Poetry Friday: Black Friday Edition

I know that on a busy holiday weekend like this one, we all don’t have as much time for poetic pursuits as we might like, so I’ll keep this one brief and on topic.  In the recent poetry collection I co-wrote with Shane Guthrie, Ouroboros 2, one of the poems I wrote was, in fact, about “Black Friday” itself, the day after Thanksgiving.  I thought it was as apt a moment to share the poem as I am likely to have, and it’s provided for you in full below.  As is the case with all the poems in the Ouroboros (don’t know what an “Ouroboros” is? see this page for an explanation), it appeared without any title, and as is always the case when I share my own work for a Poetry Friday, I provide it without any further comment in the post itself.  If folks have reactions—good, bad, or indifferent—I hope you’ll share them in the comments, where I will happily interact and maybe even explain what I think I was going for.  To the extent that I know, myself.  Without further ado, my Black Friday poem from Ouroboros 2:

“I pushed it open. Any way the crowds wanted to,
they surged,
shouting Black Friday instructions to their conscripts,
heaving like a tide into the electronics section
for this hollow holiday,
the day after gratitude when all we want is to carry over
that full feeling
into some other place inside us that remains empty.
And as much as I want to look down on you
as you pass like war-torn refugees
between the theft-prevention gates,
I am complicit in this profane event:
I am trading my time
for something of yours.
Not just money, but something larger than that:
the dignity of longing that is lost by possession;
the kindness we earn
by learning how to live without.“

Poetry Friday: 1940

Alice Duer Miller, who (it should be remembered as you read) was a descendant of a signer of the Constitution and a general in the Revolutionary War (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Given the length of The Grapes of Wrath, I’m likely to have a few opportunities to read and reflect on the poetry of 1940, so for today I’m branching out a little farther into the forgotten poets of this era than I might otherwise do.  In 1940, an American suffragette named Alice Duer Miller, with a reasonably long career as a writer of novels and screenplays, published a novel in verse entitled The White Cliffs.  The book tells the story of an American woman who marries an Englishman, and is widowed by the First World War—she remains in England, and as the book ends she fears for her adopted country, and for her English son who wants to go, like his father, to war.  I can’t claim that I think most of The White Cliffs is particularly good poetry, although as pro-English propaganda, published during that portion of World War II where England stood largely alone against the Axis powers (and America sat idly by), the novel is alleged to have had a meaningful impact on the increasing willingness of the otherwise isolationist American middle class to contemplate going to war.  Anyway, there are moments where the verse works well enough for me to want to reflect on it, and here on this final weekend of the London Olympics, it seems fitting for me to think a little bit about England and Englishness, with Miller as a guide.  Here is a sonnet from The White Cliffs, section XXI of that novel:

“The English love their country with a love
Steady, and simple, wordless, dignified;
I think it sets their patriotism above
All others. We Americans have pride—
We glory in our country’s short romance.
We boast of it, and love it. Frenchmen, when
The ultimate menace comes, will die for France
Logically as they lived. But Englishmen
Will serve day after day, obey the law,
And do dull tasks that keep a nation strong.
Once I remember in London how I saw
Pale shabby people standing in a long
Line in the twilight and the misty rain
To pay their tax. I then saw England plain.”

I was especially drawn to this poem because it contemplates patriotism, something I’ve been wrestling with for a while in my musings about America and what our literature reveals about us.  The Olympics have been another opportunity for me to encounter patriotism—both American and English.  To name only two media accounts that caught my eye this last week, first off, I saw a clip from Fox News in which the hosts complained that people don’t shout “U-S-A! U-S-A!” as much as they used to at the Olympics, which to them seemed a troubling sign of America’s impending doom as a culture and nation (I paraphrase, of course…but I’ll admit to being at least a little surprised at how seriously they took an issue that feels more like an Onion article to me).  Then I read an article just today about the BBC, whose director instructed the team covering the Olympics to be sure not to fixate too much on the events where British athletes were likely to medal, but to cover important achievements in sport no matter what nations were involved.  These are extreme examples, of course—not every American pumps their fist about gold medals, and not every British citizen is self-effacing.  But I wonder if Miller was, in fact, on to something when she suggests a simple contrast between the countries.  The Americans have pride, she says, and the British have duty.

