Thursday jazz: all day long, I listened to Stan Getz, joined by a variety of other musicians and vocalists.
1. In his broadcast today, after opening with some Buddy Holly and chatting a bit about Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry and their songs about high school, Billy Collins remarked that he'd been reading an interview with writer Alice McDermott in which she said about her work: "I hate leaving anyone behind."
Billy Collins told us he also hates to leave anyone behind.
This got me thinking about difficult poetry, poetry that, as Billy Collins put it today, positions itself out ahead of the reader and seems to challenge the reader to catch up. The reader has been left behind.
Billy Collins told us that when he was a much younger man, he looked to Wallace Stevens, one of these "catch up with me" poets, a titan in the poetry of the USA, as the ultimate poet. Stevens' poems are often deliberately obscure and puzzling; his poems explore philosophical matters of metaphysics and epistemology and the role of the imagination and art in our efforts to negotiate the nature of reality and how we arrive at knowledge.
He explores these matters in musical language, exotic settings at times, and, on occasion, with exotic words, like these found in a couple of his poems: "Complacencies of the peignoir" or "concupiscent curds".
When Billy Collins talked about John Ashbery as being another "catch up with me" poet, he told us that he had long ago given up on trying to figure out what John Ashberry's poems mean -- but, instead delighted in their playfulness. I surrendered to Wallace Stevens in a similar way many years ago. Wallace Stevens became a source of pleasure, not of frustration, for me when I began, in Billy Collins' words, "to waterski across the surface" of his poems. I quit working on the poems, but let the poems work on me. I'd ask myself, "What's alive in these poems that's alive in me?" Well, I can tell you that the love of the sounds of vowels and consonants are alive in me; curiosity about the multiple ways we see things is alive in me; the imagination's influence upon how we experience reality is also alive in me.
Turns out, that while I couldn't offer up much of an interpretation of many of Wallace Stevens' poems, I enjoyed them in much the same way I enjoyed playgrounds as a youngster: I like to swing out and back, out and back with Stevens; I enjoy using a milk carton to wax the slide of his poems and enjoy climbing their ladders and swooshing from on high back to the ground again; I enjoy asking Wallace Stevens if he'll push me on the merry-go-round of his poems and enjoy getting dizzy as the pictures in his poems rush by.
Billy Collins' comments about Wallace Stevens were to prepare us to hear him read his playful parody of Stevens' poem, "Sunday Morning". Billy Collins poems is entitled, "Monday Morning". He read it after reading his poem, "On Turning 10" and before his take off on on William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming", called "Dancing Toward Bethlehem". Billy Collins' "Monday Morning" plays with the first stanza of Stevens' "Sunday Morning" and before reading his own poem, Billy Collins read that section of Stevens' poem.
I very much enjoyed how Billy Collins then walked us through his poem and helped us hear (and see) the echoes between his poem and Stevens'.
He made sure we weren't left behind.
2. I'm happy to report that after her freaky accident in the kitchen on Monday, Christy is getting around pretty well -- she got together the other day with Teresa and Dawn, she has been out watering her flowers, and she has jumped right back on the horse that threw her and is cooking in her kitchen!
Understandably, though, she asked me to do some shopping for her at Yoke's and to pick her up some hooch at the liquor store. The liquor store had sold out its inventory of the Captain Morgan White Rum that Christy wanted. I texted Christy, wondering what to do, and as I waited for her response, my right eye caught the Ouzo perched on the top shelf of the liqueur section. I swear, I had looked for Ouzo before at the Kellogg Liquor Store and didn't see it, so, either I missed it before or it's a new product.
No matter. I love Ouzo and plucked myself a bottle off the shelf, found out what Christy wanted, returned home, delivered Christy's groceries and white lightning to her, and returned home, opened the Ouza, smelled its enticing anise aroma, and began an evening of sipping small doses of my favorite of all liqueurs.
3. The temperature dipped down into the 70s today, making it the most comfortable day we've had in several weeks. Debbie read outside on the deck. Christy and Everett enjoyed the cool evening on their deck. Debbie and Gibbs joined them and so did I, with a glass of vanilla ice cream mixed with milk, flavored with dashes of Creme de Cacao and brandy. Before long, however, the wind kicked up and it started to rain, so we all took shelter in our respective homes.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
There are things you cannot deny.
That can lift spirits from low up to high.
A baby’s giggle, a park,
Favorite tunes or the arc.
Of that rainbow glowing up in the sky!
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