THE SKID MARKS

Let's get basic before getting bombastic. In the world of poetry, what is rant?

Martin Espada said usually rant is a "put down--as in, oh, that's a rant." Then Espada added a string of descriptors: polemic, rhetoric, didactic, and the ultimate current day insult (if you are a poet) sentimental. To add more wallop to this punch, he said the rant was about "avoidance of content." Continuing, he said the tone of the rant is angry and barely controlled; sometimes it is out of control. Espada's definition of rant (maybe his definition is a rant) includes: strong rhythm, musical qualities, direct and open expression, explicit language, urgency, sometimes lacking a message, sometimes a call to action, sometimes a poem of persuasion.

In her opening remarks, Alicia Ostriker said, "political poets are often accused of preaching to the choir, but that I try to keep in mind what Blake says: 'When I tell any Truth, it is not to convince those who do not know it but to encourage those who do.' All of us tend to fall into discouragement and need all the help we can get to stay hopeful." Ostriker emphasized that the rant is not an exchange of ideas. The rant is a way to find community and overcome loneliness.

Colorado Sky said, "Rants are pathetic. They have to be." He maintained nevertheless that a rant, a form of emotional poetry, must have an ethical foundation. From the "furnace of emotion comes the anvil of the moment."

Sky pointed to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Here are the first three stanzas of section 1 of Whitman's seminal poem that changed the landscape of American poetry.

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, 
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their 
parents the same, 
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, 
Hoping to cease not till death.

Sky's challenge to the rant writer is "What kind of skid mark are you going to leave on the way out?" After all, he said, "It is not who you are but what you do that will be remembered." Sky also spoke about rants containing objection and affirmation. Here the Dresser began thinking about call and response used in an evangelistic church that goes something like this.

The Preacher: You are all sinners. The Congregation: Amen.
The Preacher: You disrespect your father. The Congregation: Amen.
The Preacher: You patronize your mother. The Congregation: Amen.
The Preacher: Now is the time to confess your sins. The Congregation: Hallelujah!

Is this an exchange of ideas? No, but it is way to find community as Ostriker suggested.

FREE DEATH AND HAIKUS

Sky also said he likes when a rant sneaks up on you, such that you don't know the poem is a rant until you are well along in reading it. He referred to William Blake and "Transverse City," a rock song by Warren Zevon. Here are the first two stanzas of Zevon's offbeat song.

Told my little Pollyanna
there's a place for you and me
we'll go down to Transverse City
life is cheap and death is free

Past the condensation silos
past the all-night trauma stand
we'll be there before tomorrow
Pollyanna, take my hand.

He said not all rants are loud and that they can be subtle. Even short. To prove his point, he offered his haiku.

History repeats
Itself. It has to
because people
don't listen.

RANTS OF HELL AND CURSE

Espada said political poets are subversives and it is their job to subvert language. He said Pablo Neruda does this in his poem "General Franco in Hell." Espada said this poem is grounded in images and all five senses. The poem is dreamlike and immediate and it avoids the pitfall of vagueness and generalities (the characteristics of a poorly written rant). Here's the first stanza of that potent and ranting poem.

Evil one, neither fire nor hot vinegar
in a nest of volcanic witches, nor devouring ice,
nor the putrid turtle that barking and weeping
with the voice of dead woman scratches your belly
seeking a wedding ring and the toy of a slaughtered child,
will be for you anything but a dark demolished door.

Read the poem in full (the English translation is by Richard Schaaf) set with images on the blog Stregoneria.

In this post, the Dresser will look at Kim Robert's walking tour "The 'Harlem' Renaissance in Washington;" the panel discussion by Grace Cavalieri, Brian De Shazor, and Jennifer King on preserving poetic history; a partial glimpse at Francesco Levato's film festival selections, and photos from various readings.

