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Morton Marcus: Hello, everybody, this is Mort Marcus. This is the Poetry Show. And about a month ago, Jack Marshall was in town for a little-publicized reading up at UCSC. And I asked him to do an interview with me. Jack Marshall, great American poet

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who has just come out with his memoirs of his youth as a- well, you'll hear about it on this recording. Very much winning awards, he's got ten books of poetry out, the only man I know to win the Bay Area Critics Review Award in two different

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years. So let's go back to October 5th of this year and hear Jack Marshall. Hello, everybody, this is Mort Marcus and this is a recording for the Poetry Show. It is October 5th, 2005. And believe

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it or not, it was a surprise to me, this is the first time we have Jack Marshall on the show. Jack Marshall has been a friend of mine, oh, going on around forty years. And I have said in print and will say on the air now, I think he is one of the

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finest poets, one of the most original poets as well, in America in the last part of the 20th century. We're going to talk today about two books: one is called, "Gorgeous Chaos," which was his New and Selected Poems that came out from Coffee

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House Press in 2002. And the reason that he's down in Santa Cruz today is that he is going to speak at University of California at Santa Cruz tonight about his new book, which is a memoir called, "From Baghdad to Brooklyn." Jack, let me just

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say a little bit about Jack. He has one- I think you're the only person I know of who has won the Bay Area Book Reviewers Awards twice. I don't know if anyone else has done that. He has also won a Pen Center USA West Award for one of his books, and was a

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finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for another one. Jack, it has been way too long. I really thought I had you on here before. Welcome to the Poetry Show. Jack Marshall: Oh, thank you, Mort.

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Morton Marcus: That's it? Jack, tell us, and tell your audienc out there a little bit abou yourself, where you come fro and what your youth was like little bit Jack Marshall: Well, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York in the

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early 30s. I grew up- I was born in 1936 and so I spent the 40s in Brooklyn during World War II. And my parents were both Arabic Jews, which I know sounds like an oxymoron, but they came here during the Depression and grew up in a small, insular

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Morton Marcus: Yeah, it's- it was interesting. You know, I've ommunity of Arabic speaking ews who are a minority within a inority of larger Ashkenazi ews. And I grew up playing ball n the streets. And then after leaving home I lived in New

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ork working at various jobs, a d did some traveling, and then hipped out as a seaman on a orwegian freighter to Africa, ame back. And lived in New York nd started writing in earnest nd then came out to California n 1968. And I started writing

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hen I was about fourteen years ld, and basically was not so uch interested in going to chool as much as I was in raveling and writing, which I id after I left high school. So then started reading authors ho interested me and pretty

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uch did it on my own from then. known you for so long and didn't even know till last night you hadn't gone through college, because you are really one of the better read poets that I know. And you are smiling. But

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it also goes to the fact, tha 's something you and I have tal ed about, you really do not n ed creative writing worksho s, that, you know, before the 2 th century, in fact, well into he 20th century, there were 't creative writing workshops.

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So if you were interested in poe ry, you were interested in fi tion, you just read and you l arned how other people did it then you imitated it and went o your ow Jack Marshall: Yeah, I think the function of creative writing

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workshops, maybe the main benefit of them is that you meet people your own age, your own peers, and see what they're interested in and who they're reading and what they're doing. It can be supportive, it can also be very competitive. And I

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did teach at the University of Iowa for a couple years, and I noticed that the competition there was really quite fierce. And I was very glad that I was not a student there but rather teaching. I was invited to teach because I didn't have any

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academic credits. So that was one- that was one benefit I saw of- you do see what other people are doing and you create friendships that you may not have had before. But as far as helping it with your work, I think a handful of friends can

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do that for you. Morton Marcus: And certainly we have done it for each other over the last forty years, and sometimes fiercely, yeah. Jack, what I always ask, and you can go to your memoirs for this if

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you want to read it, because we are talking about that area that your memoirs deals with. The memoir, which I should tell you out there again, called, "From Baghdad to Brooklyn," has just come out. And it deals with Jack's early life, not the later

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life, and it deals with those experiences as a very young man, but also those experiences when he became a poet. So the question that I usually ask is, how did you become a poet? Why did you become a poet? And you can either tell us or you can

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read some pages. Jack Marshall: Well, my interest in poetry, I think, actually came out of my knowledge of the Bible. There were certain books in the Bible that stirred my interest. My favorite book in

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the Bible was what is in English called, "Ecclesiastes," and in Hebrew is called, "Qohelet." And I found that the lines there were so stirring and so vivid, the imagery was so powerful that I- when I would read English poets like Shakespeare, Shelley,