She makes no secret of her preference (or rather, her character’s preference) for the British approach, as she describes it.  As a self-confessed Anglophile (though hopefully not a pretentious one), I understand the tendency of a certain kind of American personality to praise something we feel was lost in our country’s separation from Britain—national humility, perhaps, or the ability to endure great trials with quiet resilience.  Despite the reality that I know is lost in this generalization, it’s hard not to think that there is something really right about it.  When Mo Farah crossed the line, and London’s Olympic stadium erupted with joy, I didn’t hear anyone shouting “U-K! U-K!” (or “G-B! G-B!” for that matter).  I know I have a few readers from the United Kingdom—would you agree with me that citizens of the U.K. would find that kind of thing pretty unthinkable?  It’s certainly hard for me to envision.  I was thinking about “U-S-A!” after seeing that piece on television, and I thought how odd it seemed.  If Michael Jordan hits a three-pointer, I’m thinking it would be an incredibly dickish move for him to shout “Michael Jordan! Michael Jordan!” as he runs back down the court.  If the crowd shouts it, though, I think we’d cut them slack.  “U-S-A!” creates this weird problem, then—the people shouting it are shouting about the athletes and themselves.  (I should note that we are not the only nation on earth to do this—I’ve heard “Ca-na-daaaa” shouted at international curling championships, though it’s usually shouted as a cheer during the match to express support, and not as a chest-bumping display of dominance after the team wins.)

I’ve steered this reflection into the world of athletics, but of course we have to acknowledge that Miller is writing it in a time of war, as a woman who remembers another world war in her youth—the character voicing these thoughts is even more personally affected by both wars than Miller is herself.  This ode to duty, to obedience, to civic responsibility, takes place against the background of the London Blitz—if you’ve never read about the Blitz, you should.  The stories are very moving, whether you read non-fiction accounts of the city’s survival, or one of the many books that are set in that time and place: my personal favorite, of course, is Connie Willis’s two-part novel, Blackout / All Clear, her magnum opus (although maybe not quite her best novel).  In any case, Miller, through her character, is praising the qualities the British people discovered in themselves that—this cannot, I think, be overemphasized—saved Western civilization, saved the democratic experiment and the idea of freedom.  It may be that, similarly pinned in a corner, any nation would have been able to sum up that kind of stoic and obstinate unwillingness to quit the field.  All I can say is that I see and admire it in other nations, and I sincerely wonder if my country—a people sometimes seemingly united only in our hatred for each other—could do the same against such odds.  There were beautiful glimpses of it in the fall of 2001, inspired (of course) by tragedy.  Tragedy is not really the American experience, or maybe rather I should say that it is not our country’s narrative, not the story we tell ourselves as we drift to sleep each night.  Our narrative casts us as the up-and-comer, the beacon of liberty, the victor over the despots of the world, the bringer of peace.  There’s an important truth in each of those statements, but I hardly need tell you that this narrative is also seriously misleading about who we were and who we are.  Every nation’s story is more complicated than that.

I haven’t said much about the language in Miller’s poem—for good reason, I think, since I really don’t feel the sonnet is well crafted (compare it to Millay’s from two weeks ago: the two women are not playing in the same league).  But I do want to credit her for accomplishing, in a short space, some important rhetorical observations about national pride.  The comparisons of pride to duty, of romance to logic to obedience, are telling even if overly broad.  The closing image is an important one—in some ways I feel a lot of truth in what she says about that misty scene of the taxpayers’ line, although I wonder what that image obscures, what objects in the distance will grow fuzzy and indistinct if I focus in on that moment.  I wonder what image I would use to characterize America honestly and positively—this nation of my birth that, despite the faults that dismay and anger me, I love and would defend.  I only hope to avoid a boastful love.  For my part, I’d like what Miller praises: to love America “with a love steady”, simple and dignified (though not wordless….wordlessness is a power I do not have).  I’d welcome any thoughts you readers have, about America and about the United Kingdom, about patriotism and love of country (the same thing?).  And of course thoughts about Miller’s poem as a poem, if you have them, especially if you think I was too dismissive of it.  Certainly I’ll credit her with making me think.

