For hard times

In Borders or Kinokuniya, it's easy to pick out the Asian books section. It's the shelf with red book jackets and covers. And while the sex-and-relationship section has a similar color scheme, it has the additional pink which, thankfully, isn't found on Asian books. The other colors that do adorn Asian books, be they fiction, non-fiction, or memoirs, are gold and the black, often seen as gold motifs or black ornate spirals.

So if books were organized by colors, then in my fantasy bookstore or personal reading room, right by a tall window with a wide window seat covered in some warm, inviting fabric, I'd like to have a shelf full of books that range from lemony yellow to egg-yolk orange to Buddhist-robe saffron. One book that is a perfect blend of orange and yellow, trimmed with deep blue, is Good Poems for Hard Times, most likely cloaked in that vibrant color to give cheer to the sluggish spirit. The color of mandarins, pumpkins, the setting (or rising, whichever you fancy) sun.

Inside, the only colors are found in the verses, which are wonderful to read, though I prefer the poems in the first anthology. The highlight of this book is the introduction by Garrison Keillor, who made the selections and who hosts the wonderful NPR program, The Writer's Almanac. It's some of the finest reading for the kind of day when you find yourself alone, disappointed, heartbroken, ill and lying on a couch, mentally tortured by people you have to pretend to be nice to, picking out potential songs for your funeral, wishing that avenging unicorns existed (well they do, in action figure form only though), or just wondering how a poem could help a person get through a difficult time.

"The meaning of poetry is to give courage. A poem is not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader are obliged to solve. It is meant to poke you, get you to buck up, pay attention, rise and shine, look alive, get a grip, get the picture, pull up your sucks, wake up and die right. Poets have many motives for writing (to be published on expensive paper, to show up the others in your M.F.A. program, to flaunt your sensitive nature and thereby impress someone who might then go to bed with you, to win valuable prizes and fellowships and maybe a year in Rome or Provence, to have a plausible excuse for making a mess of your life), but what really matters about poetry and what distinguishes poets from, say, fashion models or ad salesmen is the miracle of incantation in rendering the gravity and grace and beauty of the ordinary world and thereby lend courage to strangers. This is a necessary thing. At times life becomes almost impossible, and you curl up under a blanket in a dim room behind drawn shades and you despise your life, which seems mean and purposeless, a hoax and a cheat, your shining chances all wasted, pissed away, nobody can chance this or make this better, love is lost, hope is gone, nothing left but to pour a glass of gin and listen to weepy music. But it can help to say words. Moaning helps. So does prayer. God hears prayer and restores souls of the faithful. Walking helps. Many people have pulled themselves up out of the pit by the simple expedient of rising to their feet, leaning slightly forward, and putting one foot ahead of the other. Poems help.

America is in hard times these days, the beloved country awash to the scuppers in expensive trash, gripped by persistent jitters, politics even more divorced from reality than usual, the levers of power firmly in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicism is stunning, especially their perversion of the gospel of the Lord to blast the poor and the meek and subvert the tax system in favor of the rich, while public institutions are put in perpetual fiscal crisis, meanwhile newspapers dwindle in sad decline, journalism is lost in the whirlwind of amusement, and the hairy hand of the censor reaches out—what mustn’t be lost, in this dank time, is the passion of young people for truth and justice and liberty—the spirit that has kept the American porch light lit through dark ages of history—and when this spirit is betrayed by the timid and the greedy and the naïve, then we must depend on the poets. American poetry is the truest journalism we have. What your life can be, lived bravely and independently, you can discover in poetry.

The intensity of poetry, its imaginative fervor, its cadence, is not meant for the triumphant executive, but for people in a jam—you and me. Remember the last time you hitchhiked and stood thumb out, as the car whooshed past, waiting for the kind stranger, focusing on each pair of oncoming headlights and thinking, I am not a killer. I won’t weird you out. I am actually extremely nice. I am a student in college. I really need you to stop and give me a ride. Then your hitchhiking days were over. You graduated. You got a good job, a car, a family, a house, a church, you salted away some dough. And then trouble struck. (Sirens, klaxons, cries of alarm.) And now, damn it, you are (figuratively) right back out there on the highway, except now it’s raining. Maybe your good job went up in smoke. Perhaps your assets have been turned to succotash by a lousy investment in an old warehouse you meant to convert to fashionable shops and ethnic restaurants, which you halfway did and then it went belly up, there being too many such warehouses in your town, and an accountant in a blue-striped shirt gives you the plain bad news, and now you may lose your lovely old 1910 manse under the elms with the bay window and curved veranda on the big corner lot in Crocus Hill, and now you must scrabble your way back up the slippery slope again, but you’re older and less steady and your heart sinks at the prospect of having to grind out a living again. Perhaps you have gotten a terrible phone call from your beautiful faraway child—liver cancer? How can a kid get liver cancer? She’s 34 and lovely and exercises daily and never drank or smoked!—and now your good life is upheaved, time is stopped and the calendar canceled, and you’re off on the plane to a hospital drama in a strange city. Perhaps your brother, the one you’ve worried about for twenty years, has finally gone careening off the road at 3 a.m. and totaled his car and is still firmly in denial that his drinking must now be discussed though his wife is in torment and his children wary and confused and you must face him and be the recipient of his stupid anger. These troubles come to people all the time.—Perhaps you are foundering on work and no help is at hand. Me, too.—Perhaps you are imprisoned in a character you created for yourself who seemed smart and cheerful and virtuous and now feels like a wooden costume, heavy, clunky.—Perhaps you have been banged around by various events and are a little, how shall we say, oysgeshpilt, and need something to make sense.—Perhaps you have sat in a doctor’s office listening to his spiel about leakage in the mitral valve and congestive heart disease and suddenly realized bwannggg this is your mitral valve under discussion and you are headed for a scary ride down the canyon toward surgery. A stranger will shave your private areas and anoint you with antiseptic and slide you onto a gurney and you’ll be wheeled into a chilly room with bright overhead lights and a kind lady will begin telling you about anesthesia as one would explain darkness to a small child.

This is a book of poems that if I knew you better and if you were in a hard passage I might send you one or two of along with a note, the way people used to do, believing in the bracing effect of bold writing. Whether you stole the book, bought it used or remaindered, found it on the bus, got it from your son for Christmas, I hope it does you some good. That was the reason for putting the poems together. These poems describe a common life. It is good to know about this. I hope you take courage from it."

~ from the introduction of Good Poems for Hard Times

Posted by Monoceros at July 13, 2007 5:33 PM