My Thoughts About The Catcher in the Rye, for what it’s worth

U2 has a song at the end of the Pop album in which Bono sings, “Jesus, Jesus help me. I’m alone in this world, and a f***ed up world it is too.” It is a sentiment that I think pretty much everyone has thought at one point or another, though you might have chosen cleaner language to express it. To me, this line captures the essence of Holden’s predicament, the only difference being that Holden doesn’t know who to ask to help him escape his loneliness. Holden’s quest is a quest for love, the kind that is reciprocated, but he doesn’t know what such a thing looks like.

The root of Holden’s problems is pretty clear: he slept in the garage the night Allie died, and he broke his hand punching the glass. Holden’s angry response to his brother’s death isn’t what strikes me as alarming; what alarms me is the fact that he was alone the entire night, free to break the windows, break his hand and fall asleep, without the encumbrance of a comforting hug or commiserating tears to thwart his rage. He’s alone in the world that night, and given the absence of any figure who might give him comfort, a f---ed up world that is too.

Holden’s grief is the part of him I connect with the most. It is unresolved, displaced, projected and long-lasting, just as genuine grief is. Now everyone needs their alone time to deal with their grief. You have to feel it, you have to let it work its purgative, cathartic power on you, or else it never ebbs. I remember vividly the walk I went on the morning my father died. I think I was supposed to go to the neighbor’s house, and I have no idea where any of my four siblings went. I was eleven years old, it was a little after 7:00 and raining. Rick Waters was out walking his dog, and didn’t believe me when I told him my father had died. I hated him even more in that moment. I turned and went to St. Bernard’s Church, where I was an altar boy, and talked to Father Dan for a long time. I don’t remember what he said, but I knew he could give me what I needed to get through that morning.

For months, even years afterward, I used to find a little spot in the basement where I could be alone and cry, for what I’m not exactly sure. Sometimes my mother would come and sit with me, most times she wouldn’t, but I had always the sense that she knew where I was, so while I dealt with my sadness by myself, I never felt like I was dealing with it alone.

Outside the house, life was going on. Little league baseball games were being played, spelling quizzes were being given, the Yankees and Mets were continuing their seasons. That summer, Mr. Longo, my best friend Frank’s father, took my brother and me to the All-Star game at Yankee Stadium. He also took me to Long Beach Island for a week. In July, I had walked up to Highlands school with Frank one morning for the start of his basketball camp, and Mr. Eaton made sure I was a camper for a week, even though I hadn’t registered or paid.

In other words, my experience with grief was 180 degrees different from Holden’s. You couldn’t swing a dead alligator around my neighborhood without hitting some adult who was a father figure to me, without hitting an adult I could trust. Twenty-one years later, as I was writing a poem about my father’s death, I asked my brother why I couldn’t find a poem that struck an appropriately depressing tone. He answered that a sad thing had happened to us, but that we didn’t have sad lives.

Holden’s life is sad, however, but sadness is not an emotion available to him. It hovers over him, seeps into his pores, takes him by the hand and guides him all around New York City, yet he never knows, or at least admits to himself, that it is there. Much is made of the connections Holden makes and severs through the story. Whether it’s Mrs. Morrow, the three witches, Horwitz, Sunny, the nuns, Sally, Luce, Holden makes sure his conversations are with essentially “disposable” people. The three people of whom he speaks with great fondness – Jane, Allie and Phoebe – are people he tries to maintain as abstractions. Jane is there, but he doesn’t reach out for her; Allie isn’t there, but he consistently reaches out to him. Phoebe is the only person in the story who has the ability to reach him, but only if Holden sees her as a person. Finally, with the magic words “Shut up,” she breaks the spell surrounding him. Those are the words that shatter the sense of invulnerability that Holden tries to effect throughout the story. Those are the words that bring him home and start him on the path of accepting and dealing with his experience.

While Phoebe is the catalyst for his cathartic moment in the rain, damn near bawling, Allie remains the most meaningful person to him throughout the story, and adds such great depth to the story. The moments when Holden recalls or expects an action of Allie’s are the moments that hold the story together. The three most telling of these moments are the composition scene, in which Holden reveals in both content and tone the profundity of his admiration for Allie; the bicycle scene from Lake Sedebago; and the “don’t let me disappear” scene after his night at Grand Central. Forgive me for finding Christian imagery in pretty much everything, but Holden’s view of Allie raises compelling themes of betrayal and redemption that find their ways into the fabric of every other scene in the novel.