LOOKING FOR LANGSTON

At 9 am in the morning, about 20 people assembled at the corner of 14th and U Streets Northwest
to go on a fourteen-stop tour of Kim Roberts' "'Harlem' Renaissance in Washington." Poet and poetry entrepreneur Kim Roberts has developed a series of DC walking tours and is a sought after resource guide. For example, the DC Humanities asked Roberts to develop a Zora Neale Hurston walking tour to coincide with the 2007 Big Read, a nationwide reading project promoting in 2007 Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Many of the stops along the Hurston tour coincide with the Harlem Renaissance in DC tour. The Dresser will not attempt to recreate the tour here, but rather will provide some photos with a bit of text to give you the flavor of what was seen and heard. One book to put on your reading list to help you understand the importance of the artists who lived and worked in DC, before they went to New York and became associated with the Harlem Renaissance is Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro.

The Dresser was excited to learn that The Saturday Nighters Club, a literary salon hosted by poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, happened at 1461 S Street NW. (See the blue building pictured below.) This is the street that the Dresser worked out page layout details of many Word Works books with book design artist Janice Olson who once lived at 1404 S. Poets who came to Johnson's house included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, May Miller Sullivan, Jesse Redmon Fauset.

Fauset who rented a house at 1812 13th Street Northwest, was a teacher of French and Latin at M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School), and subsequently, the literary editor of The Crisis, the NAACP magazine. Fauset, known for her coming-of-age novel Plum Bun and touted as the most prolific woman writer of the Harlem Renaissance, served as a mentor to many of the other Harlem Renaissance writers.

The Whitelaw Hotel at 13th and T Streets Northwest was DC's only first-class hotel and apartment house for African American visitors and residents for many years. Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Joe Louis are among those icons who stayed or lived in this building.

Other stops on the tour that excited the Dresser were the Richard Bruce Nugent House--Nugent was the first person to publish African American gay fiction; Duke Ellington's house where he was raised and started his first two bands; the Thurgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage--the old 12th St Y, former residence of Langston Hughes, and Split This Rock venue (Crip Poetry was held inside this building); and the True Reformer's Hall (12th & U Streets NW)--site of Duke Ellington's first paid, professional gig.

Two of three pianos in the Shaw Heritage Room of Thurgood Marshall Center

The Dresser dips her hat low to Kim Roberts for another Split This Rock hurrah to the body (and mind). The Dresser who spends way too much time at her computer keyboard loved talking about poets in a stroll around the streets of DC!

INTO THE ARCHIVAL BOXES: RADIO & UNIVERSITY

Grace Cavalieri organized the panel "Vaulting History" that brought together archivists Brian De Shazor, Director of Pacifica Radio Programs, and Jennifer King of George Washington University's Special Collections.

Cavalieri, who was a founding staff of WPFW-FM in Washington, DC and who created and continues to produce "The Poet and the Poem,"
radio shows that are now hosted from the Library of Congress but for over twenty years aired on WPFW-FM, has been instrumental in encouraging poets to become part of the Washington Writer's Archive in the GWU Special Collections by donating their journals, books, and memorabilia to this expanding collection. The Dresser notes here that poet and GWU professor David McAleavey was instrumental in establishing the GWU Washington Writer's Archive in 1986.

Cavalieri deferred to poet and statesman Archibald MacLeish to understand the early relationship between radio and poetry. MacLeish said, "Poetry is an art without audience while radio is an audience without art." King at GWU has the entire series of Cavalieri's "The Poet and the Poem" which began in 1976 and they are available to the public. Cavalieri's recordings range from little known local poets who called into the radio program while it was on the air to internationally known poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka.

De Shazor, who works from the founding Pacifica Radio offices in North Hollywood, California, brought segments from his show "From the Vault" that highlighted historic recordings made at KPFA-FM. Pacifica archives contain rare recordings from such people as Coretta King speaking after her husband the Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated. Audience members were invited to search the Pacifica archives online.

