Remembering Freddie Hubbard

Freddie Hubbard, one of the great trumpet players in jazz and a native of Indiana (born in Indianapolis on April 7, 1938), died yesterday (December 29) at the age of 70. Ted Gioia described Hubbard’s technique in The History of Jazz: “his trumpet playing was fiery, propelled by insistent rhythms, but also softened by a warm, full tone.” When he was honored by his hometown, Hubbard proudly commented: “Man, they gave me a key to the city. Can you imagine going back to Indiana and getting the key to the city? So that made me feel pretty good.” Certainly, one can safely say Freddie Hubbard’s music has made many of us feel pretty good and, as the accompanying video verifies, it will continue to do so.

An Elegant Epigraph: Richard Hugo on Triggering the Imagination

As a new year approaches only days away and many are seeking inspiration to complement their resolutions to write more poetry, perhaps this is the perfect time to remind all of Richard Hugo’s wonderful book, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, that has aided many among the past few generations of poets. In particular, today I highlight a bit of Hugo’s commentary on selecting subject matter for poetry:

“The initiating subject should trigger the imagination as well as the poem. If it doesn’t, it may not be a valid subject but only something you feel you should write a poem about. Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it, a wise man once told me. Not bad advice but not quite right. The point is, the triggering subject should not carry with it moral or social obligations to feel or claim you feel certain ways. If you feel pressure to say what you know others want to hear and don’t have enough devil in you to surprise them, shut up. But the advice is still well taken. Subjects that ought to have poems have a bad habit of wanting lots of other things at the same time. And you provide those things at the expense of your imagination.

“I suspect that the true or valid triggering subject is one in which physical characteristics or details correspond to attitudes the poet has toward the world and himself. For me, a small town that has seen better days often works. Contrary to what reviewers and critics say about my work, I know almost nothing of substance about the places that trigger my poems. Knowing can be a limiting thing. If the population of a town is nineteen but the poem needs the sound seventeen, seventeen is easier to say if you don’t know the population. Guessing leaves you more options. Often, a place that starts a poem for me is one I have only glimpsed while passing through. It should make impression enough that I can see things in the town—the water tower, the bank, the last movie announced on the marquee before the theater shut down for good, the closed hotel—long after I’ve left. Sometimes these are imagined things I find if I go back, but real or imagined, they act as a set of stable knowns that sit outside the poem. They and the town serve as a base of operations for the poem. Sometimes they serve as a stage setting. I would never try to locate a serious poem in a place where physical evidence suggests that the people there find it relatively easy to accept themselves—say the new Hilton.

“The poet’s relation to the triggering subject should never be as strong as (must be weaker than) his relation to his words. The words should not serve the subject. The subject should serve the words. This may mean violating the facts. For example, if the poem needs the word ‘black’ at some point and the grain elevator is yellow, the grain elevator may have to be black in the poem. You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.” — Richard Hugo

—From “Writing Off the Subject,” an essay in The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo (W.W. Norton, 1979).

[“An Elegant Epigraph” serves as the recurring title for a continuing series of posts with entries containing brief but engaging, eloquent, and elegant excerpts of prose commentary introducing subjects particularly appropriate to discussion of literature, creative writing, or other relevant matters addressing complementary forms of art and music. These apposite extracts usually concern topics specifically relating to poetry or poetics. Each piece is accompanied by a recommendation that readers seek out the original publication to obtain further information and to become familiar with the complete context in which the chosen quotation appeared as well as other views presented by its author.]

Robert Frost: "Christmas Trees"

No matter how ornate your Christmas tree appears to be, or if you have no tree at all, may this time of year be a festive, fulfilling season for sharing with friends and family. I extend my best wishes to all with hope for a rewarding holiday that presents ample opportunities for reflection, renewal, and recognition of the many everyday joys our lives provide. I also offer below the gift of a poem by Robert Frost that closes with his Christmas greeting to everyone.

CHRISTMAS TREES


A Christmas Circular Letter


The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine,
I said, “There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north.
He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.


—Robert Frost

Mark Strand: "Lines for Winter"

Early Sunday morning (December 21) marked the solstice and brought the beginning of a new season. Although the bitter cold and brisk winds felt yesterday—temperatures never rising to zero, wind chill measurements in the minus-30s—and the fact I spent hours defrosting a few water pipes before they could burst certainly indicated wintry weather, today (December 22) actually represents the first full day of winter. Consequently, I suggest this date as an apt moment for readers to revisit an appropriate poem, “Lines for Winter,” that first appeared in Mark Strand’s 1978 collection, The Late Hour, which I pulled from my bookshelf again this morning to jot the following few notes.

Readers who know Mark Strand’s work will discover in this piece some characteristics familiar from a number of his other well-known poems. The voice maintains a calm, steady, and controlled tone that assumes an authoritative presence throughout the lines—sometimes sounding ominous, but at times equally soothing and reassuring. The speaker also provides evocative images that play upon readers’ overall expectations for a prevailing atmosphere, carefully suggesting a particular mood or level of emotional involvement.

Throughout the poem, one can perceive the speaker as addressing another (as the dedication insinuates) or as engaged in an exercise of self-reflexive contemplation. The second-person pronoun contributes to this since Strand often has applied it as a device with the purpose of the speaker reflecting upon his difficult state of mind, as if he is gazing into a mirror while narrating self-referential observations. Most likely, the best approach for readers would be to assume both views are intended and each option adds to the texture of the poem. Moreover, one also can question whether the individual addressed will heed the speaker’s advice and be consoled, or the result when he says “tell yourself” may merely be an attempt at self-deception, justification, rationalization, or guidance for the speaker himself in the hard times confronted during his own life.

Further, Mark Strand enjoys employing repetition of phrases in ways that create emphasis or invite varying interpretations with each appearance of a word pattern. As is often the case in Strand’s poetry, the vocabulary and syntax of the sentences seem simple, perhaps disguising their more complex and subtly provocative content. The poem opens with a plain line readers will witness three times, and on each occasion the tenor of the speaker’s meaning seems altered. In its first statement, “Tell yourself” may be an offer of friendly advice. However, later utterances of the phrase take on a different sense, perhaps as a command or even a reprimand to the person being addressed. The selected words gather strength and volume with their prominent positions as they are repeated in the poem, and the recurrence of such language excerpts adds to the settling, almost hypnotic, tone developed in the rhythm of the poem despite some unsettling content.