Poetry Friday: 1938, part 2

It’s been too long since I was able to sit with one of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, so I was glad when I stumbled into the stuff Langston Hughes was writing in 1938: I feel like digging into a great poem, but unfortunately the length’s a bit daunting (I try to cap the amount of poetry I ask anybody to take in from a blog post at about 20-25 lines).  So it seemed best to me to just sit with the first portion of this poem: you can read the whole thing here, if you like, but my comments are going to focus primarily on the excerpt I provide below.  This is the first few stanzas of Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again”:

“Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.”

I like the prophetic feel of the poem—the underlying sense that Langston is speaking something into being, that he has come out of the wilderness, his breath stinking of locusts and honey, ready to tell his nation some hard truths.  His doubled use of the word “America” is, of course, the key to the poem, and I think it works really nicely: the contrast of the world as it is with the world as it claims to be.  In this case, I am struck (despite the poem’s criticisms of America in 1938) by Hughes’s positive associations with the American ideals: this isn’t a jaded man too bitter to express hope.  He’s talking about the pioneer spirit and about the dream of freedom, using phrases like something out of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” or the verses of “America the Beautiful” that we have trouble remembering.

Langston Hughes, who despite being one of the most influential figures in American letters in the 20th Century never won a Pulitzer or a Nobel for his writing.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But falling in the gap between the stanzas of hope and praise are the footsteps of the truth: that America has never been “America”, not to the black Langston Hughes, despite his fame as a writer.  He is so plain-spoken, so direct, which I think is the source of a lot of his strength as a poet—this is the same direct power I remember from the way he addresses his white teacher in the poem he writes for “English B”, and expressed in the closing lines of his more famous poem that begins “What happens to a dream deferred?”  The power of his statements actually arrests the poem’s forward momentum—the four-line stanzas halt suddenly, as the poem addresses his parenthetic comments, asking who it is that comes to bring this challenge to the idea of America?

And I am impressed by the scope of Hughes’s ideas, since it would be easy to focus on the numerous injustices being suffered by his community.  But instead he opens with poor white laborers—they stand next to him in the shadows, beside the outcast Native American and the suffering immigrant.  All of them look to America in disappointment: they were promised the Land of Opportunity, and they got this.  In a world where the winds were beginning to blow again—where German racism and Italian fascism and Japanese imperialism were joining forces to imperil the survival of ideas like equality and liberty—Hughes wants not so much to damn America as to wake it up.  He is smart enough to know that America may, in 1938, prove to be the last best hope for freedom: he also knows that too many Americans take for granted that the battle for freedom has long ago been won.

This is a message Americans have a hard time hearing.  Even now, we still live in a country where it is considered disloyal for a politician to suggest that there may be some things that America needs to live up to.  We still live in a country where many of us think being proud of our great ideals is so precious a possession that we are unwilling to risk losing it, even if it means blinding ourselves to the truth.  Just the other day, at the school where I used to teach, a parent requested a meeting with teachers and administrators in order to complain that American history classes were teaching about injustices in America’s past—the rationale for the objection?  Essentially that, if they are taught the truth, students might stop loving America.

It makes me wonder.  Much as I am proud of many of the stories in my country’s past, I wonder if it would be so bad a thing to lose my love of it—if I would be a better man, a better citizen, if I loved less and challenged more.  Langston’s poem still lies ready to challenge us, to ask us to live up to the dream that had not been realized in 160 years when he wrote the poem, and which has lain unrealized another 75 years since he did.  He believes that the country we believe in can still rise up—that, as he says later in the poem, “out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, / The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,” we can redeem our lost opportunities and the waste we have made of our promise.  In fact, he more than believed in this idea: towards the end of the poem, he swears an oath to make that future real.  It is, I think, more than a shame that a man who had every reason to be angry at his country could be so lonely in that oath; that, while he was swearing a commitment to the country that had failed him, the powerful people who preached the American ideal largely did not bother themselves enough to make it happen.

