Dave Read's essays

By Dave Read, July 29, 2023 – With USC poised to award its highest academic degree to someone* whose research concerns “menstruation in contemporary poetry,” I feel confident in my judgment that USC is ignorant of poetry’s crucial role in the American war of liberation.

If my judgment is wrong, however, and that storied institution does know the value of poetry, then the judgment must be replaced by a prognosis that institutional madness has set in there. Maybe it’s just too hot and sunny in southern California?

Does the fact that the doctoral candidate limits the field of research to contemporary poetry imply that poets such as Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath can be overlooked, or does it tell us that bodily functions are being nudged toward the limelight, for the delight and edification of the poetry audience?

Perhaps it will be this newly-minted professor’s mission to isolate a space for the proper consideration of “menstruation in contemporary poetry?” Please, can anyone tell me how to put dibs on the PH.D that equity, diversity, and inclusion would demand be set aside for “priapism in colonial poetry,” to name just one potentially related field?

How did we get to such an anti-intellectual place, where equity is valued over equality, where diversity and inclusion are valued over the traditional color-blindness of the goddess Justice and her sister Lady Liberty? Who says the time has come to forget the Civil Rights struggle’s goal of integration? Word on campus is that we need to embrace the far more sinister segregation that traps us in solitary silos of personal identification?

Two huundred fifty years later, only the poetry of Common Sense and The Declaration of Independence remain. The faulty logic and the historical inaccuracies employed by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson have long since been deconstructed into a million pieces in every political science classroom in the world. And every time, the Red Coats lose again!

But, it wouldn’t matter even if William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift had been there to produce rebuttals to America’s foundational literature. Once its poetry had seeped from the rational into the emotional part of their minds, American colonists were crazy enough to think they’d be able to defeat, with farm implements and hunting rifles, the most awful weapon of mass destruction history had ever seen – the British Empire, which otherwise did very good work to laicize much of higher ed!

*Rachel Neve-Midbar

By Dave Read, July 17, 2023 – The un-representative, un-elected leaders of American society, including, but not limited to, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk, amount to a perfect imitation of King George and the parliamentarians who long ago flooded Boston with men in Red Coats. The king’s mercenaries were ordered to take up residence wherever convenient and to keep an eye on the colonists, especially those upset by the ways and means kings keep iron grips on their kingdoms.

Today’s make-believe kings have flooded, not only Boston, but much of the world with secret recording devices, sold fraudulently as “smart speakers,” but which are used to train A.I. and to inform marketing departments and intelligence agencies what people talk about when they don’t think they are being recorded, much less eavesdropped on.

Whenever someone stops you on the street, or comes to you at home or school or work, and tells you they have come to assist you, if you aren’t alarmed, then you aren’t armed with an adequate understanding of human nature and how tyranny operates.

Although King George forced us to use them, the American War of Independence wasn’t won by the people with the best arms, it was won by the people with the best ideas and the ability to translate them into the spiritual pandemic that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men still haven’t found a cure for.

“…don’t steal, don’t lift…”

The sooner we remove fraud from the American marketplace, the sooner Americans will be restored to the degree of personal liberty they enjoyed at the end of the second world war, and which they have ceded bit by bit, digital byte by virtual bite ever since we lost faith in ourselves.

We squandered our well-deserved peace dividend when we began to act as if a free people would ever fall for the sales pitch of tyranny. Today, the only people afraid of communism/socialism are the geniuses of the Republican party, and elements of the other party who let them get away with it. No matter how dark the place one party has sunk to, the other is nearly as afraid of the sunshine of open, honest governance.

How soon after his death did we forget the brilliant admonition of President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” We allowed the academic-military-industrial complex, built for the prosecution of one war, to transition itself into the faceless tyrant that today has its own Red Coats stationed or hidden in every country on earth.

Our accidental slide into machine-aided tyranny will continue, and we won’t resume the way of life this nation was founded upon, unless we re-dedicate ourselves to Common Sense.

Go ahead and read the pamphlet, if you’d like; Gen. Washington ordered 25,000 copies and also had it read aloud to his soldiers, since many were barely literate. But, you already know where and how common sense must be applied: don’t vote for a liar or a thief, don’t vote for anybody who would cheat a customer, contractor, agency, or spouse.

