First hearing him read some thirteen years ago, at a youth conference in Wyoming, the thing about Robert Pinsky's poetry that shook me up was the way he spoke. He enunciated like no one I'd ever heard. He hit each syllable not only clearly but with dynamics. The syllables took the manner of punctuation, propelling you forward or sitting you still.
How they combined into words and phrases, construction in pursuit of meaning, put what I understood about poetry to that point in a fresh light. Line breaks, rhyme, meter, onomatopoeia, symbols, styles, they were simply supports. What mattered was what you wanted to say.
Of course, I needed more years to realize what had grabbed me. But I was grateful when I slowly caught on and glad this week when Pinsky came and read at the Folger. Salzburg pal Jess and I caught him there Tuesday. (Photo above was hers. We also ate Good Stuff burgers and discussed her new roommate, Abe Lincoln.) Pinsky read for an hour or so and then took questions. He talked with excitement about decades of collaborations with musicians and technologists. He enunciated with drive, even reading the poem I'd heard him read thirteen years ago.
What he said at his Yale reading later this week: "A poem is a work of art made out of the sounds of a language. It is not a song. It is sounds of speech approaching the conditions of a song." He spoke similarly on writing at an event with Springsteen a couple years ago. "For me, it’s an awful lot like noodling at the piano, playing with colors, except it’s syllables. I write with my voice. My voice box is my writing instrument."
At the Folger, he read another one I was hoping we'd hear, one just called "Book." Part captured a more recent hope and fear of mine:
Enchanted wood. Glyphs and characters between boards.
The reader’s dread of finishing a book, that loss of a world,
And also the reader’s dread of beginning a book, becoming
Hostage to a new world, to some spirit or spirits unknown.
It was cool this week to have Mike Daisey, rock-star monologist, link to my blog post about his Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs show. Was also curious to read the stories, also linked off his blog, about how he plans to change and not change his show after the tech icon's death. Daisey sets the narrative bar about as high as he can take it, so the challenge of adapting to the developments is going to be especially complicated.
Like? Daisey to the New York Daily News: "There’s no rewriting because nothing is written, but it changes everything in a fundamental way. It impacts every area." Tenses, at minimum, but potentially much more.
But also… Daisey to Variety: "What'll be really interesting is the amount of deification that's happening right now, and how the show will play in that environment." Daisey to WSJ: "What will really change is the tenor of the crowd. … Discomfort is usually good. Frankly, discomfort is a fine place for people to be." I'll be intrigued to hear reactions and reviews.
One of the best Jobs things circulating this week is his never-TV-aired narration for Apple's "Crazy Ones" ad. (An overdone Richard Dreyfuss take aired instead.) Daisey appears to share this type of thinking.
What's playing: The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams. (Spotify.)
What's playing, in particular: two songs from it.
A GQ story examines how the new album came to exist — the journey of the notebooks over six decades, as well as the processes of writing, editing and interpretation. The writer doesn't find most of the famous-name contributions too interesting (and listening to them now, while all are decent, neither do I). But two songs stand out to him, one from Hank granddaughter Holly Williams and one from no-relation Lucinda Williams. Listen once (twice, three times, repeat…) and you'll agree.
Holly's:
The first is a ballad called "Blue Is My Heart," which was written in February 1947, just as Williams was gaining a foothold in Nashville—and succumbing, yet again, to the demons that drove him to drink. It is easily the most beautiful song on Notebooks.
Lucinda's:
Her offering, "I'm So Happy I Found You," is the Notebooks sparsest recording: just an acoustic guitar, a modest tune, and that torn-up, trembling voice. It is also the most affecting. When Lucinda sings "I fail at everything I do," I can't help but believe her, just as I would've believed Hank.
