A few links to remember

I linked last week to the article in The Paris Review about Ron Hansen's book.  I forgot to also link to this good article by Dana Gioia on "Poetry of Enchantment," which I originally saw on GretchenJoanna's blog.

I also appreciated this bit of trivia awhile ago from Amy Welborn's always informative blog  about the former poet president of Notre Dame, Fr. Charles O'Donnell, who apparently was born in the town that was the county seat of the county where I grew up.  Greenfield, Indiana, is also the hometown of another Indiana poet, James Whitcomb Riley, who is celebrated with a festival every summer around his birthday. I knew nothing of O'Donnell, but grew up listening to recitations of Riley's verse from my grandmother and ancient fourth grade teacher.  I suppose that part of the reason Fr. Charles O'Donnell is not as renowned as Riley in the county is because he was a Catholic priest and intellectual in a stolid, protestant region.  His poetry is less accessible than Riley's folksy, narrative verse.

For comparison, here are a couple of their poems for this season:

Advent

by Charles Leo O'Donnell

Hush! Dost hear a calling, Juda,

Like an infant's cry?

Juda, selling doves in market,

Only hears the winds go by.

Hark! Dost hear a footfall beating,

Or is it stir of wings?

Juda, busy tithing cummin,

Does not hear these things.

Lo, is yon a new light breaking,

Now the dark grows deep?

Juda, see, a star, a wonder—

Juda is asleep.

http://poetrynook.com/poet/charles-leo-odonnell

And from Riley:

Child's Christmas Carol:

Christ used to be  like you and me,

When just a lad in Galilee, -

So when we pray, on Christmas Day,

He favours first the prayers we say:

Then waste no tear, but pray with cheer,

This gladdest day of all the year:

O Brother mine of birth Divine,

Upon this natal day of Thine

Bear with our stress of happiness

Nor count our reverence the less

because with glee and jubilee

Our hearts go singing up to Thee.

from The Poem and Prose Sketches of James Whitcomb Riley

and this;

Who Santy-Claus Wuz

Jes' a little bit o' feller--I remember still-- 
Ust to almost cry fer Christmas, like a youngster will. 
Fourth o' July's nothin' to it!--New Year's ain't a smell! 
Easter-Sunday--Circus-day--jes' all dead in the shell! 
Lawzy, though! at night, you know, to set around an' hear 
The  old folks work the story off about the sledge an' deer, 
An' 'Santy' skootin' round the roof, all wrapt in fur an' fuzz-- 
Long afore 
I knowed who 
'Santy-Claus' wuz! 

Ust to wait, an' set up late, a week er two ahead; 
Couldn't hardly keep awake, ner wouldn't go to bed; 
Kittle stewin' on the fire, an' Mother settin' here 
Darnin' socks, an' rockin' in the skreeky rockin'-cheer; 
Pap gap', an' wonder where it wuz the money went, 
An' quar'l with his frosted heels, an' spill his liniment; 
An' me a-dreamin' sleigh-bells when the clock 'ud whir an' buzz, 
Long afore 
I knowed who 
'Santy-Claus' wuz! 

... and it goes on for a few more verses.  Most likely both of them will be forgotten and neglected by readers before too much longer, and perhaps that is no great loss.  Riley's verse has much in common with Gioia's claim that poetry is an ancient art, universal in human experience, originally performed as a form of oral culture.  I admit I like reading out loud his poetry, which tries to capture the experiences, feelings, and dialect of the people of his time and place, although the dialect sounds nothing like what I hear in Indiana accents.

O'Donnell's poetry also captures universal feelings and experiences, but perhaps his audience is smaller. Here, for instance, is a poem that speaks directly to those who have walked the paths around the lakes at Notre Dame, but is less relevant to others, although walking in the woods is a common experience.

At Notre Dame
So well I love these woods I half believe
There is an intimate fellowship we share;
So many years we breathed the same brave air,
Kept spring in common, and were one to grieve
Summer’s undoing, saw the fall bereave
Us both of beauty, together learned to bear
The weight of winter. When I go other where —
An unreturning journey — I would leave
Some whisper of a song in these old oaks,
A footfall lingering till some distant summer
Another singer down these paths may stray —
The destined one a golden future cloaks —
And he may love them, too, this graced newcomer,
And may remember that I passed this way.
Rev. Charles L. O’Donnell, CSC

Now this poem makes me think about my two oldest boys, whom I haven't seen since August. They will be home this week!! I can't wait - this kind of hopeful expectation adds to the poignancy of the theme of Advent patience and preparation, akin to the meaningfulness of being pregnant of Advent.  I now have more sympathy now for my mom's desire to have everyone home for Christmas!

Reverde

Catalog of spring in the deep south: Early magnolias in full bloom, buds on the maples and crabapples, daffodils and a few hyacinths are blooming, weeds are greening. I can’t tell what birds are back because I didn’t notice which ones left, other than white cattle egrets no longer nesting in the big cedar down by the public pier, although I have seen a few around.