The initial Allie scene is designed to jump out at the reader through the gentleness in Holden’s tone, and the rhythm – long sentence, short sentence, long sentence, short sentence, long sentence, He’s dead now – of Salinger’s prose. I’m most interested in the Bobby Fallon’s house scene, because it is here that Holden reveals a feeling that he betrayed Allie. After reliving the memory of leaving Allie behind when the older boys went to shoot BB guns, Holden tries to change things and tells Allie to go get his bike. In the next paragraph, Holden is motivated to reflect on whether or not Jesus would have sent Judas to Hell. Holden argues that everyone else would have sent Judas to Hell, but not Jesus. Is he indicting himself for his betrayal of Allie, casting himself as Judas to Allie’s Jesus for surviving? Is he telling his listener that he needs Allie to forgive him if he is to go on living his own life?

And then come the moments when Holden steps off the curb and prays that Allie will save him from falling. Boy, there’s a lot of falling in the book. Tripping on the staircase at Pencey, stumbling over his suitcase at Sunny’s knock, passing out in the bathroom at the museum, these are among the literal falls in the story. Put them next to the figurative falls – the children running in the field of rye, the “horrible” kind of fall that Mr. Antolini describes – and you have to consider the first fall of all: the fall from grace suffered by Adam and Eve. When Holden imagines all the little kids in his elysian field, he imagines them not as children in a state of innocence but as children in a state of grace. You can bet that the kids Holden watches over aren’t forming cliques to prevent Cindy from playing tag, the they’re not picking on the slow kid. No, these children know nothing of the unpleasantness that exists in all our natures. He will save them from a fall from this state of grace. His catcher? Allie. But not really.

Holden has convicted himself of betrayal, but the only redemption he can consider prior to his figurative death and rebirth in the bathroom, is a fantasy. The beauty of the book is that Salinger holds out the promise of redemption for Holden, but doesn’t allow him to achieve it in the pages of the novel. In the end, you realize that Holden is telling this story from his hospital in California (what, they don’t have psychiatric hospitals in New York?), and that the hands that didn’t hold his – mommy’s and daddy’s – still aren’t extended in his direction. Somehow, however, Salinger gives us the impression that, over time, everything will be ok.

All you need is love. The lyrics are true. We all find redemption in a connection with a person who accepts us without judging us, whether that person is a friend, a family member or a lover. The tricky part is reciprocity. At some points, there’s no avoiding feeling alone in the world. It takes a certain amount of wisdom and courage to find the means to lift oneself out of that loneliness.

Do I suck as a human being because I take no time to create or write? Wait, don't answer that, or at least keep it to yourself. Here's something I wrote once that I like. Originally, I wrote it from the point of view of an 18 month-old girl, but I can accept it from my current point of view as well.

Word Play

I shall play with language I shall.
Language shall I play with.
Marbles. Warbles.
Shall language play with I?
With play shall I language.

I shall dream language with words.
Dream in words? No.
I shall dream.
I shall language.
I shall words.
Words, language shall dream.

Meaning shall words language.
Smile. Cackle. Squeal. Whine.
Blaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
I shall play with meaning.
I shall play I shall.

No, I'm not shipwrecked. I'll return again when I can steal some time during school to post something I wrote in a past life and always wanted to post, but for now I have folders upon folders of essays to deal with and the onslaught of the college recommendation deluge. Thanks for your patience.

Is writing a blog that almost nobody knows about the same as Tom Hanks talking to that volleyball in that awful, awful movie TNT runs over and over again?

Irish in the house, yo.

Here's something I found rummaging through folders on my flash drive.

In the shadow of Macgillicuddy’s Reeks, 1848

A grass-bespeckled tongue like a periscope in enemy waters peeks
through cracked pale lips.
Is the enemy near or far?
Death trudges nearer, nearer, his bloodless blade rusted from underuse,
neglect.
Now arm’s length, now elbow’s length, Death
Takes hand in hand
And together they walk, step by step, in unison, away
Away

The Mets win, so it's time for a baseball poem.