Likewise, the echo of “as it gets cold” implies the language could be seen as appealing to readers for separate stages of understanding, not just the physical “cold” of winter, but also the coldness that comes with loss of emotion and possibly death, or at least accompanying the sober recognition of one’s own mortality. Surely, images of winter or night frequently signal acknowledgment of one’s mortality, and the “gray” in line two hints at a common sign of aging. Even the poem’s title, “Lines of Winter,” may be seen as reference to later life’s facial lines, those wrinkles gained through age and experience, particularly for anyone who has endured a history of painful events.

Strand also asks readers to associate other repeated phrases with alternative explanations, especially given the clever locations of line breaks. When the speaker recommends to the individual addressed “you will go on,” “as you keep going,” or “go on or turn back,” readers reach the conclusion that the listener has been advised to get on with life despite any disillusionment or disappointment encountered, and not to give in to despair.

The poem appears to become a call for survival over surrender in harsh circumstances, signified by the frigid and dark images of winter scattered throughout the lines of the work. Even the lighter scene involves a “cracking white,” which also includes “a valley of snow,” and each expression can be construed as carrying negative connotations showing one facing possible pain, growing numb to emotion, being reminded of an absence of life in the winter scenery, or awaiting oncoming death. Furthermore, “the small fire” mentioned consists of “winter stars,” and it does not offer warmth to hearten one.

The poet points to the situation in which the one addressed finds herself; however, by isolating the phrase twice (“you find yourself,” “and you find yourself”) as a line of its own, Strand suggests following the speaker’s instructions might permit the listener to discover something new or reinforcing about the self and accomplish the desired goal of not only becoming better informed than “what you know which is nothing,” but of attaining the lifelong hope of more fully knowing oneself. Such awareness, we are led to believe, should direct us to personal illumination, comfort, and contentment.

Certainly, when the speaker refers to “where you will be at the end,” the journey’s destination may be death itself. Thus, the closing lines advance advice about dealing with one’s mortality by understanding one’s self and accepting, even loving, the person one has become: “tell yourself / in that final flowing of cold through your limbs / that you love what you are.”

The present condition in which you exist, as well as the lifetime of experiences and your emotional responses or actions undertaken, may be described as the “tune your bones play / as you keep going.” The introduction of music by this lyrical poet includes an active attitude that could be seen as optimistic of one evolving and adapting to circumstances, just as one has control over direction in life and may change his or her tune. Only when a final silence arrives with our own deaths would the ability to play our own tunes stop, including those hopeful tunes we regard as poetry, and only then should the aim of improvement come to an end as well.

Perhaps the poet previously has demonstrated a way of comprehending this issue. In his book of essays and commentary about poetry, The Weather of Words (Knopf, 2000), Mark Strand once remarked: “Much of what we love about poems, regardless of their subject, is that they leave us with a sense of renewal, of more life. Life, on the other hand, prepares us for nothing, and leaves us nowhere to go. It stops.”

LINES FOR WINTER

for Ros Krauss


Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

—Mark Strand

For further personal commentary in “One Poet’s Notes” about Mark Strand’s poetry, readers are invited to visit the following pages: “Mark Strand: MAN AND CAMEL,” “Marking Mark Strand’s Birthday,” “Mark Strand: ‘Poem After the Seven Last Words,’” and “Giorgio de Chirico: Painting Poetic Images.”

Revisiting the Gotham Book Mart and Greg Rappleye's FIGURED DARK

When I read news reports last week about the disposition of contents from the defunct Gotham Book Mart, I recalled a few observations since its closing, which I noted here last year. At the time, I remarked upon the storied history of the bookstore, and spoke a bit of my personal recollections from those days I frequently browsed the shop’s shelves or when I attended readings and publication parties, including that for John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, as well as an occasion for one of my own collections of poetry. In addition, I recalled Frances Steloff, the legendary owner of the Gotham Book Mart and continuing presence until her death in 1989 at the age of 101.

In that previous article I lamented the loss of such an historical literary place, oddly positioned on West 47th Street. Then, I wrote: “the shop was unusual in many ways, including this literary gem’s location in the center of the midtown diamond district, surrounded by wholesale outlets and appraisers of precious stones. Walking down 47th Street’s narrow passageway of storefront windows glittering with valuable gems and expensive jewelry, one would suddenly come upon the famous sign above the Gotham Book Mart’s entrance, ‘Wise Men Fish Here,’ a reminder to all that the title alluded to a nursery lyric inspiration for the bookstore’s name—L. Frank Baum’s ‘Three Wise Men of Gotham’ from the Mother Goose rhymes.”

Moreover, I wondered what would become of its vast and unique inventory. However, due to the good fortune of an anonymous donor’s intervention, the Gotham Book Mart Collection will find a new location at the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscripts Library. In addition, Penn Libraries plans a complete inventory of the collection’s contents will be made available through Franklin, the library’s online catalog, and particular materials will be digitized to make them accessible to all.

The Gotham Book Mart Collection contains more than 200,000 items, which one news article described as “primarily focused on modern and contemporary poetry and literature, but also encompassing art, architecture, jewelry, music, dance, theater, drama, and film. The collection includes many first editions, books from small presses, experimental literary magazines, outsider literature published by Black Sparrow Press, poetry published by St. Mark's Church, books from the personal libraries of Truman Capote and Anais Nin, proofs, advance copies, pamphlets, photographs, posters, reference works and catalogs, broadsides, prints, postcards, and items signed by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Robinson Jeffers, Woody Allen, Wallace Stevens, and John Updike.”

In my writings from last year, I included the following picture, a famous photograph taken inside the Gotham Book Mart, and I detailed its content. Taken November 9, 1948, during a reception at the Gotham Book Mart for Dame Edith & Sir Osbert Sitwell (seated in the center). Clockwise, they are surrounded by W.H. Auden (seated on the ladder), Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Charles Henri Ford, William Rose Benet, Stephen Spender, Marya Zaturenska, Horace Gregory, Tennessee Williams, Richard Eberhart, Gore Vidal, and José Garcia Villa.

