Once more

For Boston

In the silvering of light, in the brief race of day,

They go on before us. In the run to say who won,

Pheidippides steps off glory, here in Boston.

What agonies we bleed to know the route is done.

And what of those with no knees now to pray?

What will become of them, here in Boston?

My wife’s first steps when she chased a walking dog

Were on the Common. Now when we visit her days.

Whose shade will follow us, here in Boston?

Here in Boston, eight-year-old Martin Richard

Floats on forever on his still-strong legs. Here

In Boston, Krystle Campbell rises, in Boston,

Refusing to stay among the honored dead.

Lu Lingzi, where did you first learn to walk?

In some bright and spreading other common?

And the dozens down and broken, blasted back

To their toddling days: Will they stand to see

The race the others surely won, here in Boston?

I want to turn back all the calendar’s leaves

To the day before that marathon. I want to leave

Off a finish line so all will run forever, from Boston.

On and on, now and now and forever for forever,

They rise and run, and Krystle is taking Martin’s hand

And Lu Lingzi catches them in the silvering light of Boston.

My love, my only wife, my one heart, when you

Took off after that dog, did your mother laugh?

Did Martin’s mother clap when he first stood in Boston?

But hear us, patient light. Give us the smile

Of Lu Lingzi. I want to hear birdsong break when

Martin Richard stands again to walk, here in Boston.

This massacre will not stand. It will not stand!

Nor will it run the route from Marathon to Athens

To shout out its darkest name, not from Boston.

We will keep running, dear heaven, let us keep running

Until we find a new freedom under God, the joy

Meant for Martin, the dazzling light from Krystle,

The ineffable joy of China in the cheer of Lu Lingzi.
Let us rise. We will stand with them at the finish line.

We will inhale the precious light coming from Boston.

On Patriot’s Day, freedom still rings from our Boston.

Into the bleeding night, tears head toward our Boston,

A new river, a new destination, a new love, here in Boston.

  

In Boston

My heart is breaking for the people of Boston this morning. I know and love the town, and my wife was born at Mass General and learned to walk on the Boston Common.

A few years back, I won a literary award and received it only a few blocks from the site of the Marathon explosions yesterday. The city was unimaginably beautiful and has so many associations for my family.

But this is not about people who visit the city from time to time. It's about the dead and the injured. It's about the wonderful people of a great city. It is about evil, which must be fought without ceasing for all our lives.

Boston is a strong city. I look forward to going back. Today, more than any time in my life, I am a Bostonian. All Americans are.

Keep the Music Playing

If we are lucky, we learn music first from our parents. We become aware, slowly or suddenly, of the music they love or the songs they sing. In my case, I was smitten early by the classical music my parents loved. Though their tastes were different (Mother loved opera more, my father orchestral music), the end result was the same for me.

But the first sounds I remember are the popular songs is my mother sang to me. Her name was Ruth, and she had a strong, wonderful voice and loved to sing to her babies. She sang to me and my older brother Mark, and when Laura Jane came along nine years after me, she sang to her, too. Mother was a soprano and was in the church choir for years. All of us grew up to be musicians--Mark as a fine guitarist who actually played in bands, Laura Jane as far and away the best pianist among us, and me as as composer.

I daresay that all of us, though, still carry the sound of our mother's voice with us. That's why the death of Patty Andrews yesterday (on my birthday) makes me so wistful.

Patty Andrews

Our father never like popular music--he is serious (but joyful) about music, still, at the age of 90. He especially loves Classic and Early Romantic composers. Mother, on the other hand, loved many kinds of music, especially popular music on the radio. She died in 2008, but she has never left us, and when I saw early this morning about the last surviving Andrews sister's death at 94, I immediately heard my mother's voice.

She sang many Andrews sisters songs to me when I was little, but I especially remember "A Bushel and a Peck," which came out the year I was born. I can imagine her listening to the radio as she did her chores with two small children, learning a song's lyrics almost on a single hearing. She also sang "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" to us (obviously she sang to Mark, too), as well as standards from many other singers of that era.

I think Mother probably sang to (and with) Laura Jane more than either of her sons, but the bond of a mother and daughter is a special and perhaps sacred thing.

Our parents were both World War II veterans, too, and in my growing years I began to get a sense of what the Andrews sisters meant to all the heroes who offered themselves to serve our country during that terrible time. In the online guest book for Patty Andrews this morning, a man named Joseph Pegler from San Diego spoke for an entire generation when he wrote, "The three of you got a lot of us through the South Pacific during WW2. God bless you for ever."

My blessings for Patty Andrews and her sisters are just as heartfelt but from a very different place inside. I would want to thank her for giving my mother songs that my mother then gave me. They live, and they go on, and their rhythm is a heartbeat that will be with me until my own song has ended.

Pride and Prejudice

I'm sure you've read it, but that lovely book by Jane Austen is 200 years old today. I read it first when I was in college, and I've always been a sucker for the romance of outer restraint and inner rapture. 

My favorite film of it by a long shot is the marvelous 2005 version with Matthew Macfadyen and Keira Knightley.

Here's the book at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342.

My papers

I will be in discussions shortly about donating my papers to the University of Georgia's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library where they will be open to the public.

