Billy Collins: horoscopes for the dead

Having not read any poetry since school days, I’ve nevertheless had Billy Collins’ “The Trouble with Poetry” on my to-be-read list for the last few years. Never quite got around to searching it out and reading it, though. After reading the misleadingly thin “Horoscopes for the Dead,” I plan to correct that oversight as quickly as possible.

Collins was the Poet Laureate for the US from 2001 to 2003. It’s easy to see why.

Hangover

If I were crowned emperor this morning,

every child who is playing Marco Polo

in the swimming pool of this motel,

shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth

Marco             Polo                 Marco             Polo

would be required to read a biography of Marco Polo – a long one with fine print –

as well as a history of China and of Venice,

the birthplace of the venerated explorer

Marco             Polo                 Marco             Polo

after which each child would be quizzed

by me then executed by drowning

regardless how much they managed

to retain about the glorious life and times of

Marco             Polo                 Marco             Polo

Though only a thin 102 pages, there are over 50 short poems here, just the right length to read four or five before sleeping every night, their simple yet powerful imagery an excellent precursor to an almost guaranteed night of symbol-rich dreaming.

Some funny, some touching, some simply true in an unassuming, non sky-is-falling kind of way, all of them bear the slight imprint of time taken with them, of the choosing of a specific word, a certain order, that alters the meaning of the whole just so.

Great for in-between reading, and for sipping rather than chugging, as I wanted to do after reading the first few. I exercised some discipline, though, and only read my proscribed 4 or 5 poems a night after finishing with the rest of the night’s offerings, and that felt just right.

Gotta find that “Trouble. . .” of his soon.

Since they’re short, and the book’s short, and this review is short, here are two more in closing.

Feedback

The woman who wrote from Phoenix

After my reading there

to tell me they were all still talking about it

just wrote again

to tell me they had stopped.

After I Heard You Were Gone

I sat for a while on a bench in the park.

It was raining lightly but this was not a movie

even though a couple hurried by,

the girl holding his jacket over her head,

and the chess players were gathering up their pieces

and fanning out into the streets.

No, this was something different.

I could have sworn the large oak trees

had just appeared there overnight.

And that pigeon looked as if

it had once been a playing card

that a magician had transformed with the flick of a scarf.

I won’t spoil the pleasure of discovery that comes with reading the titular poem – it’s long and tasty and exceedingly clever and sad – but I’m sure you can find it out in the ether somewhere if you can’t find the book. I envy you who have not read it, or him, before.

Eddie Vedder: Ukulele Songs

Quirky. Quaint. Quixotic. Other unusual words that begin with “q.”

Yes, each describes Eddie Vedder’s newest album, Ukulele Songs. But it doesn’t end there.

While I suspected when I heard about the project that Eddie wouldn't be making a novelty album, that there would be some real substance there, part of me also thought, “What? Really?” I didn’t quite giggle, but it was a close thing.

I’ve listened to it all the way through at least five times now, and any threat of impending giggling has completely dissipated. Though there are lots of smile-inducing moments, none are of the derisive/incredulous variety. I shall attempt to explain.

There are plenty of examples of pure ukulele music, to be sure. Listening to his takes on 30’s and 40’s classics like “Dream a Little Dream,” “Once in a While," "Tonight" (with a little help from Cat Power,) and, particularly, “More Than You Know,” it’s easy to conjure images of young men in loud Hawaiian shirts and fatigue pants, serenading their sweethearts while palms wave in the warm breeze and smiles of both sincerity and a knowing kind of “are-you-serious?” play across both faces. That’s not to say that these songs aren’t beautiful examples of the craft, but I’d wager that if I could travel backwards in time and show the 20 year old Vedder the track list of his future solo album, he’d hurt himself laughing, and/or punch me in the face. I’d never imagined that he would be drawn to such obvious examples of the Tin Pan Alley school of songwriting. Maybe the medium made that transition easier? I think it did.

His voice, though, is surprisingly well suited for this type of crooning. Rough and gravelly still, oozing with experience and character – think Johnny Cash on any of his American Recordings, where his voice was sometimes nowhere near the tune or the melody, where it almost didn’t even sound like singing, but speaking. Now subtract 50 or so years from that deep scratch and you’ll get an idea of how much of Vedder’s life experience and character seep through and into each of his songs, no matter the backing instrument.

