Bless'd be the Name of the Lord

“Can you believe this shit? Look at this—unnecessary line breaks, no punctuation, and what does it mean?” Montalvo, my young son, read me the poem, or rather, showed it to me, since poetry, Gentle Reader, now comes through the phone. Then we got to the comments, after first noting that the offending phone-poem had had over 100 likes.

Well, Montalvo had certainly fomented a firestorm: was it the reference to “illiterate morons,” that had so deeply troubled the unduly sensitive? Or maybe it was the reference to the careful writer—which he, following my lead, abbreviated TCW—that had so riled the paper-thin skinned. Whatever it was, the social networks were not burning, not blazing, but exploding in flames. Think fire in a rum plant.

“Can you believe what morons my generation are?” asked Montalvo, and I took a moment off to contemplate subject / verb agreement. So I barely registered when he said, “Christ, my fucking generation will fucking kill poetry, the way we’re massacring it….”

Right, so now it’s time to swing into paternity—a land I’m traversing frequently, these days.

“You know, there’s a lot of bad poetry out there, and sometimes the worse it is, the more it sells.”

“Is that what you meant when you said some people won the Nobel Prize who shouldn’t have?”

Did I mention that Montalvo is obsessed with the Nobel Prize, to the point of reading the list, just to see who’s there and who’s not?

“Shit, I haven’t fucking heard of most of these guys—I gotta start reading these dudes, figure out how they did it….”

I suggest that he might print out the list, add a few blank years, and then write in his own name. This idea he ponders seriously.

“How can people be such morons!” he explodes, and goes on to tell me about Raju, an elephant in India, and a prisoner for 50 years, who was recently freed. So the elephant freaked and started crying, and now the “experts” are wondering: were those tears real?

“Fifty fucking years, those bastards have kept the elephant, and for twenty-five of them, at least, he’s had shackles with spikes on them digging into his flesh! And those morons are asking if the tears are real? Don’t they know animals have feelings? Fuck!”

“More feelings than some humans do,” I tell him, but guess what? One of the amazing things about the Millennials is that they appear and disappear, or maybe it’s just that they’ve mastered shifting instantaneously time and space, since Montalvo is now cadging coffee from Carly, and asking him and Amil if they believe that we’re alone in the universe. Such questions vex the young….

And now I have to tell him that we people are committing exactly the same atrocities on our own kind as we perpetrate on the elephants. Look at all the prisoners we lock up for years, if not decades, and then release onto the streets. And then I think of the famous scene from The Shawshank Redemption—you know, the one where the prisoner blasts Mozart’s Sull’aria out through the speakers in the prison courtyard. It’s a knockout—and we decide to watch it simultaneously, each at his own computer. It’s a totally Millennial thing.

So I watch as the music soars over the prison courtyard, and is it because Montalvo has some experience of prison courtyards, having liberated—though slightly less legally than they did Raju the elephant—a blue Macaw held captive by its “owner?” Or could it be that the music, some of the most celestial that Mozart ever wrote, is itself getting in? Anyway, my young son’s eyes are widening, and he’s murmuring, “fuck,” under his breath. Tennyson one day, Mozart the next!

Well, that’s a nice introduction to opera, and probably necessary, since Montalvo is joining us tomorrow for the Met broadcast of Otello, and has graciously accepted the invitation by announcing that he’ll go, since there’s no dress code.

“I hate dress codes, don’t you?” he says, as I’m writing away.

“Of course not, I love them,” I tell him; who says only kids get to be contrarian?

“Why,” he asks.

So we have a little discussion about the benefits of decorum, of how having a social map often, surprisingly, gets you to the destination much faster and easier than not. Then you can go home and have a drink, see?

So he sort of gets that, and I go back to writing, and then it’s time to read a poem that he wrote yesterday, when he was felled into the abyss of despair and depression. What was wrong? He couldn’t even tell me, so miserable was he when I had called him yesterday. That, of course, immediately made me start worrying—not for nothing am I my father’s son: had Montalvo formed another mystical relationship with an avian? And if so, had it led to the same result? I worried for five hours until I called him before bed; “I’m much better,” he reported.

Right, so what was the problem?

“Matters of the heart,” he said.

Remember that? You’re 21-years old, and love is an emotion that they just came out with yesterday, and they haven’t got the formula quite right, or they’re mixing it all up too strong because, damn! Think martinis on an empty stomach after a night of no sleep!

So I read the poem, and we talk about it, and Montalvo decides: it’s going first, the first poem in his book!

“BAM! It’ll hit those motherfuckers like a twenty-ton weight! Man, those dudes won’t know what the fuck I’m talking about! I mean, they’re gonna be saying, ‘what the fuh???’”

Would the careful writer—sorry, that’s TCW—allow that to pass? Of course not, so now it’s time to suggest that readers generally have a lot to do, and if they’re doing you the honor of reading your work, shouldn’t you put in the work to make it as clear as possible?