I’ve been surprised at how slowly spring has been arriving here. Maybe the transition isn’t quite so glorious as it is in the north because the contrast between winter and spring is not as stark. But the pervasiveness of brown in the landscape is perhaps appropriate for Lent, brown being a more penitential color than purple.

I’ve been a little homesick for the glorious springs of my Midwestern years. Down the street from where we lived in northern Illinois there was a house that planted its entire yard in pink tulips that leapt into bloom around Eastertime. (Made me wonder if there were a breast cancer survivor living there.) My sister’s photos of a photogenic tree near my parents’ house and the completion of The Teacher’s Funeral by Richard Peck also have me thinking of Indiana. The Teacher’s Funeral is about a small town Indiana boy, Russell Culver, who wants to run away from home to go to the Dakotas to work, but his sister becomes the school teacher in the one room school after the former teacher dies, so he has to postpone his plans. The events of the year and his sister’s perseverance – and her winning the heart of his best friend – change Russell’s plans. Russell, although the main character, remained a little shadowy, not quite fleshed-out, whereas his father and his sister Tansy seemed more fullblooded, but perhaps I’m expecting too much from a YA story.

The book is heartwarming, although at times it felt like Peck was trying too hard to bring in local color – for instance, some of the dialogue about Indianapolis and a reference to the need to go to Purdue University to learn engineering in order to pull the enormous Aunt Fanny out of a ditch. I looked up to see if Peck ever lived in Indiana in order to tell if he had just done his research or if he wrote from experience and found out that he went to school at a small Indiana college where several of my family members attended. This book doesn’t have the depth of A Long Way from Chicago or A Year Down Yonder, nor of the book by his homonymous fellow author, Richard Newton Peck, A Day No Pigs Would Die, but I did appreciate the poetry by the Sweet Singer of Sycamore Township – reminiscent of the work of Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley.

Here’s a stanza from Riley’s ode to spring, “The All-Golden”:



I catch my breath, as children do
In woodland swings when life is new,
And all the blood is warm as wine
And tingles with a tang divine.
My soul soars up the atmosphere
And sings aloud where God can hear,
And all my being leans intent
To mark His smiling wonderment.
O gracious dream, and gracious time,
And gracious theme, and gracious rhyme –
When buds of Spring begin to blow
In blossoms that we used to know
And lure us back along the ways
Of time’s all-golden yesterdays!



or, more indicative of his style, “When the Green Gits Back in the Trees”



In Spring, when the green gits back in the trees,
        And the sun comes out and stays,
And yer boots pulls on with a good tight squeeze,
       And you think of yer bare-foot days;
When you ort to work and you want to not,
       And you and yer wife agrees
It’s time to spade up the garden-lot,
       When the green gits back in the trees
               Well! work is the least o’ my idees
               When the green, you know, gits back in the trees!



At one point in time I couldn’t wait to get out of Indiana – This is the best poet Indiana has to offer? I used to think, although I did like to listen to my grandmother read “Little Orphant Annie” and “The Raggedy Man.” Riley’s dialect comes to life when read outloud. But I thought his poetry seemed to glorify the backwardness of the small towns across the state. And in my adolescent arrogance, I assumed these places had lost most of the charm they had during Riley’s day. The highlights of the week were high school football and ice cream at the drive-in after little league games, no longer picnics and tire swings over swimming holes.


But now I miss those soft serve swirl cones. And the sunsets over fields of soybeans. And poking through woods on the edges of cornfields, looking for wildflowers, turtles, and hiding places. The heat rising off the pavement on long summer bicycle rides across countyline roads to get to a friend’s house, when you had to race farm dogs tearing after your tires. Riding on sleds pulled behind pick-ups down icy roads in the winter. It’s altogether too easy to fall into a reverie about the joys of childhood, much like Riley does in his poetry.

My husband gave me a collection of his poems for my birthday the year we came back to Indiana for him to get a masters degree at Purdue (construction management, not engineering). That book and the cd made by one of our babysitters with a song about Indiana borders are guaranteed to arouse nostalgia for the place I still think of as home. Perhaps because I wanted to leave so badly when I was young, I doomed myself to being a wanderer during my middle years, in exile, like I cashed in my birthright and can’t return. I worry that my children won’t have a connection to a place to consider home, no roots, although they talk often about wanting to go back to Virginia.



Then again, if I had never left, perhaps I wouldn’t appreciate what I left behind. Nor would I have had the opportunity to fall in love with the ocean (although I still think Lake Michigan can compare). Although I complain about being homesick, I do love getting to know a new place and new friends and don't wish that I hadn't ever had those experiences.  At one point when my husband and I were engaged we looked at rings with the verse from Ruth, "Whither thou goest, I will follow." (We got these instead, with our anniversary and fides, spes, caritas engraved inside. Indulge me as I just had another happy trip down memory lane looking at that web page.)  A reminder that wherever our home on earth is, we are in exile, homesick for eternity.


I’ve been doing an ecumenical Bible study and one of my sons is reading Revelations for Lent, so here are a couple more fitting quotes to close:

For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building from God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.--2 Corinthians 5:1


And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God [is] with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, [and be] their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. --- Rev 21:3-4