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....
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.
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.
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.
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 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....
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 am down for Poem Club. Thank you.
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
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.
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". .
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 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦
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.
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.
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."