When Beloved Writers Die

John Updike died earlier today.

I was reading Updike's Bech: A Book when I heard, and in it, Updike is funny and smart, and loving.

He loved books and writing so much, and he loved showing everyone how much he loved books and writing. You can see it on every page.

When David Foster Wallace died recently, I wrote a piece for my other blog about the deaths of the writers we love.

Here's that piece:

I've been a reader for 50 years and I've seen writers I love die, some naturally and some unnaturally. I've said goodbye to Faulkner, Hemingway, Plath, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Primo Levi, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Saul Bellow.

The deaths have always hit me hard because the relationship you have with a writer is different from the relationship you have with anyone else. In the secret place you go to when you are reading, you and the writer share dreams and fears and wishes and hopes in a way that is nothing like your relationship with anyone else.

The writer is your lover and your confessor, your mother and your father, your God and your Satan. And you are the same for him. The writer tells you what he dreams and what he fears. When he tells you what he dreams, you help him come a little closer to those dreams. When he tells you what he fears, you help him push those fears away a little bit. And this works the same for you when you tell the writer in this secret place about your fears and dreams.

It's hard when a writer you love dies, but it's only hard for a while. His death begins to fade when you pick up his book again, return to that secret place.

Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem

I've spent most of the day dropping in on poetry blogs and listening to what the poets are saying about Elizabeth Alexander. She's the poet that Obama chose to write and deliver the inauguration poem yesterday.

Some of the poets felt that Alexander did the best she could given that there were a couple billion people listening to her who would rather have been eating grass than thinking about a poem, and some of the non-poets liked the poem because they felt you didn't need a dictionary and a PhD in modern poetics to understand the poem, but most of the reviews were pretty negative.

They felt that the poem's language was flat, it wasn't musical, it had too many cliches, there was too much needless repetition, and she wasn't a very good reader.

I don't think it was all that bad. In fact there were some passages that were downright moving.

What I think the poem needed was some pruning. She needed to run it through a couple more revisions.

Let me show you what I mean. First, I'll post her poem, and then I'll post a slimmed down version of it.

Here's her poem:

Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama’s
Presidential Inauguration


Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

__

If you've read all of that, you probably agree with me that it doesn't have the kind of intense condensing that we see in the best poems.

But there is a poem here. My old creative writing teacher at the U of I in Chicago (Paul Carroll) would have said, "the whole poem is in the last 6 three line stanzas. Cut out everything else and throw it away!" And I think he would have been right:

Here's what she should have read:

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.

_________

There's an interesting discussion of the poem going on at Edward Byrne's poetry blog.

Also, Sharon Mesmer (author of the very funny Annoying Diabetic Bitch) just posted a funny poem at her blog called Things I Hate about the Inaugural Poem.