PLAYS - all are unpublished performance scripts

The Physician (1973) -- a blank-verse play set in South Africa in the time of apartheid.

The Dancing Asparas - or Captain Willard's Blues (1995) -- a prequel/sequel to the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now

Knowing Their Names (1997) -- a one-act farce in tribute to actor/director/playwright Steven Berkoff (the complete text of the play can be found at Iain Fisher's website celebrating Berkoff; his site also includes some short remarks about my first impressions of Berkoff, along with an essay analyzing Berkoff's production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, entitled: Like a Warrior: Laughter, Gender, and Death in Steven Berkoff's Coriolanus)

The Living and the Dead: Six Characters in Search of a Lost War (1999) -- a play about Robert McNamara's role in the Vietnam War, based on Paul Hendrickson's The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War.

Ambiguity on Broadway (2001) -- a farce about playwrights and literary agents

_________________________________________________

ESSAYS

An Approach to Poetry (1998)

The Bard of Avon Dethroned? (2004)

Desperate Quest - A Poet Looks at Sustainability (2012)

My Debt to Donald Hall & The Gaiety of Without (2018)

My Greatest Challenge (2021)

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An Approach to Poetry

Ars Poetica

1.
Poems live in the mouth,
not on the page.
This is non-negotiable

2.
There are approximately
1,000-times more
bad poems than good ones.

3.
Poetry can’t make much
happen— but it can
make some things happen.
                                                                              
From early on, I  wanted to write unified books of poetry, collections devoted to a central subject or theme, exploring things deeply and systematically— as opposed to collections of random poems gathered into a pile every few years.  I believe poetry can also be an instrument of thought, a light you can shine on virtually any subject, illuminating it in ways that prose, no matter how eloquent and informed, cannot do.  Poetry can be analytical.
     This isn’t something I can prove, but it can’t be easily disproved either, and has guided my writing for half a century.  It also marks me something of an outlier among poets of my era.  I don’t mind that— every poet should be as different as possible from every other poet of his time (and earlier times), not simply for the sake of variety but because every distinct poetics is potentially a distinct vision, a clarification of reality.
                                                                                            *     *     *
I was always drawn to narrative and dramatic poetry— first in folk ballads like Sir Patrick Spens, The Highwayman, and Casey at the Bat; and later to the Iliad and Odyssey, Chaucer, Elizabethan poetic drama, the works of Milton, and the Romantic and Victorian poets, especially Browning’s incomparable The Ring and the Book.  I also came to love Robinson Jeffers’ searing tales of frontier California, and Robert Frost’s stark vignettes of rural New England— this was poetry with characters, story, and structure.  You can’t sustain the poetic fire of a sonnet or one of Emily Dickinson’s gems across an entire narrative, of course, but you can try—and with a little luck and a lot of hard work, the results can be something special.
     At first I tried to write like Robert Frost— a fool’s errand, but the effort taught me how supremely hard it is to write well in meter and rhyme.  They can’t be just adornments; they must grow organically out of the poet’s mind and sensibility.  A perfect rhyme or a skillful metrical effect can never be forced into being— as Keats put it, poetry “must come as the leaves to a tree, or it had better not come at all.”  This is true of free verse too, of course, but in strictured poetry it is doubly true.  Paste on a rhyme and dog trot your meter and you get… well, doggerel.   
     So where does that leave the free-verse poet?  Maybe too free.  If doggerel was a danger inherited from the Romantic/Victorian tradition, the constant risk for us now is the possible collapse into mere chopped-up prose — and for me the best defense against that was voiced by T.S. Eliot in his axiom that every line of free verse must have “the shadow of an iamb” behind it.  That is, it must have a rhythmic pattern that keeps the language brisk, alive, vivid, memorable.  As Pound put it: “Make it fresh.”  Conforming to this standard makes free verse every bit as difficult as poetry in rhyme and meter, if not more so, since “freshness” is a very subjective thing compared to words that echo each other and the rhythm of regular beats across a line.
    Most of my poems are in free verse, and pay very close attention to sound, rhythm, stress, line length and line breaks, enjambment, stanza form, and line spacing.  These elements can add some of the intensification that rhyme and meter once did, but not as strongly— and I suspect it’s possible that in hundred years or so, the free verse experiment may have played itself out and most poets will again regularly compose, if not in sonnets and other fixed forms, at least in rhymed and metered couplets, quatrains, etc. (as pop music has always done, at least until the late 90s).  Such lyrical properties endured for millennia before the free verse revolution, which is barely two hundred years old now— a very short time in the history of language and the human impulse to bring it into song.
___________________________________

The Bard of Avon Dethroned?

In Sonnet 55, Shakespeare boasts:

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

The Bard was at least partially right— he has continued to be read all over the world with a reverential fervor that at times borders on hysteria.  Critic Harold Bloom, for instance, giddily credits him with “inventing” the modern concept of “the human.” And yet his reputation has long been shadowed by two controversies: a) was he anti-Semitic (The Merchant of Venice) and b) was he sexist (The Taming of the Shrew).  Although I suspect he was both, I think there is room for disagreement here.

In spite of these concerns, however, Shakespeare’s psychological and dramatic powers are certainly undeniable and have led many critics and others to conclude that he was the most talented poet who ever lived.  Maybe so, in terms of sheer verbal power— although that is a questionable criterion— but his world view and politics have recently come to seem repellent to me, primarily as a result of several scholarly studies arguing persuasively that he was a cheerleader for what historians have increasingly come to recognize as a brutal police state: the so-called “Golden Age” of England during the rule of Queen Elizabeth and King James. 

Of course, the debunking of Shakespeare I offer here will seem like heresy and arrogance to many lovers of poetry.  All I can say is that I’m far from the only one who holds such views.  Here are a few of the revisionist studies of Shakespeare that have greatly (and permanently) altered my view of him:

• Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (St. Martins Press, 1996)


• Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576-1642 (Princeton U Press, 1981)


• Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613 (Yale U Press, 1995)


• Nick Hazelwood, The Queen’s Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth, and Trafficking in Human Souls (William Morrow, 2004)
• Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, editors, Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (U Penn Press, 1999) – See especially
•     “Introduction: A New New Historicism, ‘To roast a Goose alive,’ ” p. 2


• John Anderson, “The Aristocracy and Their Mental World” in The Oxford History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford U Press,
•    1996), See especially the characterization of the aristocratic view of the lower classes as the “meaner sort… un-thankful,
•     wayward, cruelly envious and impudent... rabble [and] fools,” which might stand as the caption to many of Shakespeare’ 
•     scenes of lower class people.  The words are actually those of a chaplain at Capel house, the ancestral estate of one of the
  • elite 5% of the population controlling some 70% of the nation’s wealth in Shakespeare’s time.  p. 175

If you  look closely at such studies and still say they  don’t matter for our Great Will Shakespeare, his genius as a poet/dramatist  puts him above such concerns, then you and I are not on the same page in our valuation of poetry— or life.
_________________________________

Desperate Quest: A Poet Looks at Sustainability (excerpts)

Published in: J. Williams & W. Forbes (Eds), Toward a More Livable World; Social dimensions of sustainability - Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2012; pp. 83-112

PREFACE – Please! Somebody Talk Me Down!

Desperation is probably not the most congenial term to introduce into a conversation on sustainability.  So, with apologies to the other contributors to this volume who may have a more optimistic outlook— not to mention better credentials on the subject than mine— I must first issue a caveat: I seriously doubt that sustainability can be achieved in the “developed” countries of the world, much less in the Third World; that is, not with the speed, precision, political will, and coordination necessary to prevent massive ecological and climate disruption, and consequently a virtual collapse of the corporate “civilization” that has come to dominate the globe over the past several centuries. [1]

In fact, just thinking about “sustainability” for very long makes my head feel like it’s about to explode.  This is not an effort to be funny— it’s a simple fact.  I said as much to Dr. Jerry Williams when he invited me to contribute to this volume.  Actually, the way I put it to him was more like: “The word sustainability triggers a rush of factoids in my brain that jostle each other madly for a while before dissolving into incomprehensibility.”  I thought that would stop Jerry in his tracks.  For reasons of his own, however, he wouldn’t take no for an answer— so he bears at least part of the responsibility for the dark, rambling nature of these remarks.

Why elaborate on such a dour vision?  First, I wanted to see if I could talk myself out of my funk.  As Rachel Maddow says: “Please, somebody, talk me down!”  To which, my muse whispered in my ear: Fat chance— but worth a try.  I suppose that’s a confession that I still harbor a few grains of hope that humanity will come to its senses at one second before midnight and pull off the greatest comeback since the day the Buffalo Bills, trailing 38-3 late in the game, beat the Houston Oilers, 41-38.  It was almost a miracle.  Ah yes, miracles!  That is precisely what is needed in these desperate times— and, of course, precisely what we’re not about to get.

__________________________________

[1]  For more hopeful views, see: Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (William Morrow & Company, 1997); Eric A. Davison, You Can’t Eat GNP: Economics as if Ecology Mattered (Perseus Publishing, 2000); Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest - How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming (Viking Press, 2007) and Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Little Brown and Co. 1999); David Korten, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth – A Declaration of Independence from Wall Street (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2nd edition, 2010,); Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (St. Martins’s Griffon, 2007); Harvey Franklin Wasserman, SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030 (publisher unknown); Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: the Roots of Ecology (Sierra Club Books, 1977).
_____________________________________

from PART I. THINKING LIKE AN ENGINEER 

The Offering

There is a mythic bird—poised
on the edge of the day
after tomorrow.  He may be

the one Wallace Stevens saw,
a creature with fire-feathers
dangling down— or he may be

an heir of the huge vultures
on the walls of Çatal Höyük.
I approach the bird slowly

offering the food called
sustainability— fresh, raw,
undigested.  The large bird

treads the ground, hard,
eying me warily— but
without fear or forgiveness.

