I think this is a great little story because of the way it raises a very simple and clear question (Did the man's son die in the war?) which then makes a sort of branching structure in my mind: He did die (or he did not). If he did die (which is my first-order expectation), how is the poem/story going to use and build on that to make me feel something new? And likewise if the son didn't die. So: how is this simple thing going to ascend into something more than anecdote? I feel it succeeds in doing that by erring on the side of the less-expected answer (the son lives), and for the unexpectedly muted quality of the man's gratitude - and for the two occasions where the grocer improves the narrator's selection (with the apple swapping). There's something lovely about that - why twice? What is offered in second iteration that isn't in the first?
I am always interested in stories that easily could go dark and somehow find a legit and non-cheesy way not to....
I am posting something here that has to do with The Stone Boy--and I put it here so that it doesn't get lost in the threads. I'd been looking for this and I finally found it--a part of an essay written by the poet Gregory Orr. It can be found in his wonderful book Richer Entanglements. Here you go:
"If disorder's fiercest face is random, life-threatening violence, then my own experience of it would be my younger brother's death in a hunting accident when I was twelve. Since I was holding the gun that killed him, the horror of the event entered me as a participant as well as a witness. Wishing, no doubt, to console me for what I had done and to explain the universe to themselves as well, several adults came to my room the evening of his death and earnestly and compassionately informed me that it was an accident. Accident. Interesting word. It is with words that we make order, that I even now am trying to make order and coherence. The word "accident"to a twelve-year-old's mind was the true name of terror. Is this a world ruled by accident? Are accidents of the sort that leave your younger brother a lifeless corpse at your feet--are these things just part of what the world is about? Unbearable word, unbearable world--this accident. My twelve-year-old mind knew instinctively it couldn't survive by such a concept as accident and went quickly to work trying to impose order, which is meaning, on his horror. I had heard about good and evil--like everyone else, I sensed them in myself. But here was an eight-year-old boy--dead. He was my brother; he was innocent and good. And he was dead. If good was dead, then evil must have done it, and so I was evil. What little religious background I had gave me the story of Cain and Abel, and the story seemed to fit enough to do the job, to restore order and meaning, and thus it was assimilated into the explanation I was formulating. So, as a youngster i had a near-fatal dose of the amoral, nameless, random horror that sometimes surfaces in human lives. I instinctively rejected that understanding of it called "accident" as partaking of the horror, not mitigating it in any way, not making it possible for me to integrate the experience into ongoing life. And, unimpressed and unconsoled by the ordering principles that adults offered, I formulated my own rigid ordering principle of good and evil, Abel and Cain."
There's more, but I'll stop here because I'm even sure anyone will see this. If anyone wants the next paragraph, let me know and I'll add it here.
"It is with words that we make order, that I even now am trying to make order and coherence." I love that. And I think of this often, when struggling to find the words that will help me make meaning out of experiences in my own life. My understanding of Arnold in The Stone Boy was: here's a child who has no language for his trauma, no language for his grief. Without the words, how can he even begin to comprehend what happened and how he feels about it? (Interesting to learn that the word "accident" was unbearable for Orr. But then again, it makes complete sense--to say that terror is arbitrary and happens without reason is much more terrifying)
Thank you for mentioning Orr. Perhaps this has already been posted elsewhere, but Orr had an essay in the NYT some years back that I thought of while reading The Stone Boy: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/opinion/sunday/reflections-on-a-shooting-range-death-from-one-who-knows.html. I meant to link this before, but this seems as good a place as any now (and to mention the poem "A Moment" for any who come across this comment, and are interested).
Thanks for the link to the NYT piece, but especially for drawing our attention to "A Moment", which I've just now read (for the first time). It's a beautiful, moving, powerful poem.
Hi Manami. Yes, that NYTimes piece is really apt to the story. Thanks for posting the link. Are you a poet? You probably know already of his book A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry which is a great resource.
"It is with words we make order...." That's it, right there, for anyone who writes.
I don't know why i didn't think of Orr earlier, when we discussed the story. Because I actually think of him often, I don't know why. I saw him lecture once, a million years ago. He mentioned his brother then and ever since I feel like i carry him around with me.
I'm glad you came across my post. I didn't know where to put it!
Thanks, Mary. I thought of Orr immediately when I read "The Stone Boy," and also of a friend in college who had the same misfortune and also turned instinctively to poetry, to sense-making. I was in a room with both of them once, when Orr was visiting for a reading and (generously) a visit to an advanced poetry class. I don't remember what was said. (It was over 30 years ago), but I do remember Orr's deep attention to the students' questions & their work, yet another moment where I was reminded of the seriousness of the work of poets, and a moment where I was also deeply impressed by Orr's generous attention. I also remember the strangeness of knowing that both he and my friend had accidentally shot & killed their brothers. And it didn't come up during the, because of course it didn't. For all I know my friend caught up with Orr later and spoke to him about it and they shared a moment of deep understanding for a kind of loss so few know or understand. I'd like to think so, anyway. It's how I'd want that story to end. But if I were writing the story I might not actually end it that way, because I know other details about troubles in my friend's life after that day (we drifted apart after college, and I haven't seen him in years), that suggest he wasn't the kind of person who'd have been able at that point in his life to initiate that moment with Orr. Perhaps his experience was a little closer to Stone Boy than Orr's, a life shattered with no adults attempting to help make sense.
