He Put the Hop in the Lindy | Frankie Manning, the Last King of Swing
By Emily Gordon and Robert L. Fouch
Imagine this scene: In a packed ballroom, hundreds of women edge closer to the dance floor, angling for a chance with that handsome fellow with the brilliant smile, the one who moves with such power and grace. Never mind that the man is 85 years old. This is the legend of lindy, the king of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in its heyday, who danced for royalty and has sidestepped old age as he would another couple on the floor. This is Frankie Manning, and as the song begins to swing, the women clamor to be one of his 85 partners–one for each of Manning’s remarkable years.
Swing dancers, musicians and jazz and dance lovers from all over the world will descend upon Roseland Ballroom tomorrow night to celebrate the man who helped create the lindy hop–the dance Life magazine once pronounced “this country’s only native and original dance form,” which has hooked a new generation on partner dancing.
Manning, as any young swing fanatic can tell you, was a member of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a celebrated ’30s swing performance troupe that performed at Radio City, the Moulin Rouge, the Royal Albert Hall. Manning also choreographed movies of the era, including jaw-dropping scenes in “Hellzapoppin'” and the Marx Brothers’ “A Day at the Races.”
Perhaps Manning’s most famous legacy, though, is the invention of the air step–or, as it’s now called, the aerial. “You have to remember that those were the beginning days of lindy hop, that everything that was created was ours, was new,” he says. “So a person could never say, ‘That’s wrong.'” When he told Frieda Washington, his partner, “Get on my back, roll over, come down in front of me,” what was her reply? “Just think of this,” he says now, “something you’ve never seen, don’t know how to do it, your partner don’t know how to do it–and she said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ Brave girl, very brave.”
The Savoy in the ’30s was the place to dance. It was New York’s only integrated club–unlike, for instance, Roseland, where Manning and some friends were once turned away at the door. At the Savoy, “They didn’t care what color you were. All they wanted to know is, ‘Can you dance?’ … Clark Gable walked into the place and somebody’d say, ‘Hey, Clark Gable’s in the house!’ ‘Oh yeah, can he dance?'” Manning knew the legends–Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie. He played point guard for Cab Calloway’s basketball team.
Today’s swing dancers speak with awe about Manning’s career. “Frankie’s stuff is so out there,” says Janice Wilson, who teaches lindy and won the 1999 Dancesport International lindy hop championship with her partner, Paolo Lanna. “When you see the old films, all of [Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers] were phenomenal dancers, but you have a really hard time looking at anyone else.” But those days would soon end. Manning was drafted, and spent five years fighting in the South Pacific. When he came home to New York, they were playing bebop, and the lindy hop was passé.
So Manning took a job at the post office, where he stayed 30 years. He still danced–“If I wasn’t dancing, I don’t think I would be here”–and when they played rock and roll, “I learned how to do those dances, too.” It seemed that Manning, and the lindy, had had their day. But not quite. In the ’80s, rockabilly and swing bands grew out of a retro subculture. Erin Stevens, co-owner of the Pasadena Ballroom Dance Association, and her dance partner, Steven Mitchell, set out to track down the finer points and pioneers of lindy hop. They had the old films but, Stevens says, “we didn’t have any names”–African-American dancers and choreographers at the time often weren’t credited.
Finally, they came across Manning’s name, and found him in Corona, Queens. He eventually agreed to teach them, and thus, says Stevens, “we learned the heart, the soul, the feeling, the basics, from Frankie Manning.” It wasn’t long before Manning was coaxed out of his living room and into the studios. For Manning, swing is as much about socializing as it is about dancing, and now, he says, “People want to get back together again, they want to be friends, they want to talk to each other.” And that’s what Manning preaches: affection and respect. “A lot of times if I get a class of beginners … I say, ‘OK, now you’re going to have to put your arms around the lady.’ For some ungodly reason, they are very reluctant. I say, ‘Fellows, touch the girl, she doesn’t mind. Do you mind, ladies? No. See there?'” He always tells them: “Make sure you treat her as if she’s the queen, and you’re just a jester in her court.”
Given that their teacher has 71 years of dancing experience, his students tend to listen. Manu Smith, webmaster of yehoodi.com, New York’s central swing website, says, “You look at Frankie and you think to yourself, OK, you’re teaching us this step. You might have invented it. When you look at Frankie, he is lindy hop … You feel honored to be corrected on a step by Frankie.” Manning seems to breathe the dance, as another student, Katherine Lewis, puts it. “Instead of counting out the steps the way other teachers do, he just scats. ‘Be-dop-a-oody-ah-be-doby-yonk-ah!’–and you’re like, oh, that’s it! All of a sudden, you feel it in your body.”
For his part, as is obvious from Manning’s gigantic grin when he watches his students, the swing revival has given as much to him as he has given to it. “I see some of these young kids get out on the floor, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re doing, but I see something that I say, ‘Oh, wow. Yeah, I can do something with that.’ … They’re creating also, just like when I was young.” Some of modern lindy hop’s best will be performing at tomorrow’s birthday bash–dancers from Sweden, London, Singapore, California and New York. Manning chose the bands: Grover Mitchell’s Count Basie Orchestra and George Gee and His Make-Believe Ballroom Orchestra–“That’s one of the swingingest bands in the land,” Manning says. His old friend Buster Brown will tap dance. More than 100 couples will dance the Lindy Chorus, a routine Manning choreographed.
Lindy-hop teacher Laura Jeffers is counting on being in the lucky 85. “He has this dance in him. You can watch him and listen to him talk about it, but you can get so much of the dance from just being near him. He is the most goodwilled person I have ever met in my entire life, about people and the world–aside from everything else. It’s like a gift.”
–Published in Newsday: May 25, 1999

