Montalvo and the Big S

It’s easy to forget, because we do it all the time and it’s normal for us, so it was nice of Joshua to drop around and remind me.

He was one of many people who—obviously—I was supposed to remember, and that was clear when he sat down and peered nervously at me; in situations like this, what choice do you have?

“I’m sorry, but I don’t remember you,” I finally said. And he went on to tell me that I had intruded myself on a group of his fellow high-school students who were being coached on their poems for the Poetry Out Loud contest last year.

Here’s my version: I had held back as much as I could, since some of the kids were struggling even to understand their poems, some were consistently mispronouncing words, most were speaking either too quickly or too softly or…something. And the coach? She was murmuring—sorry, make that cooing—the gentlest words of encouragement on them.

And that’s nice, because discouragement? Who needs it? Isn’t being a Latino kid reciting English poetry enough of a challenge?

But there was this thing: if one of these kids was going to go to Washington, DC, to face native speakers from the fifty states, shouldn’t they have a decent shot of it? So there I was, writing and wincing in the corner, and then my father, Jack, dead these two decades, cleared his throat up there in heaven and fixed his gaze down though the clouds at me. His eye is as the eagle….

So I had gently taken over the group, after assuring the coach that she was doing an excellent job, and that I had little, nothing really, to say.

Now for Montalvo’s version:

“Man, you fuckin’ blew those kids outta the water. They didn’t know what the fuh had hit ‘em. Most of those kids didn’t even know what they were saying! You blasted them off the planet, man.”

Well, Montalvo is a youth who measures poetic success with the grade of “PANTIES OFF, LADIES” at the top, so my own performance?

“Jockstraps off, team!”

This, however, was after Montalvo had settled down a bit, because I had made my umpteenth parental blunder by answering truthfully to his question: “did you like my poem?”

When am I gonna learn?

“No,” I told him, and look, you don’t have to be adolescent to hear that as less a word than a slamming door.

The problem? The stuff that seems so obvious to everybody else around me, as they read their poems to each other, I just don’t get. So Montalvo read the poem to me, and then asked: what was it about? My answer, of course, was completely wrong.

“How can you not understand my poetry,” he demanded, “it’s perfectly clear,” and then proceeded to recite the poem again. It’s sort of the equivalent of all the tourists encountering non-English speaking people. What do they do? Raise their voices!

The problem—as I, and only I, see it—is that a lot of the poets are sort of commentators on their emotional fields, as it were. Think talking heads given a news analysis from the wars of feeling. Want an example? Well, I’ve just moved up and looked at one poem, and came upon this:

Our unspoken reason has led me

To understand the world we live in.

OK—looks like poetry, but is it?

So I’ve been telling Montalvo, don’t, please, report in. Instead, break out your verbal paint box, set your brush to work and set my eye and soul ablaze with the colors of metaphors, similes, images, adjectives, verbs that stab the eye. And I had suggested that he might do one short poem, but using an extended metaphor. And since of course—of course!—I hadn’t explained what I wanted, much less shown him an example of one, he had failed. Oh, and then I had panned the result.

There is sadism in teaching. Or rather, there is a time for plain words and honesty. There’s also a lot of bad teachers blaming their students for the bad teaching. So it was time to apologize, and then ask—since the Calvary had come over the hill—if he had read Sonnet 18, by the big S.

“Look, would you just assume that I haven’t read all this stuff,” he snapped, “because it makes me feel like a fuckin’ retard to have to say that I haven’t.”

Right. And so upset is he that he wants me to read it, not him. Is he afraid of encountering a word he doesn’t know?

So I start in:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?


Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,


And summer's lease hath all too short a date:


Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,


And often is his gold complexion dimmed,


And every fair from fair sometime declines,


By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:


But thy eternal summer shall not fade,


Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,


Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,


When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
   

   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   

   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

So we tackle it, and, the first question?

“Since when can you drop all the ‘e’s’’

“Since forever, I tell him, “though, in fact, nobody in the last hundred years or so has done it.”

“Can I?”

Time to throw a bone!