Coincidentally, at the end of last year the University of Arkansas Press released a wonderful book of poems by Greg Rappleye, Figured Dark. This excellent collection was published near the close of 2007, perhaps too late to be considered by many for their lists of best poetry books for the year. Although most readers would have encountered the volume in 2008, it does not qualify for this year’s lists either because of its publication date.

Nevertheless, I must state Figured Dark was among my favorite poetry books read during the last twelve months. Rappleye’s poems invite readers to engage in contemplations on various topics, such as the beauty and fragility of nature, the value of life and living while acknowledging aging and mortality, the poet’s appreciation for language and admiration of other arts. Rappleye’s work exhibits an ear for lyricism and an eye for detail; yet, the words flow so smoothly that they often imitate an intimate conversation with a wise and concerned companion frankly confiding his thoughts. Figured Dark is a book of poems to which I have returned repeatedly and enjoyed reading throughout the past year.

Therefore, I am pleased to use this opportunity to revisit and recommend to all Greg Rappleye’s poetry and to connect his voice with the ongoing narrative about the Gotham Book Mart through this marvelously appropriate poem, “Rainy Afternoon at the Gotham Book Mart,” one of the fine pieces in Figured Dark and one that aptly seems reminiscent of some works by a distinctly New York poet, Frank O’Hara:

RAINY AFTERNOON AT THE GOTHAM BOOK MART

The sign reads Wise Men Fish Here
and away from the slanting rain
is a miraculous draught of books:
old novels, first editions, an entire wall
of poetry. The center table spills over,
as if a trawler has just dropped
a thousand titles onto a raised deck.
I find Allen Tate’s Collected,
an anthology of Czech poets
in face-on-face translations
and a print of the famous photograph,
“A Collection of Poets”—the reception
in 1948 for Edith and Osbert Sitwell.
They are posed center-left
at the rear of this narrow room,
for what Elizabeth Bishop called “a party
in a subway train,” circled by Stephen Spender,
Marianne Moore, Tennessee Williams,
the famous and the now-neglected others.
To the right, that’s Bishop and Randall Jarrell,
in the foreground, Delmore Schwartz,
all in the shadow of Auden, who has draped himself,
Christ-like, across a black stepladder.
I’ve seen the article from Life,
with its gushy Sitwell headlines:
“They Sprang From a Famous Family,”
“They Brave New York,” six pages
spread among the adverts for Minit Rub
and Studebaker, for Lucky Strikes
and Apple Pyequick. This print
is one exposure after the one in Life.
See for yourself—this head turned,
a poet’s arm raised. Jarrell and Bishop,
who’ve been discussing Rilke, now look
stage-left and out of the frame, as if
already seeking an exit. Schwartz,
who interrupted them to press
some obscurity with Jarrell,
has gone slack jawed,
as if he’s just foreseen the years to come.
I go back to the shelves, where I find
Delmore Schwartz: Life of an American Poet,
with its 1961 photo: Schwartz, seated
in Washington Square—
destitute, averting his eyes,
his cigarette held in the familiar style,
a tabloid, headline screaming
HEIRESS KEEPS HER MILLIONS,
tossed beneath the bench.
I pay for the books, the famous print,
and for an extra dollar, buy a plastic sleeve
to keep it safe, then step through the jangle-bell door
into the rain on West Forty-seventh—The rain
that slants from the crowded light, The rain
of pour and pouring down,—a storm
that Bishop told us Will roar all night.

—Greg Rappleye

Greg Keeler: "Our Pleasant Assassins"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Greg Keeler’s “Our Pleasant Assassins,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue (Volume V, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Greg Keeler is the author of a half-dozen collections of poems, including A Mirror to the Safe (Timberlost Press), American Falls (Confluence Press), and Epiphany at Goofy’s Gas (Clark City Press). His poems also have appeared in various anthologies, including Literature, edited by X. J. Kennedy, and Strong Measures, edited by Philip Dacey and David Jauss. Keeler has written Montana "operas," and other musicals, and recorded tapes and CDs, including Live from Nowhere (Trout Ball Productions). He teaches English at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Poet of the Year: Mark Doty

Once more, the close of the year arrives with numerous “best of” lists, such as the New York Times selections of notable books and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, as well as various recognitions of individuals in all sorts of fields, led by Time magazine, which will choose its “Person of the Year.” And again “One Poet’s Notes” joins in the end-of-year enjoyment to name a “Poet of the Year” for 2008 to be considered alongside others’ designations of “Entertainer of the Year,” “Athlete of the Year,” etc.

Last year “One Poet’s Notes” determined John Ashbery deserved to be “Poet of the Year” for his achievements during 2007. As mentioned then, every year an array of poets merits acknowledgment and appreciation for the substantial contributions each has presented, and as seen in 2008, a number of poets have distinguished themselves during the last twelve months to a degree that they earned serious consideration for this annual honor. However, no poet this year has had a more noteworthy period of accomplishment than Mark Doty, the 2008 Poet of the Year.

Moreover, the widespread recognition received by Doty this year indicates perhaps he has reached a new and even more significant level in his career. Indeed, the Judges’ Citation for the National Book Award in Poetry that Doty was given in November for his most recent collection, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, specifically observes that with “this generous retrospective volume a gifted young poet has become a master.” This development does not surprise those of us who for two decades, beginning with Turtle, Swan in 1987, have followed closely Doty’s steady advancements as a poet and the author’s repeated deliverance of marvelous works in book after book.

Certainly, Mark Doty’s volumes have been important touchstones to readers of poetry, and they have served as influential examples for many contemporary poets. Appropriately, Doty’s poems in his previously published collections have been cited for their excellence, as the poet attained such prizes as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Poetry Series Prize, and the Whiting Writer’s Award, among others. In addition, the United Kingdom edition of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, an award for which Mark Doty remains the only American winner. (My Alexandria was chosen for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1995.)

In addition to the great recognition for his poetry this year, Mark Doty had his book of prose, Dog Years: A Memoir, named as the 2008 recipient of the American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards’ Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award. This latest volume of his prose also was a New York Times bestseller, drawing an even greater audience to Doty’s works. Heaven’s Coast, Doty’s first book of memoirs, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 1996.

