Playlist 2017

Songs are stories too. And sometimes poetry. In this year of much darkness and much light, I turned to true stories, songs that gave me courage, and old favorites. Many thanks to my friends for their music.

Blues Run the Game, Jackson C. Frank
Mill Towns, David Francey
Far End of Summer, David Francey
Get Behind the Mule, Tom Waits
Hold On, Tom Waits
House Where Nobody Lives, Tom Waits
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, Jacqueline Schwab
Lately, Aengus Finnan
Lass Among the Heather, Keith Murphy
C’est Aujoud’hui Grande Fete, Keith Murphy
Waves, Margie Adam
Lighthouse, Cris Williamson
Morning Glory, Terry Garthwaite
Doc Con Xa, Pham Van Ty
Le Morvandiaux Cesar’s The Sound of Sleet, Jeremiah McLane & Timothy Cummings
Bourees 3 Temps, Jeremiah McLane & Timothy Cummings
Keys Meadowhawk Mstr V2, Jeremiah McLane & Timothy Cummings
Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary’s, Keith Murphy
A Psalm of Life, Jacqueline Schwab
Loftiδ verδ ur skyndilega kalt, Ólafur Arnalds
ρu Ert Sólin, Ólafur Arnalds
ρu Ert Jöδin, Ólafur Arnalds

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010, by Lucille Clifton

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What a treat to reread Clifton’s poems, not to mention finding some new to me! I was thrilled when she was nominated as our poet of the month in my poetry discussion group. I’ve loved her work and been profoundly influenced by it since I first encountered it in the early 1970s.

What makes her work so astonishing to me is the way she uses plain language in what are often quite short poems and yet addresses complex themes. Moreover, she packs her poems with music and emotion.

Many of her poems are sheer delight, simply celebrating being alive. These sing with jazz rhythms and the melodies of speech. Good examples are the well-known “homage to my hips” and the lesser-known “homage to my hair” that starts:

when i feel her jump up and dance
i hear the music! my God
i’m talking about my nappy hair!

Another aspect of her work that astonishes me is how she holds her rage in check. It is there, in the poems about injustice and racism. But she finds ways to present it that enable us, even those of us with privilege, to participate in. There is, to me at least, always love in her poems as well, even the darkest ones.

Her sense of injustice may lurk under humor, as in this untitled poem that starts her first collection that begins:

in the inner city
or
like we call
it home

Another technique she uses is repetition. The lines quoted above are repeated at the end of that short poem, but by then we have a different slant on them. Or several different slants: as we discussed the poems, we found different meanings in them, sometimes because of the diverse life experiences we brought to them and often because Clifton’s lines are simply open to multiple interpretations.

She sometimes uses questions to enhance that openness and to invite the reader to participate in the poem. Sometime the questions even feel like a call-and-response, creating an unexpected resonance. For instance, each of the three stanzas in “the photograph: a lynching” is a question. Details, such as the woman who smiles and fingers a cross as she watches, arouse rage and a burning desire for justice but Clifton ends by asking:

is it all of us
captured by history into an
accurate album/ will we be
required to view it together
under a gathering sky?

Note the ambiguity in these lines as well. In our group we discussed various interpretations of “us” and “we” and “a gathering sky”. And if the latter portends a storm, what might that be? Also, the lynching itself is never described, only the audience’s reaction before the final question.

Her persona poems sometimes function as a container for rage or other complicated emotions. Another famous poem “jasper texas 1998” speaks from the point of view of a man’s head. Again, she does not describe the tragedy, leaving us the title and the dedication “for j. byrd” as sufficient clues. But speaking as the head in a voice that is measured and resigned gives us the opportunity to summon our own grief and outrage.

Many of the poems here are full of love and sometimes a wry understanding, especially those about her parents, husband, and children. This is also true of some addressed to all of us, such as her famous “blessing the boats” and this section from “the message from The Ones”:

the angels have no wings
they come to you wearing
their own clothes

they have learned to love you
and will keep coming

unless you insist on wings

Finally I am astounded by her prolific output. Parenting six children is no joke, even without the financial struggles. I know, too, from colleagues how generous Clifton always was with other poets, especially those just starting out.

As one person in my poetry discussion group said, holding this hefty volume—it is 720 pages—is like holding a life. What a privilege to be able to delve into a lifetime of work from this remarkable woman!

What is your favorite Lucille Clifton poem?

