1B: Selected Poets: Gerald Stern, Frank O’Hara, Galway Kinnell, Al Young, Billy Collins & Poets in Performance

The Poems and the Poets
“The Dog” by Gerald Stern (586)
"The Day Lady Died" by Frank O’Hara (587)
“The Bear” by Galway Kinnell (589)
"A Dance for Ma Rainey" by Al Young (630)
"I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'" by Billy Collins (634)

GERALD STERN

Gerald Stern (1925-).  Portrait by Michael Hafftka

Gerald Stern on the web: Academy of American Poets, Poetry Foundation, Poetry Society of America, and The Rumpus.  An excerpt from The Rumpus interview follows.

The Rumpus: Talk to me about political poetry.

Gerald Stern: I don’t know what to say that hasn’t been said already. Not everyone confronts. Not everyone is summoned. It’s you who are “political,” it’s not what you say. Political means so many things. We are political willy-nilly. Political poetry is an easy invitation to disaster. But then so is love poetry. But we are a little more patient with bad love poetry. It might be an evil necessity that we want to get rid of—so we can go back to the other. Oppressed persons, oppressed cultures, tend to be more political, obviously, as are those with a rage for justice, or the crazy messianic desire. Oppressed cultures often envy those which are not, or oppressed individuals do, and sometimes those which—and who—are not envy those which—who—are.  All said before. Some are spokesmen, spokespeople: they can’t help themselves. They can’t think of anything else. Maybe they’re deprived, even depressed. If you don’t have a bed, or a dresser or a wall, or a book or a toy you are oppressed. An African American in a white world.  A Jew in a Christian world. A gypsy. A Native American. A Chinese American. Let’s say, you were born deprived. What then? Some don’t identify; they just don’t. Berryman’s best poetry was not (properly) political. Yet “The Imaginary Jew” (totally political) is his best story. It’s insane—why does a poet have to do it? Can’t he not?  I have left out what I don’t remember or don’t know. Temperament, fear, shyness, obedience, kindness. I use to be better at this!  This is the last time I’ll talk about it.

Rumpus: I want to ask you about caves. You wrote an essay all about caves in What I Can’t Bear Losing. You talked about physical and metaphysical caves, you looked at caves as places of both confinement and liberation, and you said at one point that the artist’s “job” is to be a cave dweller. How is being in the cave—the place of confinement and liberation—useful to the artist?

Stern: The cave is a dark, shadowy place. It’s a place that’s very close and yet distant at the same time, and it’s a place of revelation and isolation. Your form, your body, your writing is your confinement. It’s a kind of liberation to break free in language, if you can break free, but it’s also a confinement, because form confines you—whatever the form. I’m not talking necessarily about rhyme, though that’s certainly confinement. It’s through that form, through that discipline of writing, that you liberate yourself. You come into, through the isolation of writing even, an understanding, maybe of some form of detachment, which is a complicated and ambiguous word. Maybe being an artist is a kind of detachment. You’re in the cave, you’re isolated, you’re apart from everything and it’s there you can find out what you believe in, or what is—what is the nature of being, as you see it, you know?

Rumpus: This sounds very much like Buddhism.

Stern: Well, if the Buddhist’s job is to be detached, I think that the artist’s job is to be both detached and attached. We understand detachment, sort of, albeit in Buddhism it’s a different story than, say, Medieval Christian mysticism. For the Christian mystics, detachment meant to leave attachment so that God could enter you and take over completely and you could climb the ladder to their heaven. Kind of crazy, but what the hell? Attachment has to do with suffering, so it’s really close to Buddhism, because Buddhism wants to relieve you from suffering; you’re supposed to escape from suffering. But the artist’s job, as I see it, is to be both attached and detached.  How can he not embrace suffering?

For the full interview Rumpus conducted with Gerald Stern go here.

For your viewing pleasure watch Gerald Stern: Still Burning. 

Dave Groff conducted an interview with Tony Leuzzi about his new book of poems, The Burning Door in The Brooklyn Rail, June 5, 2014. Leuzzi makes a reference to Gerald Stern, who he interviewed in 2011: "I once asked Gerald Stern about the title of his book Everything is Burning, and he said, '[E]verything is being consumed on a literal level, everything is dying … But another name for burning is living. Everything is alive, everything is turning' (Passwords Primeval 153)." 

An excerpt from Leuzzi's full interview with Stern follows:

Tony Leuzzi: You have often been compared to Whitman. Could you talk about

your relationship to Whitman? In what ways do you see yourself as

his descendant? In what ways do you see yourself as different?

Gerald Stern: Charlie [C. K.] Williams just wrote an incredible book about

Whitman called On Whitman., which has been published by

Princeton. At first, I thought, "God, another book about Whitman?

I've got about ten upstairs in my office. What is Charlie going to say

that has not been said?" But he managed to say something new. He

talked about what Whitman meant to him, and about the music of the

poetry. A little while after the book was published, he got an email

from a woman in Tel Aviv who asked him why so many American

Jewish poets identify strongly with Whitman. Charlie sent the email

to me and I wrote a response to this woman, and explained what I

saw as the Jewish connection with Whitman.

I think Jewish poets easily identify with Whitman because he doesn't

really come out of the Protestant—the Christian—tradition. There is

such a tradition in English poetry whether the poet is an observant

Christian or not. Obviously Donne and Herbert are Christian

poets; and Byron—even Keats—can be seen as non-Christian,

even though the two of them come out of that tradition. I don't

think we've entirely resolved where he comes from; maybe the The

Bhagavad Gita, maybe Transcendetalism. When I talk about the

Christian tradition, I am talking about terms of reference, origin, and

mythology.

