Poet in Person: Philip Levine

I first heard of Philip Levine during my years at Northwestern University (1977 - 1981).  I read Poetry magazine regularly, and he was just the second winner of the generous Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 1987.  I often imagined winning the Pulitzer Prize, which Levine won in 1995, and the Lilly Prize, too, not so much for any self-aggrandizement, but more for the curiosity about where poetry income came from. 

I am glad to know that Brooklyn Heights is home not just for Levine, but also for Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and WH Auden, the last of which of course is tops for among my favorites.  At age 86, Levine must be among the last of the old guards of poetry, who is inspired by crowd and scenery at Fulton Landings and also disenchanted at newer establishments in the city.  

One last thing, director and producer Guy Shahar is the namesake of a troubled but quite likable adolescent at The Learning House, where I was the Clinical Director (1993 - 1995).  Sadly our Guy died in a car accident.  This is an example of what I call synchronicity.

Poet in Person: Alan Shapiro

Then, I ran into this familiar gentleman in the Poets in Person Series from Cortland Review.  I commented:

I know Alan Shapiro! I was one of those 2000 - 3000 students he taught, when I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University. If memory serves me right, I was a sophomore (1978 - 1979) when I studied with him. Small world, eh :) This video is too funny! 
That sophomore year, I took the first of three poetry courses with Charles Hartman, and the second was with Shapiro.  The third was with Mary Kinzie at the beginning of my junior year.  I remember Shapiro to be earthy, which is to say casual and approachable, thoughtful and wryly humorous.  I believe Howard Nemerov was one of the poets he emulated, so his poetry often had vivid imagery and metered verse.  In turn, Shapiro taught me and influenced me thus.  I credit all of my NU professors for helping me build a strong foundation for the rigors and techniques of poetry, which many poets and would-be poets now sorely lack and with which I explored a range of emotions and matters.  

Poet in Person: Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson

I personalized Google News for Dr. Ron Art to include poetry, and the New York Times headline caught my attention Claudia Emerson, Pulitzer-Winning Poet, Dies at 57 (December 4th).  In particular, it was Pulitzer, Poet and 57 that prompted me to open the link.  I am a poet, I am 55, and I have imagined winning the Pulitzer Prize, since I discovered another such prize-winning John Ashbery in the late 1970s.  I loved reading about personal stories behind Emerson's book:

In an interview with PBS in 2006, Ms. Emerson said that writing “Late Wife” was a way to deal with her emotions about falling in love with a man whose beloved wife had died of lung cancer. She then looked back on her first marriage and found poetry in it, too. “I process the world through poetry,” she said.

Part of Ms. Emerson’s inspiration, as expressed in the poem “Artifact,” was seeing objects from her first marriage, to Jesse Andrews, a carpenter, and from her second, to Harry Kent Ippolito, a technical designer and musician. “When someone is missing, their possessions take on meaning,” she told PBS.

Then, I stumbled on Poets in Person Series by Cortland Review, and there was Emerson relating her down-to-earth, loving home and relationship with her husband:

Lament for Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Dear Eleonora meanders

Across the vast expanse

Of his tragic musings,

Mixing with the sound of surf

And the eloquence of his

Hallucination, bizarrerie of which

She is simply unaware.

Only the words echo magically

As youth in love is prone

To hear them, not really

Understanding at all.

Poe might have imagined

The beatings, foreshadowing

What has been foreshadowed before –

The final consumption into nightmare,

Pain and release from pain,

How the art ultimately imitates,

As it must, the life

It haunts so intimately. 

Where is that enclosure now?

This shrinking square of red light

Suggests it was never really there.

We do not see it.

But he who has lived and

Died in it know only too well

The sudden burst of illumination

Like insight before everything diminishes

And falls into the throes of darkness. 

Lament for Poe © Ron Villejo

I saw a dramatic portrayal of Edgar Allan Poe on stage, and was drawn deeply into his macabre world.  This shrinking square of red light was how the play ended and how horrifically his life must've ended.  In September 1980 I wrote this poem.

Nicole's Love Song

(image credit)

On an elbow, chin on palm,

I recall how desolate

What seemed that perpetual

Zürich dusk, odd silhouette

Of bare trees against the sky

For the isolated eye.

Evening was not quite the calm

Where some dreaded fear became

Definite once and for all

That the introverted can

Cling to with maternal grace.

Silence had a sound at lame

Lonely moments, moments when

It was chatter come like odd

Comfort, at times willowy

Whispering like douce ennui,

Sweet loss of all touch and care –

Till returning back to face

Myself as myself, despair

That could only turn to God.

Nicole's Love Song © Ron Villejo

I read three of F Scott Fitzgerald's mere handful of novels, and Tender is the Night stood out for me.  It was an autobiography of sorts: Fitzgerald in the rising psychoanalyst Dick Diver, and wife Zelda in the troubled Nicole.  The trochaic meter and rhyme scheme are modeled after those of WH Auden.  I began to write it in April 1982 and finished it a year later. 

Puck

Randall Duk Kim, as Puck, in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Puck am I, and only that,

Shameless, light and mischievous,

I whose antic air no one

Seeks beyond the comic age

Which I parody on stage.

There is nothing serious,

Yet I feel the sudden hush

After everyone has left.

None but I can hear my own

Hollow laughter echo through

Mock reality and doubt.

Then a melancholic rush

Overwhelms the figure who

By his self-indulgence made

Gaiety a wreckless state.

Truths incline to irony,

And I exit now without

Any love or company.

Puck, after WH Auden © Ron Villejo

More than 30 years ago now, I traveled to the American's Player Theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and feasted on Shakespeare in the wooded outdoors over two or three summers.  One of my best memories was the performance of Randall Duk Kim as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  That was summer of 1980, and in November that year I wrote my poem.  There must've been something in that APT production that prompted me to write a darker, melancholic Puck.  Or maybe it was just my mood at the time, but my poetry professor Mary Kinzie at Northwestern University loved the poem.  It was this poem that she said Auden had a liberating effect on me.