Generating good

I just heard it again on a talk show. A newspaper editor, commenting on President Obama’s history-making statement yesterday, called support for marriage equality “generational.”  With my generation coming out as the losers who are against.  I beg to differ.

Yes, I’ve seen--and cringed at--all the photos of those of a certain age, pursed-lipped, their faces hate-contorted, waving Tea Party or anti-choice placards, cheering from the front pages of the papers. Maybe those were cheap shots. Maybe there were just as many earnest young haters in the crowd. Who knows?

What I know is this: my generation sat in at segregated lunch counters and marched for civil rights. My generation protested a war--the first in a series, as it has turned out--that threw away the lives of young people for dubious reasons.  My generation worked for gender equality and women’s reproductive rights.  

Hatred is always an equal opportunity handicap. I would assume, in fact, that the bullies who make life intolerable for gay teens are of a generation that prefers to see itself in a quite different light. No generation gets it all right. But I’m standing up for mine and the people in it who have tried to add their lives to the human evolution toward justice, human dignity, and respect. We’re all evolving.

Not a year for fiction?

I cannot pretend to guess why the Pulitzer Prize committee, in its great wisdom, decided not to award a prize in fiction this year. I had personally been hoping they might crown my friend Edith Pearlman’s magical year: her excellent “Binocular Vision” won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. My sister-in-law Susan, one of the most astute and adventurous readers I know, is urging me to read Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams.” I had thought this year’s crop seemed pretty bountiful. No? Well, what do I know?

This morning Ann Patchett has a smart column in the New York Times making the excellent point that prizes, like it or not, help to sell books and selling books is what keeps the publishers and the bookstores in business. Patchett says it is fiction that gives us a way to imagine another life. It gives us a chance to be empathetic. And, she says, “staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than polar icecaps.”

Ah, quiet. Ah, alone. Alone with a good book--what could be better?

Remember the book that first opened that magic door for you, the one that showed you a world where another life happened and you, at least for the length of the story, were part of it? Doesn’t that still happen? Doesn’t a good story well told still have the power to grab us from our screens and plunge us deep into the page? What was your prize-winner this year?

Where the poem comes from: Ingrid Wendt

I’m part of a new Facebook group made up of authors with books out from Word Tech, the publisher who did my second book, Container Gardening. I invited the poets I’ve met there online to send me a poem and a “where the poem comes from” background on it. This one is from Ingrid Wendt, the author of several award-winning books of poetry, including “Singing the Mozart Requiem” (Oregon Book Award), “Surgeonfish” (Editions Prize), and “The Angle of Sharpest Ascending” (Yellowglen Award). Ingrid’s first book, Moving the House, was chosen for BOA Editions by William Stafford, who also wrote the introduction. Her newest book , Evensong, a finalist in the T.S. Eliot Award, was published in 2011 by Truman State University Press. Wendt is the co-editor of From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry, and In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts. Her teaching guide, Starting with Little Things: A Guide to Writing Poetry in the Classroom, is in its sixth printing. She lives with her husband, poet and writer Ralph Salisbury in Eugene, Oregon.

Here is Ingrid’s poem, from her collection “Surgeonfish,” and her story of how it came to be written:

The Thing to Do

Though what I did that day was right,

reporting the rattlesnakes coiled tightly

together B diamond-backed lovers

blind to my step within a breath of

leaves crackling under the bush;

Though he did what he had to,

hacking them dead with his long-handled

garden hoe, flinging the still-

convulsing whips of their passion into

the bed of his pickup B that scene,

bright vulture of memory, stays;

picks this conscience that won’t

come clean: this wasn’t

the way the story would go

those times I wondered if ever

I’d see my own rattlesnake out in the wild,

having listened through years of summer

hikes, in the likeliest places, without

once hearing that glittering warning

said to be unmistakable; knowing

since childhood, the thing to do is not

flicker a muscle, to stare the face of danger

down as though it didn’t exist.

No rattlesnake ever had eyes for another.

And menace never multiplied, one season to next.

“The setting of this poem is the D.H. Lawrence Ranch 20 miles north of Taos, New Mexico, elevation 8600 ft. above sea level, where I spent a summer as the recipient of the annual D.H. Lawrence Award, living at the edge of a ponderosa pine forest, next to a meadow full of wildflowers, all alone except for the birds and wind, wild turkeys, coyotes, and the bear whose track I found one day on the road but never saw. On the other side of the meadow, far off and hidden in trees, were cabins where families from the University of New Mexico came for vacations and conferences. I never saw a soul, though I sometimes heard the far-off voices of children playing.