I love Whitman, but I came to resent people saying I was "a

reincarnation" of him. It's just not true. There are some surface

similarities. I, like Whitman, use anaphora a lot. I taught Whitman

for years, of course, and read him, but I may have also gotten this

syntactical device from Blake or the Jewish Bible. Parallelisms,

too: the prophets as well as Whitman use them. So I came to resent

people identifying me with Whitman, and I began to resent Whitman

because of it, which is illogical of course, but then what's new? Why

all the focus on Whitman when I also loved Smart, Blake, Milton,

Roethke, late Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Rimbaud as well. Still, in

spite of resentments, I love Whitman. I think he was a great poet.

And I'm more and more beginning to see that he's a mystic, really,

particularly in his middle work, the poems he wrote in his late

30s—a kind of real mystic without realizing it. He thought he was

deriving information from the influence of opera, transcendentalism,

Emerson, Thoreau and such; he thought he was a kind of New

England poet, that his journalism stood him in good stead, as well as

his sympathy with African Americans at the time (though he didn't

take an extreme position), but finally there's something else that

maybe even he wasn't totally aware of and didn't pay much attention

to; even in his last years, when his powers declined, when he was

pushing his fame endlessly, writing letters, living in Camden, NJ,

the grand old man, revising his work. In any case, if you write in

the Protestant tradition, which is the dominant one, it excludes most

Jewish poets.

If the link to the above interview does not work, search Tony Leuzzi, "An Interview with Gerald Stern," Great River Review, Fall/Winter2011, Issue 55, 4-27. 24

Gerald Stern on the PBS NewsHour 

FRANK O'HARA

Frank O'Hara (1926-66)

A good place to start for Frank O'Hara on the web: www.frankohara.org. it has his poetry, audio, video and more. O'Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art and this essay discusses how his poetry and painting mix. Other websites to visit: Poetry Foundation and Academy of American Poets. Here is O'Hara reading "Having a Coke with You":

O'Hara, as you know, wrote "The Day Lady Died" as a remembrance of Billie Holiday.  Watch and listen to performances of Holiday singing "One for My Baby (and one more for the road)," "Now Baby or Never," and  "Strange Fruit".  More about the original lyrics and the man who wrote "Strange Fruit" can be found at NPR, PBS [i]NDEPENDENT LENS, and The New York Times Book Review; here's the first chapter from Strange Fruit. "Strange Fruit" is considered one of the greatest songs of the 20th Century and certainly one of the greatest about racism in America. If you've never heard Holiday sing, it is about time you take a few minutes and do.  More of Holiday singing can be seen at this video documentary

Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit" (mid-to-late1950s)

GALWAY KINNELL

Galway Kinnell (1927--2014) at Battery Park City, New York.  Photo by Mark Woods.

Galway Kinnell on the web: his website, at the Academy of American Poets website. and at The Poetry Foundation website. C.K. Williams remembers Kinnell in The New Yorker, following Kinnell's death. You can listen to him reading a selection of works by poets Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman and Dickinson. More of his own poetry can be found here.

Kinnell reading "The Bear" in the early 1970s.

In the following excerpt from a 2001 Daniela Gioseffi conducted with Kinnell, Kinnell talks about his work in the Civil Rights movement and its connection to his poetry.

Daniela Gioseffi: I know that you worked in the cause of registering black voters during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's. . . . Can you say something about that work that you did then and what went on around you and why you were involved in it as someone who was really a poet at heart?

Galway Kinnell: Ah, well, it was mostly that I found it unbearable to live in a segregated society. In my childhood in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, I wasn't really aware of the prevalence of segregation because, though practically everybody was an immigrant, they were almost all from Europe. There were no immigrants from the black populations of the South or the Caribbean in my school. In my childhood I saw very few people of color. In my grammar school, there was one Jewish person. I learned about segregation later, when I traveled about the country and spent time in the South. But when I actually came to discover it, I found it shocking and horrifying. I think when I first became aware of it I was at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, near Tennessee. I went down there for a summer on my GI bill. And there was a black writer who came to visit, and I went into town with him. He had to buy a train ticket and I went to the train station with him. Well, the amount of fuss produced by a white and a black man walking together was obvious. He grew worried, but I didn’t, because I just didn’t realize that it was a dangerous thing for us to walk together talking as friends. Afterwards, I talked with him about it and he conveyed the experiences of his life that made him too wary of the situation. Then, I came to know other black people, and heard more of their experiences and read more and more about the history of it all, and realized that it wasn’t a phenomenon confined to just the Southern states, but that it was pretty much a national phenomenon. Certainly New York was a segregated city then, and still is to a significant degree.

Daniela Gioseffi: Yes.

Galway Kinnell: When I went down there to work in the South, I thought it would be unseemly for me to "use" the situation down there as material for art, and I decided not to write a word while I was there. I put aside everything having to do directly with poetry and just did my work as a Civil Rights worker. A couple of years later I realized that was a serious mistake, I had misunderstood the relationship of art and life.

Daniela Gioseffi: It was idealistic, but all the same, the more said anywhere and everywhere, the better, yes?

