the satisfaction of pride

This poem would have been perfect for the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, but I don't want to wait another year to post it. Anyway, something on pride is very fitting for Lent.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Forget about the other six, says Pride.
They’re only using you.
Admittedly, Lust is a looker,
but you can do better.

And why do they keep bringing us
to this cheesy dive?
The food’s so bad that even Gluttony
can’t finish his meal.

Notice how Avarice
keeps refilling his glass
whenever he thinks we’re not looking,
while Envy eyes your plate.

Hell, we’re not even done, and Anger
is already arguing about the bill.
I’m the only one who
ever leaves a decent tip.

Let them all go, the losers!
It’s a relief to see Sloth’s
fat ass go out the door.
But stick around. I have a story

that not everyone appreciates—
about the special satisfaction
of staying on board as the last
grubby lifeboat pushes away.

-- Dana Gioia

Published in First Things Aug/Sept 2010

Trace Him by the branches.

Many months ago when it was my birthday, I received from my husband a book of the works of John Donne, poetry and prose and sermons. On a recent trip we had listened to a Mars Hill Audio Journal CD that included an interview about him, with the always fascinating Dana Gioia. I've been perusing the book since then and have found many good and juicy snippets, such as this:

Acknowledg God to be the Author of thy Being; find him so at the spring-head, and then thou shalt easily trace him, by the branches, to all that belongs to thy well-being. The Lord of Hosts, and the God of peace, the God of the mountaines, and the God of the valleyes, the God of noone, and of midnight, of all times, the God of East and West, of all places, the God of Princes, and of Subjects, of all persons, is all one and the same God; and that which we intend, when we say Iehovah, is all Hee.

--John Donne 1572-1631, Sermons V

From Earthsea to Alexander

To prepare for a recent road trip, I visited the public library looking for a book on CD. I ended up with a whole stack of boxes to take along in the car later that morning and was very pleased with a few of them.

My car was also loaded down with a Thanksgiving turkey, baking pans and tablecloths and some already cooked food, things to contribute to a feast at Pippin's house. I was taking myself early to help prepare, and Mr. Glad would follow later.

Ray Bradbury

Two slim library cases held one disk each of an introduction to a book in the Big Read program of the National Endowment for the Arts. I was only vaguely familiar with the list and the program, not having any family member that I know of participating. But of the offerings I browsed I was interested in A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin because of recent recommendations from someone, I can't remember who. And Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury was a book my reading group discussed a decade or so ago. The recordings were about 30 minutes each.

When I slid the Wizard introduction into the player and the narrator's voice came into my car, it took me a few seconds to realize that it was Dana Gioia, my favorite book reviewer, poetry critic, and literature teacher. His voice was recognizable, but his intonation was all jazzed up, brighter and more dramatic, I suppose to keep the average somewhat reluctant American reader listening.

His commentary was in brief snatches, and mostly introductory to several other authors who talked about the book, including LeGuin herself, and to short passages read from the text. None of the comments or readings was longer than a minute or so, and most were much briefer than that, which made it easy for me to pay attention; I'm sure this feature was also designed for listeners of diverse ages who are used to having their short attention spans catered to.

The Big Read program is intended to reverse or at least slow the decline in the number of readers in our nation, and I haven't heard if it is working. But this recording was a wonderful introduction to LeGuin. I enjoyed myself thoroughly while listening to what seemed like a sort of CliffsNotes in audio technicolor. There is music in the background that also adds to the drama.

CliffsNotes (Yes, they do squish the name together like that nowadays) seems to have some videos out, and digital flashcards, but for literature I think these NEA audio files would be much preferable, being a better bridge to visual and private reading activity than listening to a talking head, as I assume the CliffsNotes videos are.

The general plot and themes of the novel were discussed, and the particular skills of that writer. LeGuin talked about her background as a reader and writer and how she developed into the writer she is. Her childhood was spent in an intellectually rich household in Berkeley, where her father founded the anthropology department at the university and her mother wrote a book on Ishi.

There were many refugees from Europe in town then, such that "everyone had an accent." It seems that her exposure to many cultures nourished her imagination to create new worlds and people groups. The Earthsea books do sound appealing to me now, and if I keep looking at that cover illustration I pasted here I'll be bound to buy the first one soon.

But the first CD I took out of the box from my library stash was not from the NEA; it was a 2-disk collection of Popular Poetry, Popular Verse, Volume II from Naxos AudioBooks, a broad offering of everything from Shakespeare and Longfellow to Donne and Robert Herrick. It's not surprising that I didn't remember hearing most of the poems before  -- but I'd like to listen again. The many love poems made me miss my husband whom I had only seen a couple of hours before.