He sniffs at the offering
then turns away.  He peers up
at the gathering clouds, as if

he sees something
up there--
something I cannot see.

Note - Çatal Höyük was a Neolithic village in Anatolia (Turkey), ca. 7,500 BC.   Stevens’ bird is in the poem “Of Mere Being.”

EPILOGUE -- Coincidences, Confessions, Qualifications

Coincidences
 Ironically, in the same week that I was invited to contribute to this volume, I discovered the book Can Poetry Save the Earth? – A Field Guide to Nature Poems (Yale University Press, 2009) by John Felstiner.  Great, I thought— this guy has done half my work for me!  The title’s half-serious, half-wistful rhetorical question locates the solace of poetry in the context of our unfolding planetary crisis—and the book did help me find some prime examples of eco-poetry, particularly in Dickinson and Snyder. [1]  

Felstiner’s survey of more than fifty poets is fresh and nuanced, celebrating in a meticulous prose both their craft and their insights on our current ecological crisis.  He ends the book with this query: “Can Poetry Save the Earth? For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken.”  That strikes an appropriate note of humility in addressing such a vast subject— poetry’s influence is finite, its blessings a necessary but not sufficient element in any reconstitution of a sane and sustainable world.

Confessions

I began my writing life trying to take up W. H. Auden’s challenge to poets, in his elegy for W.B. Yeats:

Follow poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.

Today, the bottom of the night seems darker than I ever imagined— and it has become much harder for me to persuade myself to rejoice, much less to persuade anyone else.  So, no, I haven’t talked myself down.  To the contrary, I still fear, as a friend put it recently, that we are probably “an evolutionary dead-end species.” 

And yet, I also fervently believe with Keats that the poetry of earth is never dead, with Stafford that the earth “speaks everything to us,” and with C.D. Wright that there is a sanctuary in the mind made of poetry and music and laughter.  There are consolations, very real ones, in what Robinson Jeffers called “the honey of peace in old poems. “

I further believe that the ethos of sustainability found at the heart of the greatest poems of the English language can contribute to a wide range of redemptive environmental efforts.  As Paul Hawken points out, there are literally millions of such projects underway now, large and small, around the globe, and I could just as well have begun this essay with a catalogue of them.  I say hail and godspeed to everyone involved in such endeavors— with the hope that the labors of the community of poets will increasingly reinforce their efforts.  

Qualifications

 I feel obligated to say that I find nothing in poetry, not in mine, nor that of any other poet, living or dead, in any language— nothing that seems to embody a truly “digested,” sustainable, ecological consciousness that even remotely approximates the sensibility of preindustrial indigenous populations and some of their present-day heirs— from the Hopi and Tohono O’odham of the desert Southwest, to the Australian aboriginals, the Pumé of Venezuela, the pygmy people of Africa, and the Yanomami of South America.[2] 

Of course, we must guard against idealizing or trivializing the complex ethnographies of these cultures, and so I acknowledge that some of the ancient, tribal cultures around the world have participated in the on-going “Holocene Extinction” as well as intra tribal violence.  But we can still look to the tribal peoples who have historically demonstrated a graceful, instinctive grasp of Gaia’s intentions, habits, and (above all) needs that have been lost to modernity.  Taking that look in a serious way is one of the last, best hopes for us as a species of learning again how to say: In our minds, so be it.
________________________________

[1] The book is enhanced by a unique selection of color photographs, from Blake’s Creation, which depicts the madly abstract Urizen (Blake’s version of Jehovah) attempting to geometrically measure the cosmos, to a child’s two-part, colored-chalk picture heart-breakingly called Yucky Pollution, Shiny Pretty.

[2] See Frank Waters, The Book of the Hopi (Viking Press, 1963); Gary Paul Nabhan, A Naturalist in Papago Indian [Tohono O’odham] Territory (North Point Press,1982); Harvey Arden, Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia (HarperCollins Perennial, 1994); Pei lin Yu, Hungry Lightning: Notes of a Woman Anthropologist in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Jean-Pierre Hallet, Congo Kitabu ( Random House, 1964); Louis Sarno, Songs from the Forest – My Life Among the Ba-Benjelle Pygmies (Penguin Books, 1993) and the CD Echoes of the Forest – Music of the Central African Pygmies (Ellipsis Arts, 1995); Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (Simon & Schuster, 1961); Dennison Berwick, Savages: The Life and Killing of the Yanomami [Kindle Edition] (Voyage Press, 2009); Kenneth Good and David Chanoff, Into The Heart: One Man's Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1997).

___________________________________________________

My Debt to Donald Hall and The Gaiety of Without
          (Published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2018)
 
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
- W.B. Yeats
 
You will never be any good as a poet unless you
arrange your life by the desire to write great poems.
- Donald Hall

Part I
Once upon a time, I studied poetry at UM with Donald Hall, and it was a defining experience for me, but my first debt to him has nothing to do with poetry per se.  For it was in Don’s writing seminar that I met my wife Judy— my muse, critic, best friend, neuroscientist, poet, and wife of 50 years. (1)
      The first time I saw Judy, in the fall of 1965, she was sitting just to Don’s left in a classroom in Angell Hall.  The name of the building aside, Judy did look heavenly in a peony-pink blouse against her dark tan.  I was in love in two seconds flat.  The problem was, since only first names were used in class, I couldn’t look up her phone number to call for a date.  So I went to Don’s office and gave him a lame story about wanting to know my fellow classmates better, to respond to their work— blah, blah, blah.  Could he give me last names?  He pulled out a class roster, leaned back in his swivel chair, squinted at me for a second or two, stroking his sandy-red, bushy beard, and said: “The one with the tan, right?”  Thus Donald Hall became godfather to our marriage. 
      My second debt to Don is entangled not just in the craft and culture of poetry, but also in ancillary issues, like gender, politics, moral courage, aging, and memory.  I had come to Ann Arbor on the recommendation of an undergrad poetry teacher who told me: “Go to Michigan, study with Donald Hall, and win a Hopwood.”  But when I arrived that fall, the Vietnam War was heating up, and UM was at the center of some fierce national soul-searching.  I had resigned from the Naval Academy two years earlier, in large part because of qualms about the war (which were vastly enhanced when we were lectured on how easy it was to wash radioactive fallout off ships). 
      In any case, that summer I had turned my back on the war, only to have it flare up on the UM campus in the form of teach-ins and protests.  Police vans unloaded riot-geared cops in the twilight outside my garret window as I sat reading Yeats for the first time, finding him about as historically relevant as could be (“the centre cannot hold,” “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed”) and scribbling lines of my own (many about my new girlfriend).  I also wondered if I was a coward for being in Ann Arbor instead of Da Nang.  My father’s generation had to go to war, so why shouldn’t I?     
      In short, though I felt in my bones by this time that poetry was a glorious thing, I wasn’t otherwise much different from a lot of young men of the time— randy, angry, confused, and much in need of a new model of manhood and civic aspiration.  Don, with his all-or-nothing, strive-to-be-great-in-order-to-be-good devotion to poetry, gave me such a model. 
      Becoming a poet, he insisted, was a kind of war: a war for words, for vision, for moral and aesthetic truth.  It too demanded sacrifice and endurance.  It demanded, in fact, your entire life: Vita brevis, ars longa est.  Donald Hall was the incarnation of that truth for me, not just in Ann Arbor, but more importantly later when he left academia, moved to Eagle Pond, and wrote, wrote, wrote.  There, he exhorted: “Abolish the MFA!  “Ban the McPoem!” “Iowa delenda est.”  (How brave to say such things in the era of deconstructionism, mega-mergers, and psychobabble.)
      Don’s early gifts to me included astute, patient criticism of my poems and (thrill of thrills for apprentices) an occasional glimpse at what the master was working on.  (I once dared to suggest a minor change or two in a draft of “The Man in the Dead Machine,” which he incorporated into the published version in The Alligator Bride.)  I also soon cherished his two volumes of New Poets of England and America (co-edited with Louis Simpson and Robert Pack) and his Contemporary American Poetry.  These collections enlarged my sense of the possibilities for poetry in general and for my own.  (One beef: Don’s sense of a poet’s best work was so unerring that after reading what he had anthologized, you could be sadly disappointed when confronted with a writer’s less accomplished things.)
      His early service as a critic and editor was balanced by his much later Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets, which recalls his encounters with some of the great figures of modernist poetry (Frost, Eliot, Thomas, Moore, Pound, and others).  The book casts a critical eye on their work in ways that make the personal stories all the more interesting.  This is an important work, providing more illumination of its subjects than some of the huge, mercilessly detailed biographies now in fashion.
      Their Ancient Glittering Eyes is about more than poets as people, however.  It’s about the way poetry is memory at its best (and worst), the way language and only language can “tell us who we are.”  Reading the book, though, you may come to wonder if there’s any sense in worrying about greatness in the arts— only to be left with an intractable paradox: though we can never fully define greatness, we still must strive for it, over and over, most of us doomed never to succeed in the struggle to achieve it.  “Arrange your life” for this quest, Hall advises.
 
