A Note on “Youth” from Tom Sleigh:

When I was covering a famine in East Africa, I met a young Somali boy in Dadaab Refugee Camp near the Somali border who told me how Al-Shabaab, a Somali fundamentalist militia, had forbidden him and his pals to listen to music, play cards, watch movies, and a lot of other things kids like to do. Then I recently read in the New York Times how Shabaab has now forbidden the use of plastic bags. As a Somali medical student observed: “I see it as a good decision, but they must ask themselves: Why do they also ban humanitarian workers from operating in Shabaab-controlled areas? I don’t know why sanitation, and the health of the environment, is important but not the health workers.” These are the kinds of contradictions that the refugee boy negotiates every day. So in this poem, I write about a similar contradiction in the life of war-zone children, in which daily mortar fire at tea time becomes synonymous with play time.

A Note on “Breaker” from Tom Sleigh:

Last week I shared my poem about two twin boys who had grown so used to living in a war zone that mortar barrages at teatime had become synonymous with playtime. This week I’ll read "Breaker", a poem about being a stepparent and taking my first real walk with my stepdaughter.

Before I met Hannah, I had no children. I’d been told that you measure time differently when your life and a child’s life are suddenly running parallel, and I’ve found that to be true. When I look at Hannah’s face now, the woman she’s grown into and the child she was remind me of how densely involuted time can seem. For example, just a few days ago, after not having visited for something like two years because of Covid, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw an ancient Greek grave stele sculpted in marble of a woman who holds what looks like a new-born infant on her lap. The woman’s face is in profile, and the bridge of her nose, as well as its tip, have been sheared away. The baby is wrapped in swaddling, the face turned from us so that you can see how the back of the infant’s head has been worn smooth by wind and rain. When you read the label, you learn, with a quiet shock, that the infant is in fact a grandchild, and the woman the child’s grandmother. The inscription reads: "My daughter’s beloved child is the one I hold here, the one that I held on my lap while we looked at the light of the sun when we were alive and that I still hold, now that we are both dead."

A Note on "Words from Chernobyl" from Tom Sleigh:

"Words from Chernobyl” takes off from "Voices from Chernobyl" by the Belarus oral historian, Svetlana Alexievich. Her book is an edited series of interviews with ordinary Chernobyl citizens, and soldiers, scientists, and health care workers who were ordered or volunteered to help in the “clean up” of the Chernobyl power plant when it melted down and exploded in 1986. Surrounding the plant for the past thirty-five years is an officially mandated, uninhabited, thousand-square-mile area sometimes called the Zone of Alienation—an accurate description, I think, of the psychological and biological conundrums and paradoxes the poem describes. The eight line stanzas all use terminal slant rhyme—a way to order, at least for me, the strangeness of the witnesses’ perceptions.

If you’ve ever seen the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, it seems weirdly prophetic—the Stalker leads a writer and a professor through a post-apocalyptic disaster zone to an enigmatic Room where one’s most deeply held desires are said to be fulfilled. In contrast, in 2012, the French street artist, Combo, installed in one of the many abandoned buildings at the actual Chernobyl a floor-to-ceiling mural of the Simpsons having a picnic while in the background the stacks of the nuclear power plant where Homer works release ominous green and yellow plumes of smoke into the cloudless blue skies. The battered and blistered Room is piled high with thousands upon thousands of contaminated HazMat respirators covering every inch of floor.

A Note on "Dream of a Song Woven from the Veil" from Tom Sleigh:

This poem is written in homage to Nat and Cannonball Adderley, famous for their embrace of bebop, funk, and R&B. When I was a kid, I loved the brothers and their music, especially Nat because he played cornet, and not the more usual trumpet. I also played cornet and Nat became my idol, such that my music teacher and I would play Nat’s solos together: he’d play a riff and expect me to copy him. As to how I came to hear of the Adderley brothers, I owe it to my older brother, Jay, who discovered jazz when he was twelve and introduced my twin brother, Tim, and me to all the great jazz artists when we were nine. Both Tim and Jay became superb jazz players, and I can’t help but think of the Adderley brothers when my own brothers play together. And since I came from a musical family, my parents had turned Jay on to Duke Ellington and Count Basie.