Reviews:
Poetry Without Pain: National Poetry Month roundup (Newsday)
How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love With Poetry, by Edward Hirsch
How to Read a Poem…And Start a Poetry Circle, by Molly Peacock
A Grain of Poetry: How to Read Contemporary Poems and Make Them Part of Your Life, by Herbert Kohl
Poetry Anthologies After September 11 (Newsday)
Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, ed. Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians
110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, ed. Ulrich Baer
Poems of New York, ed. Elizabeth Schmidt
Speaking From Memory (Newsday)
Handwriting: Poems, by Michael Ondaatje
Above an Abyss (The Nation)
Meadowlands, by Louise Glück
Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, by Jane Kenyon
Pollitt, Poet (The Nation)
The Mind-Body Problem: Poems, by Katha Pollitt
Obituaries:
Ted Hughes (Newsday)
Iris Murdoch (Newsday)

Poetry Without Pain | Averse to verse? Good! For National Poetry Month, here are three books to stir the stanza lover in you.
By Emily Gordon
HOW TO READ A POEM: And Fall in Love With Poetry, by Edward Hirsch. Harcourt Brace, 352 pp., $23.
HOW TO READ A POEM…And Start a Poetry Circle, by Molly Peacock. Riverhead, 209 pp., $22.95.
A GRAIN OF POETRY: How to Read Contemporary Poems and Make Them Part of Your Life, by Herbert Kohl. HarperCollins, 175 pp., $23.
Otherwise sensible people are always going around saying they don’t like poetry. Not “Emily Dickinson perplexes me” or “haikus give me the heebie-jeebies”; nope, they tried it, and it didn’t agree with them. “It’s just not my thing,” they say with inexplicable pride, as though staking a claim for verbal democracy. Often, these are folks who savor words and delight in the pleasures of reading. Yet somehow they can justify dismissing a whole genre of literature, which spans thousands of years and countless phases of human creativity, out of hand. You don’t hear anyone declaring that they’ve never really seen the point of paintings, or “This Gustav Mahler–why doesn’t he just come out and say what he means?” So why is poetry so scary?
For one thing, it’s being taught that way. A generation or two ago, poets were literary figures who would be on the final exam; learning poems, often by heart, was a standard feature of public education all through school. While this hardly guaranteed appreciation, hearing poetry and speaking it aloud repeatedly meant that, for many students of those eras, the words could and would come back to them at unexpected–sometimes desperate or rapturous–moments or even decades later. Accustomed to poems, people worked them into their heads, and because the words themselves were musical and had meaning, the poems stuck there.
These days, on the other hand, the dread Poetry Unit tends to be administered during a few weeks of high school English as a painful but necessary dose, like a vaccination, or presented as an awesomely intricate equation to be broken down with stern, deadly precision. When poetry is snipped from the fabric of basic learning and, hence, daily life, what gets lost is not only the passion of the person who created the thing, but the idea that it can produce passion (or pensive reflection, or sudden epiphany, or sharpened observation) in the reader, too.
Nevertheless, among the cute cameos of public-transportation verse, Shoebox doggerel and, of course, Jewel, there’s the poetry that considerable numbers of people write in private and, in some cases, even publish. The annual “Poet’s Market” adds scores of entries for poetry journals to each new edition; graduate poetry-writing programs are multiplying; spoken-word poetry had a big commercial revival after years of urban-fringe momentum; Dylan (Bob), Morrison and Cobain are in lots of people’s canon; current poet laureate Robert Pinsky–a frequent charismatic presence on radio and quoted even more frequently than Joyce Carol Oates–is something of a rock star himself.
And yet poetry largely remains a public embarrassment, a disagreeable chore, for even the most avid literary enthusiasts–as everything from the threadbare state of most poetry organizations to dwindling NEA grants for poets to the dearth of poems in major magazines vividly attest. Not to mention that assorted cranks make a biennial announcement of the Death of Poetry, to wit: MFA programs are the work of Satan, and the Only Authentic Voices Are Out There on The Mean Streets Outside the Ivory Tower, Man. No wonder, then, that in this last National Poetry Month of the 1900s, writers are attempting to reconcile the steadfast poetic impulse in the human spirit and the icky, panicked feeling it seems to produce in so many.
Toward that end, two poets, Edward Hirsch and Molly Peacock, have published books titled “How to Read a Poem.” Peacock–author of four books of poetry and a memoir–takes the hand-holding route; her aim, as stated in her subtitle, “…and Start a Poetry Circle,” is to coax readers toward feeling comfortable, and then release them into the world. She takes 12 poems by both classic (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Li Ch’ing-chao) and contemporary writers (herself included)–each on a different theme–and discusses them in turn, examining everything from the poet’s likely state of mind to the poem’s formal makeup.
