Well, here it is, round 2. Maybe we should just stop messing with Robert Frost's work until he rises from the grave and tells us what it is that he wants....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/books/22frost.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=James+Sitar&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
News...
Award Nominations for "Morning...":
The Conference on Christianity and Literature's Book of the Year Citation (no cigar)
The Pushcart Prize (no word yet)
The Kentucky Literary Award (no word yet)
Publications:
Ars Poetica ("The Room," link on the right)
Riverwind ("After Chuck's Zen Garden)
Words ("Spofford Lake")
The Chrysalis Reader ("In January," tentatively accepted)
New Southerner ("Your Days Are Waiting", link on the right)
Public Appearances:
January 29 @Holly Hill Inn, 6:30pm for "Tapas Tuesday" reading with Lynnell Edwards, Erin Keane, and Ben Lesousky.
February 9 @ The Carnegie Center in Lexington, 9am-12pm for a lecture/workshop on William Stafford and Practical Poetics.
Every Monday in March @ Asbury Theological Seminary, 5:30pm for a reading of "Psalm: A Meditation on God and the Hebrew Alphabet" and a workshop on "Modern Psalmists." See J.D. Walt's blog for more details.
...and the best for last...
Baby Gigi
She's happy and healthy and giving Amanda hell doing ninja moves in the womb. Amanda is taking it in stride--still looking beautiful, still going strong. We're really looking forward to April 28th (and the surrounding weeks...)!
The Conference on Christianity and Literature's Book of the Year Citation (no cigar)
The Pushcart Prize (no word yet)
The Kentucky Literary Award (no word yet)
Publications:
Ars Poetica ("The Room," link on the right)
Riverwind ("After Chuck's Zen Garden)
Words ("Spofford Lake")
The Chrysalis Reader ("In January," tentatively accepted)
New Southerner ("Your Days Are Waiting", link on the right)
Public Appearances:
January 29 @Holly Hill Inn, 6:30pm for "Tapas Tuesday" reading with Lynnell Edwards, Erin Keane, and Ben Lesousky.
February 9 @ The Carnegie Center in Lexington, 9am-12pm for a lecture/workshop on William Stafford and Practical Poetics.
Every Monday in March @ Asbury Theological Seminary, 5:30pm for a reading of "Psalm: A Meditation on God and the Hebrew Alphabet" and a workshop on "Modern Psalmists." See J.D. Walt's blog for more details.
...and the best for last...
Baby Gigi
She's happy and healthy and giving Amanda hell doing ninja moves in the womb. Amanda is taking it in stride--still looking beautiful, still going strong. We're really looking forward to April 28th (and the surrounding weeks...)!
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Some Thought's on Phillip Levine's "At Bessemer"
AT BESSEMER
19 years old and going nowhere,
I got a ride to Bessemer and walked
the night road toward Birmingham
passing dark groups of men cursing
the end of a week like every week.
Out of town I found a small grove
of trees, high narrow pines, and I
sat back against the trunk of one
as the first rains began slowly.
South, the lights of Bessemer glowed
as though a new sun rose there,
but it was midnight and another shift
tooled the rolling mills. I must
have slept a while, for someone
else was there beside me. I could
see a cigarette’s soft light,
and once a hand grazed mine, man
or woman’s I never knew. Slowly
I could feel the darkness fill
my eyes and the dream that came was
of a bright world where sunlight
fell on the long even rows of houses
and I looked down from great height
at a burned world I believed
I never had to enter. When
the true sun rose I was stiff
and wet, and there beside me was
the small white proof that someone
rolled and smoked and left me there
unharmed, truly untouched.
A hundred yards off I could hear
cars on the highway. A life
was calling to be lived, but how
and why I had still to learn.
—Phillip Levine
What a great way to open a poem, “19 years old and going nowhere…” Levine’s work is filled with meditations on his young life and the memories that linger in his mind. Levine is a poet of justification—meaning that he seeks, in many parts of his work, to understand his experience and streamline into lines of poetry. In this way he justifies his experience; he shows his reader that tough times make the man.