POETRY IN MOTION: MEETING THE UNEXPECTED

The Dresser tends not to be a night owl. She was born early in the morning and her biorhythms tend toward sun-is-up-get-up. However, she met Francesco Levato just after the walking tour with Kim Roberts and he said he was about to attend his first Split This Rock event, that he had been delayed by snow in leaving Chicago where he is Executive Director of The Poetry Center of Chicago. Therefore, the Dresser decided if he took all that trouble to get to DC to show some of his films and films by other people that she should make a reasonable effort to attend that event. And besides, after she heard Dennis Brutus talk about being in prison splitting rocks, she was all keyed up anyway so she and a bunch of poets took the subway back to the Langston Room at Busboys and Poets.

An unrelated poet coming many poets after the child poet delivered this line, "I dream of a child who will ask, 'Mother, what was war?'"

Dennis Brutus stood with the crowd listening intently. Later, in a filmed interview he said he hoped to see poets influencing others with emotional responses to the war.


































Here are images from that closing Split This Rock ceremony.

Brutus, who won the Langston Hughes Award in 1987 and was the first non-African American to receive that award, brought home what the Split This Rock Festival title means in its most brutal human experience.
Brutus did this by describing his years on Robben Island where he was imprisoned along with Nelson Mandela. In this maximum-security prison, he was forced to split rocks until the rocks became gravel. His hands became a mass of blisters on top of blisters but he said he was spared the harder work of digging out rocks from the limestone quarry (Mandela was not) because Brutus who had been shot by South African secret police had suffered a "through and through wound" and was not strong enough for the quarry work.

From the podium, Brutus suggested that what Americans need to do is rise above the certainty of the proverbial "Death and Taxes" credo that we live by. How? By not paying our taxes to fund the war in Iraq. He urged Americans to not be complicit in supporting atrocities done in the name of all Americans. The Dresser who is native of the Washington, DC area doubts that most of us are strong enough to quarry the rocks of political activism that would involve going to prison because we will not support this unjust war. However, what Brutus has said has moved the Dresser, who believes in universal truths, peace and social justice, to go down to the White House today and join Sarah Browning to express poetically a protest against the five years of American involvement in an unjust war waged against the people of Iraq.

What Sarah Browning and her army of volunteers has achieved with Split This Rock is monumental on all levels. Not only did the Festival provide a platform of learning and ways to engage in social action, but it was also the best administered program that the Dresser has ever take part in. No one lost a beat. Some people may not have been able to show up for key speaking appointments and activities might not have happened right on time, but there was always a plan b and plan c to fill in the gaps. Participants like the Dresser were much appreciative that events didn't always start on time because it allowed stragglers to get there without missing anything or prompt ones to talk to the participants waiting who themselves were as interesting as the featured speakers. Hats off to Sarah (author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden) who was awarded a bottle of whiskey and bouquet of flowers at the Saturday night reading.

[Stay tuned for a larger report on Split this Rock that will include reviews of Kim Robert's walking tour "The 'Harlem' Renaissance in Washington;" the panel discussion by Jose Gouveia, Martin Espada, Alicia Ostriker, and Colorado T. Sky on "Poetry, Politics, and the Rant;" the panel discussion by Grace Cavalieri, Brian De Shazor, and Jennifer King on preserving poetic history; and a partial glimpse at Francesco Levato's film festival selections.]

YOGA AND POETRY

Poets belong to the fringe--American poets are outsiders looking in, both in at themselves and in on a culture that does not value their writerly talents. In "Yogic Path to Poetry and Conscious Action," Jeff Davis asked, "What are poets for in a destitute time and what does yoga have to do with this?"

Since 1972, the Dresser has been practicing either Hatha or Anusara Yoga and has discovered through this workshop that yoga has always been her frame for writing poetry. Jeff Davis made her see the intersections between yoga and poetry, something she was not consciously aware of. Here are some of the ideas and comments made by the three yogi poets.

From Jeff Davis,
--Poetry and yoga are the practice of the art of living, which involves the intention to live consciously.
--Yoga is a mode of activism. The Dresser may be extrapolating a bit large but she believes that Davis is also applying this to poetry. Certainly Poets Against the War as a collective is encouraging activist or politically charged poetry.
--Yoga is about expansion and Davis said without getting around to explaining this that yoga alters consciousness. The Dresser assumes that Davis was speaking about awareness and what yogis typically call mindfulness. If a poet works deeply in understanding the mysteries that surround us all, then poetry expands the poet's understanding of the world and probably becomes more aware.
--Change arises from intention and not coercion. Here the Dresser understands one must choose to change and this is related to how we approach living. For the Dresser, living mindfully involves the pursuit of poetry, which constantly explores change and adjustments.