Your story here is so moving, I've kind of just been sitting on the sofa for a little while now, pondering it. Orr has spent his life on making order out of disorder, on laying hands on others with his gift. Clearly, poetry saved his life. But others have to first be open to receive. From Orr's book: "...poetry is there, waiting for us, offering us its resources when we're ready to dramatize our experience and shape it into something fixed and stable, yet pulsing with life." Isn't that amazing?
Seems like the next few hours and days will be a cliff-hanger, might as well put the rest of this one up for us. It's not every day you get to share this vantage point, as tragic as it may be. Thanks, in advance.
Hi Allan. Glad to know someone read it. Here's the rest of it, which I really love so much, speaking as it does to the saving power of the written word:
"I have no wish to dwell on this story. It's enough to say that I experienced what I think all must feel, certainly all poets: a personal instance of the threat of disorder and a personal discovery of the mind's ability to, need to, create or discover an ordering principle to counter the threat and permit life to continue. How prevalent and intense the documented disorder in poets' lives. How many poets orphaned at an early age. How many with violent or alcoholic parents. How many people who can read Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" with a full sense of the child's terror and awe against which the poem's formal structure, the very metaphor of the waltz itself, must assert its calming, ordering powers."
The first apple-swap is a correction, I think, a taking back of a small ungenerous - and probably habitual - act (the inclusion of at least one poor quality item was a routine practice among the fruitsellers of my childhood). The replacing of the rotting apple, a small gesture, is done in response to the narrator connecting to the fruitseller as a person, remembering about the old man's son and asking about the son's fate in a caring way. The narrator shows relief at the news that the son is alive "That's fine" he says and maybe his asking and his response remind the fruitseller to try to feel 'fine' about it too, and the old man has now connected to the narrator enough not to want to take advantage of him so he swaps out the rotting apple.
The narrator's second response "That's wonderful" is much bigger, moves from relief to celebration, and it prompts a deeper - happier? - response from the old man " Yes he said gently, it was wonderful". The second swap, of a perfectly good but small apple for a larger one, is an act of gratitude. Perhaps the old man is thanking the narrator for reminding him that it is 'wonderful' that his son didn't die in the war, or perhaps he is just thanking him for caring.
Why twice? When the grocer first replaces one apple for another, it seems he's grateful for the customer asking about his son returning from the war. Then the grocer adds that his son came back at Christmas and the customer responds, "How wonderful! That was wonderful!" with the grocer responding gently, "Yes…it was wonderful." Is his son home but not the same as he left, changed by war or is the grocer merely bracing for any moment, when his son is not ok? Does the grocer appreciate the customer who keeps seeing the bright side of things, thereby replacing the second apple as a gesture of gratitude and/or a reminder to himself? Readers of the poem are left to consider the muted quality of the man’s gratitude.
The first apple was the grocer himself: I felt rotted out, but fate was on my side. Here's a fresher apple to show you that. The second apple was the customer: Your hopefulness helped me, and you are worthy of larger fruit. So, thank you.
Very perceptive; those are indeed the places where the underlying currents sheer on the surface, and then (thank God) you wisely dangled that ellipsis. I appreciate the simple beauty of the story's human interchange, and that you allow that to go on living. I don't like to see the robins nailed to the fence; I appreciate them for what they are, and how they are. Thank you, Sensei.
I just want to thank everyone for their contributions in Story Club. It's so refreshing to have such a genial group in an online forum, sensitive to the pleasures and music of language and to art. Difficult times in the world make art feel that much more important. We fight so that we may keep free the highest values of our humanity. Thank you everyone.
Thanks, Mary. This is wonderful. After having read it I watched this interview with William Stafford, which is terrific and chimes with a lot of what I feel I'm learning here.
Thank you for the link, Ben. I was deeply affected by the way that Stafford expressed respect for his students and also for his personal approach to writing. I loved what he said about art: "...your whole life is the research for what you are writing." As a photographer, I feel that about my choices of what to shoot and what I am really saying when I make those decisions.
Ben! i watched that video and just loved it. Those two! They were mesmerizing together. i almost felt stoned listening to them. There is so much to learn from William Stafford. Thank you so much for posting this.
Mo Henderson, thank you so much for sharing Akhmatova‘s words. I hope they are true, I hope she got them all out. And I hope her daughter continues to love. We need those who can, to continue to love! The actions of the combined poets is an act of love, a higher ground touching our hearts, hopefully sending out tsunami waves like a meteor slammed into deep, deep waters, reaching into all the dark places.
Nancy, isn't the turn in this poem just wonderful? The whole two hours of Ukrainian poetry - including Ilya Kaminsky reading his own work - will soon be posted on youtube by a poetry group called Words Together, Worlds Apart.