Galway Kinnell: Exactly. It was ignorant idealism. I should have gone down there thinking that my job was two-fold, one was to do the work of voter registration and desegregation and the other was to write about all this to be as informative as possible through poetry or any other form of writing my pen might have taken. Later, I tried to write about it, but what I wrote lacked the life that it might have had originally.

For all of the above interview, click on this or click on this.

Kinnell in Selma, Alabama, 1965, with student organizer Harriet Richardson.  Photo by Charles Lee Moore. 

AL YOUNG

Al Young (1939--) Over Bay of Naples.  Is this a selfie? Or taken by PC Mack?

Al Young's website you can get lost in the many audio and video podcasts. Young, who served as California's poet laureate from  is featured on an NPR program where he talks about poetry and music.  Since he has written about Ma Rainey and we will read his poem about her, take time to read this biography of her, too.  She was known as the Mother of the Blues (1886-1939).  If the question remains: Who was Ma Rainey? If the question remains a pretty good answer is here.

"Deep Moaning Blues," above, sung by Ma Rainey in 1928. She is accompanied by the Tub Jug Washboard Band.

Al Young spoke at Google in 2009.  He gives a wonderful overview of the nature of poetry

 before he discusses his love of music, sings (he has a beautiful voice), and reads a sample of his poetry.

Young's website has an extensive interview with him.  It appears to be in the style of a FAQ, one that he wrote about himself. He addressed topics related to new technology and storytelling.  Here's an excerpt: 

Question: Haven’t the movies and hi-tech media supplanted books, the printed word, and old-fashioned storytelling?

Answer: Yes and no. Bombarded with graphic and visual imagery, many people, who do their reading on-screen, regard printed matter as an adjunct to watching something. Because it is easy to confound data and information with knowledge, training routinely passes for education. Giving thought to some matter or problem isn’t the same as following instructions or acting on orders or command. The reason I have dutifully hyperlinked so many of my literary references in this biography and FAQ page is that I would be naive to expect viewers who didn’t grow up with books in a bricks-and-mortar library as I did to know much of anything about writers or cultural movements or historical developments to which I so casually and matter of factly allude as I speak. When an unaware viewer clicks into a link, she or who may glimpse a bit of what I’m talking about. We dwell in an age when books are respected (even people who don’t read often ache to write a book), but film and video is revered. I’ve lived long enough to know a lot of stuff I think needs to be passed along to others. Figuring out how best to do this forces me to experiment. The human voice and vibratory frequencies we emit without knowing it play a big role in oral storytelling; not the funded kind. The listener, the reader, the viewer — each of us becomes an irreducible and essential part of the storytelling process. So, re-phrasing this answer to this question, I would say: No and yes. No good story ever needs to wait around for somebody to film it.

Al Young at CalArts, 2006, with pianist Kenn Cox and bassist Edwin Livingston. Photo: Harris Hartsfield

BILLY COLLINS

Billy Colllins (1941--)
painting by JenniferOHcious

To learn about Billy Collins, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate, 2001-03, see these websites: Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, Stephen Barclay Agency and Library of Congress online resources. Paris Review interviewed Collins for its Art of Poetry series.  Here's an excerpt:

INTERVIEWER

What inspires that first line? Is it something you see? Is it a passing thought, a line of someone else’s work?

COLLINS

There can be remote influences, but I think the line itself comes out of talking to yourself. It’s a matter of paying attention to the detritus that floats through your head all the time—little phrases that through your own self-talking, your talk monitor, sometimes pop up. Also, I try to start the poem conversationally. Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside. What I do with the reader later can be more complicated, but the beginning of the poem is a seductive technique for me, a way of making a basic engagement. Then I hope the poem gets a little bit ahead of me and the reader.

The full Paris Review interview with Collins can be found here.

Billy Collins reads

 "I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'"

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers play "Three Blind Mice" (1962)

Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers - "Blue Moon" Feat. Freddie Hubbard

Collins was the U.S. poet laureate (2001-2003) when American poets were invited by President and Mrs. Bush to read and discuss the work of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman at The White House.  The planned symposium drew protests of the war in Iraq, so many poets declined the opportunity to appear. Other poets wished to appear and take advantage of the setting to protest the war in Iraq and get their message out. The White House cancelled the symposium.

Collins discussed this controversy with The New York Times, February 23, 2013. 

Q: As the poet laureate of the United States, I assume that you were invited to the White House symposium on poetry that was canceled recently once some poets began planning to use the event to protest war in Iraq.

Collins: Yes, I was. I would have gone if it had been held, to see what was going to happen. Politicizing the event has resulted in its cancellation and perhaps the end of literary events at the White House.

Q: Could it really have that effect?

Collins: I don't know. I've always tried to keep the West and East Wings separate. I think the loss in this particular case was the opportunity to look at Whitman and Dickinson. In the middle of both of their lives occurred the central trauma of our country, the Civil War. And Whitman more or less jumped into action. He served as a volunteer nurse and wrote a poem, ''Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,'' where he holds the body of a dead boy and buries him. Whereas Emily Dickinson just stuck to her knitting, and her knitting just happened to do with immortality and death and the grave. It is a wonderful demonstration of the choice that poets have, to deal with the world around them in whatever way they think best.

To see the remainder of the interview, click on this.

Collins gives a TED talk, "Everyday Moments Caught in Time." 

He presented it in February 2012. It runs for about 15 minutes. 

The Country

by Billy Collins

I wondered about you

when you told me never to leave

a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches

lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.