From Kazim Ali
--We are disconnected from our bodies.
--We need to find peace in the body.

From Susan Brennan
--Having a body is difficult and heartbreaking.
--Life is constantly putting us in one difficult position after another.
--Are we willing to fight for imagination?
--In the life of a poet, I liked to be alone but in a yoga community I learned to share the experience of searching for higher truths with others. This experience is called satsang. Split This Rock is a satsang. If you create satsang, you create a living organism.
--Poetry is the honey of divinity.

CRIP POETRY

After the Dresser became a bonafide mother (as opposed to the third parent in her natal family because she was the oldest of six children), she developed the belief that things must have a place in one's household such that she could walk around her house with her eyes closed and find anything she needs. Perhaps deep down, the Dresser believes one day she will not be able to see.

Disability culture is coming into its own. Kathi Wolfe

said people who have disabilities need to "claim our space where our voices have not been heard. We need to stare back at those who stare at us." Wolfe also said it was time to neutralize epithets against those with disabilities, such that lesbians and gays now use the word queer and Wolfe uses the word crip. However, Wolfe also said that it was time to raise awareness about insensitive use of metaphors bandied about by writers who have no disabilities. For example, she, as a person with low vision, was tired of hearing about her "world of darkness."

Stephen Kuusisto, who learned braille at the age of 39 because his mother refused to acknowledge his blindness, said he does not believe in disability poetry.
He tells his students, "dare to be angry and put that anger on the page." What Kuusisto is angry about involves politicians appropriating stories of disability for their own political ends. For example, recently president Bush spoke about the soldier William Gibson who despite having his leg blown off in Iraq, asked to go back to the front and continue his career. Simplistically Bush stated that with people like that, the enemy can never win. In a post to Planet of the Blind (It's Not as Dark as You Think), Kuusisto said "If disability can be used as a heroic metaphor for overcoming or fighting the odds, does it follow that "not talking" about the majority of disability experiences faced by our soldiers means their stories are insufficiently symbolic?"

Poet Sarah Browning with the support of the DC Poets Against the War, Institute for Policy Studies, Busboys and Poets, and Sol & Soul has pulled out all the stops to bring poetry in protest against the war in Iraq to Washington, DC. This is the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq and Browning intends to make it meaningful beyond those who typically come out to protest.

Where did Browning get the name of the Festival? From the poem "Big Buddy" by Langston Hughes:

Don't you hear this hammer ring?
I'm gonna split this rock
And split it wide!
When I split this rock,
Stand by my side.
- Langston Hughes

The Dresser attended the 2nd event of the first day and this was a reading featuring: Martin Espada, E. Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye and Alix Olson.

Highlights from the reading:

From Sarah Browning: "We come together to give hope. Ethelbert Miller said, "not with our dirges but our jubilees.'" Absent from the conference due to illness are Sam Hamill and Sharon Olds.

Adrienne Rich sent a new poem entitled "Emergency Clinic" that was read by festival organizer Melissa Tuckey.

From Martin Espada who wondered about a chair standing next to the speaker's podium: "This chair is for the person who should be here to hear the truth--Dick Cheney's chair!"

From Ethelbert Miller: "The sickness of war surrounds us. Do we want to be well in 2008? Let us proclaim the wellness of peace!"

From Naomi Shihab Nye: two poems that packed big wallops--Letters our Pres won't be sending and a poem about an old Muslim woman who spoke no English who got stranded in an airport and broke down in a crying fit. Nye came to her rescue and pretty soon everyone at that gate was eating the old woman's cookies. Why can't the world be like this all the time? Nye asked.

From Alix Olson, performance poet--a breaking up with my country poem.

