Monday

May 24, 2004

Mahogany China

by Jim Dodge

MONDAY, 24 MAY, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Mahogany China," by Jim Dodge, from Rain on the River. © Grove Press. Reprinted with permission.

Mahogany China

My grandmother tells me
About her first love
Johnny Hansen was his name
She'll always remember
A warm autumn day
She was fifteen
Or almost fifteen
Had a mare named Patches
And she and Johnny went riding together
Down along the Chetco River
Low and mossy before the rains.
She can still taste the fried chicken
She made for their picnic
And how worried she was
Her lips would be all greasy
If he wanted to kiss her.

Tells me this as she polishes
The mahogany china closet
Over and over
Five minutes
The same spot
Till it shines.


Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Joseph Brodsky, born in St. Petersburg, Russia (1940). He grew up in the Soviet Union, and began writing poetry as a young man. He became popular in underground literary circles, but in 1964 he was arrested for "social parasitism" and sentenced to five years' hard labor in Siberia. Writers and politicians from countries around the world protested his imprisonment, and he was released after eighteen months.

In 1972 he left Russia for America, where he taught at several universities. He had translated English poetry from the time he was a teenager, so he was already fluent in English when he arrived in America, but it took several years before he began writing poems primarily in English. He said he wrote in English as a form protest against the Soviet Union, and also so he could reach a wider audience. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, and from 1991 to 1992 he served as the Poet Laureate of the United States.

Brodsky said, "Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe . . . that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens."

He also said, "Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul."

And he said, "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."


It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer William Trevor, born in Mitchelstown, Ireland (1928). His collections of short stories include The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories (1967) and Beyond the Pale (1981); and his novels include Felicia's Journey (1994) and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002).

He started out as a sculptor. He exhibited his work in Dublin and was commissioned to sculpt relief carvings for churches. But eventually he got tired of sculpture; he wanted to create works of art that dealt more directly with human beings, and so he started writing. His first major novel came out in 1964—The Old Boys, about eight men over eighty years old who meet at a reunion at their old public school.

Trevor has gone on to write many more novels and short stories. He's known for writing about ordinary people in Ireland and England who find themselves trapped by their circumstances. He said, "All my writing is about noncommunication—which is very sad and very funny."

Trevor's story "Mrs Acland's Ghosts" begins: "Mr Mockler was a tailor. He carried on his business in a house that after twenty-five years of mortgage arrangements had finally become his: 22 Juniper Street, SW 17. He had never married and since he was now sixty-three it seemed likely that he never would. In an old public house, the Charles the First, he had a drink every evening with his friends Mr Uprichard and Mr Tile, who were tailors also. He lived in his house in Juniper Street with his cat Sam, and did his own cooking and washing and cleaning: he was not unhappy."

Trevor said, "I am not much interested in myself either as a person or as a writer. I tend rather to write and to leave it at that. . . . Writing . . . suffers from too much introspective attention."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

«

»

  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
  • “I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.” —Anne Tyler
  • “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” —Stephen Greenblatt
  • “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” —John Edgar Wideman
  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
  • “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Let's face it, writing is hell.” —William Styron
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
  • “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” —Paul Rudnick
  • “Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” —Padget Powell
  • “Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.” —Shelby Foote
  • “I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.” —William Carlos Williams
  • “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.” —Iris Murdoch
  • “The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is my dharma.” —Raja Rao
  • “Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.” —Anthony Powell
  • “I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.” —Michael Cunningham
Current Faves - Learn more about poets featured frequently on the show