So this is a poem that reminds me to be more aware of my surroundings—to spend less time counting my blessings as an American, and more time asking myself if the American dream has really been extended to all the people who have been promised it.  We pat ourselves on the back more than any nation I know of.  Perhaps we should spend a little less time blowing our own horn, and a little more time living out the dream.  If we manage to realize the truly inspiring ideals that we have long taken as our creed, somehow I think there will be no shortage of other people to speak up on behalf of America, land of the free.

Poetry Friday: 1934

Based on the feedback from last week’s poll, we forge ahead with American poetry.  Today’s work is, in part, a “found poem”—a poem written on the basis of (and borrowing many details and phrases from) an actual letter published in a magazine.  The letter was written by a worker in the garment industry in San Antonio in 1934, a worker named Felipe Ibarro.  The poem was then composed by a young woman named Tillie Lerner (who was later better known under her married name, Tillie Olsen).  I’m only sharing a portion of the poem here—if it grabs you, you can set about hunting it down.  Here’s the opening passages of “I Want You Women Up North to Know”:

I want you women up north to know
how those dainty children’s dresses you buy
at macy’s, wannamakers, gimbels, marshall fields,
are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh,
down in San Antonio, “where sunshine spends the winter.”

I want you women up north to see
the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill
“exquisite work, madam, exquisite pleats”
vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,
gouging the wages down,
dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,
stitching these dresses from dawn to night,
In blood, in wasting flesh.

Catalina Rodriguez, 24,
body shriveled to a child’s at twelve,
catalina rodriguez, last stages of consumption,
works for three dollars a week from dawn to midnight.
A fog of pain thickens over her skull, the parching heat
breaks over her body,
and the bright red blood embroiders the floor of her room.
White rain stitching the night, the bourgeois poet would say.
white gulls of hands, darting, veering,
white lightning, threading the clouds,
this is the exquisite dance of her hands over the cloth,
and her cough, gay, quick, staccato,
like skeleton’s bones clattering
is appropriate accompaniment for the esthetic dance
of her fingers,
and the tremolo, tremolo when the hands tremble with pain.
Three dollars a week…

There’s a lot more—more about Catalina and Maria and Ambrosa, and the rest.  I find this work amazingly powerful: powerful enough to want to sit with just these opening lines and ponder them.  The anger and the dignity in the opening address—you northern women, you shoppers, you ladies who lunch, hear the voice of the people on whose backs you are borne—is immense.  The sharpness of that catalog of department stores, the cut in the little quotation about San Antonio…these little touches are very skillfully done.  It’s amazing to me to see how openly our culture could have confronted all of this as far back as 1934.  My grandmother was in high school, and sweatshop laborers were toiling at the clothes she may have worn.  I like the way the images of the salesladies bleed into the images of the foreman and the workers themselves, all of them caught in this chain of blood, no matter how much the retail end of it may have felt insulated from the brutality of manufacture.

And the way the poem works with even such simple things as capital letters gives me pause—are maria, ambrosa, and catalina lowercase because they are objectified, reduced to less than human?  Or is it more that Tillie is rejecting the conventionality associated with proper nouns, and essentially presenting us with a poetic voice that is intentionally raw and less than perfect?

Catalina is heart-breaking, the shriveled little girl’s body at work in a factory that will kill her.  Even in the image of her slowly bleeding to death, her blood continues to “embroider” in a double metaphor that was beautiful and terrible, for me.  Everything takes on that horrific sheen—the “music” of the sewing machine and the rhythms of her hands become a dance, but not just any dance.  It is the skeleton’s dance—the Danse Macabre—for which she will get, if she is lucky, three dollars a week.  The poem is almost too much to read in one sitting, even though it is only two or three pages long.  Just that paragraph about Catalina is enough to push me over the edge.