Hirsch’s book, with the less imperative subtitle “And Fall in Love With Poetry,” nonetheless has similar goals; the essays that make up the book are, like Peacock’s, organized around larger ideas: initiations, Polish poets, desolation, form. Instead of addressing one or two poems per chapter, though, Hirsch (who also has four poetry books to his credit) uses numerous excerpts to explain each point, which makes for a denser, more meditative and considerably longer narrative.
Hirsch’s mission reflects that of the poets he most admires, to whom he defers with exuberant conviction: “I am completely taken by the way that Whitman always addresses the reader as an equal, as one who has the same strange throb of life he has, the same pulsing emotions.” Or, quoting Paul Valéry: “A poet’s function–do not be startled by this remark–is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” Throughout Hirsh’s tour of the rhythms, layers, contradictions, history and personalities of the poetry available to us in English, he turns “the poetic state” inside out, offering it to us carefully and considerately. His critical views are assured and emphatic–he remarks that Christopher Smart “was the least jaded of poets…. I believe he believed everything he said. He would not be dissuaded from saying it, either, though his testimony imperiled him and put him on the far margins of society”–yet he also leads us deliberately enough through them, line by line, that we stay with him all the way to their conclusion.
In short, reading Hirsh’s “How to Read a Poem” is like a very long evening with a learned and perceptive friend who keeps leaping up to his bookshelf for more and better illustrations, and finding ever more connections and revelations. Whereas–to return to the other guidebook of the same name–Peacock’s chumminess comes across as forced. Comparing two poems about fathers, one by Yusef Komunyakaa, the other by Michael Ondaatje, Peacock writes:
“But why am I assuming that these writers are writing about their own fathers? Couldn’t it all be fiction? I make the assumption because of the pure electricity of the currents of emotions in the poems and because poets (even fiction writers who are poets) write poetry because they are pointing to emotional or spiritual or intellectual truths through language–through letters–and not through plot or character development or the course of ongoing prose. Perhaps I am hopelessly over-identified with these poems because of my own father. I feel free to be openly subjective at the same time as I spy the grammatical and musical structures that underpin–or overthrow–my whirligigs of interpretation.”
Twelve such indulgent whirligigs end up being more exhausting than Hirsh’s much lengthier reflections. Still, as a first introduction to the impulses and architecture of poetry, Peacock’s “How to Read a Poem” could be illuminating for fledgling poetry circles, particularly if they use her last chapter (which plugs the National Network of Poetry Circles) as a handbook.
Finally, Herbert Kohl’s “A Grain of Poetry”–which puts the how-to part second–demonstrates brilliantly that it doesn’t always take a poet to teach poetry. Kohl, a “teacher-educator,” writes in a direct style that, while simpler, is no less lyrical than Hirsch’s. “Expectations of what poetry has to sound like or talk about come from old school memories of rhyme and meter,” he writes. “It is easy to avoid or resist freshness in language because it can be so disorienting.” Kohl has an unusual, and affecting, way of stepping around a poem to look at it from every angle; he overturns it for inspection, then picks it up and puts it down next to another one, which then completely changes the look of the first.
He also has a remarkable field of vision. Here’s a sequence of excerpted poets, in a few pages of a single flowing point: George Herbert, Ron Padgett, Robert Creeley, Czeslaw Milosz, Jane Hirshfield, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Juan Delgado, Martin Espada, Sherman Alexie, Charles Simic. There’s nothing faux-inclusive about this lineup; every poem or piece of a poem clicks satisfyingly into the next, and as he reminds us, “It is a mistake to put poets in boxes and cut yourself off from poetic voices that might come from different perspectives and cultures than your own. A poet is not a preacher or a politician.” And Kohl isn’t holding any of these poems at arm’s length–he reaches right in and rearranges them, highlighting words in bold type or shuffling line breaks so that what he’s explaining will be unmistakable.
Kohl also lets poets speak for themselves, including their thoughts on their own work at some length. If Hirsch is entreating us to walk alongside him through endlessly rewarding terrain, Kohl is holding his breath: “Read it, silently at first, then out loud,” he suggests before a poem by Janice Mirikitani. “I’ll save my comments until after you have a chance to enter into the poem.” And elsewhere, he writes: “Poets have the power to merge opposites, imagine the unimaginable, break all of the usual rules of language in the service of their sentiments and dreams, and rethink the ordinary ways in which language serves us.” As Keats used to say, that’s all ye need to know.
–Published in Newsday, April 25, 1999