But your face was absolutely straight

when you twisted the lid down on the round tin

where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?

Who could whisk away the thought

of the one unlikely mouse

padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper

gripping a single wooden match

between the needles of his teeth?

Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,

the sudden flare, and the creature

for one bright, shining moment

suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer

in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid

illuminating some ancient night.

Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,

the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces

of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants

of what once was your house in the country?

"The Country" by Billy Collins, from Nine Horses: Poems. © Random House, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

Colllins reads "The Country" with animation.

POETS IN PERFORMANCE: from Moyers & Co.

from Moyers & Company:

"Over the years, Bill Moyers has welcomed some of America’s best poets to share their works and inspiration. Many of those writers have performed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, which Bill and his colleagues covered for television specials including Fooling with Words (1999), The Language of Life (1995) and Sounds of Poetry (1999). Below, enjoy a showcase of such poetry from past productions and very recently from Moyers & Company, performed by the poets who dreamed them up, or by other artists who, like Bill, simply adore poetry.

"Coleman Barks | Robert Bly | Lucille Clifton | Rita Dove | Martín Espada | Nikki Giovanni | Maxine Hong Kingston | Galway Kinnell | Stanley Kunitz | Kurtis Lamkin | Li-Young Lee | John Lithgow | W. S. Merwin | Naomi Shihab Nye | Sharon Olds | Adrienne Rich | Christian Wiman| Luis Alberto Urrea| Philip Appleman| James Autry| Kyle Dargan| Wendell Berry"

See Bill Moyers page for more about poetry, including links to the poets named above reading their work.

9: Laura Hildebrand & Unbreakable

The New York Times Magazine
December 18, 2014

The Unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand
by Wil S. Hylton

Erik Madigan Heck for The New York Times

Late one afternoon in the summer of 2004, an aviation enthusiast named Bill Darron drove down the alley behind Laura Hillenbrand’s house in Washington. He parked his car at the rear entrance and popped open the trunk. Inside were three large boxes filled with destructive implements: bomb fuses, a flare gun, a black metal device called an intervalometer and a hulking 50-pound contraption known as a Norden bombsight.

The Norden was among the most sophisticated pieces of combat equipment in World War II. Mounted inside the nose of a bomber, it could take control in midflight, steering toward an enemy target to release a payload with unprecedented accuracy. It was said that on a clear day the Norden could “drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet.” To operate it, bombardiers trained in secret for months, learning to lock its delicate cross hairs onto a target several miles away; once their training was complete, they swore an oath to protect the Norden with their lives. “It was the first secret weapon of the war,” Darron told me. “It’s the combination of a telescope, a gyroscope, an adding machine — it’s just an amazing piece of gears and optics.”

Darron hauled the boxes across Hillenbrand’s yard and up the back stairs of her home. She met him at the door and guided him into the dining room. Then Hillenbrand disappeared into another room, and Darron began to assemble the bombsight in silence. He rested the base unit on a high surface, attached the upper unit known as the football and placed a large map of Arizona on the floor a few feet away. The map was coiled around two window shades like an ancient scroll, and one shade was attached to a small motor, so that when the power came on, the map would slowly unfurl — allowing Darron to peer through the bombsight as if gazing down from an airplane in flight.

Darron had never met Hillenbrand or read any of her work. He knew that she had published a book on the racehorse Seabiscuit and that she was working on a second about the World War II bombardier Louis Zamperini, who was captured by the Japanese and held as a prisoner of war for more than two years. Other than that, he knew almost nothing about Hillenbrand herself. When she first wrote to him with aviation questions a few weeks earlier, he suggested that she visit the annual gathering of World War II buffs in Reading, Pa. “I said, ‘If you’re trying to do research on World War II, you’ve got to go there,' ” Darron recalled. “And she wrote me back, and she said, ‘I can’t.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, you can’t?' ”

To read the complete article click on this.

1B: Randall Jarrell (1914-65)

Biographical and critical reports of Randall Jarrell can be found at Modern American Poetry, Academy of American Poets, and  The Poetry Foundation.  Jarrell was frequently covered by The New York Times. 

Here's a Jarrell biography from Chapter 16, a community of Tennessee Writers, Readers and Passerby, biography of Jarrell:

"Two mysteries surround the life and career of Randall Jarrell: how he was able to accomplish so much in half a century, and whether or not his death at age fifty-one was accident or suicide.

"Born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Owen and Anna Campbell Jarrell, the family moved to California when Randall was only a year old. Owen Jarrell worked as an assistant to a children’s photographer, and later opened his own studio, but financial difficulties eventually led to marital dissolution. Randall, his younger brother Charles, and his mother moved back to Nashville at his maternal uncle’s request. Anna Jarrell began teaching English at a secretarial school, and Randall held his first job as a newspaper boy. He also sold Christmas wrapping paper door-to-door. The future man of letters was an excellent student, and fell in love with language through his readings at the Carnegie Library.

"Jarrell earned his Bachelor’s degree (1935) and Master’s (1938) from Vanderbilt University, where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom, and was mentored by Allen Tate. Ransom left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio, and Jarrell followed, working there as an instructor. During his two years at Kenyon, Jarrell met and roomed with poet Robert Lowell and established an enduring friendship with novelist Peter Taylor. Jarrell later accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas, Austin, another appointment of many that earned him positions at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of North Carolina and University of Cincinnati, and visiting professorships at Princeton, and the University of Illinois.

