Author: ellen

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Ted and Julia and your children and mine

Here in Massachusetts we’re understandably thinking a lot about Ted Kennedy. We’re reading and listening to accounts of his many accomplishments and his almost as many challenges. And we’re hearing about his upbringing, including those famous dinner table discussions where the fledgling Kennedys were urged to think seriously about public events and about their own future roles.

Meanwhile, we’re having a Julia moment. We’re in love all over again with Julia Child, getting out those old copies of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” or buying new ones. We’re hearing that voice again in our ears, channeled by Meryl Streep, urging us on as we braise and whip and learn to have our way with carnards and poulets.

And the thought came to me that these two zeitgeist moments are not unrelated. In fact,I think they have something profound to tell us. First of all, a case could be made for the similarity between Ted and Julia. Think about it: Each got a start that was not without its delays, its setbacks, its discouragements. Each worked hard on something they were passionate about. And each came to an enormous level of achievement and influence only after years of setbacks and persistence.

But there’s another message in their stories: the family dinners.

When American fell under the spell of Julia the first time we had succumbed to the siren call of easy food. Ready-made, heat-and eat, and mixes to make what earlier generations knew how to whip up from scratch. We were ripe for new food adventures, but we were also getting out of the kitchen. And the dining room.

Imagine if Rose had had a 2009-type schedule. Rush home from work. Maybe take John and Eunice to tennis practice, Ted tp a playdate, Jean to the library, and Bobby’s got a soccer game. Maybe she’d leave food out (well, ok,, this is the Kennedys–the cook would leave food out) in the kitchen for when each one got home. Maybe no one would sit at the table but Joe, reading The Wall Street Journal, making a few phone calls with dinner, checking his Blackberry..

But Rose didn’t do that, either because that’s the way she wanted it or because that’s the way the world was then. According to national folklore she sat them all down, Joe at the other end, and they talked. All of them. About the world and its problems. About its opportunities, their own abilities, and the possibility of making the world better. And somehow along with dinner the Kennedy kids got the message that they could make a difference. And that they should.

And so, strangely, here we are in the long shadow of Ted’s public legacy, with Julia luring us back once again into the kitchen. We’re being tempted anew to think of feeding the ones around our table something that demands effort to prepare and time to enjoy. And we’re being given the chance to think about what can happen around a dinner table.

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Where the poem comes from: Lloyd Schwartz

I met Lloyd Schwartz eight years ago. It was two nights after the twin towers fell and we were two of four poets reading at Borders at Downtown Crossing. The reading had been planned long in advance. As it turned out, the room was filled with people in search of the solace poetry might offer and the comfort of being together.

Since then I ‘m always delighted to have a chance to hear him, and the poem he’s given me to share with you here, Proverbs from Purgatory,” is a favorite. It is from his book “Cairo Traffic.” Lloyd is the editor of the Library of America volume of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning classical music editor for “The Phoenix.” and a reviewer for NPR’s Fresh Air.

Just seeing the words on the page lets me hear Lloyd’s quiet, measured reading that brings out the gentle humor and poignancy of the work. Here is what he says about the poem:

“I think one of my most peculiar poems is one in my last book called “Proverbs from Purgatory.” It’s a series of twisted old maxims and hints at but never reveals a narrative. It has several sources. My late friend Michael McDowell (who wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) would return to Boston with tales from the dark side of Hollywood, often quoting various Hollywood figures. ‘I know this town like the back of my head’ and ‘I’ll have him eating out of my lap’ were two amazing lines I wanted to do something with.

“They also reminded me of a game I used to play in high school, where we’d mix up a couple of proverbs to see how funny we could make them. Perhaps the greatest version of this impulse is Blake’s ‘Proverbs from Hell,’ from ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (“’he cistern contains, the fountain overflows,’ ‘If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise’; ‘Enough!—or too much’; and of course, ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’). I was hoping that through this ‘processing’ some new wisdom might emerge—I once introduced the poem as ‘a pre-Postmodern exploration of the instability of language.’ Then along came W, our un-elected leader, to prove that the inability to make logical sense, however hilarious, was either utterly useless or truly dangerous.