**A Fan’s Notes**
By Emily Gordon
“For the first, but certainly not the last, time, I began to believe that Arsenal’s moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own,” wrote Nick Hornby in “Fever Pitch,” a memoir of his obsession with his local English soccer team. At the time, this proved to be a faulty theory, but today it seems perfectly apt. Just as Arsenal captures the soccer grail – winning the league championship and the FA Cup in the same season (“an event that’s happened only six times this century,” he reports) – Hornby is scoring writerly goals with his new novel, “About a Boy” (Riverhead, $22.95). On a tour wedged into the off-season, ending just before the World Cup, Hornby stopped to talk at lunch in New York.
“About a Boy” follows Hornby’s first novel, “High Fidelity” – starring Rob, record-store owner, dumpee and maker of lists – which has become a cult favorite in both Britain and America. The new book, too, is about a 30-something guy in London; Will, though, is single and comfortably unemployed, living off the royalties from an excruciatingly well-covered Christmas jingle composed by his father in 1938.
Surely something can alleviate the dullness of an existence consisting of soccer matches on TV, movies, shopping and a top-notch stereo: “It’s a little short on soul,” as Hornby observes. Will’s got the answer: attractive single mothers, to whom he will look great after the accursed ex. Inevitably, both moms and kids soon fill Will’s life – in particular one irony-impaired man in the body of a 12-year-old boy. His name is Marcus, he’s never heard of Kurt Cobain and, once the child-phobic Will has (reluctantly) let him infiltrate his ordered world, nothing can, of course, be the same.
Much like “High Fidelity’s” Rob, Will is winsomely familiar. (As a friend of mine put it of Rob, “I don’t know if I am him or I’ve dated him.”) This is no doubt why fans feel they know, in turn, Nick Hornby. “I get letters addressed `Dear Nick,’ ” he says, riffing on the likelihood of other novelists’ receiving similar greetings (“Dear Don”? “Dear Norman”?). In person, his demeanor does little to formalize matters; with an Englishman’s healthy lack of reverence for the press, he leans forward on his elbows, simultaneously casual and intent, with bright blue eyes focused in a thoughtful, impish gaze.
Easily as amusing as his characters, Hornby also comes off as kinder and more circumspect. Since the success of “Fever Pitch,” though, he has, like Will, been able to make his own schedule. “Some of Will’s TV routines correspond very neatly to the routines of a writer,” he says, grinning. “I live a charmed life. I have a little apartment around the corner from where I live where I try to go from 10 to 6. Of course, I don’t actually write from 10 to 6.”
When he gets distracted, he walks around Highbury, his North London neighborhood, which is full of “perfect writing material” (not to mention the Arsenal grounds). “When I can’t write I go to the record shop; I’ve made friends with the guy who works there. He told me he wanted to put the jacket for “High Fidelity” up against the register with a sign: `Yes, I’ve read it!’ He used to give me a 10 percent discount, but when the news that I sold my first film rights came out, he rescinded it.” (These days, Hornby likes pop bands from Ben Folds Five to Radiohead.)
Though Hornby’s life does overlap with Will’s, 12-year-old boys are not a regular feature (his own son is 4 1/2). He recalls that some of the inspiration for “About a Boy” came from being invited one day to “hang out with guys of all different ages, just spending the day doing whatever they would normally do.” The boy he spent time with was 11, and the two of them spent the day “playing Gameboy, playing football in the street, going out for chips.” Unlike Marcus when he first meets Will, Hornby’s companion wasn’t suspicious. “The funniest thing he said was when we were talking about marriage. He said he couldn’t wait to go on honeymoon, and I was startled because we hadn’t talked about sex or anything. But he said, `Yes, because you get to go to places like Hawaii and Cornwall.’ ”
Hornby has taught high school, which was exhilarating at times, but also draining. “What kind of bad day could a writer have compared with the worst day a teacher could have?” Now, he often gets called into schools to read to students. “They think since my first book is about football, I’ll be the magic route into literature, and before you know it, they’ll be reading `Great Expectations.’ After all, `Fever Pitch’ is kind of a book. But afterward the kids usually come up and ask me who looks good for Arsenal this year, or who has the best haircut.”
Hornby will soon have a new wave of admirers, since both his novels are being made into films (“High Fidelity” stars John Cusack as Rob) set in America. “People from North London ask me how the films can be set anywhere but North London, as though all I’ve done is set down a list of street names.” He’s not worried about how the movies will turn out. “If it’s a decent book, it has a life far beyond the film,” he says. “Does anyone ever say about Joseph Heller, `Why did he have to sell the film rights to `Catch-22?’ ” He’s now working on his own screenplay, about an American musician who defects to England after his sister dies.
Hornby’s work, like that of Lorrie Moore, whose writing he loves, is deceptively fun to read. Some critics have mistaken his light tone as unserious: “If you put a joke in your book, you’re doomed,” he says without concern. He’s also not afraid to put references to current culture in his books. A lot of contemporary writers, he muses, are “interested in posterity – they don’t want to put anything in that will date it. I don’t think anyone will be able to read `High Fidelity’ in 40 years.”
Doubtful, since his characters – churlish, wistful, morally vague – are so resonant. In Will, Hornby says, “I tried to make a character with no redeeming qualities. I saw `As Good as It Gets’ on the plane, and it’s a similar situation: Both Will and the Jack Nicholson character are forced into a situation where they have to break out of their routine.” As Will discovers, kids can do that to you, a fact Hornby knows well: “You don’t notice your life is changing.”
So has literary success changed his life on a grand scale? He cocks his head. “The particularly strange thing for me is that my first book is about being a fan, and now I have fans, I think.”
–Published in _Newsday_, June 21, 1998

