The Eroica Meditations

Happy 240th!

These days in lieu of paying attention to the news I find myself taking note of significant dates in history. I figure if as long as I'm Van Winknled I can't quite live in, respond to, and comment upon the present, at least I can happily romp around in the distant past.

Today happens to be one of those days when long ago something significant happened, although at the time it wasn't news to anyone except a man and woman of little note.

Two hundred and forty years ago, in Bonn, Germany, a son was born. The parents named him Ludwig.

This was the same name given to their first child who had died young. It was also the name of little Ludwig's grandfather, a Court Capellmeister.

In his early years the fact that the boy was Ludwig Van Beethoven meant nothing to the world. He was just another kid in Germany. We know what church he was baptised in, what houses he lived in, but little else about him caused ripples until he took up a musical instrument. By age 8 we have it recorded that he gave a public concert in Cologne. Now it was becoming clear. He was a child prodigy. The next Mozart!

Another good reason to check out garage sales.

I learned these facts and more from a large book I bought at garage sale years ago. Produced for the Beethoven Bicentennial in 1970, it is filled with reproductions of period documents, original musical scores in the master's hand, and paintings of key historical figures and sites.

This book is the closest thing I know of to a Beethoven scrapbook. Buying it at the garage sale for a buck was an easy decision. After all the time I've spent listening to  Beethoven's music, how could I not want to know more about the man behind it?




Some of the first LPs we owned

Begin With the Ears
When I was a first grader my father did something quite remarkable for a former Oklahoma farm boy supporting a wife and three young sons on an entry-level accountant's salary. He went and bought us a Hi-Fi.

The Magnavox unit, a large piece of cherry wood furniture, was roughly the size of a kitchen cabinet. It contained an automatic record changer with a tone arm that weighed approximately 2 lbs. and an AM/FM radio. In its guts were glowing vacuum tubes.

The man at the music store knew we would need music to play on our new record changer. My father had heard and liked some classical music when he went to college, so the man suggested the Nutcracker Suite, Rhapsody and Blue, and the 1812 Overture. We stacked up the records. I sat back in my child's rocking chair. Immediately I was overwhelmed by the rich monaural sounds pouring out of the 12" speacker behind the gold and fabric grill. But the best was soon to come.

Beethoven.

Over the years there would be many discovered treasures. The Pastorale. The. Eroica. The Ninth. The Appasionata. The Emperor. The encounters with Beethoven's music would be spread out over time, but the effect was always the same. The music left me searching for words to describe something so titanic, so emotional, so true.

How to Achieve Greatness

One day, several years and several houses after the hi-fi, a piano showed up. This was how it seemed to my brothers and me. Our parents would later claim they ran the idea past us, but I don't recall seriously contemplating what was suddenly about to be required: I was going to have to take piano lessons.

Truthfully, this seemed a little nerdy and what for? Neither of our parents played any kind of instrument. Sure, I liked to listen to the music on the hi-fi, but my early years of playing the piano was the furthest thing from that kind of music making. I played simplistic ditties or boring measures from the Czerny book, all of it resounding in a clanging cheap fashion on the Wurlitzer upright. To obtain such aural miseries I had to practice a half hour every day when I would rather have been reading history books or chasing horned toads in the dirt.

This was not a happy time.

Then we moved to Alaska and I finally got a better teacher who 1) had a baby grand piano which actually could be made to sound amazing during my lessons, 2) challenged me to reach a level of proficiency where I could some play music I cared about, and 3) made me meet the highest standards of technique and interpretation. I was still no Horowitz, but I now hated practice and lessons only 70% of the time instead of 100%.

For each lesson I received a grade on a scale of 100. I usually made a low 90. After so many lessons with a cumulative score of something or other, I qualified for a prize in the form of a miniature statue of a famous composer. Actually, this wasn't particularly motivating. Especially after I acquired all the major composers. Years later I threw away almost all of these plastic blandishments. But I kept Beethoven.

Not everyone can be a Schroeder (sigh).

Looking back, I realize my piano lessons weren't all for naught. They taught me that greatness begins with practice and excellent teachers. Even someone with the genius of Beethoven did not form himself without help.

