Observing the 4th of July

Sometimes in 101 we have assigned a personal essay about observing the 4th of July.  Most of the students wrote about family celebrations with a few references to parades and community fireworks.  There was a domestic, happy quality to these tales.  That is the sort of event on the surface of the poem, "Immigrant Picnic," by Gregory Djanikian, though the poem also hints at the personal loses involved in even the least traumatic relocation. 

The custom of public orations for the 4th seems to have fallen out of practice.  Only at Holden Village have I experienced a public reading of the Declaration of Independence such I have read about in descriptions of historical and fictional Independence Day observations in the 19th and early 20th century.  A powerful example, surely one of the great American speeches, is Frederick Douglass' "What to the American Negro is the Fourth of July?"  He lauds the nation's ideals, honors its founders, and points directly at its failure to enact its best commitments.  Here is James Earl Jones' reading the speech. VIDEO LINK

Even if slavery is outlawed, there is much in these words to inspire us decades later, to remind us that even as declaring independence was followed by a war to achieve it, so too proclaiming equality and freedom requires daily effort to make those ideals into reality.

Generational happiness

My Am Con students wrestled mightily with the reality of Americans' seemingly unending dis-satisfaction.  We noticed it in Quicksand and in Ragtime both set more or less in the early 20th century.  (Enich coined a fine term for it; if he reads this, perhaps he'll add it in the comments.) By the end of the fourth semester they were also working on coming to terms with gap between national ideals and aspirations and the realities of national life.  Angels in America gave some of them a handle on this problem.  Hannah's admonition that one must have an "idea" about America combined with Belize's declaration that he did not have to love America gave them a way to recognize that the gap is not always reducible to collective (or even individual) hypocrisy.  There is also something of a "work in progress" quality to the nation, its culture, and its people.

Perhaps these realizations come at a particular developmental stage, to each generation in its own time and in its own way.  Poet Carl Dennis hints at something like that in his poem, "Our Generation," which I take to be about the generation labeled the "boomers."  Here he manages to shine a gentle light both on the pursuit of individual happiness and on the few who notice the gap between the county in theory and the country in fact.  He does it gently and with quiet hope.

Our Generation

Whatever they'll say about our delinquencies,

They'll have to agree we managed to bridge the gap

Between those who arrived before us

And those who followed. We learned enough

At the schools available to fill the entry-level positions

At the extant sawmills our elders managed,

At banks, drug stores, freight yards, and hospitals,

Then worked our way up to positions of trust.

There we were, down on the shop floor

Or up in the manager's office, or outside the office

On scaffolds, washing the windows.

Did we work with joy? With no less joy

Than people felt in the generations before us.

And on weekends and weekday evenings

We did our best to pursue the happiness

Our founders encouraged us to pursue,

And with equal gusto. Whatever they say about us

They can't deny that we filled the concert halls,

Movie houses, malls, and late-night restaurants.

We took our bows on stage or waited on tables

Or manned the refreshment booths to earn a little extra

For the things we wanted, the very things

Pursued by the generations before us

And likely to be pursued by generations to come:

Children and lawns and cars and beach towels.

And now and then we stood back to admire

The colorful spectacle, the endless variety,

As others before us admired it, and then returned

To fill our picnic baskets, drive to the park,

And use the baseball diamonds just as their contrivers

Intended they should be used. And if we too

Crowded into the squares to cheer the officials

Who proclaimed our country as fine in fact

As it is in theory, as faithful a friend to the planet

As any country we cared to name,

A few of us confined to a side street,

Carried signs declaring a truth less fanciful.

A few unheeded, to be sure, but no more unheeded

Than a similar few in generations before us

Who hoped that the truth in generations to come,

Though just as homely, would find more followers.

Carl Dennis
The Kenyon Review
New Series, Volume XXVII Number 2
Spring 2005

We are all pioneers, or maybe not

In the opening scene of Angels in a America, the funeral of Louis' grandmother, the rabbi speaks about the immigrant journey and asserts that the descendents can not make the same journey.  " You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist." 

One commentator remarks that all the major characters in the play are pioneers of some sort, perhaps contradicting the rabbi.  Certainly the Mormon characters bring to mind their own ancestors who made the 19th century journey from New York state to Utah across the western plains.  Even if Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier hypothesis is out of fashion and the frontier was not the most important experience in shaping American character, the mythology of journey--both immigrant and pioneer in the west--remains powerful.  

This poem allows us to think about the value of a slow journey at ground level from the perspective of those who more often travel rapidly in the air.   (Remember Harper's final speech delivered through the window of an airplane.)  Nye encourages us to consider what we miss as we travel fast and high, but she does not avoid noticing that the old journey also had its cost.

 

Full Day

by Naomi Shihab Nye

The pilot on the plane says:
In one minute and fifty seconds
we're going as far
as the covered wagon went
in a full day.
We look down
on clouds,
mountains of froth and foam.
We eat a neat
and subdivided lunch.
How was it for the people in
the covered wagon?
They bumped and jostled.
Their wheels broke.
Their biscuits were tough.
They got hot and cold and old.
Their shirts tore on the branches
they passed.
But they saw the pebbles
and the long grass
and the sweet shine of evening
settling on the fields.
They knew the ruts and the rocks.
They threw their furniture out
to make the wagons lighter.
They carried their treasures
in a crooked box.

"Full Day" by Naomi Shihab Nye, from Come With Me. © Greenwillow, 2000.

Noticing happiness in poems

It is national poetry month so yesterday a group of faculty read poetry to each other: some poems written by the reader and some not.  These were not poems about happiness.  Indeed some had topics quite the opposite: sorrow, guilt, or mourning.  Nonetheless, the act of gathering to read and then reading did generate a sort of joy in the shared appreciation for the beauty of the words.

