Joseph Bathanti: A (Quick) Appreciation

           I recently attended the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Library’s On the Same Poem luncheon.  Each year the library chooses a poem for the community to read, has teachers lead conversations about it, and brings the poet to town for a reading and Q and A.  Past writers have included Rita Dove, Fred Chappell, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Tony Hoagland, and Kwame Dawes.  This year, for the tenth anniversary of the event, the chosen poem was “Entering an Abandoned House,” by North Carolina’s poet laureate, Joseph Bathanti.
           I’ve long been an admirer of Bathanti’s, and I often quote him, particularly an answer he once gave at a reading when asked what he thought about “so many bad poets” who were writing:  A bad poet never hurts anybody.  Corporate crooks steal millions. Bad doctors kill people.  Bad lawyers and bad politicians ruin lives.  A bad poet eventually realizes he’s bad, and, if he doesn’t, who is he hurting?”

I had the honor of introducing Bathanti at “On the Same Poem,” and I thought I would post a draft of my comments.

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I’m jealous of the students here today, jealous that you’re discovering Joseph Bathanti’s work when you’re young, and in doing so, you’re discovering something else, something important.

            I was almost forty when I published my first book of poetry, and it confused my mother.  For one, the poems didn’t rhyme.  But, on a more fundamental level, she recognized some of the people, places, and events.  I was writing about things she knew, but how could that be?  How could our lives be poetry?

            It took me a long time to figure that out.  I grew up in a factory town where in school we learned about Shakespeare and Keats.  They were wonderful, but they seemed to have nothing to do with us.  Even those we had an easier time understanding, like Langston Hughes, were still “historical.”  Outside of school, there was no poetry.

In other words, I didn’t know poets like Joseph Bathanti existed.  I didn’t know about books like Anson County, Land of Amnesia, and This Metal.  I didn’t know that you could write about what he writes about.

Joseph Bathanti writes about abandoned houses (and exploring them), baseball, bars, bathrooms, single mothers, proms, weddings, factories, the tangled relationships between parents and children, the town and county and state where people live.  In doing so, he writes about desires and ambitions and brokenness and how much we long to connect and how much we misunderstand.

He writes about our lives.  And, with empathy and compassion, with a wonderful eye and ear, he shows us that our lives are poetry.

It’s a gift.  It’s a gift he has, and it’s a gift he gives us.

And the importance of his work has been recognized, he has received numerous prestigious awards, fellowships, and prizes.  You can look them up and see, but I’m particularly glad that his work is being recognized here.  In a library.  In a project dedicated to the relationship between poetry and community, poetry and our lives.

My jealousy at the students discovering him when they’re young is dwarfed by my appreciation of his work and by the privilege in being the one to introduce him.

Ladies and Gentleman, our state’s poet laureate, Joseph Bathanti.

A Few Links to Bathanti’s biography and work

http://www.press53.com/BioJosephBathanti.html

http://www.ncarts.org/freeform_scrn_template.cfm?ffscrn_id=603

Our Other National Anthem: YMCA

            We’re at our town’s minor league baseball team’s season opener, and the Jumbotron begins to play YMCA.  People around us get up, and my seven year old son is confused.  He knows what the Y is; he goes there to swim and play basketball.  But, he doesn’t understand this Pavlovian reaction to the song and the way people are twisting themselves into shapes that are similar to, but not quite, dancing.

            “Why are they doing this?” he asks.

            It’s a question that I’ve had myself.

I was in college before I encountered people who were openly, comfortably, playfully gay.  Not coincidentally, that’s when I learned about the concept of camp and I realized the Village People, who I had loved since I was young, were gay and were mocking stereotypical American masculinity.  It startled me, and it was one of those realizations where you feel stupid afterwards because it’s so obvious.

What’s odd is how over the years YMCA has gone from being a popular song to being an iconic one.  It’s an American folk song.  It’s played at ballparks, arenas, weddings, schools, parties.  People with strong “family values,” who believe America will crumble into the sea without the Defense of Marriage Act, will stand, shape themselves into enormous letters, and sing about how there’s a place for young men to go and be with other men and have fun and do what they want they feel.   Such people might angrily point out that the C stands for Christian, and that claiming the song was originally a gay anthem disparages a wholesome charity social organization.   Perhaps they don’t know it appeared on the album, “Cruising,” (along with the other hit, “Hot Cop”).  Perhaps like the younger me, they simply haven’t thought about it.

