Transcript for Episode 28
Elise:
Sam and I recorded this conversation in July 2020, when covid cases were low and government restrictions on gatherings had eased. We talked in person, socially distanced, with outdoor airflow—and you may hear some of these conditions in the audio. I hope you enjoy this episode.
My guest today is Samuel Hazo. How should I begin to describe his impressive and long-lasting career? Perhaps by telling you that his collection of poems Once for the Last Bandit was a finalist for the National Book Award or that he was Pennsylvania's first Poet Laureate, serving in that capacity from 1993 until 2003. Or perhaps I should mention the International Poetry Forum, which he founded in 1966 and directed until 2009, and which brought to Pittsburgh major poets of the 20th century and international leaders, such as Princess grace of Monaco. Or maybe I should detail his distinguished teaching career in Duquesne University’s English department, as he is now the MacAnulty Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus. Or perhaps I should simply say that Samuel Hazo is a lifelong Pittsburgher whose deepest concerns are family, Christianity, war, suffering, and the mystery of death. Sam, welcome.
Samuel:
Thank you very much, Elise.
Elise:
We're recording in July, and I hope it's not gauche or poor form of me to say an early happy birthday to you. But I'm calling attention to your birthday because, as I said in the introduction, you are a lifelong Pittsburgher, and the Beatrice Institute is based here in Pittsburgh and takes much of its identity from the city, its institutions and its history. And you've written so much about Pittsburgh. So I want to start by simply asking you, what are some of your earliest memories of Pittsburgh?
Samuel:
Well, I grew up in Squirrel Hill. We lived on Murray Hill Avenue originally, and then Wilkins Avenue and finally moved into what was then East Liberty, on Shady Avenue. And basically my memories of Pittsburgh are of the time when it was a smokey city. The mills were thriving. There were mornings I would walk from Shady Avenue to Central High School, Central Catholic, and if I held my hand in front of my face, like this, a yard away, I couldn't say my fingers. That's how bad the smog was. And then of course the aristocracy, the financial aristocracy of the Mellons, and then the political aristocracy with David Lawrence collaborated and decided if they're going to work here, they might as well not die of cancer here. So they passed a number of different laws, all of which outlawed bituminous coal, they screened the chimneys of the smoke stacks of the mills, and Pittsburgh then became what it is now. I mean, it gradually lost its focus as a steel center. They started still some specialty steel companies here, but the real employer here is medical, is UPMC. And that's, that's what you see.
Elise:
When you described holding your hand out, it sounds Dickensian. In the fog, the beginning of Bleak House, as the fog is just curling around you.
Samuel:
Well, it was that bad and every morning was like that. I mean, it was unusual if you got up and it was a clear day, because that the smoke, especially in humid weather, it would just settle over the city, and there was no alternative. You just breathed it in. I used to notice that when I went to school at Central, we all had to wear white shirts and neck ties. Well, by the time I got from my home on Shady Avenue to Central, I'd run my hand like this on the collar and it was all dirty.
Elise:
So I wonder then too, how your home and family life influenced you growing up. So many writers, the home, the family is the place they are always looking back to.
Samuel:
Well, of course it did. Actually, my mother died when she was quite young. She was about thirty-five. And my aunt, who was actually my great aunt, but she was my mother's aunt, even though they were just a couple years apart. And, when she was dying, she asked my aunt to raise us, because she knew that my dad, who traveled, couldn't do it. And my aunt did that. I'll tell you more about her, but she was an amazing, amazing woman. Everybody said you're making a big mistake. They’ll forget all about you. Let their dad do it. Her brothers weren't for it. People called her foolish. She didn't bat an eye.
Actually there was a court case, and my dad had found a woman that they thought he wanted to marry. It turned out to be a disaster. It wasn't his fault. He was just lonely. But they went to court, and I’ll never forget—the judge called me in, my brother and me, and, “So where would you like to stay, with your dad or with your aunt and your grandfather?” And I said, “Well, we want to stay with my aunt and my grandfather.” He said, “What else do you do?” “Go to school,” I said, “I'm a Cub Scout.” He said, “What, what else do you do?” I said, “Well, you’re always a Cub Scout.” He smiled. He said, “That's very good.”