Well, if he’s going to write a sonnet, why shouldn’t he drop some ‘e’s just to give it a nice archaic effect? That done, we go line by line, until we arrive at the moment I just love:

“Motherfucker,” he breathes.

That, along with “what a Niggah!” is Montalvo’s Presidential Freedom Medal / Purple Heart / Nobel Prize (you choose) tag line. And what poet is not going to be attracted to the idea of, ‘my words, baby, are gonna blast you into eternity? Panties off!’?

So then it’s time to look and see: what has Shakespeare done? How did he use the metaphor through all fourteen lines of the sonnet? How did he extend it, morph it, tweak it? And isn’t it interesting that the poem works, paradoxically, by at once diminishing the summer day, which can be too hot, the winds too rough, the sun clouded, and anyway, it’s all too fleeting? Yet somehow Shakespeare still suggests all this and makes you feel both the wonder of the summer’s day, and that the object is even more wonderful.

A Niggah indeed.

Well, he’s just called now, since it’s raining torrentially and he’s not coming today; he’s on a motorcycle now, and doesn’t want to get the computer wet. This, I tell him, is a good plan, so we agree, he’ll stay at home, where he doesn’t want to be, instead of at the café, where he does. I go back to writing this, and then remember Joshua—the high school kid who remembered me though I didn’t remember him.

“You really helped us a lot,” he said, and went on to tell me that he’s in the university now, studying computer science, but he wants to get back involved with Poetry Out Loud, because that had been the coolest moment of his high school years. Then he looked at me, and I remembered that feeling that day: the kids had looked at me with all the trust and admiration with which my cats had looked at me, in those terrible moments when they had been asking me to help them to their death. When those moments happen, or when Montalvo breathes in that he’s understood a sonnet by Shakespeare?

That’s when I remember…

…teachers make a difference.  

Coming Soon—A Puerto Rican Sonnet!

“I’ve been reading up on sonnets, and I’ve decided I like the Shakespearean sonnet better than the Italian,” said Montalvo, who, until he had the misfortune of bumping into me, had happily whiled his time away with free verse. Here’s one example:

Magic Trick

Your memory

Can’t be forgotten…

Those eyes

Will always be

Remembered…

And my feelings

Will never

Die.

Montalvo has this thing—he thinks that any reader who sees a poem of a page and a half, with lines of ten or twelve syllables, will immediately have a mind freeze—too long, too complicated, too much work. So, his strategy? Short poems, short lines: get in, get to the point, get out.

“It sounds almost like a haiku,” said Mary Anne, a painter and professor, who had joined us for coffee, and had just heard one of Montalvo’s poems. So then it’s time to point out that even in a severely restricted form, a poem can have depth, can provoke thought. Challenged, I came up with the only example I could:

The wren


Earns his living


Noiselessly.

His response?

“What’s a wren?”

It’s both the best thing and the hardest thing of working with him—because so much of what I assume everyone will know? Well, people don’t.

“No pierda,” I tell him. We’re going over one of his poems.

“Hunh?”

“I really think you mean ‘no pierda’ instead of ‘no pierde.’”

Well, he’s unconvinced, and why shouldn’t he be? I learned Spanish, after all, in my 30’s. So he does what any kid would do: ask his buddy Carly. I wait for him to come back with the answer.

“It turns out that both are correct, but that I probably mean ‘no pierda,’” he reports.

“So what did they tell you?”

It was, I’m sorry to say, the usual half-baked explanation: better than “because it kinda sounds better,” but not by much.

“Has anybody told you about the subjunctive?”

“Sub—what?”

So we did the subjunctive: first in Spanish, then in English. That’s when he tells me the words that are daggers to the heart.  

“It’s totally cool that you’re teaching me stuff, ‘cause that’s what parents do. Nobody’s taught me anything since I was sixteen. My mom taught me how to do laundry. And now I hate doing laundry….”

16 to 21, his current age: five years.

And what have I taught him? Well, there’s the simple stuff—when to use “your” versus “you’re.” Yes, because this boy, a product of the State of Florida Department of Education? He slid through 12 years of English classes without learning what a contraction was.