“Around the time I started to work on the proverbs, some friends were involved in an incident that threatened to open large rifts in that particular social fabric. Without ever becoming explicit references, many of the perverted proverbs about friendship in the poem surely emerged from that situation. (My poem ‘A True Poem,’ which begins, ‘I’m working on a poem that’s so true, I can’t show it to anyone,’ was another poem stemming from that experience.) At the same time, a couple of friends (Gail Mazur, Robert Polito) also suggested several additions to the poem that I found irresistible.

“I think it’s both my funniest poem—I love to read it aloud because it gets laughs—and probably also my darkest. And if both aspects of it are true, then maybe it’s a success. It was first published in ‘The Paris Review’ in 1995, and in a 1996 interview in the magazine ‘Civilization,’ George Plimpton, the ‘Paris Review’ editor, talking about humor in literature, mentioned that it was one of his favorite poems in his latest issue. It’s one of the ‘reviews’ of my work I value most.”

PROVERBS FROM PURGATORY

It was déjà vu all over again.

I know this town like the back of my head.

People who live in glass houses are worth two in the bush.

One hand scratches the other.

A friend in need is worth two in the bush.

A bird in the hand makes waste.

Life isn’t all it’s crapped up to be.

It’s like finding a needle in the eye of the beholder.

It’s like killing one bird with two stones.

My motto in life has always been: Get It Over With.

Two heads are better than none.

A rolling stone deserves another.

All things wait for those who come.

A friend in need deserves another.

I’d trust him as long as I could throw him.

He smokes like a fish.

He’s just a chip off the old tooth.

I’ll have him eating out of my lap.

A friend in need opens a can of worms.

Too many cooks spoil the child.

An ill wind keeps the doctor away.

The wolf at the door keeps the doctor away.

People who live in glass houses keep the doctor away.

A friend in need shouldn’t throw stones.

A friend in need washes the other.

A friend in need keeps the doctor away.

A stitch in time is only skin deep.

A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

A cat may look like a king.

Know which side of the bed your butter is on.

Nothing is cut and dried in stone.

You can eat more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Don’t let the cat out of the barn.

Let’s burn that bridge when we get to it.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

Don’t cross your chickens before they hatch.

DO NOT READ THIS SIGN.

Throw discretion to the wolves.

After the twig is bent, the barn door is locked.

After the barn door is locked, you can come in out of the rain.

A friend in need locks the barn door.

There’s no fool like a friend in need.

We’ve passed a lot of water since then.

At least we got home in two pieces.

All’s well that ends.

It ain’t over till it’s over.

There’s always one step further down you can go.

It’s a milestone hanging around my neck.

Include me out.

It was déjà vu all over again.

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Lessons from Julia’s book

I’ve just returned home from the neighborhood farmers’ market with a bulging bag of what August does best–corn and tomatoes and melons. Also pea tendrils from a stall of Asian vegetables where I was discussing recipes with two Haitian women. And long lavender Chinese eggplants I need to find a recipe for.

It’s the bountiful season, no doubt, that’s put me in the mood to cook the fruits of my hunting and gathering. But according to this morning’s New York Times, we’re also all under the spell of Julia and The Book. (And if you haven’t yet seen the movie, have you got a treat waiting for you!

My copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” has a slightly ripped binding. It’s old (first edition, 14th printing) and spattered and has notes penciled in beside many of the recipes (“next time make the brown-braised onions FIRST”). I was a new bride and Julia taught me to cook. She also taught me to be ambitious and adventurous in the kitchen. Maybe even outside the kitchen. And maybe that was her most enduring lesson, the reason a new generation of cooks is making her book a best-seller today. Yes, we know what is healthy to eat, but maybe eating shouldn’t be only about what sustains our bodies.

