by Anthony
old at twenty-three, alone,
thin overcoat flapping.
How closely the past shadows us.
In a hospital a mile or so from that pond
I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes,
reach out across forty years to touch once more
that pond’s cool surface,
and it is your cool skin I’m touching;
for as on a pond a child’s paper boat
was blown out of reach
by the smallest gust of wind,
so too have you been blown out of reach
by the smallest whisper of death,
and a childhood memory is sharpened,
and the heart burns as that armada burnt,
long, long ago.
(1996)
Paul Bettany (b. 1971) first came to prominence in the film Gangster No. 1 (2000). He has gone on to appear in a wide variety of other films, including A Beautiful Mind (2001), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), Dogville (2003), The Da Vinci Code (2006), Margin Call (2011) and Transcendence (2014).
A Poetry Reading at West Point
WILLIAM MATTHEWS (1942–1997)
TOM MCCARTHY
My wife, who is also a poet, introduced me to this poem. She knows poems and she knows me. Of course it moved me. How could it not? The idea of how people struggle to connect with art also deeply resonates with me. And how the artist struggles to connect with his audience and remain true to . . . well, the truth. Regardless of the side you play for, citizen or artist, the need to reach out, to connect, to feel and to affect is so satisfying and so elusive. The process is awkward, moving, funny, clumsy, desperate and occasionally wondrous. It’s essentially human.
‘Sir, thank you. Sir.’ Straight to my heart.
A Poetry Reading at West Point
I read to the entire plebe class,
in two batches. Twice the hall filled
with bodies dressed alike, each toting
a copy of my book. What would my
shrink say, if I had one, about
such a dream, if it were a dream?
Question and answer time.
‘Sir,’ a cadet yelled from the balcony,
and gave his name and rank, and then,
closing his parentheses, yelled
‘Sir’ again. ‘Why do your poems give
me a headache when I try
to understand them?’ he asked. ‘Do
you want that?’ I have a gift for
gentle jokes to defuse tension,
but this was not the time to use it.
‘I try to write as well as I can
what it feels like to be human,’
I started, picking my way care
fully, for he and I were, after
all, pained by the same dumb longings.
‘I try to say what I don’t know
how to say, but of course I can’t
get much of it down at all.’
By now I was sweating bullets.
‘I don’t want my poems to be hard,
unless the truth is, if there is
a truth.’ Silence hung in the hall
like a heavy fabric. My own
head ached. ‘Sir,’ he yelled. ‘Thank you. Sir.’
(1997)
The actor, screenwriter and director Tom McCarthy (b. 1966) wrote and directed the films The Station Agent (2003), The Visitor (2007) and Win Win (2011). His other screenplays include Up (2009) and Million Dollar Arm (2014). His numerous acting credits include Meet the Parents (2000), Syriana (2005), Goodnight, and Good Luck (2005) and The Wire (2008).
Bedecked
VICTORIA REDEL (1959– )
BILLY COLLINS
I’m a grown man who reads a lot of poetry, but I cannot recall a single instance of being moved by a poem to sobbing – I mean shoulders shaking, face-in-the-hands sobbing. If a poem begins to show signs that it might have me that way, there’s no time for me to break down emotionally. I’m too busy trying to figure out how the poet is managing to pull it off. But there is one reliable test of a poem’s power to unglue me – all I have to do is read it out loud to a class. After decades of teaching poetry, I can count on one hand the poems that I find impossible to deliver to a room full of students without losing it; Victoria Redel’s ‘Bedecked,’ I have repeatedly discovered, is one of them.
Redel’s poem is a mother’s defence of her young son’s freedom to dress up whichever way he likes – including lots of accessories – as he innocently flouts the conventions of ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ dress. The subject is interesting on its own, but the power of the poem lies in its direct address to its readers, the repeated ‘Tell me’s’, and the escalating determination of the mother to make her point. Judiciously, while she is protecting her son’s freedom of appearance, Redel is also granting the reader his or her freedom of speech. You can tell me whatever you like, the mother allows, whatever ‘you need to tell me’. But then comes the poem’s fierce turn: ‘but keep far away from my son’, with its threatening implication of the reader. But as the poem begins to end, Redel’s joyful display of how beauty’s ‘facets set off prisms’ that ‘spin up everywhere’ as rainbows are cast from the boy’s ‘jeweled body’ is more than enough to convince us that ‘it’s fine – really maybe even a good thing – a boy who’s got some girl to him’. The poem’s timing is perfect; its very last word is where tears are likely to overspill their little banks.
