wiccans to Native American tribal religions to Voodoo to Russian Old Believers. Meanwhile a neighborhood friend included my wife and me in her Jewish celebrations and traditions.

Our work and neighbors also brought my wife and me in close contact with Sikhs, Quakers, Moslems, and such cults as the Church Universal and Triumphant in Montana, as well as the Rajneeshees of Antelope, Oregon, fame. My cult dossier remains incomplete because I knew no one from Jim Jones’ People’s Temple who drank the cyanide in Jonestown, Guyana. Nevertheless, I felt that I had some experience with most religions through first person experiences supplemented by Joseph Campbell’s film series and central book readings from the various faiths, not to mention various religious classes on the history of religion as well as Jesuit and Methodist classes in Old and New Testaments.

But I was shocked and perplexed when I attended a recent funeral held at a Protestant church. Just as I entered the sanctuary, one usher passed out the program for the service and another handed out the church’s business card. That’s right–a business card.

The passing out of business cards during a funeral seemed quite out of place. I had never encountered this before. The church’s logo or branding appeared on the right side. Contact information for the church’s various “campuses” was printed to the left. That a church had various “campuses” also came as a surprise.

Having been brought up in a world where colleges and universities had campuses, I was taken aback when Nike created its own “campus,” with other major companies following that trend. Suddenly most high tech companies competed to have a “campus” for their headquarters. They took a word that meant the grounds of a school or college, and turned it into something that gave their corporations a different cachet, a type of elitism. They weren’t really big corporations or businesses, they were something different, not industry, but extensions of graduate school. To some extent, this was true. Most blue-collar manufacturing of their products was hidden, not on the “campuses,” but rather abroad. The idea of campus had been co-opted by business.

The church business card also stretched the idea of campus. One of its campuses was not really a campus at all. It was a golf course. A single service was held there each Sunday in the club house. The green finishing holes seen out the windows may have reminded people of the green open area of a campus. Nothing is impossible. I wondered if business cards were passed out to Sunday golfers who needed God’s help in attaining par and who were ridden with guilt at golfing instead of celebrating the Sabbath.

The main church where the funeral service was being held was listed as another campus. That meant the church itself and the parking lots around it where it was difficult to find parking. There was no feeling of a campus unless a single structure could constitute a campus. In all fairness, the church did harbor a preschool, but it was housed in the church building. Since the golf course campus had been advertised as the “North Campus,” the main church may have been the south campus. The possibility of east and west campuses lingered in the air. Maybe they will have golf courses too.

So, was handing out business cards at a funeral the church’s attempt to recruit members the way Microsoft and Oracle compete with each other? Are they saying, “We don’t just have worship sites; we have campuses,” which sounds much more expansive, important, or boated depending on one’s point of view? In any event, maybe we can list our house as a campus. Maybe some good tax and spiritual advantages there. We still have a little lawn left.

This humorous hand-drawn envelope was sent in 1927. It shows a long-snapper hiking the football to a quarterback who is so far off in the distance that he can barely be seen yelling “A13, Shift, 5x, 176!” It seemed appropriate to post while The “Grate” One who now occupies the Presidency of the United States, has been busy attacking the National Football League because players, coaches, and team owners are protesting. Furthermore, he contends that the game is becoming too soft (the players who have concussions and die early deaths are “fake news”)–to name just a few of his complaints. It’s interesting that when he tried to buy a team years ago, owners rose up against letting him into the league because he was such a known corrupt shyster or conman. We need the humor.

The back of the envelope (not shown) has a drawing of a path that leads past a cactus to an outhouse, with a sign pointing to the outhouse reading, “THE END OF THE TRAIL.”

Food experts constantly sing their mantra “Shop the Periphery” if we want to eat healthily. Healthy is defined as sitting down to eat from plates that contain two-thirds colorful fruits and veggies (especially greens), and only one-third protein. So instead of trolling the food aisles, I tried periphery shopping at our local grocery store.

Before I say anything else, you should know that I, as a cancer survivor, do not take talk of eating well lightly. And I still appreciate the humor in my prostate being stabbed with a dozen or so biopsy needles, which is nearly as much fun as grocery shopping.

Girl Scouts were selling Thin Mints and Tagalongs (my favorite) from two grocery carts outside the store. Well, I had to support them by purchasing a couple of boxes. I figured that their being outside the store qualified as their being on the “periphery.” I noticed that they pretty much kept their new vegan cookies hidden and were smart enough to carry few of them.