Thanks for sharing that poem and the news about the reading, Mo! I have Deaf Republic & have been following Kaminsky's twitter and FB accounts, and somehow missed anything about the reading. Here it is: https://youtu.be/XTnDRmOhKos
Thank you for this, George. I have family in Ukraine right now, some currently sitting in metro stations. Even if this all ends soon and they are physically unharmed, they are already not the same as they were. Even if this leads to Putin's overdue demise and the world greatly benefits, the rest of my family watching this war from afar will always feel like the Italian man in this story.
It is a brilliant story and very instructive. I think it makes an excellent model for short story. I saw what I thought was the "twist" immediately: "My son left for the front today and I'll never see him again." The father will never see the son again because he won't be the same person.
In stories, we think we should hide the twist and then spring it on the reader. This author doesn't do that. He let me get it right away, and let that insight color the rest of the story rather than make it the point. (I'm learning that this is a very George approach.) The gentle, sad wisdom of the shopkeeper who looks out for the oblivious yay-sayer.
Agreed. For me, it read as if the poet trusted us to get the “twist” right away, and, instead of overdoing it and explaining to us just in case we missed it, we get a tender final moment that the reader can try to connect to the twist, characters, themes, etc:
“He took the bag of apples from my hands again / and took out one of the smaller apples and put in a large one.”
Thanks for all the poems, everyone! Here's one from Ko Un's remarkable collection Flowers of a Moment that always comes to my mind in times like these:
No man is an island entire and of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. ….
Any man’s death diminishes me. Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne 1624
This is not actually a poem. It’s a sermon. But written by one of the best poets of all time.
The robust discussion here regarding the effectiveness, the value, of the piece George shared with us reminds me yet again how fascinating is this thing we’re trying to do. If we all agreed on its beauty and meaning, if we all understood why our friend’s piece is chosen for publication and not ours, this whole enterprise would be bereft of the mysteries we’re all grappling with.
I want to share this with you all: I read a beautiful essay by Aimee Bender in which she discussed how profoundly she was moved hearing the Wallace Stevens poem Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour read at a funeral. So intrigued by what she wrote, I found the poem and…could barely understand a word of it. Including the title! I must just be a dumbass, I thought.
Then, I went through a year of tremendous grief. Toward the end of that year, I picked up Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour again and, lo, I understood every word of it. Somehow my experience had resulted in me being able to crack a code of sorts.
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour is particularly applicable to the situation we find ourselves in now, grieving what the Ukrainian people are dealing with. Check it out.
Thank you both. I found a recording of Stevens slowly, lovingly reading this. "We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous." Out of all the differences and indifferences, a community, if only we would lay claim to it. "Being there together is enough."
Thanks so much for posting this. Reznikoff was a curiously unheralded poet during his lifetime and some of his work--like this poem--is terrific. The apples and the two moments of changing one for another is a brilliant strategy to sort of track the horror and sadness of war to the happiness of the returning son and then, with a bigger apple--a hope for the future. And the nuance and delicacy of the closing gesture(s) is what veers the poem into its mystery making it poetry and not--as one might think in the early going--prose. It's not so popular nowadays to distinguish poetry from prose, but there's a difference, which is--because we are consumers--usually more important to a reader than a writer.
Hmmm. My read was the old man was touched by the kindness of the stranger in asking about his son, both times. We don't forget when people pay genuine attention to our little corner of the world. The apple was an unspoken nod to that kindness.
I have been endeavoring to get my teenage son to give poetry a chance. I sent him this and he had printed it out and stuck it on his wall with various other quotes, photos, etc. that he says give him hope :-) Thanks!
Since this *is* Story Club, I'd like to draw attention to the fascinating Grey Area between prose and poetry, which this poem so clearly inhabits.
Presenting some text "as a poem" is somewhat akin to placing an object in a gallery. Once it's enshrined in the exalted space of the gallery, it is transformed. Or more accurately, one's cultural *experience* of it is transformed. In a vaguely similar way, laying out text "as a poem" asks the reader, in effect, to take every line or phrase more seriously, to give every word more import, because ... it's a poem, and that's how poetry works: words charged with meaning.
If a poem like Reznikoff's is presented as plain text, it still works, and is perhaps no less powerful, but I think we still *read it* in a different mode. We don't know, at first, if it's just text, or if it is charged with meaning. It might be a prose-poem, or not. Only after we begin to read, or with a piece this short only after we've read to the end, is it clear that this is a Thing in itself, a work of art and not just an ordinary chunk of text. Seeing it presented in a "poetry layout" we know from the start that this is a special kind of text. As a result, our first reading is more careful and attentive and open.
Further, poetry layout endows text with a kind of meta-punctuation, by allowing line breaks and spacing to serve in the role of commas, colons, dashes, and periods. A single word can be set apart, or the meter of the text can be enhanced, without resorting to a distracting amount of conventional punctuation. Lines can be double-spaced. Phrases can be indented, or not.
And somewhere in this process, we might find rhymes creeping in, or heroic cadences, or pithy pauses, none of which can be reliably depicted in blocks of ordinary text.
Of course, sometimes the skill of prosody in the prose rises so far that blocky conventional paragraphs can't overshadow the poesy -- colors emerge that mere type cannot convey. This is where art transcends its medium and McLuhan is defeated.