Then there are songs that are pure Pearl Jam – they’re just played on four (or in some case five or six) string miniature guitars instead of being delivered via the crunching wall of sound we’ve all come to know, love and expect from these sorts of songs.

“Can’t Keep,” “Satellite,” “Light Today,” and “Longing to Belong,” even with its lovely cello (the only accompaniment I remember hearing on the whole disc,) could all be the stripped-back, acoustic only, demo versions of songs that he’d then take to the rest of the guys to be worked up into full blown Pearl Jams.

Not long ago I was discussing with a good friend who knows and appreciates good music as much as I do something about, but not unique to, Eddie Vedder. We concluded that he is the kind of artist who either finds an outlet for his bottled energy, angst, anger, obsession, love, hate, confusion, frustration, et al – or doesn’t. If they don’t, they end up walking the streets, or worse. Wondering how to communicate all of these seemingly disparate thoughts, and not being able to purge them, give them birth and let others see and hear and experience them, and thus be rid of their caustic heat and acidity. All artists, probably, are like this to some degree.

Eddie found Stone Gossard, Mike McCready, and the others in Pearl Jam – really everyone in the Seattle music community of the times – and was able to channel that brooding darkness through the filter of their instruments, that huge, crushingly liberating sound, dissipating and diluting it just a little so it wouldn’t burn us too badly (but leaving just enough that we could still feel that heat.)

Go back and listen to any of those one-word titles on 10 or vs and tell me there are not some deep-seated issues he’s working through, that it could have been anything less than cathartic to sing the words to “Jeremy,” or “Black,” or “Alive” surrounded by the beautiful anger of Gossard’s and McCready’s guitars, and (maybe more importantly) the screams from the appreciative audiences. Did they know or could they tell how purgative or even healing that process may have been to the performers? Maybe. Likely not. Who cares? They could tell something – they could see, hear and feel the authenticity of the words and music, and that was enough.

If he hadn’t survived that crucible of raw exposure – many did not, and not just those from that particular scene at that particular time – he would not have been able to make Ukulele Songs. There are definitely shades of that early emotion and power here, whether it’s on the old or the new tunes – his voice is too distinctive not to leave a stamp on them. (Else why would so many imitators have come and gone in the last 20 years? Yes, I’m looking at you, Creed.)

Some of the most powerful songs on this record are the slow originals. It’s possible that he chose the uke to help deliver these missives to us for the same reason the would-be lotharios from the 40’s chose it for their moonlit serenades – the feelings are real, but maybe the novelty of the instrument can also raise a smile, make them not take the message so very seriously. Or maybe he chose it so there would be almost nothing between himself and the listener. Songs like “Without You,” and this excerpt from “You’re True” are perhaps TOO true, and need to be cut with a little levity, a dash of frivolity that only the ukulele could deliver.

 “’Open up,’ she said – ‘Be you. Be true.’ Now I’m at home in my own skin. . .

“Yes, you could be the one to hold my hand beneath the full moon, you could be the one – you’re true.”

A very pleasant surprise, and not at all the joke I feared it might be, this is a strong album that will always bring a smile to the surface when one of its denizens sneaks into any of my future shuffles, as I know they will.

A quick note on the art direction and the photography used in the “booklet” that accompanies the album: phenomenal. Very striking, arresting images start with the cover and don’t let up at any point in the visual narrative. So a quick acknowledgement to the visual arts team:

Album cover sculpture & photography by Jason deCaires Taylor

Booklet photography by Danny Clinch

Aerial photography by Sonny Miller

Waterfall photography by Stefan Mentil

Chopper pilot Don Shearer

Abigail Washburn: City of Refuge

Abigail Washburn must be tired. Really tired.

Then again, I have a theory as to why she might not be as exhausted as all of her recent activities might lead one to believe.

I first heard about Abigail when she was blogging from China during the Olympics in 2008. Sounded pretty cool for an America banjo player to be tapped for that assignment, I thought. And didn’t think anything more about it, or her, for a while.

Until a good friend of mine with a similar penchant for new and unusual music told me about “City of Refuge,” Washburn’s latest full-length. The songs were captivating from first listen, varied and interesting enough that I started digging for more information on this Renaissance woman with such a myriad of interests and abilities.