If you're any bit inclined toward this kind of music, your playlist for the morning is forming in your mind right now. All of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road a few times around, maybe Lucinda's cover of Gentle on My Mind (off the Talladega Nights soundtrack, of all places), maybe some of the Caitlin Cary songs from Whiskeytown, and the sun keeps coming up…
"I don’t need a swing in my room, I need a bloody minibar," says the model Lara Stone, distending her world-famous lower lip and disparaging with a withering shrug the desperately cool flourishes of the designed-to-death hotel — a converted house of detention — where she is staying in Amsterdam.
We are in a car speeding back to the city from Stone's childhood home in Mierlo, a sylvan burg about 80 miles south that could be described (in a good way!) as the Massapequa of the Netherlands. We've been hanging out with Stone's parents, Michael and Toos, eating pancakes at a supremely odd ecclesiastically themed pancake house where a looming Virgin Mary stares down at flapjacks as big as personal pan pizzas.
Matt, Marc and I saw Mike Daisey's Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs a few months back. We somehow got tickets in the front row. (Matt got the above photo before the show.) From that vantage point, we had an amazingly absorbing experience. Nothing but the lip of the Woolly Mammoth stage and this table stood between us and Daisey, maybe the best monologist in the country. As he described a near-obsessive love and growing fear of Apple, he was Ned Beatty in Network. He set you to explore whatever you knew of Apple — even if you knew a lot.
The monologue was half a tribute to Jobs: his ideas, his creativity, his thinking differently. The other half of the night was a challenge to Jobs: his cutthroat business tactics, his secrecy, his questionable and critical Chinese supply chain. Daisey was a proud fanboy. To wind down after a show, he explained, he would disassemble and then reassemble his Macbook. But he had concerns, ones that sent him to Foxconn's gates to interview factory workers. The split nature of the show allowed him to define how mass innovation happens. Jobs fit into the line of world-beating tycoons, ones like Rockefeller and Carnegie, ones who would not believe there was a line, or if forced to admit as much, would tear apart the line at whatever great cost, rethink it, rebuild it, and sell it.
(Video from mpiccorossi who may or may not have also been at #ona11.)
Before the night drops too far back in time, it must be said the Marah show at Jammin Java a couple weeks ago was a fun, fun time. Brother Serge rejoined Dave and Christine for a tour leg or two after a three-year absence — raising children, living in Utah — and you know how it is when family gets together. The gathering is loud, messy and full of laughter, everyone happy to be in the same house once again. If you add drinks, a packed, supportive club, a borrowed bass that sounded like a kazoo, and massive quotation marks around "acoustic," and you had a contagious mood that put you in the Marah family too. Audio on the above video isn't terrific, but you get the picture. The band asked the club to run the smoke machine whenever Christine played drums.
Other materials from the evening: Serge explaining what he's been up to ("I sand stuff with a sander…. I'm not necessarily building anything, but…."). A nice version of East. Always nice when a sound takes over the room (and where I was standing with the cool Treehouse folks in the second row). Below, my Blackberry camera tries as hard as it can. The lineup. Serge on bongo drums. Serge on harmonica, Dave with a tambourine on his head. I wish one of Christine on drums turned out. Atop keyboards, accordion and everything else (like holding the band together to make it to a reunion), she's starting to kick ass on them.
Kay Ryan has the continual power to leave me blank on a subway ride. Not speechless — because who but tourists talk with strangers on the subway — but blank for the moment, unable to offer any thought of my own to the world. I have her latest collection on my coffee table, fresh from the Amazon box. But I've been forcing myself to wait until I catch up on my stack of magazines. Given the power of her "Tree Heart/True Heart," the tiny poem from today's commute home, I'm also apparently helping myself get off the Metro at the right stop. The first a.m. I crack that book, I'm going to spend the day in the New Carrollton train yard.
Where Ryan takes you along a path a minute before dropping a piano on you (a Doritos bus-stop ad also comes to mind), Sophie Cabot Black tends simply to grab you and throttle you, and that approach works as well. Black's "Private Equity" was one of the many poems that knocked me out last summer, and her "Sheetrock" inflicted the same on me this summer. Don't listen to the poet's audio. God bless her writing, but the poem works better laid on top of the passion in one's own head. "As if almost too late we ripped into each other / With whatever we had…."