This makes it, for me, all the more remarkable to consider the author.  Tillie Lerner Olsen wasn’t a poet by trade, as you may have caught in that aside aimed at “the bourgeois poet”.  She was a radical, a member of the American Communist Party.  She fought for workers all over the nation throughout her long life (90+ years).  She was arrested on Bloody Thursday, in the San Francisco General Strike.  She was jailed for helping packinghouse workers organize their own unions.  Armed with only an 11th grade education and the books at her public library, she became an intellectual and a writer of high acclaim, winning awards from foundations and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, teaching at Stanford and MIT, and ultimately receiving a special award from the Institute of American Arts and Letters for having essentially developed “a new form of fiction” in the writings she composed out of the realities facing the working class.  Regardless of your specific feelings about the benefits of unionization (or the concerns you may have about someone’s willingness to commit to Communism as an ideology in the 1930s), I think Tillie’s clearly a remarkable woman, and deserving of admiration in many respects.

By the time Tillie writes this, she has already fallen seriously ill with pleurisy and with tuberculosis.  Whether caught in the factories she had worked, or in the jails she had been confined to, these were the consequences of trying to live as she did.  I love that Tillie’s first published poem—this piece—is not about herself.  She had lived a remarkable life already, and would go on to do much more.  But in this piece she backs away to give someone else the center stage: she uses many of their own words, and is loyal to telling their story.

These people were real.  Frail Catalina, age 24, was a real woman.  She made clothes that our grandmothers wore—perhaps some of us, in a closet somewhere, still hang on to that handiwork as nostalgia.  To us, they may have symbolized a simple time: an era of sweetness and happiness.  I think we need to see them again, not to become paralyzed by guilt or anger, but to acknowledge that history is complicated.  To acknowledge that injustice has been done, and that our willingness to remain blind to it makes us complicit in that injustice in a real way, however small.  I don’t know what we can do for today’s Catalinas, for the workers of the world whose lives are brutal and painful in part because we like buying cheap clothing.  It’s more complicated than any one sentence bromide I can offer.  I think we owe it to Catalina, and Maria, and Ambrosa, to hear their voices, at least, and to invite them to speak more clearly to us.  We will be afraid of what they have to say, but we cannot keep hiding from it.  We should not, at least, and I hope that we won’t.

Martin Luther King and the Nobel Peace Prize

Here, on this blog that wrestles with and searches for America, I can hardly let the holiday honoring one of our greatest citizens pass without note.  Dr. King did more than maybe any other American (with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln) to publicly call this country to a true vision of itself.  He saw what we were, what we could be, and most strange of all, he believed that there was a simple (though arduous) path to be walked between the two points.  If they could see past his race, I believe the nation’s founders, brought back to life today, would acknowledge that his vision of the country was the fullest realization of their patriot dreams, and that in a very real sense some of the final battles of the American Revolution were fought on the road from Selma, and on the bus to Montgomery, and in the Birmingham jail.

Happily for my purposes, King doesn’t just connect with the “American” interest for this blog—his use of language is poetic and powerful and of real interest to anyone who wants to be serious about American writers.  Most of us know his famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, and some of us probably know passages of his final speech or his letter from jail.  I thought today I’d share an excerpt of something you may never have encountered—a portion of his acceptance speech upon having received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.  I’ll make a few comments afterwards, but mostly I just hope you read this, and remember Dr. King today.  He believed in all of us more than we have ever given reason to deserve.  He had more faith in our ability to hear the better angels of our nature than any of our leaders, before or since.  May we make him glad of that faith.

“I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today’s mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. ‘And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.’ I still believe that we shall overcome.

This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.”