Less than 10 years ago Washburn was studying at Colorado College, the first and only (at the time) Asian Studies major; she must have persuaded the faculty to offer one, which – after learning a bit more about this deceptively tiny woman – wouldn’t surprise me at all. The plan was, she says, that she’d go to China and study law. She’d spent significant amounts of time there on more than one trip, and felt like that’s where she might land.

Before leaving, though, she wanted to find something distinctly American to take with her, to remind her of these shores and of home.

So she picked up a banjo.

Having never played before she listened to some of the old masters, drawing particular inspiration from Doc Watson’s “Shady Grove” LP. (I know the guitar recordings of Doc and his son well, but never knew he played the banjo, too. First of several lessons Abigail had to teach me, it seemed.)

She taught herself how to hammer out some tunes – clawhammer them out, to be precise. She played with different groups of friends up and down the East Coast and before she knew it she had a record deal.

Abigail spent the next 5 years or so with Uncle Earl, an all-girl bluegrass outfit that recruited John Paul Jones to produce one of their albums. Again, that got my attention but for some reason didn’t hold it.

She recorded her first solo effort after that, which was produced by future-husband Bela Fleck. That collaboration led to the formation of Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet, which included Fleck and which yielded an EP, a full-length, and extensive touring throughout North America.

After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed tens of thousands and changed the lives of many millions more, Abigail spent some time there with the volunteer relief effort. She visited villages across the affected areas and played for the locals. After these shows, she says, it was not unusual for children and adults alike to gather around and teach her their songs – trading meaningful sounds and words with each other in the midst of life-altering tragedy.

One of those children taught Abigail a song that the child’s mother – lost in the quake – used to sing to her. “Sala” would become the cornerstone of the benefit album Abigail recorded with David Liang and the Shanghai Restoration Project over the span of one week, released on the one year anniversary of the quake. (The album is called “Afterquake,” and can be purchased here:  http://www.afterquakemusic.com, but I prefer the slower, softer version of “Sala” released later, which you can find here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGuET34Ivj8.)

The influence of these and her many other Chinese experiences inform nearly all of Washburn’s creations – whether in the ambient sounds of schoolchildren that open her latest album, the many tunes she sings in Mandarin (only one on “City,” but others available all over the Interwebs,) or the enchantingly lilting way that even her so-called traditional songs recall the Orient. The fiddle turns, the vocal structures, the pacing – there’s something about this magical melding of East and West that result in sounds that are totally unique, yet strangely comforting in their familiarity.

This love of sharing and learning isn’t confined to Eastern audiences, though. In one of her recent tour videos with the band of like-minded and equally talented musicians she’s taken to calling “The Village,” they visit an after school program in Aspen. Seated in a circle, teaching these kids old-timey traditional and new, fun songs to sing with her band providing the simple accompaniment, Washburn seems completely in her element and at home. She teaches them all to square dance (admitting in an aside to the camera, “I’ve never taught anyone to square dance before. . .”) everyone hopping and spinning and laughing uncontrollably. I’m sure those kids still carry that day with them.

I was lucky enough to see Abigail and the Village – with her husband playing in her band for much of the show (bonus!) – a few weeks ago at the Variety Playhouse here in Atlanta. Opening for The Wood Brothers in front of a near sold out crowd, Abby appeared surprisingly nervous on the first few tunes; I had expected that she’d be a jaded pro by now, unfazed by the spotlight. That brief glimpse and minor revelation added somehow to the overall charm of the show, and of Abigail herself.

She quickly got comfortable, though – the warm reception to each song probably helped – and before long she was intro-ing one of the previously mentioned Mandarin songs from the new offering: Taiyang Chulai, which she said “was taught to me by Old Lady Wong, and which means, ‘the sun has come out and we are SO happy. . .’” She also explained that when singing in traditional Mandarin, hand gestures are mandatory – the song is incomplete without them – but she was able to reassure us: “I know – it’s awkward, but it’ll be over in a minute. . .”

 Like the rest of the show, the gestures and the song were perfectly appropriate and melded seamlessly with the Washburn canon.

An unplugged version of “Keys to the Kingdom” was another highlight – so good it simultaneously raised both chills and goosebumps.

The liner notes on “City” close with a sweet plea: “If you like the music, would you send Gramma June a thank you letter?” since she and other family members helped bankroll the project.

So I did.

Dear Gramma June,

“Thanks” seems like such a small word for the incredibly huge gift you’ve helped present to the world with the City of Refuge album. I know you must be very proud of Abigail and of how the album turned out. It moved me deeply, and I listen to it often.

