He showed
up last night, wanting to do some writing, and did take the computer out of the
case. And it may be true that I derailed him, since I mentioned that it might
be a plan to both force himself to write in specific meters and forms, and—at
different times—abandon them.
Montalvo
looked at me blankly.
So I tried
to explain, citing Shakespeare and iambic pentameter.
“I’ve never
read Shakespeare,” he said.
“You did go
to high school?”
It turns
out he did, and slid by, somehow, on the grease of a good intellect. Nice, but
where could he be if the good intellect had been shored up by a good education?
Is it time
for a jeremiad?
My
grandmother knew more poetry than anyone I knew, and could still recite reams
of the stuff when she was quite old; in the clip below, which she recorded in
her eighties, she’s reciting from memory.
“Every
Friday afternoon we had elocution,” said Gram. “And all the little children
would stand up straight in front of the class, and start off on all the old
chestnuts. It was ‘The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had
fled.’ Or it could have been ‘Captain, my captain!’ Then of course the was the
spreading chestnut tree….”
Nor was it
a bad idea—is anybody memorizing anything anymore?
The answer,
I discovered years ago, is yes, since I once saw two pre-teenage girls spend
forty minutes reciting rap music in a bus. And the amazing thing is that they
had done it quite spontaneously: young minds do.
I’m sharing
a table with Yeats and
Montalvo, because I remembered having heard him recite his own poetry. Wait—it
wasn’t so much “recite” but what Seamus Heaney called “an
elevated chant.” Here’s
what a wonderfully crusty Yeats has to say about his reading:
“I’m
going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm,” says Yeats in
the first segment, recorded in 1932, “and that may seem strange if you are not
used to it. I remember the great English poet William Morris coming in a rage
out of some lecture hall, where somebody had recited a passage out of his Sigurd
the Volsung.
‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble,’ said Morris, ‘to get that thing into
verse!’ It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I
am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.”
OK—that was
a thing to hear, and then I remembered the story about hearing Brahms play his
Hungarian Rhapsody number one. Well, dear Reader, I’m saving you the two
minutes you undoubtedly would have given it: the sound quality is awful, to the
extent that the piece is virtually unrecognizable. It’s the sound of a piano
being played during a hurricane.
I take a
break to “edit” the poem that Montalvo has just transcribed, and we have a
little talk about line breaks.
“It might
be a little stronger if you shifted the word ‘into’ to the next line, and ended
with the verb ‘fall,’” I tell him.
“Oh, and
what about using a stronger verb than ‘fall?’ Maybe ‘plunge?’”
Right—then
it was time to drop back in on voices from the past—in this case Florence Nightingale,
who can be heard, and who delivers a short message of support for her
“dear comrades” at Balaclava.
“You know,
that first stanza? It’s a statement, and that makes me crazy. So could you give
me an image, a metaphor, something that summons up a picture?”
He goes
back and revises.
“Poetry is
imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” I tell him, and then think, ‘damn,
who was that?’
Answer—Marianne Moore.
“That’s the
difference between poetry and prose,” I tell him.
“Prose?”
Teaching
teaches you some things. I hold up my right hand and say “poetry;” then the
left hand and “prose.” He gets it.
Voices from
the past. I ponder this young man, my new son, in front of me, and wonder what
my grandmother would make of him. She would understand, I think, a young man
carrying notebooks in which he has written his poems. She would get the
impetuous, rebellious spirit. And she might like an older man reading and
critiquing a younger writer.
‘There are
some things that don’t change,’ I think. ‘The young are busy reinventing the
world, and God bless them for it, because if there’s any hope for us, somebody
has got to do some major reconstructive surgery. But the old see continuity,
the rolling river of tradition. Also valuable….’
“Well, it’s
a post that doesn’t have an ending,” I tell him, since I’m floundering here.
“Some
don’t,” he tells me.
Who’s
teaching whom?