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Keats, there was a resonance there. And my interest in poetry was triggered, I think, by an English teacher in school who read out loud poets and then when he came to read Dylan Thomas, I could see that he was really, really passionately in

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love with Thomas' work. And I didn't see teachers that excited about anything they were teaching up until then, and that passion was very contagious and I started to read on my own and felt the same kind of passion in literature, in poetry

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especially. And so I started reading outside of school and was lead from- you know, you start reading, one poet leads you to another, one writer leads you to another, it's sort of a daisy chain. And, you know, you're basically- you're on your

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own from there on. There is a section in here in the memoir- let's see. The book is divided into short sections, which enabled me to move around rather than sticking to a strictly linear chronology. And so, you know, memory is a tricky thing.

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It skips around and leads you here and there and you're pretty much at the disposal of some inner trigger. And we writers, or people who talk about writing, talk about it as if you have a knack with words or you have a talent with words when I

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find it's just the opposite. I think you're really a servant of the language. And the best work often feels as if it comes- comes from somewhere else and you're really a funnel for it. So that you're used by the language rather than you using

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language yourself. And- well- I can't- Morton Marcus: Well, while Jack is looking, I should tell you that the memoirs really sort of deal with this some very

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alienated smaller group within the Jewish community. And Jack is raised very, very strictly and begins to go to the library and begins to find out that there are many different ways of looking at the world than just the way of this closed little

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community. And so his growing really has to do with rejection of some of these very, very tight and really superstitious beliefs. So this emerges throughout the memoirs. You got the pages?

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Jack Marshall: Well, yeah, I have- I have this section where I talk about discovering the public library: There were no English language books in our house, other than Siddurim, which is prayer books in Hebrew, and Haggadahs for

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passover. I never saw any books at all. It was not until I learned by chance of the existence of that storehouse of potential explosives, the public library, that I discovered my first access to English language books outside of school. One

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summer day, while playing running bases with my friends on the street, I spotted tall, bespeckled Eddie Strasser, down the block walking toward us. A few years older than the rest of us, and not a ballplayer -- although his younger brother and

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little blonde sister were -- I noticed him carrying an armful of books and asked where he'd gotten them. "The public library," he answered matter of factly, suggesting he'd been going there for some time. I asked them where it was. "18th

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Avenue and 60th Street," he said, that was four long avenues and five street blocks away. Wondering about the stack of books in his arms, I asked, "How much?" "You could take out eight at a time," he said. I had meant how much did it cost, but was at

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first shocked at the number of books allowed. "Eight books? What does it cost?" I asked. "It's free," he said. Free? Now I was suspicious. If I had learned anything by age ten, it was that nothing was free. He assured me it was true but my

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first impulse told me there was a trick. "How?" I asked. He explained that all you needed was a library card. "How do I get it?" "Just ask." It sounded too easy, too good to be true. "That's all?" I asked. Squinching his nose to keep his

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glasses from slipping down from perspiration, he nodded, swallowing his sharp Adam's apple in his long, thin throat. "It's closed," he said, "but you can go tomorrow." As we stood with the game going on behind me, looking up at his face, he

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was at least a foot taller than me. My eyes turned skyward. The space behind and above his head enlarged, like a close up drawn back from to reveal its subject within its larger background. And I remembered having a premonition that the world was

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about to open, the street longer, the sky more spacious, time more full. Before he left with the books cradled in his arms, I noticed several had scientific titles on their spines. Eddie had earlier wanted to be a doctor and planned on

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attending Harvard Medical School, to which we all expected him with his genius brain to win a scholarship. Years later, on one of my trips back East, I asked about him and learned that he had married a woman whose wealthy father owned a

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mercantile business. Eddie, he was made a partner and that ended his medical career. Yeah. Morton Marcus: Okay, and from there you go to the library and

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just discover an absolutely new world. You can read some of that now. Jack Marshall: Next day I set off to walk the nine blocks with growing excitement but prepared for disappointment. The library

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was located on the ground floor of a building off the corner of 18th Avenue, just as Eddie had said. When I opened the door, I faced row upon row and shelf upon shelf of books in the middle of a large room, as well as shelves filled with books

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lining the walls. Reading tables stood invitingly uncluttered in the center of the well lit room. Wandering around in the children's section from one subject to another, I came upon a series of books entitled, "The Great Scientists," "The Great

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Explorers," "The Great Composers," with an illustration of each famous man at the head of their biographical chapter. There wasn't a woman in the series as I recall, except for Madame Curie, paired with her husband, Pierre, the discoverers