This is really a great post! Thank you for all of this. Reznikoff's "story" is deepened by the very fact that it is a poem and that we read it as a poem. The two cannot be separated, story and poem. These lines, for instance, derive much of their power from the way they sit on the page (poetically, as separate lines), along with the repetition:
"and again it was late at night, dark and lonely;
and again I saw the old man alone in the store."
A story makes us stop and think, but a poem! It's all about the thinking. Why the word choice? Why the repetition? Certainly we think of these things when looking at a story, but not in the way we do with a poem. For a poem IS word choice (among other things). So here, the word "again" said twice. Such emphasis--on purpose. And "again....dark and lonely." Well, lonely for who? And what is this narrator doing on this street, one he seldom uses? What has brought him here? Because this is a poem (and not simply a story) the layers go deeper and deeper and the underlying meanings emerge. Loneliness, a road not often taken, fresh apples... Poetry is metaphor, right?
I've long been fascinated by the ways that the printed word can be enhanced -- color, bold, italic, underscore, font family changes, spacing, size, positioning, etc. That said, we're so used to utterly plain unembellished text that almost any of these come across as gimmicks, and can be very annoying. I've done a lot of technical writing, and there are innumerable scenarios where one really must differentiate between explanatory text, on-screen prompts, on-screen user text entry, hints, resulting computer output, etc., etc., along with the usual headings and subheadings and marginalia that accompany most highly structural material. But in writing fiction, I always hesitate about putting anything in italics, even if the speaker would be legitimately giving some word or phrase tremendous emphasis. Sometimes it seems there's no way to have a character say what works best without some embellishment to ensure the reader interprets it as intended.
I used to write a lot of poetry (I still wax poetic on occasion), and I grew up on Ferlinghetti and Corso and other beat or post-beat moderns, whose work really depends on exotic spacing and layout. I had a lot of fun with that, but now I'm focused on other aspects, most especially the language. My poetry had probably never been much in tune with the current vogue, because I love the language so much that it lacks the quality of dry insinuation that seems to dominate most of what I see published.
But I'm rambling OT. It is indeed very unfortunate that this editing facility isn't a bit more flexible. I'd like to include an image, too, now and then, but I can see why that might just lead to a mountain of visual distraction that truly isn't *writing*.
I just tried entering lines with Shift-Enter endings, but they still came out with paragraph spacing between them. Then I tried starting a line with a '.' and 10 spaces, to fake an indent, but the spaces were collapsed, so that didn't work either.
I would have thought that a site dedicated to *writing* would be able to accommodate poetry! A weird, profound, and unnecessary deficiency.
When word processing was finally democratized in the workplace, every human with a PC was setting off headlines in centered bold caps, oversized and underscored, in some typeface unrelated to the rest of the document.
Ya gotta play with it for a while, I guess, since type is so subtle, yet powerful, but the results were sooooo unbearably klunky. Comic Sans uber alles!
It's about a 1-minute read. I don't think it's a poem, although even the prose layout looks like one. Lotsa short lines. I guess that's Jack's definition of poetry, eh?
I liked the ease and simplicity, yet the depth. And I feel like there's an unspoken, "Yeah, my son came home, but he's not the son who left. THAT one, never came home."
I felt the same unspoken expression you did, and I wonder if it had do with the exchanged apples. They lend the poem a "you never stand in the same river twice" quality.
Yeah, it was the exchange of the apples but also the old man's grim but not sad face. Not sad because his son did return, but grim because it's a son haunted by his experience. And, yeah, "never stand in the same rive twice" is a good comparison.
I think this is a great little story because of the way it raises a very simple and clear question (Did the man's son die in the war?) which then makes a sort of branching structure in my mind: He did die (or he did not). If he did die (which is my first-order expectation), how is the poem/story going to use and build on that to make me feel something new? And likewise if the son didn't die. So: how is this simple thing going to ascend into something more than anecdote? I feel it succeeds in doing that by erring on the side of the less-expected answer (the son lives), and for the unexpectedly muted quality of the man's gratitude - and for the two occasions where the grocer improves the narrator's selection (with the apple swapping). There's something lovely about that - why twice? What is offered in second iteration that isn't in the first?
I am always interested in stories that easily could go dark and somehow find a legit and non-cheesy way not to....
I am posting something here that has to do with The Stone Boy--and I put it here so that it doesn't get lost in the threads. I'd been looking for this and I finally found it--a part of an essay written by the poet Gregory Orr. It can be found in his wonderful book Richer Entanglements. Here you go:
"If disorder's fiercest face is random, life-threatening violence, then my own experience of it would be my younger brother's death in a hunting accident when I was twelve. Since I was holding the gun that killed him, the horror of the event entered me as a participant as well as a witness. Wishing, no doubt, to console me for what I had done and to explain the universe to themselves as well, several adults came to my room the evening of his death and earnestly and compassionately informed me that it was an accident. Accident. Interesting word. It is with words that we make order, that I even now am trying to make order and coherence. The word "accident"to a twelve-year-old's mind was the true name of terror. Is this a world ruled by accident? Are accidents of the sort that leave your younger brother a lifeless corpse at your feet--are these things just part of what the world is about? Unbearable word, unbearable world--this accident. My twelve-year-old mind knew instinctively it couldn't survive by such a concept as accident and went quickly to work trying to impose order, which is meaning, on his horror. I had heard about good and evil--like everyone else, I sensed them in myself. But here was an eight-year-old boy--dead. He was my brother; he was innocent and good. And he was dead. If good was dead, then evil must have done it, and so I was evil. What little religious background I had gave me the story of Cain and Abel, and the story seemed to fit enough to do the job, to restore order and meaning, and thus it was assimilated into the explanation I was formulating. So, as a youngster i had a near-fatal dose of the amoral, nameless, random horror that sometimes surfaces in human lives. I instinctively rejected that understanding of it called "accident" as partaking of the horror, not mitigating it in any way, not making it possible for me to integrate the experience into ongoing life. And, unimpressed and unconsoled by the ordering principles that adults offered, I formulated my own rigid ordering principle of good and evil, Abel and Cain."
