Yep. That’s definitely William Stafford’s granddaughter.

In his wonderful memoir Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, Kim Stafford reproduces a conversation he had with his 11-year-old daughter, Rosemarie, shortly after her grandfather’s death:

“Rosie,” I said, “you haven’t cried, except that one time. You seem pretty happy.”

“Dad,” she said, “I have my feelings. I just don’t show them the way others do.” We looked out across the horizons of the dunes, and then the waves.

“I don’t have to hold on to Bill,” she said, “and I don’t have to let him go. He’s part of me.” A breeze rustled the dune grass. Distant, the breakers smacked down like a drum.

“There was something in his face,” she said, “no camera ever got—it was his calm. I have his calm.” She leaned toward me. “And nobody really dies. There are just five people: Sad, Shy, Curious, Angry, and Happy. Everybody comes out of those five, and then goes back. I’m not even a girl, really—I’m just kind of a mind-ship….”

“with sadder joy but steadier elation”

I just read a hand-wringing Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “The Suicide of the Liberal Arts.” It opens — because such articles are legally required to — with a fond anecdote about the author’s hard-nosed high school teacher, Father Alexander, who insisted that nobody “in this day and age can be called well educated who has never read The Iliad.”

This reminded me of my favorite moment from a writer’s conference I attended a couple of years ago. Derek Walcott — the Nobel Laureate famed for his modern retelling of The Odyssey — admitted to the audience that he had never read The Iliad and had no desire to: “All these guys slicing heads…”

The castle has many entrances, my friends. Here’s a Derek Walcott poem I’ve always loved:

 

Nearing Forty

Insomniac since four, hearing this narrow,
rigidly metred, early-rising rain
recounting, as its coolness numbs the marrow,
that I am nearing forty, nearer the weak
vision thickening to a frosted pane,
nearer the day when I may judge my work
by the bleak modesty of middle age
as a false dawn, fireless and average,
which would be just, because your life bled for
the household truth, the style past metaphor
that finds its parallel however wretched
in simple, shining lines, in pages stretched
plain as a bleaching bedsheet under a guttering
rainspout; glad for the sputter
of occasional insight,
you who foresaw
ambition as a searing meteor
will fumble a damp match and, smiling, settle
for the dry wheezing of a dented kettle,
for vision narrower than a louvre’s gap,
then, watching your leaves thin, recall how deep
prodigious cynicism plants its seed,
gauges our seasons by this year’s end rain
which, as greenhorns at school, we’d
call conventional for convectional;
or you will rise and set your lines to work
with sadder joy but steadier elation,
until the night when you can really sleep,
measuring how imagination
ebbs, conventional as any water clerk
who weighs the force of lightly falling rain,
which, as the new moon moves it, does its work
even when it seems to weep.

“I’m not afraid of dying,” you said, “just of getting hurt.”

Today someone posted a Facebook status asking friends to recommend poems about parenthood, and although there are others I’ve read more closely and taught more frequently and thought more about, the first one that leapt to mind was Anne Porter’s “For My Son Johnny.” I’m grateful for the invitation to revisit this poem of love and loss. If its last lines don’t break your heart you should probably have your heart checked.

Porter was an anomalous poet. She was born in 1911, when “Large patches of the former century / Still lay about / Like snow in April” (outdo that simile, poets) and lived to be 100, but was known for most of her life as the wife of the painter Fairfield Porter. Though she wrote poetry steadily for decades, she didn’t publish a book until she was 83. I reviewed her second collection in 2006, and it has stayed with me, obviously. Thank you, Anne, for sharing a little portion of your great gift with us.

Richard Pryor, Maya Angelou, and a singular sketch

It’s been a year since Maya Angelou died, a decade since Richard Pryor died, and 38 years since this improbable vignette starring the two of them first aired:

To my knowledge, there’s never been anything else like it on TV, before or since. I love its indifference to our categories — “comedy,” “drama.” Pryor reprises one of his familiar characters, Willie, the good-natured drunk, and we laugh along with him at his situation. The laughs are real, too: When the bartender (an understated John Belushi) challenges Willie to walk a straight line, Willie points to the one person in the room drunker than he is: “I’ll walk it, if you let her draw it.” But then Willie shambles across the street to his apartment, where his wife, played by Maya Angelou, blindsides the sketch with a harrowing monologue about fear, fury, racism, despair, and enduring love. Written by Angelou herself, the lines are lyrical and riveting and not funny in the least, and they make the laughter that preceded them feel petty and cruel. As Pryor would say in a different context, “This ain’t as funny as we thought it was gonna be.”

Viewers like knowing exactly how they’re supposed to feel, which may be why this scene has never been imitated, and why poets are rarely invited to write for TV. But for my money this is one of the best things that has ever happened in popular entertainment, because it’s as subtle, as difficult, and as richly rewarding as life itself. How many comedy specials can say that?