Body & Soul

Three poems written in response to Frank Conroy's novel, Body & Soul. Claude Rawlings, his protagonist, is a young pianist playing with his first orchestra. Conroy describes this in  a lovingly rendered Russian accent:

“Is different, orchestra. Great slow beast, powerful beast. Patience is necessary. Very much patience to control such a big animal. . . .  You know the octopus?”

“The octopus? Sure.”

“W

A secret at the heart of the book is revealed late: how Claude's mentor came to be running a pawn shop cum music store in New York City after World War II. Perhaps the deepest moment in a deep book. I hope I do it justice.

And finally, the moment Aaron meets his student and Claude his teacher; for the one a redemption, a return; for the other--quite literally--a door opening where had been a wall.

A poem that shifts back and forth between hope and despair. Here I riff on Yeats' "the center cannot hold" and his slouching beast, claiming not knowing as itself a gift.

A poem mixing 2020's fires with trips taken with my father in the past. 

Imagining my father and his second wife taking their honeymoon in Big Sur, using the sea imagery to segue into Ulysses coming ashore disguised by Athena. Poetry takes us to all sorts of mongrel places. The form here riffs on a kind of waltz rhythm with a four-stanza bridge. 

Sebastian Bach had his church side—and his coffee-house side. For many years, he led a pick-up group of musicians in Zimmermann's coffee house in Dresden. The moment is notorious when he did indeed tear off his wig and throw it at one hapless musician. 

Bach married his cousin Barbara, whose seventh pregnancy suddenly went south on her; she died while Sebastian was taking the waters with his Prince. The violin concerto has one of the most haunting themes this side of Romanticism.

My approach to Bach is personal, to the point that my book on him includes a conversation, or an attempt at conversation, between a character very like me and a character very like him. While Bach may be a god to musicians, his connection with his God can be felt in his music, a kind of intercession for a lost modern. 

A poem from One Ulysses, a collection whose  eponymous protagonist moves among Saigon, Troy, and a modern Ithaca. Here I use the four-beat, four-line, four-stanza form Robert Frost employs in “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.”

A second poem from One Ulysses, this one in the form of quatrain, couplet, quatrain, couplet, with the rhymes shifting up from stanza to stanza—and a kicker line at the end. 

And a third poem from One Ulysses. Here we have a mix of rhyme schemes over a scaffolding of four-beat lines whose insistent rhythms take us for, well, a spin. 

Written while I was living in Big Sur, California. One of my first Petrarchan sonnets—and, I like to think, still one of my best. "Newest Moon" won a contest run by Printers Ink bookstore; the prize: any book in the store. I brought home the American Heritage Dictionary I'd lusted after for years, the one that takes words all the way back to their (often surprising) Proto-Indo-European roots. 

Written at the start of the quarantine; published in the San Francisco Chronicle in June, 2020.

Like so many others I've written, a poet's poem, recursively referring to my own writing process—and my recurrinrg despair about it. How can a silent say hope to be heard? Since this is poem number 9998, I had the magic number ten thousand on my mind—and in my lines. 

My sister Deborah fell in love with the BBC series, Life On Mars, a show with both an overarching narrative arc, and episodes tightly woven around characters and crimes. A show that defies easy summary. I fell in love too—and speak to that involvement here. 

Yielding to the pull of trying my hand at poetry in my second language. Celebrating how “love" and “flower” rhyme in Spanish (“amor” and “flor”)—and then the happy discovery of the strongly contrasting, the surprising, “matador.”

I include below a rough translation.

OPEN WIDE

Tell me what used to occur here,

and you can explain to me what happened to you. 

I want to know what happened with your wife:

s

Written in the first flush of my adopting a daily writing practice, "Adoptee" reflects the stories I'd heard about how frought it could be to seek out a birth parent. 

Another quarantine poem. Published in the San Francisco Chronicle in August of 2020.

My father died in the Nineties. Since then, I've had the pleasure of continuing our relationship through poetry; I like to think that has matured as I have.

In the spring of 1980, I read a book on John Keats, where I found the phrase, ”his lungs were wholly gone.” This stuck in my head, resurfacing here poetically. I call this one of my favorite poems: the abstractions of the first three stanzas finally settle—may I say, ”home in”—in the last lines.

A poem of the moment, commenting on the wildfires in California in August of 2020. How to contain our feelings in the face of seeming fury?

A recent poem from this site's home page, written in response to "D956,” the catalogue number of Schubert's Quintet in C Major. Here we have a pun on ”bars,“ being both musical and personal. The following three poems in the Gallery keep this one company. 

Following on "Persistent Theme," three more poems in response to Franz Schubert's Quintet in C Major. ”Who needs what drugs might do / when you have this?“ But this poet still writes a poem in thanks for his gift to her.

And here's the adult, thinking to play again, thinking to play the student again after years, tugged at by the memory of when he played before.