There's more, but I'll stop here because I'm even sure anyone will see this. If anyone wants the next paragraph, let me know and I'll add it here.
"It is with words that we make order, that I even now am trying to make order and coherence." I love that. And I think of this often, when struggling to find the words that will help me make meaning out of experiences in my own life. My understanding of Arnold in The Stone Boy was: here's a child who has no language for his trauma, no language for his grief. Without the words, how can he even begin to comprehend what happened and how he feels about it? (Interesting to learn that the word "accident" was unbearable for Orr. But then again, it makes complete sense--to say that terror is arbitrary and happens without reason is much more terrifying)
Thank you for mentioning Orr. Perhaps this has already been posted elsewhere, but Orr had an essay in the NYT some years back that I thought of while reading The Stone Boy: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/opinion/sunday/reflections-on-a-shooting-range-death-from-one-who-knows.html. I meant to link this before, but this seems as good a place as any now (and to mention the poem "A Moment" for any who come across this comment, and are interested).
Thanks for the link to the NYT piece, but especially for drawing our attention to "A Moment", which I've just now read (for the first time). It's a beautiful, moving, powerful poem.
Hi Manami. Yes, that NYTimes piece is really apt to the story. Thanks for posting the link. Are you a poet? You probably know already of his book A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry which is a great resource.
"It is with words we make order...." That's it, right there, for anyone who writes.
I don't know why i didn't think of Orr earlier, when we discussed the story. Because I actually think of him often, I don't know why. I saw him lecture once, a million years ago. He mentioned his brother then and ever since I feel like i carry him around with me.
I'm glad you came across my post. I didn't know where to put it!
Thanks, Mary. I thought of Orr immediately when I read "The Stone Boy," and also of a friend in college who had the same misfortune and also turned instinctively to poetry, to sense-making. I was in a room with both of them once, when Orr was visiting for a reading and (generously) a visit to an advanced poetry class. I don't remember what was said. (It was over 30 years ago), but I do remember Orr's deep attention to the students' questions & their work, yet another moment where I was reminded of the seriousness of the work of poets, and a moment where I was also deeply impressed by Orr's generous attention. I also remember the strangeness of knowing that both he and my friend had accidentally shot & killed their brothers. And it didn't come up during the, because of course it didn't. For all I know my friend caught up with Orr later and spoke to him about it and they shared a moment of deep understanding for a kind of loss so few know or understand. I'd like to think so, anyway. It's how I'd want that story to end. But if I were writing the story I might not actually end it that way, because I know other details about troubles in my friend's life after that day (we drifted apart after college, and I haven't seen him in years), that suggest he wasn't the kind of person who'd have been able at that point in his life to initiate that moment with Orr. Perhaps his experience was a little closer to Stone Boy than Orr's, a life shattered with no adults attempting to help make sense.
Your story here is so moving, I've kind of just been sitting on the sofa for a little while now, pondering it. Orr has spent his life on making order out of disorder, on laying hands on others with his gift. Clearly, poetry saved his life. But others have to first be open to receive. From Orr's book: "...poetry is there, waiting for us, offering us its resources when we're ready to dramatize our experience and shape it into something fixed and stable, yet pulsing with life." Isn't that amazing?
Seems like the next few hours and days will be a cliff-hanger, might as well put the rest of this one up for us. It's not every day you get to share this vantage point, as tragic as it may be. Thanks, in advance.
Hi Allan. Glad to know someone read it. Here's the rest of it, which I really love so much, speaking as it does to the saving power of the written word:
"I have no wish to dwell on this story. It's enough to say that I experienced what I think all must feel, certainly all poets: a personal instance of the threat of disorder and a personal discovery of the mind's ability to, need to, create or discover an ordering principle to counter the threat and permit life to continue. How prevalent and intense the documented disorder in poets' lives. How many poets orphaned at an early age. How many with violent or alcoholic parents. How many people who can read Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" with a full sense of the child's terror and awe against which the poem's formal structure, the very metaphor of the waltz itself, must assert its calming, ordering powers."
No apologies necessary. Glad you found this thread!
The first apple-swap is a correction, I think, a taking back of a small ungenerous - and probably habitual - act (the inclusion of at least one poor quality item was a routine practice among the fruitsellers of my childhood). The replacing of the rotting apple, a small gesture, is done in response to the narrator connecting to the fruitseller as a person, remembering about the old man's son and asking about the son's fate in a caring way. The narrator shows relief at the news that the son is alive "That's fine" he says and maybe his asking and his response remind the fruitseller to try to feel 'fine' about it too, and the old man has now connected to the narrator enough not to want to take advantage of him so he swaps out the rotting apple.
