Hey, did you know that Columbia had a poet laureate? Neither did I. It’s a new thing.
In fact, it didn’t become official until after the governor’s people had ditched the state’s poet from the inauguration ceremony — although the city had apparently made the decision to create the office earlier.
There’s a release about it here.
Ed Madden — 2008
Anyway, the city’s first-ever official poet is USC English prof Ed Madden. This caused me to quote Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf: “I know him!” Which is not something I can usually say about distinguished poets.
Ed was one of the first batch of eight Community Columnists we appointed back when I was first editorial page editor at The State, winning out over hundreds of competing entries in our contest. He and the others would write one column each a month for our op-ed page, for which we’d pay them a modest fee. Back in the days when there was money for such things.
So I knew he could write. I just didn’t know he did it in verse.
And you know what? The poem he read before the mayor’s State of the City speech last night is pretty good. Not to pick on Marjory Wentworth, but I think his piece was better than the one that she didn’t get to read at the Haley shindig. Having majored in history and journalism, I don’t have the words for explaining why that is, except to say that it strikes me as way literary and stuff.
A Story of the City
(for the 2015 State of the City Address by Mayor Stephen K. Benjamin, 20 Jan 2015)
In the story, there is a city, its streets
straight as a grid, and in the east, the hills,
in the west, a river. In the story,
someone prays to a god, though we don’t
know yet if it is a prayer of praise
or a prayer for healing — so much depends
on this — his back to us, or hers, shoulders
bent. We hear the murmur of it, the urgency.
In the story a man is packing up
a box of things at a desk, a woman is sitting
in a car outside the grocery as if
she can’t bring herself to go in, not yet.
Or is the man unpacking, setting a photo
of his family on the desk, claiming it?
And is the woman writing a message to someone—
her sister maybe, a friend? In the story,
a child is reading, sunlight coming through
the window. In the story, the trees are thicker,
and green. In the story, a child is reading,
yes, and his father watches, uncertain
about something. There is a mother, maybe
an aunt, an uncle, another father. These things
change each time we open the book, start
reading the story over. Sometimes a story
about trees, sometimes about a city
of light, the city beyond the windows of a dark
pub, now lucent and glimmering. Or sometimes
a story about a ghost, his clothes threaded
with fatigue and smoke, with burning—you smell him
as he enters the room, and you wonder
about that distant city he fled, soot-shod,
looking back in falling ash at the past.
Sometimes it’s a story about someone
singing. Or someone signing a form, or speaking
before a crowd, or shouting outside a building
that looks important, if only for the flag there,
or the columns, or the well-kept lawn.
By now it’s maybe your story, and the child
is your child, or you, or maybe we’re telling
the story together, as people do, sitting
at a table in a warm room, the meal
finished, the night dark, a candle lit,
an empty cup left out for a prophet,
an empty chair, maybe, for a dead friend,
a room filled with words, filled with voices,
the living and the dead, someone telling
a story about the people we are meant to be.
Ed Madden, Poet Laureate, City of Columbia
Above is video of him reading it. Click on this link to go straight to the poem.
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Hey, sorry about the video! When I first called it up, it went straight to Ed’s part (and if you click on that link, it will do so for you). Then after I embedded it, that didn’t happen.
The poem is introduced right at the 10-minute mark. If you started at the beginning and waited, it probably got pretty tedious. Sorry…
Nice poem!
I scratched my head over all of last week’s poems in The New Yorker. It’s nice to read poetry and understand it.
So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow….
This is cool…
Right after I posted this, W.B. Yeats started following me on Twitter.
My fave:
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love…
And so forth…
Actually, maybe that’s not my fave. Maybe this is:
I sthe poet laureate a paid position? Because I would have a problem with that. Otherwise, I’ll go back to ignoring poetry, just like I have since grade school.
Apparently a poem is where you
take a paragraph of text and insert
line breaks
randomly. And then you throw in
some words, and some commas, and
an occasional semicolon; just; to; make
people
think “Oooh, this is
DEEP!”
Not at all. Now I’ll confess I sort of felt that way about the state poet laureate’s poem. It seemed too prosaic to qualify.
But this has a rhythm to it, and makes evocative use of language that distinguishes it to some extent from prose.
All of that said, I’m with you, Doug, in preferring poetry that rhymes and has a definite, obvious rhythmic structure. I’m old school. I prefer Dickinson, Coleridge, Poe, Tennyson, Kipling. You know right off that’s poetry; you can tell from a mile away…
I think the poem above is pretty bad.
Similar to my effort here
Trains leaving the station
Leaves blowing along the tracks
Water falls from the heavy clouds
My feet smell like crap
Thanks for the post, Brad, and for the kind words.
No, the position is not a paid position. It does come with a small budget to use to promote the arts in the schools and the community.
Sorry if the poem doesn’t satisfy everyone. 🙂 Hard to do that, especially writing quickly for a public occasion like this. I’ll try harder next time! I wanted to somehow capture the idea that a community, a city, a family can be defined by the stories we tell and retell about ourselves. (That was the topic of one of those columns I wrote so very long ago for you at The State.)
The poem is in blank verse, unrhymed pentameter, an old form. That is, the line breaks are not arbitrary at all, though I did roughen up (or loosen up) the more conventional iambic rhythm in order to more closely fit the sound of speech. The last couple of lines are an echo of the poem Arkansas poet Miller Williams read at Bill Clinton’s 1997 inauguration. Williams passed away on Jan 1. That little echo was, I hope, a small gesture to honor him.
Again, thanks for noticing the poem, and for your kind words.