Dante’s Tears: The Poetics of Weeping from Vita Nuova to the Commedia, by Rossana Fenu Barbera

Rossana Barbera

Sometimes you find a book that answers questions you didn’t know you had. This book roused my curiosity about many things, not just Dante and tears, but also silences, numerology, medicine, and religious beliefs during the Late Middle Ages.

Earlier this week someone mentioned a history professor she once had who hated the sentence: “Things were different back then.” When I read these works of Dante’s back in my schooldays, that’s probably why I didn’t question all the weeping that goes on in them. As it turns out, though, the cultural context for tears really was different from today’s.

I haven’t read Dante since then, though of course I’ve encountered references and bits and pieces of his work over the years. Still, I had no trouble following Dr. Barbera’s explanations of the various meanings of tears during that time and how this understanding illuminates Dante’s most famous works. (Full disclosure: I have known the author for over ten years, first as a teacher and then as a friend.)

By tracing the way Dante presents his own tears and those of others, the author demonstrates how Dante’s philosophy and world view developed over the 26 or so years he spent writing these works. In Vita Nuova, where he first meets Beatrice,:

Dante’s confused and distressed state of mind is not merely emotional or decorative. It embraces the very essence of the book, the writing of which seems to be motivated by Dante’s finding a new path in life, finding his new life . . . Vita Nuova is the stage on which Dante represents his struggle to define the truth of Love, to test positive and negative behavior. Vita Nuova was the occasion, in Dante’s life, to discover a new poetic; in a way, it is the paradise and wood where Dante gets lost.

The Commedia, in which Dante travels through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, demonstrates Dante’s evolution to a more nuanced understanding of love and death, sin and redemption, and to a new poetics to express them. He more subtly uses different kinds of weeping to describe whom he meets and what he learns during his time in Hell and Purgatory. For some he meets, tears are a relief or a means of atonement. For others, they are a terrible punishment.

For example, Dante reserves the ninth and lowest circle of his Hell for traitors, those who broke the political order or society’s rules, which to him meant betraying the community itself. I was struck by the current relevance of this verdict, centuries before Rousseau published The Social Contract, which describes how citizens are willing to surrender some of their freedoms to the government in exchange for protection of their remaining rights.

Confined with Lucifer in a frozen lake of tears, these traitors are not allowed to weep, and therefore not given any way to relieve their sorrow or to petition God for forgiveness. If they do cry, their tears are frozen in their eye sockets, their heads tilted back. By delving into the significance of tears and Dante’s poetic use of them, the author brings home the true horror of these punishments and the depth of Dante’s scorn for these traitors.

I was also particularly interested in the history and meaning of the sin of acedia, better known today as sloth. However, it is more complicated than laziness. What we now call sloth was understood as a medical problem related to melancholia and tristitia (sorrow) until the “first Christian thinkers . . . began to associate diseases with or to explain them as a product of vice and sin.” When first identified as one of the seven deadly sins, it was considered “an inertia of the spirit” seen among monks who shifted their attention “from spiritual aspirations to earthly appetite.”

The relevance to today is obvious. As massive problems beset our society—problems we feel powerless to solve—it is tempting to bury our heads in the sand, whether by binge-watching television shows, video games, retail therapy, or focusing on personal ambition. Even though Thoreau’s “To be awake is to be alive” has been my motto since my teens, I am not immune; the lure of my book-lined room is sometimes irresistible.

In Dante’s Purgatory, acedia is the middle of the seven plateaus, separating the sins “that cause harm to others (Pride, Envy, and Wrath)” from the sins of “excessive love of earthly goods (Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust).” It is “intended as the mother of all temptations”. The exploration of Dante’s uses of weeping helps us better understand Dante’s struggle in this crucial area, the centerpoint of the entire Commedia and how we ourselves might move forward with open eyes.

Drawing on over a hundred sources, the author summarizes research and scholarship. She goes further and adds her own conclusions, clearly expressed and supported by the journey she has taken us on through the beliefs and worldview of the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Like the most satisfying of jigsaw puzzles, the pieces of the author’s argument slot together and yield a fascinating new portrait of Dante, his times, and his works.

Nearly all of the academic writers I know loathe tangled academic prose. What makes this book such a joy is not just the breadth of scholarship and the shrewd conclusions, but also the clarity of the prose. Even if you are not familiar with Dante’s works, the liberal quotations here will bring it to life and perhaps inspire you to explore these two works armed with your new understanding.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

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Tartt’s first novel begins with a quiet bang. I am no fan of prologues, but this one shows how powerful they can be. By mentioning a murder in the first sentence, this first section of the Introduction raises a huge story question and creates suspense that carries through the first half of the book. Tartt doesn’t stop there, but infuses each page with what Donald Maass, literary agent and writing guru, calls micro-tension. Sometimes it is out and out conflict and other times a vague sense of unease, but it is always there.