I passed through the automatic doors and hung a right to the Deli. After purchasing its specialty–a hot, greasy whole chicken–, the pastry section next confronted me on the periphery. I hit the freebie “Try Me” pastry counter hard, cramming a triple chocolate cookie and a day’s old slice of sugar cake into my mouth. I did buy a frosted Bear Claw roll and eyed a fancy chocolate birthday cake for my wife’s upcoming birthday.

The meat section covered most of the back corner of the store. With beef being so expensive, I had to hit the sales meat specials to pick up some cheaper burger (not lean) and less desirable cuts that might be tenderized if let soak for several days in a sauce containing enough chemicals to start to break down cellular structure. Also picked up some franks and some pizza pepperoni, whose nearly banned chemicals might also soften up the poorer cuts.

On to the liquor and wine section against the back wall! Past that came displays of what’s being advertised on the cable “Nor Available Anywhere Else, You Saw It Here, It’s AMAZING!” TV channels. I picked up a spray can of Flex Spray sealant, thinking that both my bathroom and my personal plumbing might need it after my shopping trip and eating. Guaranteed to plug leaks.

Near the light bulb section, I picked up some motor oil in case I decided to ever drive to the store again. As I wandered the remaining walls and far corners, I picked up some bird seed and suet blocks, being concerned that the wild birds might not be eating square meals either. The way the song sparrows have behaved over the years, there did not seem too much prostate cancer in the males or cancers in any of them, but one can never be too sure. The bird food contained nuts, so I figured that eating nuts was about as healthy as it gets for birds, particularly when they have a source of greens and protein around them most of the year. Ignoring what I just said, I threw a bag of moss killer into my cart to kill some of that green.

On the way to check out, I avoided buying any electronics, jewelry, and in-store pharmacy drugs, although some Pepto was tempting. I would stop at the do-it-yourself blood pressure testing booth, but I already know what the readings would say after this shopping trip. Avoiding the arm-squeezer, I squeeze past the long line of non-shoppers at Customer Service, most of whom are trying to wire money out of the country or return goods. No food here, but I hope the wire transfers will buy somebody some food somewhere, as I’m not having much luck on the periphery.

The automatic lottery ticket dispensing machine near the restrooms beckoned me. I realize that lottery tickets do not represent food, but they could. Some of my leafy green went into the machine.

Near the check outs, some miniature toys and trading cards made in China and in plastic blisters occupied a display next to the rack of batteries of various sizes. The toys visually echo in miniature my greasy chicken sitting in its blister. The only things left to buy to eat at the check stand were some Tic-Tacs and other breath mints. Some of the mints had some green in them, so that was something. I suppose I could have purchased a copy of The National Inquirer or one of the other tabloids, and that would be called eating it, but I had no stomach for them.

On the way out, the store offers one more chance at food and drink. The coffee stand–with its sweets and outstanding feature of self-serve soft drinks, also in Big Gulp sizes.

It was worth buying some more Girl Scout cookies on the way out. Unfortunately by the time I returned, the Girl Scouts in their green uniforms and pin bandolier sashes had departed, as had their cookie boxes the color of brilliant veggies and fruits reminiscent of well balanced meals if you use your peripheral vision.

Faced with vacuous or soul-crippling Drumphian demagoguery being hurled by the recent crop of disgusting political candidates, and with language junk being cranked out by PACs, SuperPACs, schlock jock radio broadcasters, FOX, the main press which has abrogated its watchdog duty, and the myriad of think tanks and bogus research foundations funded by the Koch brothers and other million/billionaires, corporations, and fringe lunatics, I sought inspiration and solace in an old notebook of quotations from poets and other writers.

 

Like me, some of these writers probably have had too much contact with academia for too long, leading Robert Bly to say his moldy oldy, “A sonnet is where professors go to die.”  Judson Jerome in On Being a Poet (in regard to the problem of ambiguity in a poem) said, “Good lines resonate with all those meanings because they probe to the core, not because the poet has deliberately obfuscated meaning and piled random association on association to keep undergraduates occupied.”  While these pronouncements might be seen as poetically Donald Drumphian in themselves, Jerome’s suggestion that figurative language does heighten one’s emotional response, but it’s more effective when used sparingly if the poet wants to poem to begin low-keyed and then build makes sense to me.  What really hit home was his saying that meter is what activates both left and right brains.  Free verse appeals to only one side.”  Amen.  Good poems can be written without meter, but great poems seem to be have some kind of meter.

 

Which brings me to Anne Morrow Lindbergh and North to the Orient.  She struck many poetic chords in her narrative.  However, one gentle, straight-forward prose passage has always yielded delight.  “The next morning we were off again, I with an extra handkerchief tucked in my pocket.  You will probably need an extra one, you know.  That extra handkerchief seemed to set a seal of success on the trip.  It made it at once intimate and possible.  Hadn’t an extra handkerchief taken me to school and back, and put me on a train for college, and sent me out the day I was married?  One could go anywhere with an extra handkerchief–especially if it had a blue border.”

