Imagery | V E R S E and I M A G E

Archive for the ‘Imagery’ Category

Tradition

Posted in Imagery, tagged Aurora, Aurora Ohio, Christmas, Grazini Christmas, John Mlinek, Luke 2, Ohio on December 24, 2012| 4 Comments »

It’s 1975, late afternoon on Christmas Day in Aurora, Ohio at the Frenches’. Linda and I have braved the West Virginia Turnpike in winter (Our Motto: Under Construction unto Eternity) to drive up from Durham. My folks still live in Aurora, too (we’ll divide our time with a microtome), but right now we’re sitting in the living room with Mom and Dad French, Skip, Jill, Sue, Becky, Annie, Jodi, and several imposing snowdrifts of torn wrapping paper, eating another delicious something, and waiting.

There’s the knock. John is here! Hugs galore, then he sets up his screen and fiddles with the old Super-8 projector and little reel-to-reel tape player, frame by frame and inch by inch so they’ll sync when he throws the switch. Dim the lights. Action, sound! Grazini Christmas. A new tradition is born.

. . . . .

How many years, John, did you make that pilgrimage to the Frenches’ to set up your projector? Your audience gradually shrank as the sibs moved on – Minnesota, New Mexico, West Virginia. Some years I had to work on Christmas and we didn’t make it north. A few years ago you sent us a Grazini DVD and man, did those memories come rushing back! Now this season I’ve watched GC twice already, once when you sent me the YouTube link and once with my Mom after showing her how to add it to her Favorites Bar. Margaret may be getting tired of me going on and on about the amazing story boarding and cinematography accomplished by two teenagers learning on the fly. Linda has reminded us how she had to trail you guys around downtown Cleveland all day until it was time for her thirty-second scene. But most important, John, is the lump in my throat – I still get it during that closing scene. Every darn time. I know what’s coming, I can recite the dialogue, one might say the message is so simple as to be obvious, but I still choke up.

. . . . .

Readers, it’s time for you to watch Grazini Christmas. In 1972 two high school seniors, John Mlinek and Dave Prittie, made a movie with a handheld Super-8 camera, a portable tape recorder, and scissors and tape. A hero for our time, Grazini-Man searches for the true meaning of Christmas. The film is literally a family tradition – watch for Linda as the little old lady and her brother Skip as the blind scam artist. Much of it is shot on location in Cleveland; that’s the real Higbees Department Store Santa (the store security guard chased them out once he figured out what they were up to). The closing scene is set in The Church in Aurora, where Linda and I were in the high school youth group, just a block from Linda’s parents’ home. Tradition.

How is it possible to “make” something a tradition? The word means that which is handed down – doesn’t that imply that a tradition must seep into you from the past, that it requires years and years of gestation before its birth? Maybe John hadn’t created a tradition the first time he knocked on Linda’s door with his projector, but I’m willing to say that by the second time he had indeed. I think the secret is more than the family context, the predictable jokes, the backstory. I think this little film connects with something primal – at some level we are all of us always searching for meaning, whether we can articulate it or not.

Thanks, John. Got to go now. Getting ready to premier Grazini Christmas on the big flat screen. Linda says, “Hi.”

. . . . .

And there were in the same country shepherds
abiding in the field, keeping watch
over their flock by night. And, lo,
the angel of the Lord came upon them,
and the glory of the Lord shone round about them:
and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not:
for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy
which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David
a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you;
Ye shall find the babe
wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude
of the heavenly host praising God,
and saying, Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Luke 2:8-15 KJV

. . . . .

Click to watch Grazini Christmas, written produced and directed by John Mlinek.

. . . . .

Read Full Post »

The Saga of Blue Rat

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bat-Poet, poetic voice, poetry, Randall Jarrell, Saulism, Southern writing on December 1, 2012| 3 Comments »

He began life as Blue Mouse, and how apt: pointy nose, bristly whiskers, cupped ears, and of course he’s the color of September sky. Nowadays, though, when I walk in the kitchen door and Saul careens from across the room, he grabs my hand and says, “Get Blue Rat! Get Blue Rat!” Just how has the little creature transformed? Perhaps it’s the prehensile tail (it has wire in it so it can curl and grab things, like little boys’ ears), or the big googly Muppet eyes. Could be because Blue is three times the size of the life-like field mouse finger puppet that drives the school bus and doesn’t talk much. Most likely, however, it’s because of Blue Rat’s voice: gravelly, colloquial, with a distinct Bronx accent.

Voice? Voice, you say? How did a little stuffed plush critter come by a voice? Well, from his conception Blue Rat has been designated as my ward. When it’s play time (and it’s always play time) and we pull out the fuzzy animals, plastic figures, Lego men, Saul commands, “You talk Blue, and I’ll talk all of these.”