The narrator's second response "That's wonderful" is much bigger, moves from relief to celebration, and it prompts a deeper - happier? - response from the old man " Yes he said gently, it was wonderful". The second swap, of a perfectly good but small apple for a larger one, is an act of gratitude. Perhaps the old man is thanking the narrator for reminding him that it is 'wonderful' that his son didn't die in the war, or perhaps he is just thanking him for caring.
Why twice? When the grocer first replaces one apple for another, it seems he's grateful for the customer asking about his son returning from the war. Then the grocer adds that his son came back at Christmas and the customer responds, "How wonderful! That was wonderful!" with the grocer responding gently, "Yes…it was wonderful." Is his son home but not the same as he left, changed by war or is the grocer merely bracing for any moment, when his son is not ok? Does the grocer appreciate the customer who keeps seeing the bright side of things, thereby replacing the second apple as a gesture of gratitude and/or a reminder to himself? Readers of the poem are left to consider the muted quality of the man’s gratitude.
The first apple was the grocer himself: I felt rotted out, but fate was on my side. Here's a fresher apple to show you that. The second apple was the customer: Your hopefulness helped me, and you are worthy of larger fruit. So, thank you.
Very perceptive; those are indeed the places where the underlying currents sheer on the surface, and then (thank God) you wisely dangled that ellipsis. I appreciate the simple beauty of the story's human interchange, and that you allow that to go on living. I don't like to see the robins nailed to the fence; I appreciate them for what they are, and how they are. Thank you, Sensei.
Branching structures in my mind given unexpected branches is cool.
That is so beautiful. This is by way of saying thank you:
You Reading This, Be Ready
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
William Stafford
I just want to thank everyone for their contributions in Story Club. It's so refreshing to have such a genial group in an online forum, sensitive to the pleasures and music of language and to art. Difficult times in the world make art feel that much more important. We fight so that we may keep free the highest values of our humanity. Thank you everyone.
Nice said Lee^^
A crackerjack of a gift
From thou to we Mary G
Absence of iambic signals
Free verse form, fourteen
Lines, set in four stanzas
Four-four-four-two lines
Finds me musing: sonnet?
Thanks, Mary. This is wonderful. After having read it I watched this interview with William Stafford, which is terrific and chimes with a lot of what I feel I'm learning here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SA8eFWof8U
There are so many great resources all of you are putting forward. I'm sure I'm missing a whole bunch of them. Is anyone keeping an archive?
Thank you for the link, Ben. I was deeply affected by the way that Stafford expressed respect for his students and also for his personal approach to writing. I loved what he said about art: "...your whole life is the research for what you are writing." As a photographer, I feel that about my choices of what to shoot and what I am really saying when I make those decisions.
Yes, I liked that bit too. Great that you enjoyed it.
Ben! i watched that video and just loved it. Those two! They were mesmerizing together. i almost felt stoned listening to them. There is so much to learn from William Stafford. Thank you so much for posting this.
The nearby video of Stafford's son Kim speaking about his father is also both generous and instructive.
Most excellent!^^
I am down for Poem Club. Thank you.
me 4
Ditto.
Me, three.
Me five.
This morning, a group of Ukrainian & US poets and translators held a virtual reading - so many touching works. Here's one by Anastasia Akhmatova:
That's my home. . .
1
That’s my home.
There was a bridge here.
Now there isn’t.
That’s my home.
That’s my yard.
It’s still here.
Where a bridge stood,
there’s a river.
No more bridge.
Where there was once a pass,
now there’s a line.
We live here,
on the line.
In the devil’s belly,
that’s where.
2
I came back
Barely made it
Took a while to get everyone out
I have a big family
My parents are old
Then there are my
Brother my sister my
pregnant daughter
I got them all out
Out of that damned house
Just imagine
There’s a river
There was a bridge there
Now it’s destroyed
On the one side of the river these people
On the other side, those
Whoever they are
Between them, our house
It took me so many trips
There and back
For each person
I barely got them out
A big family
These on the one side, those on the other
The house stands like a shadow
As though lead passes through the walls
Or the house contorts its beams
So that it can dodge the hail of bullets
It twists left and right
What it took me, a woman
To get all of them out
You can’t imagine
One by one
Right from the belly of the beast
Coming back every time,
Diving into all of that,
Not knowing
If there will be a way
But I got them all out
And now my daughter
Yes, the pregnant one
Says she wants to return
She’s headed back tomorrow
She has someone there
A man she loves
See, he stayed back there
And love, well
You know how love goes
With those young people
You know how it is for them
Anything for love
Translated from the Russian by Olga Livshin and Andrew Janco
Mo Henderson, thank you so much for sharing Akhmatova‘s words. I hope they are true, I hope she got them all out. And I hope her daughter continues to love. We need those who can, to continue to love! The actions of the combined poets is an act of love, a higher ground touching our hearts, hopefully sending out tsunami waves like a meteor slammed into deep, deep waters, reaching into all the dark places.
