To Garner Wisdom

"Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy. The amount of work is the same."~~~Francesca Reigler

Tuesday, April 27

The Art of Loosing

After the sudden death of his father, the poet Kevin Young looked for a collection of poems that might speak to his sense of loss. To his surprise, he couldn't find such a collection, so he went to work compiling one. The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, Young's anthology, came out earlier this year.
Early in the collection, Young includes a poem, "Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden, that was read at his father's service. It begins:
                    
                        

   Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
                         Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
                    Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
            Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
                                                         
Young says the best poems are "precise about a feeling. A poem can be both blunt -- it can say it straight out -- it also can say, 'Stop all the clocks,' 'Do not go gentle into that good night.' It can plead in a way that we may wish, but we are not able to. And I think that that ability -- to be direct and say it full out, but also make music out of it, make metaphor, make meaning -- is really what a poem does best."
Courtesy of the author Kevin Young has written and edited many collections of poetry. His 2003 collection, Jelly Roll, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
As grief comes in many forms, so do the poems in The Art of Losing, which takes its title from the Elizabeth Bishop poem "One Art" ("The art of losing isn't hard to master ... "). Young includes poems on subjects from the unexpected -- like David Wojahn's "Written on the Due Date of a Son Never Born" -- to careful preparation, as in Hal Sirowitz's "Remember Me":


Every weekend your mother & I tour cemetery plots,
Father said, the way most people visit model homes.
We have different tastes. I like jutting hills
overlooking traffic, whereas she prefers a bed
of flowers. She desires a plot away from traffic noise.
I let her have her way in death to avoid a life of Hell.

Near the end of the collection, Young begins a section on redemption with "The Trees" by Philip Larkin, which points out not only that, while they seem to be reborn each year, trees eventually will die ("their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain"), but also that "their greenness is a kind of grief":  That burst of hope, Young says, is "one of the feelings that these poems capture.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh                                                                              
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh

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Shade Tree Mechanics

Shade Tree Mechanics
Working on a car can be dangerous. The car can fall if it is jacked up and fall. With daddy working on anything seemed as if fire was the main danger. Grandmother's house had not been built back long after their fire. We were living in a new brick house, which I thought was a mansion. I drive by there now and am amazed at how small it seems. That night he had pulled the navy blue Dodge Dart he was driving at the time beside the carport. I always got really worried when he tried to do something drunk. He had to, just had to get the car fixed, to go visit Parker. Parker was the local bootlegger. One of the local bootleggers. Lauderdale County was dry. Traveling to Pulaski was really not an option, considering the not so reliable car Daddy had. I could see out the kitchen door as he stood under the hood messing with the breather on the top of the engine. He took it off and was pouring gas into the carburetor. The next thing I knew flames were coming from under the hood of the car. Forget there being an easy way to put the fire out. There was not a water hose hooked up. It was before fire extinguishers were standard in homes. Dirt was the answer at that moment. I saw the fire and him getting sand from the pile that was left in front of the house from the building back of Grandmothers house. The fire was finally put out, but the car was in need of more repairs than before he started.

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