ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE

Part of the job in writing a blog like boomerpdx is reading The New Yorker.

That’s where I found The Fifties by Monica Ferrell.

She’s got a website loaded up with the works.

The works?

She (Monica) has been recognized with residencies at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize.

She has taught fiction and poetry for the MFA Programs at Columbia University and Bennington College, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Purchase College (SUNY).

She was born in Delhi, India, and divides her time between Vermont and New York.

 

I’d never heard of her until I found her poem The Fifties in the pages of The New Yorker.

Do I seek out poets to write about? Noooo.

Do I seek out poetry to read? Noooo.

But if it’s in the magazine each week I take a look.

Sometimes something more than a cartoon sticks.

 

The Fifties stuck.

Now I know more about the poet and want to read more.

That’s how these things are supposed to work.

 

Navigating The New Yorker In Oregon

I have a subscription but not my password.

The current issue is upstairs, and I’m not.

I want to cut and paste The Fifties for boomerpdx, but without signing in.

So I did screenshots.

You need to be fast with the screenshot of shift/command/3 on a Mac because the smart people at The New Yorker only show the screen briefly before asking for an email to continue reading.

I’m a subscriber, so I get a break?

Sure I do.

 

Something About The Fifties

 

 

 

The opening stanza, the first line, is what got me.

Who’s calling the adults of the 1950’s innocents? And why?

Those were the people just five years out from the cataclysmic ruin of the 1940’s whose wreckage was still smoldering.

Their’s was a celebration of steel blades, fresh milk, robust cigarettes, a world warming up to the throw-away culture coming, and they weren’t getting tossed on the fire, too.

The bomb shelter would protect from that.

And a poet born in 1975 has them dialed in?

 

 

I read a novel called Marathon Man by William Goldman, the same William Goldman who wrote the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The main character is a graduate student son of a man who caught up in the fifties’ Un-American Committee hearings.

Goldman painted a crummy picture of the dad’s life being shattered into pieces the son runs through.

 

 

How It Works, And Works For You

Before reading The Fifties, put on the brain protector so nothing escapes.

Dive into the flashback of their ‘advanced’ medicine, segregation, and Frank O’Hara.

Frank O who? Meditations of what?

If you like a poet, and they mention another poet, another writer, essayist, novelist, or blogger (ahem) then you owe it to yourself and your taste in literacy to take a look.

Hit the Frank O link for the short read of ‘Meditations in an Emergency.’

Discovering the references in The Fifties, from a little dab will do you, to liberal sweating, is bending time when it includes a reminder that the internet is forever.

Monica Ferrell shines a new light on an era seventy-five years past. I like a new light. That’s not nothing.

And she updates another poet, Frank:

 

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.

It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious.

On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

 

PS: When a poet snags you, check on who snagged them.

 

PS: Now write your own poem. Why you? Why not you? (Thanks Monica)