"Beginning in the 1940’s and into the following decade, Jarrell served as literary editor for The Nation, and as poetry critic for Partisan Review and Yale Review. He held the position of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1956 to 1958, and was a m" ember of the editorial board of American Scholar for eight years, beginning in 1957.

"The pivotal experience for Jarrell came in 1942 when he volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Force. He began training as a flying cadet but failed to qualify, and then became a celestial training navigator in Tucson, Arizona. His exposure to military life was catalyst for much of his early work, including what is arguably his most anthologized poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” a sparse but powerful five-line piece about the dangerous occupation of a B-17 gunner who hung upside down in a plexiglass sphere to engage enemies attacking the plane.

"Jarrell’s first book of poetry, Blood for a Stranger, published after he began his four-year military stint, established his position of importance in the American literary scene. His next two books, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses(1948) confirmed Jarrell as a major poetic voice. Not only was he respected as a poet, but Jarrell made a name for himself as a blunt and often feared critic through his biting reviews in major literary magazines, and in a book of essays, Poetry and the Age (1953). He worked successfully as a translator, short fiction writer, and novelist. Jarrell, in his final years, even wrote two children’s books, The Bat Poet (1964) and The Animal Family (1965), the latter illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

"Among his many accolades: a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Levinson Prize, Oscar Blumenthal Prize, National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant, and a National Book Award for The Woman at the Washington Zoo in 1960.

"Shortly after publication of his final poetry collection, The Lost World (1965), Jarrell suffered from mental illness, one moment experiencing complete joy and the next, depression. He attempted suicide in 1965 by slashing his wrist. Apparently recovering, he returned to teaching that fall. While admitted to a hospital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for therapy on his injured wrist, Jarrell left at dusk for a walk along a busy, nearby highway. He was struck there by an automobile and died instantly. The coroner’s ruling was accidental death, but many of his closest friends believed Jarrell committed suicide. Jarrell’s friend, the poet Robert Lowell, expressed this belief in a letter to fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop: “There’s a small chance [that Jarrell’s death] was an accident … [but] I think it was suicide, and so does everyone else, who knew him well.”

"In what can only be considered a short but fruitful life, Jarrell left behind an impressive legacy: eight collections of poetry, influential criticism, a novel, numerous translations of Beckstein, Grimm, and Chekhov, and two books for children.

In Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, William Pritchard states that Jarrell will be remembered as one of the best American lyric poets “for his brilliantly engaging and dazzling criticism, and for his passionate defence … of writing and reading poems and fiction.” Covering the memorial service held in Jarrell’s honor on February 28, 1966, the New York Times quoted Robert Lowell, who credited Jarrell with writing “the best poetry in English about the Second World War,” and described his friend as “the most heartbreaking poet of our time.”

I found a page for Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner."  The writer of the site quotes Jarrell: "A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. [See the photo below.]  When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose."  The poem appears below.  It was published in 1945.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, 
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. 
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, 
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. 
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. 

Randall Jarrell won the National Book Award for his poetry collection, The Woman at the Washington Zoo, in 1961.  His acceptance speech follows.

"Sometimes I read, in reviews by men whose sleep I have troubled, that I'm one of those poets who've never learned to write poetry. This is true: I never have learned. Sometimes a poem comes to me -- I do what I can to it when it comes -- and sometimes for years not one comes. During these times the only person who helps much is my wife: she always acts as if I'd written the last poem yesterday and were about to write the next one tomorrow. While I'm writing poems or translating Faust I read what I have out loud, and my wife listens to me. Homer used to be led around by a little boy, who would listen to him: all I can say is, if Homer had ever had my wife listen to his poems, he would never again have been satisfied with that little boy.

"It is customary for poets, in conclusion, to recommend poetry to you, and to beg you to read it as much as you ought instead of as little as you do. The poet says this because of the time he lives in -- 'a time,' writes Douglas Bush, 'in which most people assume that, as an eminent social scientist once said to me, "'Poetry is on the way out.'" Now poetry -- if by poetry we mean what Frost and Dostoevsky and Freud and Ingmar Bergman share -- isn't on the way out, unless humanity is on the way out; when poetry 'goes out of a place it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go,/It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.' Poetry doesn't need poets' recommendations. And perhaps it is a mistake to keep telling people that poetry is a good thing after all, one they really ought to like better; tell them that about money, even, and they will finally start thinking that there's something wrong with it. Perhaps instead of recommending poetry as a virtue poets should warn you against it as a vice, an old drug like love or dreams. We say that virtue is its own reward-know it too well ever to need to say so. Let me conclude by saying, about poetry, my favorite sentences about vice. They come out of Crime and Punishment. The murderer Raskolnikov is shocked at Svidrigaylov's saying that he has come to St. Petersburg "mainly for the sake of the women." Raskolnikov twice expresses his disgust at Svidrigaylov's love of "vice." Finally Svidrigaylov says with candid good-humor: "It seems to me that you have vice on the brain.... Well, what about it? Let's say it is vice. There is something permanent about this vice; something that is always there in your blood, like a piece of red-hot coal; something that sets it on fire, that you won't perhaps be able to put out for a long time, not even with years. You must agree it's an occupation of a sort.

"Poetry, art -- these too are occupations of a sort; and I do not recommend them to you any more then I recommend to you that tonight, you go home to bed, and go to sleep, and dream."