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of radium. All this was free? Why hadn't I heard about it before? And now that I did know part of me wanted it kept secret. My excitement grew into an anticipatory joy when I was so easily granted a temporary card to be followed in a few

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days, I was told by the librarian, by a permanent card, and proceeded to take out my first in a long series of free books. Despite the quietness of the place and the few silent browsers, this was no island of calm. I sensed I was about to

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discover, in the midst of the daily doldrums of living, an as yet unnavigated sea of possibilities, an unrest I knew I wanted to spend my days exploring. Walking back home, sensing I was on the edge of a new, more adventurous world,

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stranger and more unpredictable than the familiar world the twilight around me was closing in on, I felt a hitherto unknown mood of tranquility in the atmosphere of that summer evening spread out. And I walked with more purposeful motion in

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the soft, buoyant weather. Morton Marcus: And then go on to meet some very advanced people, Rimbaud, at an early age. Jack Marshall: Yeah, well, Rimbaud, I think appeals to all

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youngsters if they read poetry. He was the one poet who wrote his best work as a young teenager, and then gave up writing poetry all together before he was age twenty to become a traveling merchant and an explorer and pretty much

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ended up in a bad way, losing a leg to gangrene in Africa. So his life was as adventurous, if not more so, than his poetry. So I imagine most of the poets who read Rimbaud are inspired by that, and he's a difficult influence to get over,

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especially in one's life. Morton Marcus: But if one is to grow beyond adolescence, one has to do that. Jack Marshall: Yeah, yeah. He's a wonderful instigator. His

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poetry is about the purity of childhood, the vision- it appeals to one in- early on and in the adolescence because it's full of rebellion and brilliant descriptions of elemental forces, sunrise, sunsets, water, rivers, oceans, but seems to

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stop after that point when he- when he- I believe that he must have become so disenchanted with other poets and poetry that he was intent on working out whatever fate he had in his life and and so left poetry behind, so-

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Morton Marcus: Yeah, which was too bad and had a very, very short life there afterwards. Jack Marshall: Yeah, unfortunately, his poetry was more well made than his life.

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Morton Marcus: Yeah, which often happens. Jack Marshall: Yeah. Morton Marcus: Okay, well, would you tell us something about your poetry? What do you look for in poetry? What do you attempt to

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accomplish in it? Jack Marshall: Well, for me and for my own poetry, poetry is, as best as I can boil down, is precise perception and feeling propelled. And the propulsion for me is a very important

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matter. To me, it not only expresses energy but it also creates energy, at least that's my feeling. And so the poets I'm most drawn to and have always been, are poets who have a terrific propulsion behind their language. And perhaps

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excessively so, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas, and Shakespeare in the plays, and Saint-John Perse, the Frenchmen. A lot of different poets with lots of different styles, but the imagery I'm drawn to a certain

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kind of vividness of imagery, physical imagery. And poetry can do something that prose doesn't do very much of and that is compress time. I'm drawn to poetry that takes shortcuts, makes great condensations so that you don't belabor what's

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obvious, and you move on from one image, one idea, one feeling to the next. And then it's sort of woven- it's woven out at an accelerated rate and to me, that's what creates the excitement.

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Morton Marcus: Okay, yeah. Can you- would you read us a poem? Jack Marshall: I'll read a poem titled: THE GARDENER'S NOTE, CLIFFSIDE, POINT LOMA. At one time, I was living in San Diego on the cliffs at Point Loma with a

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group of people in a sort of loose commune. And so the ocean was right out our front window and we lived on the cliff and I did some work in the garden there. And so I imagined a character of the gardener, who is partly myself, but really

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more than myself. Will the sun show today? Will the water darken or clear in which a naked woman bends, smoothing the surface with the flat of her hands? From this height, she is no one I know,

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though she could be the pregnant woman who took acid on the beach and lay down to have her child as the tide came in. From here, she is more exposed than juice under the bruised skin of ripe fruit. Her face, an orange in the mist, innocent of how in

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peril it hangs from the branch. How can you tell her how many other worlds smelling of torn roots and rain also gather in what you feel for her? She trusts her fragileness to the ocean as if sand or the tiles of her bathroom. I want to be near

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a whore the first morning she feels the last bloom go, dead in her bones and sighs. I want to hear it like the music of bridges to a drowning man. Funny how when things fall apart, a humming light cuts through, how a bus driver giving directions

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through his fat, an old woman's face rising out of its wrinkles to shape a smile seem heroic. After days of not speaking, you wonder if the silence isn't the last beginning left, if the freshness that stings isn't in your safekeeping. I think it's

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time I learned from whatever in the air or on the earth will survive our kind. Maybe when I return, things will be changed and I'll stay. Morton Marcus: There's finality about those last lines that are

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really great, how rhythmically they come in. Okay, let's hear some more, another short poem. Jack Marshall: Okay. Morton Marcus: So again, we are talking with Jack Marshall, who

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is down to speak at the University of California, and whose last two books are his Selected Poems, New and Selected Poems, "Gorgeous Chaos," which came out in 2002, and they just released, "From Baghdad to Broadway- From Baghdad to

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Brooklyn," a memoir. Jack Marshall: I wish it were Broadway. Morton Marcus: Yeah. Jack Marshall: Maybe it could be.

