(Host)
Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea is now touring Vermont, giving
readings at local libraries throughout the state. Commentator Tom
Slayton – long time journalist and observer of all things Vermont –
attended a recent reading by the poet at the Vermont State House in
Montpelier.
(Slayton) The best Vermont poetry speaks with a
characteristic voice that is clear, crisp, and as invigorating as a
sunny April morning. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes plain, it bridges many
individual styles, but can be heard in poets as different as Robert
Frost, Galway Kinnell, Ruth Stone and David Budbill.
Most
recently, that open, direct voice can be heard in the work of the
current Vermont Poet Laureate, Sydney Lea of Newbury, who gave a reading
at the State House earlier this month, to open Montpelier’s celebration
of National Poetry Month.
Lea’s
poetry is almost conversational in tone, and very accessible: you don’t
have to struggle or ponder to get the meaning of his words. But that
directness can be misleading, because his poems are also very subtle,
often slyly humorous, and, sometimes surprising. They work on more than
just their explicit, surface level of meaning. Like any good Vermonter,
Lea is adept at saying things without saying them, so his poems
resonate in your mind long after you’ve heard them or read them.
In
his poem, "To A Young Father," for example, Sydney Lea urges a younger
man to take the time to absorb the beauty of a nearby river in fall by
crossing a one-lane iron bridge and taking in the reflection, of "the
back of the furniture mill/ in upside down detail on the river…":
But
then the poet admits that he’s never taken his own advice. He begins to
run through the details of a life as busy as anyone’s – children to
raise, a lawn to tend, bills and the other day-to-day concerns that
assail us all. His thoughts of the river’s beauty, glimpsed in brief
moments through his busy years, recur to him, interspersed with memories
of his children’s lives, and his own. And he finally says, with a
backward glance, that even in those brief glimpses, the river "must have
been lovely, all these years."
At
his State House reading, Lea held his audience of about 100 quietly
spellbound as each poem, a slice of a deeply felt inner life, plainly
stated in all its beautiful complexity, unfolded.
The
final poem was entitled, "I was Thinking of Beauty," which is, of
course, a major part of every poet’s job. It somehow managed to combine
Lea’s own affection for the music of Charles Mingus, with a
long-smoldering mental argument that the poet had with an overbearing,
doctrine-bound professor, along with a neighbor’s precise description of
cedar waxwings, John Keats’ famous one-liner: "beauty is Truth; truth
Beauty," Maori tattoos, Jamaican steel-drum band music, and more – all
of which led Sydney Lea to his wonderful conclusion: that beauty eludes
all our definitions and simply exists, eternally: :I was thinking,: he
says, " that it never had gone."
And
so, without stating it directly, the poet makes us think about beauty:
as an idea, as a memory, and, in this case, as a lovely poem by the poet
himself: Vermont’s Poet laureate, Sydney Lea.
I
Was Thinking of Beauty
— for Gregory Wolfe
I’ve surrendered myself to Mingus’s Tijuana Moods
on my obsolete record machine, sitting quiet as I sat last
night.
I was thinking of beauty then, how it’s faced grief since
the day
that somebody named it. Plato; Aquinas; the grim rock
tablets
that were handed down to Moses by Yahweh, with His famous
stricture
on the graven image. Last evening, I was there when some
noted professor
in a campus town to southward addressed what he called,
precisely,
The Issue of Beauty. Here was a person who seemed to
believe
his learned jargon might help the poor because his lecture
would help to end the exploitations of capitalism –
which pays his wage at the ivied college through which he
leads
the impressionable young, soon to be managers, brokers,
bankers.
He was hard above all on poems, though after a brief
appearance
poetry seemed to vanish. It was gone before I knew it.
The professor quoted, Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, then
chuckled.
He explained that such a claim led to loathsome politics.
I’m afraid he lost me. Outside, the incandescent snow
of February sifted through the quad’s tall elm trees,
hypnotic. Tonight as I sit alone and listen, the trumpet
on Tijuana Gift Shop lurches my heart with its syncopations.
That’s the rare Clarence Shaw, who vanished one day, though
Mingus heard
he was teaching hypnosis somewhere. But back again to last
evening:
I got thinking of Keats composing and coughing, of Abby
Lincoln,
of Lorrain and Petrarch, of Callas and Isaac Stern. I was
lost
in memory and delight, terms without doubt nostalgic.
I summoned a dead logger friend’s description of cedar
waxwings
on the bright mountain ash outside his door come middle
autumn.
I remembered how Earl at ninety had called those verdigris
birds
well groomed little
folks. Which wasn’t eloquent, no,
but passion showed in the way Earl waved his work-worn hands
as he thought of beauty, which, according to our guest,
was opiate. Perhaps. And yet I went on for no reason
to consider Maori tattoos: elaborate and splendid,
Jamaicans shaping Big Oil’s rusty abandoned barrels
to play on with makeshift mallets, toxic junk turning
tuneful.
The poor you have
always with you, said an even more famous speaker,
supreme narcotic dealer no doubt in our speaker’s eyes –
eyes that must never once have paused to behold a bird,
ears that deafened themselves to the song of that bird or
any.
Beauty’s a drug, he insisted, from which we must wean the
poor,
indeed must wean ourselves. But I was thinking of beauty
as something that will return — here’s Curtis Porter’s
sweet horn –
outlasting our disputations. I was thinking it never had gone.
To
a Young Father
This
riverbend must have always been lovely.
Take
the one-lane iron bridge shortcut across
the
town’s west end and look downstream
to
where the water backs up by the falls.
Boys
once fished there with butterball bait
because
the creamery churned by hydro
and
the trout were so rich, says my ancient neighbor,
they
tasted like heaven, but better. Try to
stop
on the bridge if no one’s coming
to
see the back of the furniture mill
in
upside-down detail on the river,
assuming
the day is clear and still.
I’ve
lived here and driven this road forever.
Strange
therefore that I’ve never taken
the
same advice I’m offering you.
I’ve
lived here, but I’ve too often been racing
to
get to work or else back home
to my
wife and our younger school-age children,
the
fifth and last of whom will be headed
away
to college starting this autumn.
I
hope I paid enough attention
to
her and the others, in spite of the lawn,
the
plowing, the bills, the urgent concerns
of
career and upkeep. Soon she’ll be gone.
Try
to stop on the bridge in fall:
that
is, when hardwood trees by the river
drop
carmine and amber onto the surface;
or in spring, when the foliage has gotten
no bigger
than
any newborn infant’s ear
such
that the light from sky to stream
makes
the world, as I’ve said — or at
least this corner —
complete,
in fact double. I’d never have dreamed
a
household entirely empty of children.
It’ll
be the first time in some decades,
which
may mean depression, and if so indifference
to
the river’s reflections, to leaves and shades,
but
more likely — like you, if you shrug off my
counsel
or
even take it -- it’ll be through tears
that
I witness each of these things, so lovely.
They
must have been lovely all these years.
Note: Poems printed on this page appear courtesy of Sydney Lea.