So later on many years, my aunt was determined to get her citizenship papers, and we were studying American history, preparing for this. She went down and took her test—same judge, by the way. We went and met her at the street corner, “How’d you do, Kate?” “Don't ask me.” I said, “What?” “I forgot everything. I thought it was Abraham Washington. I got everything mixed up, but I said to him, finally,” she said, “I'm raising my two boys to be good American citizens. If that's not enough for you, that's the best I can do.” And the judge said, “That's about the most patriotic thing I've heard all day. No more questions.”
Elise:
Good. So she was awarded her citizenship?
Samuel:
Yep.
Elise:
Good, good. Was faith a part of your life growing up with, your aunt or with your dad and your brother?
Samuel:
Well, they, yeah, they were, I guess you could say, Catholic. But my dad, I think he became a Catholic when he got married, but he doesn't like the Maronite priest here at all. And when my mother died that priest wanted to have the funeral himself. And my dad just told him to just get out of here and said, “My wife was married in St. Paul's Cathedral, and she wants to be buried from St. Paul's Cathedral.” And that's the way it was.
Elise:
Good. You went to Notre Dame for undergraduate. What was it like at that university when you were there?
Samuel:
If I give you a figure, you'll faint.
Elise:
[Laughs] OK…
Samuel:
Tuition, room, board, and laundry each semester was $373.
Elise:
I fainted. Wow. Wow. Okay.
Samuel:
Isn’t that something?
Elise:
That is something, yes.
Samuel:
I actually I had a good record at Central, and I think I was valedictorian at Central, but I didn't have a scholarship. So I was at a graduation party, and there was a girl there, I've never seen her since, her name was Myra Jane Barry. I’ll remember that name forever. She said, Dr. Leo O'Donnell gives a scholarship every year to Notre Dame to a Pittsburgh student. And if you want, I know the secretary, I can make an appointment for you. I said fine. Went down, met Dr. O'Donnell in early June; June 27th I was on the campus of Notre Dame. It was on the trimester program at that time. And I'll be indebted to Dr. O’Donnell all my life. But that's, that's the way it happened.
But Notre Dame at that time was basically a boys or men school. This sounds like I'm bragging, and I'm not. I didn't have any money, but I just go to dances at St. Mary's once in a while. And there was a girl there that I thought was very nice and very attractive, and I asked her for a dance, and she agreed, and we danced. And I think I asked her out for a movie, a movie at that time called The Killers. It was based on a Hemingway… And, but after that I never took her out. I never wrote. Nothing. And about five years ago, I got either a call or a letter from this girl, whose name was at that time Cheryl Paul. And she said, “Are you the Hazo, the Sam Hazo who danced with me at St. Mary's in 1946?” I said, “Yes, I am.” And she says, “My name is Cheryl Paul Ricketts. And I saw your book, and I thought I'd just call you.” I said, well, that was very sweet of her to call. She said, “I have five children. I lost my husband about four years ago.” I thought for a girl to do that after all that time, that took a lot of guts. So I wrote her and I sent her some books, and we exchanged letters and so forth for about two years. And then I got a very short letter. She said “I can't write you anymore. I have"—and she named the disease—“and I'm going into hospice care tomorrow.” And that was the end of that story. But I’ll remember that forever. I mean…
Elise:
It was a gift.
Samuel:
It was a gift. Sure.
Elise:
When you were at Notre Dame, you started by studying law, correct? Is that—you were in the law program?
Samuel:
I had the usual bourgeois ideals, and being a teacher or a writer or—that never even occurred to me. So at the end of my third year there, they had a program for the law. Your law program could begin if you had a good record at the end of your junior year. And I had a meeting with a Dean then; a man named Clarence Manion was the Dean of Notre Dame. Ultra-right Catholic. And I had an interview with him, and he said, he talked to me for a while. He said, “I don't know if you're interested in law.” I said, “I am very interested in law.” He said, “It doesn’t sound like that to me.” And I wasn't interested. So I've been grateful to him ever since for refusing to let me in law school.
Elise:
Sometimes we really need other people to show us who we are.
Samuel:
It's true.
Elise:
So what was it about English, then, studying language and literature and poetry, that became you?
Samuel:
Well, actually it depended on two people. There was a program at Notre Dame called the philosophy of literature. It was, that was your major sequence. So four semester course, first year was taught by a man named Rufus Rauch. And the second year was taught by Frank O'Malley, who was a… some would say he is a tradition at Notre Dame. And those two courses attracted me very much. And I never regretted taking them. But that's, that's what did it,
Elise:
What did you read in those courses? Do you recall?