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Morton Marcus: Fred Astaire-ovic. Jack Marshall: [Laughs] Morton Marcus: And so we are we're talking with him, if you've just tuned in.

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Jack Marshall: I'll read a poem titled, "Crane," which refers to Stephen Crane, the novelist Stephen Crane, and to Hart Crane, the poet who wrote, "The Bridge." Just a little background, there's a town in Elizabeth- it's called

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Elizabeth, New Jersey. And my father had a small store there and I used to go down on weekends to help him out. And so I learned something when I worked there in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I didn't know the fact that Stephen Crane was buried

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there. So this is, "Crane-" Morton Marcus: Let me [unintelligible] to those people out there who don't know, Stephen Crane is the great American author of, "The Red Badge of Courage," and some

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wonderful short stories, who died at an early age but led this idea of American writers had to be adventurous which Hemingway picks up among other people. Really great, great, great writer. If you've never read, "The Red Badge of

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Courage," out there, it's astonishing. Jack Marshall: CRANE Tonight, I want to return to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Stephen Crane lies under a stone, and my father, after

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twenty years of skimping wages, finally opened his own dry goods store. I worked there after school on weekends but it didn't take a genius to see from the sad look of the place, dim light, threadbare goods, where it was headed. In all the time I

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spent in that smog-sucking town of wan bargain hunters and hangdog merchants, I never knew of, let alone visited Crane's grave. Then, I was more enamored of that other Crane, Hart, lovely name, whose grave is the belly of the South Atlantic.

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Besides, I couldn't imagine any reason why anyone would want to stop off, never mind die, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. It seemed nobody there cared about, much less knew, the color of the sky. That last image is taken- "Nobody knew the color of the

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sky," is taken from Stephen Crane's, "The Open Boat," the story, yeah. Morton Marcus: Which starts off as actually an experience when he was in a shipwreck. And he did a huge journalistic report

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on it, and then realized it could be made into a great naturalistic, almost a novella. It's very long and it's one of his great works. "The Blue Hotel," is another one, incredible one, incredible works. We are coming up to a

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break in the show, but we still have time for more poetry, anything you'd like to say. Well, I'd say you know that, obviously, your description of your poetry is that it's- it doesn't have any axis or themes, it's really an aesthetic act. An

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act in which you get in close contact with the way you're feeling and thinking and you really, in many ways it sounds like, let the language take over. Jack Marshall: Yeah, I think Auden was right in when he said,

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"Poets, you write poetry, not if you have something to say or feel you have some cause to support, but where you- where the language is preeminent, where you discover the strengths and the possibilities of language." And I found myself

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often when I start with a line or a think I have a line, and then another line connects to it, that the thing almost seems to have a life of its own or is moving in a direction that I had no plan for, and that's when it gets exciting, when it's taken

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out of your hands. And you are in a sense living, you are sharing in the life of the language. In fact, one of my credos is the line by the philosopher, Wittgenstein, where he says, "To create a language is to create a form of life." So

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it becomes almost a biological sense of creating a life. Morton Marcus: And that sounds like a good time to take our half hour break. Talking with Jack Marshall, we'll be back in a moment.

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Bob Spitz: You're listening to the Poetry Show on KUSP. Following the Poetry Show tonight on "From the Bookshelf," Lisa Jensen will be holding court here at KUSP. She's a novelist and columnist will be here beginning at nine o'clock

00:31:19.260 - 00:31:37.290

on KUSP. We'd like to thank our listeners, supporters. In part, our show is sponsored by our community of contributing listeners. To become a contributing listener, visit our website at KUSP.org. You can also find out the latest movie

00:31:37.290 - 00:31:55.590

reviews along with archived reviews of film, now one video or DVD, at our website at KUSP.org. A couple of poetry events coming up on Saturday, November the fifth at 7:30pm: Shana Compton and Jennifer Cox will be reading at the Louden

00:31:55.590 - 00:32:12.750

Nelson Center, 301 Center Street in Santa Cruz, presented by New Cadence Poetry Series and co-sponsored by Poetry Santa Cruz. On Wednesday, November 16th, at 8pm, Santa Cruz City Poetry Slam will be held at The Attic. The Attic is located at