            There are plenty of cases of music getting mainstreamed, sanitized, and made acceptable.  The popularity of “YMCA” isn’t any odder than ice cream trucks playing Ragtime melodies and tunes that used to be considered the devil’s music.   In the 1920s, people feared that hearing ragtime and jazz was going to provoke you to jump into someone’s car, go somewhere, smoke reefer, and get busy.  Now it’s a pied piper tune for children.  Or what about those cheery kid’s songs like Ring Around the Rosy which is about the plaque or London Bridge Is Falling Down?  Or there was the McDonald’s ad campaign years ago -- Mac Tonight -- which reworked Weill and Brecht’s “Mac the Knife” from Three Penny Opera, a song about a serial killer, into a jingle about dinner.

I answer my son’s question.  “People are doing this because it’s fun.”  He looks around and says, “It looks like when we got here.”  I know what he means.  We had arrived at the playing of the national anthem, and he had wondered why everyone was standing up together.  It occurs to me that the two songs you’re guaranteed to hear at sporting event in the U.S. are The National Anthem and YMCA.  And one of these is joyful, inclusive, makes you want to move, and suggests the messy ironic complexity of what it means to be an American.

Reckoning

The taxes become more and more

difficult to do, a result, perhaps,

of my life becoming more full,

more rich, although frankly

it feels more as if I’m being

wrapped up, thread by thread,

form by form, like Gulliver,

or a fly about to be eaten.

No.

            That’s not right.

Let’s be somewhat honest today.

I’m neither hero nor victim.

I wasn’t forced to wed, have kids,

buy a house. But, I must give

an accounting of my actions,

and this, I suspect, is the source

of our resentment each spring,

how we must provide a reckoning,

even as we understand the numbers

don’t explain what we’ve done or why,

and no matter what the tally says

it’s far too soon to know just what

it is we may have gained or lost.

A Flash View with Steve Mitchell

Steve Mitchell has been many things, including the author of The Naming of Ghosts and the organizer of the interview series The Writing Life.

And then what happened?
The car pulled away, sliding into traffic and away. It was summer and the sun was high and at some point the glass looked like hot gold, blotting the interior as the car disappeared from view. I stood at the curb. I remember waves of traffic flowing by me and the faint scent of something summery, perhaps magnolia.

What do you think about it now?
I think we were young. But usually, I don’t think. The memory simply arises, with an exhilarating sadness. That sense you can have of your life changing at a turn, with the excitement and the unknowing.

Describe a dream
I’d swallowed a raw egg whole. I could feel it in my throat, feel the lump behind my ribs. I could see the egg in my chest as if studying an X-ray. I wondered if I’d stop breathing, or if my esophagus would crush the egg in a slow fist, the way they say a snake does.

Then I was inside the egg too. Because in a dream you can be two places at once, both inside and outside. The shell was close and comforting at first but it grew tighter and tighter. I began to peck at the shell of the egg, tiny pecks at first then, sensing cracks, hard and more insistent.

I could see the body of a bird, me, closed within the shell, immobile in the throat. I worried that even if I escaped the shell I’d be captured by the mouth. Then I woke up.

What question shouldn’t you have asked?
“Why?” You should never ask why. Every answer to “Why?” is a lie.

What question couldn’t you answer?
See above. Also, “What does it mean?” Good Lord, if I knew what it meant, I’d never have to do it. Meaning is always three steps beyond me. Every time I think I’ve caught up, it’s turned the corner a block ahead.

It seems some folks live in a world where meanings are lined like boxed sets of books on their shelves, color-coded and pretty, with an accent lamp. Most of the time I can’t find a meaning when I’m looking for it. It’s only later I discover it, pushed under the bed or wadded at the back of the sock drawer.

Name it!

The Denial of Comfort

You can read more about Steve Mitchell and his work at: www.thisisstevemitchell.com

I’ve Been Meaning To Write This For a While

            In the middle of the night, I went to the bathroom, and, afterwards, when I pushed the toilet handle, nothing happened.  I took off the tank lid, expecting to see a broken chain, and discovered there was no water.  I checked the faucet of the intake pipe; it was open.  I checked the bathtub and sink taps; water flowed from these, just not to the toilet.  It was a mystery.  I shrugged, used a wastebasket to flush, and went back to bed.

            In the morning, I put “Call Plumber” on my To-Do list.  For weeks I meant to make the call, but I didn’t get around to it.  I told myself it was because I had so much work to do (even though I know the call would only take a few minutes), but I knew the truth.

            I am a procrastinator.

            I always have been, and I suspect I always will be.