1B: The Appointment in Samarra

"The Appointment in Samarra" 
(as retold by W. Somerset Maugham [1933])
The speaker is Death

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Obama Plan Would Help Many Go to Community College Free
The New York Times
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and TAMAR LEWIN

JAN. 8, 2015

President Obama running onto the stage before delivering remarks at Central High School in Phoenix on Thursday.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Thursday that he would propose a government program to make community college tuition-free for millions of students, an ambitious plan that would expand educational opportunities across the United States.

The initiative, which the president plans to officially announce Friday at a Tennessee community college, aims to transform publicly financed higher education in an effort to address growing income inequality.

Read the whole story here.

Writers on Writing: Sherman Alexie's Fence (Paragraph) and Constance Hale's Boat (Sentence)

boat fence by Stavros Kammas

Sherman Alexie's description of a paragraph is unforgettable, at least for some with a little hint. Here's what he has to say: "I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn't have the vocabulary to say 'paragraph,' but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose.  They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs." He then describes, in his essay "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me," the pictures that he had once imagined.  His reservation was a paragraph within the United States.  His family lived in a house that was, yes, a paragraph. Each member of his family, all seven members, were paragraphs within their house, yet "each family member," he believes, "existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us."  

This sounds like an essay in the making for that fence-building Alexie. Or any other enclosure, barricade or coop that he or any writer would like to assemble.

But before we get that essay built, all chained up and cinder-blocked, we must say goodbye to the paragraph and say hello to the sentence, so let's give a big warm embrace to Constance Hale. Hale, I have learned, has her own blog, Sin and Syntax, and has contributed a series on writing to The New York Times. 

Hale has some thoughts on the sentence, as I mentioned. It is a vessel that will take us forward, across the water.

Because she envisions, "a sentence as a boat. Each sentence, after all, has a distinct shape, and it comes with something that makes it move forward or stay still — whether a sail, a motor or a pair of oars. There are as many kinds of sentences as there are seaworthy vessels: canoes and sloops, barges and battleships, Mississippi riverboats and dinghies all-too-prone to leaks. And then there are the impostors, flotsam and jetsam — a log heading downstream, say, or a coconut bobbing in the waves without a particular destination."

She can't stop there. She gets to the nitty gritty of subjects and predicates in her essay, "The Sentence as a Miniature Narrative."  She likes her boat, and she is not about to step off of it. Here she goes: 

"The outline of our boat, the meaning of our every utterance, is given form by nouns and verbs. Nouns give us sentence subjects — our boat hulls. Verbs give us predicates — the forward momentum, the twists and turns, the abrupt stops.

"For a sentence to be a sentence we need a What (the subject) and a So What (the predicate). The subject is the person, place, thing or idea we want to express something about; the predicate expresses the action, condition or effect of that subject. Think of the predicate as a predicament — the situation the subject is in.

"I like to think of the whole sentence as a mini-narrative. It features a protagonist (the subject) and some sort of drama (the predicate): The searchlight sweeps. Harvey keeps on keeping on. The drama makes us pay attention."

Now where does that boat go?  Somewhere inside a fence. Undoubtedly, it is somewhere inside a fence. Is it a marina? If you had Mr. Alexie and Ms. Hale sitting down together for the blue plate special to climb that literary Mount Everest café of conversation they might be able to answer that question. Where would you find such a place? Where one eats like a horse and takes it all in like a camera? It would be that land known as the mixed metaphor. Here are more.

Fence Boat by Tea Kolo

1B: James Joyce (1882-1941)

Want to read a biographical sketch of James Joyce? Take a look at the Joyce biography page at The Brazen Head: A James Joyce Public House, the self-proclaimed best Joyce page on the web, and www.biography.com. The latter has a good written overview and video of Joyce's life. There is also the video, below, about Joyce that you might find of interest; however, if you are in the mood for watching a video, try the www.biography.com first; you might find it a little--a lot!-- more livelier.  I did.

From The New York Times, July 6, 1961, Ernest Hemingway's admiration of James Joyce is highlighted: "Hemingway was quick to see the merit in the work of James Joyce. . . . In a letter to Sherwood Anderson dated March 9, 1922, Hemingway wrote:

"'Joyce has written a most goddam wonderful book (Ulysses) * * *. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving, but you can find the whole Celtic crew of them in Michaud,' (then a moderately expensive Paris eating place).

"Nevertheless, on several occasions Hemingway contributed to the funds raised to aid Joyce, with whom he did a considerable amount of stout drinking in Paris. When Joyce's Ulysses was pirated in the United States, Hemingway was one of the organizers of the protest which bore the names of many of the most distinguished figures in world literature."

James Joyce: "A small, thin unathletic man with very bad eyes," the narrator

 of the above video says, so Hemingway stood between Joyce and a punch.

Joyce is known for four works of fiction, beginning with the collection of short stories Dubliners (Joyce attempted to publish in 1905; finally published in 1914), which contains 15 stories, including "Araby." Many of the stories have been staged in the theatre and made into films.  John Huston directed "The Dead" in 1987, based on the last story in the collection.  You can see a trailer of the film, or watch the complete film at Veoh. Here is an excerpt from The Dead's stage production from 2000.

News about Joyce's Dubliners, from "Joyce's Town", The New York Times: "In 1905, James Joyce wrote to the publisher Grant Richards: 'I do not think that any writer has yet presented Dublin to the world. It has been a capital of Europe for thousands of years, it is supposed to be the second city of the British Empire, and it is nearly three times as big as Venice.'