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931 Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz and that is also co-sponsored by the Poetry Santa Cruz. We're going to get right back into our interview now. Thank you for listening. Morton Marcus: We're back with Jack Marshall, who is our guest

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this week on the occasion of the publication of his memoirs, "From Baghdad to Brooklyn." Jack, again for people who have just tuned in, is really an award winning poet. One of his books, was a National Book Circles Award finalist. He's won

00:32:47.500 - 00:33:08.470

a Pen West USA Award and two Bay Area Book Reviewers Awards, a very select award which he's won twice, which is really amazing. And his Selected Poems had come out in 2002 called, "Gorgeous Chaos," so we're talking about both books. Jack, we were

00:33:08.470 - 00:33:23.410

talking about your poetry in relation to it's being aesthetic, in relation to language taking you to areas that you never imagined were inside yourself and sort of just open up. And I think that is the most exciting part of being a

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poet, and maybe an artist of any sort, is when suddenly a territory that you didn't know existed opens up and you're really mapping it for the first time, so to speak. You're an explorer, but a psychical, a psychological explorer,

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exploring the viscera of the body. At any rate, let's hear another poem, talk about it. Jack Marshall: All right. I have an ongoing series of poems, which unfortunately grow longer. The title is, "From the Big

00:34:06.590 - 00:34:40.760

Brass Handbook." And I imagine these as an ongoing collection that are periodically added to by generals and "big brass." Handbook, advice by generals as if these are advice to the troops, to- secret communiques. And this is the first one of the

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series, and I think by now there's about five or six of them distributed in the various books: FROM THE BIG BRASS HANDBOOK, this is with an ode to William Blake.

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Smooth as a lawyer navigating through tax laws, let no talk of sacrifice and duty hint of any doubt, however least you hide while carefully guiding your tongue in smokey caucuses and televised forums. Keep intentions hidden from

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civilians, reduce them to needing and being thankful for gifts. Magnify small gifts, sense and praise the sly touch of the grave. See behind daytime actions, their nighttime motives, and you'll see your rivals, once arm in arm, go for

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each other's throats. Mildly even with words, threaten their livelihoods, let alone their lives and watch them wince and run for cover, necks slack as turtle waddle wagging to the block, right up to Thanksgiving Eve, then reassure them, careful

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not to sound as though you're mangling motives, until it seems you mean all things. First son, then father, each day becoming more like mother. A time will come when you will think: how many cows must I lead through how many houses without letting

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them see how pitifully feeble all their beefing is? People finally look like what they think, and what they aspire to stands clear. So, through murmured phrases, meaningful pauses, nodding as though you knew more than your grin, must

00:36:43.990 - 00:37:04.990

you fatten the poor on pomp and promises, how crumbs trickle down from above, while convincing them of the need to live on those crumbs, soon to be past pleasures better off forgotten. When happy, fill them with fear, flatter them when

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they falter, and frighten them when they lazily draw back from the labors of the common struggle. Say, only this ensures to enrich you, not the few, give them that smile when they frown, frown when they smile, conceal the strain you endure while

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fulfilling your mission. Through a series of sown confusions, create expectation of disaster rather than its presence, for something in them craves for more than what's delivered and delights in what's against them. When the many breed and the old

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decline, let them not rise, enough are born, more than enough. So beware of telling women bearing sons that they're working for the army, or you'll see the spare too celestial to call this illusion, or see Earth overrun. Repeat till words

00:38:10.330 - 00:38:36.370

whiten, repetition more than precision heals, as rock music enslaves. Preach restraint in desire and fervor in war. Keep it sweetened as from birth, the teeth of their children. Oh, worthy object of our grace, let us see only gratitude on your

00:38:36.370 - 00:38:59.380

face. Time is our way of keeping everything from happening at once and only he, who's aware of the deceit all around him, has a chance to be happy. Unless you have a sweet tooth for suicide, give thanks for that deceit. It's in the laughter you hear

00:38:59.980 - 00:39:12.580

when everything goes wild. Morton Marcus: And of course, just after we get through talking about the aesthetic approach to poetry, we get into the poetry which actually you've been writing more and more of

00:39:13.510 - 00:39:28.960

since we have entered the Iraq War, and that is political poetry. Poetry that is definitely inspired by almost an outcry against what's going on in all forms of the government right now.

