Divorce, Remarriage, Childhood Memories, Loss

Recently, our school announced that poet Mark Cox would be added to its “Wall of Fame.”  To think that an award-winning poet (Cox won the Whiting Award and the Pushcart Prize) walked the halls of our campus (okay—we’ve built a new facility since his days in high school) is pretty amazing.  I thought that I should read some of Cox’s poetry, so I picked up his 1998 collection, Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone.

I know that poetry isn’t everyone’s idea of pleasure reading, so let me just share a few passages that I marked while I was reading.

from “Get Me Again”

And don’t we all know what’s going to happen?
And aren’t we surprised when it does?

from “Like a Simile”
(which is written as line after line of simile)

Fell into bed like a tree
slept like boiling water
got up from bed like a camel
and showered like a tin roof…

from “Still Life with Motion”

The monoliths of our time are billboards,
our main streets—thruways.
We move and move,
we rent U-Hauls and our Ryders,
we shift and pack and lift,
we dolly, we cart, and still
the limp duffle bags of despair
the Samsonite pullmans of delusion
arrive before us, remain with us.

from “A Stone”

There is too much weight to carry and not
go down from futures we could not have imagined into
pasts we didn’t really live.

from “Grain”
(in which the author imagines his death
and the difficulty of leaving his wife)

I will not want to leave my shirts emptied
over the backs of chairs,
I will not want to leave my toothbrush
leaning dry against yours,
I will have to be taken from you, love,
carried off by strong men
whose fathers sowed the grain fields around me,
it will take three of them, love,
I will remain so heavy with need for you…

Cox’s poetry is thick, dense, literary.  If you make the effort, though, you’ll discover some nuggets like those above.  If you like poetry that’s a little more accessible, try Ted Kooser’s excellent Delights and Shadows or Billy Collins’s Sailing Alone Around the Room.  (Both Kooser and Collins are former U.S. poets laureate.)

 

Beauty Too Rich…For Earth Too Dear

Emily:  Do any human beings ever realize life
while they live it?—every, every minute?

Stage Manager:  No. The saints and poets,
maybe—they do some.

Our Town, Thornton Wilder

Marilynne Robinson must be a saint or a poet, then!  Her novel Gilead (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005) is one of the most beautiful, lyrical, breath-taking, read-slowly-so-that-you-appreciate-everything books that I have read in a long time.

John Ames is a seventy-six-year-old minister; he is the son of a minister and the grandson of a minister.  He has lived and worked in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, for his entire life.  He remembers stories about his rabble-rousing grandfather (who fought in the Civil War), and he has witnessed two World Wars himself.  It is now 1956, and Ames realizes that he has few years remaining on this earth.  Knowing that he will never see his young son (who is only seven) grow to adulthood, Ames decides to write the boy a letter.  That letter—in which Ames explains himself and his life to the man he imagines his son will become—forms the entire text of the novel.

This is a quiet book.  Ames recalls his childhood in the small town of Gilead, a significant journey with his father to Kansas to find the grave of his eccentric grandfather (who disappeared without explanation one night), a church destroyed after being struck by lightning, the brother who rebelled against his father’s faith, the loss of his first wife, the unexpected love of his second wife (who is several decades younger than Ames), the incredible daily gift that is his young son, his lifelong friendship with another local minister (“Old Boughton”), and the story of Boughton’s prodigal son.

Through all this, Ames revels in the wonders and miracles of everyday life.  As Thornton Wilder does in his classic drama Our Town, Robinson captures the joy and ache of a life that does not last long.  Let me leave you with a taste:

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life.  And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light.  But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than [that] seems to imply.  Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.  You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.  Only, who could have the courage to see it?

 

A Teen’s Dark Tale

I think I’m one of the last people on the planet to read Crank, a young adult novel by Ellen Hopkins.  Some of my students were talking about it the other day, it was one of the “top ten” books checked out of our school library last year, and another teacher in my department said that it keeps “disappearing” from her bookshelf.  So…I decided that I should check it out.

The book (which is based on events that happened with the author’s daughter) tells the story of a 17-year-old girl who becomes involved with meth.  At the beginning of the story, Kristina is a good daughter and a high-achieving student.  When she spends a few weeks over the summer with her father (and meets an attractive but troubled boy), she tries crank—“the monster”—for the first time.  Kristina—who starts referring to herself as “Bree,” her more adventurous, more flirtatious, less responsible alter-ego—quickly descends into a drug-fueled world that she cannot control.  She rebels against her parents, drops her best friends, sleepwalks through school, and does whatever she needs to do in order to score drugs.

In many ways, this book is a Go Ask Alice for a new generation.  Crank is written as a series of poems, making this book (at 544 pages) a very quick read.  (And for lovers of this book, Hopkins has recently published Glass, a sequel to Crank.)

 

Not Enough to Praise

Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.
—Doubt, John Patrick Shanley

I picked up In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions without Becoming a Fanatic (by Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld) after I heard an interview with one of the authors on NPR a month or so ago.  I was also intrigued by the book’s title, which caused me to think of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Doubt.  (By the way, don’t judge the play by its movie; the stage play is far superior!)

The book provides an explanation of how the modern world has led to the development of plurality, fundamentalism, and (conversely) relativism.  The first five chapters of the text—which develop this explanation—are an interesting study in history, sociology, and philosophy.  By the time the authors reach the last two chapters, in which they finally address the importance of doubt, the book feels like it has run out of steam.  Despite its interesting and promising title, the book never does adequately discuss the value of doubt (or the way in which the reader can “have convictions without becoming a fanatic”).

In Praise of Doubt is a thin book, it has some thought-provoking ideas, and I’m not sorry that I read it.  If the title more aptly represented the content, though, I’m not sure that I would have picked it up in the first place.