Trillin Chillin'
On days like Sunday and Monday, with the heat and humidity and general atmospheric charm of the inside of a JV basketball player's sweatsock, when midtown smells like sauteed garbage, and the heat rising from the sidewalk grates brings to mind the outer circle of hell that is a rush-hour subway car with no working a/c, it's a little hard to justify living in New York. But then, it's hard to be bored with so much to DO. With that in mind, Wordwhore and I hereby resolve to attend more bookworm-y type events around the city. To make our resolution manifest, we have added a wee little calendar to the bottom of this page, by means of which, dear reader(s?), you may track our plans.
Thus inspired, we ventured up the western coast of the little island to 82nd street. There, in the pastoral expanses of the Barnes and Noble, we sat among a sea of white and grey head to hear deadline-poet laureate Calvin Trillin read from his latest book of political verse, Obliviously On He Sails. When I say a sea of grey and white, by the way, i mean that most people present seemed to have a good 30-40 years on us. It was like being at an Episcopal church. Are we unusually young for his fan base, or is it always like this uptown? (Mr. Trillin, of course, is a stranger here himself; his Greenwich village digs, he says, are surrounded by a metaphorical white picket fence, a symbolic boundary, marking his home as an eastern annexation of Kansas City. At one point in the evening, when remarking on his habit of using footnotes in his poetry, he allied himself with another member of the Missouri diaspora: "I use footnotes sometimes. T.S. Eliot used footnotes.... T.S. Eliot and I , I guess you could think of as the Missourah School.")
One of my weaknesses as a snooty and bookish sort is how twitchy I get when confronted by poetry, particularly in the reading form. No more am I a great fan of liberal preaching to whiny choirs, although I am the kind of democracy geek who even votes in primaries. Funny poetry, on the other hand, and witty preaching, are other things entirely. Trillan read his poems in a dry tone, and seemed refreshingly immune to the worshipful salivating of the post-reading audience:
In response to the first sychophant: "Nice to have a cousin here. I'm sorry what I said about Aunt Sadie. I forgot she was your mother."
To a tired little question about whether it's "hard" to write: "I have to turn the poems in on Monday , so I set the showerhead to iambic pentameter on Sunday night."
To one of a string of political questions of the sort that seemed to imply he is oracular: "My candidate remains Ross Perot, because of the rhyming possibilities. A good iambic pentameter candidate. A little buggy, but a great name."
Calvin Trillan is a great hero of mine, more for the combination of boyish enthusiasm and tongue-in-cheek description that characterizes his essays than for his poetry, which is the kind of candy I prefer in small doses. Still, while they can't touch the beauty of his recent New Yorker essay about his late wife, Alice, the poems -- particularly when read aloud -- have the charm of Ogden Nash and the bittersweet wit of H.L. Mencken. Plus, it's fun to get to call the war-mongering draft-dodgers populating Capitol Hill these days "sissy hawks."
Thus inspired, we ventured up the western coast of the little island to 82nd street. There, in the pastoral expanses of the Barnes and Noble, we sat among a sea of white and grey head to hear deadline-poet laureate Calvin Trillin read from his latest book of political verse, Obliviously On He Sails. When I say a sea of grey and white, by the way, i mean that most people present seemed to have a good 30-40 years on us. It was like being at an Episcopal church. Are we unusually young for his fan base, or is it always like this uptown? (Mr. Trillin, of course, is a stranger here himself; his Greenwich village digs, he says, are surrounded by a metaphorical white picket fence, a symbolic boundary, marking his home as an eastern annexation of Kansas City. At one point in the evening, when remarking on his habit of using footnotes in his poetry, he allied himself with another member of the Missouri diaspora: "I use footnotes sometimes. T.S. Eliot used footnotes.... T.S. Eliot and I , I guess you could think of as the Missourah School.")
One of my weaknesses as a snooty and bookish sort is how twitchy I get when confronted by poetry, particularly in the reading form. No more am I a great fan of liberal preaching to whiny choirs, although I am the kind of democracy geek who even votes in primaries. Funny poetry, on the other hand, and witty preaching, are other things entirely. Trillan read his poems in a dry tone, and seemed refreshingly immune to the worshipful salivating of the post-reading audience:
In response to the first sychophant: "Nice to have a cousin here. I'm sorry what I said about Aunt Sadie. I forgot she was your mother."
To a tired little question about whether it's "hard" to write: "I have to turn the poems in on Monday , so I set the showerhead to iambic pentameter on Sunday night."
To one of a string of political questions of the sort that seemed to imply he is oracular: "My candidate remains Ross Perot, because of the rhyming possibilities. A good iambic pentameter candidate. A little buggy, but a great name."
Calvin Trillan is a great hero of mine, more for the combination of boyish enthusiasm and tongue-in-cheek description that characterizes his essays than for his poetry, which is the kind of candy I prefer in small doses. Still, while they can't touch the beauty of his recent New Yorker essay about his late wife, Alice, the poems -- particularly when read aloud -- have the charm of Ogden Nash and the bittersweet wit of H.L. Mencken. Plus, it's fun to get to call the war-mongering draft-dodgers populating Capitol Hill these days "sissy hawks."
posted by Tedious Relation at 5:31 PM
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