What Are We Afraid We'll Miss?

Tickets to Broadway plays are expensive and for that reason alone I expect the audience to be as in thrall as I am, keeping noise noiseless and giving rapt attention to the stage. Instead I find myself in the distinct minority.

During "Time Stands Still," a dark story about the difficulties of returning to "life as it was" after documenting the cruelties of war, cell phones rang out no less than six times during the performance forcing the actors to freeze mid-sentence or, as they once chose, to began the interrupted scene again. The man sitting next to me had his wife's cell phone in his pocket as a favor to her (no purse) and had no idea how to turn it off when it began playing her customized medley. Poor guy, he was mortified.

"Billy Elliott," a delightful musical and birthday present for my newly 13 year old grandaughter was full of youngsters who really thought the darkness was an opportunity to text away the two plus hours driving the theater ushers nuts as their lit palms clearly weren't what the actors had signed on for. Then there was the performance of "The Doll's House," where I watched ushers physically remove cells phones from the hands of two theater goers.

All this is leading me to Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni, which I saw in Lucca, Italy a month ago. An SRO crowd, many families with children, young children, and mostly Lucchese, living in Puccini's hometown. As with his Turandot the year before, in a land where the cell is a life line (I rarely saw any that were more than merely phones) not one rang, not one child whined with boredom or begged for a coke or milk duds. The audience sat in their velvet seats and gave themselves, as we did, over to an afternoon of intoxicated freedom.

My daughter, just back from Radio City Music Hall with her eight year old, called to say how great the Rockettes were, such symmetry...ah, well. She then told me how it seemed as if noone stayed seated, and there was more up and down in the audience than on stage. And she doesn't even know my rant on this subject.

So, what's up? Does anyone else feel like Science Friday comes around way too quickly?

Autumn

Think inside
a foiled Klimt, gilt

interfacing copper
with a creole-colored mix,

aster and chrysanthemum where lasers
white-light kettle ponds

to mirror each Narcissus
bent like me, a plumet

in hand
to measure depth.

In the Moment with Wilder and Wallace

Thorton Wilder received the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Our Town in 1938. I saw it last Sunday at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York and at least once before in high school but I had little memory of it. The cast, led by Helen Hunt as the Stage Manager, was extraordinary, each character so fully realized that the little black-box theater was transformed into Grover's Corners and the audience sat agape.

There is a wrenching (literally) moment at the end of the play when the Stage Manager rips a curtain back along a rod to reveal one of the most beautiful, holy came to mind, scenes I've been witness to. Minutes before, the audience is slightly aware of a cooking smell or sense of cooking, but it was hard to figure which exactly... a nearby restaurant, gearing up for an early supper crowd? And then the revelation is before us, a visual epiphany.

Emily Webb has died but asks to return to Grover's Corners for just a day, one ordinary day. This is what is behind the dark curtain and where, for the first time, she actually sees her life in the moment, in the kitchen of her home.

Mrs. Webb is frying bacon, (for real) making coffee and scrambling eggs just as she has done every morning for her family. Sunlight fills the room, the milkman stamps snow off his boots before coming through the door with his clinking bottles, the newsboy delivers the morning paper. Emily's sudden awareness to what is real and essential is in plain sight for the first time, not in her life, but in her death. A stunning moment of collective self realization decended over the audience.

The late writer, David Foster Wallace, tells a story, "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, Morning, boys, how's the water? And the two young fish swim on for bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, What the hell is water?"

Wallace says that "we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: This is water, this is water. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out. True freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

I learned today that a friend and neighbor played George Gibbs in one production where Thornton Wilder was the Stage Manager. "I just thought he was a nice old man," said Peter Walker reminiscing on his 82nd birthday.

Running after Rae Armantrout

When Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize for Versed (Wesleyan University Press, n.b. university press) I thought I'd better take a closer look at this poet's work because most of the time I don't know where she is going even as I devour each poem like a last meal. Truthfully, though, she makes my head hurt, not unlike how I feel trying to learn a foreign language, all tongue tied and brain fried.

In the April issue of Poetry Magazine, the editors wrote, "when we find ourselves puzzling over something in a poem or wondering why a particular choice was made, we can go straight to the source and put our poets on the spot..." which is exactly what they did. Thus each poem is followed by a q and a and Rae "spoke" which gave me something to really hang onto.

She begins her poem, Paragraph with:

Record breaking Thriller
dance attempt.

Poetry Magazine asks: The poem mentions Thriller and Michael Jackson (not specifically); what kind of music was in your mind -- if there was any --when composing the lines of this poem? How does music mark the passage of time for you, if it does?

R.A. replies: I seem to mention music occasionally in my poems, usually popular music. I'm interested in why certain things are popular. I also mention movies and television. "Record breaking Thriller/dance attempt" is a phrase I either read in a magazine or heard on TV --I can't remember which. The phrase struck me as somehow telling. "Record breaking" and "attempt" are actually rather sad qualifiers to the dance and the thrill. They abstract the possible experience. I think the whole poem deals with the way in which experience is mediated, the ways in which we have "para" experience.

Dan Chiasson's piece in The New Yorker (May 17th, 2010) asks, "So who is Rae Armantrout? The author, for starters, of some tantalizingly hard poems, poems that sometimes track their own difficulty:

Wrapped strands and

What passes

for messages,

what pulls itself

apart to flash,

the twinkle
or tickle
of articulation

In these lines from her poem, Passing, the play is both sonic (twinkle, articulation) and semantic (What pulls itself apart to flash? For one thing, a flasher's raincoat!). It keeps everything in motion -- never "passed," always "passing"--and replaces forms of settled identity with processes, open-ended, repeatable, of doing and undoing."