I learned from the bicentennial book that as a child, Ludwig studied for two weeks with the mighty Mozart. Soon after that he had a year of lessons with the great Franz Joseph Haydn. After that he studied with other notables in Vienna who at the time were considered the very best. By his teachers Beethoven was challenged and he was encouraged. This is what good teachers do. The rest, of course, is up to the pupil. Does he or she have that mysterious quality that we think of as a "gift" or "talent"? Will he or she make the most of it?

The answer for me was no and no. But by the end of the my piano lessons I could limp through Fur Elise and I could play with feeling and satisfaction the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Sometimes if you can't be great yourself, you have to settle for touching the hem of the garment.

Mercurial Personality
By the time he was in his early 30's Beethoven knew that he had a reputation for something besides being an incomparably gifted composer and performer. In 1802 he inked out the so-called "Heiligenstadt Testament" and he dealt directly with the issue of his terrible interpersonal relationships.

To those who saw the side of him  that seemed (in his own words)"quarrelsome, peevish or misanthropic" Beethoven wanted them to know that this wasn't the real him. Inside was a tender man with nothing but outpourings of affection for humanity. Why did he come off as such a jerk in person? There was a "secret reason why I seem to you to be so," he wrote.  Beethoven went on to reveal that for the past 6 years he had suffered from an incurable condition. It caused him to withdraw in an effort to disguise his disability. He described his life as a "miserable existence." Of course, all us know what he strove to keep secret in the early years of his life. The composer was going deaf.



First pages of Heiligenstadt Testament

The ensuing years brought more masterpieces, but no improvement in Beethoven's disposition. In 1825 he received a letter from a copyist he had been working with and whom he had criticized for performing his work poorly. This man, Ferdinand Wolanek, decided to return the scores and withdraw from the assignment after Beethoven called him a "Bohemian blockhead." In his letter to Beethoven, Wolanek defended his professionalism and stated, in essence, that Beethoven was impossible to work with.

Beethoven's reaction was to place a giant X across the front of the letter and write in large letters: "Stupid, conceited ass of a fellow!"

That wasn't enough. Beethoven scribbled over the margins of the letter: "So I am to exchange compliments with such a scoundrel who steals my money. Instead I should pull his ass's ears." He flipped over the letter and wrote still more invective on the back. In today's parlance, Beethoven went ballistic.

Beethoven answers his mail

Don't Roll Over Beethoven
As fascinating as the lives of artists tend to be, especially ones like Beethoven who struggled against afflictions and adversity, in the end I have to admit that the personality is not all that important. The main thing is the notes in the air or the paint on the canvas or the words on the page--how they impact my body, mind and soul.

Recently I've been reading a book that makes this point. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee (with photos by Walker Evans) Agee recounts how he and Evans went down to Alabama during the depths of the Great Depression and lived among poor white sharecroppers for one month in the summer. Their plan was call to America's attention the plight of these ignored and ragged people and their children by using a combination of striking black and white photos and exquisitely poetic prose.

Agee was particularly concerned that the resulting book might be wrongly received as an aesthetic object. He worried that people would thus sidestep the real purpose of the book which was to do justice to the people who were the subject of it and then move the reader to relieve their distress.

Early in the book Agee states that a disillusioning attainment to the level of "art" is what habitually happens to the best creative human expression. What starts out as what Agee calls "fury," something "dangerous" to our conventionality and pre-conceived ideas, is taken over by others and tamed. It is officially accepted, hung on the walls of a museum, it is played in the concert hall, it is studied in school. Agee calls this "castration."

Agee turns to Beethoven as an example. He suggests that if one wishes to get back to what the composer intended, he should take a recording of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, turn it up as loudly as possible, get down on the floor, and put his ear next to the speaker and stay there, completely concentrated on listening.

"Is what you hear pretty? or beautiful? or legal? or acceptable in polite or any other society? It is beyond any calculation savage and dangerous and murderous to all equilibrium in human life as human life is..."

I think that starts to get at it. Those are some of the words I couldn't find to describe what I was feeling all those years ago and, indeed, still feel today whenever I listen to Beethoven. Music like his changes how I receive and think about life. Beethoven in my ears leads me through a world that is simultaneously more beautiful and tragic than I normally recognize.