A view of the Split This Rock Audience including poet Alicia Ostriker.

THE BRAINCHILD

Rockwell's librarian, known as Lib, is a computer providing a virtual reality library and under development by a group of computer engineers at a firm named InfoPower or IP for short. The project is the brainchild of a young Korean-born engineer named Kim Lee but who has assimilated to American culture. The story is told by an IP engineer named Keith Robertson who the Dresser suspects loosely represents Ted Rockwell. Ted Rockwell, a touted engineer and nuclear power expert, wrote this book based on passionate discussions he had with his late son Bob, a cultural anthropologist, about the rise of the Information Age, virtual realities, and 3-D.

Once a reader gets past book jacket superlatives like "magnificently illustrated by Thomas Chalkley" (are the illustrations really necessary? Maybe this is the only way to get people who don't read much to open this book), introductory scenes where dialogue does not flow naturally, and old slang like "This drove some of the theoretickers wiggy," he or she will most likely join the Dresser in appreciating how Rockwell weaves together a story that incorporates science, technology, and paranormal phenomena. For example, the Dresser loved the scene where a mysteriously dark psychic, "the seventh son of the son of a universally feared gypsy sorcerer," tries to exorcise what ails Lib (what ails Lib is the main thread of this novel) and manages to fell Keith Robertson in a hypnotic trance and to strew the room where Lib "lives" with a stinking mass of herbs and melted candle wax.

THE PEDOGOGY

As Rockwell juggles the human stories of the engineers working on how to fix Lib (is it industrial sabotage by IP competitors?), he slips in a variety of interesting information. For example he gets the IP uber boss nicknamed Murph to expound on Denis Diderot who in 1775 wrote, "the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from direct study of the whole universe."

Did you want to know something about random number generators, the philosophy of Christian Scientists, or geomagnetic interference with ESP performance? Have a look at Scene 14: "Sprindrift and the New World Order" starting on page 75. Just reading the titles of the scenes listed in the table of contents is enough to give the reader a thumbnail sketch of where Rockwell is going with the story. Ending scenes 27, 28, and 29 deal with lobotomy, zombie, and awakenings.

THE WASHINGTONIA

Another aspect of Rockwell's tutorial approach is his offerings of Washingtoniana. For example, Rockwell sets one of his scenes at the venerable Cosmos Club where he accurately describes every detail about what surrounds the old French Renaissance mansion that houses the club and also talks about the hidden entrance to its off street parking. Then he talks about the hot popovers served daily in the club's dining room. The Dresser who occasionally is a luncheon guest at the Cosmos Club thinks that Rockwell creates a holographic experience--the reader could walk into this scene through Rockwell's description and accurately experience the Cosmos Club.

Other sign posts of the Washington, DC area include mentions of George Washington University professor and author Deborah Tanen, Beltway Bandits (the technical contractors located on interstate route 270), and (the Dresser makes a conjecture here) the Spiritualist Church mentioned by Rockwell that is headed by his fictitious psychic Anne Winfield might, in fact, be modeled after the Falls Church, Virginia, Center for Spiritual Enlightenment which was founded by the world renown psychic Anne Gehman. Oh, yes, there are a lot of surprising goodies packed into The Virtual Librarian.

ASHES, ASHES, WE ALL FALL

Except on February 5, 2008, at the Clarice Center for the Performing Arts (College Park, MD), the Dresser saw Timberlake Wertenbaker's musicalized play The Ash Girl and now has a new view of Cinderella. For starters, her stepsisters (played by Kelly McGuigan and Kate Wolfe) are annoying, but they want to study science and nature and not to be bothered about going to the ball. Their alcoholic mother (played by Sarah Shook looking like a Saturday Night Live version of Goldie Hawn), who has been abandoned by Ashie's father, has problems with money and makes lots of bad decisions, including the eventual mutilation of her daughters' feet.


Photo by: Stan Barouh
But Ashie (Liz Brown) is depressed and hides in the ashes, when she emerges (and this is scary), she tells the audience, "Ashes are warm. In the ashes, no one sees you. Ashes are safe. I will stay in these ashes, melt into them." Wow, is she ever depressed! What we find out much later is that her father has incestuous feelings for his daughter so he left home to battle his demons.

