Today’s guest is David Mason, not David Mason the serial killer (1956-1993 see Wikipedia) but David Mason (b. 1954) the distinguished poet, professor and former Poet Laureate (2010-2014) of Colorado.In a blurb to Mason’s The Sound: New & Selected Poems, Charles Martin writes, “David Mason’s ambition to expand the realm of narrative in contemporary verse has been central to his poetic project, even as successive collections revealed him as one of the best lyric poets of his time.”
From Jack Foley:
“There was no tenured chair of Creative Writing for James Joyce. There was no Nobel Prize. There was only a life given over to and devoured by the work.” Thus David Mason on one of his heroes. Of another, Joseph Conrad, he writes: Conrad’s “love of mortal particulars more than the general or ideal—arises from a single, undivided heart.” Mason’s work itself arises from a boundless feeling for the world that refuses to rest in cliché, from the cultivation of an openness that holds us in fascination before the wonders of the world and the wonders of writing—and the wonders of the people who produce writing. Always attracted to form though never limited to it, Mason has produced a body of work in which autobiography—or quasi autobiography—merges with a drive towards story, towards myth. His various “characters,” like his lyrical pieces, express the various facets of his multiple, continually striving consciousness. Though we can call some of his works by the somewhat contradictory phrase “verse novels,” he is in a way closer to the dawn light of English poetry: Geoffrey Chaucer. He writes, “One hears something and wants to make a corresponding sound. I have been hard of hearing all my life, catching vowels more than consonants, so the sound I follow is watery. I hope you can hear it too.”
Mason’s books include Ludlow: a Verse Novel; The Country I Remember; Arrivals; News from the Village; The Scarlet Libretto; Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade, 2004-2014; and Davey McGravy: Tales to be Read Aloud to Children and Adult Children.
This is “4 JULY 11”:
From over the ridge, chrysanthemums of fire
burst into color. One hears the pop-pop-pop
of another birthday, but the heart is flat champagne.
Who cares about freedom, and Damn King George?
Who cares about sirens out in city lights?
I’ve got enough to fight about right here,
the howitzer let loose inside my ribs,
the thudding ricochet from hill to hill,
from hurt to hurt. Hard birth. Hard coming to.
…
And this is “SARONG SONG”:
The woman in the blue sarong
bade me believe in ships.
Come sail with me, the journey’s long,
sang her alluring lips
that baited me in a net of words
and hauled me to her bed
at the top of the world where thieving birds
loved me till I bled.
I came from an underworld of snow,
she from a windy dune.
She dared to look for me below
the phases of the moon.
Come walk with me, the journey’s joy,
She sang with her blue eyes.
Untie the sarong, my bonny boy,
and bare me to the skies.
In the latter poem, Yeats sings along with Mason.
Part One of Two.