The Judges’ Citation that accompanied the National Book Award for Fire to Fire described Doty’s poetry: “Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty's poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion. With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis.” Elizabeth Lund wrote about Fire to Fire in a Christian Science Monitor review: “Mark Doty holds a magnifying glass to his subjects. He uses language as a way to highlight a moment, elevate it, and unearth hidden depth and meaning. Fire to Fire, his new and selected poems, illustrates how he has done this over the past 20 years.” Writing in the Dallas Morning News, John Freeman commented: “Fire to Fire is packed with poems about flowers; seasons; elegies to beloved, late poets; dogs, who live parallel to us on speeded-up time; and tattoos, which mock (or mark) our impermanence with their inky finality. In the urgency of his urban observations there is a fanatical desire to preserve. Miraculously, these imperatives never overwhelm the art. The rhythm of Mr. Doty’s lines, its syntactical genius, propels us down the page, stopping time when necessary, making the familiar—be it advent calendars or lilies—exotic.”

In Publisher’s Weekly, Reginald Shepherd commented: “Desire, and its capacity to transform and transfigure, is one of Doty's main themes. Enough desire (so often mixed, as T.S. Eliot wrote, with memory) can make us as beautiful as the objects of our desire. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Doty has never eschewed beauty.” Indeed, during an interview conducted by Craig Morgan Teicher, Mark Doty spoke of his poetry in Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems: “In these new poems, I found myself turning over notions that have always been at the fore for romantic poets: the nature of beauty, the nature of the soul, how love exists in time. I’m always thinking about beauty as a subject—that contested, difficult, fascinating ground that’s so important to me.” Suitably, the accompanying video seen above reveals Mark Doty at the Dodge Poetry Festival reading “The House of Beauty.”

When interviewed in 2003 by Jaclyn Friedman for Poets & Writers, Mark Doty remarked upon his role as a poet: “I have to believe that the practice of poetry, and the professing of it (in the sense of both teaching and speaking as a poet in the world) is an act of paying attention to experience, of responsive awareness. And in that sense it does make the world a bit more human. I have seen firsthand poetry’s power to awaken, deepen, provoke compassion.” Similarly, in “Pipistrelle,” a lovely piece from Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, Doty wonders: “Does the poem reside in experience / or in self-consciousness // about experience.” This poem recounts a moment when the speaker hears the high-pitched sound of a bat flying through nightfall’s darkening sky:

But when I said what I’d heard,

no one else had noticed it, and Charles said,
Only some people can hear their frequencies.
Fifty years old and I didn’t know

I could hear the tender cry of a bat
—cry won’t do: a diminutive chime
somewhere between merriment and weeping,

who could ever say? I with no music
to my name save what I can coax
into a line, no sense of pitch,

heard the night’s own one-sided conversation.
What to make of the gift?

For two decades readers have listened closely to Mark Doty’s poetic voice, detecting a marvelous elegance in the language, hearing those expressively eloquent words he has created. We have marveled at the gift of his trained ear and the musical lines he has sung to us in his lyrics. We have witnessed his dedication to poetry throughout this time, and in 2008 we have been reminded once more of his ability to produce poems with power that awakens, deepens, and provokes compassion.

McCoy Tyner: The Past and the Present

McCoy Tyner was born in Philadelphia on this date (December 11) in 1938. His remarkable ability first came to the attention of John Coltrane when Tyner was still a teenager and played a couple of times with Coltrane. In the first half of the 1960s Tyner was further associated with John Coltrane as a member of his quartet. During that stint working with Coltrane, Tyner firmly established himself as an accomplished accompanist and a sensational soloist.

Now, more than a half century since he initially began his career, McCoy Tyner continues to tour at the age of seventy, appearing this weekend at the Blue Note in New York City. In his book, The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia eloquently explains Tyner’s musical expertise seen evolving during his years as a member of Coltrane’s quartet:

Tyner delighted in ambiguous voicings, liberally spiced with suspended fourths that rarely resolved, often played with a thunderous two-handed attack that seemed destined to leave permanent finger marks in the keys. Tyner’s solos were, if anything, even more energetic. Single note lines, leavened with wide, often unpredictable interval leaps, jostled with sweeping arpeggios, cascading runs, reverberating tremelos. His touch at the piano, which originally possessed brittle sharpness, took on volume and depth, eventually emerging as one of the fullest and most easily identifiable keyboard sounds in jazz.

Therefore, the above video of McCoy Tyner’s amazing solo performance of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” seems appropriate in providing a sample of his playing that blends his past with his present.

As my last class of the semester met yesterday, and I am now reading a final few student reports on past poetry collections by significant poets, I will take this opportunity to recognize Tyner’s 70th birthday by listening to his music during the process and by remembering Tyner’s encouraging attitude toward artists embracing the past in order to pursue new directions in the future.

Occasionally, my students, particularly some in poetry or fiction writing, question the need to write term papers about previous works and wonder about the benefit in reviewing writings by past authors. Continually, I emphasize to my creative writing students the value of analyzing those writers whose works have laid the groundwork for today’s literature to be written by them and others in the present.

I similarly will remind myself once again on this day of the importance for all artists, including contemporary poets, to have knowledge of previous practitioners in their fields by repeating the following words of wise advice once offered by McCoy Tyner: “I think it is good to use the past as a base; it’s good for anyone to have foundations to use as a starting point, because the stronger and deeper the foundations are, the further one can progress.”

Poetry Writing and Poetry Reading

As the semester comes to a close today for my Poetry Writing class, I take this moment to reflect once again on the significant degree of development witnessed in the poetic skill of the students during the past few months. Recently, I participated as one member on a panel at a symposium discussing the creative process. Accompanied by distinguished and enlightening artists from separate fields—including painting, sculpture, acting, playwriting, and music—I was asked a familiar question by the moderator, who wondered whether creative writing could be taught.