Hold on, the demons (also known as the Seven Deadly Sins plus one) have bodily forms and go by the names: Angerbird, Slothworm, Pridefly, Envysnake, Greedmonkey, Lust, Gluttontoad, and Sadness. And is Ash Girl friendless? No. She has eight friends to balance out the eight demons (Sadness is not considered by the Seven Deadlies to be one of them). Ashie's friends are Boymouse, Girlmouse, Otter, Owl, Fairy in the Mirror, and three spider friends. Finally, the prince (Andrew Blau) is a stranger in a strange land. He has been forced to flee his country (possibly India) because of a political situation that has felled his father. His mother (Maya Jackson) wants him to marry a local girl and assimilate, but he thinks his neighbors are all too white.

DRAMA THROUGH MOVEMENT AND COLOR

What the Dresser particularly loved about this production was the stylized movements of the Deadlies and Ashie's friends. As the audience got seated, Owl (played by David Olson) was on stage presiding. He squatted and rose in his owlness. The Dresser found his presence and performance as engaging as any professional street mime she has encountered in San Francisco, California, or Florence, Italy. Angerbird (played by Aaron Bliden) dressed in punk laced up boots and coifed with a Mohawk moved quirkily. His model seemed to be a teenage boy who is awkward and unable to control himself. The Dresser found it hard to take her eyes off this gangly creature until Pridefly (Zachary Fernebok) inserted himself into the action. While Angerbird was quirky, Pridefly was jerky--even in his speech.

Director Leslie Felbain has made Wertenbaker's play, which received its world premiere in 2000, a riot of movement and color. Just as she allowed in her production of The Green Bird, Felbain encouraged the actors in The Ash Girl to speak to the audience before the show started officially and during the intermission. In the program playbill, the Dresser found a handsomely printed card inviting "all the Daughters of the House to the palace of Princess Zehra" for a ball in honor of her son Prince Amir. This eye-catching invitation became one of the talking points for the cast as they made their visits to individual audience members. Did you ever want to be in play? Felbain gave the audience their chance to participate.

The costume design team headed by Ivania Stack produced enviable wearing apparel for those dressed as humans, but even the creatures wore attractive and colorful vestments. The staging was cleverly tiered and the backdrop suggested a surreal dark forest. The scene where Fairy in the Mirror (Amanda Elkins) exerts her magic was delightful because things didn't always present as expected. The Fairy allowed Ashie's animal friends to be what they want to be and so one of them was changed into a huge dragon while the other transformed to a horse wearing pink tutus.

Photo by: Stan Barouh

Original music written by Colleen Harris (she is also the music director for this production) was featured in this production. A cellist and percussionist sat on stage and played. Some of Harris' pleasing compositions sounded like Renaissance songs. In the palace ball scene, ballroom dancing mixed with a little unpolished ballet took place. Since the Dresser had not expected more than ballroom choreography, she wasn't particularly bothered by the balletic lifts that were clearly not within these dancer's abilities, but her seatmate who teaches dance cringed.

INTO THE LAND OF LIVERPUDLIANS

The story begins as the poet in the presence of her mother tries to make sense of where her maternal parent came from and how that legacy informs the poet's life. In the following excerpts from the opening poem of the book, the poet notes the communication differences and struggles with something that is lost between the mother and daughter. Has the mother lost her mind? Has the mother died? The Dresser is not sure.

REMEMBERING MY MOTHER'S CHILDHOOD

When she says stove she means fireplace,
a great soot-blackened maw. When I say
Liverpool I mean an unreal city, purified
of reeking detail like a fairy tale

...................... ... handed down. A girl
might safely climb into the leaping
flames, they are so rinsed and mythical...

.................................. ...I cannot
even place the telling--whether
in a kitchen...daughter and mother

crying over onions...
...My memories of her memories
are too reduced. I can only give them
to the fire, piece by broken piece.

