Over the past week I've been reading a lot of poems. I just felt like I was getting a bit sick of, well, the kind of numbing, academic, descriptive sentences which I am confronted with constantly in my readings. Even a fictional novel, no matter how avant-garde, seemed insufficient. I wanted poetry - a world that I had dabbled in for a bit in middle school, and have since more or less abandoned.
For me, Poetry is, when you come down to it, the most precise and elegant form the english language can take. With nothing more than words and paper, writers can manipulate spacing, lines, even font for dramatic effect, but it really all comes down to words - everything hinges on the ability of these jumbles of letters to convey feelings that, suprisingly, large analytical paragraphs and sentances simply cannot. It is a high-wire act that must be flawless from beginning to and, where a single slip-up in word choice or placement can take away from the message.
You can read a poem once and get something out of it, but today I tried to memorize a few of my favorite works from Lawrence Ferlingetthi's 1959 work Coney Island of the Mind. It has a bit of the gritty, no-nonsense flavor of Charles Bukowski, but marries it with the beatific stylings of Allen Ginsburg.
Memorizing a poem is almost a dangerous act - by ingraining each stanza into your mind, you start to turn over each word, uncover all the possible meanings in your quest to find the "angle" that will stick the poem in your head. A line that seemed innocuous at first can, when this process becomes underway, reveal itself as rather disturbing. Nonetheless, the benefits outway (of course) some of the more psychological drawbacks. By memorizing something line by line, then stanza by stanza, and finally in its entirety, you percieve the hidden, internal relationships (whether by theme, rhyme, or some other connection) between words and phrases. If you've done it right, by the time you are done the poem has become a story, a complete and complex world unto itself. Secondly, because you have memorized the poem in the way best suited for YOU, once you deliver the poem it becomes your own - the cadences, what you stress and de-stress - it becomes a kind of Verbal Jazz in your hands where you have a set body of notes (words), but what you do with them is up to you. In about 10 or 15 minutes you have gone from suffering under a poem to becoming its master, taking it to places only you have envisioned.
I'll come back to this subject later, but here is a clip of Lawrence himself reading from a large swath of his poetry. The goodness begins at 5:30

Time travel through sound

I was not expecting this.

Last night I was watching online a truly fascinating film, "Grey Gardens" by the Maysles brothers. It is the story of two aristocratic ladies, a mother and a daughter, who have fallen into poverty, are living together in the east Hampton in a completely dilapidated old house inhabited by raccoons, and who both are some of the most singularly unique and interesting people you can ever hope to meet.

Did I mention its a documentary? As in, their singular lives will now be known, in amazing intimacy, to anyone who watches it?

Anyway, over the course of it the movie the mother, 78 year-old "Big" Edie, sings a song from her youth, "Tea for Two". Now, I've seen movies that try to convey nostalgia for a previous period - see Woody Allen's "Radio Days". But this one sequence, of her singing in an ineffably beautiful and cheerful voice along a faded record,literally took my breath away. It seems to capture the melancholy of remembrance, and of remembering the "golden" 1920s in particular amongst her class - of modernity co-opted by a culture still sentimental, still attempting to behave with decorum. One particular section, from about 2:15 to 2:28, has an orchestration that evokes a very particular image to me - a sunny day on riverside drive, the skyscrapers of mid-town in the distance, and young, well-off couples in beautiful couture promenading along the woods as delicate, brightly colored automobiles stream by. Watching her sing, I feel like I am seeing a woman from the 1920s (her daughter seems more of a 1940s gal) who is stuck in a mental time bubble, physically aging, and AWARE she is aging, but retaining all the sensibilities and conceits of her youth. To listen to the orchestration alone, follow this link to the trailer.

As a historian I should be disseminating this music, and her actions, for hard, empirical insights into life in the past, the effect of senility on memory, etc. But right now I am content just to bask in this movie and let these two individuals wash over me - and this one sequence seems to affect me in ways that are inadequate to put to pixels. I hope you get something out of it as well, and I encourage you to watch the whole movie.

Musings on Glendale Graveyard

Tired of staying at home this afternoon, I decided to take my bicycle out for a little spin through Glendale. It was freezing outside, but at first I didn't feel it - I just winded my way down Myrtle Avenue, the setting sun casting an orange hue on the shuttered businesses lining the streets. Scattered black-clad pedestrians filtered past as I slowly pedaled my way to my destination - the Cypress Hills cemetery.
Past an old catholic church and through a rickety iron gate, I saw before me an expanse of graves, covering the ground like fresh snow. Only the wind, graves, and the trees kept me company as journeyed past the rows of tombs. Looking to my right and left I could see entire streets of the dead, segregated into ethnic neighborhoods in death as they very well might have been in life - Chinese, Italian, Jewish, Irish. You don't need to be a sensitive soul to get a bit chokey as you see name after name, date of birth and date of death, each one having contained such vitality at one point, each one now inert (and in many cases, it seems, forgotten).
Finally, I wound my way up a hill to a copse of trees and laid my read bike against an elm. Before me, past the graves, past the trees, past the rickety fence, lay the skyline of Manhattan aglow with the fire of a setting sun. And here, strewn about me, were all those who had come here - to find freedom, to make a name for themselves, to discover themselves. And yet, these graves were not those of conquering heroes, but the nameless thousands who had lived and died in obscurity, and some in poverty. This contrast, between the vibrant, vertical spires of achievment and the horizontal expanses of the inert humble, is what struck me so.
For a long time cities killed more of their population than their citizens could replace: disease, malnutrition, crime, and all the others were to blame. To make up for this net loss, cities had to draw people in from the countryside, the pure, innocent townsfolk lured into the metropolitan furnace to, through their sacrifice, power the engine of modernity and progress. Today cities are rather more stable than in this period - birth rates have equaled or exceeded death rates. And yet, there is still something enormously powerful, and still relevant, in the idea that the city at once elevates and destroys, pulls up and pushes down, brings life and brings death to its citizenry. And yet, people still keep coming to the city - for only here can their dreams for a better life possibly come true. The graves surrounding me attest to how few of those dreams were ever, in the end, fully realized.
It is almost a psychological need for graveyards such as this to be relegated to the outskirts of the city. Just like the outcasts of the past, the homeless, the insane, the criminal, were banished from the center of the city into remote facilities to spare the "civilized" townsfolk knowledge of their existence, so the abodes of the nameless, humble dead must be kept out of sight, out of mind. In a metropolis so concerned with getting ahead, with the quick buck, with the hustle, the mere presence of these graves would, possibly, temper their spirits and bring them the kind of deep, profound thoughts which do not necessarily facilitate global capitalism. Ironically, the sight of the dead would make people too human.
And so the young, brilliant young things work at the office, celebrate their accomplishments, pursue their little goals and ambitions. And later, their bodies will be lowered into the ground in places like Cypress Hills Cemetery, next to people much like them from generations past. Their spirit, of course, will live on in the hearts of those that remember them. But to the distant metropolis, as vibrant as fire and yet cold as ice, it is as if they never existed.