**Dame Iris Murdoch, 79, Celebrated Novelist**

By Emily Gordon

Dame Iris Murdoch, a novelist whose mastery of the English language was equaled by her confidence in the world of ideas, died Monday in Oxford, England, at the age of 79.

In his recently published book, “Elegy for Iris,” critic John Bayley, her husband of more than four decades, confirmed that she had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for the past five years.

Murdoch, who wrote more than 30 books – including the novels “The Sea, the Sea,” which won the 1978 Booker Prize, and “The Green Knight” (1994) – had lost contact with her intellectual faculties, though she and Bayley continued to be, as he wrote, “fused together.”

Murdoch was born in Ireland on July 15, 1919, the only child of Anglo-Irish parents, and grew up in the suburbs of London. She had a sparkling career as a scholar; educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, she studied for a year with disciples of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein before going on to a lifetime of teaching philosophy at Oxford University. She also produced a legion of highly charged, intricate, sometimes comic novels, as well as poetry and plays. In 1987, Murdoch was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knighthood for women.

Murdoch’s novels stand apart from anything written during her lifetime, in part because her style developed without sway to literary trends. Her earliest work is informed by existentialism; while working for the UN after World War II, she met Jean-Paul Sartre and the French writer Raymond Queneau, whom she considered an inspiration.

In her books, intensely thoughtful people are wracked with intellectual and moral struggle, which often requires the searchlight of an even greater mind for the relief of some understanding. Her themes are love, freedom, metaphysics and even enchanted mysticism. This often lends her scenarios and her characters a radiant quality that is both recognizable and utterly strange. Yet they cohere, because, as she told the Times of London, “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

As Bayley lovingly describes her, Murdoch was a contented eccentric, unconcerned with conventional standards of female allure or housekeeping; their home in north Oxford was a sea of books, papers and a collection of stones. She refused most editing, even of punctuation, and wrote every book – which she conceived in full before penning a line – in longhand, eschewing even manual typewriters. She and Bayley had no children. She once said, “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.”

Yet it seems, in both Murdoch’s published interviews and through Bayley’s searing portrait of her both before and after the fog of Alzheimer’s surrounded her, that she had found that fortune in her own life as a writer, scholar and companion. She wrote: “Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.”

–Published in _Newsday_, February 9, 1999

**Obituary: Poet Laureate Ted Hughes**

By Emily Gordon

Ted Hughes, Britain’s poet laureate, died Wednesday of cancer at age 68 in his Devon home. Known as much for his tragic marriage to American poet Sylvia Plath as for his own formidable work, Mr. Hughes spent decades in the light of a public scrutiny that was highly unusual for a modern-day poet.

He was born Edward James Hughes in 1930 in Mytholmroyd, England, the son of a carpenter. After serving two years in the Royal Air Force, Mr. Hughes went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, first studying English, then switching to archaeology and anthropology. Upon graduation he moved to London, where to support his writing he worked as a script reader, as a gardener and at a zoo. (His extensive knowledge of animals would become crucial to his poetry, which often drew on the violence of the natural world.)

In 1957 in Cambridge, Mr. Hughes met the brilliant, and still unknown, young Plath. They married within a few months and moved to Amherst, Mass. Their meeting – instantly dramatic and literally bloody (in a fierce embrace, she bit him hard on the cheek) – foretold the passionate combat that would characterize their life together.

That same year, Mr. Hughes published his first book of poems, “The Hawk in the Rain,” followed by “Pike” (1959) and “Lupercal” (1960), which won a Somerset Maugham Award and the 1961 Hawthornden Prize. In 1962 his “Selected Poems” appeared, by which time Mr. Hughes and Plath had returned to England. After Plath committed suicide in 1963, Hughes stopped writing poetry for nearly three years.