As to the poem’s public dimension, the off-rhymed, run-on couplets play off against the civil unrest of the last half century. The poem begins with graffiti of President Kennedy’s Cold War “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech and proceeds to Watts in 1965, Baltimore in 1968, and on up to our present day.

Over the years Kennedy’s speech—which expressed in 1963 American anti-Communist solidarity with West Berlin—has become associated with various forms of graffiti protest art painted on the Berlin Wall. “Ich bin ein Berliner” has been used to draw attention not only to who was being walled in in 1961—the West Berliners—but also to who is currently being walled out in 2021—the East Germans and immigrants excluded by West Berlin’s rampant gentrification. However, “Ich bin ein Berliner” can also mean “I am a jelly doughnut!”, since that also is a local usage of “Berliner”—as always, the political and the absurd are never far apart. The poem also takes off from W. E. B. DuBois’s ideas about “the Veil” and “double-consciousness,” and explores what might happen if you were to translate those ideas into musical forms.

A Note on "A Man Plays Debussy for a Blind, Eighty-Four-Year-Old Female Elephant" from Tom Sleigh:

As I said in last week’s post, I come from a musical family. My mother grew up in a dirt-poor Dust Bowl farming family in western Kansas. She discovered piano by overhearing through an open window a local neighbor lady playing in her living room. She so loved hearing the music that she asked the woman if she could do housework in exchange for piano lessons. My mother was something of a prodigy and quickly outstripped her teacher, learning to play what’s come to be known as the Great American Songbook, as well as jazz, ragtime, and classical. When she went to college (she was the first person in Greeley County, male or female, ever to attend) she put herself through school in part by playing in bars and dance halls. Because her name is Rosamond, she called her combo Rosie and Her Four Thorns. “The bar we played at,” she once told me, “was called The Bloody Bucket. And believe me, it was aptly named.”

When I came across Paul Barton in a YouTube video playing Debussy for an old blind female elephant, it brought back to me my mother playing “Clair de Lune.” Something about the elephant, the intensity of her listening as she flapped her ears, reminded me of my mother’s single-mindedness as a musician. She often played Debussy—and as I listened to Barton playing it for the elephant, the fact that both my mother and the elephant have lived to extreme old age (the elephant into its middle eighties, my mother into her late nineties), that both are blind in one eye, and that my mother exudes a kind of pachydermal calmness and otherworldliness as she plays, made me feel a strangely familial kinship.

As to poets going mad in poems, and their perhaps overhyped tendency to kill themselves, I think of the French thinker (philosopher is too heavy a word) Jean Améry and his concept of suicide as “voluntary death.” Primo Levi accused Améry, who died by his own choice, of being a “professional of suicide”—but of course that was before Levi also killed himself. Some would say that the elephant in the poem, despite her being mistreated most of her life, is a survivor. But Liam Rector, the poet friend of mine who takes his own life in the poem, would also think that he, too, was a kind of survivor: his life may have ended, but like Améry he believed that suicide could be a radical form of freedom, a sort of “road to the open.” And like Améry he knew that such a road led nowhere, and that it was ridiculous even to talk of roads.

A Note on "Ostrich" from Tom Sleigh:

The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer wrote a beautifully compressed memoir called "Memories Look at Me". I’ve always loved the autonomy he gives to the Memories, as if the fact that he lived through what his Memories are looking at isn’t nearly so important, or interesting, as what the Memories themselves perceive as they peer back across the years at the Rememberer.

