Tag Archives: The New Yorker

“Blackbird” by C.K. Williams

27 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Fall

There was nothing I could have done—
a flurry of blackbirds burst
from the weeds at the edge of a field
and one veered out into my wheel
and went under. I had a moment
to hope he’d emerge as sometimes
they will from beneath the back
of the car and fly off,
but I saw him behind on the roadbed,
the shadowless sail of a wing
lifted vainly from the clumsy
bundle of matter he’d become.

There was nothing I could have done,
though perhaps I was distracted:
I’d been listening to news of the war,
hearing that what we’d suspected
were lies had proved to be lies,
that many were dying for those lies,
but as usual now, it wouldn’t matter.
I’d been thinking of Lincoln’s
“…You can’t fool all of the people
all of the time…,” how I once
took comfort from the hope and trust
it implied, but no longer.

I had to slow down now,
a tractor hauling a load of hay
was approaching on the narrow lane.
The farmer and I gave way and waved:
the high-piled bales swayed
menacingly over my head but held.
Out in the harvested fields,
already disliked and raw,
more blackbirds, uncountable
clouds of them, rose, held
for an instant, then broke,
scattered as though by a gale.

__________

“Blackbird” by C.K. Williams, which you’ll find in his collection Wait.

Williams, who for three decades taught at Princeton, passed away last Sunday. His poems are sometimes challenging, always ambitious, and unusually sincere as they traverse public and private life. I think “Blackbird” is a good example of this ability, as well as of Williams’s knack for speaking with emotion and cunning intelligence in the same breath.

For many years, his poems and critical essays were included in The New Yorker. Most are worth a read, though the opening line of his tribute to his friend the poet Galway Kinnell resonates today:

About the death of any friend one feels sadness; with some, though, that sadness is tempered by gratitude, by a feeling of privilege to have been able to live in the world at the same time as the one who’s gone.

“Blackbird” is basically a mash up of Larkin’s “The Mower,” Bly’s “Awakening,” and “On Being Asked to Write a Poem against the War in Vietnam” by Hayden Carruth. If you want to stick with Williams, his “Repression” is a good place to start.

The photo: snapped outside Charlottesville, Virginia.

C. K. Williams

The Writer’s Drug of Choice

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Interview, Literature, Writing

≈ Comments Off on The Writer’s Drug of Choice

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ernest Hemingway

Interviewer: John, you’ve been an editor for a very long time, and I imagine that you’ve worked with writers who have used various drugs to stimulate their writing.

John Bennet, New Yorker editor: Mostly caffeine and tobacco, and drugs of that nature. And simple hysteria.

I think it’s pretty hard to really write a complicated piece of writing if you’re hallucinating. That’s not to say that many of these writers haven’t done that in the past. But when they’re actually producing, they rely on caffeine, which is of course a drug.

Most writers I know write better than they’re able to write. That’s to say if it’s a good writer, he or she can write a great piece. But they do it by dent of great personal sacrifice. They tend to adrenalize themselves, whether it’s with caffeine or with just simple hysteria or panic, into this highly agitated state, whereby they are able to produce writing of the quality that they want to produce — that otherwise they feel they can’t produce.

And in general I must say it’s a rather destructive process to watch, when you work with writers who essentially have nervous breakdowns every time they have to write a piece. Which means it’s really a damnable profession, writing, because most people who are writers tend to be miserable — at least when they’re writing.

__________

Bennet, exchanging words with Sasha Weiss, story editor for the New York Times Magazine, in his joint interview with Oliver Sacks for The New Yorker Out Loud (Bennet’s remarks start at around 19:30 in the audio above).

You’ll find Sacks’s longer takes on this stuff in his highly acclaimed new memoir On the Move, which I plan to pick up in the coming weeks.

Read on:

“1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Comments Off on “1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Irish Coast

How long do we wait for love?
Long ago, we rowed on a pond.
Our oars left the moon broken—
our gestures ruining the surface.
Our parents wanted us to marry.
Beyond the roses where we lay,
men who loved men grew wounds.
When do we start to forget our age?
Your husband and I look the same.
All day, your mother confuses us
as her dementia grows stronger.
Your boys yell: Red Rover!
We whisper your sister’s name
like librarians; at last on the list,
her heart clapping in her rib cage,
having stopped now six times,
the pumps opened by balloons,
we await her new heart cut
out from the chest of a stranger.
Your old house settles in its bones,
pleased by how we are arranged.
Our shadow grows like an obituary.
One of us says: “It is getting so dark.”
Your children end their game.
Trees stiffen into scrapbooks.
The sky’s shelves fill with stars.

__________

“1 Corinthians 13” by Spencer Reece.

I can’t understand Spencer Reece. His CV: Born in Hartford, Connecticut; Master of Theology, Harvard; Master of Divinity, Yale; Missionary to the Nuestras Pequenas Rosas orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Missionary to the homeless and ordained priest of the Episcopal Church in Madrid, Spain; Manager of a Brooks Brothers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It’s that last bit which is, as Gore Vidal would say, the joker in the deck. French cuffs and Windsor knots hardy pair with homeless shelters and Honduran slums. But then again, rarely does religious poetry move with such a frantic, almost manic, energy, so perhaps Reece is capable of registering and giving voice to an usually wide spectrum of human experience. I once wrote, in a stroke of mild hyperbole, that Mark Jarman (a reader of this blog and my favorite living religious poet) wrote like T.S. Eliot in a fever dream. There is certainly something feverish to “1 Corinthians 13” as well, though Reece seems to be less in a reverie and more in a careful though entranced plod through the wilderness of memory.

When I first found it, I was so moved by this poem that I reread it about six times and immediately ordered the containing collection, Reece’s The Road to Emmaus. I think this poem is the strongest in the book, though Emmaus also contains “The Clerk’s Tale”, a poem so intricate and strangely stirring that The New Yorker, in an unprecedented editorial move, devoted a full back page to it. Oh yeah, and, coincidentally, it’s about a guy who works at a men’s clothier at the Mall of America in Minnesota. I suggest you give it a slow and careful read.

By the way, in the 13th chapter of his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul says, among other things:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing…

Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.

I took the above picture in Ireland.