Sometimes I am hijacked by poetry

Apparently, I need to return my English degree. And I need to send letters of apology to Sister Margery and Sister Vera and Professor Everyone Else. Because I have learned nothing. Nothing!

I went to the noon Courtroom Concerts that the Schubert Club puts on at the Landmark Center to hear my dear friend KrisAnne Weiss sing. (And oh! She was magnificent! And Oh! That voice!) Among other things, she performed a cycle of songs by a local composer that used the poetry of Amy Lowell as their foundation.

And I realized that I have never, ever read the poetry of Amy Lowell. Indeed, I knew nothing about her. And those poems blew me the frick away.

Amy Lowell was one of those women – born in privilege, yet bound by constraints of narrow-minded American Aristocracy – who baffled the people around her. Denied education, so she vigorously pursued self-education. Bound by the conscriptions of femininity, and threw them off. Spoke in public when it was shocking to do so. She was short, brusque and loud – a wide woman. She was smart-mouthed, quick-tongued and abrasive. She pissed people off. She smoked cigars in public and spoke in public and embraced her off-kilter public persona, when it was taboo for a woman to do so.

And I’m kinda in love with her.

Here are the poems that did it for me. I hope they do it for you as well.

Pyrotechnics

Our meeting was like the upward swish of a rocket
In the blue night.

I do not know when it burst;
But now I stand gaping,
In a glory of falling stars.

Obligation

Hold your apron wide
That I may pour my gifts onto it,
So that scarcely shall your two arms
hinder them
From falling to the ground.

I would pour them upon you
And cover you,
For greatly do I feel this need
Of giving you something,
Even these poor things.

Dearest of my heart

 

Nashville

Oh, Nashville! How do I love thee! I love your nonsensical streets. I love your generously portioned food. I love your catfish and your chess pie and your fat-backed greens, so tender and smooth, they slide down the throat without bite.  I love your gracious mansions abutting your nongracious Walmarts. I love your old brick buildings, your wandering river, your warren-like trailer parks, and your music flowing from open doors onto crowded streets. I love your dogwoods and flowering plums and tulip magnolias as they uncurl – both delicate and lurid and demure and wanton – for a tiny collection of perfect days before vanishing forever. I love your floral-wearing, deep-fleshed women and your mustachioed men wearing pressed button-downs stretched neatly over high, wide bellies and tucked into starched Wranglers with large, sliver buckles. I love the men who call me “darlin'” and the women who call me “baby” and the children who call me “ma’am”.

You walk through Nashville, and you pass by the ghosts of Johnny Cash and June Carter, of Waylon Jennings, Patsy Cline, Minnie Pearl, and Bill Monroe.

We go to Nashville a couple times a year to visit with my husband’s war-bride grandma (been in this country for sixty years and still speaks with an English accent) and his aunt and uncle and cousins.  At this Easter visit, I sat in a garage and listened to a gaggle of old white men with stubbled chins and hacking coughs as they balanced their instruments on their knees and played bluegrass for hours and hours. In between songs they traded insults and self-deprecations like baseball cards (“His wife is what we call a go-getter. She works and he go-gets-her.”), but once the music started they transformed into angels.

Music is funny that way – even cities that have had their share of bad decisions and small thinking (and believe me, Nashville’s no stranger to the Bad Idea), music transforms them. When we sing, we stop yelling. We move in a rhythm that is not our own. We listen. We open up. We let the music take us away.