Frequently over the years, I have been challenged to defend creative writing courses and the notion anyone could learn creative writing in an academic setting the way other subjects are presented and comprehension achieved. Even colleagues in the English department and elsewhere throughout the university sometimes have posed questions out of curiosity or displayed a bit of skepticism concerning this topic. Each time I have been asked about this, I have repeatedly responded with an affirmative and enthusiastic answer. Of course, as is the case in painting and music classes, creative writing courses provide opportunities for students to gain knowledge and to practice the craft. With proper training and encouragement, each individual should demonstrate advancement in his or her abilities over a period of time.

However, I always have qualified my replies by reminding all that accomplishments at the highest levels of creativity and achievements of excellence in writing poetry or fiction, as in any other art, depend upon a certain amount of inherent qualities held by an author—an acute sensitivity to the sound and sense of language, an inquisitive mind filled with imaginative and innovative perspectives, and a deep desire to continually better oneself expressed through ongoing study of examples produced by other writers (past and present), as well as great dedication exhibited in one’s own hard work and an admirable ambition accompanied by the willingness to risk failure.

One of my poetry writing teachers, Dave Smith, once explained in his book, Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry:

Can creative writing be taught?
Writing can be and always has been taught. One may teach both the forms and formulas of literature. One cannot teach how to write masterpieces of great art. Art history, art appreciation, and studio instruction teach a great many valuable things about painting. There has never been a course which could teach even the most talented apprentice to be a Michelangelo. But was Michelangelo self-taught in a void? In writing what is taught is respect for time, history, discipline, struggle, expectation, and accomplishment.

When my students end a semester in poetry writing, I usually suggest their task has just begun if they truly want to excel as poets. I recommend that they consider the term’s lessons about how to employ language effectively—and any basic knowledge gained about composition, style, or form—ought to be seen merely as a start toward a more singular and stimulating voice, as well as an invitation to use the tools consequently provided by classroom discussions to find words, lines, and stanzas that supply the literary means to stretch one’s vision, perhaps allowing an instinctive initiation of imagery or an intuitive attainment of insight.

Nevertheless, each semester during the last week of classes I pleasantly discover one reward of teaching poetry writing. For years the syllabus in my poetry writing course has included a culminating event to celebrate the fine poems attained by the students in compositions contributed as class assignments. Fortunately, through the long-standing cooperation of Valparaiso University’s Brauer Museum of Art, each semester my students have had the honor of presenting a formal reading in the wonderful setting of one of the museum’s main galleries (shown in the video tour above) to which all at the university and townspeople in the surrounding community are invited for an evening of poetry, followed by a chance to speak with the student poets while enjoying refreshments during a reception in the lobby.

The other night my students read a sampling of the various poems produced during the semester, including an ekphrastic piece each had written inspired by an artwork in the museum, a tradition begun more than a decade ago in 1996 when writers at the university created poems in response to the artwork of Charles Burchfield as part of a special exhibit of the artist’s major paintings. A unique bond between painting and poetry enhances the placement of the students’ reading in the museum, as every poet remains true to the painter’s goal of eliciting emotional or intellectual reactions through vivid and expressive imagery.

Throughout the hour of the students’ presentation, I was impressed by the assortment of subjects and variety of perspectives offered in differing and distinctive voices, as well as the range of tones that were properly spread from solemn and elegiac to humorous and joyful. Elements of craft evident in the construction of the poetry frequently seemed to have been selected and implemented in a natural manner, fitting together seamlessly and effectively. Students, some of whom might have begun the semester without a complete awareness of the ways one establishes lyricism in language while evoking authentic emotional reactions through rich images, shared with the audience assorted examples of their poetry that now carefully and subtly blend those components.

Additionally, I admired the courage revealed during the students’ reading as they gazed out at those in the rows of chairs before them. To deliver one’s personal thoughts and emotions to others in lyric poems often leaves the writer feeling very vulnerable, especially when speaking to numerous strangers. Nevertheless, although I’m sure a number of the students originally might have been nervously hesitant about a public reading of their poetry when they first learned about it in the syllabus at the start of the semester, a certain amount of competence and confidence gathered through class conversations and workshop of their poems apparently permitted them to read with more assurance.

Indeed, the students previously had attended excellent presentations at the museum earlier in the semester by a couple of visiting writers, and they had observed how an experienced poet like Susanna Childress skillfully entertained and engaged an audience. Certainly, such experiences could have been sources of further intimidation and engendered even more anxiety for beginning writers; however, as the students read their poetry in the museum gallery this past week, all watching could appreciate the increased ease and striking success with which they now delivered their words.

Clearly, few of the students in my creative writing classes ever contemplate continuing with poetry or fiction writing as a vocation, and some may never publish a poem or read their poetry publicly again. Normally, not all the students are majors in creative writing or English. In fact, this time there were majors in biology, psychology, physics, and computer science, among others.

Nevertheless, I hope all of them will be avid readers throughout their lives, and I believe creative writing courses develop better readers as well as better writers, particularly by encouraging a supplemental view through the author’s eyes when reading. Additionally, as Dave Smith further writes: “Creative writing is one of the few formal opportunities in education for self-discovery and self-creation. It leads a student less to right answers than to right questions. It creates more intelligent, informed, and responsible readers by immersing them in the actual process of imaginative exploration and accomplishment.”

I am convinced I recognized some of these resulting qualities listed by Smith in my students and their works as they took part in the formal presentation at the Brauer Museum of Art this past week. Therefore, perhaps whenever I am asked again whether one can learn to write poetry, or someone even seems suspicious of the value in a creative writing course, I may just suggest the questioner attend the next end-of-semester student reading, where any doubt likely will be dismissed with each fine poem read by a new poet.

Floyd Skloot: "The Moonlight Manuscript, 1696"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Floyd Skloot’s “The Moonlight Manuscript, 1696,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue (Volume III, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Floyd Skloot is the author of fifteen books, including poetry collections The Evening Light (Story Line Press, 2001), Approximately Paradise (Tupelo Press, 2005), The End of Dreams (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), Selected Poems: 1970-2005 (Tupelo Press, 2008), and The Snow’s Music (Louisiana State University Press, 2008); volumes of memoirs In the Shadow of Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), A World of Light (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); and the novels Summer Blue (Story Line Press, 1994) and Patient 002 (Rager Media, 2007).