Quite a bit of music was interspersed between groupings of poems. I skipped most of this because I was impatient to hear more poems, and I had no idea how long I might have to wait through the instrumental portions. The poems were read by Tony and Jasper Britton, and by Emma Fielding, all of whose voices and reading were not over-dramatic or annoying in any way. Here are some of the rich words that fell upon my ears:

Prayer (I) 
By George Herbert

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
     God's breath in man returning to his birth,
     The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
     Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
     The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
    Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
    Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
    Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
    The land of spices; something understood.

Out of the 5+ hours I was on the road on the way up the state, there were only 10 minutes or so that I didn't need my windshield wipers. The rain was often drenching, so when I had to stop for refueling and resting I was back in the car lickety-split and pushing the Play button again.

I tried a speech by author David McCullough, his Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities from 2003, but he was very dry, in content and delivery. I have found from Mars Hill Audio Journals that some writers of the most fascinating books are not good at speaking even in interviews.
 
The last thing I was listening to when I arrived home again the day after Thanksgiving was Alexander the Great and His Time by Agnes Savill. It is nine CD's and I only heard three of them, but it was the most detail I've ever read on Alexander, who is certainly a fascinating ancient man. The descriptions of battles sometimes were hard for me to follow, but overall it was an easy "read" and I'm trying to figure out when I might finish it.

I kept thinking about the great contrast between my comfortable life -- just sitting in my heated car snacking on food that I had easily bought at the store -- and that of the high-achieving, fighting, indomitable but gracious man who slogged all over his world under the harshest conditions and must have had comparatively little ease in his relatively short life.

Alexander in The Battle of Issus

And the other Big Read disk? That was my favorite of the two I tried, because I still remembered Fahrenheit 451. It was wonderful to hear the author tell how he and his brother would run, not walk, to the library, and spend hours there every week. He started writing stories as a young child, and never stopped.

Here's a list of books in the Big Read program. I'm planning to listen to more of the introductory recordings, which are lots of fun even if I never get around to reading the actual book.

Every season feeds upon the past. -Gioia

Veterans’ Cemetery

The ceremonies of the day have ceased,

Abandoned to the ragged crow’s parade.

The flags unravel in the caterpillar’s feast.

The wreaths collapse onto the stones they shade.

How quietly doves gather by the gate

Like souls who have no heaven and no hell.

The patient grass reclaims its lost estate

Where one stone angel stands as sentinel.

The voices whispering in the burning leaves,

Faint and inhuman, what can they desire

When every season feeds upon the past,

And summer’s green ignites the autumn’s fire?

The afternoon’s a single thread of light

Sewn through the tatters of a leafless willow,

As one by one the branches fade from sight,

And time curls up like paper turning yellow.

-- Dana Gioia

Golden Gate National Cemetery

This poem feathers my nest.

I think I'll share a few of Dana Gioia's poems over the next weeks, some with a thin connection to the season or current events. The subject of money, for example, is always up-to-date for most of us. And for the nation, the ownership of it, the earning or the distribution or taxing of money are topics that often come up when people talk about the upcoming election. Let's take a short break from the usual to enjoy the poetry of it.

Money

Money is a kind of poetry.  –Wallace Stevens

Money, the long green,

cash, stash, rhino, jack

or just plain dough.

Chock it up, fork it over,

shell it out. Watch it

burn holes through pockets.

To be made of it! To have it

to burn! Greenbacks, double eagles,

megabucks and Ginnie Maes.

It greases the palm, feathers a nest,

holds heads above water,

makes both ends meet.

Money breeds money.

Gathering interest, compounding daily.

Always in circulation.

Money. You don’t know where it’s been,

but you put it where your mouth is.

And it talks.

--Dana Gioia

California Hills in August

I'm almost too late to post a poem with this title in a timely manner, not that the hills won't look pretty much the same for another month or more. This year the grass is especially brown and parched, and we have lots of fires making the sky brown, too.

Over three years ago I posted this poem by Dana Gioia, which was the first time I wrote about him. Just now by putting his name in the search box at the bottom of this blog I discovered that it's come up repeatedly.

I understand that Gioia has returned to our fair and thirsty state after serving as president of the National Endowment for the Arts for a few years. I wonder if he gets out of town far enough these days to feel the summer as he so aptly conveys it in this poem.


