The Lighthouse Writers Blog

Here’s the opening to Mark Strand’s intro to Best American Poetry 1991 (One of the first poetry books I bought, outside of school):

“It is 1957. I am home on vacation from art school, sitting across from my mother in the living room. We are talking about my future. My mother feels I have picked a difficult profession. I will have to struggle in obscurity, and it may be years and years before I am recognized; even then there is no guarantee that I will be able to make a living or support a family. She thinks it would be wiser for me to become a lawyer or doctor. It is then that I tell her that although I have just begun art school, I am actually more interested in poetry. “But then you’ll never be able to earn a living,” she says. My mother is concerned that I shall suffer needlessly. I tell her that the pleasures to be gotten from poetry far exceed those that come with wealth or stability. I offer to read her some of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens. I begin with “The Idea of Order at Key West.” in a few minutes, my mother’s eyes are closed and her head leans to one side. She is asleep in her chair.”

Has anyone else had a conversation like this? Feel free to post your own as a response….

(My Dad, circa 1987: “What the hell do you want to be an English major for?” His sincere expression of love and concern–and I mean that not sarcastically.)

Cheers,
–MJH

Picture this: a relatively handsome, bored, long-haired undergraduate boy slouches in a classroom, sometime in 1987 (or so). Contemporary American Poetry, four credits, Tues/Thurs 10 to 11:50 am.

The professor drones on about Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop. The boy likes these poets. They are interesting. They make him think, and he likes to think. But not too much.

They turn the page to a new decade, a new group of poets. In his red-jacketed anthology, there is a black-and-white photo of a handsome poet-dude, resembling a bit of Chris Reeve, the Superman years.

They begin reading poetry from this guy out loud, this guy whose name is Mark Strand.

The boy in the classroom feels a charge, and his mind begins to awaken, somehow.  Something in these poems seeps its way into his unconscious, and the poems, while they have meaning on their face, underneath lies a seething mass of emotion, idea, phobia, desire. For example:

SLEEPING WITH ONE EYE OPEN
  
Unmoved by what the wind does,
The windows
Are not rattled, nor do the various
Areas
Of the house make their usual racket–
Creak at
The joints, trusses, and studs.
Instead,
They are still. And the maples,
Able
At times to raise havoc,
Evoke
Not a sound from their branches
Clutches.
It’s my night to be rattled,
Saddled
With spooks. Even the half-moon
(Half-man,
Half half dark), on the horizon,
Lies on
Its side casting a fishy light
Which alights
On my Floor, lavishly lording
Its morbid
Look over me. Oh I feel dead,
Folded
Away in my blankets for good,
and
Forgotten.
My room is clammy and cold,
Moonhandled
And weird. The shivers
Wash over
Me, shaking my bones, my looses ends
Loosen,
And I lie sleeping with one eye open,
Hoping
That nothing, nothing will happen.

This sounds hokey, but when the boy first heard that poem, the hair on his arms stood on end. Really. (Or as the young kids say nowadays, For Reals.) And Strand’s poems still have that effect. (Okay, so the boy was me, when I had hair. When I was a bored, low B-average college student, blah, blah, blah….)

Come get your hair stood up at the Lighthouse Writer’s Studio weekend. May 3 and 4.

Oh, and check back daily as I will be violating copyrights and posting more of Mark’s poems here.

Cheers,
–MJH

Boston, MA, John F Kennedy Presidential Library, Sunday March 30, the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award 

In the early spring of that year we sat in the auditorium and looked across the bay to the city.  On the shore there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and blue in the shipping channel.  On the podium, Patrick Hemingway stood and read aloud and it was a fine reading, clear and strong, and the sun sparkled off the water, and…..

Sorry, I got a little caught up in the moment.  In truth, being just a bit of a cynic (in a healthy, good natured way) I feared Poppa’s son reading from the opening to A Farewell to Arms might come off as hokum.  But his voice really was clear and strong, and the audience of between 300 and 400 did get caught up in the cadence and rhythm of the piece. 

Sherri and I were in Boston over the weekend of March 30^th to attend the 2008 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for “distinguished first works of fiction,” and for the L.L.Winship/PEN New England Awards (kind of like our Colorado Book Awards).  My book, Migration Patterns, was selected an Honorable Mention, and we had Mileage Plus credits stacked up, and what better excuse to visit a great city?  The ceremony was held at the JFK Presidential Library overlooking the bay and the city skyline.

The ceremony itself featured short readings not only by Patrick Hemingway but also by Joshua Ferris and the poet Ann Killough, winner of the L.L. Winship poetry award, and a feisty, short (yea!!) keynote by Alice Hoffman.  But the real fun of the weekend was in attending the Saturday night reception at Beacon Press (see pic below) in the heart of the Beacon Hill district, about a block from the state capital, and the

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Lighthouse instructor Janis Hallowell’s new novel, She Was, comes out later this month. 

Guess who’s already read it? He kind of likes it.

I read this beautiful and compelling novel straight through in one sitting. Janis Hallowell writes with great compassion about the heart of the heart of our country and of our culture. She Was brings back the Vietnam era and elucidates our current wars and tribulations. The story is a family novel that touches all of us. Amazingly, it is also a shocking thriller that is impossible to put down. The writing is clean and honest; the message moved me. It is one of the best novels I have read in years.”
—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War