"But Joyce’s view of the city in Dubliners, his landmark collection of stories, had less grandeur than that pitch. The Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell recently wrote on Slate that Dublin in the book 'is a claustrophobic place, a place of entrapment and congenital disappointment, filled with frustrated people living thwarted lives. It is in every sense a small city.'

"On Tuesday, Penguin Classics is publishing a centennial edition of the book with a new foreword by Colum McCann, who writes that Dubliners, published nearly a decade after Joyce wrote the stories in it, 'was ripped up, burned, bowdlerized, rejected, resurrected, lost, dismissed, forgotten, thrown away, flogged, flayed and eventually celebrated.' A century later, it’s all celebration. In June, the fledgling Irish publisher Tramp Press will issue Dubliners 100, in which contemporary writers reimagine the collection’s 15 stories. Contributors include Patrick McCabe, Paul Murray, Eimear McBride and, perhaps bravest of all, Peter Murphy, who takes on 'The Dead,' considered by some the best story ever written." (Source: The New York Times, "Joyce's Town," by John Williams, May 23, 2014)

 

Joyce also wrote three novels: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). You can read Joyce's Ulysses here. 

Ulysses tells the story of Leopold Bloom as he travels around Dublin one June 16, 1904, known as Bloomsday, and fans of the novel celebrate it with public readings of its more than 700 pages. Influenced by Homer's poem The Odyssey, Joyce also pays homage to numerous literary styles.  It was published to much acclaim for its sophisticated stylistic achievement and daring experimental features, including the so-called ""stream of consciousness," which takes the reader inside the mind of its characters. It has also attracted much controversy from the days of its publication when it was serialized in a literary magazine.  Frequently banned and considered obscene for its depiction of a character masturbating the U.S. Post Office burned copies of it during the 1920s upon its arrival in the U.S.

Finnegans Wake, a novel that Joyce worked on from 1922 until its publication in 1939, is far more experimental. Read it here.

Marilyn Monroe, unlike many dedicated readers, read to the end of Ulysses, we are to believe.

Here's a summary of Ulysses, with a particular focus on Molly Bloom, wife of the protagonist Leopold Bloom, and the book's legal and moralistic reception.  Roger Marsh explains  that "[T]he final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the most famous – some would say notorious – pieces of writing in 20th-century literature. It’s famous because, although very long, it’s written entirely without punctuation, as a so called ‘stream of consciousness’. It’s notorious because it was this chapter, principally, that got the book banned for 12 years following its first publication.

"In 1922, the arbiters of taste and decency in the English speaking world were not yet ready for explicit and intimate discussion of sex, especially from the mouth of a woman (even if they were put there by a male author). Nowadays, such explicit material is less remarkable and even the lack of punctuation seems less challenging in a world of text-speak. Even so, it’s hard to read, because Molly’s sleepy interior monologue drifts realistically from topic to topic, introducing thoughts and fragments of thoughts without warning, as they occur in real life. . . . 

"Molly, meanwhile, remains at home, mostly in bed. The highlight of her day, as [her husband Leopold] Bloom well knows, is the arrival at 4pm of her most recent lover, Blazes Boylan. Boylan is a concert impresario who has organised a concert tour for Molly, and he has arranged to come over to her house and ‘go through the programme’ with her. Bloom knows full well what this means, and so, it seems, does the whole of Dublin. More than one of Bloom’s associates, when he informs them of the impending tour, asks him knowingly ‘who’s getting it up?’

"Normal marital relations between Leopold and Molly have, we learn, been non-existent for some years, ever since the death of their young son Rudi, which tore them apart. Molly, however, is a passionate, sexual woman in her prime, and the list of her lovers, all known to her husband, is long. Thus when Bloom climbs the stairs and prepares for bed in the early hours of 17 June, he takes up his usual position, his head at the foot of the double bed, muttering vaguely about eggs.

"At this point begins the long interior monologue – 22,000 words – which closes the novel. Bloom’s day is done, but Molly – having spent the day in bed, one way or another, is not finding sleep easy. Her mind races, first taking up the half-heard comment about eggs, and then quickly moving on to reminiscences of the distant and recent past. She recalls her husband’s pathetic attempts at infidelity, and her own rather more successful ones – these in very graphic detail. She assumes that Bloom ‘came somewhere’ – he did, but not in the way she imagines – and speculates about his latest liaisons. Often her mind drifts back to Gibraltar, where she lived as a girl, and to her father and other characters of those days. From time to time the songs she is to perform on the concert tour come into her head. In particular, the popular ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ pre-occupies her – how to enunciate certain words, and the protracted note on the word ‘so-o-o-ong’, which seems to be echoed by passing trains: ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling…’. Unable to move much in bed for fear of waking her husband, she also wrestles with bodily discomforts (wind, the onset of her period) and eventually finds it necessary to slip out and use the chamber pot beside the bed.

"Finally, towards dawn, she begins to succumb to sleep. Romantically, her final thoughts are of the day that she agreed to marry Bloom (‘well as well him as another’) lying in the grass up on Howth Head above Dublin Bay, and she remembers how she got him to propose to her. There is an inevitability about her answer, for throughout the soliloquy Molly has punctuated her stream of consciousness with the word ‘yes’, thrown in almost as a marker for a new topic or a change of mood. As the chapter reaches its closing lines, the appearance of the word ‘yes’ increases in regularity, until the final line reads: ‘he could feel my breast all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.’ And here Joyce writes the chapter’s only full stop."

