The Old Burying Ground

Happy Leap Day.

So last night I attended the University of Michigan at Carnegie Hall concert thanks to some tickets from a new friend and colleague, Tom Wisniewski. We were in Box 1 on the first tier, practically part of the orchestra. I mused "this must be what it feels like to be Queen" as the audience had just as much a view of us as they did of the stage. Our position allowed us to see through the side door where we waved to Keith Taylor and Thomas Lynch, two of the three poets involved with the first piece to be performed. It also allowed me to practically read the music on the stands of the bass players below us.

The first was a new composition by Evan Chambers, a suite from The Old Burying Ground (2007). Tom tells me it is only half the piece, and the other section involves two Irish poets and the poet Richard Tillinghast, with whom I studied at Michigan. The suite they performed involved three poets: Keith Taylor, who was my pedagogy mentor at Michigan; Thomas Lynch, who taught the Creative Nonfiction class every other year (Eileen Pollack taught it in the alternating years and I took it with Eileen when I was there); and the poet Jane Hirshfield (I believe they all do the Bear River Writers' Conference each summer).

The song cycle interspersed a poem by each poet with a singer and the orchestra, so Keith began with the poem "All the Time You Want" as a sort-of introduction, then the folk singer Tim Eriksen sang "And Pass From Hence Away" and "O Say Grim Death" the original texts of each taken from the Old Burying Ground at the Jaffrey Center in New Hampshire. This section ended with Thomas Lynch reading his own poem "O Say Grim Death" which incorporated lines from the epitaph of Isaac A. Spofford. The tenor Nicholas Phan then sang "A Bar So Pure" followed by the soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird singing "Nancy Eliza" (again, all the lyrics were epitaphs from the graves). Jane Hirschfield then read her poem "Pompeii" at which point Anne-Carolyn sang "Emma" and Nicholas returned to close with "Oh Drop on My Grave."

The epitaphs used for the lyrics were quite poetic though very traditional in their Christian outlook on the afterlife being true freedom, in not questioning God's will, and in earthly life being some sort of prison: "Think reader can thy heart endure / a summons to a bar so pure" and "Oh drop on my grave as ye pass it no tear / But rejoice for the freed one, whose fetters lie here" and "Oh say grim Death, Why thus destroy / The parents' hopes, their fondest joy? / Cease Man, to ask the hidden cause / God's will is done--Revere His Laws". What can I say; they dated from the late 18th and early 19th centuries (not that these sentiments don't still exist today).

The second piece the orchestra performed was Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor, and it was quite a treat as it featured the French Horn (an instrument I played for 8 years in a former life). Part II (Scherzo. Kraftig, nicht zu schell which means, "strong or powerful, not too fast") featured a soloist from the horn section (Zachary Wasserman, I believe) and his silver French Horn. What an amazing performance! He totally nailed it and he knew it at the end--quite pleased, as he should be. The entire horn section was heavily featured throughout the three parts of the symphony, and it took me back to the days when I played. I couldn't have asked for a happier convergence.

The orchestra of course got a standing O as they deserved and they treated the heavily-Michigan audience to the fight song as an encore. Go Blue!

After the concert I got to see Keith and a delightful thing happened: a young woman approached me and asked "Are you Matthew Hittinger?" I said yes and she said "Do you remember me?" Sure enough it was Tania Strauss, a student from the very first section of Creative Writing I taught at the University of Michigan back in 2004. She was one of the best students in that section and produced an amazing fiction portfolio (I think she even got a rare A+ from me on it). Well, after that class she pursued the creative writing sub-concentration in the English department and just graduated this past year. Today marks her first day working for the Museum of Natural History. I hope to have coffee with her soon in the city and catch-up.

That's all for now. Go do some leaps.

On Fragments and Unpublished Work

A conversation started on GoodReads in response to my line "Remind me to destroy my fragments folder before I die" when I was commenting on Elizabeth Bishop's Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, the volume of fragments and unpublished poems Alice Quinn put together.

It's funny, some would argue that if a writer really didn't want their fragments or unpublished poems to see the light of day after their death, they would have destroyed them during life. But that would require a preparation based on the knowledge of the day and hour of your death.

Some writers leave notes to destroy their unpublished work after they are dead, or leave notes on the work that it is "not for publication." Literary executors and academics then decide if the work is worthy of print or should remain out of the public eye. I worry that with authors who have huge posthumous followings and literary legacies, the desire to read more trumps the actual quality of the unpublished work.

Perhaps it's the writer's ego, some secret desire to see those fragments printed that stops them from destroying them, even if they leave a note to do so. Perhaps it's just a matter of unfinished business--I mine my fragments for material during dry spells and keep my early work in a folder for those moments when I want to humble myself and see where I've been and how far I've come.