People in other countries seem to know it better than we do here in America, the idea that eating just may be also about sustaining our souls with food that we take the time to prepare with careful attention and eat not standing up or driving, but sitting at a table with people to whom we also give careful attention.

Julia’s ‘60s ultimately gave way to the excessive ‘80s and we started paying more attention to amounts on our plates–enormous or minceur–and her lessons started slipping away from us. But Nora Ephron and Julie Powell have given us a chance to relearn them. A little butter isn’t a terrible thing. Good food rarely comes in a box with listed ingredients. Cooking is an art, but it can be mastered. And savoring good food in the company of friends and family is one of the great pleasures we are given in this life.

Bon appetit to you, Julia. And to Nora, Julie, Meryl, Amy. And to us.

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Say the magic word….

I haven’t put up a post in a while (has anyone out there noticed?) because I’ve been a little distracted. Farklempt as Mike Meyers would have said years ago. And all because of one word: married. Which is what I’m “getting” next week.

I’m sure if you had asked either of us last year, we wouldn’t have predicted this. And even though ours is the one man-one woman model–and I mean that as description, not political rhetoric–we’re getting an unexpected lesson in the significance of same-sex marriage. Not that we ever questioned its importance and not that we haven’t been proud these past five years to be residents of Massachusetts, but our engagement has given us a whole new look at the institution of marriage. Let me explain.

We met in early 2007 and, last summer, began talking about moving in together. How to merge two lives is always a question that seems to have no possible answer. It’s especially complicated when the lives involve long tangles of friends and family members, the tether of treasured possessions, not to mention real estate.

His place was the logical choice, so I dismantled my apartment, parceling out furniture and all the et cetera; changed my legal address; got the new supply of checks, stationery, and address labels. Reader, I moved in with him. And when we decided to get married, it seemed like icing on the cake.

Of course we realized later that it’s the icing that gets all the attention. As soon as we told people we were getting married, we were….ta-da…engaged! E-mails flew, congratulations poured in, and people rushed to wish us well.

It was lovely. It was touching. And then it was a little odd. We shared a home, memberships in museums, subscriptions to newspapers. We shopped for groceries, cooked our meals, sent out birthday cards, together. Didn’t anyone notice we were already a couple?

And that’s when the same-sex marriage thoughts kicked in. From the moment we decided to move in together, we were clear in our intention that we were permanently a couple. But even when we thought we were making our situation clear, society didn’t seem to notice. I find myself chafing a little in the face of the ebullient tide of marriage chauvinism washing over us. What we are to each other isn’t more true or more committed, I tend to grouse to him, just more public.

So this is our own defense of marriage act, joining with those who believe that marriage is between two people who love each other and who are committed to creating one more small island of connection that may, we hope, radiate outward. So we’re getting married. Who doesn’t love icing, after all?

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Where the poem comes from: Miriam Levine

For the past few days I’ve been reading “The Dark Opens,” by Miriam Levine. Despite the title, or maybe in perfect accord with it, this is a luminous book filled with wise and tender observations of the world in finely-crafted poems. Oddly, as I prepare this blog post, I see that one of the book’s blurbs was written by Denise Duhamel, whose line provided a take-off point for the poem by Dustin Brookshire which I featured in the last “Where the poem comes from.”

Miriam lives not far from me in Boston area and we finally met face to face just recently after e-mailing back and forth for months. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, a novel, a memoir, and a non-fiction book. And I always enjoy reading her blog, which often includes her photographs.

Here is Miriam’s poem, “Daughter,” from “The Dark Opens,” and her discussion of how it came to be written:

Daughter

You beg for a tattoo like your friend’s.
A band of stars at your ankle.
There’s no way to escape regret.
Indelible dye makes it worse.

Growth spurts knock you out.
The cold makes you drowsy.
That’s nothing new.

Don’t sleep too long.
Dark night never gets tired of holding you.

Get up and remember the song.

You can sing as you dart and kick:
I have to be careful when I dance.
My dye-job is fading.
And white hair grows at the roots.