Surely, he has this effect on others, although not everyone, of course. In that way, Beethoven is a bit like religion. Only the faithful can believe in his version of heaven or his hell. Yet Beethoven does not need to proselytize with missionaries or priests or use manipulations by emperors or kings to win adherents to his "church." For more than two hundred years his music has gone out and found those who have ears prepared to hear.

For those the music chooses, the result is absolute devotion, an urgent wish to hear more, so they can feel connected to something larger that this "deaf" man heard more loudly than the rest of us ever have.

"Anyone who understands my music will never be unhappy again," Beethoven is reported to have said at one point. All these years later I think that's the one of the most intriguing claims I've ever heard and it's reason enough for me to keep on listening, keep on trying to understand. - V.W.

PS: Also, historically important, today is my wife's birthday. Happy birthday, darling! How lucky you are to share a birthday with Ludwig!

PPS: For anyone who is wondering, "eroica" is Italian for "heroic" and it is the title Beethoven gave to his Third Symphony.

.

Never Mind the Jackson Pollocks, The Abstract Expressionists Were Here

While we were out of town and staying in a different locale for a few days I decided to pass some time by strolling behind our lodgings to see what might be available to photograph. At first it didn't look promising.

There was a wooden deck and a barbecue grill. Beyond that, the most interesting trees were stripped of their autumn color. True, someone had hung a rusted, valveless coronet from a branch, but as photogenic as this venerable musical instrument sounds, every way I framed it turned out unsatisfying. I might as well have been photographing a giant paperclip.

I lowered my view. I started looking at the ground which was covered with the following:

                           - Leaves
                           - Twigs
                           - Acorns
                           - Deer droppings
                           - Rocks

Hmm. Interesting. I bent lower. The camera shutter began making the satisfying ka-chik sound. At that moment an odd thought occurred to me about nature. On this day and in this place it looked like modern art.

The Importance of Being Wilde: A Brief Digression

In "The Decay of Lying," an 1889 essay cast in the form of a humorous dialogue between two slightly bored young gentlemen (Vivian and Cyril), Oscar Wilde offers to the world his, at the time, revolutionary views on art. Using Vivian as his mouthpiece, Wilde contends for the absolute superiority of art over every form of reality. He's tired of people saying, "Oh, that's just art," as if art in all its forms is a harmless and not particularly useful child's play or mere ornamentation.

Wilde claims (through Vivian) that art is so powerful that it influences life and how we live. And he contends for an ideal vision of life that art can give us to compensate for the "defective" offerings of nature, about which Vivian loudly complains:

"But Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects. Why, even Morris's poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature can...[but] I don't complain. If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air."

Haven't you noticed all
the Turner sunsets lately?

According to Wilde, art does even more than turn out nice William Morris chairs or lovely houses. He says that nature is actually influenced by art and improves itself thereby. How so? How can a sunset be affected by a painter, for example? Because, as Wilde points out, we only know nature through our senses and perceptions and these can be shaped and informed by art.

Vivian/Wilde considers the case of the English artist J. M. W. Turner, renowned for his blasts of chrome yellow and orange over a maritime horizon. Vivian says that Turner sunsets are everywhere in nature these days. However, before Turner painted his sunsets, no one ever saw one.

Vivian makes a similar pronouncement about fog, a favorite subject of impressionist painters who were then the rage.

"At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them."

The principle is not so hard to understand. If we encounter something in art, we may start to notice it outside of art. It might be a certain way a garden of flowers reminds me of a Renoir. Or I watch Jersey Shore and later I see a woman in the checkout line who sounds like Snooki. Or everyone around me  starts peppering their conversation with a phrase popularized on YouTube or in a commercial. It's a paradox: Life and nature imitate art, Wilde says, not the other way around.

Enter the Abstract Expressionists
Until I went looking for subjects for my photos it had never occurred to me that modern art, especially the ultra-famous group called the "abstract expressionists," could prove the truth of Oscar Wilde's insight. These men, and a few women, who painted in the 1950s and 1960s were known for finding ways of applying paint to canvases so that it resembled nothing recognizable, much less the beauties of nature.

Rothko painting


Those who were dismissive of this school of painting, including the general public, were quick to fault it for its nonfigurative aspect. They said the painter had created in a random fashion and even a child could do that...or an elephant holding a paintbrush in its trunk! Please tell us, just what is that red Rothko supposed to resemble? 

Mark Rothko had his own justification for painting something that did not look like anything recognizable. He was painting an emotion.