It’s a powerful speech: you can read the rest of it here, if you like.  What touches me most deeply is how profoundly American it is—for all that my country has to be ashamed of in the racism that Dr. King and the civil rights movement confronted, we can also be proud that we are a country that had raised up the banners King looked to as ideals.  When he says (in his more famous speech) that his dream is “deeply rooted in the American dream”, he’s being fully honest.  He was a man who believed in the freedoms this country guarantees to its citizens (however much we break that promise).  He was a man who was convinced in part by our nation’s history that a group of people dedicated to the right cause could never be defeated, not for good.  When America’s founding documents promised him the equality, opportunity, and liberty he had been denied, he didn’t see it as a cruel joke, but rather as an inherent element at the core of the American identity, which would one day have to win out over ignorance and cruelty and injustice.  His America could no more prevent the new birth of freedom than a child can stop itself from growing into an adult—it is carved into our destiny as a people.

I’m disappointed at the places where progress remains slow, and angry that justice still lies wounded in the streets for too many people.  But the message of this day is that Dr. King was right about us.  We have come farther today than we had in 1964.  We had come farther by then than we had by 1861.  This wasn’t inevitable—it took people to work and act and risk and sometimes give up their lives.  All of them committed themselves knowing that the final victory was far off.  So it is for us.  May we work and act and risk—yes, perhaps even our safety, our very lives, when necessary—for justice.  That city of freedom may still be a ways off, but I feel like we’re getting close enough to hear them singing, and it makes me want to run these last few miles.

Thanksgiving: The most American holiday

I hope you and yours are enjoying whatever Thanksgiving festivities you engage in.  For us in our new city, Thanksgiving has been both different and the same: like any holiday, there are certain rituals surrounding Thanksgiving that provide that comfortable sense of familiarity almost no matter where you are.  As I sit to digest an excellent meal (and, like many other Americans, ask myself the annual question “why is it always the Lions and the Cowboys on Thanksgiving?”), I’m also pondering Thanksgiving as America’s holiday, and thought I’d share thoughts about it here, on this blog that attempts to make sense of my country.

I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays—unlike Independence Day (another competitor for the title), which most other countries celebrate on their own day of founding/independence/revolution, Thanksgiving as a formal annual celebration is a North American thing.  And I like that: I think it in many ways spotlights some of the things that are best about America.  It’s a holiday that reaches across all ethnicities and religions (or lack thereof).  Unlike most other days of celebration, which can alienate some group of people (large or small), it’s pretty hard to come up with anybody who will feel excluded by a national intention to feel thankful.  It is a day to acknowledge how lucky we have been—and America has certainly had its fair share of luck.  It is a day to remember with gratitude that we have been more fortunate that we strictly deserve.  As the prototypical First World nation, I’m glad that our distinctive national holiday is one that essentially asks us to admit our humility in the face of all we have to enjoy.  It’s a holiday of hospitality, the one holiday I can think of where I hear of people observing it by feeding the hungry or clothing the needy (though not enough of us do these things).  When people around the world envision the good qualities they associate with Americans, I think a lot of them are lived out today.

Yes, it’s a holiday devoted to gluttony and family argument and the glorification of materialism, too.  We can rag on Thanksgiving if we want to.  But the beautiful thing about Thanksgiving is that it’s almost impossible to observe it without in some way touching the goodness in it.  We can celebrate the 4th of July in ways that make a mockery of true love for our country.  We can celebrate Christmas in ways that totally subvert the message of that story.  But I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone on Thanksgiving who hadn’t taken at least 30 seconds that day to say they were grateful for something.  Thirty seconds isn’t much, but it’s no less beautiful, being brief.

The other thing I want to mention about this marvelously American holiday is that I think we need to remember more of where it comes from.  No, not the “Pilgrims”—they get more than their fair share of air time (and the implicit anti-Native American racism in their story is the only off-note in an otherwise great holiday for me).  They deserve to be thought of, of course—they didn’t invent the idea of a day of thanksgiving, but we’re certainly inspired by them in some ways today.  If you haven’t read Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates (and you should!  it’s a very brief and easy read, and you’ll be surprised how much you learn, both unexpectedly good and unexpectedly unwelcome, about the Puritans), I don’t think I can adequately summarize it here.  Suffice it to say we should remember them with some gratitude, as well as with a determination not to commit the same mistakes.  But they’re not really where we get our national days of thanksgiving.

