Reading My Friends, #3

Welcome to Reading My Friends, Episode 3.

Here is a link to the Substack Podcast, if you want to hear the blog.

This is Lyman Grant, coming to you from the 4 Door Lounge, my backyard study in Harrisonburg, Virginia, deep in the heart of the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.

Thank you for joining me for the third installment of this little podcast.  As always, thanks to all of you have subscribed.   Notice that we do not charge for subscribing, but with the subscription, notice of new installments goes to your email. Don’t be afraid to click that button. If you do, you will never have to wonder—as I know you do—what is Lyman up to these days in his 4 Door Lounge?

Before I get started here, I need to apologize for being absent for these two or three weeks. It was February/March, and I came down with a respiratory thing (not COVID) that just would not go away, and finally when it paused, honestly, I got a little depressed and quiet and inward focused. But let’s end that today, and talk about reading another one of my friends.

I have been reading another book that has been on my shelves for a decade or more, The Importance of Elsewhere by Jerry Bradley, published in 2009 by Ink Brush Press. 

I can remember the first time I met Jerry.  Maybe it was about 15 years ago, I attended my first annual meeting of TACWT—Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers.  It is a group of writers who teach creative writing, and I would say, mostly from Texas small to mid-size colleges.  In one of the sessions, I read some poems and Jerry came up to me and ask if a particular one had been published. It had and Jerry said something like, “Damn, the good ones usually are.”  That simple compliment of my work made me a Jerry Bradley fan for life.

While reading this book, I had the strangest association popping around in my head. John Updike.  Totally nonsensical. Updike in Pennsylvania and Connecticut; Bradley in Texas and the Southwest.  Updike was Christian; Bradley seems free of religion.  So I pondered and realized I was thinking of Updike’s young narrator, Sammy, in the canonical short story, “A&P.”  Sammy is an intelligent, unsophisticated working-class kid, fascinated by women, with a wicked, sharp tongue. I hope Jerry doesn’t hate me for saying this, but the poems in this book are the kind I could see Sammy writing once he had earned his doctorate in literature at state schools. Clever, wry, sophisticated, but without losing touch with one’s natural vocabulary, critical of conventional life while still accepting one’s place in a society where sexual pleasure and mortality walk hand in hand. A first gen college student who conquered the rigors of academia but never dulled out.  These poems are funny, tender, knowing, and totally accessible to the common reader. 

Having said all this, I should emphasize that Jerry Bradley has had an exceptionally distinguished academic career.  Visit his website for confirmation. 

I have talked too much, let’s read a poem:

Burning Love

In the fifth grade while the rest of us
craved baseball and candy,
Glenn fell in love. During recess
he kissed a girl behind the trees;
she had begun to grow breasts,
though he was too young to do much about that
or them.  He was enchanted instead by her name
and wrote Sue again and again
on book covers; he daydreamed about marriage 
in history and math.  He even scratched
her name on a mesquite's skin with a fork
he swiped from his lunchroom tray.
Then in what passed for passion in those days,
he fashioned the heads of kitchen matches
into a tattoo on his wrist.

She gave off more heat than light.
Unimpressed by the blisters that
spelled her name irrevocably into a scar,
she kissed another boy on the school bus home.
Glenn cried when he heard.  He tried not to,
but he did.  First heartbreak is always sad;
still he sensed how much worse it
might have been.  Then he called himself lucky,
so lucky he hadn't fallen for Elizabeth.

Here is a second poem, very unlike our first.

Moon over Palo Duro

A hammered medallion,
the moon hangs above a place
the wind and water want back.

Night here sings of the forge,
and sounds of the anvil echo
along the canyon walls--

it plays like a stone fiddle
in a month of short days.

Just another big bang theory,
a lesson in circumference.
And see the stars, how they splinter

like sparks from the hearth?
It is where God struck his tarnished coin
before he beat the daylights out of the land.

I think this is a very cool poem.  “Cool” is an academic distinction that only retired professors of a certain age and attitude can use.  The moon, the moon, the moon, how many poems are there about the moon?  But have we ever heard it called “a hammered medallion’’?  Then that metaphor grows into myth.  The God/Vulcan and “forges” and “anvils.”  Sight and sounds clashing.  Then for me, the tension breaks with a half joke: “Just another big bang theory.” Myth and science clashing.  “Bang” shifts its meaning from hammering to exploding. Then we return to the smithing, stars sparking.  Only to arrive at bigger joke and a bigger truth “God beat the daylights out of the land.” One sentence connecting so much: God/the creator, God/the abusive father, beating/hammering, day/night, land/sky, beauty/horror.  All in just a little poem about the moon in Northwest Texas.

The Importance of Elsewhere is 77 pages, 64 poems in four sections.   The first generally focuses on the past, the poet’s middle-class life in the fifties and early sixties, I am guessing. The second section puts us on the road doing a little sight seeing. In section three we wander the dry land of West Texas and New Mexico. The fourth turns a darker jaundiced eye to the world.  After all that travel to Elsewhen and Elsewhere, we return home, where “every heart that opens / leaves a wound that never closes.”

Here's the poem with that astonishing final line:

Simple Division

this was once a field and a small forest
before the estates began to pile
and gave us something to see

now ashamed there are no trees
a woman packs a suitcase
because a new man offers roses

across a hundred households
this is the way families split
well, things that are are

and derive little benefit
from being explained
one looks for clarity

in simple promises
but every heart that opens
leaves a wound that never closes.

Thanks for listening.  I hope to see you next week. Share is you care to.