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begging your indulgence
Sep. 8th, 2006 10:37 amI really ought to activate my lulu.com blog for the handful of people who read my poems, but I produce so few it isn't worth it.
This one is a side effect of last night's reading by Margaret Atwood. I should LJ-Cut it, but I offer apologies instead:
Summoning the Heroes: a self-help reminder for other people's book signings
It is an easterly wind.
It is a northerly wind.
---George Hitchcock,
“What to Say to the Pasha”
“I’ve read all your books.”
“I’ve never read your books, but I’m going to start now.”
“Your book changed my life.
You see, it was the summer of sixty-nine, and I was fourteen….”
The things audience members say in front of authors
are either stupid, or touchingly self-absorbed,
or simply an annoyance to those impatiently standing
behind them in the mile-long signing line.
Worst of all is the free associator:
“Listen, you read us that poem about Dover Beach.
Well, you know, I’ve been to Dover Beach.”
We need a handbook of forty-word phrases:
“What to say to Umberto Eco.”
“What to say to Margaret Atwood.”
I told Salman Rushdie, fatuously,
“I always hoped for the day
when you could sign my copy of The Satanic Verses.”
And he: “Well, there it is, then.”
I murmured reverently and unintelligibly
when my turn came to shake hands with the Dalai Lama.
His Holiness, with enlightened tact, replied, “Humh!”
We are never at our best when we meet our heroes.
I myself tend to revert to age twelve,
a full two years short of my normal mode of operation.
“I want you to have this,” pressing a poem into Czeslaw Milosz’s hands,
and apologizing awkwardly when asking Octavio Paz
to sign a lifetime’s accumulation of his successive works,
and he, graciously, “it’s no trouble, really, it’s nice to have fans.”
Far worse to show up unannounced on the doorstep.
I managed to reach Kathleen Raine one year and N. O. Brown another
just as they sat down to record long-planned formal interviews.
Raine gave me a quick tour of the library and art collection.
For the best, then, that I couldn’t find Alan Watts in sixty-eight.
Joe Campbell, Tom Altizer, I asked the right questions,
and as for Owen Barfield, I managed to meet him
by asking the first person I saw to please give me directions.
He said, “I’m afraid I’m a visitor here myself.” And I:
“I came for Owen Barfield’s lecture. I don’t suppose you’re him?”
I missed connections as usual a dozen or so years later.
In London, in the Anthroposophical Bookshop:
“I see you have something new by Owen Barfield.”
“Oh, are you the young man he said would come in today?”
and I: “Oh no, I really haven’t thought much about Owen Barfield
since California. I saw the book in the window.” And I left.
And the next day, on coming back to buy the book:
“You know, you just missed Owen Barfield yesterday.
He arrived not five minutes after you went out the door.”
But that year I went on to meet other remarkable men,
and my articulate queries, so I thought, probably sounded to them like,
“Oh, how strange, you know, because I’ve been to Dover Beach.”
Jerry Cullum
September 8, 2006
Feast of the Birth of the Mother of God
This one is a side effect of last night's reading by Margaret Atwood. I should LJ-Cut it, but I offer apologies instead:
Summoning the Heroes: a self-help reminder for other people's book signings
It is an easterly wind.
It is a northerly wind.
---George Hitchcock,
“What to Say to the Pasha”
“I’ve read all your books.”
“I’ve never read your books, but I’m going to start now.”
“Your book changed my life.
You see, it was the summer of sixty-nine, and I was fourteen….”
The things audience members say in front of authors
are either stupid, or touchingly self-absorbed,
or simply an annoyance to those impatiently standing
behind them in the mile-long signing line.
Worst of all is the free associator:
“Listen, you read us that poem about Dover Beach.
Well, you know, I’ve been to Dover Beach.”
We need a handbook of forty-word phrases:
“What to say to Umberto Eco.”
“What to say to Margaret Atwood.”
I told Salman Rushdie, fatuously,
“I always hoped for the day
when you could sign my copy of The Satanic Verses.”
And he: “Well, there it is, then.”
I murmured reverently and unintelligibly
when my turn came to shake hands with the Dalai Lama.
His Holiness, with enlightened tact, replied, “Humh!”
We are never at our best when we meet our heroes.
I myself tend to revert to age twelve,
a full two years short of my normal mode of operation.
“I want you to have this,” pressing a poem into Czeslaw Milosz’s hands,
and apologizing awkwardly when asking Octavio Paz
to sign a lifetime’s accumulation of his successive works,
and he, graciously, “it’s no trouble, really, it’s nice to have fans.”
Far worse to show up unannounced on the doorstep.
I managed to reach Kathleen Raine one year and N. O. Brown another
just as they sat down to record long-planned formal interviews.
Raine gave me a quick tour of the library and art collection.
For the best, then, that I couldn’t find Alan Watts in sixty-eight.
Joe Campbell, Tom Altizer, I asked the right questions,
and as for Owen Barfield, I managed to meet him
by asking the first person I saw to please give me directions.
He said, “I’m afraid I’m a visitor here myself.” And I:
“I came for Owen Barfield’s lecture. I don’t suppose you’re him?”
I missed connections as usual a dozen or so years later.
In London, in the Anthroposophical Bookshop:
“I see you have something new by Owen Barfield.”
“Oh, are you the young man he said would come in today?”
and I: “Oh no, I really haven’t thought much about Owen Barfield
since California. I saw the book in the window.” And I left.
And the next day, on coming back to buy the book:
“You know, you just missed Owen Barfield yesterday.
He arrived not five minutes after you went out the door.”
But that year I went on to meet other remarkable men,
and my articulate queries, so I thought, probably sounded to them like,
“Oh, how strange, you know, because I’ve been to Dover Beach.”
Jerry Cullum
September 8, 2006
Feast of the Birth of the Mother of God