I have a great deal of affection for the libraries, especially the Main Library on North Campus, which I began haunting on an almost daily basis when I was a freshman at UGA in 1968. In those days, the large addition in the back hadn't yet been built, but even so, it was an amazing place. 

Over the years I became friends with Porter Kellam, who was named director of the Library in 1950 and was still there in 1968. He retired, I believe, in 1970, but he was around and active for many years after that. He was a marvelous and warm man, and he was generous and thoughtful to my wife Linda, who worked in the Main Library's Copy Room when we were both in graduate school in the early 1970s. I have been delighted to be friends also with successive administrative people in the Libraries as well.

UGA Main Library

Here is what they say online about Hargrett:

"The Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a leading repository on Georgia history and culture, holds 200,000 volumes in its rare book and Georgiana collections, 6 million pages of historical manuscripts and photographs, along with maps, broadsides, and UGA archives and records. Of particular note is one of the largest collections of Confederate imprints, as well as material of a specialized nature, such as broadsides, historical maps, and sheet music. In addition, the holdings include programs, posters, drawings, photographs, engravings, and other ephemera relating to early American and British theater and the motion picture industry. Other areas of emphasis include performing arts and natural history. Holdings date from the 15th century to the present."

Anyway, as this unfolds, I'll be sure to add more information about my papers. 

Rethinking My Books

I have lately been going back and back to the beginnings of my career as a writer, seeing how I got here from there.

The journey has been anything but smooth, but I think most writers would say the same thing! I know people who take pride in not having changed in any essential thing throughout long lives. I have changed though, and those changes are probably most obvious in my books.

The first piece of sustained fiction I ever wrote was an Avant-Garde novella set in a corn field in Mexico, where I have never once set foot in my life. A volcano erupts. This causes no end of personal and relationship problems for the people who live there. I knew, when I finished it--I think I was about 19--that it was junk. But I also knew I'd written something around 75 pages long, and before doing it, I had no idea I could.

At the time, I mostly saw myself as a poet and was already publishing in little magazines across the country by the time I got to college. And in truth I had never thought much about long-form fiction until the summer I was fifteen. That was when I read two books: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (in English and, though I didn't know it then, abridged.)

During my years from 19 until about 27, I was almost exclusively writing poetry and learning my craft as a journalist. But my wife Linda kept nudging me to write a novel, and I finally did in 1977-78--a turgid mess called Let Us Have Madness. It was just over 400 pages long and dealt with a small-town newspaperman who discovers a small cadre of ex-Nazis living in his county. (To be fair, this was only a little more than 30 years after the end of the war, and a great many vets of all sides were still in their 30s and 40s.)

Looking back, I realize I didn't know a thing then about rewriting. This was also in the typewriter days, so a second draft meant starting from scratch. A clean copy was a nightmare from which I still haven't awakened, as Stephen Dedalus might say. I let a friend read Let Us Have Madness, and he gave it back and said it was hilarious. I didn't bother explaining that it wasn't supposed to be. It was like someone thinking Moby-Dick was a sit-com.

By then I was in my late 20s, and my choice was to quit fiction entirely or to approach it in a different way. So I decided to write only about things I knew and loved, and so I made a list of those things, and from that list came a plot and characters.

And also from it came what was to be my first published novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest, in 1984.

A poem

I'm going to post poems on a regular basis this coming year. And though explaining poems goes against many critical grains, I will most times at least give a little background about the poem.

This poem is about aging and poetry anthologies. I have dozens and dozens of them, as most of you probably do, too. And the ones with pictures of the authors from 30+ years ago show young writers who have grown old, since we can look up current pictures on the internet. Sometimes, the poets have aged gracefully. Others are paying for all that "romantic" smoking, drinking, and drug use from many years ago.

But what really interests me is that most of their poetry doesn't age at all. Or perhaps I should it doesn't age to me. For a long time, I felt the poetry of someone like Allen Ginsberg aged badly, but lately I'm not so sure. I do think his "first thought, best thought" idea for writing poetry was much of the time an excuse for laziness. At the same time, I have always been amused by poets who claimed to have worked on a specific poem for 20 or 30 years.

In short, we are trying to write poems through the lens of who we are--what we know, what we love, and, yes, what we look like. There's no other way.

So with all that in mind, here's a poem for today:

Settling for the Anthology

The desirable women who wrote poems

Selected for The Best American Poetry 1994

Have grown old on my shelf. Their breasts

Sag, they scratch graying hair in the grocery,

Take out the book to prove to themselves

They were once anthologized. The men, too,

Have grown on, truculent maybe, a little

Ridiculous, trying to book readings at small

And smaller colleges, mostly commuter schools

Now, and they pretend they can still drink,

Are still desirable to young girls, when they

Know too well the fatly shuffling figure they see

In the plate glass is the poet himself. And so

It goes on, one succession in the natural world

Replacing another, the new poets emitting

The aroma of sex and drunken desires while

The ones who age shop at Wal-Mart for images

Of one thing that reminds them of something else.

Those who believe in the poetry of aging

Have not aged. Those who believe in the poetry

Of youth have forgotten it. In the small streams,

Freshwater mussels stay clamped shut as

Storms come, rushing them from one stone

To another, a place to lodge, a code to crack.