There are many strange things going on in this poem. First, there is this issue of “the runaway.” The speaker here is not necessarily a runaway in the traditional sense, but is drawn away from his loser life to this dark town. We get the indication that the speaker is retelling this story from further down the road of life—the judgment of “going nowhere” being the indicator. We know the poem is retrospective and that time is functioning as memory—a memory that will be defined in the end by the speaker. We know from the opening lines that this poem will be a coming-of-age story, a story of self-awareness when one’s eyes are opened to the harsh realities of the surrounding world—this is a moment of revelation that all people have. Can you think of the moment where you realized this? That this world is full of pain and violence? Everyone has a moment when there innocence is lost. In this sense this poem is elegiac and seeks to understand that moment of loss. This sense of “waking up” becomes a literal moment in the poem when the speaker wakes to darkness in the woods—the comparison is an obvious one and the reader has the sense that something about the speaker has changed, the realization has occurred. We’re introduced to a character with no real identity, a hobo who watches the speaker during sleep, touches him once and smokes a cigarette. The speaker wakes while this is going on but isn’t sure if it is dream or reality—there is a blurred truth resting in the land between reality (the harsh creepiness of a voyeur) and the mind (the very life that must be enlightened to reality). This is where innocence moves from naivety to relativity or “reality.” The speaker then falls back to sleep and dreams of “a bright world where sunlight / [falls] on the long even rows of houses”—a stark contrast to the dreary Bessemer, a suburban post-war paradise of promise and prosperity. And as the worlds of dream and reality run together, so do the descriptions of the contrasting worlds, a masterful move on Levine’s part that leads to the ending of the poem: the turn and the realization of experience.
This is also a poem of place, as indicated by the title giving the setting. Bessemer is an Alabama steel town, a place that went to hell after WWII, the time in which this poem probably takes place. The mill is there, cold, stoic, dark, and the speaker thinks he is above it (“…I looked down from great height / at a burned world I believed / I never had to enter”). Indeed, the speaker thinks that he will be able to avoid losing his innocence in a way, but the observation is a statement of arrogance in a way. But the whole situation is unavoidable—the voyeur has already been there to strip away his virtue (not be rape or violence, but simply by presence—the idea that a person would watch another in such a vulnerable position), and we know, because this poem is written, of the moment’s significance: that the road ahead is hard and long, that the speaker must embrace the inevitable future in all it’s shinning uncertainty. This is where we learn about hard times on the horizon as if it is a kind of prophecy.
And then there is the ending:
A hundred yards off I could hear
cars on the highway. A life
was calling to be lived, but how
and why I still had to learn.
We see the remnant of the old life (the cars) as a distant din, a fleeting noise moving away from the speaker’s ear and then time comes back into play—that wise voice-of-experience from the beginning of the poem returns to place a value on this night—that the whole world is ahead and waiting to be lived in. In the end, this poem chooses the embrace, it chooses life, and in that, chooses hope, however reluctantly.
EXERCISE: Try to remember a moment in your life where you “opened your eyes”—it might in fact be your earliest memory—and write a poem in the voice of an adult recalling this moment. The poem should focus on the reconciliation of the childhood memory with your perception of reality as an adult.
19 years old and going nowhere,
I got a ride to Bessemer and walked
the night road toward Birmingham
passing dark groups of men cursing
the end of a week like every week.
Out of town I found a small grove
of trees, high narrow pines, and I
sat back against the trunk of one
as the first rains began slowly.
South, the lights of Bessemer glowed
as though a new sun rose there,
but it was midnight and another shift
tooled the rolling mills. I must
have slept a while, for someone
else was there beside me. I could
see a cigarette’s soft light,
and once a hand grazed mine, man
or woman’s I never knew. Slowly
I could feel the darkness fill
my eyes and the dream that came was
of a bright world where sunlight
fell on the long even rows of houses
and I looked down from great height
at a burned world I believed
I never had to enter. When
the true sun rose I was stiff
and wet, and there beside me was
the small white proof that someone
rolled and smoked and left me there
unharmed, truly untouched.