The prologue also immerses us in the voice of our narrator, Richard Papen, a young man from a working class family in southern California, who transfers to the fictional Hampden College in Hampden, Vermont.

Wanting to continue his Greek studies, Richard makes a huge effort to join the only Greek class. The professor, Julian Morrow, accepts students according to his own whim and then requires them to take all of their classes with him. One of Tartt’s strengths is her descriptions of people and places. With just a few phrases she conjures her characters.

It was a small, wise face, as alert and poised as a question, and though certain features of it were suggestive of youth—the elfin upsweep of the eyebrows, the depth lines of nose and jaw and mouth—it was by no means a young face, and the hair was snow white . . . He put his head to the other side and blinked again, bright-eyed, amiable as a sparrow.

Julian’s appeal for Richard is not only the entrée to an exclusive club, but also the image of Richard himself that Julian makes him believe in. Julian treats all of his students as serious scholars who care, not only about the language, but Greek culture itself, including its love of beauty and its attempt to balance Apollonian rationality with Dionysian ecstasy.

In this class, Richard joins the select few: Henry, brilliant and wealthy, the quiet leader of the group; Francis, also wealthy, prone to melodrama and attracted to men; the beautiful twins, Charles and Camilla, whose relationship is a clique within the clique; and Bunny, a narcissist from a destitute Brahmin family, who believes it is his right to take whatever he wants. Aristocrats all, they include Richard in their secret society, though he never feels entirely confident that he is one of them.

In this story of a middle-class youth fascinated by the beauty and nonchalant grace of his new aristocratic friends, I was immediately reminded of one of my favorite books: Brideshead Revisited. This novel has some of the charm of Brideshead, but lacks its serious underpinnings. Stretching over several decades, the Brideshead story embodies the massive cultural changes in Britain, asking what remains when so much has been stripped away. The Secret History, though, has the much smaller scope of a single school year and only addresses the coldness and carelessness of privileged youth.

While the prose was often entrancing, I felt that the book did not need to be so long. For example, the Christmas vacation section is one that could have been cut down. Richard’s situation, living in an unheated attic with a hole in the roof, and what followed taxed my credulity and threw me out of the story. The narrative function of that section, to bring Henry home and endear him to Richard, could have easily been achieved with a more believable way of giving Richard pneumonia.

The novel reminded me of Diana Gabaldon’s books which seem less like compelling stories and more like an opportunity to sink into another world. Luckily I was listening to it as an audio book, so my “reading” stretched out over a couple of long car trips and many walks. If I’d been trying to read it as a book, I would probably have grown tired of it by the middle, where we finally get to the murder.

That felt like a logical stopping place, but as it turns out, the rest of the book, which is about the aftermath, is interesting in a different way. We may have the answer to the question of how and why the murder happens, but now we wonder what its effect will be on these characters.

Richard, like similar narrators of other lives (Charles Ryder and Nick Carraway, for instance), speaks in a careful and thoughtful, almost detached, tone of voice, as though answering an oral exam question. He is looking back on these events from the advanced age of 28, hence the detachment. While it might seem that such a tone might be boring, I actually found it engaging and more effective than an emotional tone might have been. Repressed emotion, if done as well as it is here, gives the story more power.

Since the book was narrated by the author, I was disoriented by the sound of this southern California boy’s voice being so high and having an accent redolent of the deep South. The other characters being New Englanders were equally jarring. However, I eventually got used to Tartt’s voice and even found it soothing. It was so soothing, in fact, that I began putting on the sleep timer and listening to it as I fell asleep, which was always within a few minutes.

Some of the reviews on Goodreads indicated that the book was most popular among high school students, one even saying that fifteen was the best age to appreciate it. I can see that older teens and college students, being of an age with the protagonist, would take a special interest in it, but the deluge of praise and awards seem proof that it is equally popular among older adults.

However, I found it ultimately shallow. I was certainly as charmed as Richard by this coterie of people, their old-fashioned formal dress, their erudite conversation, and literary references. But none, except perhaps Henry, seemed to have gone beyond these superficial attributes.

Thus, unexpectedly, my reaction to this book reminds me again of Brideshead, where Anthony Blanche says that Sebastian, while undeniably charming, reminds him of “‘that in some ways nauseating picture of Bubbles. . . when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then—phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.’”

What books have worked well for you as audio books? Do you have a favorite narrator?