Samuel:
We started with Piers Plowman, parts of The Divine Comedy, Chaucer. Senior year we read Christopher Dawson, Charles Péguy, Leon Bloy, Francois Mauriac—I mean, all very enlightened, European Catholicism. And I'm glad I was introduced to Catholicism in that way, because other than that, it would be just parish Catholicism and catechetical Catholicism. And that just bores me.
Elise:
Can you say more about that? What about the cosmopolitan, intellectual Catholicism boosted your sense of the faith?
Samuel:
Well, it showed me that being a Christian was simply being realistic about the way the world works. And I always thought, and I still think, that I don't like any life that's based on obedience. I don't care if it's ecclesiastical, military, academic, commercial. It doesn't matter. I always think everyone should have a good to-hell-with-it in his back pocket and nobody should be able to counteract that. My concept of Catholicism was pretty much confined to what the imagination can conceive of as real.
Elise:
Which is quite a lot.
Samuel:
It is. Everything.
Elise:
Everything. Right.
You spoke about obedience, and I wanted to ask you—I know that you went into the army, you were in the Marine Corps. I don't want to impinge on any of that.
Samuel:
It applies to that too, particularly.
Elise:
Yeah. Right, right. So I wanted to know, again without impinging on any memories that you don't want to relive or share, how do you think that that experience changed you changed, your thinking?
Samuel:
Well, I'll tell you one incident. I went in as a private, and then they had a program open to people who were enlisted and who had gone to college. So I think originally about 500 out of the entire Marine Corps. And we came to Quantico and they screened us for eight weeks commissioning 250 of us, the rest, “return to your former duties.” We went through about four or five months of pretty tough training. And finally, I had a meeting with a major, and my record was very good. I mean, all that. Finally I just told him, I said, “Sir, excuse me, but I don't think I could kill somebody. And we're taught all the means to do so. I know how to kill someone with a newspaper.” and he didn't say anything. They didn't, say “what's the problem,” right? He just said, “Well, I’ll put that on the record.” Actually, I didn't see any action as a Marine officer. I just went to Portsmouth, Virginia. There was a forwarding depot there. I worked as a legal officer. And then I got out, unfortunately I was on the reserve for five years and fortunately we weren't in another war or I would’ve been called back. I got married—that would have been hell. This applies to the Marine Corps, which has as a military outfit. It's as good as they come.
Elise:
When you came back to Pittsburgh, you said you got married. At that point, what were your hopes? What did you hope to do, hope to become?
Samuel:
I don't know if I hoped to become anything. I knew what I didn't want to do. So I taught at a prep school, Shady Side Academy, for a couple of years, and then I had a chance to teach at Duquesne. And at that time, I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it the whole time I was there. I don't have any regrets about that at all. I was, at one point, there was a vice president at Pitt who became the chancellor at the University of Indiana. And he called me, and he said, “Hazo, how would you like to be my vice president when I go to Indiana?”
Elise:
So that's how you were in Bloomington, too. Okay. So you didn't take that position, though?
Samuel:
No.
Elise:
Okay. Well, our paths may have crossed in some other strange way if you had done that?
Samuel:
Well, actually it showed me what Pittsburgh meant to me. That was all a matter of luck because, when I got out of the service, I went down to the VA and fellow said, “You're entitled to the GI Bill.” And I said, “Well, you can put down for ‘MA.’ I don't know what I'll do after that.” He said, “I want to put down PhD, because you have enough to get a doctorate.” And I said, “Well, what if I don't?” He said, “Well, if you don't, that's your business, but if you want to, and you don't put it down, you're not going to be permitted to do it. You're going to get a lot of red tape.” So because of him, I was able to get a graduate education.
Elise:
The kindness of strangers, sometimes. I'm hearing that over and over again, in some of the stories we're talking about.
Samuel:
That’s true.
Elise:
How did poetry enter your life? How did you come to decide…
Samuel:
I always, of all the forms of literature, poetry, always the one was always the one that spoke to me most intimately. And I tried my hand at writing when I was in the Marine Corps. I had some things published. And when I finished a poem that I was moved to write, as opposed to a short story or something, I always was the least dissatisfied, with that form of writing. And I still feel the same way.
Elise:
You said that “when you were moved to write a poem.” Is that your way of approaching the writing, by being affectively or inspirationally moved?