What do you want me to do? Lie here with you?

Or break every mirror and never go out?
I’ll wait for the sun to light us both.

You’re on your feet. We’re facing the same way,
the sun does what it’s supposed to do,
the mirror angled to the window,
your face just behind mine.

What was the inspiration for my poem, “Daughter”? At first it might seem the poem was sparked by an actual experience: mother, Miriam Levine, finds her daughter sleeping too much, urges her to get up. In fact, I have no daughter. The event described in the poem did not happen. What, then, inspired the poem? It was my reading Anne Carson’s translation of a newly discovered poem of Sappho’s in which the Greek poet, who was born c. 610 BCE, addresses the young. Here are the first three stanzas of the poem:

You, children, be zealous for the beautiful gifts
of the violetlapped Muses
and for the clear songloving lyre.

But my skin once soft is now
taken by old age,
my hair turns white from black.

And my heart is weight down
and my knees do not lift
that once were light to dance as fawns.

(New York Review of Books, Oct. 20, 2005)

I hadn’t written about aging, but Sappho’s poem helped me get at the subject and to connect both with my long past young slothful self and to the imagined contemporary girl longing for a tattoo. I try to bring age and youth together. “Daughter” is about coming to life, to the dance, to poetry and song, about choosing love and connection and escaping regret. I must have been aware of all of these things, just as I was aware of the tattoos I saw inked into tender young skin, but it took Sappho’s poem to wake me. Does any of this add to the appreciation of “Daughter”? Probably not, but it may help to know that poets find “the violetlapped muses” in the work of other poets.

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Where the poem comes from: Dustin Brookshire

I first met Dustin Brookshire online when he contacted me a few months ago after hearing one of my poems read on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. He invited me to add a brief essay to his blog feature, “Why I Write,” and I was delighted to be there among poets I greatly admire like Dorianne Laux and my friend and mentor Patricia Smith. Most recently the featured poet is Alan Shapiro, whose essay is fascinating.

In 2008 Dustin founded LIMP WRIST magazine and Quarrel, a blog focused on poetry revision. He has been featured at poetry readings in Atlanta and Savannah and his work has been published in numerous online magazines as well as in Atlanta’s DAVID magazine. Besides writing poetry and thinking up provocative poetry projects, Dustin serves on the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival Committee, and is a political activist who tries to keep elected officials on their toes.

As part of my series on poems’ starting places, Dustin talks about his poem, “Stuck,” which originally appeared in O&S:

“I am working on a project with Robert Walker, a poet and graduate student at Virginia Tech.  We share a love and a passion for the work of Denise Duhamel, and we send each other lines from Denise’s poems.  Whatever line is sent must become the first line of our own poem.
 
“’Stuck’ starts with a line from Denise Duhamel’s ‘Mille Et Un Sentiments’: “I feel like I may be repeating myself, that I’m totally stuck”  While I obsess on many things in my life, I find myself severely stuck on two topics: my parents’ use of the “f” word during my childhood and a sexual assault by an ex-boyfriend.  Both topics can be difficult to write about, whether it is because of reliving the incidents through words or simply for the fear of how my poetic voice sounds through my words.
 
“Ostensibly, it seems as if ‘Stuck’” comes from Denise’s line, but as Denise once said, “As poets, I think we all write from a deep wound.”  And, for me, that is exactly where “Stuck” comes from—a deep wound.

STUCK
 
I feel like I may be repeating myself, that I’m totally stuck
on the words of my mother and father, You’re Fat.
Father:  I’ve never seen a fat person who looked happy.
Mother:  You don’t want to be like your grandmother.
Don’t tell your father I said that.   I haven’t even told
my new therapist about my calorie counting parents.
We’re stuck on the rape. How I’m stuck with anger.
How I’m stuck on not crying about it.
I tell her I tear up when I think about it, sometimes.
She tells me tearing up isn’t crying, isn’t release.
Then I become stuck on changing the topic.
You see, I have a way with being stuck,
stuck between forgiving and forgetting.
 