In celebration of the postseason and my discovery of the "delight agenda," thanks to Tony Hoagland, I'm posting this poem. I wrote in during a course at Wesleyan with Tony Connor, a Welshman with a wonderful voice and an aura that left no doubt about how comfortable he'd be in a dark bar with a glass of Scotch.

The details of the poem are from a still photograph in a baseball book I haven't been able to find in the last couple of years. For those of you who don't understand the title, the New York Highlanders were the American League team in New York City in the very early 20th century. All the names of the poem are the names of people or billboards in the photo. I set the characters in motion, and I'm pretty sure that I've been true to the facts of the play that followed.

It's one of the few poems I've written that I like pretty much every time I read it.

Before There Were Yankees
Cleveland Naps v. New York Highlanders, May 1912

Bert Daniels danced off second base,
the score was two to one.
A drive up the middle started the race,
New York runner versus Cleveland gun.
His toes tapped third; he headed home
prepared to bask in glory.
“Bert Daniels outruns Shoeless Joe;”
that’s how they’d report the story.
But alas, poor Bert, ‘twas not to be;
you’d trot no victory lap.
In the bleachers they knew it, they could see
another feather in Joe Jackson’s cap.
He moved the ball in one graceful stride
from his mitt to his throwing hand.
And in no time flat, launched the horsehide
to the dismay of the New York fans.
Ted Easterly crouched to block the plate
As Bill Evans moved into position.
and feeling he might be one second late
Bert Daniels prepared for collision.
From ten feet in front of the Old Bushmills sign
with PhilipMorris looking askance
Shoeless Joe fired that dart on a line;
Did the Highlander still have a chance?
His spikes gleamed in the sun as he started his slide
and dirt flew around home in a cloud.
Evans pulled off his mask, the tag was applied.
the ump called the baserunner out.
Bert Daniels jumped up in vain disbelief,
“You’re joking! You cost us the game.”
The sun shone on Joe, years away from the grief
of the scandal that ruined his name.

Yes, Even Still More ‘Nother Notes from the Dodge Poetry Festival

Hopefully you don’t think that this is the ring of Hell in which you’re doomed to read nothing but Dodge Poetry Festival notes for eternity. This was a good experience. Really.

First, however, thanks to Lindsey Simpson, who gave me the notebook in which I recorded for posterity the impressions left of me by the Dodge.

When I reached Waterloo Village nine-ish, garbed in shorts and my NC golf windbreaker, the rain abating, the temperature trying to get its chin over the wall of 50 degrees, I stopped into the main tent to get my bearings. There, Jorie Graham was telling the assemblage about the night the US commenced the Shock and Awe bombing, and the poem she wrote. Knowing that I can’t carry the grief of others as she does, I slinked out after reconnoitering the first session listings. Tony Hoagland had written a couple of poems that I remember enjoying, though I didn’t remember the poems themselves.

‘Twas a benevolent god led me to the Farmstead Tent. Hoagland was funny, engaging, and best of all, insightful. I found myself scribbling nugget of wisdom after nugget of wisdom in my notebook. Through the hour that I sat in the Farmstead Tent, I found the right ways to give feedback to all the senior poems I’ve been carrying in my satchel.

I’ll take his session out of order, and start with the idea he emphasized most. He repeated this poem three times:

Put your hand on the table.
Look at it.
Turn it over.
These are the kinds of facts
that habit leaves in the dark.

These are the kinds of facts that habit leaves in the dark. Paying attention to moments like these, getting past habit, is something that can “educate your poetic intelligence.” And it seemed that every word of his educated my poetic intelligence, if I can lay claim to such a thing.

The other thing I want to remember more than anything else is his idea of agendas. After he read his poem “Invitation,” which plays with corporate names in a wedding invitation, he said that he wrote it to play with the words, not to advance some political AGENDA, or some wisdom AGENDA or an abstract AGENDA. He wrote it simply that it might be enjoyed, that, as Wallace Stevens said, there might be some delight in it.

I’ve told my students that I want their notebooks to be 85% crap when they finish writing on their last page. Tony is, of course, more articulate than I. He talked about the importance of paying attention not only to experiences, but also to the “flotsam and sewage flowing between the ears,” by doing things like “listening to the rabid conversations you have when you’re in the car alone.” As he put it, “You can notice that once in 100,000 thoughts you think something that’s not stereotypical of yourself,” and this, he said, is what you pick out of the trash.