The national Thanksgiving begins sporadically when our early Presidents (Washington, Adams, Madison, etc.) declared them.  They weren’t always every year.  There had to be something to be thankful for.  I wish, in some ways, it was still like that.  That Thanksgiving would happen only because we really said to ourselves “Whoa! You know, we’re really grateful for X this year, and we should take a day and acknowledge it!”  But in other ways I’m glad it’s every year, like clockwork, because that too is an acknowledgment.  It acknowledges that no matter how bad the year, we have much to be grateful for.  We have so many people to thank in our lives on a daily basis, spending one day out of 365 to be thankful is almost embarrassingly small as a gesture, in truth.  If there was some way to balance both ideas—the certainty that we’d be thankful with the spontaneity of the bold and surprising proclamation of Thanksgiving—I’d be a fan.

When did we make the shift?  What great year, what year of Jubilee, was so auspicious in America’s history that from that year forward we have observed Thanksgiving every year?  1863.  The mid-point of the Civil War, a year in which thousands upon thousands were killed and maimed, and in which the country remained broken, shattered in two pieces.  From our vantage point we know 1863 was the turning point in the war, but if you look at the newspapers from November 1863, you won’t see it.  They still looked for victory, and had some cause for optimism, but also many reasons to doubt.  But in the midst of all that death and uncertainty, Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation is a work of remarkable hope.  If he had skipped that year, no one would have been shocked.  Plenty of years had been skipped in the country’s history to that point, including the year previous.  So why did 1863 mark a change?

I have no idea.  But I’d like to think this.  I’d like to think it’s because 1863 was the year of the Emancipation Proclamation.  I’d like to think it’s because 1863 was the year of the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln hailed the new birth of freedom.  I’d like to think it’s because Lincoln knew that the war was not a mindless bloodbath—that the valiant sacrifices made by American soldiers were forging a new country in their blood.  The “last measure of devotion” was the final ingredient needed to move the United States one vital step closer to realizing the promise of the Declaration—that all are truly equal from their birth, and that this country is sincerely and vitally dedicated to that confident belief.  You’ll notice from his words that Lincoln does not regret the war.  He is thankful that peace has been preserved in every way with every nation and among all people, with the important exception of the military conflict.  Thanksgiving isn’t just a day to be thankful for the easy times in our lives.  It’s a day that offers up thanks for the crucibles in which we are refined.  It’s a day where we can express gratitude that we are moving towards something greater, and that even some of our most painful passages are seeing us through to something better.

So today, I hope we can carry a little of that around with us—the knowledge of what it means to be a part of this country that annually pauses for the sake of gratefulness, for the sake of the words “thank you”.  Somewhere amid the food and the football and the frantic shopping outings, let’s be thankful not just for what happens on a personal scale, but also for the strides we have made and will make as a country striving for an ideal of justice.  And then let’s get back out there Monday and keep our feet moving in the right direction.

Poetry Friday: Graham Isaac and Prohibition

One of the nice things about working with the poetry written by friends is that, rather than picking a topic I think is significant, now I’m doing more reacting to what I’m handed.  I like that kind of constraint—the difference between preaching a sermon based on whatever verses you think are important, and preaching a sermon based on a fixed text that you now have to reflect on even if you would never have chosen it willingly.  I know that analogy won’t work for a lot of people but I couldn’t think of a better one.  Anyway, Graham Isaac—whose poetic talent is exceeded only by his talent for friendship—gave me a few options to consider, and one of them is a poem about Prohibition.  Given that A) this is the week that a new documentary has come out on the Prohibition era, and B) 1932, the year of my current novel, is the last year before the Constitution is re-amended to end the policy of Prohibition, so the America I’m reaching out to is as “dry” as it was going to be, in some respects, I thought it would be worth considering.  So here is a poem by Graham Isaac entitled “Extra Wide Bathtubs”:

At night he dreams of prohibition,
streets clean and whispering after 11pm,
of people leaving theaters in unstained gowns
quietly discussing directorial technique.
Of grocery stores with unlimited supplies of juice
of never finding beer cans on his running trails.