Even after he returned to writing, producing an astonishing number of volumes of poetry, prose, translations, children’s books, plays and criticism – more than 75 over his lifetime – Plath continued to haunt him.

He came under fire in his role as her literary executor. (Though Mr. Hughes had left her for another woman – Holocaust survivor Assia Wevill, who later killed herself along with her child by Hughes – their divorce had not yet gone through at the time of Plath’s death.)

Mr. Hughes provoked a sustained outcry for withholding some of Plath’s work and papers from publication and denying scholars permission to quote. He omitted the angriest poems about him from her book, “Ariel”; he lost an unfinished novel; in an act that appalled Plath’s students and fans, he destroyed the last volume of her diaries.

The conflict between Mr. Hughes’ perception of his family’s privacy (his two children by Plath; daughter Frieda, and son Nicholas, are now in their 30s) and her literary and historical stature has produced its own field of scholarship and discussion, resulting in works that include Janet Malcolm’s “The Silent Woman.” It has been an emotional subject for many nonacademics as well. Repeatedly, people have chipped the name “Hughes” from Plath’s gravestone in Yorkshire. Throughout the years, while providing introductions and corrections, Mr. Hughes would not speak about his former wife, and the subject had seemed closed.

Yet earlier this year Mr. Hughes, who was appointed poet laureate by Queen Elizabeth in 1984, made a dramatic reversal and published “Birthday Letters,” a substantial volume of poems about Plath’s indelible influence on his life. By publishing the book in the last stages of the cancer he had kept secret for 18 months, Hughes ensured, and perhaps sanctioned, a perpetual interweaving of their words and lives. While often uneven, the book is startingly raw and tender.

Critics have praised Mr. Hughes for his willingness to take risks in his subject matter, his interest in mythic themes and the richness of his language, characterized by one critic as having a “nearly Shakespearean resonance.” With equal insistence, others have objected to his fascination with gore and the animal world and dismissed him as a “cult poet.” In his poem “Pibroch” (from the book “Wodwo,” 1967), all of nature is caught up in destruction and change:

Minute after minute, aeon after aeon,
Nothing lets up or develops.
And this is neither a bad variant nor a tryout.
This is where the staring angels go through.
This is where all the stars bow down.