He was big on the number 100,000, as he used it again when discussing how the poet should apply her talent, saying, “Don’t waste your talent going in the direction of 100,000 you have already gone. Go in your direction, because that’s where your experience is.” Thanks to his awareness of audience, the fact that teachers go on Friday because they’re desperate for clearer ways of teaching kids how to find the amorphous, intangible thing that is the poetry inside them, he was able to talk to the problem so many of us face with kids trying to write the big message – seize the day – rather than writing their own experiences – that day, I was afraid they’d laugh at my timidity, afraid I’d make a fool of myself. In talking about this idea of direction in choosing your subject and then pursuing it, he said, “Sometimes you follow your content into the next room. You have to leave your wound (the pain you keep addressing because you can’t escape it) and move on to a better class of problems.” To get to that new room, sometimes you have to try a new form or a new point of view.

The other common problem we high school teachers deal with in poetry is un-teaching kids to use the fewest words possible when they write a poem. Good advice that is, of course, but teenagers take it to an extreme. Those who try to minimize words in a poem frequently leave out the information a reader needs to know what the hell they’re talking about. These are the Teflon poems that never get past a level of abstraction and obscurity. They hold what they’re really saying out of reach of a reader. Tony said that he prefers clarity over grace or aesthetics in a poem, so he’ll use more words to be clear. For example, you can use the chemical name for rocket fuel in your poem, but if you’re pretty sure your reader won’t know what that is, then call it rocket fuel too. I was reminded of what Paul Muldoon said in my first Dodge in 1998: “Any idiot can be difficult. It’s hard to be clear.”

He talked about the drama, the tension, inherent in the moments that are on the cusp of something, such as the way you feel when you see someone put a bottle or glass too close to the edge of the table – you worry the whole dinner when he will accidentally knock the bottle over.

Toward the end, he got to reading his own poems, other people’s poetry and talking about the books about poetry that have had an influence on him (in response to a great question asked by another festivalgoer). The poems he talked about he called dialectical poems. He read “Invitation” and Kenneth Pachett’s “The Orange Bears,” and recommended Robert Pinsky’s books on poetry (you’ll be surprised how interesting a chapter can be on syllable duration) and Carl Dennis’ Poetry and Persuasion, which contains ideas that he said got into his “groundwater.” Now that’s a precise way of saying something you can’t really put your finger on.

I bought his collection, What Narcissism Means to Me, and so far I’ve enjoyed it immensely.

Well, that’s it for me from the Dodge. See you there in 2008.

Still More Notes from the Dodge Poetry Festival

In one of Billy Collins’ poems – the title is escaping me now and the book is at school – he reflects on the influence, or the image, of the bicycling poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the same gentleman who wrote a meandering, acrobatic poem called “Constantly Risking Absurdity.” In his session from the Main Stage on Friday, Collins discussed the absurdity so many English teachers risk when they ask the question, “So what is the poet trying to say?” or when they themselves take on the clarifier role: “So, in this poem, Dickinson (substitute Shakespeare, Wordsworth or whomever you wish) is trying to say…”

The implication, of course, is that the poet tried but couldn’t say. And that our special group of fifteen year-olds in this formerly obscure little classroom is going to say what Emily Dickinson did her best but failed to say.

The laughter that followed the riff I summarize above was divided into three types: genuine laughter that follows the saying of something funny; knowing laughter of teachers who recognize such absurdity from the mouths of their students; uncomfortable laughter of teachers who know themselves guilty of such a deed but would rather that others believe they’re laughing at someone else. I’m not sure which of those laughters was my laughter.

I can’t believe I’ve never said “so-and-so is trying to say…” You see such a scene on TV or in the movies and the sentence just seems such a natural part of the journey into figurative meaning. At the same time, I’ve tried to be very explicit with students that poems don’t mean anything. Poems simply say something, and readers make meaning of what’s been said. In any discussion about poetry, the poem simply provides the facts of the discussion.

And why do people have to give shit to Billy Collins?