Samuel:
Absolutely.
Elise:
Can you say more about that, what that means to you?
Samuel:
Well, I don't think that writing a poem is something you do from ten to five every day. I think that's, anybody who does it is wasting his time. I mean, it's like writing a poem on request or on demand. When I went to see Governor Casey and he offered me this, I said, I'll take it on two conditions: no salary, and I won't be asked to write some poem if some judge in Lackawanna County is to be elected. The purpose is to try to make poetry an expected part of public life. And he agreed. And so I did it for ten years.
And then the governor, I’ve forgotten his name. One day, 2003, I get a letter from him, not from him, from his office, secretary. There was some, the Poet Laureate of New Jersey, it was, I’ve forgotten his name. He'd written some poems that were considered antisemitic, and it was a big scandal. So this governor apparently thought that he was going to have trouble with me. So I wrote him a letter, saying, you know, we serve at the pleasure of the governor, so I'm not going to raise a fuss about this, but Pennsylvania should be represented with a poet for the same reason that I was. And there should be a state poet. His answer was in a letter. Perfect, political answer: “Every Pennsylvania poet is a State poet.” Can you improve on that?
Elise:
Not politically, not politically. No, no. That was studied.
I do really appreciate what you say, though, about that poetry should be a part of public life, public discourse. And I don't know that many people practice that, or that we are living in an era when people are turning to poetry to help us get through and to think through, be inspired by, our lives as citizens.
Samuel:
No, it's absent. That's why so much poems by American poets are not known outside of sometime their state or their generation, or not known in Europe at all. And are not known even in this country, even in their own state.
Elise:
What kind of poems would you like to hear more of and read more of in the public sector?
Samuel:
Poems that speak to everybody, to everybody. I was just reading a poem by Bill Merwin. It's only a six-line poem. You've had a thought that came to you, and you said, God, that's a brilliant thought, and you were just about to go to sleep, So I'm just going to think about this in the morning. And you'd get up in the morning and it's gone. Right. And he writes,
Coming late, as always,
I try to remember what I almost heard.
The light avoids my eye.
How many times have I heard the locks close
And the lark take the keys
And hang them in heaven.
Elise:
Pretty perfect poem.
Samuel:
It is. I can’t improve on it.
Elise:
The compression of the images and the sounds, even as you were reciting it…
Samuel:
Oh, you can take ordinary statements sometimes.
Elise:
Right.
Samuel:
I was looking through some poems, and there's a poem called “One-Liners or Less”:
What made Elizabeth admit,
“I’m not attractive to men…”
Or Patti state, “My brother
is so good he’s boring.”
or Dolores in her eighties claim,
“I want more birthdays, but I
don’t want to celebrate them.”
Or Barbara, once divorced, concede,
“The world is ruled by couples.”
Such frankness in women makes
the truth less fearsome
if admitted when faced,
and there’s a lighter side as well.
Watching his wife in underwear
peruse the mail, he asked,
“What if a strange man walked in?”
Without pausing to look up,
she said, “You are a strange man.”
After a party-crasher mocked
his French hostess by stating,
“Your meal was fit for a pig,”
she smiled a Parisian smile
and said, “So glad you felt
at home.”
But Marilyn Monroe
outdid them all.
When asked
if she had something on
when Joe DiMaggio proposed,
she answered with grave innocence,
“The radio….”
The shorter the line,
the keener the wit- the keener
the wit, the surer the touch-
the surer the touch, the truer
the art that knows when one word
more will be a word too much.
Elise:
Thank you. That was recited, for those of you listening. And it really, it begs me to ask you, what role do you see memory playing? You have so much that you just have memorized, that is part of who you are. Does memory play a role in your work? Why do you think memorizing is important?
Samuel:
I'll answer a one phrase: Memory is all we have. The future doesn't exist. The present is becoming past. And the past exists only a memory. So, if you don't have that, you have nothing. Why do people keep pictures? Why do people keep letters?
Elise:
And everything is alive there. It reminds me of what you mentioned earlier as you encountered that intellectual cosmopolitan Catholicism. That it gave you a sense of imagination where all things could be contained.
Samuel:
Absolutely.
Elise:
And memory seems to dovetail with that. That all fits.