–Published in _Newsday_, October 30, 1998

Speaking From Memory
By Emily Gordon
HANDWRITING, by Michael Ondaatje. Knopf, 78 pp., $22.
THERE IS SOMETHING almost boyishly game about Michael Ondaatje’s poems: He takes risks he rarely approaches in his prose, despite the tremendous ones he ventures there. It can be startling to come upon such tender honesty, so much personal reflection and detail, in fragments from a writer whose characters and narratives–like those in his best-known book, “The English Patient”–are so well formed. We may catch ourselves wondering whether this material would be better served in fiction or memoir. But these stories are undeniably his, and his to make into poetry.
Throughout “Handwriting,” his ninth book of poems, Ondaatje continues to demonstrate that he is an emissary of the world. A Canadian who lives in Toronto, Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, and speaks from memory when he summons up saffron, parrot trees and jackfruit, “a silted water garden in Mihintale,” “a nine-chambered box from Gampola.”
The book’s first section (of three) presents landscapes and historical vignettes from his first home, replete with buried Buddhas, bronze Buddhas purloined by shaking men in the dead of night, a Buddha’s tooth “smuggled…from temple to temple for five hundred years,” heady smells, stealth and secrets. It’s clear Ondaatje loves the sounds these scenes evoke. Indeed, the names of the plants and the cities alone are redolent and magical, unfamiliarly intoxicating.
Yet what this collection proves even more clearly is that Ondaatje’s true mastery lies in his diplomacy of the senses. The book’s second section, titled “The Nine Sentiments” and drawing on themes of classical Sanskrit and Tamil poetry, is a celebration of the body, particularly in the form of a beloved woman. Ondaatje’s eroticism occasionally crosses the line into excess cleverness: “I hold you the way astronomers / draw constellations for each other / in the markets of wisdom.” And sometimes it’s simply too much (“Ancient dutiful ants / hiding in the ceremonial / yak-tail fan / move towards and climb / her bone of ankle”); the English Patient would raise what’s left of his eyebrows. But the great majority of these poems are winsome and stirring, and Ondaatje’s reverent stance–“My path to this meeting / was lit by lightning,” “her fearless heart / light as a barn owl / against him all night”–allows for buzzed and empathetic reading.
And so, if the first section of “Handwriting” concerns an almost-buried time, myth, symbol and a sensory return to the childhood realm, “The Nine Sentiments” is a study in the geography of the body. It’s full of trysts, lovers’ breathing, the discovered truths of and underneath the skin. This section tells a complete tale of anticipation, connection and attendant terror, and ends with questions–“Where is the suitor / undistressed / one can talk with / Where is there a room / without the damn god of love?”–that are, alas, unanswerable, but still full of a kind of partisan allegiance to passion. In the third (untitled) section, Ondaatje exposes other devotions, as with the sentimental rush of memory for “the tears / I gave to my ayah Rosalin on leaving / the first home of my life,” and his identification with the 14th-Century poet-calligrapher Yang Weizhem, composer of an elegy for Zou Fulei, “almost unknown, / who made the best plum flower painting / of any period.”