"...the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point."

But a strange thing was happening to me during my photo shoot. Rothko was right, but at the same time he was wrong. Yes, much of the work of abstract expressionism was emotional, I'd always granted that, but for the first time it seemed to me that these paintings might have something to do with nature as well...because just as Oscar Wilde contended, nature had set out to imitate art.

No filtering or Photoshopping was required. As I strolled around the property I could clearly see the phenomenon through my viewfinder.

It was crazy, but the camera didn't lie.  Nature had "conspired" to look like an abstract expressionist painting.

Example No. 1
I was looking at this propane tank outside the house.


It's fairly nondescript until one goes in close and seeks out
Nature's "imitation" of abstract art.



Mark Tobey painting

Propane tank moss streaks

Example No. 2:
The bark on the trees was interesting. It seemed to be unwinding itself from the tree trunk and in some cases it hung down like a beard.




Barnett Newman painting

  If I zoomed in on the bark, I saw this...

Example No. 3:
The rocks in this area are pockmarked limestone. They resemble solidified sponges or frozen gray sea anemones.

Of course, one can collect rocks and build a wall and end up with something like this...

Jane Frank painting

Or it might look like this...

Or here's the same wall zoomed in...

Example No. 4:
The most famous of the abstract expressionist is Jackson Pollock, called by his detractors "Jack the Dripper." Pollack laid out a large canvas on the floor of a garage converted to studio and he flung and rained down paint as he moved around the painting in progress, being careful not to step into the wet paint, of course.

Jackson Pollock painting

I tipped my head to the ground and noticed the way the leaves and twigs had covered a backdrop of dark earth.

"Outdoor Floor No. 1"-  Action Painting by Mother Nature

My Favorite Photos:
At this point I was seeing the "abstract" almost everywhere. Nature didn't conform to plans, designs. It was wild and free and energetic. I no longer needed an analogue from the world of modern art to discover, frame, and shoot nature's explosive expression.

Thrilling Conclusion
At the end of the day, as the sun set (behind the hills so I could not be sure if it was a Turner sunset or not), I was left with the powerful realization that without art I'm less aware and, therefore, less alive. If I had never seen an abstract painting, my photo shoot might have ended in minutes with me grumping, "Nothing to take a picture of here!" Instead, art had opened my eyes.

The point of art isn't to fetishize it and hang it on a wall and worship it or oo! and ah! at it in the museum. The value of art is that it gives me a way to see more deeply into the everyday world. It helps me realize that I'm surrounded by wonders and it leads me to override my habit of shrugging my shoulders and failing to notice any of it.

At its best, art helps wake up ol' Rip V.W. to another kind of "news," the kind that's surely worth being awake for. I must try to step lightly from now on because, believe it or not, for as long as I reside on Planet Earth, I seem to be walking on art. - V.W.


.

Review of Bare Naked Books

In my house I'm surrounded by books.

Stacks of them stalagmite the floor. Bookcases assert themselves from the walls in four different rooms. When I go to sleep, books keep watch on nightstands.

The other day I’m sitting in the room we call the library which also includes a flat screen TV, a DVD player, and a replica 1930s radio. I guess it's the media room, but library is easier and more satisfying to say.

I look at the books on my shelves and I think to myself, "You know what? You guys could use a makeover."

So I did it.

How to Arrange Books

Before I got out the step ladder and started moving things around, I decided to seek seek some help from experts. A bit of googled investigation turned up this advice.

- Put books of a common size together

- Align the books and don't shove them all the way to the back

- Keep books off shelf edge which makes them resemble cliff divers
- Mix in some horizontal stacks of books

- Place the larger volumes on lower shelves

- Leave some open spaces between book rows and fill with art objects

As tried out these tips I was in a sort of on-task bliss. Over the next few hours I was handling some of the things I valued most, including books going back to my childhood. All of them had given me hours of pleasure and often life-changing illumination. I was handling old friends like Catch 22, Anna Karenina, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath. And I was getting somewhere because visually things looked neater, but still—

That’s when I found one more tip.

-Remove dust jackets, let the books bask in their cloth glory

Hmm, I had not thought of that. Aren’t book spines rather boring? But at that point it became another excuse to prolong what had become an entire afternoon “off’ in which I was going up and down the ladder, pulling down books, temporarily stacking them on the floor, thumbing a few and reading at random.

