The stunning renovated Detroit Music Hall Center
My retirement community, some of us, took a bus trip to Detroit. It’s not so far away, a first try at trips out of town sponsored by the “club,” as we’re called. After having lived on the east coast for many years, having been to some of the world’s best museums and a number of beautiful cities, here I go, on a bus to Detroit. Poor Detroit, wracked by poor management, bankruptcy, racial tensions, and abandoned by the car industry. You pass lot after empty lot where abandoned and deteriorating houses have been removed. Of course that’s not all: there’s some beautiful architecture, a stunning, renovated Music Hall Center, the Detroit Institute of Art. It’s a city in recovery. San Francisco had its earthquake, Chicago its fire, Hiroshima, Dresden, and Warsaw their dreadful war damage. All things fall and are built again.
Robert Lowell called highly polished, highly structured poetry “cooked,” and spontaneous, less structured poetry “raw.” There’s a neighborhood in Detroit called Heidelburg where vacant lots have been turned into “lots of art” and abandoned houses become gigantic art sculptures. The street, sidewalks, and trees have been pulled into a mammoth installation: the Heidelberg Project. It stays in my mind, the energy of things-in-progress. Sloppy, amateurish, colorful. Pieces of junk gathered into random shapes. Ugly, you might say. A mess. Some in the city think so. Out of such arises cathedrals, you might also say.
A house in Heidelburg.
When I was growing up in Arkansas, I thought the great art, the great poetry, lived either in books or on the east coast. To me, Arkansas felt rough, unformed, more like raw material. Whether that was true was beside the point. I felt that I lived in a vast openness, an emptiness, one I could shape by myself. I knew no famous people to intimidate me. I stumbled along, figuring things out the best I could--both a hinderance and a blessing. Would I have been a better writer with early guidance, brilliant models? Who knows.
I felt that I lived among wreckage, like inner city Detroit. The wreckage of my family and my own emotional wreckage. I made my simple structures, my poems, kept making them, kept reading other people’s poems. I never imagined fame. I didn’t even know what fame would be. I never dreamed of writing books. I was filling notebooks full of rubble, having great fun, great satisfaction, with it.
A raw piece of lapis lazuli
Which is to say, the energy, the joy, is in the making. In making something new. Here is the last few stanzas of Yeat’s glorious poem, “Lapus Lazuli”. He describes what’s carved on a piece of beautiful deep blue lapis lazuli. The cracks, the imperfections in the stone, are picked up to make the picture. The picture is of ancient men looking upon, Yeats imagines, a scene of destruction. They are playing their instruments. They are utterly happy. . . . .
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discolouration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
The P. S…..
I’ll be in reading in Northport at the glorious Dog Ears Books on Friday the 23rd at noon. Bring your lunch!