This dynamic of displaced feeling as it unfurls over time is part of what I experience whenever I think of the dead friend in the poem. Yes, he was a real person—someone who held strong views and who refused to back down when those views were challenged. That kind of conviction, which can sometimes seem mere stubbornness, was both an act of courage and self-sabotage. Though at the charge of self-sabotage, my friend, who is now a Memory, would shoot back, “I understand what you’re saying, Tom…but you’re kind of missing the point.”

And I probably was. For my friend enjoyed argument for its own sake. And even more than that, for him argument was a kind of sacrament—not so much a religious sacrament as a moral one. Another way to put it is the distinction that Seamus Heaney draws between two very different artistic temperaments: one is more interested in the profound sensuality that poems can attain—what Heaney characterized as “a kind of free love between the auditory imagination and the unharnessed intelligence”; the other characterized my friend, who wasn’t so much interested in how human beings are framed and tuned as he was in how life works upon our moral sense. And because moral judgement formed the basis of his writing, it wasn’t enough to write “a successful poem.” It also had to be true. And that’s where the arguing came in, the need to feel right, to vanquish all contradiction. And so by sticking his head in the sand, he could ignore all doubt and fear. This may sound like a judgement, but I don’t mean it to be so: it was simply his way of unlocking the word-hoard and working with and in it.

To which my friend would make scornful though not unaffectionate reply, “Where do you get this stuff? An ostrich, afraid? Don’t you know that an ostrich can kick so hard it can kill a lion with one blow?”

A Note on "Age of Wonder" from Tom Sleigh:

There are certain things in every poem I write that I don’t fully understand: at first, I thought that the title “Age of Wonder” was a riff on Richard Holmes’s book by the same name, in which scientific discovery, initially at least, wasn’t the province of government agencies or academic institutes. Instead, it was the obsession of private individuals to explain to themselves the fundamental, hidden laws of the universe—the sort of obsession that drove Isaac Newton to discover the laws of universal gravitation, to co-invent calculus with Leibniz, and to posit that white light was in fact all the unaltered spectral colors combined. But what Newton most cared about—he wrote upwards of a million words on the subject—was the search for The Philosopher’s Stone, the alchemical substance that could transform base metals into gold. This obsessed him as much, if not more, than his so-called “legitimate” discoveries, and prompted John Maynard Keynes, who bought Newton’s papers, to observe that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.”

So maybe that’s the Age of Wonder that I’m really talking about—the search for a substance that becomes the medium in which two people perform a mutual experiment—on, with, and for each other—in the hope of discovering the real nature of time. Love, and the process of living together year after year, would combine in a kind of crucible of shared experience, and transform whoever we thought we were into an unheard of, never thought of before, new compound. That was the dream, at least—to find the emotional and spiritual equivalent of what Newton, a notorious loner, called Philosophical Mercury: add it to lead, and suddenly the lead would bubble up in a molten blaze and turn into gold.

But of course you eventually have to come down from the secret tower laboratory and stare time in the face—the lined, sleep-drawn, blur-eyed face of time that we see reflected in the window each morning when one or the other gets up to pull the shades to let in the sun.

A Note on "In Which a Spider Weaves a Web on My Computer Screen" from Tom Sleigh:

This is the second to last post in “Age of Wonder: Poems from 'The King’s Touch'". Next Tuesday, Feb. 1, is publication day: so many thanks to all of you who have followed along week by week.

Today’s poem chronicles what at first seems to be two separate events: one in the private sphere, the other in the public. But both events mirror each other in that both chronicle catastrophes. In the 1930s, at the moment when Hitler was consolidating power, the Baltic German naturalist and biologist, Jakob von Uexküll—whom some have called the father of bio-semiotics—developed a theory that every creature, from single-celled ones to humans, were all interpreters of signs. If a tick on a leaf smells butyric acid wafting from the sweat glands of a mammal, it first has to perceive the odor before it drops onto the mammal and starts crawling to where the tick’s sense of touch sends it the sign that HERE, RIGHT HERE is a good place to start sucking blood. This world of signs Uexküll called the tick’s "Umwelt", literally its “surround”—its own particular bubble of perception, and hence of signs. To von Uexküll, the fact that all creatures live in a world of signs was proof that every creature is sentient and inhabits their own all-encompassing, subjective world. So when the speaker in the first part of the poem callously sweeps away the web, the devastation for the spider would be recorded by the spider as a “spider-catastrophe.” But the result is that the spider begins to spin a new web.

