Cavellini il Magnifico/Eddie Rosenthal/Sondheim On Poetry & Music/David Alpaugh's Mixed View/Ed Coletti Poem/Letter to Mary Oliver

 Cavellini il Magnifico

At times, I still wonder if  G.A. Cavellini and I might be related to each other on my Tuscan mother's side. She was Anna Cavellini.  He was born the same year as both of my parents, 1914.  A knowing few appear to regard me also as somewhat of an absurdist.

Ed Rosenthal - my friend, poet, Chess Expert, website developer, dog whisperer, and all-around decent fellow has a new blog he wants shared with you.  The URL is

http://takingrefugeinpoetry.blogspot.com/

Sondheim Contrasts Poetry and Music

Stephen Sondheim intensely loved poetry.  Here he looks at the differences between poetry and musical lyrics. See also No Money In Poetry November 2011 edition

“Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.”

“Poetry seems to me to exist in terms of its conciseness—how much can be packed in,” he told Bernard Levin in 1980. “Lyric writing has to exist in time … Therefore it must be crystal clear as it goes on.”

 I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in. The whole idea of poetry is denseness, is concision, is abutment of images, and that sort of thing. You can't do that when you've got music going, and expect the audience to take it in.

 Poetry is something that you can go back and read multiple times to extract its meaning. But with lyrics, you hear them once and they have to stick."

Now see David Alpaugh's mixed view on the subject in my then favorite of his essays which I originally featured here in 2011.

When Poetry Counts Even More

I once again caught myself wondering about what had happened to the status of poets actually influencing the course of history in many countries and the poet's quieter influence on the health of readers. I recalled my own poem in the Fall 2020 issue of  So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum Library and especially the amazing letter of gratitude to Mary Oliver (1935-2018) from a teenaged girl who had been  pondering suicide.

If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.  — Plato

 

Underground During Ages of Autocracy

 when all the writers and artists who depart

facebook twitter instagram and even email

begin painting and reciting in caves catacombs

and other hidden chambers from which

their material work emerges clandestinely   

being distributed by hand subversively

much the same as the works of

 

Gallileo Voltaire Pussy Riot Ai Wei Wei

Pasternak Solzhenitsyn Thamsanga Mnyele

Wally Serote Thomas Paine Mayakovski   

 

whose creations became entwined with struggle

as ferns with mosses and mushrooms surviving

even thriving in the cool obscurity of caves

where these poets of truth and even hope expanding

as ocular pupils beyond restraint by the iris

enabling oversight engendering action

more substantial than  the statesmen politicians

and silenced effigies of incendiary leaders

 

while all the more of us in our catacombs

study and write our muses continuing in us

 

Diogenes Socrates Plato Sappho Pindar

Hypatia of Alexandria Hildegard Von Bingen

Thomas Merton Teresa of Avila Salman Rushdie

 

No one knows how it all ends

with a bang a whimper a sigh

something there is senses an ending

to the all there is was or won’t be

the scent from funereal blossoms waving

 

 Ed Coletti in So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library (Fall 2020)