Chiasson writes, "Though the results looked radical, in a way Language poetry (a school Rae was often associated with) was oddly conservative. It put poetry, of all things, at the very center of culture. These poets suggested that, if you wanted to change the circuitry of the culture, you had to go to poetry, where the wires were. There all damage done to language by advertisers and politicians could be undone. But, lest poets become faux finishers, they wanted to keep those innards of language exposed, rather than tuck them back inside a consistent speaker whom we get to know, and come to like or to despise, as we read. Poetry shouldn't reveal the soul of a unique individual: there's no such thing as a unique individual."

This was all extremely helpful especially in toto and gave me a bit more understanding of a poet whose voice is so different from my own. Chiasson spoke for me with, "As in fly-fishing, as in illness, so in Armantrout's poems: one is on the hook."

R.J.JULIA BOOKSELLERS READING

BOOK 2010

Design by Cummings & Good

Haberdasher's Daughter, my first poetry collection, is now available. The elegant cover, designed by Peter Good, presents the book in a special light that I hope will illuminate readers as they follow my story-telling through the narrative poetry. I knew for certain that 2010 was "the year of the book" especially after Cummings & Good's calendar echoed my mood in the above photograph.

Poetry readings and book signings are being scheduled through the fall and I'll let you know as the dates unfold. The book is available on-line through the publisher, Antrim House Books at www.antrimhousebooks.com/levine.html, through me or by mid July, at R.J.Julia Booksellers in Madison, CT.

Welcome to Haberdasher's Daughter.

Observations

In the May 17th issue of The New Yorker, Paul Goldberger writes about One Goldman Sachs Plaza, headquarters for the new Goldman Sachs. At forty three stories and two city blocks, "the building appears to have been designed in the hope of rendering the company invisible." I should add here that the architect was Henry Cobb whose last skyscraper was Boston's John Hancock building.

Having just published my first poetry collection, Haberdasher's Daughter (Antrim House Books), I was particulary amused by Goldberger's use of a sartorial metaphor for the building:

" The new headquarters is architecture as a well-tailored suit. From a distance, the building looks utterly unexceptional, but as you get closer your eye picks up signs of quality --- the drape, as it were, and the stitching. Cobb's facade of clear, colorless glass and bands of shiny steel is completely flat, and this two dimensionality might have been dull were it not for the subtle shift of proportions in the quiet plaid pattern of the steel grid as it ascends. By the time you are close enough to touch this architectural garment, you can tell that a lot of money has been spent."

Quiddity International Literary Journal

I recently had three poems published in the Quiddity International Literary Journal. You can listen to them by hitting on the title for a link to each one:

Maple Syrup, Honor System

Recipe For the Lonely

Tsunami

Ira Sakolsky recorded me a few months ago at his Riverway Recording Studio in East Haddam and I've been told they are quite good. Personally, I haven't gotten up the nerve to listen on my own yet. Why is it so many of us can't stand the sound of our own voices?

Anna Quindlen, Writing and Read(ing) to Grow

This is my first post after setting up my website and facebook information under the careful supervision of Laura Williams, a woman for all time.

Recently I went to the Longwharf Theater in New Haven for a Read to Grow event. Read to Grow is the brainchild of Roxanne Coady, owner of R.J. Julia bookstore in Madison. The mission of this organization is to "improve early literacy for all Connecticut children by providing books, by helping families share books with their babies starting at birth, by encouraging language development and by promoting an awareness of literacy services." Quite an undertaking.

Read to Grow has provided more than 100,000 children's books to CT. families. Please check out their website for more in depth information at http://www.readtogrow.org/. You should all know about their hard work.

Anna Quindlen, best selling author and columnist was interviewed by Roxanne at the smaller Longwharf stage which provided an intimate setting and kind of insider view between two literary stars, albeit from slightly different perspectives. Anna read from her newest novel, Every Last One and I wanted to pass into cyberspace two of her suggestions.

The first was the idea of not writing until the themes, form, and characters are developed and so real in your mind that you can't be pried away from your desk. Make use of that morning power walk, the hours in front of the telly with your (her) needlepoint, the endless errands, to sort out a plan, a modus operandi for what you're about to tackle.

I subscribe to the same manner of working and never sit down to write a poem until I have a pretty firm idea of what it's going to look like, sound like and feel like. All that time spent looking out of my office window waiting for a CT.blue bird to nest in the little house I put up a few months ago, or watching the huge carpenter bees body slam each other out of the way as they drill under the eaves to lay eggs somehow prepares me to open myself to my thoughts and helps to create the space I guess that my brain needs.

When Wallace Stevens worked at The Hartford Insurance Company he walked the few miles from his house each day in an iambic pentameter shuffle while he composed his magnificent words. I don't think that's an apochryphal story, but maybe. In any event, I like it and prefer to think of it as true.

Anna also shared with the audience the process she uses before sending her work to her editor and agent. She reads her work aloud. Sometimes this will take up to a week. When the ms is returned and she makes the agreed upon changes she reads the work again, aloud.

This is an incredibly useful piece of information in particular when dialogue is in play. You'd be amazed at the number of times the conversation taking place bears so little resemblance to actual conversation. In the memoir class I teach with Lary Bloom at Writing at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, we begin with dialogue exercises to bring the ear into play early on so the students get used to hearing their words as well as reading them. There is a big difference.