Xylophone Notes

I have been working on a grant for days now. While I have been deep in Grantland with all of its accompanying frustrations, my own words went scuttling away faster than any crawdad I ever saw. And, like those tenacious crawdads of yore, no amount of poking under the rocks with a stick could bring my personal words back out.

I sent the grant draft out to my colleagues for review this afternoon. For the last hour of it, while I snipped and tied up loose ends, Warren was in the basement practicing ragtime rhythms and tunes on his xylophone.

The notes were hopping up the stairs and spilling into the kitchen. Bright, bouncing notes - brisk, high bouncing notes right out of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Ragtime notes. 

When Warren was twenty, he spent his summer working in the Musser factory in La Grange, Illinois. For the most part, he spent his days drilling holes in xylophone and marimba bars. In the evening, he would head to the upstairs room he was renting nearby and play his marimba for hours.

The marimba is a sonorous instrument with rich, lush tones that hang forever in the air. The marimba does not bounce and chatter like the xylophone does.

The marimba sings. The xylophone chants jump rope rhymes.

The marimba is flowing water. The xylophone is pebbles skipped across water.

When I first heard and watched Warren practice marimba, almost three years ago, I did something I rarely do: write a poem. (Rarely? How about never?) The sounds resonating in the air pulled the words right out of me.

Today's xylophone playing did much the same thing. Those gold-hatted, high-bouncing Fitzgeraldian notes yanked those stubborn words right out of the rocks and crevices and threw them down on paper. I picked up my pen for the first time in days and rearranged them until I came up with this.

Many thanks, my dear husband, for always giving me gifts from the heart, even when you are "just practicing." Here is one from mine in return.

Warren at the Marimba

I
Running water
Over rocks
Over small ripples.

The notes clear.

II
I see you standing there
Hands over the bars
Mallets bouncing as your wrists turn to their own tunes

Where are you and what are you seeing?
Are you in the music?
In the babbling stream?

Do your hands know the way?

III
You said one summer you practiced in a small upstairs room
Facing the garage and alley
Every night you would stand up there and play
Hours on end
No air conditioning

It was hot
Chicago summer hot but you didn't notice

You were in that babbling stream
You were in that cool water

Your hands were finding their way through the notes, caressing the wet pebbles.

On Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, and I fear I have reached the last day of the month without paying any homage to something I so deeply love. Like Jesse Stuart, I want to call out:

Hold onto April: never let her pass!Another year before she comes again…

But April has passed. Or will after the day ends. And I have spent it immersed in grant writing and Chasing Light…, when I wasn't chasing bills and laundry and all of the various and sundry things that came across my path this month.

The closest I got to poetry this month was watching the middle school poetry jam that was a Chasing Light… community event. That and catching some shards that our visiting composer used in his talks.

I used to write poetry. A lot of poetry. Poetry fascinated me, poetry held me. It was the warp and the woof of my most inner self. As late as my early 40s, I had a folder, some six inches thick, that contained poems and fragments of poems and ideas for poems dating back more than two decades.

But those were very bleak times and after one too many post-midnight inquisitions by an unstable spouse as to "who are you writing about?" or "what does this line mean?" or "what are you hiding?," I took the folder to the office and spent three hours shredding every last piece of poetry I had ever written.

My words were too dangerous to own.

I was numb as I sat there feeding the sheets into the shredder. That was a good thing, because otherwise I would have dropped to the floor from a broken heart that day.

Sometimes lines from the shredded works come back to me, like little ghosts. They shimmer and rustle in the air, fading away if I try too hard to sound them out.

Sometimes I think about writing poetry again. This week, spending time with our visiting composer and hearing him talk about composing music, I have found my thoughts often drifting to poetry.

Could I write poetry again? Will I remember how it feels to kindle words into light? Will I still know how to do it?

I don't know. Not counting an occasional parody or some light verse, I've only written two poems since the Day of the Shredder. Neither has been read aloud, not even to Warren.

Time will tell. It's another year until April comes again.

Loving Shakespeare

Poor William Shakespeare.

So many folks automatically make a face when they hear his name. I used to work with a woman who would wrinkle her nose and announce loudly, "I hate Shakespeare," the moment she heard me refer to him. Never mind that she hadn't read anything by him since leaving high school many years earlier. She hated him and that was all there was to it.

Me? I love the guy. He was funny, he was brilliant, he was amazing. He had a vocabulary of over 60,000 words. Most of us - then and now - do well to have 20,000 words (and we all use far less in our everyday lives).

