This time a young woman in a brown short-sleeved dress said, “I sat down here an hour ago and there was nothing in my mind. I’d rushed to get here and there was just a jumble of stuff in my head that I’m supposed to be doing, a little to-do list for Sunday. And then in the silence a word came to me, and the word was ‘unprepared.’ I turned it over in my mind. I wasn’t prepared for meeting. I had nothing to say. And then I thought, But isn’t this the essence of Quakerism? We’re not supposed be prepared. We’re supposed to sit here and wait for what’s true to come.”
She said some more things I don’t remember, and then she sat down, and I thought, She’s right, the key sometimes is not to be prepared. Wait and see. Don’t prepare for wars by having huge military bases all over the world, four hundred bases. Don’t prepare for terrorists by creating a homeland bureaucracy. Don’t expect people to hate one another. Wait and see what happens.
Then there were announcements. A film about sustainable agriculture was scheduled for Wednesday, and the knitting committee was going to be knitting blankets for sale, the proceeds to go for the furnace fund. They’re thinking ahead to winter. Then everyone went into the other room to eat and have coffee.
Afterward I drove to Planet Fitness listening to the song about Darfur, by Mattafix. It’s sung by a British man, Marlon Roudette, who has an extraordinary maple-sugar voice. At first I thought he was a woman. “Where others turn and sigh, you shall rise,” he says.
Chevron discovered oil in the Darfur region of Sudan in 1978. In 1979, the CIA installed a friendly governor in Darfur, and the Carter administration began sending weapons and money to Jaafar Nimeiry, Sudan’s president, who allowed the United States to build military bases in the country. Reagan sent more weapons and proclaimed that President Nimeiry, a murderous dictator, was a great friend to America — the CIA loved him because he was anti-Qaddafi. The result of our years of military assistance and meddling was a brutal civil war and a catastrophe of refugees and starvation. If you corrupt a government with money, weapons, and covert advisors, people are going to die. That’s why the CIA has to be abolished immediately. It takes no great insight to see this. “You don’t have to be extraordinary, just forgiving,” sings Marlon Roudette.
• • •
YOU CAN’T INCLUDE IT ALL. You might think, I’ll write a poem and it will have every good thing in it, and every bad thing, and every middling thing — it’ll have Henry Cabot Lodge and clouds and eggplant and Chuck Berry and the new flavor of Tom’s of Maine toothpaste and bantam roosters and gas stations and seafoam-green Vespa scooters and the oversalting of rural roads — but it doesn’t work. I’ve tried. As soon as the poem becomes longer than two pages, it stops being a poem and becomes something else. The longest poem I ever wrote came out in 1980 in a journal, now forgotten, not well known even then, called Bird Effort, which is the name of a Jackson Pollock painting. In the same issue was a poem by John Hall Wheelock, who had recently died — a friend and confidant of Sara Teasdale’s who produced a glorious posthumous oral autobiography. Really, if you want to know about kindness and poetry in the twentieth century you should immediately read John Hall Wheelock’s memoir. It was published a while ago by the University of South Carolina Press.
My long poem was called “Clouding Up” and it went on for two and a half pages. It was mostly about clouds. There was something in it about the Cloudboys and the Nimbians, I wince to remember. It was a poem I’d written in college. My creative writing teacher, a taciturn but fair-minded man, wrote, “I’m a bit baffled by this. To be frank, it’s boring.”
Well, yes, it was boring. But I was undeterred, and I sent it to fifteen places, and Bird Effort published it, and after that I wrote much shorter poems.
I’ve written three more poems about clouds since then. I can’t get enough of them. I am drawn to describe them even though I know it’s futile. They’re different every day. Debussy liked clouds. The first movement of his Nocturnes is called “Nuages.” He also liked sunken cathedrals. He died when he was fifty-five.
• • •
I’M PARKED by the salt pile now. It sits here all summer, waiting for winter, when it will be dribbled out onto the roads and sometimes poison the roots of the trees.
All systems go. Boink. I’m ready. Thanks. Good.
Greetings, this is Chowder’s Poetry Slurp, and I’m here to welcome you to another show in which we talk about the world of freelance hydroponics. I’m Paul Chowder, your harbormaster, confidant, and co-conspirator. And I hope that you will sit back and close your eyes and just let the poetry wash over you. Just let it pass over you in a lethal tide of poetical merriment. You are the sunken cathedral, my friend. This is PRI, Public Radio International.
“The Sunken Cathedral” is the name of a piece for solo piano by Claude Debussy. The experts say that it is based on a Breton folktale about the lost cathedral city of Ys — rhymes with “cease”—which allegedly sank beneath the waves one day when a woman stole the key to the seawall and the floodgates opened. But the experts don’t know what they’re talking about in this case. They’re making it up. I’ve found this to be true over and over — the experts often don’t know anything useful, really. First all women should have breast X-rays once a year and then, no, that’s bad. First women should take hormone pills after menopause, then no. First we should eat eggs. Then, no, eggs are bad because they have cholesterol. Then, no, eggs are good because they give you good cholesterol. And the advice is offered with such arrogant assurance. Roz’s radio show is undermining some of that arrogance, and that’s a good thing.
I talked to Gene, my editor, today, and when he asked I told him that I was making steady progress on my book of prosaic plums and that I now had a title for it: Misery Hat. I’ve sat on that poem all these years. It hurt that Peter Davison rejected it, and I turned against it and forgot about it. But I read it recently and thought it had some reasonably good turns, S-turns. Dryden has a nice passage about the French way of praising the turns in Virgil and Ovid: “Delicat et bien tourné are the highest commendation which they bestow on somewhat which they think a masterpiece.”
Forget it, never mind, it doesn’t matter.
“Misery Hat,” said my editor. “Interesting title.” I knew he didn’t like it. I could hear that slight catch in his voice. But he’s happy with me right now because Only Rhyme is still selling.
• • •
YOU THINK this is all a game, don’t you? Well, it isn’t. It’s serious. I helped my dog Smacko into the car — he resists getting in the back seat and he’s a little stiff these days — and I drove to Fort McClary with my music on shuffle. The Gap Band came on, singing “Early in the Morning.” I hadn’t really listened to the words before. For years, bizarrely, I paid almost no attention to the words in pop songs, even in Beatles songs. I heard them, and I could sometimes recite them, but I didn’t care what they were about — they were just semi-random vocalizations over a chordal groove that I could move my head to like a wobble-headed figure on a cabbie’s dashboard. Now I pay attention to the words. “Got to get up early in the morning, to find me another lover.”
Then Fountains of Wayne came on, playing “All Kinds of Time.” Holy shit, is that a good song. What a great undulating guitar thing in the middle. Shit! Apparently Collingwood, one of the songwriting pair of fountains, has or had a drinking problem — well, who wouldn’t after singing a song as good as this one? He managed to catch the moment nobody has ever caught, the suspended hopeful moment as the quarterback is looking for a receiver, the most poignant and killing moment in football. There are some great chords, and Collingwood is able to control his falsetto notes, and the whole thing is just total genius. The quarterback knows that no one can touch him now. He’s strangely at ease. The play is going to end in a sack — we realize it, gathered around the wide-screen TV — and then this slow wavy-gravy warble of a guitar solo comes on that is like the look of a football in flight — the football that he hasn’t yet thrown — and it’s totally mystical and soul-shaking. Power pop is the name given to Fountains of Wayne’s style of music, it seems — but whatever it’s called, they are great songwriters and they deserve thanks.