Here’s a man who writes poetry that finds a moment, a real moment, writes his way through that moment up to a moment of truth, and then gives you a moment to think about it in that silence that I mentioned a few posts back. Clearly his poetry is momentous. But if your sensibility is a different kind of sensibility, then you can move on.

So this shaggy college student stands up and suggests, in a rambling discourse about the “dire estate of contemporary poetry,” that Collins is somehow harmful to the cause, whatever the cause is. And I’ll let it go that this moron has no frame of reference to compare this “estate” of poetry to any other state of contemporary poetry. But the idea behind his barely coherent effort at intellectualism was that humor or open-ness somehow devalues a poem, that a poem can’t have weight if it has lightness.

Well you can’t really tell me that “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July” doesn’t have power. Sure, you’re laughing, and then you finish and turn the page. But then you realize the number of experiences you’re not going to have, the fact that your observing life is so much fuller than your experiencing life, and you’ve been given a chance to reflect on the space between carpe diem and status quo. And you want to tell me that “The History Teacher” doesn’t have some quality rage in it? I could go on and on, but the point is humor only undermines content when it is misplaced. As Collins said, humor is epistemological, a way of looking at the world. I might twist it a little and say that humor is a way of dealing with the world. In either case, I put a lot more stock into the ideas of a person who has a sense of humor, a sense of perspective, than I do into the person carrying oh-so-publicly the weight of his seriousness.

There’s a part of me that hopes Shaggy never clears the fog enveloping him just so we have more people to mock. My mother would scold me for that – heck, I’d scold my kids for that – but I guess I’m just not nice. Sorry.

Still to come in the final sequel to Notes from the Dodge Poetry Festival: Tony Hoagland.

More notes from the Dodge Poetry Festival

Before we get to the notes you’ve awaited with such patience, let me get something off my chest. If Curious George was my monkey, I would have kicked his ass long ago. Every friggin day it’s something. He’s constantly screwing something up because he’s so-called curious, and when he walks away scot-free, the man in the yellow hat blissfully ignorant of the path of destruction in George’s wake, he leaves a boatload of clean-up or repair work for some low-level employee of a department store or park service. I guess their lives don’t much matter in George’s narcissistic little universe.

Actually, the being who deserves the beating is the man in the yellow hat, the enabler, the “parent” who is so caught up in his own petty little pleasures – like taking a moth census in front of a camping lantern – that he pays not a scintilla of attention to the misdoings of his little George. I long for the episode in which a class action suit is brought against the man in the yellow hat for damages related to George’s vandalism against everything in the cartoon universe.

Can we tie this into the Dodge? Of course we can. Here’s how:

Anticipating the question that must be asked frequently of any creative mind, Billy Collins spoke of his influences. It’s probably safe to say that most people think the answer to such a question – who are your influences – will consist of names who have created in a similar vein, in this case, poets. But Billy Collins isn’t your mundane speaker, so he listed two influences, one which isn’t surprising, and one which, if you think about it, also isn’t surprising.

The envelope, please. The winners are: Ernest Hemingway, and Looney Tunes cartoons. Hemingway is sort of obvious. You can tell that Collins likes sentences, and you notice that his sentences rely much more on specific nouns and verbs for description than on adjectives or adverbs, and that his style is free of showing off his command of sentence structure. Would that I were so able.

The Looney Tunes influence seems sort of inevitable as well. Not only did the Bugs Bunny cartoons offer a certain kind of literary sensibility (no, seriously), but they also allow poems to do things that prose can’t. Whether it’s the Road Runner smooshing Wile E. Coyote with an anvil every week, or Kenny somehow meeting his maker at the same interval, the cartoon universe provides possibilities that allow us the kinds of do-overs that enable us to reconsider the reality of reality. Do I sound way too pompous or look-how-abstract-I-am in that sentence? When I spend time with my creative writing class looking at magic realism in Kafka and Borges, couldn’t I achieve the same effect by watching Bugs?

If you were to go back to the Genesis of my blog (how’s that for self-serving hyperbole?) – of course I’m not asking you to actually do such a thing – you’d see that I’m not a huge fan of using video games and other pop culture pursuits in formal instruction. But I always enjoyed Saturday and Sunday mornings with Mel Blanc. Maybe I can be a poet someday too.

Still to come:
“So, what was Emily Dickinson trying to say in this poem?”
Tony Hoagland