00:39:30.490 - 00:39:55.030

Jack Marshall: Well, political in one sense, but I think for something to be effective politically, it has to be true psychologically. And I find a lot of what's said in a poem like this feels to me to be true, certainly for myself. I

00:39:55.630 - 00:40:21.760

don't exempt myself from any of the accusations in this poem, and I feel that political is just means that this is true on a larger scale, on a mass scale. And that is why I don't feel as if my poetry is aimed at a public, I don't believe in that,

00:40:21.760 - 00:40:40.450

I don't see it that way. What I do see is that poems are trans-personal, that they're aimed at another person, other persons, other individuals. But as far as public goes, I don't see it that way. And I'm sure that a poem like this would not

00:40:40.450 - 00:40:59.560

appeal to many people. But if one reads something like this, in my own work or other people's work, and feel that it is true, then it's done its work. And I certainly feel it's true for me because I knew when I was writing it that I was speaking

00:40:59.590 - 00:41:09.910

about myself as well. Morton Marcus: Well, I'm going to take you on a turnaround from that because as you know, you are in Robinson Jeffers country. Jack Marshall: Yeah.

00:41:09.990 - 00:41:23.490

Morton Marcus: And I'm going to ask you to read a poem called, "Of Jeffers, 1961." This- Santa Cruz has been home, or was home, to William Everson. Jack Marshall: Yes.

00:41:23.940 - 00:41:45.030

Morton Marcus: Who, of course, looked at Jeffers as his mentor. And Jeffers is so important to an area that gets our programs, which is the Monterey area, the Carmel area. So it's on page 200 and I'd like you to read it. It's a lovely, lovely poem.

00:41:45.000 - 00:42:15.390

Jack Marshall: Well, it has a little story before it because when my wife and I first came out to California in 1968- no, I'm sorry. We came out actually 1961. Yes, in 1961. And Jeffers had always been a very, very important poet to me, although

00:42:16.380 - 00:42:37.290

his writing is very different than mine. But I always felt an absolute truthfulness in Jeffers, just as solid as any of the granite he wrote about, and I wanted to see where he lived. And so we went out to Carmel and I asked people. I said, "Where

00:42:37.290 - 00:42:57.600

does Jeffers live," and they said, "Who?" I knew was- I was on the right track because I had heard that people didn't even know where he lived. And we finally did make our way out to his house and I stood out across from his house and looked over

00:42:57.600 - 00:43:15.630

at the house, and I saw two blond-haired children looking out at me from the window. And I thought to myself, "Okay, I will go walk across the road, knock on the door and ask to see Jeffers, and tell him how much he meant to me." And I was just

00:43:15.630 - 00:43:33.750

about to take a step when I saw these two arms, each arm grabbing one of the children pulling them back and drawing the shade and I knew that was it, you know? And then the following year, he- well, later that year, I believe he died.

00:43:33.930 - 00:43:53.040

Morton Marcus: Yeah. Jack Marshall: So, this this poem comes out of that: OF JEFFERS, 1961 An eagle older than I, wings folded in the high bow of an old

00:43:53.040 - 00:44:15.090

redwood, crusted bark thick as piling in a Turkish rug, jagged grey slopes hugging the heat, the boulders long after sundown and the coolness of the hawk's shadow. Hills like fog yet hard as iron, no horseman, no hunter but the winged one to scavenge

00:44:15.090 - 00:44:38.070

mate, young, eggs and build a nest in the splinters, the left, the lightning left. As if fledged from heat and rock, the hawk, its mate ten years dead, hovered as we walked, the cliff granite from which the house was built. It shooed us, wings over

00:44:38.070 - 00:44:59.610

its brood, away and turned seaward to the gathering wave mass, soon to be delivered. One wants at such a time a summit against loss, to build your house beside an ocean is to come close to living in the house you were born. Hearing long

00:44:59.610 - 00:45:21.060

fluttering folds of music in sundown's quietness, drawing out the long home before breath was drawn. As if the wind were engine, the same hawk or its offspring hunts these same hills, crying the same cry that never grows tired, dreams the

00:45:21.060 - 00:45:38.670

same rock slides, hears the same crack and dry rumbling thunder of thirsty mountains in its throat, sharp, stabbing cries of gray-winged gulls in seagoing flight over heights widened for the wind dance.

00:45:40.880 - 00:45:59.750

Morton Marcus: Lovely, lovely poem. We are talking about both Jack's poetry and his new memoirs that have come out called, "From Baghdad to Brooklyn." And I wonder if you would read the section from it about music, and it's a very

00:45:59.750 - 00:46:12.520

telltale section because you talk about the music from the old country and then go into the music that influenced you when you were a boy. So if you could read that, that'd be great. Jack Marshall: You mean, "The Muezzin in the House," that

00:46:12.520 - 00:46:31.570

section? This is a section titled: MUEZZIN IN THE HOUSE, and muezzin is the name of the the Muslim singer on the minarets who calls the faithful to prayer five times a day.