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The Occasional recipe…lemonade syrup

Here in Boston it’s felt like summer for more than a week now, so I think it’s safe to offer one of my favorite summer recipes–lemonade syrup. Here’s what you do: make up a batch of this and keep it in the refrigerator. When you want lemonade, just add a couple of tablespoonsful to a glass of ice water and–voila–actual lemonade.

The base of this recipe is just a simple syrup, aka sugar water. There was a time when I traveled often to southeast Asia, where a cold drink is always welcome and simple syrup is a ubiquitous sweetener. Either on its own or as lemonade, it’s a good addition to iced tea. I like to add lots of mint, which is rampant in the herb garden about now.

And, while we’re in the garden, try just some cold water with a slice of cucumber and sprigs of parsley and mint as a summer refresher. Mmmm. Reminds me of being in steamy Bangkok, sitting on the verandah of the Oriental Hotel beside the Chao Praya River, with a cool drink and a sweet juicy slice of ripe papaya with lime.

However you are cooling off this summer, I hope you are enjoying it!

Lemonade Syrup

Combine and boil for 5 minutes:
2 cups sugar
1 cup water
rind of 2 lemons cut in strips
Cool and add the juice of 6 lemons. Strain. Refrigerate. To make lemonade, add 2 tablespoons syrup (or to taste) to a glass of cold water.

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New on the bookshelf: “The Cure for Grief” by Nellie Hermann

My friend Susan Ebert, always a source of great reading suggestions and important ideas, introduced me to the work of Nellie Hermann. Nellie grew up in Newton, Massachusetts and earned an M.F.A. from Columbia and has a first novel out, “The Cure for Grief.” It tells a story of unimaginable sadness and creates what Kirkus Review terms, “a gorgeously readable meditation on mourning and survival.” It is newly out in paperback and has just been selected by Target as one of their “breakout books” for the summer. I asked Nellie to tell us about the book and here is what she said:

“’The Cure for Grief’ was not my title, originally, and I had some hesitation about its finality. Would people pick up my book expecting a true “cure,” and then be disappointed? As time has passed, though, I have grown to like it more and more, if for no other reason than the recognition that writing the book was as close to a cure as I will ever get.

“When I was in high school, I lost both my father and the youngest of my three brothers within a year, to brain tumors. A few years before that, when I was in fifth grade, my oldest brother was diagnosed with a severe mental illness. My father, who died when he was 58, was a Holocaust survivor, whose story had always been fascinating to me, as well as out of reach.

“The ramifications of all of this tragedy, the tendrils of which went back a long way, were deep and long and inappropriate for a blog post, but suffice it to say that it took me many years to be able to tell people about my story (and even now it’s still hard). Writing was where I felt comfortable letting out even a little of what I felt, and even there I wrote around my own story for a long time. It was when I was in graduate school, and a teacher diagnosed my stories as always having “damaged males on the side,” that it dawned on me that it was time to confront the story head on.

“’The Cure for Grief’’ is a work of fiction, and for me this is a lot of where the “cure” part comes in. Processing what I had been through was a necessary act—revisiting scenes that were painful for me, confronting images that I had been carrying around for years and that were beginning to fester—but just as necessary was the act of creation around what had really happened, the act of transforming my own story into one that could be given away. There was no way I could do justice to my actual family—I could not bring them back—and accepting this was crucial to being able to write the book and create Ruby, my main character, and her family, that resembles mine and yet is not mine. Giving coherence and shape to something that in real life did not (and does not) necessarily have such qualities was a truly powerful act, and one that transformed my life. Creating a new family, and watching them go through the pain and come out the other side; giving the story a home that was outside of my own body, was not a cure, but was as close as I can come.

“And the title, which I approve of more and more, came about in a way that could not be denied: many titles were being thrown about, none of which were quite right, and my editor typed the word “ruby” into an internet search engine and came up with the fact that in ancient times, rubies were thought to be cures for grief. I had not known this when I named my main character, but it seemed too significant a coincidence to be ignored.