Nancy, isn't the turn in this poem just wonderful? The whole two hours of Ukrainian poetry - including Ilya Kaminsky reading his own work - will soon be posted on youtube by a poetry group called Words Together, Worlds Apart.
Thanks for sharing that poem and the news about the reading, Mo! I have Deaf Republic & have been following Kaminsky's twitter and FB accounts, and somehow missed anything about the reading. Here it is: https://youtu.be/XTnDRmOhKos
Oh Mo, that is so lovely. Thanks for letting us know! I will look for it!
Howe wonderful. Thank you.
just wow...
Thank you for this, George. I have family in Ukraine right now, some currently sitting in metro stations. Even if this all ends soon and they are physically unharmed, they are already not the same as they were. Even if this leads to Putin's overdue demise and the world greatly benefits, the rest of my family watching this war from afar will always feel like the Italian man in this story.
Sending wishes for safety for your family in the Ukraine, and for all there.
Слава Україні
Sending all good wishes to your family, Julia. May they stay safe and come through.
It is a brilliant story and very instructive. I think it makes an excellent model for short story. I saw what I thought was the "twist" immediately: "My son left for the front today and I'll never see him again." The father will never see the son again because he won't be the same person.
In stories, we think we should hide the twist and then spring it on the reader. This author doesn't do that. He let me get it right away, and let that insight color the rest of the story rather than make it the point. (I'm learning that this is a very George approach.) The gentle, sad wisdom of the shopkeeper who looks out for the oblivious yay-sayer.
Agreed. For me, it read as if the poet trusted us to get the “twist” right away, and, instead of overdoing it and explaining to us just in case we missed it, we get a tender final moment that the reader can try to connect to the twist, characters, themes, etc:
“He took the bag of apples from my hands again / and took out one of the smaller apples and put in a large one.”
Thanks! I am right with you!
Thank you!
On Living
Nazim Hikmet - 1902-1963
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example—
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people—
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees—
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast. . .
Let's say we're at the front—
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived". .
yes, this one by Hikmet says so much.
I love this poem. Thank you
So great; thank you so much. Must read more by this one!
Thanks for all the poems, everyone! Here's one from Ko Un's remarkable collection Flowers of a Moment that always comes to my mind in times like these:
We went to Auschwitz
saw the mounds of glasses
saw the piles of shoes
On the way back
we each stared out of a different window
No man is an island entire and of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. ….
Any man’s death diminishes me. Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne 1624
This is not actually a poem. It’s a sermon. But written by one of the best poets of all time.
Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦
If only we would feel, and understand, that diminishment.
That’s what Babel helps us do. In his ambiguous way
Thank you.
The robust discussion here regarding the effectiveness, the value, of the piece George shared with us reminds me yet again how fascinating is this thing we’re trying to do. If we all agreed on its beauty and meaning, if we all understood why our friend’s piece is chosen for publication and not ours, this whole enterprise would be bereft of the mysteries we’re all grappling with.
I want to share this with you all: I read a beautiful essay by Aimee Bender in which she discussed how profoundly she was moved hearing the Wallace Stevens poem Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour read at a funeral. So intrigued by what she wrote, I found the poem and…could barely understand a word of it. Including the title! I must just be a dumbass, I thought.
Then, I went through a year of tremendous grief. Toward the end of that year, I picked up Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour again and, lo, I understood every word of it. Somehow my experience had resulted in me being able to crack a code of sorts.
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour is particularly applicable to the situation we find ourselves in now, grieving what the Ukrainian people are dealing with. Check it out.
Thanks for reading.
Thank you both. I found a recording of Stevens slowly, lovingly reading this. "We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous." Out of all the differences and indifferences, a community, if only we would lay claim to it. "Being there together is enough."
Thanks so much for posting this. Reznikoff was a curiously unheralded poet during his lifetime and some of his work--like this poem--is terrific. The apples and the two moments of changing one for another is a brilliant strategy to sort of track the horror and sadness of war to the happiness of the returning son and then, with a bigger apple--a hope for the future. And the nuance and delicacy of the closing gesture(s) is what veers the poem into its mystery making it poetry and not--as one might think in the early going--prose. It's not so popular nowadays to distinguish poetry from prose, but there's a difference, which is--because we are consumers--usually more important to a reader than a writer.
Hmmm. My read was the old man was touched by the kindness of the stranger in asking about his son, both times. We don't forget when people pay genuine attention to our little corner of the world. The apple was an unspoken nod to that kindness.
I have been endeavoring to get my teenage son to give poetry a chance. I sent him this and he had printed it out and stuck it on his wall with various other quotes, photos, etc. that he says give him hope :-) Thanks!
Wow. Wow. Wow. What we humans will do for one another. Thank you, George.
Since this *is* Story Club, I'd like to draw attention to the fascinating Grey Area between prose and poetry, which this poem so clearly inhabits.
Presenting some text "as a poem" is somewhat akin to placing an object in a gallery. Once it's enshrined in the exalted space of the gallery, it is transformed. Or more accurately, one's cultural *experience* of it is transformed. In a vaguely similar way, laying out text "as a poem" asks the reader, in effect, to take every line or phrase more seriously, to give every word more import, because ... it's a poem, and that's how poetry works: words charged with meaning.