Thank you very much!!

I didn’t really expect a response, and after 6 or 8 weeks had passed I’d nearly forgotten about it. Waiting on me at home one day, though, was a postcard decorated in an energetic hand, saying “Thank you! With Love - Abby’s Gramma June.”

After listening to this music and reading about this diminutive, powerful presence of a woman, her history and her works, I can only conclude that her family has helped to raise and present to the world a bright heart that shines like a searchlight wherever she goes, bathing the people and places she visits in positive energy and reminding them that there is sweetness and good in what can sometimes be a dark and dreary world.

So here’s my theory: spreading and sharing such light and goodness must not diminish one’s supply, like draining a battery or a gas tank, but feed it and make it grow in the giver, too. Maybe that’s why she’s not exhausted.

Thanks, Abby. Can’t believe I thanked Gramma June and not you, too! Also can’t wait to hear all of the music and learn all of the lessons sure to flow forth in the years to come.

To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild

I’ve only recently gotten into non-fiction, having preferred in the past to use the written word to make my escape from reality instead of learning more about it. Several good finds in the last few years, though, have meant that for every third or fourth work of fiction (be it science fiction, thriller, mystery, etc.) I seem to be finding these incredible palate-cleansers. Books like Maryanne Wolf’s Proust & the Squid and Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering were life-changers, and Adam Hochschild’s most recent effort has proven to be no less than that, too.

The sum total of what I knew about World War I prior to reading this gripping story?

• Trench warfare, which probably sucked in a big, bad way.
• Mustard gas, ditto
• Started by assassinating an Arch-Duke and his wife
• The “Trench Poets”
• It end pretty much teed up the rise of the Nazi party and WWII some 20 years after it was over

And that was about it.

Until now.

Hochschild’s treatise is subtitled, “A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914 – 1918,” and the leaf indicates that his chief focus will be the home front, the conflicts affecting both sides away from the fighting – everything from women’s suffrage in England to how Conscientious Objectors on all sides fared during those tumultuous times.

It’s much more than that, though. While I learned a lot about many of the sideline (and not so sideline) players I also learned a tremendous amount about the battles and the armies involved.

What I learned about the former includes how the Upstairs/Downstairs class mentality in Great Britain was still going strong not only at home but even in the trenches. Also, the propaganda machine that Britain created and maintained virtually throughout the war was terrifying in its efficiency in feeding the monster that was the War with ever more, ever younger bodies. I never knew, for instance, that when gathering some of the most capable and influential British writers of the time in that cause, around the table at that first meeting were people like Thomas Hardy, James Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. (Kipling I knew about, but not the extent to which he was involved in creating some of the more incendiary – and false – atrocities attributed to the Germans in order to boost enlistment figures.)

Regarding the latter – the specifics of what happened on and around the front lines – the figures alone are staggering, and more than once made me pause and curse in wonder. I won’t include all of those stats from the Butcher’s Bill here, but one that stuck with me was this one:

At the beginning of 1915, the first full year of the War, Germany had invaded France and Belgium and occupied over 19,500 square miles of formerly foreign territory.

At the end of the year, and at a cost of over 250,000 British casualties, the Allies had recovered exactly 8 of those square miles.

Which would cause the Allied leadership, one would think, to change their strategy, right? Nope.

World War I was sort of an arching conflict, one that bridged the basics of near-ancient warfare to those of the modern. Both sides, Allied and Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary, mainly [incidentally, A-H was much bigger in terms of land area and influence than I ever knew,]) still had relatively large horse mounted cavalries, and fully expected that once they broke the stalemate of the trenches the War would be won by a series of heroic charges, as recounted in endless poems and stories throughout the previous 200 years of warfare. Those cavalries sat idly by for nearly the entire War as the artillery barrages, machine guns, gas attacks and the immovable trenches devoured huge percentages of each country’s most able-bodied young men.

I’d heard of the battles of the Somme, and Ypres, but never of Passchendaele, even though all three had elements in common: they were horrendous, needless, borderline-criminal wastes of human life. Though the British were the aggressors in each of these battles, with extremely complicated battle plans that fell apart almost immediately in every case, they took the biggest hits on all three with over 250,000 dead and wounded at Passchendaele alone, and virtually no ground gained in any of them.