Bedecked
Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy
store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger.
He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star
choker, the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says
sticker earrings look too fake.
Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the glitter that a
boy’s only a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping
off tracks into the tub.
Then tell me it’s fine – really – maybe even a good thing – a boy
who’s got some girl to him,
and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw
in the park.
Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son
who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means –
this way or that – but for the way facets set off prisms and
prisms spin up everywhere
and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows – made every
shining true color.
Now try to tell me – man or woman – your heart was ever once that brave.
(2002)
Billy Collins (b. 1941) has served two terms as US Poet Laureate. His latest collection of poems, his fourteenth, is Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003–13.
The Lanyard
BILLY COLLINS (1941– )
J. J. ABRAMS
I am the most recent poetry fan in the family. My wife, Katie, however, has long been a true lover of the form; she reads poetry every day, even edits volumes of her favourite works. It comes easy to her in a way it never really did to me.
Except once.
Years ago, listening to NPR on my car radio, I heard Billy Collins (at the time our country’s Poet Laureate) recite one of his poems entitled ‘The Lanyard’. It gripped me in a way that poetry never had before. It was funny. It was relatable and profound and as I was driving down Washington Boulevard I had tears in my eyes.
‘The Lanyard’ is about the impossibility of ever paying back the ultimate gift a mother bestows upon a child. I loved it so much I got a copy and gave it to my mom, who loved it as well. Months later, in classic my mom form, she gave me a framed copy of the poem which she had somehow gotten signed by Mr Collins himself.
Katie and I have sin
ce been lucky enough to see Billy Collins perform his work in person. I have come to appreciate and, dare I say, even understand poetry, and now officially consider myself a convert.
This poem will always be one of my favourites. By sharing it with my mother, who has since passed away, I was able to at least acknowledge the fact that I could never repay her for all she did for me. Her getting the framed poem for me was her way of saying I never had to. Loving her was enough.
The Lanyard
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly –
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift – not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
(2005)
J. J. Abrams (b. 1966) is the director of the feature films Mission: Impossible III (2006), Star Trek (2009), Super 8 (2011), which he also wrote, and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). His next film as a director will be Star Wars: Episode VII. Founder and president of Bad Robot Productions, Abrams also produced the films Cloverfield (2008) and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011). His television credits as producer and/or creator include Felicity, Alias, Lost, Fringe, Person of Interest and Revolution.
Regarding the home of one’s childhood, one could:
EMILY ZINNEMANN (1984– )
COLIN FIRTH
Emily Zinnemann graduated from the University of Toronto and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. I heard this poem at a public reading she gave at the University of Michigan in 2009.
I’m reluctant to talk across this poem; I think it says itself perfectly. It offers sparse, beautiful fragments of memory, and then seems simultaneously to take them away. The unpunctuated ending – as if she’s just walked away altogether.
Regarding the Home of One’s Childhood, One Could:
forget the plum tree;
forget its black-skinned plums;
also the weight
of their leaning as they leaned
over starry hedges;
also the hedges,
the dew that turned them starry;
the wet-bellied pups who slunk there
trailing ludicrous pedigrees;
even the eyes
of birds
glittering
in the branches;
even the branches
Colin Firth (b. 1960) won an Academy Award in 2011 for his portrayal of King George VI in The King’s Speech. After coming to prominence as Mr Darcy in a BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1995), he has starred in such films as the Bridget Jones’s Diary series, A Single Man (2009) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011).