Does the point get through? Probably not, but I’m getting it, now. The best a parent can hope for is not a pressure hose, but erosion. You’ll see the effect in a couple of centuries.

So back to the writing, and then Carly comes by, and Montalvo has to have him read the poem—the gist of which is that love is all encompassing—out loud to us. Carly does, and likes it well enough to go recite it to his girlfriend, currently bearing their child. I go back to writing.

“Father!” explodes Montalvo, “this is a major moment in my life! A man is reciting my love poem to his lady! This is momentous! They should just give me the Nobel right now!”

Carly comes back, and reports—the girlfriend loved it!

“YES!” cries Montalvo, “PANTIES OFF!!”

Carly agrees: it’s a PANTIES OFF poem…”

Back to writing.

“Hey, Marc, how’s your writing going?” asks Montalvo.

“Interruptedly,” I tell him: if you haven’t guessed it, this post is being written in real time.

“Hunh?”

But now Carly is back, reciting his own poem, and Montalvo is liking it so much he’s sharing it over Twitter.

‘Nine more years,’ I think. Age thirty is the currently accepted age for when the adolescent brain at last, finally, after-having-driven-everybody-nuts-for-years, cedes to adulthood.

Nine years…

Think I’ll make it?

Then I remember a line from the Bible—Job, maybe?—that went something like “…and the Lord sent the locusts, bless’d be the name of the Lord.” I could tell you, but apparently Google hasn’t read the Bible.

‘Aha,’ I think, ‘I totally get it now…’

Crossing the Bar with Montalvo

“What a motherfucker,” said my young son, referring to Alfred Lord Tennyson.

We had spent forty-five minutes analyzing “Crossing the Bar,” and the first problem was what it meant. And on the off chance that you don’t remember it, here it goes:

 Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea,

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

      Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,

      And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

      When I embark;

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

It was all Mr. Fernández’s doing, since in one night of lessened sobriety, he had waxed lyrical about the poem. And “Crossing the Bar” was the poem that Tennyson always wanted anthologists to place last, a fact about which Mr. Fernández makes much.

“OK—so what’s the business of ‘sunset and evening star?’” I ask Montalvo.

“He’s talking about nighttime?” says Montalvo.

This, Gentle Reader, is to what we’ve come. (Sorry for all these twisted constructions, but Mr. Fernández has taken to reading the blog, after which he showers me with bracing criticism….)

“I’m in the sunset of my life,” I tell him.

“Hunh?”

“What does it mean, ‘I’m in the sunset of my life?’”

“Damn, I hate it when you ask those questions!”

OK, we figure out about the sunset of my life, then we have to find out what this whole sea / boat image is about.

“So he’s taking a trip somewhere?”

Right, we sort that out, and then it’s time to figure out the rhyme scheme.

“I don’t get this ABAB stuff,” says Montalvo.

For this they invented paper and pencils, and we write down the last word of each line. He gets it, and that’s when we get to the most fun—meter, in this case iambic pentameter.

“Man, he did all this shit and I didn‘t even notice it! One fucking dude!”

So he drifts off to cadge some coffee, and I start to write the first line of a stanza:

            When first I saw the young Montalvo smile

Well, he’s on top of that like a sailor on a you-know-whom, and he does quite well, which is good, because you know what? His goal—modest though it is—is first to become poet laureate, and then to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; his motivators, as we used to say in human resources, are a bit more external than internal. To this end, Montalvo has the acceptance speech all planned out.

“I’m gonna stand up there and hold up the trophy and say, ‘YO, BROTHERS! NOTHING TO SAY, GUYS! MONTALVO RULES, MAN! I BE THE BEST! PANTIES DOWN, LADIES!!!’”

I’m speechless, a state which occurs less frequently than the sun darkening at noon with roaring lions pacing the streets of the city. But I do point out that we’re in public.

“PANTIES OFF, LADIES!”

Did I mention there’s a lot of rough in this diamond?

But a glimmer of a shine as well, because now we’re going over his poetry, and he says it:

“Man, this poetry is crap! I can’t believe I wrote this. This is AWFUL!”

“It could be improved,” I tell him, and then tell him about the opportunity / problem thing at Walmart.

“There are no problems, just opportunities….”

Won’t repeat what he said: there’s already been too much profanity in this post.

But now it’s time to go back to being supportive, because he’s looking at me, almost with tears in his eyes, and asking not if he’s going to win the Nobel, but if he’ll ever be a good poet.

Yes, I tell him. Otherwise, why would I be doing this?

We go back to work, ripping apart the poems, joining up the line breaks, eliminating the dreadful dashes. At last we can take it no more, and he’s still a bit discouraged, my son.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “Tennyson didn’t win the Nobel Prize either….”