Or there was the Saxon genitive—which most people simply call “apostrophes,” but if you can call it the Saxon genitive, well, why not? Right, so I stepped back in the classroom and did a little drilling:

“The house of Montalvo?”

“Montalvo’s house!”

And speaking of the Saxons, what did he say when I told him that—generally speaking—words of Anglo-Saxon origin tended to have more force than words derived from Latin?

“Marc?”

Well, then it was time to get down to some good examples:

“Defecation,” I tell him.

“Ummm, Latin?”

“Shit,” I say.

“Anglo-Saxon!”

“Intercourse,” I say.

He’s so excited, he virtually shouts out that four-letter word, and then goes off to give the news to Carly: “hey, you know where words like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ come from?”

He’s bright, you see—he catches on quickly. He’s had everything but a structure (which is why I watched, and attached, the video below). Last week he wrote a villanelle. This week, it’s a sonnet.

Who knows where this is ending up?

Anything but Bland

Well, in the clip below robbed from YouTube, there’s a little note: “comments are disabled for this video.”

‘Gee, I wonder why,’ I thought, as I imagined the comments. Half would be shrieks of vitriol, the other half would be raving panegyrics, and, in between? A void only slightly smaller that the Milky Way.

Which is how it should be, I think, and also how—someone tell me if I’m wrong, here—it increasingly isn’t. And I’m thinking this after bumping into my older Puerto Rican brother, Pablo, at the opera yesterday.

We had decided to take Montalvo to the opera, or rather to the rebroadcast of the Metropolitan’s Otello, Guiseppe Verdi’s penultimate opera. So there Pablo was: the man who had morphed over time from a landlord into a brother, who had provided more than a shoulder for me to cry on after lost auditions and the occasional marital spat. He’d been a constant source of encouragement, as well as the source of some amusement; once, during a session of extremely vocal sex coming from the second floor, Raf and I had played the last movement of the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, turning up the volume at the climax, all the better to spur them on. Pablo had loved it; his anonymous young companion fled the house.

“I’m getting tired of Renée Fleming and that damned smile,” said Pablo, last night at the opera. “She’s perfect, but she’s bland….”

I knew what he meant. I had felt it myself, but had also changed in my feelings about Fleming: after seeing an interview with her, I had been impressed with how remarkably candid she had been, how much she had paid for her career, and how she had been afflicted with extreme stage fright. And is it her fault that she had done the Herculean job of becoming technically and musically perfect, as well has polishing her image to a diamond shine? Have we all done as much? Now she has to listen to us call her bland?

Pablo’s words, however, had stuck, and in the middle of the “Willow Song,” which has the word salice—Italian for willow—I could help thinking: couldn’t she do more with it? Each time she repeated the word, it was all exactly the same—lush, ravishingly beautiful, poised. What would Callas have done?

“She ruined us all,” said Pablo, giving us a ride home, and referring to Maria Callas, the great American-born Greek soprano whom you loved or whom you hated. Did she always deliver? By no means, and when it was bad, it wasn’t bad: it was awful, terrible, wincingly embarrassing. You wanted to crawl under your seat, or out of the opera house.

But when she was good, equally, she wasn’t good, she was glorious, magnificent, stupendous—you know, all those adjectives that oddly tend not be applied to you and me. Presuming, of course, you could stomach the voice. Here is the critic Rodolfo Celletti’s assessment:

The timbre of Callas's voice, considered purely as sound, was essentially ugly: it was a thick sound, which gave the impression of dryness, of aridity. It lacked those elements which, in a singer's jargon, are described as velvet and varnish... yet I really believe that part of her appeal was precisely due to this fact. Why? Because for all its natural lack of varnish, velvet and richness, this voice could acquire such distinctive colours and timbres as to be unforgettable.

Well, my take is shorter: the voice is otherworldly. If a will-o-the-wisp could sing, it might sound like Callas. Hearing her voice, I think of the sound of geese flying overhead: it’s a sound that encapsulates the chill of autumn, the cold marsh water soaking you feet, the reeds rustling and the smell of burning leaves.

