January 17, 2019 In Memoriam Passing Mary Oliver at Dawn By Summer Brennan Mary Oliver (Photo © Mariana Cook/Penguin Press) I don’t know what to say about Mary Oliver’s death except that she was a great and beloved poet, and also my teacher and academic adviser, and that she was kind to me. She was absurdly generous. I first met her as if inside one of her poems: in a field of tall September grass, under a big bowl of stars just before dawn. It was my first week of college, and I hadn’t been able to sleep with excitement. I had thrown a Fair Isle sweater on over my flannel pajamas, slipped some hiking boots over fleece socks, and run out into the sleeping world. I was entering the field, by the reeds of the nearby pond, when I heard her coming along the path, a small, unknown figure walking with two dogs. Unassuming yet unmistakable. Perhaps I should not say that we “met” there, since we didn’t speak. We merely nodded as if it were normal to be up at that hour, passing in the dark. When I later introduced myself properly, I’d like to think that she remembered me as the girl from the field. Perhaps she did. As she wrote in her essay “Wordsworth’s Mountain”: But dawn—dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me. As a teacher, Mary had almost no ego at all. In an act of generosity that I only now, as a “published writer,” can fully appreciate, she would bring into class her own failed poems—efforts at expressing some experience or sense or truth that would remain private and not be sent out into the world. She would talk about why they did not work. She was matter of fact about her failure. I remember one such poem she brought in, which she had called “The Pony Express.” Something about riders adrift in the landscape. She explained how she had tried but failed to express a vastness, and a loneliness, that were not coming through. Later, it would seem, she did rework this poem and publish it in her book Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010), under the title “The Riders.” It ends: Read More
August 20, 2018 In Memoriam Tom Clark (1941–2018) By Larry Bensky Baseball card of Tom Clark (© 1990 Little Sun). For decades, as his health declined, Tom Clark lived on a busy street in Berkeley in a house with many steep stairs. Crossing, haltingly, one of those streets, he was struck by a car and killed on August 17. One of the last times I saw him, he made fun of himself for his frailty, for the way he had to pause while walking in the neighborhood, and pause even more when he tried to get to his front door. But though he could have, he refused to move. His surroundings—mainly an enormous trove of books, magazines, newspapers, and his own voluminous works and manuscripts—would have been too hard, and time-consuming, to go through alone. And aside from his wife Angelica, he trusted no one to help. I asked Tom if he would be interested in being interviewed. We both knew we didn’t have forever to think about it (I’m eighty-one; he was seventy-seven). My pitch was: “You’re probably the least known person in this country to have written, and published, over forty books. There’s a great diversity in subject and mode in what you’ve written. And you keep up obsessively with the literary and political world around you. Got to be some wisdom to communicate, no?” Tom was polite but obviously totally uninterested. He listened to me and, without responding, said he had to go lie down. Some time later, when he hadn’t returned, Angelica—whom I’d known since their first days together in Bolinas in the late sixties—came and told me he was asleep, and there was no telling when he’d get up. Read More
August 17, 2018 In Memoriam Lady Soul By Brian Cullman In the end, we’re left with the music: those luminous gospel recordings she made as a young teenager, still under her father’s wing; the halting, if promising, cocktail-blues recordings from the early sixties; those earth-shaking singles and albums she recorded for Atlantic between 1967 and 1973, when the world seemed to spin on her axis. The forays into disco and standards, the comebacks and movie cameos she wandered through in the last forty years, some off-kilter, some wonderful, were all completely beside the point. You get to part the Red Sea only once. Everything after is just … after. When she finally broke through, in 1967, she was a powerhouse and seemed unstoppable. She made salvation sexy and sexuality holy; she made the radio a bigger, wilder, more inclusive place, and she made the whole world dance to her radio. And it wasn’t just her voice. Her keyboard playing was formidable, and the piano intros to “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)” and “Don’t Play That Song” take the history of popular music and shake it by the scruff of the neck before turning it loose. As a musician friend told me the morning her death was announced, “Her playing is thirty percent jazz, fifty percent gospel, and seventy-five percent just plain Aretha. And if those numbers don’t add up, that’s just the way it goes. Aretha was bigger than math.” Read More
August 16, 2018 In Memoriam Pray Like Aretha Franklin By Michael Robbins I remember the songs that taught me the human voice is the most powerful instrument on earth. Some are immortal—Billie Holiday’s “I Must Have That Man,” Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” Prince’s “Sometimes It Snows in April.” Some, like a-ha’s “Take On Me” and Steve Perry’s “Oh Sherrie,” had an outsize effect on me because they dominated the radio at the right time. Aretha Franklin’s “Baby, Baby, Baby” hit me when I was a teenager. I’d bought I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You on CD because of “Respect.” I knew Aretha only from the hits that circulated on the oldies station—“Natural Woman,” “Chain of Fools,” “Think,” “Dr. Feelgood.” Great songs, but they hadn’t prepared me for this. Nothing could prepare you for “Baby, Baby, Baby.” She starts singing a little off mic, building volume with each “baby,” somehow sounding playful and utterly devastated at once. On the second verse, she blurs the syllables of “Baby, baby, baby,” slurring a little, sultry and sad, barely landing on the consonants. Then she cries out, “I’m bewildered, I’m lonely, and I’m loveless,” and you believe her even though you know you can’t believe a pop song. Later, as if frustrated by the failure of propositional statement to capture the enormity of her emotion, she strings it out: “Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby,” the first three barely recognizable as words. She sounds absolutely bewildered, lonely, loveless. Lester Bangs wrote of Van Morrison that he was obsessed with how far he could “spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch.” Aretha Franklin taught me what this meant years before I heard “Madame George.” Later, I would admire her almost as much for her militancy as for her voice—she offered to post Angela Davis’s bail in 1976. “Angela Davis must go free,” she said. “Black people will be free. I’ve been locked up, and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace.” May she finally discover the peace that eludes us all, the peace she disturbed in all the right ways. Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex, as well as a collection of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. His poem “Past One O’Clock” appears in the Summer issue.
