Today’s show will feature, among other things, “Julie, Painted, Going Up the Stairs,” Bruce Isaacson’s deeply moving tribute to the late Julia Vinograd, written and read to Julia as she lay dying. Bruce’s poem begins,
After he was intubated four days…
After the drugs that kept him in a stupor
wore off…
After they satisfied the gods of
cost containment
by shipping him like a ham to a nursing home,
finally he awoke
and started climbing out of the bed
raving about his
management responsibilities.
We’re all pulled along by beliefs.
Fortunately, his had six-inch rails on the bed.
I’ve always known Julie to be linked
at that cellular level to Poetry but
if there were rails, she merely dreamed them away.
Poetry has more power than is known.
The show will also feature some sprightly songs composed and sung by San José’s own Tony Perez, with lyrics by Jack Foley. Here is a sample of one:
LIFE IS WHAT YOU DO WHILE WAITING
FOR THE NOTHING TRAIN TO COME INTO YOUR STATION
There’s a great world coming tomorrow
But tomorrow’s never here
There’s a great big rainbow in heaven
But the rain just won’t appear
How ’bout that fortunate winner
Why is he never me
I am just a weary sinner—
Waiting for the summer
Is a bummer.
In this world of whimsy and wisecracks
In this world of make believe
Life is what you do while waiting
For another dream to leave
This is Nina’s poem of Thanksgiving, this year:
A Poem of Thanksgiving 2018
We have just lived
through epic and dramatic days
when our external lives
dominated the inner
beginning with the felt imperative
that I had to get out the vote
and not forget to vote myself
The tsunami of fascism rising on the horizon
had to be stopped
Then the environment turned smoky
The sun turned red
The skies dark and murky
People wore masks covering fear and dread
The children grew wild with being kept inside
Adults longed to open the windows
for fresh air
precious air
The president visited and offered his scornful advice
for our dead neighbors
and over 7000 newly made homeless
camping out in a parking lot
sleeping in cars and in tents
He blamed the tree huggers
and lovers of trees for this disaster
amidst charges of election fraud
and demands for recounts
The wind shifted and rain fell
Liberation
Coinciding with the official Day of Thanks
and the dawning acknowledgement
that we rest uneasy on Indian lands
the rains offer puddles for reflection
as the interior world shyly reemerges
I prepare like the legendary grasshoppers and ants
for the interior journey of the upcoming solstice
and the coming darkness
where solutions incubate and evolve
And this is Jack’s tribute to Walt Whitman’s great poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”:
I don’t think there is another poem
More unique
And, simultaneously,
More representative of
What we may call the American spirit
Than this amazing
Presentation of the making of a poet
Of the transformation of anyone
From childhood to a condition of knowledge
How do we enter the world in a deep way
It is an aria, a performance
Something Whitman saw in the opera houses,
It is a multi-voiced, multi-selved poem in which
All sorts of styles and “voices” are brought together
(Including the hissing voice of the old crone, the sea, and the voice of the bird, “my dusky demon and brother,” “the lone singer wonderful”)
It is a poem about family (the he-bird, the she-bird)
It is a poem about the stunning fact of Death the Opener
And the great representation of the sea (Melville)
(The sea is the openness of consciousness)
It is a nature poem
In which the “outsetting bard” merges with what he sees
It includes Quakers (“Ninth-month midnight”)
And Native Americans (“Paumanok”)
It is Whitman giving himself over to the sheer possibilities of music
As world becomes word (“translating”)
It is an act of marvelous empathy and compassion in the literal sense, “feeling with”
It is a poem about the body and its transformation
Even as Whitman speaks of the soul
It is a poem in which the lorn bird and the transforming boy
Move us to what Wallace Stevens called
A new representation of reality.
This, camerados, is the great mythic moment of American letters
And it takes place not at a desk but outside,
Not as writing but as brilliant spontaneous unexpected utterance.
It ushers in (under the magical multivalent moon, in the presence of the vast, talkative
sea)
Nothing less than the world as song.