A meditation on the hells and heavens Schubert encompasses, with a few technical touches. The handle of a violin bow is called the frog, so the poem puns on "frog to prince." And chords are called "diminished" just as we can call ourselves. The diminished seventh chord can force a movement from key to key—while his diminishment in this case leaves him lost. 

Written in response to a talk by Vanderbilt professor Robert Barksy on W.B. Yeats and posted on YouTube, where Barsky tells this story lovingly, complete with a practiced imitation of the old man's voice. Tells it so well I was moved to tell it again, in my voice. If you like the poem, you might enjoy Barsky's original; he tells it at the beginning of the talk—quite accessible. 

I recently revisited Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk, where she all but re-enacts a stroke she had in her late thirties. She speaks of "La-la-land," the world seen through only the right hemisphere of the brain. In ”Life Force,” the speaker contemplates how she might approach such a state in her own life. 

I watched Stephen Meyer make his case on YouTube, arguing for intelligent design on the grounds that there hasn't been time for proteins to evolve "to fold just so," an idea that merged with my sense that "intelligence must be inherent" for it to "emerge." I then allowed myself to entertain the idea that we may be more intertwined with design than we usually imagine. (Further discussion may eventu

Written for a man who had three languages and three alphabets—and was losing his home in each of them, one by one. On the phone to his mother, she told him his dad had died the month before. 

A commentary on the times, making use of the deep connection between the words "prophet" and "infant," connected by the "f" sound that goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European from a root meaning "to speak." 

Written for the author of a book on the painter Tina Modotti. At one point in several years of research, she had an epiphanic moment when, out of the blue, she found a trunk full of the kind of personal remains can turn reportage into art, can let a biographer bring that subject to life. 

A sequel to the poem “Blue Smoke,” (also in this gallery, below) taken from a lecture by Bob Barsky. In an email to me, Barsky used the phrase “dire days indeed.” Loving its alliteration, I warned him I might steal it—and I did, putting it in the mouth of the character he'd already given me, a version of the poet-professor Allen Grossman, whom I thought it fitting to then have speak of poetry from

That grandfather character in "Dire Days" resonates with me in part because my father was old enough to be the grandfathers I never knew. Here the protagonist wakes already resonating to a song her father sang, the hymn "In The Garden:" 

        And the joy we share

        as we tarry there, 

        no other has ever known. 

In this grandfather spirit, a poem "from my father," who died in the Nineties and now revisits as one of my muses. For obvious reasons, "flickers" were what movies were called in the Twenties, when the movie was silent but the movie house wasn't: live music was supplied, keyed to the action on the screen, arranged for a whole gamut of instruments, from a wheezy organ or tinny piano all the way up t

An opening piece from a collection about my parents, Precious Prize. Here Harry and Olivia begin their love affair, meeting on a blind date, back in the 1930s, just after Prohibition has ended.

A second poem from Precious Prize, this one  in Olivia's voice, looking back at the summers spent in the country with Harry and their children. This particular heaven, however, is hers alone. 

And a third poem from Precious Prize, in the voice of David, Olivia and Harry's son. The poem refers to the rings or circles of hell in Dante‘s Inferno, where Satan‘s anus appears as the point of inflection between heaven and hell.  David informs his father about another affair Harry's done his best to ignore, between Olivia and her lover; Mad Manor was big enough to include many worlds. And here 

One of the series to my father, who died in the Nineties and still comes to visit in October, removing his glasses to catch angled autumn light. The poem holds a certain transparency most of the way through; then the last lines become more abstract, more opaque. 

A long-awaited  birthday party, and a poem to commemorate it.

A kitchen poem, celebrating small joys. I especially like the reach in the middle, where gods and microwaves, the ancient and the modern, can meet.

As a child, I had the privilege of playing the violin. As an adult, I haven't touched my fiddle in some time, and occasionally consider selling it, passing it on to the next generation, which brings up the question, How much is it part of me? Is it my only instrument for making music? This poem is part of my processing that conundrum. 

My father loved his shredded wheat, one of the few things from his childhood he could still indulge in his nineties. Here, it becomes the background to a contemporary conversation, allowing him to comment on much of the twentieth century, and our present predicament in the twenty-first. 

A poem that begins outside, in the presence of things—pale sky, children's swings—then moves towards the interior, into the past. The protagonist, suffering from an inner cold, finds some freedom by letting go of that most tenacious of possessions, himself. 

I've been staying at my sister's during the shelter in place, where I sleep in a rebuilt pool house out in the garden. This poem explores that distance, that closeness. 

Here a metaphorical journey to the Pole mixes with the more literal journeys of the siblings into joylessness, into drink, into childhood. These conditions are inside; is the Pole outside or inside? Here is poetry as I once heard it defined, as the contolled deployment of ambiguities, a poet searching for the real among the mirrors of the movie house of imagination, of history, of her own mind.  

A poem written in celebration of a long, and now long-distance, relationship, purposely maintained by mutual commitment over many years.