*     *     *
After I won my Hopwood, in the spring of 1966, Judy and I left Ann Arbor and didn’t see Don again for more than three decades— not until just after the publication of Without, the book recounting the terrible, premature death of his wife, Jane Kenyon.  Before I address the book, however, I have a confession: I agree with Don when he says he is not a great poet.  I know that, as a friend, Don will forgive me for saying this, though his poet’s ego is no doubt damning me all to hell.  But he knows what I mean. 
      If Hall isn’t great in the grand sense, his life has definitely been guided, he says, “by the desire to write great poems.”  And I’m convinced that he has written great poems— “The One Day” and “Prophecy” come to mind, among others.   It seems to me that Without, on its surface a horribly grim elegy, not only contains some of his best work, but also achieves a kind of greatness of precisely the kind intimated in Their Ancient Glittering Eyes.  It is dominated by an aching emptiness (a beloved wife lost) that is simultaneously suffused with a vital abundance (the poet’s loving memory of her, even as she was suffering a prolonged, painful death).  This strange, difficult kind of fullness generates what I’m calling gaiety.
      Hall himself is fully aware of the contradictory elements in the book.  As self-therapy, the writing of it was essential in alleviating the immediate onslaughts of grief, as he noted after a poetry reading at the University of Pennsylvania in 2007: “When I was writing Without it was the only part of the day when I felt joy.  For maybe two hours every morning, I was overjoyed, and when I ran out of steam, I was in for 22 hours of the misery of missing [Jane] and weeping and screaming…” (2)
 
Part II
Without often has the translucent clarity of a Vermeer painting: everything seen precisely, almost microscopically— but also screened through memory and forgetfulness.  Such a description might sound as if Hall’s grieving was sedate, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Like Dylan Thomas’s elegy for his father urging him (and us) to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” Without includes some very harrowing moments, particularly in the title poem— a tour de force that dispenses with punctuation and grammar, banished as if they were unnatural intrusions.  Here are the opening lines of the title poem:
 
we lived in a small island stone nation
without color under gray clouds and wind
distant the unlimited ocean acute
lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls
or palm trees without vegetation
or animal life only barnacles and lead
colored moss that darkened when months did
hours days weeks months weeks days hours
the year endured without punctuation
 
The metaphor of “punctuation” is painful, almost stopping the poem in its tracks; but it plunges ahead for seven more astounding stanzas.  The sense of a suffocating, timeless suffering registered here is replicated in other poems more briefly, but in a no less searing way, as in “Air Shatters the Car’s Small Room,” with its understated yet surreal conclusion:
 
Sometimes
driving the Honda
with its windows closed
in beginning autumn
from the low motel
to Jane’s bed, I scream
and keep on screaming.
 
“Without” is the book’s inevitable title poem, however, not only because it announces the elegiac theme so powerfully, but also because it holds the book together emotionally and dramatically— and thereby controls the book’s aesthetics.  Take it out, and other poems might seem banal or trivial, minute catalogues of medications and medical terminology for leukemia’s awful progress.  Take it out, and Without might border on self-indulgence (in the way that grief must in real life: “It is Margaret you mourn for,” says Hopkins, making just this point). 
      “Without” avoids such natural weaknesses, which are perfectly forgivable in life but not in art.  The poem condenses the ragged emotions of the rest of the book into something hard and clean.  It does not go gentle into that good night.  It fights, it claws, it roars.  Hall loves life’s sensuous obstinacy— and that fact is registered in the poem’s quirky, almost shocking, but strangely comforting closing lines: without dog or semicolon or village square / without hyena or lily without garlic.
      The way these final, grammatically jumbled phrases communicate both grief and a kind of latent joie d’vivre in the face of death would take a separate essay to unpack, but it’s certain by this point that, love it as he may, Hall refuses to pretend that life is not sometimes ghastly, searing.  With Jane dead, “Remembered happiness is agony” for him— and “so too is remembered agony.” But the rich tang of life is not utterly expunged.  It still resides in the poet’s awareness of animal, flower, and spice.  (What a gutsy poetic flare to end an elegy with the word garlic.)
      It’s also of note that Hall’s title poem, with its language-splintering rhetoric, comes at virtually the mid-point of the book, forming a fulcrum to what comes before and after, a spine to the body of the work.  I will return to the book’s architecture later, but for now I’ll only add that until you have read “Without,” you are not really in Hall’s experience of mourning.  After you have read it, you can’t get out.  Maybe this alone constitutes a measure of poetic greatness— but I have something else in mind as well.
 
Part III
At the book’s spatial center, then, “Without” records rage and grief in the most eccentric language imaginable.  But rage and grief are not at the visionary center of this book: gaiety is— of precisely the kind Yeats had in mind in “Lapis Lazuli.”  When Yeats’ ancient mandarins watch their city burn to the ground yet again the poem says: “Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”
      Hall borrowed the title of his earlier prose book about poets from this line, and the wife he mourns was herself a poet.  These facts are not merely coincidental, but rather underscore my point: how shall a poet best remember his deceased wife if she too was a poet?  As already suggested, he will transmute his grief into gaiety. 
      What a formidable task Without undertakes, calling for emotional openness and candor on the one hand, and relentless self-scrutiny and technical finesse on the other.  How much material was cut out of the final draft of the book?  I would guess a lot— given that one of the slogans Don imparted in his seminars was: “When in doubt, cut it out.”  For a serious poet, these words are more than just a cute rhyme.  They are a professional ethic: revise, revise, revise.  So in the rest of my analysis it’s important to remember that whatever else is going on in Without, the elegist was also engaged in a lot of plain, hard work-- something that means a great deal in Hall’s poetics.  (See his prose collection Life Work.)
      In the abstract, all this might sound cold or callous, like Yeats’ smiling mandarins in their fatalistic resignation; but in both cases, the impression is false.  Like Yeats, Hall is exploring something far beyond resignation; he is seeking what was once called transcendence-- or what Wordsworth describes (too casually perhaps) as “the philosophic mind that sees through death,” and Shakespeare, in King Lear, calls simply “ripeness.”  This is what Yeats’ gaiety is and what Hall seeks in Without.

*     *     *
How then are the gaiety and fullness of the book achieved?  Here is the end of one of the darkest (and most erotic) poems in the book, a snapshot of a dying woman looking at herself in the mirror and seeing her now-wasted beauty, her head hairless from chemotherapy:
 
Today
she looked at her bald head and at/
her face swollen
with prednisone: “I am Telly Savalas.”
 
Several things happen here.  First, we get a good, healthy laugh— comic relief.  But the joke also conveys the notion that, actually, it’s not funny (prednisone is no laughing matter).  More importantly, we get a glimpse here into the soul of a woman with caustic wit (no one but Jane could have cracked wise in this way without seeming cruel).  At the time, for these two people, the laughter must have cut like a knife.  Hall has just told us in a superb trope, Jane once had “thickwater hair,” a special part of her beauty as a woman.  Now the hair and the beauty are leaving and unlikely ever to return.  So the joke was an act of courage and defiance, even as it also signals (as all comic insight does) an acceptance of limits and mortality.  This is the laughter of gaiety.
      Another example occurs in a later poem, one whose bawdiness may strike some readers as crude.  In “Letter With No Address,” Hall writes to his departed wife that he misses their love life so badly that he has a Freudian vision of it being enacted between his car and hers:
 
Sometimes, coming back home
to our circular driveway,
I imagine you’ve returned
before me, bags full of groceries upright
in the back seat of the Saab,
its trunk lid delicately raised
as if proposing an encounter
dog-fashion, with the Honda.
 
I was reluctant to quote these lines, thinking that in isolation they might cheapen the impression the book makes, since this time the joke is 'dirty,' and the puritans among us might ask: “How can Hall grieve for his wife by telling off-color stories about her!”  That response is precluded by the use of the gentle, shrewdly placed adverb delicately, and the phrasing that follows: “proposing” an encounter (not propositioning or soliciting or suggesting, but proposing-- as in proposing marriage).
      This careful control of diction turns the bawdiness away (destroys it, I’d say) and elicits instead a tender, old-fashioned air of courtship via a friendly haunting.  It’s as if the car contains Jane’s spirit.  We can laugh at the moment’s cartoonish incongruity, while we wince at its deeper intimations (an effect found in Shakespeare’s comedies and Donne’s love poems.)  Here the gaiety is grinning, to be sure, but it is poised in such finely calibrated language that we realize the joke is really a fond message to Jane: if you were here, you would have laughed at this with me!  Bawdiness has been transformed into a moment of healing.
      Sexual longing grows more intense and bitter later in the book; but with an aura of gaiety already in place, the erotic reveries never seem one-dimensional.  They in fact become agents of recovery for both mind and spirit.  For example, the longest poem in Without, “Letter in the New Year,” initially seems to arrive at a lessening of grief and a more serene remembrance, full of domestic comforts: Hall baby-sitting his granddaughters; watching the light on the mountains near Eagle Pond Farm; “eating bagels in the morning / watching basket-ball by night;” returning to the reading circuit (“Poetry Man / is suiting up!” he tells his dog Gus); digging in Jane’s old peony garden.  But in the poem’s concluding lines, this domestic ease is eroded, as the poet imagines his wife’s life if he had preceded her in death:
 
I want to hear you laugh again,
your throaty whoop.  Every day
I imagine you widowed
in this house of purposeful quiet.
You would have confided in Gus...
                               ... lunched
with friends in New London,
climbed [Mt.] Kearsarge, wept,
written poems, and lain unmoving,
eyes open, in bed all morning.
You would have found
a lover, but not right away.
I want to fuck you
in Paradise.  “The sexual
intercourse of angels,” Yeats
in his old age wrote his old
love, “is a conflagration
of the whole being.”
 