...Here is the scuff, bang of stout shoes...

........................................Someone's tenor
cry, the smell of wool that never dries.
I invent this blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world
because it invented me, and lies

are my birthright. Some history may
be true. Even mine. She was born.
The sun was warm, and the life it made
is remembered by the coal as it burns.

A BIRTHRIGHT OF LIES

"Poem Without a Landscape," the second poem of Scholarship Girl establishes that the poet is traveling to discover her connection to this world. The journey proceeds from Virginia to New Jersey to Liverpool without settling. By the last stanza of the poem, questions arise about who is the poet's father and echoes back the line in the first poem "lies /are my birthright."

from POEM WITHOUT A LANDSCAPE
...
My fathers are sailors--the fathers on paper.
Who knows what other men swam those private beaches
while the women waited one year, maybe two?
My mother sailed, too. The land is not my mother.
It minds its own business, and welcome to it.
You can see the hiss brooding on their own blues.
I'll be my green world--it can seethe inside me.

Here the Dresser pauses to reflect on the assertion "The land is not my mother." The Dresser having had issues with her own mother has come to believe that we each choose into the life we have and that our parents, whoever they are, remain incidental to our existence. In "Poem Without a Landscape," the poet states that her mother's natal Liverpool doesn't recognize her and it speaks Scouse, an accent particular to Liverpudlians who also eat a cheap, boiled meat stew that is called scouse. What the Dresser particularly admires in this poem is how the poet, while acknowledging a brooding blues from her journey of discovery, sets aside the physical world to take charge of herself "I'll be my green world." Wheeler ably handles complex metaphors in an understated way. The Dresser thinks, however, that the chapbook could have benefited from a short set of notes that defined some of the unfamiliar words associated with Liverpool.

QUAKER ROOTS

Evidence of Things Not Seen is divided into three sections--Beginnings, Middles, and Ends. Theodore Roethke's "From Whence Cometh Song" opens the work and William Penn's "Evidence of Things Not Seen" closes this impressionistic offering of the Great Chain of Being from life and love to faith and death, where death is not necessarily a finality. Given that Rorem, a lapsed Quaker, has written that he believes in poetry and not God, it is interesting to see that Rorem highlights a prose text by William Penn, the Quaker who paved the way for the creation of the United States with The Frame of Government of Pennsylvania, a constitution first drafted in 1682 that advocated religious tolerance for the province of Pennsylvania.

Here is the section of Penn's essay from which Rorem derives the song cycle's title:

EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN

... Faith lights us, even through the grave, being the
Evidence of Things not seen. And this is the Comfort
of the Good, that the Grave cannot hold them, and that
they live as soon as they die. For Death is no more than
the Turning of us over from Time to Eternity. Death then,
being the Way and Condition of Life, we cannot love
to live, if we cannot bear to die ...

ROREM'S EQUAL MASTERY OF WORDS AND MUSIC

What is clear, from the selection of poems is that Rorem has a great understanding of literature and the written word in equal proportion to his ability to set words to music. Poets that Rorem drew from include literary greats such as W. H. Auden (5 poems), Charles Baudelaire, Hart Crane (2 poems), Robert Frost, A. E. Housman, Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke, Walt Whitman (2 poems), Oscar Wilde, and William Yeats. Lesser read poets (some hardly known by people who read poetry today) include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Mark Doty, Paul Goodman (4 poems), Thomas Ken, Jane Kenyon, Rudyard Kipling, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and William Wordsworth. Prose selections come from Colette, Julien Green, Paul Monette, and William Penn (2), and John Woolman. How Rorem makes Elizabeth Barrett Browning's emotionally gushing poem "How Do I love Thee?" with all its over emphasized capitalized words like Being, Grace, Right, Praise fit with Auden's down-to-Earth "The More Loving One" persuades the Dresser that Rorem understands how literature of disparate styles and periods can not only co-exist but create a larger meaning.

HOW DO I LOVE THEE? (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and the Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

THE MORE LOVING ONE
(W. H. Auden)

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime
Though this might take me a little time.