June 26, 2018 In Memoriam Donald Hall, 1928–2018 By The Paris Review Donald Hall, who served as The Paris Review’s first poetry editor, died Saturday at the age of eighty-nine. Hall had an enormous influence on American poetry. A prolific writer, he published more than fifty books, from poetry and drama to biography and memoirs, and edited numerous anthologies, including the influential New Poets of England and America (1957; coedited with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson). His biggest renown was for his poetry, where he explored mortality, baseball, and the distant past, and returned, again and again, to the subject of the death of his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. Although Hall went on to have other lovers, including his longtime companion Linda Kunhardt, he arranged to be buried next to Jane, beneath a headstone inscribed with lines from one of her poems: “I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART, BUT WHAT PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU BESIDE ME?” Hall served as poet laureate of the United States in 2006, and had, in his house in New Hampshire, a framed photo of himself standing between the Obamas. But before all that, he was an editor—first at Harvard’s literary magazine and then at The Paris Review. In this magazine, he published some of the earliest work of Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Louise Simpson, and James Wright. “I was trying to define a generation,” Hall once said about his early days as an editor. “I think it worked very well.” There are few great poets with whom Hall was not in regular correspondence. “My letters are my society,” he said in his Writers at Work interview. “I carry on a dense correspondence with poets of my generation and younger. Letters are my café, my club, my city.” In an essay for the Library of Congress, Hall wrote, “Way back we didn’t call ourselves poets, because it would have been pretentious. Poets were rare, and poets were great or they were nothing.” Although he often mourned the state of contemporary poetry, of technology and the proliferation of words, Hall measured himself and the poetry he loved against the greats. “The desire must be,” he said, “not to write another dozen poems, but to write something as good as the poems that originally brought you to love the art. It’s the only sensible reason for writing poems. You’ve got to keep your eye on what you care about: to write a poem that stands up with Walt Whitman or Andrew Marvell.” And Hall built poems that would last, poems for posterity, poems that could not be washed away. From his poem “Exile,” which appeared in the first issue of The Paris Review: Each of us waking to the window’s light Has found the curtains changed, our pictures gone; Our furniture has vanished in the night And left us to an unfamiliar dawn, Even the contours of our room are strange And everything is change. Waking, our minds construct of memory What figure stretched beside us, or what voice Shouted to call us from our luxury— And all the mornings leaning to our choice. To put away – both child and murderer – The toys we played with just a month ago, That wisdom come, and make our moving sure, Began our exile with our lust to grow. (Remembering a train I tore apart, Because it knew my heart.) We move and move, but only love the lost, Perversity our master to the bone; We search our minds for childhood, and are tossed By fevers to rebuild a child unknown.
June 25, 2018 In Memoriam Donald Hall, Foremost God in the Harvard College Pantheon By Louis Begley Donald Hall in Scytheville, New Hampshire. Photo: Henri Cole. Don Hall is dead after a brief struggle with a horrid and untreatable cancer. It was impossible not to wish for his prompt release from this misery. All the same, I can’t really believe that he is gone, that the letters we exchanged once, sometimes twice a week will never again be written, that I will never again be astonished by his flashes of humor, his unending devotion to his writer’s craft, his delight in simple pleasures. Never again the outings with his wonderful companion Linda Kunhardt to the Italian restaurant where he especially liked the strong-flavored food and into which she could, in his telling, maneuver his wheelchair without difficulty. He liked to eat until the very end, not only whatever pasta that restaurant served but also onion sandwiches he fixed himself, a delicacy the mere mention of which made me cringe. A pâté de campagne that he ate at the Lipp, in Paris, about twenty years ago, with my wife and Linda and I, was present in his memory and in his letters. All of this is gone. But Gus (his dog), the blue chair, the Glenwood stove, the changing moods of Eagle Pond and Mount Kearsarge, and the rest of the Donald Hall iconography live on, in memory and in his verse. Read More