This is exquisite and daring.  It renders a perfect fusion of the quotidian with the longing for transcendence.  How mysterious and yet comforting is that image of Jane alone in her bed, in a house filled with “purposeful quiet.”  How authentic the sense of recovery seems even as it explodes into some of the most painful longing in the book. 
      And how much would have been lost if Hall had written: “I want to make love to you / in Paradise” or “sleep with you,” or any other soft euphemism for sex.  He chose instead the rough Anglo Saxon, and it rocks our expectation wonderfully.  This choice also again links Hall to Yeats, whose famous “Lapis Lazuli” speaks of how “nymphs and satyrs / Copulate in the foam.”  This wording was actually an expurgated version of the alliteration Yeats wanted: “fuck in the foam.”  So Yeats would have admired Without, though it rarely employs the densely marbled language which was his métier.  “Letter in the New Year” evokes a churning sense of fullness, culminating in the final phrase: whole being.
      And what does the poem say, if not that the transcendent and the material world are one, that “paradise” is fucking, and that the most dreadful human loss is endurable?  Only angels experience “conflagration of the whole being.”  We humans are not burned up by love.  We lose it, go on without it, perhaps find it again with another, or don’t.  Accepting such truths, Hall intimates, is a form of gaiety.
      Another mode of gaiety is located in the architecture of Without.  I mentioned earlier that the title poem is the nucleus of the narrative: an uncontrollable explosion of grief immediately after the death, the biological truth that underlies all human aspiration, including mated love, the irrational force that social convention and human fantasy would deny.
      But before getting to the title poem, Hall weaves the story of Jane’s battle with leukemia into several poems recording other deaths.  The poet had just turned 70 when Jane died, and his mother Lucy died two months after Jane was diagnosed with the leukemia.  Then their cat Bluebeard died. Jane’s mother died.  All these losses are presented in poems that are stately and sad but not morbid— they are vibrant memories celebrating what they mourn.
      Taken together, such poems constitute a kind of family photo album of lives lived, relished, suffered, lost, and now remembered.  The collective portrait, though studded with anguish, is ultimately gay.  One of the most moving poems in the book, “Song for Lucy,” recalls a time before Jane’s death when she and Hall went to sort out his mother’s belongings just after her death.  (Ah, that task, we murmur, knowing we all must do it one day, and have it done for us.)  The final lines of the poem, which might have turned maudlin, are rendered in an understatement no paraphrase can capture: “Jane felt strong that day / as we emptied Lucy’s room / and ate a leftover cookie.”  Is this bathos?  I don’t think so.  For just a moment, appetite stamps out depression.
 
*     *     *
After “Without,” the second half of the book consists mostly of “letters” to Jane— a form of communion with its own poignancy, since Hall, though a Christian, is not necessarily convinced there is an afterlife.  In the first letter, he writes to the departed Jane: “You know now / whether the soul survives death. / Or you don’t.”  He knows these letters are really sent only to himself (and us); but the fiction of Jane’s hearing the words he writes is powerful.  There’s a sense, I suspect, in which everyone believes in ghosts:  Hall once thinks he sees Jane in a convenience store, and he visits her grave repeatedly (where he overhears someone saying: “Can you hear me, Jane?”). 
      He also has countless dreams and memories of her in their life together before leukemia (they were married for nearly 20 years).  These “letters,” in other words, are plainly a way for Hall to cling to his beloved a while longer, until his grief subsides.  Maybe everyone does something of the sort after losing a spouse; but Hall does it in intensely crafted poems that never drift into sentimentality.  In avoiding that, he honors the poet Jane Kenyon as she would have most wanted.
      The book’s structure is straightforward: illness, death, grief, and recovery— a descent to darkness followed by a return to light.  Part of gaiety is the simple, animal hope that we can “get over it,” no matter how spirit-shattering our losses.  The entire genre of elegy conforms to that model, and Without enacts it as well.  If it didn’t, it would not only be unbearable to read, but be a kind of betrayal of elegy.  After the poetry reading in 2007 noted earlier, Hall said of himself: “I've really been elegiac all my life as a poet, not just on the occasion of Jane's death.”
      Consequently, the latter half of the book has a steady pulse of recovery beating in almost every poem.  But just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water, here’s another great white— and Hall’s last letter-poem is an astonishing blend of serenity, acceptance and wry humor, mixed with terror, denial, and despair.  When he thinks he hears Jane under her gravestone saying “Where the hell / are you?” he answers: “In hell.”  This reversal of recovery is not less disturbing because it follows this droll report:
 
There’s one good thing
about April.  Every day Gus and I
take a walk to the graveyard.
I’m the one who doesn’t
piss on your stone.  
 
Like the “doggy-sex” joke earlier, the gaiety of the story here modifies both the lows and the highs that come after it— and come they do, with more force than ever.  First the low:
 
I daydreamed burning the house:
kerosene in pie plates
with a candle lit in the middle.
I locked myself in your study...
with Gus, Ada [the cat], and the rifle
my father gave me at twelve.
I killed our cat and dog.
I swallowed a bottle of pills,
knowing that if I woke on fire
I had the gun.
 
It’s like something out of Poe (the writer, Hall says elsewhere, who first propelled him into poetry).  But even this violent despair is not without an undertow of self-parodying gaiety.  How carefully plotted this macabre little melodrama, how primly arranged!  Hall is tidying up before the ultimate Bye-Bye.  So why doesn’t he just skip the damn candles and kerosene, grab the gun, and get on with it?  Answers: 1) This is a dream of dark temptation which gaiety must overcome, and 2) no temptation, no overcoming.  Hall’s nightmare, in other words, is a self-test (“Do I want to live?”) and the parody helps generate the answer.  ‘Since my suicide looks a little goofy and scripted, I might as well live.’  (Somewhere just off-stage, Dorothy Parker nods her approval).  Put differently, the poem implies that spiritual health is not a mathematical thing, but an organism that often like a crab goes backward— and sure enough, the despair is soon followed by a reconnection with life’s endless renewal and beauty, which are now represented as being not death’s antithesis but interwoven with it, just as time is interwoven in the seasons:
 
Last week the goldfinches
flew back for a second spring.
Again I witnessed snowdrops
worry from dead leaves
into air.  Now your hillside
daffodils edge up and today
it’s a year since we set you down
at the border of the graveyard
on a breezy April day.
 
Is this happy or sad?  Such categories are reductive.  It is both— which is to say, it has gaiety (in the certainty of the cycle: endless change, fluctuation, yin and yang).  In these radical fluctuations, all inside one poem, Hall is admitting he can never simply “get over it.”  With Jane gone, a part of him will always be in hell, even though his memories of her can transport him to moments of bliss: “When I dream / sometimes your hair is long / and we make love as we used to.”
 
*     *    *
One of the most powerful expressions of gaiety in Without comes in a short, deceptively prosaic piece showing Hall caring for an infant granddaughter’s bodily needs and cherishing her warmly, but with the eye of an aging man.  The poem merits complete quotation, both on its own terms and because it functions as a counterpoint to the rhetorical loudness so frequent in “Without.”
 
POSTCARD: JANUARY 22ND
 
I grow heavy through summer and autumn
and now I bear your death.  I feed her,
bathe her, rock her, and change her diapers.
She lifts her small skull, trembling
and tentative.  She smiles, spits up, shits
in a toilet, learns to read and multiply.
I watch her grow, prosper, thrive.
She is the darling of her mother’s old age.

As comforting as this is on the surface, it has disturbing depths.  As the poem progresses, we realize that the baby’s helpless dependence mirrors Jane’s debilitation before death.  Then the present-tense moment before us begins to slide seamlessly into years, and the child’s dependence becomes learning, maturation, prospering, even as her mother simultaneously slides into old age.  Somewhere behind the poem is Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man” speech— and this may be the one point in the book where we can imagine Hall’s own eyes “glittering.”
      The final poem in the book maintains and enlarges all these themes in fluid, quasi-blank-verse and in a manner I believe worthy not only of Yeats but of his predecessors, Wordsworth and Milton.  Although the poem still addresses Jane, it is no longer offered as a “letter” but simply as “Weeds and Peonies,” a more self-effacing title.  The poem is such a seamless whole, it defies partial quotation; but I will violate its unity just to show how gorgeous and “full” the writing in it is.  Here is the first stanza:
 
Your peonies burst out, white as snow squalls,
with red flecks at their baggy centers
in your border of prodigies by the porch.
I carry one magnanimous blossom indoors
and float it in a glass bowl, as you used to do.
 
This is another instance, perhaps the best in the book, of the Vermeer-like clarity mentioned earlier.  Technically and emotionally, as a culmination of the elegy in both literal and figurative ways, “Weeds and Peonies” is flawless.  (Show me a more skillful stanza written in the past fifty years, and I’ll eat it.)  Like the flowers, the language itself is bursting with an animating abundance: squalls, flecks, baggy, prodigies, magnanimous.  The “magnanimous blossom” is too eloquent as a symbol to need any explication.  And please go back and say the lines out loud.  You’ll miss half their force if you don’t hear them. 
      The rest of the poem lives up to this fine beginning and ends with an abrupt two-word anti-climax which I submit is one of the finest stylistic triumphs in modern verse, one which I won’t spoil by quoting here, but I urge readers to experience in the proper way: as the last words in the last poem of a remarkable book.
 