            I pay a financial price for it.  I put off getting the car inspected, and received a warning.  I put off the inspection, and received a fine.  I didn’t pay the fine, and the letters started to come.  Finally, to prevent the car being towed, I had to pay hundreds of dollars for what should have been a thirty dollar obligation.

            I pay a professional price.  I miss submission deadlines.  I have manuscripts that I have finished and not sent out.  I have half-drafted pieces that I need to complete.  I have ideas that I haven’t started writing at all.

            I pay a social price.  I have friendships that are deteriorating because I’ve been meaning for months, even years, to write a long letter or email.  I’ll be invited to parties or events, but not get around to responding until it’s too late.

            My family pays a price as well.  It can take months for me to fix a bike chain, a skateboard, a burnt-out light bulb, or, say, a toilet.

            And yet there also are advantages.  I’m not asked to do certain tasks because I have a reputation for being unreliable.  Other ones end up not needing to be done all.  Anyone who has returned from vacation and worked through backed-up emails knows this.  Respond to one immediately and later in the queue there will be another that says to ignore the earlier message.  Sometimes when we quickly address a problem without fully understanding it, we make it worse.  If we put it off, we find we have a better sense of possible solutions.  “Sleep on it,” the procrastinator’s slogan, can be excellent advice.

            In fact, I suspect procrastination may be the way a psyche provides balance.  The primal urges and hungers drive a person to action; the procrastination mechanism, whatever it may be, says, “Wait a minute.  Slow down.  What’s the rush?”

Fundamentally, procrastinators are optimists.  We believe that we have time, that there will be a tomorrow.  Rather than being driven by the fear, panic, and urgency of “live each day as if it’s your last,” we wander through our days with the belief that there will be more…more days…more time.  We’re wrong, of course.  There will be a final day, but when it comes, I’m not sure that we’ll feel better about it because we mowed the lawn that morning.

I never did get the toilet fixed.   Weeks later, I absent-mindedly used it again in the middle of the night.  And I absent-mindedly tried to flush . . . and it did.  At some point, the water had returned.  The tank was full.  Even in my sleepy state, I was stunned by this minor miracle.  The next morning I crossed “Call Plumber” off my list and felt a sense of accomplishment.

Driving Into Ideas

          I have posted before about getting ideas on the couch or in bed.  It turns out that this is typical.  In a Business Link survey of UK entrepreneurs 49 percent said they got ideas in bed, and Time magazine did an entire cover story last year on the phenomenon.

            Many writers not only get ideas, but actually work in bed, including Jack London, Walker Percy, Edith Wharton, Colette, Proust, and James Joyce (and Groucho Marx published a book titled Beds).  Then there is this explanatory passage about the creative process from Freddy and the Ignormus by Walter R. Brooks.

            If you are going to write poetry, you need two things.  You need quiet and you need coolness.  You can’t have a lot of people talking to you, and you can’t be all hot and sticky.  Of course you also need paper and pencil. So Freddy always took these along, and he would lie on the bank and write a little, and then think a long time, and then write a little more. Sometimes he would do so much thinking and so little writing that Theodore thought he was asleep. But Freddy said no, he was just thinking very hard.

            “But you don’t snore when you’re thinking,” said Theodore.

            “Sometimes I do,” said Freddy.  “Sometimes I do.  When I’m thinking extremely hard, I snore like anything.”

            In addition to dozing, there are two other times that ideas consistently come to me:  driving and walking.  (I’ll talk about the second in a later, hopefully longer, post.)

            For me, driving, especially on the Interstate, puts me in a meditative state.  It triggers lines from poems, memories, faces of friends, and that, in turn, triggers ideas.  For example, several summers ago, as I was driving home from an out-of-town conference, I found myself remembering the ending of John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidden Mourning.”  Other lines from his work then came to mind, such as “someone who has deeper dugged love’s mines than I/tell me where his happiness doth lie.”   And the opening of “The Sun Rising”:  “Busy old fool, unruly Sun,/Why dost thou thus/Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ? /Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?/Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide/Late school-boys and sour prentices.”  I’ve always loved the phrase “saucy pedantic wretch” since I first read it as an undergraduate decades ago.  As I said these lines to myself, over and over, I started to shape a poem in response.  Sixty miles later, or roughly an hour, I had a draft.

I understand the criticism of the Interstate system; it has played a part in the destruction of so many wonderful things from downtowns to local accents.  And, yet, I confess, I almost always feel a thrill as I accelerate onto an entrance ramp, and I almost always have ideas when I come off the exit.