Samuel:
Even people who are, who are not considered core Catholic or Christian. I mean, Linda Pastan, who’s a contemporary poet who is Jewish, and her poems, especially her poems about her children and so forth—I mean, if that's not a humane, human, natural outlook, I don't know how to, I'm not interested in any alternative.
Elise:
This desire to have a humane outlook, to have public poetry, be a part of civilians’ lives, every person's life—is that what inspired you to begin the International Poetry Forum?
Samuel:
Yes.
Elise:
I'm just going to read for listeners who may not know about the International Poetry Forum. I'm just going to give a very abbreviated list of some of the poets that you hosted here in Pittsburgh: W. H. Auden, Anne Sexton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Seamus Heaney, Billy Collins, Octavio Paz, Naomi Shihab Nye, W. S. Merwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Derek Walcott. You also hosted Senator Eugene McCarthy and Princess Grace of Monaco. And as I said, I've not really even scratched the surface of the luminaries that you brought to Pittsburgh, but because I'm a great lover of poetry but perhaps a greater lover of Grace Kelly, I have to ask you—what it was like to host a princess in Pittsburgh? How did you bring her here? What was that like?
Samuel:
Well, actually, a woman, her name was Denise Ellis. Her husband was a lawyer, and I didn't know her at all. But she saw a notice in the paper that Princess Grace had given a reading at Edinburgh, Scotland, at the castle or something there. And she said, she more or less just said, said that. So I thought about it, and I said, you know, and I wrote her a letter, but to make sure she got it, I sent it through the Monaco consulate in New York, and he assured me that she would get it. So she wrote back and said—in fact, we were just going through her letters yesterday. The first ones are all typed and signed Grace De Monaco. And then, after we got to know one another, I have about eight or nine handwritten letters.
Elise:
Wow.
Samuel:
Anyway, so Marianne, my wife, was at that time doing some travel consultancy for people, and she arranged for us to have a trip to Monaco. So we went to Monaco, and Grace Kelly wasn't there. So I met her secretary, a man named Paul [inaudible]. And I left him a couple of books of mine, and she had already received the letter that I had written, but he said, “We can't give you a date.” When we came back, she wrote me and said, “I could come. I'm having a meeting at Paramount.” She's a member of the board of directors of Paramount. And “I could come,” and she gave me a date. It was in, I think it was in February. I'm not sure. Fine. People have said to me, was the show a lot of money? She wouldn't accept anything.
Elise:
Really?
Samuel:
The only ones I paid were the ones that came with her. There was an actor named Richard Pasco who originally came with her. Anyway, we presented the program here. We got to know her, and she was very much like you: very open, easy to know, convivial, a good woman.
Elise:
That’s so kind.
Samuel:
Charlie, Charlie Jordan, who was her bodyguard—I had to hire a cop. Charlie's beat was the Edison Hotel downtown, which is the headquarters of every pimp in the city. And the next day, he's the bodyguard for Grace Kelly. She’d never met anybody—I mean, the men around her were, you know, “Oui, princess,” “Oui, madam,” da da da, all that. Charlie would say, “Princess, your slip's showin' on the right. On the right, Princess. The other right.” But that's the way he talked to her, and she liked it. As a matter of fact, three years later, when he died, he died on the job. She wrote a letter to his wife and had everybody who came with her write a letter to his wife. And then Charlie's, when I went to Sydney for the viewing, they had a picture of Grace Kelly and him, in the casket. Hmm. That's what it meant to him.
Elise:
That's extraordinary.
Samuel:
It's amazing. Yeah. And what else can I tell you about her? Actually, when she, when she was killed, Mary Anne and I were in Washington, and I'd heard she was in an accident, but the only report that came out then was that she'd broken her leg. And we were there in Washington to set up a reading for her performance for her in Washington, and then we drove home, and I didn't have the radio on. So when I got to Pittsburgh, I could hear, the cars in front of the house, and reporters and all that. And when I got there, they said, “She died.” I said, well… The only one who didn't ask me a question that night was a young girl, just starting out as a TV reporter, Sally Wiggin. She saw how I felt, and she never asked me a question, but she was following the interview very closely.
Elise:
For those who are listening who might not be from Pittsburgh, Sally Wiggin was a longtime news anchor here and is still a major community figure in Pittsburgh.
Samuel:
She is. Yes, she's. She's sweet and nice, now as she always was, and a very competent journalist.
Elise:
Very.
