Random Writing

That’s how it goes. (I wrote this in November 2016)

This has been a week of painful, powerful and potent losses. The election being the first, and ultimately the one which has engendered the most fear and sense of loss– for our country, for our world and for our very lives. As Garrison Keillor said, “Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out.” Where do we go from here? We live in a democracy and that means we have to take the good with the bad. This time it’s bad…very bad.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows.
That’s by Leonard Cohen who died the night of the election. He, who throughout my American life, had been quietly in the background composing and writing with such mindfulness and poetry —- without the attendant hoopla and noise common to most popular musicians.

Hard on his passing, Leon Russell left us, a classic rock musician whose songs were always on the radio or phonograph when my girls were growing up. These two along with the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel comprised the music of my young womanhood for so long.

And now Gwen Ifill, who since 1999 when she joined PBS, has been a regular visitor to our living room, bringing us the nightly news in a thoughtful and clear manner — news we could believe in and trust. Never in sound bites, but in full, well thought out reporting. She was shining role model for young women everywhere, not just young black women but all women. She helped us understand what was going on in this complex world. An interpreter of maladies — and blessings. And Oh how much she will be missed now.

As Billy Joel, Kurt Vonnegut and Linda Ellerbee used to say, “And so it goes.”
And indeed it does, and has for centuries. We too shall rise above this one – keeping the faith. Voltaire channeled by the poet Richard Wilbur in that first glorious production of Candide said
                   “And let us try, Before we die,
                   To make some sense of life.
                   We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good
                   We’ll do the best we know.
                   We’ll build our house and chop our wood
                   And make our garden grow…”

It’s time to listen to that record again.

This is how it went – eight years ago. And why we must vote this November!

 

 

In the Company of Poets                                                                 

In September of 2000, when I was in the midst of my love affair with the Spencertown Academy and all it stood for, I spent a few hours in Tivoli, New York in the company of three highly esteemed, oft-published poets; John Ashbery, Robert Kelly and the late Michael Gizzi.   None of these three men would be considered “easy reads” to lovers of poets like Billy Collins or Mary Oliver, but each of them has earned his place as an extraordinary American Twentieth Century Poet.

John Ashbery, who lived part time in Hudson, is recognized as one of our greatest modern poets. He has won nearly every major American poetry prize, including the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and a MacArthur Genius Grant. For several years he was Poet Laureate of New York State. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery’s work still proves controversial to some.  At the time I met him he was teaching at Bard College in Annandale.

Robert Kelly still teaches at Bard College. He developed a poetic style he called Deep Image that referenced the deep structure of linguistics. Like Ashbery he has published many books of poetry.

Michael Gizzi was my teacher and my friend.  He died far too young in 2010 at the age of sixty-one.  He was the author of more than ten books of poetry, some of it difficult, all of it jazzy, thoughtful and wide-ranging. He was, in one sense, a latter-day Beat poet.  When I met him in the early 1980s he had been teaching at Lenox High School and Berkshire Community College.  I was newly divorced and looking for ways to express myself and through Michael I found it, in poetry. After Michael died, William Corbett wrote in a tribute:  “Here was a man worth remembering not only for his poetry and the poets he helped but for his own worth.”        Amen to that.

How was it, you wonder, that a poetry neophyte such as I would spend time in such exalted company?   That September, Susan Davies and I had engaged Michael Gizzi and Clark Coolidge, another eminent poet, for a Sunday afternoon of innovative poetry and jazz at the Spencertown Academy.

Clark and Michael read from their work interspersed with, and sometimes accompanied by, Jazz played by Facing East a local quartet featuring Wayne Morris on drums, Ted Daniels on trumpet, Paul Trapanese on guitar and Dan Broad on double bass.  The afternoon was a resounding success and they were asked to repeat the program the following weekend at Bard College.  Susan was unable to attend, but I went along giving a ride to Wayne the drummer, a six foot four African American who rode in my Ford Escort with his knees practically under his chin – but we made it, laughing all the way.

Following that Saturday afternoon concert, Michael asked me to come for a drink at what is now Murray’s in Tivoli.  I told him that I had given Wayne a ride and he might need to get home, but Wayne agreed that it was fine for us to stop. So we did. We pulled up in front of the restaurant and walked through the door. Michael was sitting at a table in the front window with two men, one looking suspiciously like John Ashbery and the other a darkly handsome and rather fierce looking fellow who turned out to be Robert Kelly.  They were all drinking martinis; Wayne ordered a beer and I a ginger ale.

After some friendly conversation with Wayne about the concert and how well the jazz and poetry had blended, and after some compliments to me about the good things they had heard about the Spencertown Academy, the conversation turned to poetry in language and terms that I had only read about and with theories on scanning, rhythm (or no rhythm) versus open verse and well… my memory is not that good but suffice it to say that I sat there through three ginger ales, tongue-tied, awed and amazed that I could have this good fortune; telling myself that I would remember every detail of this conversation forever.  (pause)     But of course I haven’t, but I was able later to read some of John’s and Robert’s poetry and get a glimmering appreciation of what it was all about.  Michael’s books I own, cherish and attempt to fathom from time to time.

Wayne and I left when I sensed him getting restless to be home with his boys.  He has since left the area and I last heard he was drumming in New York and New Jersey. I have never forgotten that afternoon.

Later, in 2002 Susan and I were lucky to have John Ashbery give a solo reading at the Academy to a packed house. In fact we had some pretty exalted poets read at the Academy in those days – Richard Wilbur, Bernadette Mayer and many others.

I wrote a poem and dedicated it to Michael in thanks for assuring me that I could write poetry and that I should break away from the more structured forms from time to time. It’s called In Defense of One British Twentieth Century Poet.  You can find it under poetry on this website. 