“Born and raised in Aurora, Illinois, I was captivated throughout childhood by tales of the "Far West," especially by stories of dangerous wildlife --bears, wolves, rattlesnakes – none of which had lived anywhere near. So when I finally saw a rattlesnake outside of a zoo, I saw not just one, but two snakes, copulating. (Which they must do, of course, but who ever thought about that, or just how they do it? Not me!) I heard them before I saw them, and when I saw them, not far from the cabin, I felt no danger to myself, but reasoned that where there are two rattlesnakes, soon there will be more, and I didn’t want them going into the meadow and beyond, where the children played.

“So, being a responsible adult, I quickly jogged down the road and told the caretaker of the ranch, a crusty old guy named Al, about the snakes, expecting him to somehow trap them and cart them off to another location, far removed. What he did shocked and disturbed me, impressing itself on my memory, surfacing off and on for years, until I finally decided to bring some “closure” to my guilty conscience.

“The actual writing of the poem was something like putting together a quilt. I’ve long kept a notebook of “saved lines”: those necessarily cut from other poems, as well as “good lines” and images that come to mind totally on their own, waiting for a poem to put them in. One of those that never had a home was “bright vulture of memory, picks these bones that won’t come clean,” and intuiting that the vulture image fit the setting of the poem perfectly, I copied this line (by hand) onto a blank sheet of paper, somewhere near the middle, intuiting that’s where it belonged. The challenge then was what to put before and after.

“Many writers talk about writing as “the act of discovery,” which I used to think meant starting with one line or sentence and following the “golden thread,” as William Stafford used to say, letting the words come one after another, down the page, and seeing where they’d lead. For me, the discovery is often is in finding the exact words to shape the context in which some new perception or inner “moment of knowing” occurred: to let the reader step into the scene and live that experience with me.

“Rhythm has a lot to do with setting tone. At some point, early in the poem, maybe after the first two lines, I realized I was working in an accentual pattern of 4 beats per line, and I decided to “go with it” for the rest of the poem. This helped 1) to create a somewhat “heavy” tone, a deliberate tone, a regularity, and 2) to rein me in, to tighten the language, to avoid the maudlin. I wanted the weight of the poem to reflect the weight of the issue. I’m hoping it’s worked that way for readers.”

A new haggadah

I bought the New American Haggadah today. I had time this afternoon for only a quick look through it, as my dining room is currently Haggadah Central, with two haggadot that I’ve compiled lying in various stages of readiness for the holiday ahead. One, for a celebration with my extended family, is a version I wrote in the late 1990s; the other, written just last year, is for the seder Dr. D. and I have with friends and our families. Each has its own specific tone for its intended group. They are the result of a year of study of a variety of haggadot, old and new, consultation with my rabbis and cantor, and much editing and writing, not to mention photocopying, pasting, and shaking out of old matzah crumbs.

So I was interested to see this new haggadah, which is the work of respected writers who are also committed Jews: Jonathan Safran Foer, who was the editor; and Nathan Englander, the translator; with commentary by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein; Jeffrey Goldberg; Nathaniel Deutsch; and Lemony Snicket (who knew?). There is some lovely language; two of the plagues are rendered as “a maelstrom of beasts” and “a clotted darkness.”

The book was designed by an Israeli artist, Oded Ezer. The authors apparently all come out of very traditional upbringings and much serious scholarship is in evidence. One of my favorite aspects Mia Sara Bruch’s timeline that tracks the observance of Passover from around 1250 BCE to the entry in 2007 noting the publication of the first haggadah for Jewish Buddhists. Some will, I predict, find the artwork hauntingly beautiful; others will wonder if the pages have arrived with wine blotches already on them, and, indeed, the book’s introduction refers to those very spills of Concord grape. Strangely, the design of the pages, with commentary and timeline, requires you to read in three directions, though, happily, not simultaneously. The Hebrew is offered without transliteration, which will make it inaccessible to some families, but which carries an optimistic message about the persistence of the language, not to mention the Seriousness of the Project.

The biggest surprise for me as a Reform Jew was its masculine references to God. Really? In 2012? Was Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in the kitchen when that decision was made? For me it a chance to celebrate my own experience of a holiday in which my grandmother and other female relatives always sat around the table as full participants.

Haggadot have proliferated astonishingly in the past decades. Where once it was Maxwell House or nothing (cue Obama’s in-joke to Jeffrey Goldberg) there is now a version for every conceivable gathering. Each carries a history, clues to the time in which it was written and the thinking of those who wrote it. Every one I read brings me new understanding of the holiday that has always been my favorite. The New American Haggadah is no exception. I won’t be using it at my table, but I will be reading it and learning from it.

Oh no--Lady Marjorie is on the Titanic!

This is a spoiler only if you, like Dr. D. and me, had never watched “Upstairs, Downstairs” and are just now seeing it as consolation for the absence of “Downton Abbey.” Strangely, although there are predictable parallels, we are finding that the earlier series, broadcast from 1971-75, is edgier and grittier, and shows downstairs life as possibly a little closer to what it might have been.