A hundred yards off I could hear
cars on the highway. A life
was calling to be lived, but how
and why I had still to learn.
—Phillip Levine
What a great way to open a poem, “19 years old and going nowhere…” Levine’s work is filled with meditations on his young life and the memories that linger in his mind. Levine is a poet of justification—meaning that he seeks, in many parts of his work, to understand his experience and streamline into lines of poetry. In this way he justifies his experience; he shows his reader that tough times make the man.
There are many strange things going on in this poem. First, there is this issue of “the runaway.” The speaker here is not necessarily a runaway in the traditional sense, but is drawn away from his loser life to this dark town. We get the indication that the speaker is retelling this story from further down the road of life—the judgment of “going nowhere” being the indicator. We know the poem is retrospective and that time is functioning as memory—a memory that will be defined in the end by the speaker. We know from the opening lines that this poem will be a coming-of-age story, a story of self-awareness when one’s eyes are opened to the harsh realities of the surrounding world—this is a moment of revelation that all people have. Can you think of the moment where you realized this? That this world is full of pain and violence? Everyone has a moment when there innocence is lost. In this sense this poem is elegiac and seeks to understand that moment of loss. This sense of “waking up” becomes a literal moment in the poem when the speaker wakes to darkness in the woods—the comparison is an obvious one and the reader has the sense that something about the speaker has changed, the realization has occurred. We’re introduced to a character with no real identity, a hobo who watches the speaker during sleep, touches him once and smokes a cigarette. The speaker wakes while this is going on but isn’t sure if it is dream or reality—there is a blurred truth resting in the land between reality (the harsh creepiness of a voyeur) and the mind (the very life that must be enlightened to reality). This is where innocence moves from naivety to relativity or “reality.” The speaker then falls back to sleep and dreams of “a bright world where sunlight / [falls] on the long even rows of houses”—a stark contrast to the dreary Bessemer, a suburban post-war paradise of promise and prosperity. And as the worlds of dream and reality run together, so do the descriptions of the contrasting worlds, a masterful move on Levine’s part that leads to the ending of the poem: the turn and the realization of experience.
This is also a poem of place, as indicated by the title giving the setting. Bessemer is an Alabama steel town, a place that went to hell after WWII, the time in which this poem probably takes place. The mill is there, cold, stoic, dark, and the speaker thinks he is above it (“…I looked down from great height / at a burned world I believed / I never had to enter”). Indeed, the speaker thinks that he will be able to avoid losing his innocence in a way, but the observation is a statement of arrogance in a way. But the whole situation is unavoidable—the voyeur has already been there to strip away his virtue (not be rape or violence, but simply by presence—the idea that a person would watch another in such a vulnerable position), and we know, because this poem is written, of the moment’s significance: that the road ahead is hard and long, that the speaker must embrace the inevitable future in all it’s shinning uncertainty. This is where we learn about hard times on the horizon as if it is a kind of prophecy.
And then there is the ending:
A hundred yards off I could hear
cars on the highway. A life
was calling to be lived, but how
and why I still had to learn.
We see the remnant of the old life (the cars) as a distant din, a fleeting noise moving away from the speaker’s ear and then time comes back into play—that wise voice-of-experience from the beginning of the poem returns to place a value on this night—that the whole world is ahead and waiting to be lived in. In the end, this poem chooses the embrace, it chooses life, and in that, chooses hope, however reluctantly.
EXERCISE: Try to remember a moment in your life where you “opened your eyes”—it might in fact be your earliest memory—and write a poem in the voice of an adult recalling this moment. The poem should focus on the reconciliation of the childhood memory with your perception of reality as an adult.
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