September 2000

 

 

“…Speaking English anyway they like.” Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady

             I have always had a good ear for English dialects and a tendency to mimic.  Whenever our friend Roger calls from Arkansas, my husband always knows who it is because I immediately begin to talk with an Arkansas twang,  “Hi there Roger. How’re ya’all doing.”
             I suppose I come by this naturally being a child of the theatre and having had a mother who, not only acted in many-accented roles
but also taught Speech and Diction at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
When my sister Susannah and I were small I can remember being made by Mother to recite Peter Piper Picked A Peck of Pickled Pepper Corns,
and Around the Rugged Rocks the Ragged Rascal Ran and of course, How Now Brown Cow. These had to be said quickly and correctly, the emphasis was on hitting the consonants just right, making the vowels appropriately pear-shaped and as close to the (then) King’s English as possible, all the while holding an imaginary sixpence between our buttocks. At seven and three, this was a challenge for Sue and me, and we much preferred
the colorful accents of the radio comedians with their “Eeeh Bah Gum Chum” and “Ows Yer Farver.”
             Mother also taught dialects to aspiring actors and she would often sing a bawdy Music Hall song in a broad Lancashire accent “Be Ah cum from Lancashire, for I was born in Wareham, My old woman wears calico drawers and I knows ‘ow to tear ‘em.”  She also taught us Cockney rhyming slang: “Go up the apples and pears,” became “Go up the apples” meaning “go upstairs”, or “Me trouble and strife” meaning Wife, was shortened to “Me trouble.” She was good with the ways of the words was our Mother.

After Mother put us into the care of The Actors Orphanage, those language games were relegated to the times when we would visit her in Repertory Theatres around England during our holidays. It was there that Sue and I realized that we too had a knack for dialects. At Bristol Old Vic the Somerset accent of Mother’s landlady, Mrs Fry, was easy, you just turned esses into zeds when she would ask us “Zun’s out, want zum Zummerzet Zyder, dearies?” We would practice our West Country accents while Mother was in rehearsals. “There now, didn’t Oi tell ee true. Look see, sech a mayad she be, sez Oi, and meself loik, sez Oi.”   Later at Birmingham Rep, a Midland flatness would creep into our voices when we imitated local people. “e’s as deef as a po-ast is that old mun and he’s bloind as a but, in ‘E do-ant know the Pub’s clo-ased.” Mother didn’t like it. She thought we were being rude.
“It is not nice, girls, to imitate people when you talk to them,” she would remonstrate,“They might think you are making fun.”
“But Mummy,” we’d protest, “we can’t help it, it just happens.” After being reprimanded we would try to stop when she was around.

            Sue and I grew up in an England before the Telly took hold and everyone started sounding like David Frost or Elton John. During the 1940s and 50s, it was still possible for a Henry Higgins to pinpoint your county or even your village of birth. Not only were the dialects for each part of England different, the turns of phrase were too.   In Berkshire (it’s pronounced Barkshire in England) our Granny had Mrs. Warwick, a village woman, who came in to do the heavy cleaning twice a week “’Ow she’d make those brasses shine.” Mrs. Warwick was an excellent cleaning lady and also a much-relied upon source of gossip who provided Granny with all the goings-on in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell each time she came. Her stories would be punctuated with, “And there she’d be, if you take my meaning, Mrs. Whoite.”
Grandfather had a favorite saying from his many years at sea as a young man: “Mack’rel sky and mare’s tails make lofty ships and low sails.”
Gran and Granddad’s accents were also our mother’s natural way of speaking, regular middle-class, but she could vary her accents to suit her roles and she could talk very posh indeed at parties. “My Deeah! You should have seen her in the Scottish play, all Lah Di Dah – Where did she think it took place? At Buckingham Palace.”

             Coming to America has sort of modified my accent, but the tendency to imitate has never really left me. American accents are harder to mimic, although I do a fair Canadian or Southern. I tried taking American lessons when I first set out to become an actress in New York City. “At Last the Class Passed Madison Avenoo,” I would repeat over and over, succeeding only in sounding like an English person trying to be an American. I think the problem is because Americans tend to talk back in throat and we Brits talk more up in our heads. Anyway, eventually I gave up and auditioned only for Cockney Maids, upper-class debutantes and North Country sluts. Fortunately, there were many roles available.  My accent now is what you might call Mid-Atlantic, but mostly it’s still that middle class British reflecting my childhood and all  I absorbed aurally early on.

            My sister Susannah, however, took on another voice entirely. She and Mother emigrated to Canada when I was eleven. After several years in Canada (where she never picked up the “oot” habit), Sue returned to England and married a succession of men, all of whom came from rahnd Brixton wye. She too had trained for the theatre and she spent far more time under our Mother’s tongue than I, but once she settled for a London-life south of the Thames her accent changed for good. She quickly adopted a South London accent.        She wanted to fit in.   I asked her about it once and she said she knew it drove Mother rahnd the twist, but it was for her a way of merging into her new life and not standing out “lah-di-dah-like.” Now her accent, Cockney to most uneducated ears, but actually South London, is part of her. She drops her aitches, elongates her vowels and has many colorful turns of phrase: Gob-smacked being one that has, thanks to British cinema crossed the ocean. She’ll tell me on the phone she’s “Right knackered” and “Me and my mates got legless last night.” The way she talks now, our late mother would consider down-right common, but the writer in me finds it colorful.   When we talk, after a few minutes I automatically start talking like her. I can’t ‘elp it. I gets down-right common too, and I add all those blue notes that Cockneys and South Londoners insert into almost every phrase. “Abso-bloomin-lutely” from My Fair Lady being a more genteel case in point.
What disturbs me is why she doesn’t mimic me when we talk. But she doesn’t. Not now. Never has.

Thursday, May 12, 2016 rewrite.