|
When I returned from Kent State in October it took me a long time to collect my many thoughts. Finally I entered the following memoir of my visit on my blog, and now I think perhaps it might be appropriate to share it here:
One of my tasks in old age has been to integrate my experiences as a journalist with my sensibility as a poet. A trip to Kent State University in October 2008 brought home to me the central truth of that project: what we perceive as news is event and commentary shaken like a martini to make a questionable drug while harmony, perceptivity and nobility of soul slip under the radar. The tedious agitation that passes for news is as addictive as a video game. That this became manifest to me at Kent State is wholly an attribute of the many people I encountered there.
When Maggie Anderson called me in July of 2007 to tell me I had won the Stan and Tom Wick Prize in poetry I made her repeat herself three times. My brain would not admit the news. In retrospect it was odd because my characteristic problem is that I lack the usual filters that keep people and events from rushing me like subway trains. And yet when it came to wonderful news my few filters blocked it.
The same thing happened when I returned home October 19th after a week at Kent State University. I had conducted a 10-hour workshop in poetry and I had been honored at a formal dinner. I had read from my prize-winning book, Far From Algiers, and I had met scores of wonderful people: students, waitresses, cashiers, poets, professors, photographers, so many people. IIt had been one of the happiest experiences of my life, and yet I have been unable since then to settle my experience at Kent in my mind enough to write about it.
Now I’m trying.
I had looked forward to Kent with something like elation and dread. I have difficulty relating to more than three people at a time. I seem to handle such encounters well enough, but later my mind plays back conversations, glances and impressions in an endless loop. It’s as if there is something I lost and must go back and find, something like diving on a wreck site and running out of oxygen. Insomnia is inevitable.
It didn’t happen. My memories of Kent are uniformly pleasant and therefore untroubling. I miss the people I met. There was the poet and professor, Maj Ragain, who recited a familiar stanza to me at lunch. It took me a few seconds to recognize it as my own. No one had ever paid me such a compliment. There was Maggie, the Wick director, whose own poetry I had been reading since she called me that July. She is a portrait of gravitas and graciousness, qualities that inform her poetry. There was David Hassler, Wick outreach director, a poet whose work I have been reading and enjoying since meeting him. Each day he accompanied me to the workshop. My wife and I fondly remember the hospitality of his family, his wife Lynn and Simon and Ella, their children.
And there were the students whom I miss and think of often: Diana Wayand, James DeMonte, Natasha Rodriguez, who introduced me to the work of several wonderful poets, Derrick Medina, Brianna Ries, Laurin Wolfe, who perceptively interviewed me, and Shayna Glenn. Each of them gave me more than I gave them, and I think often of their distinctive talents.
Chris Wick, whose family has so generously endowed the Wick Center over the years, attended most of my workshop and offered often startling insights into his life as a poet of wood craftsmanship. I remember his candor and energy fondly. And there was the reserved and thoughtful Walt Wick with whom I shared reminiscences and ideas as fellow journalists.
Toi Derricotte, the judge who chose Far From Algiers for the Wick Prize, read and introduced me. It was a reunion for us, because we had met earlier in the year in New York where I had the pleasure of hearing her read at The New School. Her dynamism and joyousness permeate the space around her. Reading her work made me understand how my own work might have resonated with her. We both understand being outside looking in.
Maj Ragain introduced my wife to the ley lines of Kent, Ohio, a concept she and I have long been intrigued by. His generosity in so doing was emblematic of the generosity we everywhere encountered at Kent State University. I'm thinking particularly of Maggie's administrative assistant, Marti Loughney, who dashed out of her office to assist my wife when our car's battery gave out.
My meeting with Will Underwood, an artist who directs Kent State's press, Mary Young, the press's remarkably considerate editor, and Brett Neff, who with Susan Cash markets my book, was everything an author might dream about but rarely experience: the very picture of cordiality, fellowship and respect. There were so many pleasant encounters. One might have thought eastern Ohio populated with an extraordinary concentration of the world's decencies, and so I choose to believe.
Nothing was difficult for this old man who travels poorly—except leaving. Our farewell lunch, full of joy and jocularity, nonetheless left me with the sorrow of knowing I was leaving people I had come to like so well.
None of this can be happenstance, and I thought of that at dinner, chatting with Walt Wick. The Wick Center had been endowed not merely with money but with a grace and indeed a loveliness that has informed it over time, attracting the right people to administer, to judge, and to win, but the winning isn't so much the prize as it is the experience of meeting such people.
E-mail: dmmarbrook@earthlink.net
David Hassler, Djelloul, Toi Derricotte and Maggie Anderson.
Recent activities
I’ve spent the winter revising and editing several book-length poetry manuscripts and a trilogy of novels that I’ve been working on since the early 1990s. I find writing, revising and editing rewarding, but the task of organizing poems into thematic manuscripts daunts me. In a crazy way I regard it as an imprisonment of the poems, a miscarriage of justice.
As for the novels, they’ve encouraged the investigative reporter in me and I’ve often become lost in the investigations, preferring them to finishing the story. I’ve become knowledgable about Arab mathematics, the Arab, Jewish and African poets of medieval Al Andalus, Arab seafaring, alchemy and marine archaeology. I’ve savored what I see as a profound connection between poetry and mathematics, something the Andalusian poets understood. Some of them were mathematicians.
When the Wick Prize came to me I had been fondling the idea of the Chinese hermit poets who never cared about publishing their work. This was also true of the Sufi poets, and indeed of C.P. Cafavy, the Alexandrian Greek modernist, who had a room in his apartment where he cobbled together little collections of his poems for friends but never sought publication. We owe it to Rae Dalven, his original English language translator, and W.H. Auden, his admirer, that Cavafy is known and appreciated today. I was drawn to this notion because I regard my poems as
algorithms by which I try to come to terms with the conundrums I encounter. They could also be called prayers, which are spiritual algorithms. Arab mathematics brought me to this view. The Arabs never distinguished between chemistry and alchemy, for example. Their word for chemistry, al Khemya, is our word for alchemy. Similarly, in mathematics they sought to understand a divine modus operandi. I was never any good at math in school, but I love the history of math, and I have a hunch many students who find it difficult might be brought into its charmed circle by an understanding of its history. I feel this way about poetry, too. It’s a way of understanding and pushing the envelope of human sensibility.
So, in short, I’ve spent my time since coming to Wick Center last October writing, editing, revising, shoveling snow, planting a few bulbs, and endlessly walking the streets of Manhattan, scribbling notes, ducking under awnings when it rains, and watching people wittingly and unwittingly energizing each other.
|