On a completely different scope recently for me were Kate Daniels' "In the Marvelous Dimension" and Frost's "Desert Places." The former was an epic multi-perspective glimpse of the moments following 1989's San Francisco earthquake. Speaking as evocatively as any Pulitzer-sought, post-disaster coverage, the roaming voice let Daniels tell stories from the string of crushed vehicles. "I felt myself / growing smaller, like Alice, / a trick so I could travel / out of there, to that ledge / where a petunia waved in the dust rising / from a fallen-down freeway." For Frost, Post columnist Tom Boswell used the poem in mourning for Mike Flanagan, after the beloved ex-Oriole's suicide. "Flanagan was a first port of call for Orioles with problems because he had had his share," wrote Boz, and then he cited Frost as a New Hampshire person, like the pitcher.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars–on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
To balance those two this fall, two others, happier, arrived about the same time. Matthea Harvey's "In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden" couldn't have packed in more words. A crowded scan proved Harvey's title true. The wheelbarrow lost in the middle of the mess showed no so-much-depends desperation threatened. No fear existed, only joy.
The other poem was Charles Wright's "Bedtime Story." I've made the link a favorite and read it a few times at night in the past few weeks. From some steps back, the work looked odd. Was odd. More closely, phrasing I'd seen and liked in an art story came to mind: "in even the wildest de Kooning, you feel securely anchored." That was how it felt.
"Yep. I'm not going to go to Seattle Junior College. I mean, I've gotta be honest with you, I'm not looking for that, I'm looking for something bigger, you know? I'm looking for a 'dare to be great' situation." Lloyd Dobler, courtesy of a friend's status today hitting the day pretty well.
I got home, took a shower, turned up this one, and got back to work. Some days you need twang running over a big beat to remind you of…
(The good mood of the above video also adequately expresses last week. Play it. Watch it. Dance around the room to it. You'll be happier for it.)
Life's in the middle of an unusual run right now. My best NPR friend left for the New York Times on Thursday. The girl I was in love with for half my 20s got married yesterday. My best buddy since kindergarten gets married later this month. I got a small promotion — first time I've been "senior" anything, fun after years of "Are you an intern too?" — and on my plate a bunch of projects I've been fighting to get my head around.
All the changes are good. The people marrying are marrying the right people, and I'm happy, thrilled, for all involved. Life is working out well, better than anyone's guesses. The new jobs are exciting and cool. But these things all add up to a lot, in a ain't-it-funny-how-time-slips-away sort of way. Last weekend, I wasn't sure how this all would feel. So, I took the week off from personal decisions. (Work decisions happened as usual.) No matter what happened, good or bad, no sudden moves.
The experiment was interesting. I'd never given myself a rule like this one before, for more than a day or two at least. I usually do decisions all right and don't like sitting on them. And it's not like last week was overflowing with personal decisions — no moves, job hunts, wedding plans, or boat shopping going on. But the idea of the restriction made me look at the week differently, I think. Set in higher contrast, maybe.
More than anything else, it felt like driving in Florida in the afternoon.
The late cloud burst comes fast and furious to help the flora, feed the swamp and lower the temperatures. When whatever highway starts to disappear, you pull over the car. You sit with your busy wipers and flashers, along with everyone else, and enjoy life's power. The action comes down around you. You can only make out a few other cars and palm trees lining the shoulder. A beautiful bird skirts by unburdened.
The day is still nice, on its way to being even better, but you want to make sure you have the best traction. When the sky calms, you shift into drive, pull into traffic and follow the beautiful bird down the road.
My buddy Wes has one of the best laughs at NPR. He has a good time laughing, and it shows. Fortunately for the Internet, #ona11 student newsroom coverage captures Wes in great mid-laugh (0:46), and I've been wanting to try a YouTube-to-gif tool. More ONA postings to come.