"My apologies to happiness for taking you as my due."

This line from "Under One Star" by Wislawa Szymborska was perhaps the only direct reference to happiness and it is in passing.  I'm noticing this.  Happiness often appears in poems in passing.  It is noticed rather than examined.  This morning I read another poem (Another Insane Devotion by Gerald Stern) in which happiness appear as a single word sentence drawing upon the three details that precede it.

"[...]I think I gave the cat

half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think

I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice.

It was this I bought, the red coleus,

the split rocking chair, the silk lampshade.

Happiness. I watched him with pleasure.

I bought memory. I could have lost it."

Without dismissing the value of careful analysis and reflection, I'm inclined to agree with these poets and their example of noticing happiness.

(not) writing about happiness

"In truth, books about joy are hard to find because happiness is nearly impossible to write about. Narrative thrives on conflict." 

Lauen Goff on NPR's You Must Read This Book about Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim LINK

There is poetry about happiness, however.  For example, this collection titled Happiness by Deborah Keenan.  I wonder if this is because poetry can focus our attention on a moment and happiness is experienced in moments?

To Happiness, Carl Dennis

I made no attempt to resist this poem on our topic by one of my favorite poets.  He personifies happiness and thus suggests that happiness is a friend.  The narrative of a friend's arrival after a long absence brings a vicarious sense of happiness to me.  Perhaps even stronger, it wakens memory of similar visits and desire for their repetition.

To Happiness

by Carl Dennis

If you're not approaching, I hope at least
You're off to comfort someone who needs you more,
Not lost wandering aimlessly
Or drawn to the shelter of well-lit rooms
Where people assume you've arrived already.

If you're coming this way, send me the details—
The name of the ship, the port it leaves from—
So I can be down on the dock to help you
Unload your valises, your trunks and boxes
And stow them in the big van I'll have rented.

I'd like this to be no weekend stay
Where a single change of clothes is sufficient.
Bring clothes for all seasons, enough to fill a closet;
And instead of a single book for the bedside table
Bring boxes of all your favorites.

I'll be eager to clear half my shelves to make room,
Eager to read any titles you recommend.
If we've many in common, feel free to suggest
They prove my disposition isn't to blame
For your long absence, just some problems of attitude,

A few bad habits you'll help me set to one side.
We can start at dinner, which you're welcome
To cook for us while I sweep and straighten
And set the table. Then light the candles
You've brought from afar for the occasion.

Light them and fill the room I supposed I knew
With a glow that shows me I was mistaken.
Then help me decide if I'm still the person I was
Or someone else, someone who always believed in you
And imagined no good reasons for your delay.

"To Happiness" by Carl Dennis, from Unknown Friends. © Penguin, 2007. Reprinted with permission. 

fling yourself: from Julia Kasdorf

As the semester draws to a close, some students finish the first year and others complete their college careers.  This poem, a favorite of mine, seems appropriate to both groups and to those whose completion is less momentous but just as significant.


"Flying Lesson"
by Julia Kasdorf from Eve's Striptease.
© University of Pittsburg Press.

Over a tray of spent plates, I confessed
to the college president my plans to go East,
to New York, which I'd not really seen,
though it seemed the right place
for a sophomore as sullen and restless
as I had become on that merciless
Midwestern plain. He slowly stroked
a thick cup and described the nights
when, a theology teacher in Boston, he'd fly
a tiny plane alone out over the ocean,
each time pressing farther into the dark
until the last moment, when he'd turn
toward the coast's bright spine, how he loved
the way the city glittered beneath him
as he glided gracefully toward it,
engine gasping, fuel needle dead on empty,
the way sweat dampened the back of his neck
when he climbed from the cockpit, giddy.
Buttoned up in my cardigan, young, willing
to lose everything, how could I see generosity
or warning? But now that I'm out here,
his advice comes so clear: fling yourself
farther, and a bit farther each time,
but darling, don't drop.

knit together

This image of how a community is formed by being knit together appears in Winthrop's "Models of Christian Charity" in his conclusions about the nature of love and two sorts of laws.  Of course it is an image drawn from a particular craft, knitting.  And we can learn much from that reference.

This poem, that is today's from the Writer's Almanac, offers another glimpse into the connections that "knitted together" suggests:

Picking Pears

by Gary J. Whitehead

I stand on the top rung and the step ladder

   shakes; above me the winter pears just out

of reach, clean and strung heavy along limbs

   and swaying like my grandmother's aprons

hung on the line to dry. I drop one into

   the bag she holds open below me. She grins,

and I'm drawn into the embrace of her gaze—

   down into handfuls of earth, seasons, the empty

cup of a lost daughter, a lost breast.

   I'm stitched into miles of quilts, curtains,

tablecloths, hems of pants, skirts.

   I'm held to her like a button on a shirt pocket,

and I smell soap, tomatoes, chicken soup,

   Portuguese sweet bread, goat cheese, pears...

and I lower myself out and around the gnarl

   of branch, down the ladder to take the full

bag of the fruit I love, warm from

   the sun and spotted like her hands.

"Picking Pears" by Gary Whitehead, from The Velocity of Dust. © Salmon Publishing Ltd., 2004. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Reading Poetry

A Teacher Considers Why She Includes Poetry

I am a lover of poetry:
for the sounds,
for the shape on the page;
words turned to images
or a shaft of light.

A poem read aloud first thing:
a bell to invoke the spirit,
a bouquet of roses for beauty;
water in a pump
or a new pair of glasses.

The work of poetry:
to open the heart,
to stimulate imagination;
waves against walls
or an angle of insight.

LDL


From the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project  Billy Collins on how to read a poem, not instructions, but analogies that evoke other experiences.

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

This is NOT how American Conversation students responded to the poems they read for today!