I began carefully taking off the dust jackets. (Note: Brits like to call them "wrappers.") I did this for all the books except some that were the most collectible or were former library copies and their dust jackets were glued onto what they call in the business “boards.” This led to a discovery.

Dazzle the Eye of the Beholder

With dust jackets removed, the garish glare of the typically glossy cover went away,  presenting the shelves with a new subdued library-like effect. But there was something else that happened on a regular basis. Most books au naturel were beautiful. Rich gold or silver lettering graced the spine. Wonderful soft blue, green, or black cloth submitted to my respectful finger touch.

In the case of series in which the covers were rather pedestrian and faded to boot, the differences were night and day.

For example, my James Bond matched set had been wrapped in a cheesy, loud, Miami pastel color palette. Stripped down to their essence, the books boldly declared a 007 evening attire gravitas with black spines and gold lettering. Ian Flemming looked as if he had produced a collection of Shakespeare plays.

Civil War historian Bruce Catton’s three-volume set on the Army of the Potomac, a work that had fired off the cannon of my historical imagination when I was a tween, went from bland and blah dust jackets to a stiffly proud, regimented red and black presentation.

Some of my Hemingway collection now “popped,” especially the Caribbean green of Islands in the Stream and the recent posthumous release, Under Kilimanjaro with its copper designs on the spine.

I fell in love with how Nathaniel West’s and William Faulkner’s final novels declared “must read me” in columns of red.

Bird Lives!, the wonderful bio of Charlie Parker that reads like the greatest novel ever written about jazz (and served as the basis for Clintwood’s fine 1988 film Bird) revealed a surprise. The book's artistry went beyond the jazzy typeface on the spine to offer something on the cover. A gold saxophone player lurking beneath the dust jacket. All this time I had no idea.

Tom Wolfe’s collection of ground breaking "New Journalism" winked at me with it’s mega-title abbreviated on the front: TKKTFSB – The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby.

Isak’s Dineson’s collection of Africa stories shared a delicate line drawing.

Isak Dineson offered another surprise. The spine of my 1938 early (first?) edition of Out of Africa is elegant...

...but I also have a gorgeous facsimile dust jacket to go with it, obtained from a wonderful source who goes into private libraries and makes high resolution scans of classic dust jackets, then sells them wrapped in protective mylar for $22 each.

Then there’s a number of books I wouldn’t consider removing the dust jacket from. These  New Directions books from the 1950s are ones whose cover design was done by the famous Alvin Lustig. In the Lustig style, they're lean and graphically arresting.

Rating

My books are tangible, caressable evidence that with some things in life what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. It’s a matter of probing beneath the surface. If you really want to know something or somebody better, stay there long enough to establish a mutually trusting relationship until they're ready to slip into something more comfortable. Less is indeed more.

Bare naked we come into the world and bare naked bears cultivation in all aspects of my day-to-day life. As for books, I will continue to haunt garage sales and library clearances or even splurge at my local purveyor of same. I won't resist picking up a hardback from time to time, used or new, because at their best they offer a weighty surprise that cannot be replicated by any eBook known to humankind. Such sweet eye candy will always merit four stars. **** - V.W.

Bonus Bibliophile Goes to the Movies Feature: Here's a shout-out for possibly the best documentary film ever made about the love of books, even a mania for books and their attendant pleasures. It's Stone Reader by Mark Moskowitz (2004). My favorite scene: Moskowitz pans the camera over the books on his shelves and gives voiceover commentary about his favorites.


.

8 Things to Do (When You're Not Watching Football)

She’s 35 years old, brunette, petite, still maintains the cheerleader figure that belonged to her in high school because five days a week she jogs around the neighborhood. She’s smart, too, has an M.A. in Psych, although at present she’s not a practicing counselor which enables her to stay at home with her three- and five-year-old. 

So how is it an intelligent, fit woman finds herself bumping around the house like some kind of displaced person, just her and the kids, for great swaths of Sunday and Saturday afternoons and into the evening? How is it when she relates to her man during these times she’s like some throwback version of ultra feminine person, walking on soft feet and bringing to him in the Royal TV Den a refilled bowl of chips or a fresh foamy beer, all of it presented with a lovely smile which he doesn't even notice?

