Endless Knots

"A collaboration of the self I am with the self I was"

Last night, our friends at Karma hosted Freddy Frankel as he read from In a Stone's Hollow (Fairweather, 2007).

After retiring as head of psychiatry at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital a dozen years ago, Freddy studied poetry, joined a writers workshop, and started writing poems, many drawn from notes he'd made as a young man fighting the Nazis. (He'd left medical school to volunteer to serve in the South African Army, lying about his age to get in.) The poems resulting from opening his wartime notebook again sixty years later "reflect a collaboration of the self I am with the self I was."

In less than an hour, this fine poet imparted a comprehensive history of South Africa, relayed his own journey from his homeland to Boston, and held a packed room motionless as he read...except for when we were crying.

It's become a custom to shout a slogan at the end of Freddy's readings: "Freddy rocks!" He does. At 84 and no doubt he will at 104. He told me that he'd just seen a show of 18 portraits of "super-centenarians" - people over 110, one of whom finished his Ph.D. at 106!

Here's one poem (in the language of poetry, a villanelle) that I loved:

15 March 1945

The Appenines

Should God have quit Creation on day five,
those birds, those waters spellbound in the bay!
Men hunting men in mountains to survive

we ask for mercy as we run, shrivel
under cover while bullets ricochet.
Should God have quite Creation on day five--

day six He made a man, so sure he'd thrive;
now look, we bag torn body parts each day,
men hunting men in mountains to survive!

Some luckless soldiers won't get out alive,
still young they'll change back to dirt and clay.
Should God have quite Creation on day five.

In he widespread killing, the snowfall driven,
peace drags, sinking on its unploughed way--
men hunting men in mountains to survive

under this hell's dome. I've panicked and I've
embraced Him, cursed Him for this blood-iron fray.
Should God have quit Creation on day five,
men hunting men in mountains to survive.

Mother and Daughter Pastan, reading, together

My friend Meg emailed last week: "Wondering—I know this is last-minute—if you’d be interested in going to hear Linda Pastan read on Monday night at Blacksmith House. She’s a kick-butt poet and is reading with her daughter, Rachel, whose novel came out (with great reviews) last year."

Truth: I'd never heard of either of them and this is shameful, as I learned last night. What talents. Rachel read first from her new novel, Lady of the Snakes, which begins with Jane, a Russian literature scholar, in labor with her first child. Linda, author of many books of poetry and former Poet Laureate of Maryland, followed with complementary readings -- first from Queen of a Rainy Country and then from her other works, including a new manuscript -- about giving birth to Rachel, about family, about the window to the future closing (not precisely the words).

These were readings where (this doesn't always happen) the mind sparked, the heart beat a little faster than is comfortable, and where eyes leaked as words pulled together, sentences completed themselves, whole paragraphs took shape, and, when I left, an entire piece was ready to be written. Inspirational, motivational, and a strong reminder of how much we all have to say.

Thank you, Linda, Rachel, and Meg.

"The studio of my mind"

She lived for thirteen years after tests confirmed ovarian cancer, which she intuited long before that.  She opened her sealed orders early, knew she was meant to dance, which she did until two days before she died on April 6, 2007.

Last night, two hundred members of Dorothy Hershkowitz's family celebrated her life. Sweet nibbles to welcome guests and then the curtain.

A forty-minute film that Dorothy narrates, a dance biography, with Dorothy looking to the filmmaker, Lynn Bikofsky, and talking to us. Dance has been her "best friend," she says (at her funeral last April, the cantor recalled her saying that dance was her "conversation with God"). When things have been difficult, which they often were (we remember), she goes to her studio or at least "the studio of my mind." Dance is where she works out life, realizes emotion, travels through space. We see clips of her as a very young dancer, and, remarkably, pieces of her major early works, Kaddish, which she choreographed and performed shortly after her father's death (I made seafood lasagna for the cast party), and Monday Morning Quarterback, inspired by an incident where she had to step over a drunk in a subway turnstile. She is still dancing at the end of the film: she had to repeat a take 30 times, 30, when she performs in the halls, not the auditorium, of Dana Farber Cancer Institute, because people keep walking into frame, the background narration a lab technician saying "some people enjoy this test, find it relaxing," as Dorothy throws her body, just a few months before her death, from wall to wall with the knocks of the MRI. And then her teaching one of her last classes, frail, close to the end, her arms floating like no others, and the camera rests on her smile, her very beautiful smile.

People speak, beginning with the cantor, Lorel Zar-Kessler, and then many others. Poems, anecdotes, quotes from letters, a cello concert, cards, and emails Dorothy wrote, Dorothy-aware of death coming soon, her son, Alexander Bohn, recalling that she danced when she put away groceries, her students, her best friend in junior high, her cousin, all recalling a Dorothy the others recognized, and the brave tall man who said Dorothy was his icon of hope after his wife's ovarian cancer diagnosis because D had already lived seven years, (and, as it turned out, did live four years more after his wife died). Surely, as her husband, Dave Evans, has said, her incredibly strong body, all those years of movement, extended her life.

And then they danced, 15 of her students, in a piece choreographed by Joanie Block to "Smile."

Dave said the last words. Gratitude to all, composed and dignified, and very lovingly he tells of two things Dorothy said, the first a few moments after they met: "She poured out her love, meaning Alexander and Jonathan, her sons;" and her last, to the effect of: "No one should go hungry - there is no reason for that."

And then we all sang "You gotta have heart," words on the jump page here.

Repeating what I wrote when she died: Dance on, Dorothy.

A nice article in the Newton, Mass, newspaper where Dorothy lived.

Liam Rector's death

Liam Rector, the highly honored poet and founder and director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, which includes its low-residency MFA program, shot himself to death last Wednesday at his home in Greenwich Village. He was 57 (New York Times obit here by Margalit Fox, same woman who wrote Carolyn Goodman's obit).

Several of my friends teach in the Bennington program; others have been Liam's students; still others knew and respected him professionally. I only met him once and not in a situation where we had the chance to talk. He was on an accreditation visit for a prospective writing program; the executive director of the program, a dear friend, asked me to speak with Liam and a few other accreditors about why I thought the program would serve students well. I enjoyed the hour or so that I spent with him--and he made enough of an impression for me to gasp when I opened The Times last week.

Suicide is destabilizing to survivors in ways that no other type of death is. In my efforts to understand why people I have loved have ended their own lives, including my cousin, Gretchen Older, my aunt, Isabel Shoket Grossner, and our friend, Frank Aller, among others, I have written about suicide over the years. Here, I offer this 700-word excerpt about a suicide that takes place in my novel, The Persuasion.