If a poem like Reznikoff's is presented as plain text, it still works, and is perhaps no less powerful, but I think we still *read it* in a different mode. We don't know, at first, if it's just text, or if it is charged with meaning. It might be a prose-poem, or not. Only after we begin to read, or with a piece this short only after we've read to the end, is it clear that this is a Thing in itself, a work of art and not just an ordinary chunk of text. Seeing it presented in a "poetry layout" we know from the start that this is a special kind of text. As a result, our first reading is more careful and attentive and open.
Further, poetry layout endows text with a kind of meta-punctuation, by allowing line breaks and spacing to serve in the role of commas, colons, dashes, and periods. A single word can be set apart, or the meter of the text can be enhanced, without resorting to a distracting amount of conventional punctuation. Lines can be double-spaced. Phrases can be indented, or not.
And somewhere in this process, we might find rhymes creeping in, or heroic cadences, or pithy pauses, none of which can be reliably depicted in blocks of ordinary text.
Of course, sometimes the skill of prosody in the prose rises so far that blocky conventional paragraphs can't overshadow the poesy -- colors emerge that mere type cannot convey. This is where art transcends its medium and McLuhan is defeated.
This is really a great post! Thank you for all of this. Reznikoff's "story" is deepened by the very fact that it is a poem and that we read it as a poem. The two cannot be separated, story and poem. These lines, for instance, derive much of their power from the way they sit on the page (poetically, as separate lines), along with the repetition:
"and again it was late at night, dark and lonely;
and again I saw the old man alone in the store."
A story makes us stop and think, but a poem! It's all about the thinking. Why the word choice? Why the repetition? Certainly we think of these things when looking at a story, but not in the way we do with a poem. For a poem IS word choice (among other things). So here, the word "again" said twice. Such emphasis--on purpose. And "again....dark and lonely." Well, lonely for who? And what is this narrator doing on this street, one he seldom uses? What has brought him here? Because this is a poem (and not simply a story) the layers go deeper and deeper and the underlying meanings emerge. Loneliness, a road not often taken, fresh apples... Poetry is metaphor, right?
Thank you, again.
I've long been fascinated by the ways that the printed word can be enhanced -- color, bold, italic, underscore, font family changes, spacing, size, positioning, etc. That said, we're so used to utterly plain unembellished text that almost any of these come across as gimmicks, and can be very annoying. I've done a lot of technical writing, and there are innumerable scenarios where one really must differentiate between explanatory text, on-screen prompts, on-screen user text entry, hints, resulting computer output, etc., etc., along with the usual headings and subheadings and marginalia that accompany most highly structural material. But in writing fiction, I always hesitate about putting anything in italics, even if the speaker would be legitimately giving some word or phrase tremendous emphasis. Sometimes it seems there's no way to have a character say what works best without some embellishment to ensure the reader interprets it as intended.
I used to write a lot of poetry (I still wax poetic on occasion), and I grew up on Ferlinghetti and Corso and other beat or post-beat moderns, whose work really depends on exotic spacing and layout. I had a lot of fun with that, but now I'm focused on other aspects, most especially the language. My poetry had probably never been much in tune with the current vogue, because I love the language so much that it lacks the quality of dry insinuation that seems to dominate most of what I see published.
But I'm rambling OT. It is indeed very unfortunate that this editing facility isn't a bit more flexible. I'd like to include an image, too, now and then, but I can see why that might just lead to a mountain of visual distraction that truly isn't *writing*.
I just tried entering lines with Shift-Enter endings, but they still came out with paragraph spacing between them. Then I tried starting a line with a '.' and 10 spaces, to fake an indent, but the spaces were collapsed, so that didn't work either.
I would have thought that a site dedicated to *writing* would be able to accommodate poetry! A weird, profound, and unnecessary deficiency.
When word processing was finally democratized in the workplace, every human with a PC was setting off headlines in centered bold caps, oversized and underscored, in some typeface unrelated to the rest of the document.
Ya gotta play with it for a while, I guess, since type is so subtle, yet powerful, but the results were sooooo unbearably klunky. Comic Sans uber alles!
Yowie! That Jack piece is really great. It reminded me of a short dialog I wrote once upon a time (I tend to write dialogs).
https://cave-paintings.com/the-tiger/
It's about a 1-minute read. I don't think it's a poem, although even the prose layout looks like one. Lotsa short lines. I guess that's Jack's definition of poetry, eh?
I liked the ease and simplicity, yet the depth. And I feel like there's an unspoken, "Yeah, my son came home, but he's not the son who left. THAT one, never came home."
That's how I read it, also, Larry. Sorrow of loss, a life seen, gratitude paid, a lingering sadness, apples speaking more than words.
I felt the same unspoken expression you did, and I wonder if it had do with the exchanged apples. They lend the poem a "you never stand in the same river twice" quality.
Yeah, it was the exchange of the apples but also the old man's grim but not sad face. Not sad because his son did return, but grim because it's a son haunted by his experience. And, yeah, "never stand in the same rive twice" is a good comparison.