“Why couldn’t they have just killed James?” he asked. We knew the answer: James’s death wouldn’t have resulted in enough interesting plotlines.

Dr. D.’s and my shocked reaction to Lady Marjorie’s fate made me think of an old New Yorker cartoon in which parents are watching a young girl race from the room sobbing as the mother explains, “Beth just died.”

Fiction, on the page on or the screen, exists to draw us in and then play fast and loose with us, kick our feelings to the curb. And the more drawn in we are, the harder we fall.

Isn’t it wonderful?

Other People's Memories

Who isn't captivated by memoirs? For years my most frequent book recommendations have included two memoirs. One was “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World,” by Lucette Lagnado. The other, from the same general area of the world, was “My Father’s Paradise,” Ariel Sabar’s story of his father’s life that began in a 3,000-year-old Aramean-speaking Jewish community in Iraq. More recently I have been among the many readers fascinated by Edmund de Waal’s story of uncovering a remarkable family history he never knew about in “The Hare with Amber Eyes.”

Why do we want to read other people’s stories? The exotic details certainly have appeal. (How exactly did Lucette Lagnado’s grandmother cook those apricots down to a fragrant essence?) But I don’t think it’s just curiosity.

A line I think about often is this one by Willa Cather: “There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Certainly I am discovering something about my own life as I read these stories. In a strange way it feels as if the memoirs lead me to discoveries not just about my life as it is, but about what might have been, trying on other circumstances for the satisfying strangeness of the fit.

Case in point, the memoir I am reading right now, “Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt.” Yes, another exodus from Egypt. How could Jews leaving Egypt be anything else, and it IS close to Passover, after all. Jean Naggar, the author, grew up under unimaginably privileged circumstances. Her family had lived in Egypt since leaving Spain in 1492 and had, during those centuries, amassed wealth and power almost beyond belief and created a family life of enormous luxury. But here’s the strange thing. While I’m reading of her little footsteps echoing down the endless marble staircases and the kitchen used only one week a year, for Passover, and the countless comforts and pleasures of her golden childhood, I am thinking how much my childhood was like that. Yes, my relatives came to the United States from Russia in the early years of the 20th century with hardly a penny or a belonging aside from my great-grandparents’ wedding samovar that is now in my dining room. But I, like Jean, was a coddled child in a family of loving adults in very close to the same years. I remember the glow of taking my place at the family seder, of taking in the family lore and customs. Not the same customs by a long shot, but nevertheless some of this is my story, too.

As fiercely as if it had never happened before and yet, because it has, a connection exists across miles and cultures. And maybe that’s what memoir does most significantly for us, shows our deep human connections, how, aside from the astonishing details, our stories can be the same. We understand them.

What women want

The morning news today brought its usual package of anti-woman (anti-person!) outrages. This one was the closing of women’s health clinics in Texas, but no matter. Take your pick--it could have been any one of a hundred stories of ways in which women are ground down around the world. Including here in the United States quite noticeably where it’s open (election) season on women’s rights.

And just in time, my friend Susan Donnelly has sent me this wonderful poem by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Voigt is among the poets I admire greatly when I come across her work and then somehow I forget to seek out more. Not this time though, thanks to Susan’s reminder. What this woman wants right now is more of Voigt’s wise and finely-crafted poetry.

The Wide and Varied World

Women, women, what do they want?

The first ones in the door of the plant-filled office

were the twins, fresh from the upper grades,

their matched coats dangling open.

and then their more compliant brother, leading

the dear stuffed tottering creature -- amazing

that she could lift her leg high enough

to cross the threshold to the waiting room.

Then the woman, the patient, carrying the baby

in an infant seat, his every inch of flesh

swaddled against the vicious weather.

Once inside, how skillfully the mother

unwound the many layers --

and now so quickly

must restore them: news from the lab

has passed through the nurse's sliding window.

The youngest, strapped again into his shell,

fusses for the breast, the twins tease their sister,

the eight-year-old looks almost wise as his mother

struggles into her coat with one hand and with the other

pinches his sweaty neck, her hissed threats

swarming his face like flies.

Now she's gone.

The women who remain don't need to speak.

Outside, snow falls in the streets

and quiet hills, and seems, in the window,

framed by the room's continuous greenery,

to obliterate the wide and varied world.

We half-smile, half-nod to one another.

One returns to her magazine.

One shifts gently to the right arm

her sleeping newborn, unfurls the bud of its hand.

One of us takes her turn in the inner office

where she submits to the steel table

and removes from her body its stubborn wish.

We want what you want, only

we have to want it more.

-- Ellen Bryant Voigt

in The Lotus Flowers

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ellen-bryant-voigt