The Raspberry Patch will continue rolling out The Age of Spectacle manuscript next Friday with the first part of Chapter 3. The main reason for the break in the schedule is that the chapter is too much of a mess for me to have fixed it in the time I had available. I thought Chapter 2 needed work, and it did; but Chapter 3 needs even more. Not only isn’t it ready for Broadway, it’s not even ready for way off-Broadway: neither Bayonne, nor Cucamonga, nor Ypsilanti even. By next Friday, June 7, it will be.
Besides, tomorrow is my birthday—73 years completed—and I simply wasn’t in the mood on a beautiful day to bust a nut agonizing over getting Chapter 3 quickly into shape. I find that lacking a day-job erodes enough of my self-discipline generally that summoning the extra energy for doing the difficult is harder than it used to be.
The good news is that we have harvested not only our first blueberries of the spring, but also the first raspberries—important, I think, for a Substack named The Raspberry Patch. Not many yet but they’re delicious, and it’s still very early in the season. Tons of berries are moving toward ripeness and the bees from our hive are all over the new flowers, as well. It is as Max Griswold reportedly said: “Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts.”
Poetry is another of the arts. Most writers, true writers, try their hand at it sooner or later. Only a very few of my poems have ever been published, but I’ve not tried hard or frequently. Poetry is luxury writing for me, something I do only when the muse strikes, which isn’t often. I never try to force a poem so that I don’t enjoy the process; I learned long ago that it just doesn’t work, for me at least.
I did submit the poem below to Salmagundi some years ago, along with two others. The editor liked all three but declined to accept them for publication because, he said, they neither compelled the reader nor felt as though the author—me—was compelled to write them. That was true, but why, I asked, did a poem have to be “compelling”? If the purpose of art is to evoke emotion for purposes of elevating the spirit, and enabling intersubjective appreciation of same, then why can’t a poem simply be beautiful, calming, or patiently suggestive of higher visions?
The answer may be found, possibly, by reviewing the contemporary taste in highbrow academic poetry. Very little of it is calming, or beautiful. Much of it is angry, political, strident, and choppily terse to the point of making even Hemingway blush—if he ever blushed. Two impressions flow from this observation.
First, academic poets write mainly for other academic poets in American English departments hither and yon, and few non-academics read much poetry anymore because their tastes do not run that way. Every so often someone like Mary Oliver (1935-2019) comes along whose extraordinary talent and sensibility draws a fairly large and devoted following. She was in residence at several colleges but, as far as I am aware, never held or sought a full-time faculty position. My hunch is that as time passed many of her younger academic associates frowned upon her old-fashioned naturalist inclinations.
But her naturalistic bent is what I liked most about her writing; you can sense William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost having taken up residence in her soul, and earlier American masters resonate, too: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell, Walt Whitman, James Whitcomb Riley (…alas, as Emily Dickenson’s ordeal with her father illustrates, there weren’t many published 19th-century American women poets). Can you imagine the university-based editor of a contemporary poetry magazine getting a submission that starts something like “When the frost is on the pumpkin” and really liking it, or admitting liking it to colleagues? I can’t.
Second, lots of Americans still love genuine, which is to say trans-Hallmark, poetry but they find it nowadays mostly in song lyrics. Poetry became stuffier and stiffer just as the best of popular music in its myriad American forms became more lyrically serious. In a way, music is the most cerebrally artful of all contemporary American art forms. Even rap, which is more oral or beat poetry tracked with instruments than it is actual music (with much of a melody), displays some brilliant art from time to time.
As you’ll see by and by, I quote some dead-center-relevant poetic lyrics in The Age of Spectacle. Here’s one, the fourth verse of a song (I think I’ve got this exactly right); see if you can figure out what song the verse is from and who wrote it:
I’ve heard you say many times
That you're better than no one
And no one is better than you
If you really believe that
You know you have
Nothing to win and nothing to lose
From fixtures and forces and friends
Your sorrow does stem
They’ll hype you and type you
and make you feel
That you gotta be just like them.
Well, enough poetic foreplay. Here is “Storm, in White” (I’ve tried every way I can think of to single-space it but the template just won’t let me) and I ask of you two things: Read it aloud, for that is how poetry is supposed to happen; and if you like it well enough, consider making a(n extra?) charitable donation next week, just to spread a smidgen of joy in celebration.
Sitting on the front porch all painted white,in the cane–seated rockershe watches the thunderstormbedazzle a lazy tumid summer afternoon.Loving the earned repose,drinking the sky dramaof raindrops splashing, bouncingthe red begonia blossomsinto drunken dancedouble time to the swaying oak’s cricks and cracksbeneath the rushing wind,leaves rustling under the rumblechasing lightning flashes down country.She notions inside herself:How odd that the world’s ragingsends her calm, backs her into bliss,seats her in reverie’s lap,drowses her nearly asleep;even as too much serenityaround the cerise sedum buds jangles her nerves,tilts her soul, pushes her sideways.She is never satisfied and only rarely amused;so she blesses the storm that passes her wayin a cane–seated rocker on the front porch,all painted white.