He has had poetry and works of nonfiction appear in numerous magazines, including American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Boulevard, Creative Nonfiction, Georgia Review, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He also contributes book reviews to the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Harvard Review, New York Times Book Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications.

Floyd Skloot’s awards include the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction; the Independent Publishers Book Award in Creative Nonfiction; Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award; Oregon Book Awards in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry; three Pushcart Prizes; two appearances in The Best American Essays and The Best American Science Writing, and once each in The Best Spiritual Writing, The Best Food Writing, and The Art of the Essay.

Both The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life and Selected Poems: 1970-2005 are among the twelve books shortlisted for the 2009 Pacific NW Booksellers Association Book Awards to be announced next month.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Stuart Davis, Walt Whitman, and Jazz

Stuart Davis was born on this date (December 7) in 1894. Davis’s parents were both painters, and his father worked as an art editor for a newspaper. Therefore, one would not be surprised to find Davis follow their lead with his interest in art as well. However, Davis explored fresh and different paths of inspiration during his career. He discovered an influence from jazz when he visited nighttime locales in New York and New Jersey as an art student, particularly frequenting those growing hot spots in New York City, inexpensive clubs established in Harlem mainly to attract blacks with a fondness for the new music being performed. Davis also found a formative influence in the European Cubist artists whose paintings he first encountered at the Armory Show in 1913. Throughout his life Davis combined these two inspirations to create a novel mixture of the American spirit evident in jazz—as well as images of objects associated with contemporary society or popular culture—and what he perceived as the twentieth-century European tendency toward abstraction.

As Robert Hughes notes in his book on the history of American art, American Visions, Davis sometimes countered criticism that his work leaned too heavily on the foreign influence of Cubism, and he objected to claims that he was losing touch with his American roots, especially when Davis took a tour of France in the late 1920s. Indeed, Hughes observes that Davis believed his European excursion had “only convinced him of the essential vitality of American subject matter, whose character he would praise in a torrent of images reminiscent of his poetic hero, Walt Whitman, impacting the relatively old and the brashly new.” Hughes quotes Stuart Davis:

American wood and iron work of the past; civil war and skyscraper architecture; the brilliant colors on gasoline stations, chain-store fronts, and taxi-cabs; the music of Bach; synthetic chemistry; the poetry of Rimbaud; fast travel by train, auto, and aeroplane which brought new and multiple perspectives; electric signs; the landscape and boats of Gloucester, Mass.; 5 & 10 cent store kitchen utensils; movies and radio; Earl Hines hot piano and Negro jazz music in general . . .. The quality of these things plays a role in determining the character of my paintings. Not in the sense of describing them in graphic images, but by predetermining an analogous dynamics in the design, which becomes a new part of the American environment. Paris School, Abstraction, Escapism? Nope, just Color-Space compositions celebrating the resolution in art of stresses set up by some aspects of the American scene.

When Whitman had declared he heard America singing in the nineteenth century, he imitated in the language of his poetry the distinctive voices he perceived but had not yet adequately been represented in his nation’s literature. Similarly, Stuart Davis depicts the sounds of a new era, particularly the jazz music evolving in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, in the flow of color and position of shapes seen on his canvas.

By the late 1930s Stuart Davis became enthralled by the “swing” jazz then getting so popular across the country. He hoped to incorporate into his artwork the rhythms heard in musical arrangements by Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and others. Consequently, when commissioned in 1938 by the works project administration for artists, initiated by the federal government during the depression years, to paint an urban mural for a housing complex in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, Davis produced Swing Landscape. The mural exists as a work that he meant to be an example of how the artist bridges the domestic and foreign influences he’d felt over the decades.

As well, Stuart Davis used the painting in such a manner as to lessen any separations he’d detected between the urban cityscape of New York and nature’s landscape or seascape he’d frequently witnessed during summer holidays on the Massachusetts shore, perhaps even closing the gap between his affection for both the sophisticated European classics of Bach and the gritty American jazz of Count Basie, two very different musicians whose compositions Davis admired greatly. In the end, Davis devised in Swing Landscape a piece many now consider among his masterpieces. Oddly enough, Swing Landscape never was installed in Williamsburg and does not grace the East Coast urban region for which it was intended; instead, the work is now housed in the middle of the American heartland at the Indiana University Art Museum.

Another wonderful example of Stuart Davis’s art available in Indiana can be located in Valparaiso University’s Brauer Museum of Art. (I recommend to all the online video tour of the Brauer Museum of Art.) Study for a Drawing, a screenprint and a much later work, was selected by me as the cover for the Spring/Summer 2002 issue (Volume III, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. In his excellent commentary concerning the cover art, Gregg Hertzlieb, Director of the Brauer Museum of Art, offered the following insight:

Davis’s 1955 screenprint Study for a Drawing is a small, delightful work that is alive with the fragmented, syncopated energy that characterizes his best pictures. Using the primary colors red and blue as well as black and white, Davis reduces visual experience down to its fundamentals. His flat, geometric forms can be thought of as the building blocks of representation. Resembling cutout shapes a child may create, the forms are meant to present a highly generalized version of the urban activity that Davis saw around him. In Study for a Drawing, Davis infuses often dark or cerebral cubism with a festive air. The picture at first glance reminds one of Mondrian; however, the active composition of the print demonstrates the power of diagonals and irregular contours to impart a feeling or tone very different from the austere mood of Mondrian’s canvases.

Like the image itself, the title of this work is something of a puzzle. Drawings tend to be spontaneous and are often done in preparation for a labor-intensive print. Here, those practices appear to be reversed. The print is the study and may have been an exercise for the artist in working out design elements that would figure into a major drawing or major series of drawings. The title conveys the idea of Davis involved in a process, where the image, seemingly produced in a sudden burst of creativity, is actually the product of a number of careful steps of abstraction. Davis’s jostling forms are extreme simplifications of real objects or environments that served as initial points of interest. His inventive gift lies in the remarkable way he is able to retain a general flavor or sense of an observed scene through an almost completely nonobjective vocabulary.