Well, it was all something to think about, and we may have to, since, Montalvo’s reaction? Well, he dozed off a bit for the first part of the opera, but it was hardly surprising, since in the time it took for Raf and me to arrange the napkins in our laps, raise the glass to toast, and glance over at Montalvo, the lad had polished off a large salad, a large mofongo and a large plate of rice and beans. So there were three empty plates—had he licked them?—and there was Montalvo, waiting with dog-at-the-table patience for me to feed him French fries. Such a repast requires a little nap.

But who cannot like Otello? It has, after all, Iago (hah! That my computer should be such a Philistine!): a man so evil you could smell the sulfur in the theater. And Montalvo, having learned that we’ve just joined the 21^st century by subscribing to Netflix, asked afterward if the service had operas.

“Think so,” I said.

“I’m gonna watch ‘em all,” he said.

Well he may, because in addition to hearing opera? He’s written a villanelle, and it’s good, though lacking the—as he called it, he was angry at the time—“motherfucking iamb thing.” So it’s occasionally-iambic pentameter; here it is:

Summoning Strength

Power comes from a need not a desire,

Protect and save yourself from certain death.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

My fists will turn into earth as hard iron

Exerting all my energy with breath.

Power comes from a need not a desire.

My feelings of love will never expire,

And until I die my soul will express.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

I will always find the need to require

Strength that is needed at moment’s request.

Power comes from a need not a desire.

Risking your life for another to aspire

Love and sacrifice— erupting through flesh.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

Why has hate and fury lead this to transpire?

Break free from the chains and let your soul dance.

Power comes from a need not a desire.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

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?

Two singers on the beach

Who knows what brought it on? 

My mood was perfectly good when I left on the morning trot. Was it the music?

Well, English folksong can be a bit melancholic. And there is something otherworldly about the singer, Alfred Deller.

Deller was born in 1912, sang as a boy soprano, and never got around to changing. Yes, his voice broke, and he no longer could naturally sing soprano. But he had a beautiful falsetto, and there was the tradition of countertenors singing in the cathedral choirs.

But Deller went on to champion early music on authentic instruments, as well as what WikiPedia calls “historically informed performance.” Michael Tippett hears him, Benjamin Britten creates the part of Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Well, it’s a haunting voice, as you can hear. But maybe it wasn’t the music, or even the voice.

The weather?

Yes, it started to rain quite hard, but I found shelter next to an abandoned tennis court near the beach. And yeah, I like rain.

Well, the English folksong disc petered out, so I turned to “An Evening with Jessye Norman.” I’m putting all of my CD’s that I never listened to when I worked at Wal-Mart into iTunes. So I’m hearing things I haven’t heard in decades.

OK, first track—Dido’s Lament.

That might be when it hit.

Remember me, but forget my fate. Six words, but oh, how Purcell milks them. And Jessye Norman isn’t afraid to step up and face an emotion or two. So there I was, thinking why on earth was I giving all of my time and energy, those last years of my mother’s life, to Wal-Mart?

Yeah, I would take 15 minutes or so twice a day to call her, yeah I made the trips every three months, yeah I told her she could live with us and she said no. 

So what was she doing, those last terrible years?

More often than not, I fear, sitting in her chair by her stove.

Alone.

Why didn’t I move to Wisconsin to be with her, I thought. What the hell was I doing those mornings on the bus, walking into work at 6:30, leaving at 5?

Ever hear of Raf, she replies. She talks to me, sometimes.

And now I’m crying and in the water and I’m saying ‘I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry’ and she says don’t be. I had to have that time to be ready to do what I did. That’s what let me stop eating and drinking. Now be quiet. You were a wonderful son and remember what I said yesterday?

Yeah, it’s a triumph. That’s what you said after the recital with Gunnar, and that’s what you said yesterday about Iguanas.

Yes, a triumph.

And what have I told you today?

Remember me but forget my fate.

Yes.

Will this mourning ever stop, I ask her. You didn’t go through this with your mother, did you.

I wasn’t as close to her as you were to me. And it’s much better now than two years ago. You know that, of course.

Of course.

Now stop it. Enough. What did I sing to you?

Remember me, but forget my fate.

And I plunge into the ocean…

…and then float.