In the lucid prose poem “Death at Kataragama,” Ondaatje leaves the human realm altogether: “There is a woodpecker I am enamoured of I saw this morning through my binoculars. A red thatch roof to his head more modest than crimson, deeper than blood…. Can my soul step into the body of that woodpecker? He may be too hot in sunlight, it could be a limited life. But if this had been offered to me today, at 9 a.m., I would have gone with him, traded this body for his.” He captures perfectly a craving for escape without death or erasure – the violent gratitude for being alive coupled with the heartache of being oneself.
The poems in “Handwriting” emphasize narrative structure less than those in his previous books of poetry (collected into one volume, “The Cinnamon Peeler,” and very much worth adding to any Ondaatje library), instead lingering in spaces and pauses that sometimes cause more puzzlement than respite. Ondaatje can tell a story, but sometimes he chooses not to, and the result can be frustratingly glancing and elliptical.
Still, the stories he does tell–in longer lines, and occasionally in the form of a prose poem–are corkers. “The Story,” for instance–which begins with a king’s premonition to his pregnant wife of a war, a seven-man journey among dancing rope-makers and a fateful creep into a dangerous castle, and continues as his son becomes one of the seven – lives the story as a fairy tale adventure, rather than as abstract parable. There is wisdom here–“There is no way to behave after victory”–as well as the humor that glitters off many of his earlier poems. The story in “The Story” is tumultuous, vibrant, tragic and over too soon.
If there is a larger theme in “Handwriting,” it is the one its title suggests: Ondaatje longs for a less corrupted life of creation, one in which, for instance, “the poets wrote their stories on rock and leaf / to celebrate the work of the day, / the shadow pleasures of night,” or a stonecutter who has only one tool and uses it expertly. Just as essential is the humility required in these endeavors, recalling Robert Frost’s line in “The Woodpile” about the dignity of abandoning fuel “far from a useful fireplace.”
In each section, through the poets and artisans he invents or recalls, Ondaatje reveals his own methods and designs, failings and desires. Like Zou Fulei, Ondaatje is concerned with explicit accomplishment: making, in words, the best plum flower painting – rather than, for instance, the great Canadian novel. He celebrates craft, vision and intense concentration, even as he is lovingly, and constantly, distracted.
Certainly, there’s ambivalence inherent in this kind of life–evident in his reverie on the woodpecker, which ends, “This woman whose arm I would hold and comfort, that book I wanted to make and shape tight as a stone – I would give everything away for this sound of mud and water, hooves, great wings.” Yet his choice of “Last Ink” to end this book returns him to the company of the calligrapher, Fifth Century seals that contain multitudes, a time “before the yellow age of paper.” Ondaatje has inherited this century’s mediums for expressing the human condition, but he can be counted among those who “shared it / on a scroll or nudged / the ink onto stone / to hold the vista of a life.”
–Published in Newsday, March 21, 1999