Readers are invited to revisit the contents of the Spring/Summer 2002 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review containing Study for a Drawing and the rest of Gregg Hertzlieb’s commentary on Stuart Davis. Moreover, the issue includes poems and an essay by featured poet David Baker, as well as poetry by Barry Ballard, Jared Carter, Catherine Daly, John Gilgun, Marie C. Jones, Mary Linxweiler, Walt McDonald, Vivian Shipley, Floyd Skloot, Daniel Tobin, and James R. Whitley. Additionally, in this issue Daryll Tippens interviews Walt McDonald. Finally, books by David Baker, Jared Carter, Michael Palmer, and Vivian Shipley also are reviewed.

NEA Fellowships in Poetry Announced

The National Endowment for the Arts announced today a list of 42 poets who will be recipients of grants in 2009. Each of the authors will receive $25,000 to support a creative writing fellowship. In a time filled with numerous reports of poor economic situations, I am pleased to hear some positive news for the following poets, especially since over the years some have been personal friends or contributors to Valparaiso Poetry Review. VPR congratulates these poets. May the muses already pictured on holiday in the de Chirico painting above now get to work and provide further inspiration to these writers in the upcoming year.

2009 Grant Awards: Literature Fellowships (Poetry)

Allen, William M.
Bargowski, John
Black, Rebecca
Bohince, Paula
Brown, Nickole
Candelaria, Xochiquetzal
Charara, Hayan
Cole, Henri
Diaz, Joanne
Dischell, Stuart
Freligh, Sarah
Frost, Helen
Gibb, Robert
Goetsch, Douglas
Graham, Loren
Green, Samuel
Hicok, Bob
Jaffe, Maggie
Kasdorf, Julia
Knight, Lynne
Koo, Jason
Kronen, Steve
Leeming, Jay
McGriff, Michael
Meek, Anna George
Menes, Orlando R.
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee
Notter, William
Paloff, Benjamin
Phillips, Patrick
Powell, Joseph
Rafferty, Charles
Rathburn, Chelsea T.
Satterlee, Thom
Shearin, Faith
Shumate, David
Spera, Gabriel
Springer, Jane
Struloeff, John
Szybist, Mary C.
Worra, Bryan Thao
Young, C. Dale

Pushcart Prize Nominations from VPR for 2008

In December, Pushcart Press will be releasing its 33nd edition of small press literary selections, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Since 1976, editor Bill Henderson has brought added recognition to the many fine small presses and literary journals publishing quality material with his annual anthology distributed by W.W. Norton. Writers whose early works were first highlighted in the pages of the series’ volumes include Charles Baxter, Raymond Carver, Joshua Clover, Andres Dubus, John Irving, Philip Levine, Philip Lopate, Susan Minot, Paul Muldoon, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, Mona Simpson, and many others.

In recent volumes the nomination process for the Pushcart Prize has been opened to online journals and their editors. I applaud this move, and I encourage further acknowledgment of the high quality of writing found in many electronic publications. Therefore, I am pleased to offer the half-dozen works listed below as the 2008 nominees from Valparaiso Poetry Review for the Pushcart Prize, perhaps again signaling one way to express VPR’s support for the inclusion of pieces from electronic magazines for consideration in the long-standing tradition of this fine anthology.

As I have mentioned in the past when nominating works from Valparaiso Poetry Review for the additional recognition of an award or further publication in any “best of” anthology, I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in VPR. In addition, as mentioned in a recent post (“Thanksgiving Leftovers: Woody Allen, Best Books Lists, and Name Games”), inevitably these sort of selections often are particularly subjective. Therefore, such decisions are not easy.

Yet, I welcome the admirable efforts of the Pushcart Press and Bill Henderson to bring attention to the excellent literary works found in small presses and journals, in print and online. Moreover, I am grateful when an opportunity arises for a few of VPR’s splendid poets to reach an even larger audience and find the greater recognition they deserve through possible inclusion in such an anthology.

A little more than two weeks ago I submitted nominees from this year’s issues of VPR to the Pushcart Press, but I have withheld announcement until after the Thanksgiving weekend. Today, I am proud to announce the six following poems represent the nominations from the 2008 issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review (Volume IX, Number 2 and Volume X, Number 1) to be considered for inclusion in the next volume by the Pushcart Press, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses XXXIV, which will be published in December 2009:

PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINEES FROM 2008 ISSUES OF VPR


J.P. Dancing Bear: “Chiroptera”

Mary Biddinger: “The Last Man She Ever Knew”

Jared Carter: “Dark Transit”

Lynnell Edwards: “Suite for Red River Gorge”

Patricia Fargnoli: “The Swankeeper”

Elise Paschen: “Cicadas”

I congratulate each of these poets, and I wish to express my appreciation to all the contributors whose works have appeared in VPR this past year.


—Edward Byrne, Editor of Valparaiso Poetry Review

Mike Chasar: "Echinoidea Freddy"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Mike Chasar’s “Echinoidea Freddy,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2004-2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Mike Chasar’s poetry has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Cortland Review, The Formalist, and other literary journals. His essays and reviews have appeared in various publications, including American Book Review, American Literature, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Iowa Review, Journal of American Studies, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and Writer’s Chronicle. Chasar teaches English at the University of Iowa, and he maintains a fascinating blog on “Poetry & Popular Culture.”

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Thanksgiving Leftovers: Woody Allen, Best Books Lists, and Name Games

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions. —George Santayana

Over the long weekend—filled by having Thanksgiving dinner with family, viewing a few old films on cable, reading the first of the numerous annual end-of-year “best of” lists (including the New York Times lists of best books for 2008), watching lots of sports telecasts, and now noting Woody Allen’s birthday today (born on December 1, 1935)—I have been considering connections between all of these and forming the following serving of leftover thoughts from the holiday break.

There is an interesting moment in the film Manhattan (1979) during which Woody Allen’s central character, a writer named Isaac, is lying on a couch in his apartment, brainstorming, recording ideas on his cassette tape recorder as preparation for composition of a short story (see film clip above). In an uncharacteristic twist of direction for a Woody Allen protagonist, Isaac decides to examine an optimistic approach to life and living.