IV
I have slightly dodged my original question.  Is this a “great” book?  I say yes— and not just because I would like it to be, simply because I love and revere Donald Hall.  Without is great, I submit, because it invents a new kind of elegy.  For a long time I couldn’t quite say how.  Don told me he thinks it may be new too, but that although it sold well, the book wasn’t reviewed very widely.  He thinks this may be because some people hate it for its subject matter (but won’t say so) while others “don’t know quite what to make of it.” 
      What, then, is so disturbing about Without, and what makes it new?  A quick look at some of the great elegies in the canon, makes the answer pretty evident.  First, we can rule out formal pastoral elegy from Virgil to Milton—there are no sheep, doleful shepherds, or beatific shepherdesses in Without, no set pieces singing of “immortal” love.  Hall’s book, like most modern poetry on the subject of death, is an anti-elegy in this sense.  And compared to the great patriarch of the modern elegy, Tennyson, we can see big differences, not the least of which are stylistic.  In his long elegy, In Memoriam, Tennyson worked in uniformly cadenced, rhymed stanzas, while Hall’s elegy rarely uses end-rhyme and employs a wide range of stanza forms and line lengths.  Not surprisingly, several poems in Without are written in syllabics, a form in which Hall has been one of our premier practitioners.
      But the crucial difference between Without and In Memoriam is not merely in technique (or length).  Tennyson doesn’t just grieve and memorialize.  He meditates, he expounds, he takes positions, he educates (his lyrics on evolution and geology, for instance, have probably never been equaled).  He wrote in the high rhetoric of the classical tradition now lost in living speech, but which in Tennyson’s time was still a major resource for poets.  It’s easy to sneer at this tradition today, perhaps; but read Tennyson closely and you will be awed not only by his seemingly infinite lyric strength but by the range of uses he puts it to.  (Try, sometime, to read the poem’s nearly 3,000 lines straight through, as many Victorians did, but which few readers attempt today.  That will render a far different experience— and a better one, I believe— than reading it in pieces.)
      But although In Memoriam fully deserves its place in the canon, don’t expect to learn much about Arthur Hallam from the poem.  He’s barely there.  We never see him or hear him speak.  We don’t learn his place in the poet’s public or private life.  He is a totally invisible occasion for grief and a stimulus for poetry, not a “living” presence in the poem that the reader can share.  In Memoriam, with its sweeping canvas of 19th-century civilization, history, and geology, is filled with many things, but curiously “without” Arthur Hallam.  Recall that the poem’s full title is In Memoriam A.H.H. – the initials being the only direct register of an actual man so absent from the poem itself.
      Hall’s elegy, in contrast, is sharply focused on a highly visible woman, her death, his grief and recovery.  Kenyon is very much in this book, from start to finish.  She is what “fills” Without.  She is what gives it its sense of life and emotional abundance.  And yet Jane is not (as the subjects of many prior elegies almost always are) an idealized exemplar of humanity (as Hallam was for Tennyson).  She is simply a beloved wife, prematurely dead, and crushingly missed.  That’s the whole story, the whole theme.  Hall does not even give us (and it must have been a real temptation) a sense of Jane being “special” because she was a poet.  (‘She ain’t just my old lady, she’s a famous writer!’)
      What he shows instead is a woman smelling the snowy air, shopping for groceries, making bread, kidding Hall about his beard, mulching her roses, filling the bird-feeder with sunflower seed, walking the dog, nursing her husband during his cancer, helping him sort out his dead mother’s things, kissing him when he gives her a ring after her diagnosis (which she immediately names the “Please Don’t Die” ring), making love for the last time (in a Seattle clinic room!), briefly recovering after a bone-marrow transplant, and then— in spite of everything high-tech medicine can do— rapidly succumbing (though not before she and Hall pick out her burial dress and work on poems together one last afternoon).
      This catalogue of Jane’s presence in the book isn’t complete— all are taken from the book’s first half, before the “letters” even begin.  Her portrait (and the case for mourning her) continues in the second half, built one word, one poem at a time, with the workman-like premise that she is new to the reader, to whom she will only be as alive as these poems make her.  This austerity, a distinct aesthetic distance from Jane as a subject in a poem, may be what some readers find disturbing about the book.  But Hall’s stance is the only one possible for someone who loves his art as much as his lost wife.  Such integrity in and of itself may not exactly be greatness in poetry, but it is a step toward it.
      The risk Hall ran in writing Without was not only in the possibility that the poems might turn out to be mediocre or sentimental (thus betraying Jane and ruining all elegiac communion with the reader) but worse (given today’s book market): that the book might be mistaken for some kind of self-help tract.  At a book signing for Without I attended with Don, I saw one or two people who were clearly recently bereaved, who seemed to be buying the book with the expectation that it would make them feel better, would offer “words of wisdom,” would be a poetic “I’m OK, you’re OK” on death.  I don’t mean to be scornful.  Lord knows we must take our comfort where we can— but I can’t help wondering what such readers would feel when they hit lines like these in the title poem:
 
pain vomit neuropathy morphine nightmare
confusion the rack terror the vise
vincristine ara-c cytoxan vp-16
loss of memory loss of language losses
pneumocystis carinii pneumonia bactrim
foamless unmitigated sea without sea
delirium whipmarks of petechiae
multiple blisters of herpes zoster
and how are you doing today ...
 
This catalogue comprises some of the things that “fill” Without, things that, in my mind, make it a great work.  And who knows, maybe, in time, the widows, widowers, and others who come to the book simply for solace may learn to love these lines as much as I do for their factual truth, their lyric mastery, and their dark satire on our current conceptions of what life, death and dignity are.  If readers do move in that direction, then Donald Hall will have helped redefine the genre of elegy.
      What shall we call Hall’s innovation, then? — the “Erotic-Medical Elegy,” the “Elegy of Gaiety,” or (my choice) simply the “Elegy of Common Life”?  Those who know Hall’s work will recognize the last suggestion as a permutation of what he might have called it himself, as implied in his poem the “Elegy of the One Day.”   But all such nomenclature games are trivializing, and they distort both Hall’s idiosyncratic gaiety and the grief that informs it.  I suspect Don would prefer that his elegy for Jane Kenyon be left (in the final gaiety he offers us) “without” any labels at all.
 
CODA
I first scratched out a draft of this essay some 20 years ago, soon after Without was published, when I was 55 and Don was approaching 70.  He and I had only recently been reunited after decades of no direct contact and very sporadic communication (mostly Christmas cards).  I was not very inclined to publish the essay then because Jane had died only a few years before, and commenting on it felt like an intrusion.  Since that time, however, Don and I have corresponded more regularly, and now, with me half-way though my eighth decade and Don about to turn 90, my affection for him and appreciation of his work have only deepened, and I offer this essay as a farewell tribute.  Thanks for everything, Don.  You have been a great mentor and a fine model of what every poet should aspire to.
 
Notes
1 - A senior English major in the UM Honors College when I met her, Judy had already won a two Hopwood poetry awards.  After some 30 years in neuroscience, she returned to poetry in 2012 and has subsequently published ten collections, eight of which are haiku accompanied by her photographs.  See JudithLauter.com and Judith-Lauter.amazon.com.
 
2 - See https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Hall/4-17-07/Hall-Donald_06_on-elegy_Discussion_04-17-07.mp3
 __________________________________


My Hardwood History
__________________________________

After my wife and poetry, the greatest passion of life has been pickup basketball. Although I didn’t start playing the game until I was nearly 30, my fever for it has burned for 50 years.  And yet in grade school, high school and undergrad college years, I barely touched a basketball.  But after finishing my MA at Michigan, I got my first teaching job at the University of Arizona, was married there in the historic neocolonial Pima Country courthouse, and almost immediately developed a passion for basketball, first as a fan of the UA Wildcats and then as a pickup player.  From that time on, the game has had an allure for me that no other sport came close to.[1]  For me, there’s an almost metaphysical aura about it that in some ways resembles poetry, as I put it in the poem “Pickup Basketball Philosophy” (below).

Arizona (1966-1971)
In ‘66 UA had about 10,000 students, a slightly seedy campus, and a basketball team that regularly took a drubbing in ancient Bear Down gym.  But on one unforgettable November night, I saw scrawny, white, shooting guard Mickey Foster and the lightning-fast, black, point-guard Roland Stamps give the mighty University of Houston (then the number-two team in the nation) and future NBA star Elvin Hays all they could handle— before some 4,000 ecstatic fans— before losing 81-76. 
      Not long after the Houston game, I saw something else in Bear Down that will stay with me forever.  It happened a few weeks after Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the gold and bronze medalists in the men's 200-meter race at the Mexico City Olympics stood on the winner’s platform to accept their medals— and raised their gloved fists above their heads in the Black Power salute, both as a protest of the war in Vietnam and the racism back at home in the USA.[2]
     During the National Anthem at the start of the game against lily-white BYU squad, Stamps and all the other Black players on the home team stood, heads bowed, and arms raised in the same fist-salute, a la Mexico City.  Boos instantly welled up from the crowd.  Somebody a few rows below me shouted: “Throw ‘em out!” A frat boy to my left screamed: “Kick ‘em off the team!”  Muffled obscenities were detectable all around. 
     So I raised my arm.  Behind me, came snorts of “Nigger Lover!” and “Commie!”  An old couple on my right scowled at me like I was child molester.  Although I could see some African American arms making the same gesture I did, I’m not sure if any other white people in the crowd joined in my salute— though I hope they did.  I kept my arm up until the fading notes of “and the home of the brave.”  Though I didn’t get into a single pick up game during these years at UA, watching the Wildcats play with such heart (and political conviction) lit the fuse of my hardwood fires.