Because they all have voices. Mappy the Hamster doesn’t have a mouth – he sort of mumbles. Pinky Pie (purple kitty with pink nose) is high pitched and squeaky. Lego pirates and space men are appropriately gruff and swashbuckling. Saul “talks” all of those. I get to talk Blue Rat. He just looks like the kind of guy who’d be most comfortable chomping a Coney Island while he ogles the girl rats on the boardwalk. So every afternoon when Saul whips him up a sandwich (plastic pancake, tomato, fried egg), he gustos it down and says, “‘Ey, Baby, dat’s deelishus.”

. . . . .

Voice. (Prepare for a big leap here.) Voice. When you read, don’t the characters speak in your mind? Pitch, accent, cadence. When you write, don’t you imagine and invent a persona for each creature? Their voice? How they say is as important as what they say.

One of my favorite little books is The Bat-Poet by Randall Jarrell. The whole week I was at the Zoo last summer I carried copies and gave a couple away. The Bat Poet discovers the voice of Owl, Chipmunk, Mockingbird, and they are all true. In the end he discovers his own voice, and we discover how odd and wonderful it is to live in the bat-world.

Here are a few stanzas: I hope you’ll borrow or buy the book yourself. Is there any end to the voices we may speak?

. . . . .

Owl
. . .
The mouse beside the stone are still as death –
The owl’s air washes them like water.
The owl goes back and forth inside the night,
And the night holds its breath

Chipmunk
. . .
Curled at his breast, he sits there while the sun
Stripes the red west
With its last light: the chipmunk
Dives to his rest.

Mockingbird
. . .
A thrush is singing, then a thrasher, then a jay –
Then, all at once, a cat begins meowing.
A mockingbird can sound like anything.
He imitates the world he drove away
So well that for a minute, in the moonlight,
Which one’s the mockingbird? which one’s the world?

Bat
. . .
The mother drinks the water of the pond
she skims across. Her baby hangs on tight.
Her baby drinks the milk she makes him
in moonlight or starlight, in mid-air.
Their single shadow, printed on the moon
Or fluttering across the stars,
Whirls on all night . . .

. . . . .

New York Times book review of The Bat-Poet from 1964.

. . . . .

Read Full Post »

When the Train Whistle Blows

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Civil War, family, History, North Carolina, Our State, poetry, Southern Senence Poem, Southern writing on November 25, 2012| 29 Comments »

Southern Sentence Poem Revisited

Last week when I reminisced about my Granddaddy, Pee Wee Griffin, Seaboard Airline Engineer for some fifty years, among the many comments I received was Kathryn Stripling Byer’s: The song of a train passing has haunted many a Southern poet’s work. Haunted, that is indeed what we are.

Yesterday I caught a snippet on public radio by a Civil War historian at Duke. He describes Governor Graham dragging his heels about secession; as much as a third of North Carolinians opposed war. The Duke Prof then tells about pulling into a barbecue restaurant in Kinston recently. During the War, General Pickett encamped at Kinston on his return from a disastrous attempt to recapture New Bern from the Union. In Kinston Pickett hanged twenty-two North Carolinians he considered deserters, though most of them had never sworn the oath to the Confederate Army. Pickett was later accused of war crimes and fled to Canada – the historical point being that allegiances, honor, and motivations are a lot more complicated than South vs. North. When the Professer parks at the restaurant and looks down the row of cars and pickups with Stars and Bars on their bumpers, he just shakes his head and says, “You don’t even know who you are.”

. . . . .

Who are we, anyway? That’s why there’s poetry – that we may discover who we are. I’m pondering again the form an essentially Southern poem might take. Remember in August I suggested such a poem must include Place, Past, and Culture. Our identity is complex, but a poem’s complexity lies in its brevity. What sense most perfectly evokes a memory? The sense of smell – impossible to describe, complex and heavy with nuance, a simple odor may transport you to a time and place you thought you’d departed forever. I want a poem to do the same, to be vastly more than the sum of its words, to cause the reader to gasp and sigh at the same time.

Therefore, the SOUTHERN SENTENCE POEM MUST BE SEVEN LINES.

Why seven? When I as a doddering old man kiss my great-grandchild, I will have held or been held by seven generations of my family. There are seven Southern waters: spring from rock fissure, clear trout stream, green piedmont river, dam & lake, blackwater meandering, sound, shore. Southerners more than many are subject to the seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues. Don’t forget the seven bridges road in Montgomery, Alabama. But most of all because I think seven lines is just the right length.

. . . . .

So here’s another attempt:

When the train whistle blows
through the Yadkin Valley
we lay down our plastic toys,
lean across the porch rail
until the last beckoning
has trailed away, and I become
my grandson, wondering.

. . . . .