One of the biggest lessons I learned in reading this riveting, reinforcing work was that the leaders on both sides, but specifically the Allies in the early and middle years, were absolutely clueless as to what was going on at the front. They would order charge after charge into no man’s land only to have entire regiments, thousands of men at a time, eradicated. Many was the time an Officer made it across and nearer to the enemy trenches only to look around and wonder, “God, where are all my men?” He was the only one of several thousand to remain standing. It was not unusual for five to ten thousand men to fall in one afternoon.

Yet the carnage continued with virtually no change in the battle strategy on either side until Germany, its back against the wall with the knowledge that the Yanks were coming, and coming strong any day now, broke out of the trenches and launched a series of hugely successful raids into France and Belgium. They knew it was all or nothing, and though they made it hundreds of miles into French territory, at one point getting only 37 miles away from Paris, the advance ultimately broke down. They’d moved so fast that they’d outrun their supplies and with no permanent defensive fortifications the British – reinforced by the now arriving Americans – rolled them all the way back to Germany and the War was, in essence, over.

No cavalry charges of any consequence were ever made. 21,000,000 men were killed on all sides, which didn’t include the civilian numbers in France, Belgium and around the rest of world. (Did you know there were battles in such far flung locales as Cameroon, Mesopotamia, and the lower third of Africa? I didn’t.) The toll from the Russian Revolution, begun near the end of the War, was by itself responsible for another 20,000,000 dead at least, and probably many more.

And all that was achieved was a virtual guarantee that something like the Nazi party would arise to fill the gaping holes left in Germany’s infrastructure, and that the same battlefields would be revisited in 20 years or so, along with many new ones.

A note on the so-called Trench Poets.

Men like Siegfried Sassoon, John McRae, Rupert Brooke, and perhaps most famously, Wilfred Owen, were brave soldiers who fought and in most cases died in battles scattered along the front lines. The fact that they could, between skirmishes and charges "over the top," pause to reflect and capture such thoughts in verse boggles the mind. (Note: only Wilfred Owen is mentioned in Hochschild's book; I remembered reading about these others a few years ago and included them here knowing that such an opportunity may not present itself again any time soon.)

Some samples:

From Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches”:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you'll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

From McRrae’s “In Flanders Fields”:

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

            In Flanders fields.

From Brooke’s “The Soldier”:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. . .

A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And, perhaps most tragically, this quote not from one of his poems but from a letter Wilfred Owen wrote home describing his task of sorting the mail for the men in his regiment:

“My senses are charred. . . I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters.”

He was 25. He’d been severely wounded and had spent months recovering at home in England, and could have stayed there but instead returned to the front to ensure that his men were protected as much as possible from the folly of the generals. As his mother was celebrating with everyone in the streets of England on Armistice Day, she received a black-bordered telegram informing her that her son had been killed the week before in some gainless, nameless place she’d never heard of, one month after being awarded the Military Cross for exceptional bravery.

Hochschild may have intended his primary focus to be the lot of those who protested the War; those who refused to fight; those who promoted it from behind the lines; those who mismanaged and misunderstood it, and who sent uncounted thousands upon thousands to their deaths. The passages which stayed with me longest and which had the strongest impact, though, were those relaying the stories of the soldiers themselves. Their generals simply had no idea what they were asking these men to do, and couldn’t understand why their plans never, ever worked. They only produced more graves.

Which is where, for me, Hochschild’s narrative shines: in the telling of how these tremendous events affected the individual, whether at home or in the trenches, friend or foe. In this book he was able to personalize events that were truly on a worldwide scale, at the same time making them relatable to readers living nearly 100 years after these events occurred.

The verse he cites that has stuck with me the most and the longest was written not by someone who lived beside these men in the trenches of France and Belgium, but from one who had employed his prodigious talents to craft untruths, to cajole and embarrass young men into enlisting and going willingly into Hell.

Conversely, in writing about Armistice Day, when four years of previously unimaginable carnage was finally over, Thomas Hardy wrote,

Calm fell. From heaven distilled a clemency;

There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;

Some could, some could not, shake off misery;

The Sinister Spirit sneered: “It had to be!”

And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”

Like in all wars, arguments can be made as to whether it was pointless, or whether some end or other was achieved. But one thing common to all is the waste of human life for what is almost always a nebulous, impossible to define gain. Our modern leaders and generals would do well to remember that, though all recent evidence indicates that they have not.

YouTube preview of "To End All Wars"