In Memoriam
Poetry give us words when all we have inside are confused emotions. Sometimes the words have nothing to do with our situation, but they are words of feeling, and somehow the recitation of them is comforting. We are not alone. Someone else has known fear and loss and confusion. There is a common bond of shared humanity, a warm hand in the cold night, the wetness of another’s tears on our cheek.
David Rakoff died on August 9th. He was a great poet, raconteur and and darkly humorous essayist. Fans of This American Life have certainly heard him, and Ira Glass devoted last week’s show entirely to him.. I've one of his books of essays upstairs on Mount Toberead. I bought it for its title alone, or rather its subtitle. Don't Get Too Comfortable is subtitled "The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems." How can any reader resist?
David was 47 when he died of cancer in Manhattan. The following poem is not his own, it's by Elizabeth Bishop. It was something he would recite to himself while the MRI machine monitored the response of his tumor to the therapy. As he wrote in Oprah magazine, There is solace in the poem's portrait of New York City, my home for close to three decades. It's a New York not just of my healthier but of my younger self. And it's nice to think of it all still being there, waiting for me, just as soon as I get up and walk out of this room.
Letter to N.Y. (for Louise Craine)
In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:
taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,
and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,
and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,
and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.
-Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.
-Elizabeth Bishop
David Rakoff died on August 9th. He was a great poet, raconteur and and darkly humorous essayist. Fans of This American Life have certainly heard him, and Ira Glass devoted last week’s show entirely to him.. I've one of his books of essays upstairs on Mount Toberead. I bought it for its title alone, or rather its subtitle. Don't Get Too Comfortable is subtitled "The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems." How can any reader resist?
David was 47 when he died of cancer in Manhattan. The following poem is not his own, it's by Elizabeth Bishop. It was something he would recite to himself while the MRI machine monitored the response of his tumor to the therapy. As he wrote in Oprah magazine, There is solace in the poem's portrait of New York City, my home for close to three decades. It's a New York not just of my healthier but of my younger self. And it's nice to think of it all still being there, waiting for me, just as soon as I get up and walk out of this room.
Letter to N.Y. (for Louise Craine)
In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:
taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,
and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,
and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,
and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.
-Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.
-Elizabeth Bishop