Today's jazz: I listened all day to saxophone music, most on Stan Getz Radio on Pandora.
1. In his broadcast today, Billy Collins was in his usual jazzy mood, riffing on thoughts as they came to his mind, whether the movie "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs", the meaning of the word "epigram" (not to be confused with the other epi- words, like epithet, epigraph, etc.) or the absence of hummingbirds feeding at his and Suzannah's back yard hummingbird station. After reading a splendid poem from his upcoming collection, Whale Day, entitled,"Objectivity", a poem I experienced as deconstructive, as it slowly, surely erases the poet, the reader, and poem, he read some epigrams from Don Paterson's book, The Book of Shadows. He closed with more poems from The Art of Drowning: "The First Dream", "Dream", "Man in Space", and "While Eating a Pear".
2. I didn't want Billy Collins' broadcast to end. I wanted to listen to more poetry and more poetry conversation. I remembered that at The New Yorker online, the magazine makes audio clips of poets reading the poems they have published in the magazine.
I introduced myself to a poet who is new to me (this isn't headline news -- I have fallen way behind in the world of contemporary poetry and am slowly remedying this). I enjoyed Megan Fernandes' poem "Shanghai". I want to return to and think more about this poem. I enjoyed how it transported me to places I've never been, geographically certainly, but places in the body, in the heart, as well.
I jumped from Megan Fernandes to a recent New Yorker podcast featuring Elisa Gonzalez in conversation with the magazine's poetry editor, Kevin Young. The New Yorker podcast is a once monthly production, featuring a poet who has been published in The New Yorker reading two poems, both having appeared in the magazine. One poem is the poet's own and the other is another poet of the guest's choosing.
Elisa Gonzalez read a beguiling and self-reflecting poem by Czeslaw Milosz, "Gathering Apricots". In the poem's opening ten line stanza, the speaker describes an idyllic experience of remembering one who is gone while plucking an apricot from a tree in a place that brings the Garden of Eden to mind.
Milosz, however, has second thoughts about this moment of ecstasy and gratitude and writes a second stanza under the title of "Commentary". The poem's speaker reframes the experience, questions it, and arrives at a sobering conclusion, not only about gathering apricots, but about poetry/art itself.
Some who listen to Billy Collins' broadcasts comment that it's like being back in graduate school again. To me, Billy Collins' broadcasts are pitched to intelligent viewers, but he doesn't dive into poems in the detailed and intellectual ways graduate seminars tend to. It's what I like about tuning in to Billy Collins. He's a professor who wants to make poetry a public enjoyment, not a specialized one. One only need be curious and open to delight to enjoy Billy Collins. I love that a person as accomplished and intellectually gifted as Billy Collins can be a public poet and an accessible thinker without being condescending and by appealing to listeners with various experiences reading and writing poems.
For me, The New Yorker poetry podcast is much more like being in graduate school, but free of including literary criticism in the discussion of the poems.
After Elisa Gonzalez read "Gathering Apricots", she and Kevin Young dove deep into the poem, closely examining its movements, Milosz's apparent purposes in examining his poem within his poem, and its stance toward the making of poems, with special attention to the poem's last line: "And form itself is always a betrayal."
It's been decades since I was a graduate student and I never taught poetry at a graduate school level. Sometimes (maybe often), Gonzalez and Young went over my head, but, on the whole, their discussion expanded my understanding of "Gathering Apricots" and of the art of poetry itself.
Gonzalez then read her poem, "Failed Essay on Privilege", an autobiographical look at, in part, the contrast between her impoverished young life and the success she's enjoyed as an adult as a student, writer, and teacher. Her discussion with Kevin Young alternated between the looking at the poem, its architecture and ideas, and discussion of the arc of Gonzalez's life and her efforts to come to grips with the privilege she enjoys as an adult that she never knew growing up in Ohio.
I enjoyed that sometimes their discussion went over my head. I want to return to it, listen again, and think more about how poetry can be a means of thinking more deeply about the feelings and difficulties that can accompany upward mobility in our society.
3. After eating a delicious dinner of boiled broccolini and sweet potato served over brown rice and topped with a terrific tahini-based dressing that Debbie prepared, we watched some news programming.
On Twitter, someone had pointed out that the 1993 movie production of Much Ado About Nothing is available on Amazon Prime and suddenly I wanted to escape into the sun drenched pastoral beauty of a vineyard in Tuscany and enjoy the youth, vigor, vitality, mirth, and defeat of mischief in this uplifting, gorgeous movie and so we watched it.
I am sure I've seen this movie at least twenty times. I went to it five times in the first week it was out and, when it left Eugene, I made a trip to Portland, where it was still playing, just to see it again. I hadn't seen it recently for quite a while and I was very happy tonight that I continue to experience the magic in this movie that so excited me twenty-seven years ago when Much Ado About Nothing was released. It's possible that I enjoyed Emma Thompson's portrayal of Beatrice even more tonight than my over the top love for her work when I was so much younger.
Debbie also enjoyed seeing this movie again. When it ended, I put on the trailer for Joss Whedon's 2012 black and white movie version of Much Ado About Nothing -- a version I loved the day I saw it at the Broadway Metro in downtown Eugene -- and I think that movie will be next up for Debbie and me.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
Top of mountain is reached at the “crest”-er.
Top suit is the one with three “vest”-er.
Top in Service, 5 Stars,
Bugatti fastest of cars.
And a COVID vaccine would be “best”-er!
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