00:46:37.060 - 00:46:55.600

Every language has its supreme interpreter of love songs. At that time in America, it was Frank Sinatra. For many in Arabic, it was all Umm Kulthum, the dark-eyed voluptuous Egyptian mistress, it was rumored, of Egypt's then

00:46:55.600 - 00:47:14.980

President, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Both she and Nasser were seen by their people as equally devoted to their nation. My father used to listen to her regularly on the radio. Her rich, piercing voice could cast the note into the deepest wail of lament and

00:47:14.980 - 00:47:35.860

longing, while her concentrated ardor could arouse a passionate urgency, the more hopeless the longing, the more powerfully ardent. I heard in Umm Kulthum the pure sounding of this directive, reaching evermore extreme frequencies in the

00:47:35.860 - 00:47:52.570

spectrum of yearning, knowing hopelessness, while helplessly driven to make her appeal, transcending the personal for the elemental, and drawing others together in a summons to the primitive, desolate actuality of existence

00:47:52.750 - 00:48:12.450

experienced by all. Years later, after reading Kierkegaard's, "Either/Or," I was reminded of Umm Kulthum, how her voice seemed an embodiment of the great philosopher's counsel to despair, by which I

00:48:12.450 - 00:48:33.150

understood that if one were to take on the consciousness of what it is to be human and to suffer time, thereby recognizing their affinity with all of humankind, they would of necessity come to despair. For whereas depression is private,

00:48:33.780 - 00:48:57.510

despair is universal. This radical enlargement of the personal to the universal, Kierkegaard explains, is essential in taking on the full weight of living awareness, the council to despair. Whereas the call to prayer of the muezzin

00:48:57.510 - 00:49:14.730

arises from the needle towers, Umm Kulthum's appeal was made from street level, expressing dramas and longings and acted on the level of daily human affairs, as if the yearning for the absent lover originating from different levels was one

00:49:14.760 - 00:49:30.760

and the same impulse. When I'd entered our front room overlooking Bay Parkway, and my father, listening to Umm Kulthum on the radio would be standing with his back toward me facing the window, I'd hear him

00:49:30.880 - 00:49:51.730

accompanying the song in a subdued falsetto I can only describe as lovesick. Longing its way back to its source, coiling so far away and long ago, it felt ageless. What surprised me was that he chose such intense feeling openly,

00:49:51.940 - 00:50:11.080

since it was not his habit, even though he was unaware of my presence. Usually, he'd be more discreet. I noticed an unembarrassed flush on his face when he did notice me, a kind of youthful radiance softened and relaxed his features, and I was

00:50:11.080 - 00:50:30.070

taken aback by this display of intense fervor. The few times he'd come home from work and complain of a backache or muscle pain and have to stay in bed, he'd first ask my mother, who'd refuse, then asked me to apply the methylated

00:50:30.070 - 00:50:50.290

Vicks, greasy and reeking of eucalyptus or the even more repellent sludgy black sab that when I'd rub him with would smear like tar. Those moments return now when I experience my own aches and pains caused by no particular injury, they feel

00:50:50.290 - 00:51:11.440

more like impacted time, time's revenge on itself. When I think of him sick in his bed, a vestige old vapor floats down the years, adrift of belated sympathy for one no longer able to receive it. In the generational spinning down of

00:51:11.440 - 00:51:33.610

paternity, there must be a law, unwritten except perhaps in crumbled tablets or in retrieved memories that the Father, the one who was first, is approached late and recognized last. Morton Marcus: Yeah and then another chapter called, "The

00:51:33.640 - 00:51:51.400

[unidentified]," you go and you talk about, you know, American music and how that was different for you. We have, believe it or not, only around six minutes left. So, how about some more poems and give us a sense of- I know they're long but maybe, you

00:51:51.400 - 00:52:05.680

know, poems when you go out to the ocean and begin to reflect, and reflect on the human being and molecules and atoms and things like that. And it's, you know, it can be even a little long, we still have five minutes.

00:52:13.780 - 00:52:44.010

Jack Marshall: Okay. Okay, well, I'll try this, this poem is in five sections: FIELD AND WAVE, BODY AND BOOK I.