The explanation is simple. It’s football season. She’s become a Football Widow.



Hut! Hut! - Game Day 

And throughout the house there resounds from time to time the husband’s guttural outbursts of Yes! and Man! and Stinking, lousy! and Oh my I don’t believe this! and Did you see that? and Hurry up with the replay! and Just throw it! and Not up the middle again! and Go for it! Go for it!

How did she not notice before the wedding?

It’s not like she doesn’t understand football. When she was a cheerleader she dated a nickelback. (Of course, the guy had great hands, but his kissing? Left something to be desired.) Then she met her beloved. She knew he liked football, but something happened after they got married and bought the 52-inch screen.

He pats the couch space beside him and invites her to join in, but she just can’t do it. She understands his desire to see 22-men at a time strive for perfection as they struggle mightily against gravity and their own and other bodies and they collide at high speed and also there's the drama of not knowing how it will turn out.

For sixty minutes each game is so much more a heightened reality than anything he experiences at his dull place of work. Still, how many times can you watch it?

I Go Over to the Other Side

This season, as a result of being Van Winkled, I’ve joined the Football Widows. My project compels me to make do without the NCAA or NFL until we reach the great end zone of Super Bowl on February 6, 2011 and then, mercifully, it will all be over.

So I’m learning some of what the Football Widows do on game day.

1 - Hang out with other women in the kitchen and make snacks for the men.

2 - Deliver snacks, return to kitchen, eat some of the snacks themselves.

3 - Talk to other women about diets.

4 - Depressed, change subject to the kids, then how much the men watch football.

5 - Go shopping together (this is another way football is good for the economy).

6 - Come home, talk about what they bought, talk about the kids and how they hope the boys don’t grow up to watch as much football as their dads and how they hope the girls don’t marry someone who watches as much football as their dad.

7 - Clean up the TV room which now looks like an apocalypse of beer bottles, beer cans, pretzel crumbs, spilled chips, every surface well salted.

This routine is about as expected and formal as the refs in striped shirts, the chain markers, the goal posts, and the big men lining up in formation. That’s why it occurred to me to shake things up a little

One More Thing To Try

Here's the thing: gender need not keep one out of the game. The Football Widows can create their own powerful collisions, their own moments of unexpected grace when arms reach in and haul in the precious prize, or racing heartbeats lead one past obstacles into the brighter light. No need to put on pads and helmets. The women can go into the living room and read poetry together.

What did I just say?

Yes, this is a radical response. Bringing up the subject of poetry is like going for it and throwing a bomb on fourth down and long at your own twenty-yard line. It’s like putting in the third string quarterback. It's like trying for a 70-yard field goal. It’s like—Well, perhaps you know what I mean. Who in America reads poetry anymore?

I for one and I think I have some pretty good reasons to do so, too.

That's why for one moment I'd like to consider a certain short poem and what it might do for the Football Widows. It’s by the late James Wright.

Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

What amazes me about Wright’s poem is its brevity. It’s only 73 words long, yet I feel like I know his people, their dreams and their sorrows. Wright accomplishes this through the use of a part of speech that can prove disastrous in less talented hands: adjectives.

But there’s no piling up flowery descriptors here. Wright’s an emotional poet, not a sentimental one. Each adjective is designed to shape the rough noun it modifies until it becomes three dimensional to us.

I notice how Wright adds a "ruptured" to "night watchman" so it's no longer just some man. I'm looking at a stooped figure who has had more than his share of losses, physical and spiritual. His being "ruptured" even as he seeks solace at the football game moves me. A similar effect is achieved by the application of adjectives elsewhere: long (beers), gray (faces), proud (fathers), starved (pullets), and (beautiful).

And there’s that wonderful adverb in the last line.

Terribly.

Was James Wright a football fan or was he on the side of the Football Widows? I’d love to hear my collection of Football Widows discuss that. And maybe after that we could read a lovely nature poem by Mary Oliver. Then it would be halftime. We could drift back into the kitchen. You know, I’m not adverse to those little meatballs with toothpicks poking through them. The longer I live, the more I realize--poetry can take on many forms. Who made those anyway? The cheerleader? Does she have a recipe she can give me? Oh, that would be great! Give me a pen, I'll write it down. - V.W.

.