	This newsletter is ad-free and depends upon the generosity of its readers (that’s you!), so if you can afford to, please consider becoming a paid-up member. Or gift a subscription to someone else. Or donate. Or buy a book. Or download the audiobook. Or simply share this newsletter with friends. It all helps. Thanks x When Death Comes A powerful letter of thanks to poet Mary Oliver Although ultimately about hope, the following letter discusses suicide ideation. Proceed with caution. In 2015, then-16-year-old Aidan Kingwell was tasked by her English teacher to write to someone who had influenced her in some way¹. The result was this letter, addressed to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, whose words—her poem When Death Comes, specifically—had helped Kingwell during a particularly dark time as a young teenager, and during moments of depression ever since. Frustratingly, despite my best efforts, I’m not allowed to reprint that poem here; however, I’m sure you can find it elsewhere, including in Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume One, first published in 1992. Thankfully, it’s not essential. This letter is a powerful piece of writing that stands on its own. Dear Mary, I know it’s an unconventional subject for a letter: death. A fact of life that most of us endeavor to avoid, or at least ignore. But I, Mary — I have walked side by side with death all of my life. I was thirteen the first time I read your poem, and at that time in my life, there was a good chance that I would not see my fourteenth birthday. I had been depressed since age ten, but I had never received any treatment. My mind was very dark; I dove deeper and deeper into my own twisted thoughts with each passing moment. I was someone who was simultaneously terrified of dying and yet obsessed with the idea. I was suicidal, which is a state of being that I cannot well describe, because there are not words that can describe such utter loss of hope, such bitterness and pain and unrelenting sorrow. I wanted to end my own life so badly that most days I could not find one single reason for living. It was not a cry for attention; it was a feeling of utter self-hatred. There is also no accurate way to describe the feeling of hating yourself and your life so much that you long to end it all. It is a feeling of being trapped, of being insane, of being hopeless. When you are suicidal, you are like a wild animal just barely being contained by a thin human shell. Your soul is empty and your heart is blackened and dead. You have no straws left to grasp, no ladder to climb out of the abyss; the only rope offered to help you scramble out is in the shape of a noose, and after weeks or months or years, that noose begins to look very, very appealing. So there I stood, face-to-face with death on a daily basis, wondering if each new day was the day that it would finally consume me. I was afraid of my own mind. I found no comfort in wooden crosses or the taste of bitter crackers, nor in the deluded words of psychiatrists. That eventual uncertainty — the uncertainty of the terror of my own death — haunted my footsteps as I walked from day to day, wearing it like a heavy, bitter cloak. The very idea of my own death was killing me. Then, one day, in my seventh-grade English class, I was presented with your poem. My teacher referred to it as “a dark poem with a note of hope underlying it,” but within it, I found so much more. Within it, I found new life. My mind opened up as I read your words; I was a frail but inspired butterfly clawing my way from a dark, putrid cocoon. The way you spoke, Mary; the way you talked about death, and how he will come to buy you with “all the bright coins from his purse,” how he will come “like an iceberg between the shoulder blades.” I could tell: you knew. You knew what it felt like to be owned by death’s shadow, in the same way that I was then. You had felt the same terror, the same all-consuming dread. But you were also strong. You faced death and said that it did not own you; you had looked into death’s dark eyes and said, “No, you cannot have me; I am not yet done here.” When you spoke of not wanting to have simply visited this world, my own world turned upside down. I began to think about how horrible it would be to have only been a visitor, in the way that you said: to not have made my mark on the world, to have only passed through with no real substance. I thought of a life lived entirely in absence of beauty and amazement, a life barren of love or excitement or laughter. I began to realize that that was what suicide would do to me. I saw that life was fast becoming my own. I saw that killing myself would take me away before I even had the chance to make something of my life. Suicide would eliminate my pain, yes, but it would also close any doors of possibility that I might have still open to me, doors that may lead to happiness in my future. I never would have imagined, Mary, that not killing myself would be one of the hardest decisions that I would ever have to make. But in the end, I made the choice, and I am still alive today. My life has not been full of joy; in fact, it has been dark, and hard, and at times I have even slipped back into death’s unrelenting grasp. But at those times, I have reminded myself of what I thought then — that I want to make something of my life, and that ending it would mean turning my back on all future possibilities, as well as the few pieces of happiness that I have managed to find in the present. At those dark times, Mary, I often also read your poem to myself — the poem that catalyzed my grand suicidal epiphany. I still struggle with this menace, but now I have one thing that I did not have before: I have hope. “When Death Comes,” Mary — and it will — I want to face it as an equal, and shake its hand as a friend, and accept it as an eventuality. You taught me that that is the only proper way to die. With your words you taught me that life cannot be lived in the shadow of death — that life must be a thing separate from death. And you taught me that when death comes, I should embrace it, but also that I should not welcome it before its time. You taught me, Mary, that there was nothing to be feared in death so long as my life was one well lived. “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world,” you wrote. And “When Death Comes,” Mary, I will tell it that you were my friend. Because you were. I will tell it that I am armed with your words, and it will bow its dark face in respect, and then, it will offer me its hand and lead me into whatever may or may not lay behind it. I will feel no fear, Mary — I no longer fear death and all its ways. I will know that I have beaten death down with your words and the inspiration that they gave me. I will know that I did not let it take me in any way but the one I wanted. And I will know that my life, no matter how twisted, corrupt, and fearful, was worth living. So thank you, Mary. Thank you for wrenching death’s grip from my wrist. Thank you for showing me that the burden of my soul was not so dark. That there was still hope left in me. Aidan Kingwell From JOURNEYS: YOUNG READERS' LETTERS TO AUTHORS WHO CHANGED THEIR LIVES. Copyright © 2017 by the Library of Congress. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press. 1 Mary Oliver died in 2019, and it’s unknown whether she read this letter. However, in 2015 it was entered into—and won, quite rightly—the Library of Congress’ “Letters About Literature” contest, which ran for 27 years until 2019. Your responses to anything in this blog are most welcome and invited.  I've decided to switch away from  using the Blogger interface for this purpose.  Instead, please email me edjcoletti(at)gmail.com.  I look forward to hearing from you.