Joyce visiting with American expatriate Sylvia Beach,

 proprietor of the celebrated bookstore Shakespeare & Co.,

 in Paris, circa 1922. Beech was a champion of Joyce's Ulysses.

Good Students, Good Colleges

The New York Times, November 29, 2014

For Accomplished Students, Reaching a Good College Isn’t as Hard as It Seems

by Kevin Carey

Earlier this year, Harvard announced that it had accepted 5.9 percent of the nearly 35,000 students who applied for admission to the class of 2018. The next day, Stanford announced an even more exacting 5.07 percent admission rate, the lowest in the university’s history.

Statistics like these have come to dominate the national narrative of elite college admissions, with each new batch of ever-more-minuscule success rates fueling a collective sense that getting into a good college has become a brutal, “Hunger Games"-style tournament that only the fittest survive.

That story is wrong. For well-qualified students, getting into a good college isn’t difficult. It probably isn’t that much harder than it was generations ago. The fact that everyone believes otherwise shows how reliance on a single set of data — in this case, institutional admission rates — can create a false sense of what’s really going on.

To start, it’s worth noting that the headline-inducing single-digit rates reported by Harvard and Stanford are unusual even for elite institutions. Washington University in St. Louis, ranked 14th nationally by U.S. News & World Report, admitted 17 percent of applicants this year. Notre Dame admitted 21 percent, Wellesley 28 percent, and the University of Michigan 32 percent. Still, those numbers are low and have been declining in each case.

Photo

CreditHisashi Okawa

They don’t, however, represent the true odds of a well-qualified student’s being admitted to a top school. That’s because anyone can apply to college, well qualified or otherwise. Selective colleges immediately toss the long shots and dreamers from the admissions pile in order to concentrate on students with a legitimate shot at getting in. But they don’t parse their admissions statistics that way, in part because it’s in their best interests to seem as selective as possible. Admission rates are among the most closely watched barometers of institutional prestige. The fact that Stanford’s rate beat Harvard’s for the last two years has been cited as prime evidence that Palo Alto may be eclipsing Cambridge in higher-education glory.

Institutional admission rates also don’t account for the number of applications submitted per student. Enabled by technology that makes it easier to copy and send electronic documents and driven by the competitive anxiety that plummeting admission rates produce, top students have beensending out more applications. In May, for example, a Long Island high school senior named Kwasi Enin was briefly famous for having applied to, and been accepted by, all eight Ivy League schools.

But while the best students are sending out more applications for the same number of slots at elite colleges, the slots themselves aren’t becoming more scarce and the number of students competing with one another isn’t growing. In essence, the growth in applications per student creates a vicious cycle, causing admission rates at the best schools to artificially decline, students to become more anxious, and the number of applications per student to grow even more.

Finally, the most important priority for most highly qualified students isn’t getting into a particular elite school. It’s getting into at least one, because elite schools are generally pretty similar in their eliteness, and you can attend only one at a time.

That’s why some students are applying to 20 or more schools: to increase their odds of making a single match. The most important elite college admissions statistic, then, is not the percentage of applications top schools accept. It’s the percentage of top students who are admitted to at least one top school. And that number isn’t 5 percent or 20 percent or even 50 percent. It’s 80 percent. It turns out that four out of five well-qualified students who apply to elite schools are accepted by at least one.

These numbers come courtesy of Parchment.com, a website that helps students submit college transcripts electronically and navigate the admissions world. Services like Parchment and the Common Application are among the reasons it has become easier for students to submit more applications and drive down institutional admission rates. This year, 800,000 students used Parchment to send more than 1.6 million transcripts.

Parchment began by identifying a subset of students with combined SAT scores (or an ACT equivalent) of at least 1300. Then it identified high-scoring students who had applied to at least one of the 113 schools identified by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges as the most selective. The average overall admission rate among those schools was about 32 percent. Yet 51 percent of the applications submitted by top Parchment students to the same colleges were accepted. Why? Because top schools receive a substantial number of applications from underqualified students who are almost always summarily rejected. Once the wheat and chaff are separated, the success rate for the wheat looks much better.

And the real odds of success were even higher than 51 percent. The top students in the Parchment database applied to 2.6 elite colleges, on average. Flip a coin twice and, according to probability theory, you’ll get heads at least once 75 percent of the time. Sure enough, 80 percent of top students were accepted to at least one elite school.

Since there has never been a time when 100 percent of well-qualified students were successful in the college admissions market, the truism that elite colleges are far more difficult to crack than in years gone by can’t be correct: 80 percent is too close, mathematically, to nearly everyone.

This doesn’t mean that aspiring students can drop out of the college admissions rat race entirely. There’s a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses aspect to sending out applications. The Parchment data suggest that students who apply to many schools are more likely to strike gold than those who apply to only one or two, which makes sense given the idiosyncrasy of the admissions process.

But this is mostly a matter of optimizing odds that are very good to begin with. So the next time you read about terrifyingly low college admission rates, don’t panic: If you work hard and get good grades and test scores, there is very likely a place in the best schools for you.

Kevin Carey directs the education policy program at the New America Foundation and is the author of the forthcoming book “The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere.” You can follow him on Twitter at @kevincarey1.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 30, 2014, on page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Truth Behind College Admission. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Click on this to read the article at The New York Times site.

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