Poem of the Week, by Carl Dennis
My friend Todd is an art museum guard by day and an artist by day and night. He composes and records original songs, dives deep into pop music he orders from Japan, watches and re-watches Miyazaki films, reads and re-reads favorite novels and finds something new in them each time. Whatever draws him, he will follow: He’s learning Japanese, has become a sushi expert, and gradually, over the years, has compiled a collection of hilarious and somehow profound observations on life as a museum guard.
Todd is an artist, and so am I, and the ways we go about it are so different. I’ve never pulled an all-nighter in my life. I rarely re-read books or re-watch movies. When an idea grabs me, the intensity of the grabbing almost scares me. Instead of diving in full throttle the way Todd would do, I’m more likely to hold the idea in the back of my mind and channel its power into small daily tasks on my scrap paper to-do list.
There’s no one way to be an artist in the world, no one way to make your art. Books result from my process just as music results from Todd’s. But I look at him and the way he lives his life and it’s like I’m looking at a planet similar to the one I live on, close by but unavailable to me. There are so many ways to read the beautiful poem below, most of them related to history and the ways it repeats. But when I read it, it was the difference between the poet Carl Dennis and his brother that struck me, because it’s the difference between Todd and me, and it almost made me cry.
War and Peace, by Carl Dennis
In 1949, when I was ten,
a year after the airlift for beleaguered Berlin
had foiled Stalin’s attempt to starve it
and the Marshall Plan was offering battered Europe
a hand to get on its feet, my brother Robert,
six years older, inched his way, in the room we shared,
through the thousand pages of War and Peace
while I lay sleeping. It took him four months,
an hour a night, a project that seemed to me
even more peculiar than his listening after school
to symphonies and quartets. Yes, our mother
had often mentioned the book as her father’s favorite,
the one he’d first read, in his village near Uman,
in Tolstoy’s Russian, though he’d learned his Russian
after Yiddish and Ukrainian. But that didn’t explain
my brother’s pressing on after the first few pages.
Four months just to learn about the families
he tried to describe to me, the Bolkonskis
and Rostovs and Bezukhovs, or about the French
on the march near Moscow, and Tsar Alexander.
it was all so far from the suburb of St. Louis
where we were living peaceably with our parents
most of the time, in a quiet neighborhood.
Of course, by the time my brother read Tolstoy
he’d listened to music composed in Madrid and Naples,
in Leipzig, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.
On a Saturday close to his thirteenth birthday,
before he was driven off to his Bar Mitzvah,
he lost himself in the Rite of Spring.
If I say I followed my brother’s lead when sixteen
by reading, all summer long, his dog-eared copy
of War and Peace—the Maude translation—
I don’t equate my motive for sticking with it—
wanting to be like him, not left behind—
with his simple wish to open his life
to the wonders available. When I need to list
the wonders I’ve seen, I begin by returning
to the year I was ten, 1949,
the year that NATO began its efforts
to defend the free world from the world of darkness,
when my brother crossed the border each night
as if darkness were not an obstacle,
as if the iron curtain were a curtain of gauze,
no harder to lift than to turn a page.
For more information on Carl Dennis, please click here.
Q: Does writing about hard things ever make you agitated and upset, so that you have to walk away from the writing and regain your equilibrium?
A few years ago I sat in a crowded auditorium listening to a speaker lecture on a topic I don’t remember. What I do remember is that fifteen minutes into his lecture, he was interrupted by an audience member who jumped to his feet and, under the guise of asking a question, began to harangue the speaker. The speaker, who was elderly and softspoken, was clearly stunned at the interruption, which had clearly been planned. The audience member grew taller and louder as he launched into his own, counterpoint lecture. He gesticulated. He menaced.
Long ago I left behind the simple prayers of my childhood, the ones spoken in unison with others in church, or around the table at a special meal when everyone named something they were thankful for. I’ve never known what God is, and I don’t know what God is to others. If forced to come up with a definition, my definition of God would be something like the feeling of my children on either side of me in bed as I read them to sleep when they were little. God would be the high school students I used to teach, ringed on the floor in our classroom on the giant pillows I’d made, still and silent and sometimes falling asleep on Friday afternoons as I read them stories. God would be the idea and the feeling of peace, of a place where nothing bad can happen, where only love and comfort dwell. God would be the poems that swell my heart open in a way that almost hurts, like this one below.
Me to a roomful of high school students last week: “Raise a hand if you’ve lost someone you love to murder.”
eight and were the reason my nickname for her was Dry Salty Crunchy Carbohydrate.
When my children were little one of our favorite books was The Philharmonic Gets Dressed. Such a simple story. In apartments all over New York City, orchestra musicians are dressing for the evening performance. Everyone wears black. They muscle their instruments, large and small, into cabs and the subway, and they head to work. My children and I read this book over and over, usually at bedtime, where it soothed their way into sleep. It’s long gone from my shelves, but I still think about it. 
The men I love most get it, with “it” being the malevolence of treating women as if we’re not equal. At one point the other night, when I could suddenly barely talk because of the rage that filled me, a male friend said about sexism, It’s like air, invisible and everywhere. And you breathe it in your whole life, but when the switch flips and you suddenly realize how deep it goes and how awful it is, it’s fucking overwhelming. 
It was the summer of a long pink skirt, ice cream cones, cartwheels on the beach, waitress shifts followed by late nights at the bar followed by breakfast at the diner, a little rented room and a refrigerator shared with twelve other girls. This was Cape Cod, a long time ago, and my buddies Doc and RJ and Stu would descend on weekends. After we walked back from the bar I’d hold the back door open for them and they’d sneak upstairs to my room (guests weren’t allowed) to sleep on the floor around my bed. One weekend they brought a new boy with them, someone I’d never met, and I instantly liked him. That night we all decided to sleep on the beach instead of sneaking into my room. We spread quilts and looked up at the stars, waves lapping at the shore. 
Alison McGhee 