California Hills in August

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion,
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain –
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

©1986 Dana Gioia

A Poet and Some Poetry

I'd like to tell about Dana Gioia, who has been a great blessing to me by his writings and other contributions to the human community. He is a poet and literary critic, and served for several years, until a few months ago, as Chairman of our National Endowment for the Arts. If you are interested in poetry or arts education you may already be familiar with him. If not, you can read more here: http://www.danagioia.net/ . The way in which I first met him might best be told through excerpts from the letter I wrote him in the spring of 2002:

Dear Mr. Gioia,

I was driving down [the street] one day listening to a man on my Mars Hill Audio tape talk about poetry. When the man mentioned that he lived in [my county] I nearly ran through a stoplight, so great was my wonder. That man, of course, was you. Since that day I have borrowed two of your books from the library, and bought Can Poetry Matter?, which I am still reading. I am delighted to have you here..., contributing to the literary wealth of the area, and even if I never get to meet you, I consider you a friend and teacher.

...We always had our children memorize poems as part of their lessons in humanity as well as literature, spelling, and diction. One of our daughters took up this project on her own and memorized “Horatius at the Bridge” when she was about twelve. Recently on a long car trip my husband asked if one of us might have some poetry to recite, and she revealed that she had memorized “The Walrus and the Carpenter” while also working on her degree in biology.

...I recently read an article by Steven Faulkner in an old Touchstone magazine, “The Workshop of Worship: On Recovering Poetry for Our Children.” In it he laments the loss of poetry as a way, as Plato said, “to bring order to their wild little souls.” Do you have children? If so, you no doubt make good use of this activity! I must admit I had never thought of it the way Plato does, but reading Faulkner’s essay relieved me of my guilty feelings for not doing much more than introducing our children to the sound of poetry.

He points out that the youngest will have no idea of the meaning, anyway, but that is not important. It is the rhythm and music and dance of it that educate, and it is a shame, he says, if someone first learns poetry by way of analysis of its meaning. I am curious as to whether you know of Faulkner and of Touchstone magazine? I imagine a network of people in the poetry world who nurture and inspire one another, but I can’t know how wide-reaching it is. And how about Mars Hill—do you have a subscription to their audio magazine? It’s partly the chance to hear the audible voice of thinkers and writers that makes me love those recordings; it’s sort of like eavesdropping on some brainy people sitting at a café.

Since that first discovery of you and your books, I have heard the Mars Hill segment you did on Longfellow, too, and I was encouraged to leaf through all the anthologies in the house to find his poems to read. Then I realized anew just how important it is to read poems aloud — I seemed unable to attend to them, just sitting alone and reading silently. So I must eat my dinners quickly and read to the rest of the family while they finish; and my younger daughter and I read aloud together during our “school time” in the mornings.

I have always loved poetry, enough that it makes me sad to think how little I have read....I am glad you are boldly and eloquently bringing light to [the current disinterest in poetry in the general population], and even entering into discussion on the topic at [a local bookstore], I see! I hope to be there on the 12th to hear a talk that will probably be way over my head, but will be exciting nonetheless.

In the last few years I have become acquainted with the Eastern Orthodox Church and their richly poetic liturgy, as well as prayer-poems of some of their monastics. Perhaps that has influenced me to pursue poetry generally. This morning I read this, from Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich (translated from the Serbian):

I repent for all the slayers of men, who take the life of another to preserve their own. Forgive them, Most Merciful Lord, for they know not what they do. For they do not know that there are not two lives in the universe, but one, and that there are not two men in the universe, but one. Ah, how dead are those who cut the heart in half!

I repent for all those who bear false witness, for in reality they are homicides and suicides.

For all my brothers who are thieves and who are hoarders of unneeded wealth I weep and sigh, for they have buried their soul and have nothing with which to go forth before You.

....Would you ever consider teaching a class on poetry appreciation? ....And do you have any ideas for me on the best way to organize my own reading of poetry? If you think nursery rhymes and such are foundational, I probably have that part under my belt!

By the time he received my letter it was the afternoon of the mentioned event, and he phoned me right then to tell me that yes, he would be glad to help homeschoolers. Also, in answer to my last question, that I might like to read the poetry textbook he had co-authored with X.J. Kennedy, An Introduction to Poetry.

After that I met him a couple of times before he moved to Washington, D.C. in the service of the nation's art programs, intending to come back to California in two years. The poetry appreciation group never materialized, because I couldn't drum up enough interest.

Just last month H. gave me a book of Gioia's poems, and as I read an old favorite, "California Hills in August," I was reminded of part of another letter I wrote to Dana Gioia a bit later:

Oh, I just noticed that your poem “California Hills in August” is in the Introduction to Poetry. I think it was the first of your poems I read. I love it because I grew up surrounded by those hills..., and I tromped around on that stickery grass and sledded down on old ladders, trying to avoid the cow pies. I think, though, that all the time I was gentled by it, as I think you convey. The child just gives in to the heat and drought and lives fairly contentedly as one more creature in the ecosystem.

Here is the poem, from Daily Horoscope, which you can also read on his website:

California Hills in August

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion,
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain –
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

©1986 Dana Gioia