 

Of course, it was the “blue border’ in the emphatic position at the end that got me, as she flew off with Charles Lindbergh on their dangerous flight to the Orient.  She would see many expansive blue sky and ocean borders on her flight.

 

Her quotation also reflects the dual nature of poetry.  To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, the poet writes of two things at once, which is the characteristic tension of poetry:  one is the subject of the poetry, the other is the poetry of the subject.  That white screen or piece of paper of the poem makes a nice handkerchief.  It’s part of our past, present, and future.  It takes in whatever the poem’s subject will be.  The blue border provides a framework of meter, or what at first seems to be an added limitation or border, but in the end stimulates the poem and the poet to say things beyond what at first could be imagined, to fly into uncharted territory in the great blue.  (The opposite of Drumpf Speak.)  As Mandelstam said, “Poetry is the plow that turns up time so that the deep layers of time, the black soil, appears on top.”

 

The handkerchief and its border expresses again the duality of poetry that exists in many different ways.  Luis Cernuda talked about this duality of opposites.  “…a terrible happiness will be born in the poet because in our lives feelings rarely fail to come to us without being mixed with their opposites; only in the union of extremes can we intuit a harmony in the powers of human understanding.”

 

This does not mean that the tension or life of a poem or book can’t be political.  As Pasternak once put it, “A book is a cubic piece of burning, smoking conscience….And so we go right to the pure essence of poetry.  It is disturbing, like the ominous turning of a dozen windmills (think meter) at the edge of a bare field (think handkerchief) in a black year of famine.”

Several stories and statements by novelists and poets have been a delight over the years. Back in 1985, Ivan Doig spoke at the Yellowstone Art Center. He revealed that he wrote his books in chunks and somehow put them altogether later on, which I enjoyed hearing because that’s how inspiration generally comes to me too.

Most entertaining was his discussion of research for his This House of Sky, one of my favorites. To check his own memory, he asked the son of the schoolteacher in his book if he had any more information about the woman. The son had become an FBI agent in Denver, so he treated his own mother as a suspect, sending Doig a three-page single-spaced report on his mother!

Doig went on to tell a story about Montana poet Richard Hugo. Beth Ferris, who wrote Heartland, dragged the moping Hugo to Phillipsburg, Montana, where he did not want to go.

“It’s a mining town. I don’t know anything about mining!” he said.

But they wanted to film him there despite his protests. The next day he wrote his notable poem “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg.” Only partially based on the actual Phillipsburg, the town triggered the rest of the poem, becoming one of Hugo’s “triggering towns” for making poems, and making gray his favorite poetic color. As Doig pointed out, 500 years from now we’ll remember Hugo’s Phillipsburg rather than the real one.

The poem resonated with me because my brother-in-law, Harry Knodel, was school superintendent in Phillipsburg. He lived in a house overlooking the town, and we went there to visit his family. Our view was not Hugo’s view, but Hugo’s view was good.

One of my favorite Southern poets, U.S. Poet Laureate Miller Williams, also shared a humorous story. He wrote his poem “The Caterpillar” for his first daughter. By the time his second daughter went to school, the poem had become famous. Her teacher assigned the poem for the class to read and answer seven questions about it. William’s daughter asked if parents could help with the questions. Not knowing that the author of the poem was the father of her student, the teacher said that parents could help. Miller said he could not answer any of the seven questions that were assigned! There’s a lesson there.

When asked about the difference between craft and art, Williams described a hotel fire in New Orleans. People jumped from the 15th or 16th floor. One photographer sacrificed the once-in-a-lifetime shot. He turned his back on the scene to photograph faces in the crowd seeing the falling bodies. We see the event through those faces. Anyone else would have photographed the falling bodies. Art, not craft.

Even at an earlier event, there was poet Robert Frost. When he finished reading his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” an adoring fan in the audience expressed how much she liked the poem and how she thought it was the most beautiful poem in the English language about death.

“Death?” Frost replied. “Where do you see death in the poem?”

Horrified that she might have offended the great poet, the woman gathered herself and timidly pointed out references to darkness and sleep that signified death to her.

Frost cagily said, “Yes, now that you mention it, I can see how the poem says that.”

In the spirit of Edwin Neumann, consider this language shift. The word “hey” is an interjection, one of those words usually said for emphasis, words such as “ouch!” or “oh” or “horrors!” My Uncle Bud always had trouble with this word. Whenever someone shouted, “Hey, Bud! Come over here,” he always thought they were yelling at him, when in reality the speaker was trying to get the attention of some other man. So the use of “hey” was pretty standard, as in “Hey, you. Get off my car. You might scratch it,” or “Hey, cat! Don’t you dare do that on the carpet” (as you fail to carry the cat to the litter box in time).