Missouri (1971-1985)
Our next stop was grad school at Washington University in Saint Louis— me to study 19th century British lit, and my wife Judy to (ultimately) pursue a doctorate in neuroscience. After a semester of swimming in the novels by Jane Austen, the Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot(aka Mary Ann Evans), Thomas Hardy, and Henry James; and the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and Browning.  After a seminar one afternoon a classmate from Mountain Home Arkansas, suggested that we go “shoot some hoops.” 
     And so began my first decade of pickup ball.  In the Wash U gym, where the competition often included both street kids from the highly segregated North St. Louis and NFL players from the (then) St. Louis Cardinals. From the first, there was strong tension between the two groups, and it routinely sparked a lot of trash talk.  So predictably one day a Cardinal running back slammed his elbow into the face of a boy who said one word too many, leaving him sobbing on his knees as blood gushed from his mouth and nose.
     Result: both the NFL and the street kids banned from the gym.  Pickup ball continued for me, though, at the main campus gym, a small court in the Med Center at the east end of Forest Park, and a few years later at a downtown YMCA which I frequented while working in City Hall (as a mayor’s aid).  A black police sergeant, mid forties and built like a tank, once threatened to “put me down” if I fouled him hard again.  I believed him— but we soon became pretty good friends, and I thought St Lou was lucky to have this man as a cop.
    The YMCA game also included the first player I knew for sure was mentally unstable.  He was a 6’4” late twenties, black, with terrific skills who might have played big-time college ball if he hadn’t been unhinged.  Barely brush him, and he would stop the game, and get in your face, silently staring at you for several seconds before saying: One mo’ and you dead, muthafucka.  He was eventually banned from the building. Was his hair-trigger rage induced by the brutality of St. Louis racist culture.  How could it not have been?

Arizona Again (1985-1991)
We were ecstatic to return to Tucson and the amazing Sonoran Desert. This time Judy had a government grant for neuroscience research; and I, after a short stint at NARTC (the Native American Research and Training Center) became the Assistant Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences.  We were in our late thirties, living in a house on three-acres in the beautiful Rincon Valley 25 miles east of the city, and driving a white Celica convertible in the bright, dry desert air.  Seventh Heaven.
     Then all hell broke loose in the form of the Rocking K rezoning plan for a huge housing/resort/golf course/commercial project in the valley— our back yard.  So I turned NIMBY and led the opposition to this wet-dream sprawl fest.  It was a full-time second job in a war that lasted five years

*     *     *
One morning as I walked into my office in the historic Douglass Building, my secretary Jennifer gave me an arched an eyebrow and a fake cough as I passed by her desk.
     What? I said.  With a big grin, she said: You been ‘tooned!  She handed over a copy of the Arizona Daily Star opened to the editorial page.  There it was: a “Fitz” cartoon.  It was unmistakably me— the Roman nose, weird, the wavy hair, full beard, and hound-dog ears.   My cartoon self stood in a scene labeled BERLIN WEST, at the head of a protestors waving signs and throwing stones at a wall of giant signs reading: “Estes[Diamond’s partner] and Diamond welcome you to RINCON VALLEY.”  At the bottom of each sign is: $ $ $ $ $ $ $.  My t-shirt reads SAVE RINCON VALLEY.  I carry a sign with the word SPRAWL crossed over with the no-sign.  Mouth wide open— as if I’m ready to bite someone (which I was). My thought balloon says ICH BIN EIN SAGUARO!! 
     Oh, yeah, Jennifer crooned, you been ‘tooned good! Soon the rest of the office gathered around to rib me.  Trying to take it with good humor, I was actually pretty irritated.  My discomfort derived from the cartoon’s motif: Me as JFK, confronting a ‘Berlin Wall’ of developer greed.   Jesus, I thought, I’ll never live this down.
     In other words, I hadn’t yet outgrown the Kennedy mystique, so it felt sacrilegious to be compared to the martyred president.  The cartoon appeared only a year after the Berlin wall had fallen, and the sight of people hacking away at the rubble of the Evil Empire’s infamous symbol was still fresh. It all happened so suddenly, so painlessly— no tanks in the streets, no massacres in the public square. Germany was reunited, without a shot being fired. Leonard Bernstein led a huge chorus belting out Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on Christmas Day, 1989. Russian cellist Rostropovich triumphantly played Bach below the crumbling Wall. So if the Berlin Wall could topple, anything was possible, right?  But the Rocking K “wall” was still going up, brick by relentless brick, at the behest of a real estate speculator appropriately named Don Diamond. Unfortunately cartoon guy didn’t topple that wall. [3}   Still, seeing that satiric facsimile of myself was a proud moment— but not the proudest in Arizona. Nor was the day when craven Republican County Commissioner Ed Moore (who accused me of having ties to the Mafia) caved in, switched his vote, and Rocking K was (temporarily) withdrawn. Or the time I was cheered and Diamond’s minion was booed at a town hall meeting.  Or the day when anti-Rocking K editorials ran in both Tucson newspapers.  Or when strangers stopped me on the street or in a grocery store to thank me for telling the suits where to go. Or the day we delivered 25,000 signatures on a petition to put Rocking K to the ballot, where the polls said it would be defeated in a landslide. 
     Those were all good days— but none of them was the peak for me.  There were actually two such moments, and they both occurred in a dirty old gym with a leaky roof.

*     *     *
I had joined a pickup basketball game of faculty and staff within days of our return to Tucson— played in old Bear Down gym. [4]  Once in a while, Steve Kerr of the Wildcats (and later of the Chicago Bulls in the Michael Jordan era and later still as the coach of the Golden State Warriors) would wander in and join us for a game or two.  Of course, he only played at about half of his ability, but it was a thrill to have him among us. When the game ended he would say goodbye with a reminder that we must never tell his coach (Lute Olson) that he’d been there.  Why risk even a minor injury to play with gym rats?  Love of the game.
     After our pickup games, a few guys might stay a while to play “21” or “Bucket.” [5]  It can also be a thrill at times, as it was on the day Jeff and Carlos and I squared off.  They are both over six feet tall, in their early twenties, and have played some college ball.  They got game.  At 5-9 and forty-five years old, I have very little.  So what am I doing competing against these young bucks?  Just barely hanging on, that’s what. 
     At first, they concentrate on each other and pretty much ignore me.  On a terrific running hook, followed by two of three at the line, Jeff gets to 17, with Carlos at 15.  I’ve have 9.  Carlos has the ball, gives Jeff a head fake, blows by him, goes sailing over me for a finger roll, makes his first two free throws to lead at 20.  One more and he wins— but his last shot rims out and so he’s back to 15.
     I snag the rebound, and with Jeff and Carlos jockeying for position to rebound the shot that they’re sure I’ll miss, I put up a short running floater that rattles in.  This gives me a rush of adrenalin that takes ten years off my age— so for the next five minutes I’m red hot.  Suddenly, I’ve got 19 points, putting me one bucket away from a victory. 
     Jeff and Carlos double-team me now, and I can barely keep them from stealing the ball.  Retreating to the half court line, I weave left, right, back, do a crossover dribble that leaves Carlos momentarily behind me, and drive to the right baseline about 12 feet from the bucket.  Both guys yell: KEN-E-WAH!  I bob low, head-fake right, spulling Jeff a step away, head fake left, drawing Carlos up past my hip--\and in the little bubble of space that these moves create, I pull back for an eight-foot fade-away jumper which swishes in.  21.  I win!  Hooh-ah!” I bellow.
     Jeff collapses to the floor on his back, laughing like mad, kicking his legs in the air.  Carlos stalks away, hands on hips, mumbling: No-Fucking-Way. Adrenaline fading, I approach my vanquished foes, pull Jeff to his feet, chest bump Carlos, and say:  Thanks for letting the old guy win one, fellas. No, man, says Jeff, high-fiving me.  That was my best D.  Carlos adds with a grin, You got game, Viejo.
     A proud moment (even if there were white lies involved).  Nothing in the Rocking K battle came close.  Rocking K was a civic duty— this was for joy, life, and the poetry of the net.

OKLAHOMA (1991-2001)
In the Sooner state, we again lived on a three-acre property a 20-minute drive from the OU campus where the student gym was a spanking new, bright, clean, state-of-the-art facility—a great relief after Bear Down.  Above the four basketball courts, a track ran around the floor near the walls, one of which was comprised of floor-to -ceiling windows, revealing sunlight and sky and making time spent there even more exuberant.  Pickup ball in that ambiance was amazing.
     For some reason, however, the game here was only two days per week rather than three like UA.  The upside was that on those Tuesdays and Thursdays, the faculty had few classes scheduled in the afternoons, so our games often went on for two or three hours.  The time flew by like shot— as we made shots, missed shots, made shots, missed shots.  Totally absorbing.  Facsimile immortality.
     I met another real pyscho in this game— in his early 20s, 6-4, blazing black eyes.  Very lean and pale, with no grace at all, but a nose for the ball in rebounding. In fights in nearly every game, including one where he was throwing fists at two guys at once.  Eventually banned from the gym but not before he took a swing at me for something or other, but stopped with a dazed look on his face when and I told him if he did it again he’d be in jail tomorrow.  I saw him one other time coming out of a restaurant with his two-year old kid.  He immediately started tossing the child in the air like a basketball as he strolled along the sidewalk.  Visualizing the youngster lying on the cement with a broken skull, I yelled at this ‘dad’ to stop.  He laughed and kept tossing as he headed for the parking lot.  We require a license to drive a car, but not to have a child?  I felt very sorry for this man, this parent— but sorrier for the kid.