For Ruthie Rogers in Venice
CRAIG RAINE (1944– )
RICHARD ROGERS
A month after the sudden death of our son, Bo, we went to Venice on the weekend of what would have been his twenty-eighth birthday. It is a city we love and know well – we had often gone with our children for summer holidays, and in fact we had just been a few months previously with Bo. We also chose Venice as we had no friends there and we craved a quiet time together.
What we were unprepared for was how the sad winter light and wet weather of the city reflected our mood, and how comforting that was to us. The summer San Marco full of joy, where we would sit with our ice creams or Camparis in the Caffè Florian, was now empty, the hot sun replaced by light rain and grey skies, with wooden walkways ready to take people as the waters rose.
Our time was spent only with each other until the afternoon we met our friend Craig Raine, the poet, and his wife, Ann Pasternak Slater. The four of us sought refuge in the Caffè Quadri and over hot chocolate we talked of Venice and of Bo. A few weeks later Craig sent us this poem – a poem that makes me cry.
For Ruthie Rogers in Venice
Shoulders to cry on,
these mooring posts,
trios leaning together,
supporting each other:
in grief and inconsolable.
Mooring posts tapering to blunt black
like a child’s lost crayons
The endless wash
of salt water
See-through, threadbare, worn,
These great fogs like ghosts
in slow flight from some slaughter.
The hoarse cries of fog-horns,
lost in their loss,
with no way back,
and the world gone white
in a single night.
(2012)
Richard Rogers (b. 1933) is the 2007 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate and the recipient of the 1985 RIBA Gold Medal. He was knighted in 1991 and made a life peer in 1996. His practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, is best known for such pioneering buildings as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the headquarters for Lloyd’s of London and Terminal 4 at the Madrid–Barajas Airport. His wife Ruth, to whom the poem is addressed, is the chef and food writer who founded London’s River Café.
Keys to the Doors
ROBIN ROBERTSON (1955– )
MOHSIN HAMID
I don’t go looking for poems. I just find them. (Or they find me.) Like the time some fifteen years ago, sitting in a Manhattan subway car, I looked up and saw, as part of a series called ‘Poetry in Motion’, lines about longing by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a poet from my native city of Lahore, and was struck by a sense of, simultaneously, homesickness and being at home.
Three years ago I found ‘Keys to the Doors’ in a copy of The New York Review of Books, mailed to my house in Lahore, and I cut it out and taped it to my printer. It’s there now, stirring to the beat of my ceiling fan, as I write this.
I was a father then, am doubly so today, with a daughter coming up on five and a son of two; but then I was a newer father, with a daughter just starting to chat. She’d stride into my room while I was novel-writing, and talk to me, and ask me questions, and bring her fantasies into where I sat draped in mine.
And this poem, this poem for me is that.
Keys to the Doors
; for Eilidh
I loved your age of wonder: your third and fourth
and fifth years spent astonished, widening your eyes
at each new trick of the world – and me standing there,
solemnly explaining how it was done. The moon and stars,
rainbows, photographs, gravity, the birds in the air,
the difference between blood and water.
In true life? you would say, looking up
and I would nod, like some broken-hearted sage,
knowing there would be no answers soon
to all the big questions that were left, to cruelty and fear,
to age and grief and death, and no words either.
And you, like me, will sit and shake your head.
In true life? Yes, my sweet, strong daughter, I’m afraid
there is all this as well, and this is it: true life.
(2012)
The novels by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid (b. 1971) are Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007, subsequently turned into a feature film directed by Mira Nair) and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013).
Afterword
NADINE GORDIMER
Pablo Neruda’s line: ‘Whoever discovers who I am will discover who you are.’ I am not a man, neither will be the many women who read and receive the revelations of these poems. But in the lives of the great Neruda and other poets harvested here – whoever you are, man, woman or any other gender – you will discover in yourself matchlessly conveyed the exultation and devastation of human experience. No matter that of the almost a hundred poets chosen by various individuals, only a dozen are women. Neither gender nor the historical era in which the poem was written makes out-of-date the emotions they divulge, even if the vocabulary, ‘thees’ and ‘thous’, is at times archaic. Passion of love and loss, morality of ‘just war,’ the purposeful trajectory of life and its frustrations have been, are, for always.