Regardless, the Bishop book is pleasurable to see what could have been, what else was left out there. They are small gems, nothing on the level of the work in The Complete Poems, but they do show us a Bishop, a side of Bishop she kept pretty private in her work: her sexuality. In some respects some of these unpublished love poems constitute an "outing" of her through her own verse that she had often only obliquely addressed in the published work.

Michael Palmer's The Promises of Glass and Company of Moths

I heard Michael Palmer read back when I was studying at Michigan. Perhaps I wasn't ready for him then (that happens, that writers speak to you at different points in your life, even certain books speak to you differently when you read them again at another time, in another space, at another place in your life). At that time I couldn't get into him, but now, I just read Company of Moths and was like, wait, this is quite good--that first section "Stone" made me read and reread every poem before I could go on.

So now I'm giving The Promises of Glass another go--I started to read it back then but couldn't get past poem one. But now, having tasted his syntax and breaks...well, so far, so good.

I knew I was going to like this book just from the cover: three moth-eaten holes that expose the white space beneath what looks like human skin just visible around the edge where the black cover is also eaten away. They almost look like cigarette burn marks, and the Jackson Pollack-like white strings of paint (if they are paint) look like smoke (if they are not smoke).

What I appreciate here is Palmer's innovative syntax coupled with his line breaks, how the two in tandem really slow you down at times and make you re-read lines until that "a-ha" moment of pleasure that comes in understanding the sense. And his music is wonderful. (I know, imagine! Contemporary poetry that has music and isn't afraid of its lyricism!) It's weird, I know he's supposedly "experimental" however you want to define that (because his punctuation is simplified? I'd need to see the larger body of his work to determine how that word "experimental" is being deployed), but through the experimentation his work maintains an ear-pleasing lyricism, that, coupled with the complex syntax and the wit with which he approaches words and their meaning, satisfies my expectations of a certain type of good poetry and makes me want to read more. And his genuine use of the posed question in his verse, and not as a ploy or in a rhetorical manner, but as a genuine investigation, a genuine investigative impulse, that recording of process, the mind's process, the poem an act of thought, of thinking. Yes, yes, yes.

Emily Rosko's Raw Goods Inventory

I was re-reading Raw Goods Inventory after seeing Emily at AWP earlier this month and have two new favorite poems: "The Toy Divine(s)" and "Less Art, More Monkeys" (in addition to my old time favorites: "Elephant," "At the Sushi Arcade," the title poem, and "Even Before Your Elbow Knocked Over the Glass.")

I'm biased as Emily is friend and close-reader of my own work, but I love the final version of this collection. I read an early version of this manuscript in the fall of 2004 and this final version is tight.

I love Emily's keen sense of form in every poem, how deliberate the shapes are on each page, the edge to each word and line that often feel as if they could cut you if you're not careful. And I love how Emily experiments with form across all four sections in the book, fully using the page plane (nothing turns me off more than a book of poems where all the poems sit left-justified in boring blocks) and yet through all these visual and spatial variations, the voice, through all its tonal variations, somehow remains unified. A quality I admire.

Beth Anne Royer's Radio Dreams

I'm often refreshed by poets who can handle humor effortlessly, especially when they know how to balance their tonal range through sequencing, as Beth Anne does: at times the poems are subdued and deadpan in their humor, at times situational where much hinges on a fabulous last line, sort of like a punch line, but better. I particularly liked "In this way, the business of pleasure went on in the dark" and "There I was, smiling like a slut, and I hadn't even granted an interview." Those were lines from two of my favorite poems; I also loved the Whitman ones. Beth Anne was a fellow "younger poet" back at Bucknell in 2000, and it was nice to see some poems from those workshops, like the poems about a certain bicycle named Mildred.

Philip Roth's The Breast

I stole this off Aimee's shelf while I was cleaning her room this weekend.

A favorite line: "After all...who is the greater artist, he who imagines the marvelous transformation, or he who marvelously transforms himself?"

I often think something similar when I fantasize about my favorite superheroes...would I rather write their lives and stories, or would I prefer to just be one?

Snow Glow

It snowed tonight. I forgot about the reflective glow of the snow at night under the street lamps, and even where there are no lights, the air illumined by that eerie rusty orange light, as if I were on Mars if Mars had an atmosphere that could support life, a sky with clouds that catch and bounce the lamps, the pollutants, the sulphuric light.

In other news, I finished "The Metamorphosis Treatise," an old title recycled for this new poetic essay meditation on Kafka's famous story. I have placed it as preface to my manuscript Skin Shift and hope it does to set-up those poems the way the "Pear Poetics Preface" set-up the poems in Pear Slip. It just didn't seem right to not have any mention of Kafka in a project obsessed with post-modern transformations and skin-shifting.