That has changed. My Goodness! Oh! Ouch! Heavens! Recently the word “hey” has changed from being an interjection into being a greeting. I watch CNBC more than I should. Even though the economic and market jargon drives me crazy, I continue to watch for the information I need. One of the most noticeable stylistic changes in the reporting is the way reporters and guests address each other. All, or nearly all, speaker changes require a greeting. They sound thusly:

“Let’s go to Carla now. She has breaking news on the real estate market in California. Hey, Carla.”

“Hey, Christa, that’s right…..”

All day long the speakers go back and forth with “hey.” The word has extinguished the words of greeting that we used to use, such as “good morning, “good afternoon,” good evening,” “hello,” “hi,” “good to talk to you again,” and so forth. Instead of being an attention-grabbing word or word of emphasis, it has become more a glib sign of colloquial chumminess. It becomes a throw-away word showing that you are a member of the club and can dispense with any formality–and yet serious business, people’s money, retirement, and the world economy are at risk. “Hey” is put on each morning like television makeup for the cameras.

I plead guilty to falling into the same trap of accepting this one word at the expense of word variety, appropriateness of tone, emphasis, and even precision. As a college instructor, I too began to use “hey” as a greeting for colleagues when the word began to come into vogue as a greeting. It particularly came in handy when bumping into someone in the hallway into whom I really did not want to bump! Starting a surprise conversation can be awkward, but “hey” served as an automatic safe way of acknowledging the other speaker while buying some milliseconds to put some more cogent words together.

“Hey, George, how’s it going.” In response, George (name changed) would say, “Hey, Larry,” (which was another way of saying something, anything, when he wished to send me to the outer asteroid belt and never see me again).

As is said so often, English is a living thing…that tries to kill itself and others.

Now “hey” has spread across the air waves. But, hey!

Punster, humorist, author, journalist, one Edwin Neumann (1919-2010) delighted us with his observations and love of language and news. His best-seller Strictly Speaking: Will American Be the Death of English? became a classic. It invited me to laugh at my own lazy use of language and that of others, both a curse and delight.

In keeping with the Neumann tradition, some recent usage horrors are difficult to overlook or underhear. They really clank. For example, consider one of the zombie language changes creeping into our local television weather reporters’ mouths and brains.

“Rain will develop overnight.” That sentence, or its variations such as “We can expect rain overnight” or “Up to an inch of rain will fall overnight,” have held firm for decades as a simple, direct, sentence. But now a new entrant has entered the meteorological field.

“Rain will develop in THE overnight.” A perfectly good adverb is suddenly wrestled and shape shifted into a noun. But this differs from the usual language changes. American English loves inventing new expressions by changing a word from one part of speech to another. Most often, American English loves finding ways to shorten language. This habit shows up in another local weather forecasting favorite, as in this sentence. “Temperatures will remain relatively unchanged in the metro.” Except for the proper name of a subway or underground, “metro” serves as an abbreviated adjective for “metropolitan.” Thus, in the recent past, listeners could hear, “Temperatures will remain relatively unchanged in the metro area.” Saying “the metro” instead of “the metro area” not only shortens the sentence by eliminating the fairly abstract word “area,” but also it puts emphasis where it should be, on the more concrete and specific “metro,” which occupies the key place of emphasis at the end of the sentence. That’s all well and good.

“The overnight,” works counter to that. “The” adds, rather than subtracts, an abstract word to the sentence. Instead of simply being a strong adverb, nestled directly up against the verb, now we’ve complicated the entire sentence by adding an entire prepositional phrase, “in the overnight” to answer the question of when the rain will happen.

We could push this zombified language even further. In changing “overnight” from an adverb to a noun, we’ve made “overnight” into a thing rather than a when. It’s almost as if “overnight,” the thing, is pregnant with the rain that it is carrying inside. You just can’t trust those overnights and what they do overnight!

If the Alpha dog weather forecaster begins to use this expression, it will probably only spread to all the others as they compete and jockey for position. I suspect “in THE overnight” sounds more sophisticated to the ears of these speakers, much in the way that the ungrammatical “I” used in place of “me” has spread through the air waves, or the way the word “homage” is mispronounced. The word is pronounced “om’ij,” but now in just the past few years announcers are converting it into “oh’maj.” Oh my! There ain’t no such animal. But I suspect that saying it that way makes speakers think of themselves as sounding more sophisticated in a Frenchified sort of way. Zombie Ego.