Copyright © 1958 W. H. Auden

RILEY'S MAGIC

The evening began with The Cusp of Magic. The title refers to the summer solstice. This work was written and commissioned for the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man on the Chinese instrument known as the pipa as part of a national series of works from Meet the Composer Commissioning Music/USA made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Helen F. Whitaker Fund, and the Target Foundation. Premiering in 2005, the work has six movements with an intriguing combination of titles: "The Cusp of Magic," "Buddha's Bedroom," "The Nursery," "Royal Wedding," "Emily and Alice," and "Prayer Circle."

The Dresser thinks a profile of the composer might help in understanding the mix of titles and the use of the pipa. Photo by Stuart Brinin

In 1964, Terry Riley presented his groundbreaking In C, a tonal composition employing repetition and static harmonies. Along with Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Riley has been classified as a minimalist, a term which these composers abjure. Influenced by the long buzzing and droning music of La Monte Young, considered by some to be the first minimalist, Riley distinguished his music by its complex rhythmic patterns. After he aired In C, he quit producing formal compositions in favor of improvisation and the study of North Indian vocal techniques. Study of Indian music led to his interest in instruments that allowed subtle tuning. In 1979 when he and the Kronos Quartet were on the faculty of Mills College in Oakland, California, Riley resumed notating music. His collaborations with Kronos helped him realize that he could incorporate his love of Indian music and jazz with the music of traditional classical instruments. Program notes quote Riley as follows:

My compositions for Kronos are the most important of my notated works, each one staking out a different mood and musical structure and setting up new challenges for composer and performer. In this work, the different timbre and resonance of the Chinese pipa and the Western string ensemble highlight the crossover regions of cultural reference, so that Western musical themes might be projected with Eastern accent and vice-versa. My plan was to make these regions seamless so that the listener is carried between worlds without an awareness of how he/she ends up there.

While The Cusp of Magic begins with attention focused on complex drumming patterns (Movement 1 "The Cusp of Magic"), the majority of the work shifts the focus to the pipa (a lute like instrument), the human voice (some live, some recorded), and a succession of exotic and familiar sounds emanating from wooden prayers beads, a harmonica, different kinds of noisemakers, sleigh bells, a music box, the voice of a toy doll. Lead violinist David Harrington alternates playing his violin with such instruments as a bass drum, hand-held drums, a toy violin, harmonica, woodblocks. Underneath this mesmerizing blend of sounds continues intricate rhythmic progressions. When the piece ended, the Dresser felt like she had been in the nursery of precocious children and at Buddhist temple praying.

WHY GHOST OPERA IS OPERA

Ghost Opera, commissioned for the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, National Endowment for the Arts and Hancher Auditorium/University of Iowa, was initially what drew the Dresser to this concert. She had bought the CD when she attended a Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concert featuring Tan's The Map of Asia. The CD is sensually interesting to hear, but seeing the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man perform the piece made the Dresser realize how much a listener of the CD misses. Also while The Cusp of Magic has its table of toys and curious instruments as well as the balletic strumming of the pipa by Wu Man, Ghost Opera involves the players moving on and off stage; creating sounds that involve water, paper, stones, and metal; vocalizations from every member of the ensemble; and employing screens and lighting to create shadows.

If this five-movement work that premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1995 seems like a chamber opera and not a chamber music composition, a look at the program notes confirms that notion. Tan's inspiration for this work was shamanistic "ghost operas" of the Chinese peasant culture. In these folk operas that go back 4,000 years, people and spirits of the future, past and nature communicate with each other. Formally in the program, Tan lays out this opera as follows.

Timeframe and cast:

Now--string quartet and pipa
Past--Bach, folksong, monks, Shakespeare
Forever--water, stones, metal, paper

Next, Tan offers a mandala that summarizes diagrammatically the relationships between the string quartet and pipa (located in a centered box inside the circle), the voices of the past (assigned to four equal quadrants of the circle) and the natural, eternal elements (water, paper, stones, metal rim the exterior of the circle in north, east, south, and west positions respectively).