I’m rarely swept away these days by music or poetry. I can still drift off to Schubert’s Trout Quintet, or Jackson Browne might lay me out with “Fountain of Sorrow.” But I have to say it’s rare. It’s much the same with poetry. I read, years ago, every poem by Gary Snyder. I once loved and memorized, and often quoted, “I Go Back to May 1937" by Sharon Olds. Yes, I’ve been moved by poems, but I rarely come across one now that grips me. So I was somewhat stunned by Juliet Wittman’s accounts of people, including her, whose days, whose years, whose lives have been buoyed or transformed by some piece of music or a poem.
Not that I don’t live to be transformed. It’s just that for me, it’s almost always a novel that has the power and glory. The two I usually cite are James Salter’s Light Years, and Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees. I read them again and again. But after I finished this Substack post, something drew me to my bookcase and James Agee’s novel, A Death in the Family.
I’d love to quote the entire introductory chapter. It’s too long, of course, so here’s a small piece of it. The chapter opens, “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”
And farther down the page: “...it has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber. A street car raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on iron speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone; forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.”
Pretty close to poetry, I’d say. Does it change me? Does it change the world? In some way, yes. It soothes me and lifts me and makes me whole. Now is the night one blue dew.
I’m rarely swept away these days by music or poetry. I can still drift off to Schubert’s Trout Quintet, or Jackson Browne might lay me out with “Fountain of Sorrow.” But I have to say it’s rare. It’s much the same with poetry. I read, years ago, every poem by Gary Snyder. I once loved and memorized, and often quoted, “I Go Back to May 1937" by Sharon Olds. Yes, I’ve been moved by poems, but I rarely come across one now that grips me. So I was somewhat stunned by Juliet Wittman’s accounts of people, including her, whose days, whose years, whose lives have been buoyed or transformed by some piece of music or a poem.
Not that I don’t live to be transformed. It’s just that for me, it’s almost always a novel that has the power and glory. The two I usually cite are James Salter’s Light Years, and Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees. I read them again and again. But after I finished this Substack post, something drew me to my bookcase and James Agee’s novel, A Death in the Family.
I’d love to quote the entire introductory chapter. It’s too long, of course, so here’s a small piece of it. The chapter opens, “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”
And farther down the page: “...it has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber. A street car raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on iron speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone; forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.”
Pretty close to poetry, I’d say. Does it change me? Does it change the world? In some way, yes. It soothes me and lifts me and makes me whole. Now is the night one blue dew.
--John Thorndike