Indeed, most of Allen’s characters’ attitudes can be summed up with the following pessimistic observation offered in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) by another of Allen’s alter egos, Mickey: “There are only two types of people in the world, the unhappy and the truly miserable.” Thus, one might conclude we ought to be thankful when we’re only unhappy. However, by the end of that movie even the seemingly suicidal Mickey accidentally discovers a renewal of hope and a belief life is worth living when he drifts into a revival theater showing the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup.

In Manhattan Isaac begins his search for a positive evaluation of life by asking one pointed question: “Why is life worth living?” He then records his list of responses: “Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘Potatohead Blues,’ Swedish movies (naturally), Sentimental Education by Flaubert, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne, the crabs at Sam Wo’s . . ..” The list includes individuals and works that contributed to experiences found fitting, harmonious, beautiful, or rewarding in his life—pleasurable memories gathered together, which to some extent sketch a formal statement, a descriptive analysis of the formative influences that fashioned his character.

Similarly, in Save the Tiger, a 1973 film directed by John Avildsen, Jack Lemmon portrays a somewhat successful businessman living in Beverly Hills, but undergoing a midlife crisis. Much of what he sees in his current life offers little or no enjoyment. Consequently, in an effort to recapture his former, more youthful, enthusiasm for life, he plays a name game and thinks back to those who made life worth living for him. His list includes the following: Glenn Miller, Fred Allen, Jimmy Durante, Carl Hubbell, Eddie Arcaro, Laurel and Hardy, Sugar Ray Robinson, Hank Greenberg, Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Fatha’ Hines, Fats Waller, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Popeye, LuLu, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin. The names in this personal inventory read like an excerpt from one generation’s imaginary program of popular arts, sports, and entertainment.

The preceding lists present wide-ranging implications not only about the lives of the film characters who speak those lines, but also about elements of art and popular culture most of us might consider valuable in our own lives. One may take it for granted when determining those responsible for the aspects of our lives that have nurtured us and contributed greatly to whatever sense of contentment we may have experienced, especially when considered over a holiday weekend, most of us would initially indicate our family members and close friends. In fact, Woody Allen even ends his list when he comes up with “Tracy’s face,” and he recalls his affection for a former lover.

Many might also include teachers, clergy, neighbors, local leaders, or co-workers. However, no matter how many figures we draw from these diverse personal relationships, such resulting lists of important, inspirational, or influential individuals who have enormously enlightened, entertained, enchanted, and enriched our lives remain singular or isolated, not mutually shared with those members of society outside our own communities.

A revelation of common cultural heroes or collectively recognized works of art in our society marks the two film monologues previously cited as significant to many and recognized by others outside the closed circle of family, friends, or acquaintances in the personal lives of their speakers. In these twin instances, it is particularly essential that the references travel beyond the enclosed worlds of the speakers, of course, since both characters must seem relevant and connected to their audience in order to ensure empathy.

Moreover, one might suggest the very nature of such lists—honor rolls that often include human icons representative of contemporary culture, those stars and celebrities who comprise the intimate strangers of our society mixed like ingredients in a recipe—and the total composition of the montage one envisions when faced with such selected combinations establish a particular reflexive portrait of ourselves and our society in a given time period.

The way a gallery of Andy Warhol portraits of noted figures partially explains the painter’s self and the interests of his audience, the popular personalities we choose to place in our aggregate allow for instantaneous identification with the thoughts, feelings, or attitudes expressed by others. As Louis Simpson has written: “Time after time, the artist who is true to his own view of experience turns out to be speaking for others.”

Additionally, the artists’ creations of symbols out of ordinary articles given special attention in their works, such as Warhol’s soup cans or the American flags and targets of Jasper Johns, also permit our imaginations to ascribe to objects of art those emotions or moods we find present in ourselves and feel a need to represent through everyday physical signs. Therefore, our own menu of selections might serve as an indicator of the ways we see the world in which we live, as well as an instrument that projects for closer scrutiny our personal images of self.

It seems fitting to close these stray after-Thanksgiving thoughts with one more moment from a popular film of the seventies, The Way We Were (1973), directed by Sydney Pollock. In one scene Robert Redford, as the well-off WASP writer Hubbell Gardner, is floating in a sailboat on a calm bay with his best friend. Since their college days, whenever together the two continually play another form of name game as they attempt to list their opinions of “the best” of everything in life for which they are thankful.

Perhaps everyone ought to test himself or herself by playing this game every once in a while, as a few of us did after dinner this Thanksgiving. For example, try to name the best jazz album, the best Hitchcock film, the best modern novel, the best James Bond, the best living songwriter, the best contemporary poet, the best Impressionist painting, the best American playwright, the best Shakespeare sonnet, the best television sitcom of all time, the best major league shortstop, the best pizza place in New York, the best bookstore in Chicago, the best beer (domestic and imported), the best blend of coffee, and so on. Compose your own list. Coming up with more innovative categories supplies much of the fun.

All will soon discover a pleasant problem with the game. The purpose of the exercise cannot and should not be an arrival at the right result. Except in the case of numerically measurable topics, it is impossible really to know the best of anything not quantifiable, as every response would be subjective, and inevitably there will never be a definitive correct answer. This predicament is especially evident when contemplating art and artists in various disciplines or evaluating accomplishments of individuals associated with an array of entertainment areas in popular culture.

Therefore, as in the case of the Redford character, the game never stops: it is a lifetime adventure involving ongoing debate, perhaps with ever-changing replies as one matures and gains enhanced knowledge or accumulates more experiences, developing a growing roll of valuable images as memories to be preserved, and that is exactly the charm of the game. Answers given at any moment may define where we are at the time they are volunteered, but asked again next Thanksgiving or during a holiday conversation ten years from now, we might find we’ve moved forward in our lives and likely second-guess previous selections. Even experts’ opinions are often suspect: for proof, one need only to debate volumes on the “best books” lists or examine those chosen ten years ago, twenty years ago, and fifty years ago to see how many have held up well over the decades, as well as how many have not.

Nevertheless, the name game is enjoyable to play and provides a spark frequently leading to bursts of interesting holiday conversations with friends and relatives. Let’s see: the best jazz album, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis; the best Hitchcock film, Psycho; the best modern novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; the best James Bond, Sean Connery (especially in Goldfinger); the best living songwriter, Bob Dylan; the best contemporary poet . . .. You try it.