Voices Past and Present

Hunh?

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?