TEXAS (2001-2022)
 We relocated to Texas— only a couple of days after a horrific January ice storm coated the roads in a two-inch coat of shining lethality.  As we grunted a U-Haul down I-35, praying that no black-ice patch would flip us into a ditch, the trees along the roadway were so splintered they looked like they had been struck by artillery shells.  So we spent the first night in our new home (without heat or lights) listening to ice-loaded pine tree branches crashing down outside, fingers crossed that they wouldn’t open a hole in the roof. Welcome to the Lone Star State. 
    At Stephen F Austin State University in the small East Texas town of Nacogdoches, three days a week around noon they saunter into the gym, a light in their eyes that wives, girlfriends, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers may have never have seen—a calm fervor, free of all but the body’s exuberant flow across gravity, time, and aging, a species-old joy. 
     They come as themselves; but the minute they step onto the court, they shed that identity like a snake sheds old skin.  Here, they are only players in the swirl of the game— the sharp slap of ball on the floor, shouts, claps, hoots, groans, grins, the squeak of shoes, the sweet kiss off the glass, the soft swish, the sweat, the sprained ankle, jammed thumb, sore ribs, a three-ball, a back-door play, take it to the hoop, the long looping outlet pass and pull up for a J and… count it!  Laughs erupt constantly, curses less frequently, some shoving, a momentary glare, a pat on the shoulder and: My bad.
One game, two, some players heading home or back to work, where that light in their eyes goes out.  Some players stay for just one more-- reaching for a ring they know they’ll never grasp. When court empties, echoing and ghostly, the real world begins.
     We call ourselves the Noon Ball Association and get t-shirts labeled NBA.  There are about 50 of us on the email list— faculty, staff, men from around town, a few students, sometimes a few of the football coaches (who raise the quality of play considerably) and very rarely one or two players from the women’s basketball team. With all names changed for privacy, the NBA roll call includes:

Larry - Longtime Chairman of Physics, our court-general and arbiter of rules and disputes. Bad knees, seriously overweight, he could still snap off a 10-foot J and a nice soft hook. More and more though, he  would sit in a chair by the court, watching the younger men play.  After suffering a major Covid-19 case that could have killed him, he now uses a cane to get around and rarely shows up at the court. 

Ed - Appliance repairs, lean as a yellow pine, a mean fall-away baseline J.  Grinning he says: Even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then.  He fixed our washing machine and refrigerator but wants to sell his business.  His face is a map of granite Texan stoicism.  Dropped out of the game after eight years or so.

Ron - Has a true six-pack and a smile that would melt butter, Mr. Hustle, a deep three-ball, and a sneaky finger roll.  Just off his second divorce, does financials for someone who owns six companies, including one that makes Mustang Cobras with 700 hp engines.  Self-described as a ‘Liberal Catholic,’ Rick has a son attending in OU and visits him so often that he bought an apartment in Norman and plays pickup ball at the campus gym where I played when we were Okies. A genuinely nice guy, Rick plays HORSE with me now that I’m out of the game, never letting up on the old man for a second— and I’m grateful for that.  In spite of beating almost every other NBA guy now and then, my win-loss record with Ron is god-awful.

Antonio - From Social Services, a ton of talent but a ball-hog (a not infrequent combo among pickup dudes), with a simmering temper behind his guapo Hispanic face.  Heavily muscled, a nice deep three shooter, but streaky. Likes soccer and occasionally skips our game for it. Says his younger brother resents anything good that happens to him. (I’d like to meet the hermano some day.) Says my Spanish is pretty good. Yes, in pronunciation, but my vocabulary is small, something I plan to work on but never do.

Chuck - Nordic stock, professor of forestry, went to Michigan State and often wears Spartan sports gear. His shots have a wicked curveball spin making them extra-difficult, but they still count.  He consults with Netherland’s government on forest-fire management. There’s something about Chuck I can’t quite put a finger on, something held deeply in reserve, but we swap stories about how much we like Amsterdam and Dutch culture. We also share an affection for Flagstaff, AZ, where I once thought I might retire and came close on a listing of an off-the-grid house.  But when we drove out to look at it, we couldn’t find it after an hour of searching on the road where it was supposed to be located.  Sad and a little unnerving.

Steve and Walt – Brothers in their late 30s both working in their dad’s independent insurance office and so they dread returning to work late.  They’re both little balls of muscle imbued with a kind of mild innocence. For several years the younger one flew his own single-engine plane when not out riding in motocross competitions; the older brother plays industrial-league baseball when not at noon-ball with us.  On the day that I bought a supplemental health insurance policy from them, Walt’s desk was an ungodly mess of papers, and the floor looked as if it hadn’t been swept in years.  They both dropped out of the game recently.  No one knew why.  It happens.
 
Van - Black, handsome, 35, too good for all but our best players to defend, quick hands and feet, a real athlete who was once was a trainer for the Cleveland Cavs and a semi-pro boxer. He has anger-management issues that makes some of us hate playing with him.  Almost punched me out once over nothing.  When I tried to calm him down by putting a hand on his shoulder, he recoiled as if he’d been shot, hissing: Get your hands off me!  His eyes added: White Man.  My fear was laced with sadness.  He dropped out too and moved to Dallas.
 
Marvin - Irascible, has two gifted athletic sons Bob and Marty who are both serene, gifted, balletic players, but intense and very hard-chargers.  Marty went to Oxford on as a Rhodes Scholar, and his team there won a league championship.  Bob at cruising speed is faster than most of us full out.  My first sight of him was when he took a fall-away jumper in the corner baseline with two men in his face—nothing but net.  It was rumored that he was offered basketball scholarship but wasn’t up for it. (I later learned this was a myth.) Their hyper-religious father was in his mid fifties, had started for Panola College in Carthage TX, and still had the fastest first step on our court.  He was wired too tight—once giving me a vicious elbow in the chest when I guarded him too well for him to drive around me.  I hit the floor flat on my back and couldn’t breathe for a minute.  He never apologized— just acted like it never happened.  He badly tore a hamstring in one game and was never the same, an ex-player for several years now.
 
Frank – The tallest guy on our court, very thin but wiry strong, with long arms.  At the drop of a hat, he’ll talk Jesus at you for ten minutes straight, his emails sprinkled with “the will of the Lord.” Can’t jump an inch, but plays with intensity and joy.  A sales rep at an electrical supply company, he covers three states by car several days a week. Has worked at the same company for 45 years and has no plans to retire.
 
Dan – Even older than I am, an awkward shooter, but great on D.  In high school, he would totally shut down opponents’ top scorers.  Soft-spoken, wry, super fit for his age, he’s a freelance TV repairman and installer of satellite dishes, up on roofs in sun, rain, or snow.  Has killer stories to tell about that job.  Middle-aged women staring into their coffee cups when he arrives, ready to hop into bed with him, one woman found passed out naked on the floor.  (He put her in bed and fixed her TV.) Says liberals are kooks  but knows Trump is nuts.  Nurses his Alzheimer’s mother and his chronically ill wife.  Once got into a dust-up with a player who’s a local MD who has several clinics in nearby towns— told him he’d beat the holy shit out of him if he didn’t back off.  The doc backed off.
 
Statler – A kinesiology prof and our oldest, shortest player at 5-5, in this game for 40 years, semi-blind from cataracts but can still hit the open man and drill a short J if left open (which we often let him be).  Offered a basketball scholarship to TCU, he joined the Marines instead and went to the Korean war where hw lugged around a Browning Automatic Rifle (a weapon four feet long and weighing almost 20 lbs.) though he weighed only 120 lbs.  One day, mid-game, he slowly wandered off the court, not knowing where he was. I thought: Could’ve been me.  (Almost was, later.) He died in a nursing home a few years later, unable to recognize anyone but his wife.
 
Denzel - A DB coach for the SFA football team, his ebony African face as beautiful as a woman’s.  Thick-muscled, very quick running backwards on D, his shooting spotty.  If he doesn’t work out every day, he says he gains weight.  Never saw him even close to a fight with a white guy, but when a bro talked trash at him his eyes turned a steel-cold.  Got a job 200 miles from here, but didn’t move there
because a brother-in-law here had cancer and needed help, so Denzel commuted for a couple of years.  Hard not to love someone like that.
 
Norris – A millionaire, religious real-estate developer, very right-wing--Obama’s a Commie. Tea Party rally tonight! Come with me. After one tough game, he passed out and started turning blue.  Quadruple bypass.  Six months later he’s back out on the court, still excellent but easily winded.  He’s in his late 50s.  I envy the bastard— but not for his money.  We play HORSE now and then, and I enjoy his goofy grin and affable nature.
 
Harold – A music professor and trumpet player, directs a student jazz band that I used to love, but lately it hurts my aging ears. He gave up doing small-band gigs on the road: lotta sweat, not much bread. Plays hard, has good moves, strength, and game smarts, but no grace and no sweet-spot shots.  Once I set a hard but clean pick on him, nearly cracking a rib.  Did he ever forgive me?  Maybe.  He lived in our neighborhood for years but moved to an up-scale house on acreage after becoming chair of the Music School and then Dean of Liberal Arts.
 