“It is my hope that the book can be of help or interest to people who have or are experiencing grief, or can help those who haven’t to perhaps understand better the people in their lives who have. Being in touch with a few readers who have reached out to me to tell me their stories has been a great joy and an unintended consequence. I believe deeply in the power of narrative to transform the most terrible moments of our lives, in the act of reading as well as writing, and getting to share my story in this way is a gift that only continues to grow.”

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New media, old media, and the public interest

Just as I’ve finished my post about the likely sad demise of the Bay State Banner here in Boston, something has erupted that’s essentially a food fight between old and new media. Long story short, Ted Diadiun, of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, reacted to a blogger reacting to a Plain Dealer column by calling bloggers, “a bunch of pipsqueaks out there talking about what the real journalists do.” Predictably, the comment ignited blazing online reaction and won another embattled newspaper no new friends.

Here’s my take, for what it’s worth. Yes, there are plenty of self-serving bloggers with no idea what journalistic ethics are. Or rules of grammar, for that matter. Hacks exist in every field. If you count on the wisdom of the marketplace, you figure–some evidence to the contrary–that the cream will rise to the top and the sludge will eventually sink without a trace.

Meanwhile there are bloggers who are, like me, former print journalists who did not suddenly lose their professional standards when their newspapers downsized out from under them. And there are bloggers (maybe we should dignify them with the name online journalists) who are serious about finding and reporting news in this new forum.

Bottom line is a sense of responsibility to the public. A hissy fit, whether thrown by a blogger or a print journalist may make for fun reading, but it is of no use to readers of anything. Just looks like a bunch of pipsqueaks saying, “the public be damned.”

Meanwhile, consider switching from reading news to reading poetry:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams

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Another one bites the dust?

Here in Boston another newspaper voice seems about to go silent. Right now the Bay State Banner has just “suspended” publication, but unless a savior is found soon, that suspension will be permanent. The Banner has, since 1965, been a voice for Boston’s black community, which has often been city marginalized in the city’s newspapers and broadcast media.

The Banner spoke to a community and community is one more thing lost, or at least irreparably altered, with the death of a paper. Picture the morning commute with a train full of newspaper readers, as opposed to a train filled with people glued to their Blackberrys (Blackberries? Sure wish my blog had a copy editor.) One is a communal experience, while the other is solitary. The internet’s paradox is that while we’re connected, we’re also detached. What’s the answer? If we’re linked to a thousand different news sources, isn’t that a good and healthy thing? But then we’re missing what we have in common when we’re all reading and listening to just a few outlets.

The internet gives us immediacy. On Friday night when Sarah Palin gave her less-than-articulate resignation speech, who would have thought for an instant of waiting for the next day’s paper to find out about it? And the protests around the Iranian election results, beamed around the world by bloggers and anyone with a cell phone camera make an indisputable case for the online news. Who would want to be without that?

But newspapers give us depth. I recently saw an HBO documentary called, “Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech.” One segment concerned the publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers, the documentation of the U.S.’s deeply flawed and manipulated conduct of the Vietnam War. I was reminded again of that with yesterday’s astoundingly worded New York Times headline about the death of Robert McNamara, “Architect of a Futile War.” The credentialed reporting, the extended following of a story, the publication of lengthy documents, even the publication of important stories on non-sexy topics–all things newspapers have done year after year, all things that online news sources have yet to prove themselves in, all vital to keeping us informed. No one imagines that newspapers will–or even should–continue unchanged and new media has a long way to go before it’s an adequate replacement.

I’m thinking that each of us has a role to play in how this story unfolds. Every time we choose to read a paper or not and every time we choose which online news sources we read, we are affecting it. And, in case we’re tempted to avoid the whole question, we need to remember that nothing of consequence rides on the answer but democracy, which requires a well-informed citizenry to function.

We live in interesting times. Stay tuned for breaking news.