Similarly, in the second half of the poem the old Palestinian man, who has had to rebuild his life after being expelled from Palestine by the Israelis, describes his life as a refugee as “living like a spider in the bottom of a well.” But what he actually said to me was translated from Arabic into French, and then from French into English, and then into my own way of understanding English: three acts of translation taking place in three idiosyncratic and very personal Umvelts.

But acts of interpretation aside, when the speaker sweeps away the spider’s web, when he listens to the old man talk about the murder of his mother by Israeli soldiers, how do you begin to calibrate the relative scale of brutality—and of equal, if not more importance, its redress? Which is when the poem’s first half comes back to haunt its second.

A Note on "The King's Touch" from Tom Sleigh:

This week’s poem is the final poem in the “Age of Wonder: Poems from 'The King’s Touch'” series. We thought it appropriate to end on publication day with the book’s title poem. I want to again thank Graywolf Press for generously supporting this project, especially Marisa Atkinson, Caroline Nitz, and Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones; Ed Robbins for his perfectionism and consummate skill; and Sarah Ingber, our associate producer, whose brilliant input week after week made each of these videos an event. I also want to thank all of you who have written me from week to week and who have made this such a lively exchange.

The Latin saying “Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli” has been translated, variously, as “According to the reader’s gifts, books have their destiny”; or in a less upbeat version, “Books go to their doom according to the reader’s abilities.” Or in a compressed version of both, “One admires, another deplores.” Or in the version I prefer, “Books share their fates with their readers.” So thanks for sharing your fate with the fate of "The King’s Touch."

This title poem refers to the ancient belief that the king, as God’s divinely anointed representative, can lay hands on the sick and heal them. The particular king I have in mind is King James VI of Scotland (later James I when he ruled over both Scotland and England). He believed himself to be deeply devout, but he was also deeply squeamish about having to touch the sick. The contradiction between the king's divine pretentions—and the personal revulsion he felt for the wounds and ulcers he layed hands on—suggests how mystery and the secular collide. So the poem and the book move between illness and healing, between evil manifested as disease and the miraculous manifested as human touch.

Now fast forward five hundred years from James’s era of healing pageantry to our era of pandemic, and you have the brutal fact of body bags being loaded by a forklift into a refrigerator truck because the hospital morgue has no more room. Furthermore, it turns out that illness isn’t demonic malevolence—it's biology, it's microbes, it's who has face masks and gloves and vaccines, and who hasn't. But the patient in the poem can’t help but wish that the king’s touch will heal him. Stretched between transcendence and the irremediable facts of physical suffering, why shouldn’t the king touch him, why shouldn’t he rise up healed!

Or not. The corporal king, after all, isn’t divine, no matter how his courtiers may flatter him.

The patient, in his holey socks and hospital gown, is even further from divine majesty. And yet as he lies waiting for the procedure to start, he can’t deny that the MRI machine projects an eerie sci-fi menace that inspires both awe and fear. As the electromagnet’s coils click louder and louder, the machine begins to pound and clang. Strapped to a moving, cold, stainless steel table, he watches himself slide toward some fatal revelation as he passes through the void of what looks like a hi-tech donut hole. It’s as if a Poe story meets modern medicine meets the heavy metal drummer of Megadeth. And when that pounding reaches its loudest, that’s when the patient rises out of himself and is set adrift in space, his body a speck against Earth’s vast curve, even as his tumor begins to talk to him—but in a concerned, gently nagging, maternal voice reminding him to pack his suitcase for the coming journey.