This guy loved words. He breathed words. He ate words three times a day and for his bedtime snack as well. I bet he moved in a constant cloud of words - in his head, on his tongue, in his heart.

And the phases and words he gave us! Chances are with so many of them that Shakespeare said it first. What the dickens! The game is up! For goodness sake! Vanished into thin air! Tongue-tied! Fair play! Seen better days! In a pickle!

It's Greek to me (yes, his words) why Shakespeare has such a bad rap.

In defense of Shakespeare, it's not his fault. He has often been badly taught by too many poorly prepared teachers. Not understanding the Bard themselves, they pass their own confusion and disdain on to their students, who, like my former coworker, end up hating Shakespeare. I still remember the "Meet the Teacher" night several years ago when Sam's literature teacher for the year brandished with great glee a CliffNotes edition of Julius Caesar, reassuring us that it would make Shakespeare "so much easier" (apparently for her).

A pox on both her houses! I wanted to send her packing.

As luck would have it, I had good fortune in abundance when it came to Shakespeare. Before I ever started high school, I had a summer camp cabin mate, a year older and infinitely wiser in the ways of high school literature, advise me that the way to "get" Shakespeare was to read him out loud for the rhythm and feel of his dialogue. She was right. Second, I went through high school during a magical era that, looking back, I can only call the Golden Age of English at Hayes. Kay Hearn, Steve Tobias, Arlene Gregory, Roberta Rollins - these were my guides to Shakespeare (and others). Shakespeare wrote plays that spanned the breadth of the human experience and I am forever indebted to those teachers for helping me glimpse the depth and reach of his writings.

There was no such as thing as too much of a good thing when it came to Shakespeare, as far as I was (and still am) concerned.

Part of the reason Shakespeare sets our teeth on edge is our own fault. We forget to put him in the right context. We pigeonhole his plays into tiny, airless slots of formality. He suffers from an overabundance of High Culture.

Put yourself in Elizabethan England. Performances were held at the Globe, an open air theatre. They were held during the day because there was no night lighting. If you had money, you sat in the galleries to watch. If you had a lot of money, you sat right on stage. If you were one of the masses, as most playgoers were, a penny bought you the right to stand on the ground at stage level. There were no elaborate sets, few costumes. There was no acoustical engineering, let alone mics, amps, and sound systems. Lines were shouted. The pace was fast - the actors had to hold the audience's attention as well as move the play along so it would be done before darkness descended.

So you had this sea of humanity (plays were well-attended in Elizabethan London), many of them mere feet away from actors strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, members of the audience calling out comments and adding to the dialogue, and everyone - everyone! - talking about the play as it finished and the audience exited in waves. Shakespeare was the talk of the town as well as the toast of the town.

And what did we do to poor Will Shakespeare? We slowed him down. We put him in a suit and tie, or at least a velvet doublet. We made him sit up straight and comb his hair. No wonder so many bid him good riddance once they finish high school lit classes.

Far too many are hoodwinked into thinking of Shakespeare as this creaky ancient incomprehensible dead dude that has absolutely nothing to say to us in our modern world, when in fact he has everything to say.

Several years ago, a group known as Shakespeare Express performed "The Taming of the Shrew" at our local college. The troupe was known for its fast-paced, minimalist but accurate performances of Shakespeare's works. They performed in Gray Chapel, where our Symphony plays. Gray Chapel was the perfect venue, because the seating begins right at the stage's edge, not unlike the Globe in Shakespeare's time. Some audience members were seated on the stage. The actors played without sound equipment and with the simplest of stage props. They performed at breakneck pace and they were superb. I had two seventh grade boys with me that night - an age and gender notoriously considered "Shakespeare inappropriate" - and they were both blown away by a work written some 400 years earlier.

I wish more young people met Shakespeare that way, instead of through (shudder) CliffNotes hawked by the teacher. It is high time we had a Shakespeare immersion program in this country. I can imagine troupes of actors barnstorming from town to town bringing Shakespeare - the real Shakespeare, the plays as he meant them to be performed - to all of us.

I like to think of Will Shakespeare in our era. I bet he would be on Facebook. For sure he would love YouTube. A blogger? Maybe not. After all, the play's the thing.

Shakespeare's birthday is traditionally celebrated April 23rd, and this year marks his 446th one. I'd love to have a cake with that many candles on it for him. I'll settle for a cupcake.

And that's the long and the short of it (yep, you got it - he said it).