What were some of the other hallmark experiences from International Poetry Forum for you? Who inspired you most that you brought to the city to read?
Samuel:
Well, the one that, the poet with whom I shared my ideas about what poetry should be in society was Archibald MacLeish. Because that's exactly what he believed. And he said if poetry doesn't reach the people, it's just wasted. And his poetry, a lot of his dramatic poetry has the same purpose. One of the interesting readings was the actor Peter Ustinov. I had to really track him down to get him to come. And finally he said he would come, and he came and he gave a reading in which he used, you know, he used every dialect known to man to recite poems. And finally, at the end, he liked the poems of John Donne, and he read poems of John Donne, which were, it was ill-advised, because you can't read poems of John Donne to an indiscriminate audience. They won't get it.
There was Yevtushenko. With Yevtushenko, in fact, the people in New York said I needed a, we needed a letter to invite him. Would you mind writing a letter? So I wrote the letter, so my letter got him out of Russia, and he came and he gave his first reading here in Pittsburgh, and he came on over, forget it. There were people, and there were 2000 people there that night, and he was introduced by his friend Slater, “I present you, Yevgeny Yevtushenko.” “I am so glad to be in Pittsburgh”—then he said it in Russian. Somebody in the audience said, “Come closer to the microphone! We can’t hear you.” He said, “No, you come closer to me.”
Elise:
Perfect. That's fantastic.
Samuel:
But he, there's a man who knew how to, it was all from memory, and in Moscow he'd have an audience of 80, 80-90,000 people.
Elise:
That's astonishing. It's also just astonishing to think of 2000 people in an auditorium to hear a poet. And I'm really astonished just listening to you talk about the letters that you wrote; the way of doing this, establishing the terms on which we do these kinds of things in academia today are so different. And, frankly, they're largely impersonal.
Samuel:
That's right. That's one thing I found out about actors. We had probably some of the greatest actors in America, and British. Anthony Hopkins, Gregory Peck, [inaudible]. All of these people are good, summit actors. But! But what I found out is that between movies, they have nothing to do, except social things or family things. So they're open to something like this, which doesn't take much rehearsal, if any. It [allows] them to indulge something that they enjoy, and they can, if they don’t recite it, they can read it.
Gregory Peck came. We did a program of William Butler Yeats’s poems. I showed him the script. He said, “You read the script. I'll be Yeats. And he said the forms of Yeats. The one poem that he read it that night, and as it turned out, he was not satisfied with his reading, because it wasn't, it wasn't very animated. Well, he came back the next year for the arts and letters program, and they invited me. He asked them to invite me. So Mary Anne and I went. First poem he read, he said, “My friend Mr. Hazo is in the audience. I want re-recite a poem I should have done better when I was here.” And he recited that poem, from memory, of Yeats.
Elise:
I wish I could have heard that, both times, the poor time and the excellent time.
I wonder if you have any suggestions for how we might do more of this right now? How can we motivate ourselves to do more public recitations of poetry?
Samuel:
Just to do them.
Elise:
Just do them.
Samuel:
I mean, you don't have to have a crowd; you could do them over dinner.
Elise:
I've often thought that public recitations of poetry and drama, and just doing place on street corners, or, you know, in little public squares, would do more to change us.
Samuel:
I think it's best to do them in familiar circumstances. I just quoted two poems a few minutes ago. I felt very much at home doing that. We're here, over a table. But there are other circumstances, at dinners sometimes, formal dinners, if you want to toast somebody, it’s a perfect time to say a poem that would apply.
I was working on a poem—I'll try it on you. It's called “The Less Said, the Truer,” and there's an epigraph, it's an Arab proverb: Love comes to men through the eye; to women, through the ear.
When Cyrano proclaimed his passion
for Roxanne, he spoke from the shadows.
Seated on her balcony, she never
even saw the man but loved
what she heard.
There’s more
to this than mere romance.
All those who say that love
is based on age, height,
religion, status, wealth, or race
are talking mergers, not marriage.
The man a thoughtful woman
allows to enter her body
needs more than these to qualify.
It’s what she hears or sees
in his eyes that matters to her.
For lack of an alternative,
call it the language of the heart . . .
Bill’s wife-to-be spoke only
Japanese.
He felt what she meant,
and their thirty years together
prove it.
Taller than Faisal
by half a foot, Nouha
left Syria to marry him
because she liked “the look
in his eye.”