Bart - Tall, lanky, health-food aficionado, leaps like Spider Man, fastest guy in our game.  Once a big-rig truck driver for his own company of six rigs, once a goat/chicken farmer ‘til the barn burned down and raccoons ate the chickens. He fasts a couple of days each month.  A computer tech now but has a hard time keeping a job because he won’t take shit off nobody. I hope he’s not headed for some major blow-up. I’d call him a conspiracy nut, except that he believes in the same conspiracies that I do—the rich run the world, lots of pro-sports is rigged in various ways, etc.
 
Ella - about 5-2 and 100 lbs.  Got game, in great shape, terrific passer, super quick, her J only fair but can take it to the hole.  She was a café-au-lait black girl, curvaceous and carefree, a gorgeous smile, one of eight kids, the first in her family to go to college. She was going for a PhD in kinesiology.  After becoming pregnant, she still played the game until the 8th month.  She and her child died in a head-on collision near Dallas when her daughter was just short of her second birthday.
 
Chris and Bud - short, stocky executives in a call-service company with centers in town and in India.  In their early fifties, so-so players.  Chris was a surly, mean, loudmouth, Bud goofy and grinning on the court and off.  Chris eventually left the company, sued Bud, lost, and died of cancer not long after. Bud got cancer too, was successfully treated with chemo but stopped playing ball, and built the business into a titanic success.
 
Perry - Chairman of the Ag Department, tall, lean, semi-bald, with definite Texas look and a slow drawl.  Has a nice 12-foot bank shot near the baseline.  The first sign of his Parkinson’s was a tremor in one hand; now he has a surgical implant to control seizures, and we played HORSE for several years.  I won most of the time, except when he got hot on his “granny shot” (two-handed, underhand free throws)— which to rub it in he sometimes made from 3-point range.  Eventually got Parkinson’s and an implant to stop seizures, but for a while still came for HORSE. Haven’t seen him on court now for several years.
 
Jacob - The Chairman of the Kinesiology Department, from Brooklyn and his accent still shows it.  An inch shorter than me, but super-fit and intense.  We got off to a bad start when I fouled him (but not badly) as he went for a layup.  He instantly turned on me with a cold fury, whispering: Do that again and I’ll fuck you up bad.  I’m a tae kwon do black belt.  No shit, I thought— and replied that if he threatened me again he’d be in front of a magistrate the next day on formal charges.  Our antagonism healed over when I told him he was the best of the candidates vying to become the new university provost.  No more threats.  Amazing what flattery can do.  His wife was a gifted choreographer and very amiable person, but died of cancer shortly after they retired to Hawaii.  Ain’t life grand?
 
Chase - Part of the gym staff, in charge of the equipment room.  Maybe 25, long dark hair usually in a pigtail, full beard, stocky, very strong, with exceptional dribbling skills and very deep threes. Chase is my main HORSE opponent now, and even though he can only play on Fridays, he stays at it until I’m worn out.  We trade wins pretty evenly, but that won’t last much longer. He can hit half-court shots pretty regularly— and then I just take a letter.
      Just married when we first met three years ago, with his bride’s help he was building them a house.  Just before the pandemic closed the gym, they had a daughter.  A year or so later the gym re-opened, and Chase is divorced, still friends with his ex, and says he’s happier than he’s ever been.  Is that true?  I can’t tell.  He certainly possesses of one of the most benign temperaments I’ve ever witnessed.  He’s in a rock band (with Chase on drums) and they do (non-paying) gigs on weekends as far away as Shreveport.
      Probably my greatest euphoria on any hardwood happened in a HORSE game with Chase.  We were on our fifth or sixth game, bone tired, and just goofing around when I tried what I later came to call my ‘Super Shot.’  With my back to the basket near the free throw line, I lift a blind one-hander over my shoulder.  Swish.  Not again in a hundred years, Chase snorts.  I repeat the shot.  Swish.  We’re both
agog, but he can’t resist a final taunt: Not again in a million years.  I repeat.  Swish.  We fall on the court on our backs, laughing uncontrollably.  That laughter bonded us for life.
 
*     *     *
Many other players have drifted in and out of the game over the years, some with great skill, almost all with a little, most of their names and faces now lost to me.  We all sought something indefinable but very real in the game— and almost found it.
     Looking back over this account, I realize I’ve over-emphasized the macho rancor of the game.  It’s there, of course, men being men.  (It’s not supposed to be a contact sport, but it definitely is.)   But as I’ve known it, the dominant note on the hardwood is not conflict but the opposite—a fraternal feeling, hunger for companionship in the democracy of the game. 
        In the ‘real’ world of jobs and salaries, of bosses and the bossed, of winning and losing status there’s a constant undertone of cut-throat competition that can be emotionally and spiritually debilitating.  In pickup ball, the competition can be fierce and occasionally violent, but is fundamentally is nominal.  Everybody knows this: It doesn’t matter who wins the damn game.  No bets going down in Vegas. No contracts being negotiated.  No product endorsements on the line.  No female fans to impress (hopefully all the way to bed.)
        You’re not there for any of that— you’re there for existential freedom.  Which is to say just for the hoops.

NOTES

[1] I had previously dabbled in baseball, football, tennis, and squash, but was mediocre at them and played without joy or passion.
 
[2]  In this era, the riots in Detroit and Watts were fresh memories and the visiting speakers on campus included Henry Kissinger, Robert Kennedy, , and comedian Dick Gregory, who spoke about Black Power.  Martin Luther King had recently given a speech in which he lamented that the United States had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” A year later he was assassinated, and Barry Goldwater was awarded an honorary degree from UA.

[3] We did force Diamond to cut the size of his sprawl fest in half, but it was still sprawl, still an enviro-crime.
 
[4]  By that time, Bear Down was more than half a century old, had long since been replaced by upscale McKale Center as the home to the Wildcats, and the facility’s maintenance had been badly neglected. Rain from a leaky roof had warped some of the hardwood floor, and you could see little patches of sky up in the girders. On hot summer days, the facility’s swamp coolers couldn’t cope with the huge, dimly lit interior, and the locker room in basement was dank and cramped— but it was Bear Down.  As in the fight song: “Bear down, Ari-zon-a! Bear down U of A!”  The place had tradition, decades of sweat, and emotion in its very fiber— but none of the corporate feel of McKale, with its seating for 15,000, a flashy scoreboard, video replay, and wall-to-wall electronic advertising.  Bear Down was just a hang-out for gym rats, and a lot of character. Both Mo and Stew Udall had played there once upon a time, before moving on to bigger American games.
 
[5] A game where each basket counts as two points, and after making a shot you get up to three free throws if you make them, at one point each.  If you go over 21, you are “busted” back to 15.

__________________

My Greatest Challenge
 
In the Company of Animals – Poetry & Prose on the Path to a Peaceable Kingdom (in progress) may be the most exciting and demanding writing challenge of my life.  Combining some older poems, 50 new ones (so far), and a few prose pieces, it seems to grow more complicated and challenging almost by the day.  It has become an obsession.  When I started the book a few years ago, I thought it would if not easy to complete at least without serious emotional turmoil.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.     
     Here is an excerpt from the Introduction:
 
            Part memoir, part polemic, with memories from childhood to my late 70s, this book mounts an
            attack the depravity of homocentric consciousness.  The obscenely cruel treatment of animals
            by humans   has gone on for millennia, and consequently seems normal to most people (sadly,
            many poets).  This must end— and will— perhaps much sooner than anyone now expects.
 
Does this sound radical, or even fanatical?  That depends on your quotient of empathy for animals.  Bottom line: there’s a slow but immense revolution in human compassion currently under way, something long scorned and repressed, but which I believe is unstoppable. [1]  In the Company of Animals is my contribution to this revolution, and an attempt to hasten its success. 
    The revolution’s best battle cry comes from G.B. Shaw, who once observed: “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends.”   Is there really any room for argument with that?  If you think so (and millions around the globe still do, of course) I won’t try to convince you otherwise here.  Instead, I will end with a poem based on a childhood memory that has never stopped reverberating in my mind.
 
                                                                                        Cows
                                                                                         for Joaquin Phoenix
                                                                           ________________________
                                                                   
                                                                 I love cows… they’re delicious.  - Donald J. Trump
 
                                                         A small herd of Hereford cows grazed on the hillside
                                                                across from the trickling creek behind our house. 
 
                                                               I heard their low, slow calls on warm summer evenings
                                                               just as the Missouri sun was going down.
 
                                                               I had to stop playing in the backyard then and go inside
                                                               where Mother was frying up our dinner of hamburgers— 
 
                                                               and I loved them, gobbled them down like a starving wolf
                                                               without thinking a minute about those cows, or their
 
                                                               unearthly bovine vespers.  They were singing something. 
                                                               It took me a lifetime to learn the words of that song.


 _______________
1. Evidence of this cultural-spiritual transformation is abundant, if you know where to look— and there’s no better place to start than PETA.com and Animal Kind: Remarkable Discoveries about Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion (Simon & Schuster 2020) by Ingrid Newkirk and Gene Stone.  Other resources include: the World Wildlife Fund; Mercy for Animals (whose mission is to end factory farming); The Food Revolution Network, a movement sponsoring a major annual conference for a decade; and LIVEKINDLY, which publishes an e-newsletter and is supported by a collective of plant-based food companies.

Copyright Ken Lauter 2021