00:52:45.750 - 00:53:04.290

Now, in mid-summer, watching white wing flung out beside white wing, crossing over spilled sewage, compacted trash, corrupt perfumes en route, recycling allure. It's too late to undo the choices that brought you here. But what happened to

00:53:04.290 - 00:53:23.730

that girl left untouched, whose near touch felt like nakedness, each word naked speech? What luck to have found yourself in that place, and the added luck of the hour when a kiss is an Aboriginal thing, and even parting thrills. Then the

00:53:23.730 - 00:53:41.910

silkworm spins a yellow robe and sunbeams strobe the drops sliding from a lifted ore in the mineral law our ancestor's contagious chemistry crawled in, drifting from interstellar disasters in a smog of stars, red shifted to spacey blue.

00:53:44.250 - 00:54:00.770

II. Oh, you out there, if your lenses have sighted us, come out, come out from geology, sit on the shore, that is the house where we were born. What luck, what lack must have sent us

00:54:00.890 - 00:54:19.580

scattering to pick our way in a decay of isotopes and a plague spreading more quickly now that the walls are down? A picture had held us captive and we could not get outside. Inside the frame, taking on a shine long forgotten, long foreknown, a

00:54:19.580 - 00:54:40.310

shimmer not yet born, not yet come, out of geology. III. Once there was a king saying no, never, promising not to leave. No, never to leave us alone. That was then, when the future

00:54:40.340 - 00:54:57.590

when it was at its most marvelous, before it began. Then how quickly we come to love the moment that had been, and the moment it's over we look for what was where it used to be, how little the familiar looks like it has long to survive, and

00:54:57.590 - 00:55:19.550

the incredible hope of seeing the dawn of credible day. How call, King, your dormant, depressed, dispersed powers to a point, spiky as the opening bars of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky hornet sting through a Czar's velvet sleeve, or the crack in

00:55:19.550 - 00:55:36.830

the ice when the first light beam showed, now particle, now wave and the huge, nebulous house of Newtonian physics came crashing down, a sound closer to radiation drone than a Chopin Nocturne.

00:55:36.780 - 00:55:55.080

IV. On such a day, clearly seeing everyone present as though prior to parting, listen to sounds the pavement hears and keeps on hearing, music of poor Saturday night streets stretching the

00:55:55.080 - 00:56:15.630

length of a sob, echo of a sob in the avenues and alleys fatigue keeps open and closes on those who continue. Your ear leads you on, yet listening will awaken the one who remembers you only when you've forgotten yourself. Sunlight, drawing up

00:56:15.630 - 00:56:31.610

through your striding legs, each steps drawn, water drop on the tongue bailed up for the long haul, and then a single head, the scarlet tongue of a world too wild for naming. V.

00:56:34.420 - 00:56:53.590

In the quantum hum of phantom heaven, the more we look for, the more will exist, like oceans rolling in importing new climates we're separated from by only a film, flick of the wrist, flicker of eyes in another direction in this confusion,

00:56:53.830 - 00:57:14.260

creation, the certain confusion of creation, portable landscape more true than patriarchs to their tongues, then white-headed, black-throated, yellow-eyed starling songs yet to be sung, the wayward flight of prophecies to come, the way a

00:57:14.260 - 00:57:36.670

guide wave shapes on coming swells and folds and unfolds back into the outflunged mass carrying the imprint ever deeper into the weave. A wavelength of the marvelous gives birth to one of the lovelier faces of chaos, beautiful beyond belief, whose

00:57:36.700 - 00:57:58.960

eyelid memory has not closed over yet, whose look asks "Find me," who whispers, "Bring condoms and vitamin C." With the shut-ins' hunger for the body-less aurora to last a moment longer, tired of turning continually alongside a sea

00:57:58.960 - 00:58:15.470

grain of the galactic ocean swirl here below. I have read in the body and the book is sad. Morton Marcus: And you have been listening to Jack Marshall who is in town for a reading, reading from his Selected Poems,

00:58:15.500 - 00:58:26.300

"Gorgeous Chaos." He is down here because his memoirs have just come out, "From Baghdad to Brooklyn." Jack, thanks so much for being with us. Jack Marshall: Thank you.

00:58:26.360 - 00:58:40.620

Morton Marcus: Well, great. Bob Spitz: You've been listening to the Poetry Show here on KUSP. Next week on the Poetry Show- let's see, next week on the Poetry Show Maura Simon will be in the studio with Dennis

00:58:40.620 - 00:58:58.310

Morton. That's next Sunday, November the sixth at eight o'clock here on the Poetry Show. Thank you for listening. Unknown: I'm Gary Patton. KUSP's fall pledge drive raised over $100,000, $25,000 short of our goal. We want to thank everyone

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who contributed to this effort, community members whose voices you heard over the airwaves and on the phones and listeners like you who made a pledge. If you have not made a pledge to support KUSP's continued programming for the next six

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