When Anne met
Pamela’s French fiancé,
she told her, “I’d marry him
if I had to live in a sewer.”
Although her mother disapproved,
Rebecca explained, “I’m not
marrying my mother.”
Twenty
happy anniversaries later,
she pleaded with friends, “Please
be nice to my mother.”
What else
but love explains why Trish
mounted a Harley-Davidson
with Mark, who steered it
after midnight through the rain
from Pittsburgh to Washington
with just one stop?
In order
to prevail, love challenges risk.
Deny that at your peril.
Elise:
Thank you. “Love challenges risk.” That's lovely.
Samuel:
But imagine, I was there that night. Mark Caroletta had come to Pittsburgh to visit Trisha, who was his, more than his girlfriend, just about his fiancée. She was studying at Indiana University. And they were supposed to go back, because they had to be at work at nine in the morning, and she wanted to go back, just spend the weekend, you know, with him in Washington. It's five minutes to twelve. It’s raining, and she came out and got on the bike, on the motorcycle. I said, “Mark, are you sure you want to go? It's raining and it's night.” I imagined on the turnpike… No hesitation. And I told Mary Anne, I said, if lov, doesn't explain that, the only alternative is madness.
Elise:
I thought the same thing. Well, the two have always been tightly linked.
Samuel:
That's a true story, by the way. I didn't make up a thing about that.
Elise:
And those true stories are all around us, and are all poems, are all capable of becoming poems. They can be poetic.
And you're writing poetry now, as we kind of come to the conclusion of our conversation here—what is inspiring you right now? Earlier we talked that you were moved to write poetry, you're inspired.
Samuel:
Anything.
Elise:
Anything?
Samuel:
Anything that, you know, I was told, many people—one practicing poet said, “Don't you try to write something every day?” I said, “I don't write until I can't get out of it, when I have no alternative but to do that.” He said, “Well, I write every morning.” But the point I'm trying to make is that poetry comes the way love comes. You don't control that; you cooperate.
Elise:
I like that. “Cooperation.” It puts me in mind, the choreographer, George Balanchine, someone once said to him, “Oh, how do you create these dances?” And he said, “God creates, I arrange.” And I hear an echo of that in what you just said.
Samuel:
That’s the same thing. And that's essentially why Plato kicked poets out of the Republic. They couldn't account for what they were doing.
Elise:
Too much of a risk. That risk that's so close to love, as you said.
Samuel:
Love is it. “Love, thou art the absolute sole Lord of life and death,” said Shakespeare. And he’s correct.
There's a great story by Faulkner called “Two Soldiers.” These are family and dirt poor family in Mississippi. Their farmers. The older brother is 18. He joins the army, and he tells his younger brother, who was about eight or nine, he said, “I want you to take care of my plot till I get back. Promise?” Brother didn’t say anything. And Saturday, he goes off to Memphis, to the recruiting station. That night, the young boy, not even ten years old, he packs up all his important stuff in a handkerchief, and he starts walking to Memphis. He gets, he has a little money. He gets picked up. They take him there and take him to the bus stop there. Pay for his tickets. He gets to Memphis, goes to a cop. He says, “Where do you have the army at?” He says, “Well, Kid, there’s a recruiting station down here.” He goes into the recruiting station. There's a Sergeant. “What do you want here, kid?” “Y'all got my brother, Pete. I want to see him.” “Get out of here.” So the boy pulls a little pen knife out. “I want to see my brother, Pete!” They start chasing around the office.
Finally, a major comes out. “What's going on here?” “Sir, this boy pulled a knife on me.” “Did you pull a knife on him?” He says, “Yes, sir.” “Why did you do that?” “You got my brother, Pete. I want to see him.” “What's his last name? Do we have his brother here?” “Yes, sir.” “Where is he?” He's down to the train station, ready to go to Fort Knox.” “Get him back here and bring him in.” Here comes his older brother. He looks down, and there's his brother, ten, whom he left in Mississippi the night before. He said, “I thought I told you to take care of my plot.” “I couldn't, Pete. It hurt my heart.”
Can you think of a better line than that?
Elise:
No.
Samuel:
It hurt my heart. Beautiful.
Elise:
It is beautiful. Thank you. And thank you for this entire conversation.
Samuel:
Oh, it's a pleasure.
Elise:
It's been a pleasure for me too.