He wants it illegal like prostitution is illegal.
Full-bodied whores in saloon dresses taking
virgins into candle-lit rooms; powerful madams
with curly black hair, lilting accents and huge eyes
charming sheriffs and legislators into
delayed investigations.

Nobody wants that, his wife tells him, drinking
coffee in a slim red turtleneck. Her brother’s
vineyard does so much business they’re opening
another one. The wine, even he has to admit,
is delicious.

At night he dreams of the vineyard, of tousle-haired
youths in rolled up trousers dancing in huge vats of grapes.
Of muscled young couples swept up in each others arms.

The roads are rich with decaying fruit-rinds,
plastic juice bottles that take forever to break down,
crowds passing on crosswalks to all their places,

he imagines himself and two other men comparing
bootlegged rye, practices his speakeasy knock, a
kerosene-lit room full of scholars and pirates,
a soul-sad but drink-happy piano player rolling
notes off his fingers like it were just that easy.

What strikes me about Graham’s poem most of all is that, in much of it, he captures that strangely ambivalent attitude some people seem to have about illegal and illicit substances: that is, that the romance of it being illegal is so theoretically exciting that they really would like prohibition so they can enjoy it more.  And if you think I’m inventing a stance, trust me, I read enough political blogs to have seen a number of people object to the legalization of marijuana (and other substances) not because they wish people wouldn’t use them, but specifically because they think drug culture is more “fun” or “counterculture” or “exclusive” by being marginalized as criminal.

There’s something very sensuous about much of the poem, like the protagonist (the man who wants prohibition) is dealing with some pretty serious repression.  Maybe I’m taking this too far, but even his wife’s choice of outfit—a turtleneck—seems to emphasize how much he feels cut off from the sort of hedonist pleasures he’d like to pursue.  And yet it’s a very bounded kind of pleasure.  He wants drinking (and sex) to be in certain places, expressed in certain ways.  He wants both the bonhomie of the speakeasy and to go to public gatherings that aren’t tainted by the painfully common scent of booze on people’s breath.

So what is this—Puritanism?  Not really.  But hardly an exuberant Epicurean attitude either.  Really, the piece feels simply very American to me: in so many ways, we are a people like to criminalize and denigrate the things we enjoy doing.  We look down our noses at the kind of behavior we secretly engage in.  This runs from pot-smoking DAs to loudly homophobic closeted homosexuals to publicly prudish porn fiends.  This is human, sure.  But I have a hard time looking out into the world and finding any society that’s been quite as consistent as we have at creating public rules (written and unwritten) that are so at odds with our private desires.

And in case it’s not clear, I’m not arguing in favor of the Bacchanalia.  If you know me in real life, I figure that’s not hard to believe.  I have my concerns about the “war on drugs”, and my antipathy toward hypocrisy, but it doesn’t mean I think Americans should just all relax and decide we shouldn’t have any public mores.  But I think we let most of our feelings and actions go too unexamined.  I think we would be a healthier country if we let a little more sunlight into our dark secrets, and if we admitted that we have a little problem in the way we romanticize danger and criminality while officially abhorring them.

This moved a bit further from the text of the poem than I normally do, but I liked that it pushed me there and I hope my thinking out loud (metaphorically speaking) did something to engage you with the poem.  I’ll say this—I think it slips at just a couple of moments.  I think the next-to-last stanza (and even the one before it) lose the thread for me a bit…I can’t quite tell why we get the images we do, presented as they are, and if there’s something that ties them into the poem’s larger theme it’s just eluding me.  And in some ways the very end of the poem is just a little too abrupt for me.  I want some distance from the speakeasy at the very end….just a step backwards.  But I’m not sure if that feeling is spot on, and I’m hopeful that some of you will comment, either on the topics I raised or on my notes about the poem.  And even if not, I hope it’s nice to start your weekend with poetry: it certainly brightens my mood.