I'm Still Just Waking Up to Art

Until I began writing poetry I didn't attend many readings. I was as oblivious to the aural beauty as any other citizen. I read it. I can't say I was a great explorer, but I always had a copy of Rilke, Stevens, Dickenson on hand. However, between the time I was an undergraduate, finishing up my education at Cal-State L.A., and the time I lived in Seattle and had begun writing, I didn't go to readings.

You have to understand. I'm still just waking up. I write this as I think about seeing poets Czeslaw Milosz, Adrienne Rich and many others read at Kane Hall at the University of Washington in Seattle. I wasn't a student. I was a poet.


The first college I attended never had such events. St. John's College in Santa Fe. Euripides and Dante were no shows. At Cal-State I heard (and still remember) Creeley.  Larry Leavis. Not sure if there were any women poets I saw but I was reading Diane Wakowski, whose work I adored, and others.


I was and continue to be a half-asleep consumer. There worlds around me, especially here in New York, I am unaware of, until I become aware of them. And sometimes I become aware of worlds and poets who'll have no part of me, who'll welcome me to their readings but never show up for mine. That's more often the case than not and, yes, I'm bitter.  


But also I'm curious about the next awakening, the next dawn, the next step towards a godhead. Because for me, if a poet doesn't move me in that direction (and I'm guilty of creating detours, too), I lose interest.


All over the place?  It's a good one, this place. As they say, I'm on it.

Adrienne Rich's "Song"

Image from: lacymarschalk.blogspot.com

I haven't been able to express feelings about the loss of Adrienne Rich, maybe because for myself and any other reader of her poems, her work isn't lost. Or maybe because it will take a while to pull it together, to go back to "Diving Into the Wreck," to remember my discovery in "Split at the Root" that I wasn't the only one split at the root in the same way and in some other ways she was.

I saw her read, once, at Kane Hall, a huge auditorium at the University of Washington in Seattle. Yowza. The joint was jumping, the hall jam-packed, the rafters nearly squeezed up into and over the roof. I understood then that poetry could reach beyond a small audience of specialists to feed a greater body, to feed a spiritual hunger.

Here she is, feeding us.  Not to get maudlin, but being a woman can be a lonely endeavor if, like me, you strive to be original and not hide strength or intellect or opinion.

Song

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

_____

Adrienne Rich, republished from Southern Cross Review.  Their biography of her:

Adrienne Rich (1929 - 2012 ) Adrienne Rich was first published as a poet in 1951, when she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for A Change of World. Her poetry has reflected her own life changes and many roles. Adrienne Rich's feminism emerged in mid-career, and many of her later poems express a political rage and search for sisterhood and creative language. Her work includes nineteen volumes of poetry including The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004, which won the Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995); Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970 (1993); The Dream of a Common Language (1978); and Diving into the Wreck (1973); three collections of essays, and a ground-breaking study of motherhood, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.

The Omen: The antifeminist fathers the Antichrist

With what passes for benevolent husbanding Gregory Peck (Ambassador Robert Thorn) decides in the beginning of The Omen to hide the truth (as he knows it) from Lee Remick (Ambassador's Wife, Katherine Thorn). Their son didn't survive childbirth. The baby handed to her isn't hers.

Granted, without deception and bad decisions, horror movies don't get off the ground. Still the idea that father knows best, that (the former) Atticus Finch, for godsakes, is willing to fake out his wife because he believes it's for her own good (that phrase), is business-as-usual in this movie classic, as if Lee Remick were being served rice pudding instead of jello, well, it sticks in my girlish gaw.

The movie came out in 1976 when feminism (whichever wave) as a concept was no longer novel, though the struggle was still raw.

Peck's decision to lie may seem less strange because they are in Italy, not America. I wonder if that's why director Richard Donner or screenwriter David Seltzer chose Rome, because of its direct link to "mysteries." Obviously near the Vatican is a good place for the Antichrist to hang out.

I stray. And while I'm here let me commend Jerry Goldsmith for an Oscar-worthy score. That chanting: Sanguis bibimus, corpus edimus, tolle corpus Satani (We drink the blood, we eat the flesh, raise the body of Satan) [tra la] and Ave Satani! Ave Versus Christus (Hail, Satan! Hail, Antichrist!) [yo ho].

Back my point. Peck didn't believe his wife could handle the truth, when in fact she couldn't handle the lie. Nor could he; a photographer; at least one priest; the "this is for you, Damien" nanny; and a few assorted others (not to mention prospective victims, to wit, everyone in Christendom and onward).

It's a sweet idea, that women are innately sensitive in various degrees. That our lives best be determined by the men. (Hey, I just turned my head and there on a shelf is: On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich.)

The conflict that male caretakers like the Gregory Peck character have is within: They are as afraid of the truth as the women they purport to protect. I wonder what the construct would be today. Would Peck and Remick be replaced by a Santa Barbara couple who adopt an infant they think is a Romanian orphan born in an Italian refugee camp (plausible). I don't see why the far right doesn't finance a version in which the Antichrist is raised by a lesbian or gay couple using surrogates. Or maybe the Antichrist could be Chinese and adopted by a single mom.

While it makes sense that the living opponent to "love thy neighbor" manipulates, it doesn't make sense when husbands do the same, easy breezy, in a plot premise.