Volume 37
Fall-Winter
2011 |
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My family and I love August in New
York. Parking is easy, and we even get a
seat on the subways. But the first week
of August every summer, we, too, flee
the sirens and horns, abandoning the
cacophonous clatter of City Lore’s First
Street and First Avenue offices for a week
at the beach in Garden City, South Carolina.
My wife and fellow folklorist Amanda
Dargan’s parents rent the house, and all
of her sisters and our nieces and nephews
pile in, spending afternoons and evenings
on the screened-in porch overlooking the
sand dunes, the beach, and sea.
Among our traditions is an evening
spent reading poems on the porch, a
tradition Lucas Dargan, Amanda’s dad,
eagerly anticipates, with his at-the-ready
101 Favorite Poems, published in 1929. But
we all bring a few poems down to the
beach to read, and Aidan Powers, now 10
years old, comes equipped with a full set
of Shel Silverstein’s ingenious poems from
books like Falling Up. (One of the Silverstein
lines delivered on poetry night has
even become a kind of family expression:
“We can be friends forever,” I joke with
Aidan. “There’s really nothing to it. I tell
you what to do, and you do it!”)
Masterpieces and ditties are read side
by side. Poems from the English Romantics
like Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and
Byron are read side by side with cowboy
poetry and nonsense verses. One family
story reminded Lucas of an old limerick
that he mostly recalled: “A wonderful bird
is the pelican / His bill holds more than
his belly can….” Then Lucas forgot a line,
which we were able to recapture thanks to
the internet, available even at the beach in
recent years. “Ah, that’s it! ‘He can take in
his beak / Food enough for a week / But
I’m damned if I see how the helican.’”
But the poems that waft onto the sea
air that evening carry with them not only
the finely wrought words of their creators,
but the family stories and personalities and
ethos of the family gathering. Each year, for instance, Amanda’s sister Sarah reads
“The Minuet” by Mary Mapes Dodge in
honor of her mother: “Grandma told me
all about it / Told me so I couldn’t doubt it
/ How she danced / my Grandma danced
/ Long ago.” She reads that poem every
year, because it reminds us all of a story
that Frances, now 94, loves to tell of how
she once jumped up on a table at the
Junior Senior ball and danced to Cab Calloway’s
1931 hit “Minnie the Moocher.”
We could have guessed what poem
would come next. Lucas, a forester and
environmentalist, never misses a chance
to read Shelley’s “The Cloud”: “I am
the daughter of Earth and Water, / And
the nursling of the Sky; I pass through
the pores, of the ocean and shores; / I
change, but I cannot die. . .” Then he
adds each year, “I just think it’s amazing
that a poet could capture the hydrologic
cycle so well.”
Then my nephew Patton Adams, who
lived and worked in Beijing and speaks
Chinese, recites a poem by Li Po, “Quiet
Night Thoughts,” among the most quoted
poems of the Tang dynasty.
Before my bed
there is bright moonlight
So that it seems
Like frost on the ground:
Lifting my head
I watch the bright moon,
Lowering my head
I dream that I’m home.
“I thought it would be appropriate for
poetry night at the beach,” Patton later
explained in an e-mail, “because the moon
was shining on the water; because of the
extreme contrast between a frosty tundra
and Garden City in August; and because
being at the beach in the summer with my grandparents is one of my models
for ‘home.’”
In The Second Life of Art, Italian poet
Eugenio Montale writes about how the
journey of art is an “obscure pilgrimage
through the conscience and memory of
men…” He suggests that music, painting,
and poetry exercise their powers outside
the moment of creation, when they free
themselves from “that particular situation
of life which made them possible.” It is
in precisely those moments when the
poem is appreciated in situations, and
for reasons the poet could not even have
imagined, that the “circle of understanding”
closes and “art become[s] one with
life….”
The poems on the porch were composed
at different points in human history,
but as part of their “obscure pilgrimage,”
they sojourned for a few moments on a
porch in Garden City. Here they became
part of the way family members share
what they love with one another, and, in
the process, share something of themselves
(since, in some sense, you are what
you love).
The evening wouldn’t be complete
without my daughter Eliza reciting John
Masefield’s “Sea Fever” from memory:
“And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing
fellow-rover, / And quiet sleep and a
sweet dream when the long trick’s over.”
“Oh my God—look at that beautiful
sky,” Amanda says. We look up to see
the moon casting its reflection on the
water. Then Amanda’s sister tells us that
supper is on the table, and the poetry is
put to bed.
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Photo: Martha Cooper |
Steve Zeitlin is founding
director of City Lore.
Thanks to Amanda
Dargan for her help with
this essay.
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But the poems that waft onto the sea
air that evening carry with them not only
the finely wrought words of their creators,
but the family stories and personalities and
ethos of the family gathering.
This column appeared in Voices Vol. 37, Fall-Winter 2011. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society today.
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