Dave Read

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, June 2023 – The vast sea of American literature springs from the Colonial literature that underwent a fundamental transformation during the interregnum of 1763-1775, as it became apparent that Americans would never reconcile themselves to the authority of the British monarch and parliament. Whatever fealty for England there was at the outset of the Colonial era was worn thin by the French and Indian War, then vaporized by the Stamp Act. It’s quick repeal is the poster child for the adage “Too Little, Too Late.”

Whatever else describes the motley colonial population, it had a general awareness that America was the start of something new, while England and Europe were ancient things, animated by ancient concepts and regimes. New England, New York, New Hampshire, Newport, New Haven – welcome to the new world.

Even cursory research into the origins of American literature pays handsome rewards almost immediately. And, right from the get-go, the twin themes of nature and her human partner are evident, in the earliest American prose and poetry. Rather than locate themselves somewhere along an ancient literary continuum, the first American writers wrote as if they were discovering a new world!

These excerpts show the first American writers to be cheerful and big-hearted; they are content to go all-in on ordinary things, which devotion elevates and sanctifies them. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence writes: “Franklin is the real practical prototype of the American, Crevecoeur is the emotional… Crevecoeur’s Letters are written in a spirit of touching simplicity, almost better than Chateaubriand. You’d think neither of them ever would know how many beans make five.”

From Letters of an American Farmer, by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

As if to demonstrate how near poetry is to the best prose, here is Philip Freneau’s, poem To A Honey Bee. In his benchmark, two volume Literary History of the American Revolution, Moses Coit Tyler wrote of Philip Freneau, “…a true man of genius, the one poet of unquestionable originality granted to America prior to the nineteenth century.”

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, June 2023 – The place where I was born turns up in the study of both American history and American literature, facts which I was barely aware of during twelve years of schooling at Oswego, NY. The story of my hometown, before and after the first British fort was erected there in 1722, includes people and events important to American independence and American literature. In fact, they are interesting enough for a young person to build a career around; they’re more than enough to keep an old man learning eagerly!

For the scope of this project, let’s declare its watershed event to be the 1534 encounter, in the valley of the upper St. Lawrence River, between native people of spoken culture and migrant people of written culture; that is the start of American history. (Earlier Spanish settlements in Florida had little bearing on colonial or revolutionary American history, nor did even earlier visits by Irish monks and by Vikings!)

In 1534, with a commission from the French king, Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence (naming the river for the saint whose feast day it was when he arrived); he mapped the river’s gulf and the two large settlements inland, and called the place the Country of the Canadas, since canada was the local word for village.

Cartier’s royal commission directed him to “discover certain islands and lands where it is said that a great quantity of gold and other precious things are to be found.” As things panned out, there was a great quantity of beavers available for immediate exploitation; the Yukon’s gold would remain hidden for centuries.

But, before the end of the 16th century, France had built such a prosperous business in the fur trade, that her ancient antagonist, her monarchial rival ten leagues off shore, would set sail for the new world. We cannot blame the French for luring the English in their wake, but, what began as yet another battle between the English and the French wound up producing the United States of America!

And the end of the beginning was the rout of the British by French troops and native Canadian allies under the command of the Marquis de Montcalm. My boyhood home stands on the site of the British headquarters; three forts were burned to the ground and 1,700 British-American soldiers were perp-walked to Montreal. King Louis XV was so delighted that he had a medal struck to commemorate the French victory at Oswego! The rather quick reversal of fortune in favor of the British inspired FDR to make a meaningful speech at the dedication of a monument there in 1913, when he was assistant secretary of the Navy.

What’s next? Background on relations between native Canadians and French trappers and Jesuits before the arrival of the English.

BREAKING NEWS – THIS JUST IN:
Who Governs Poetry?

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Dec. 2019 – You could park a double-wide in the gap between my initial poetry performance and my decision to go all-in with the muse. In year years, the gap is forty-seven.

Late in 1969, shortly after a two month stint in Yosemite National Park, I was the helper assigned to the hosiery guy at Kennedy’s Department Store, across the street from the more famous but less fancy Filene’s (the one with the discount basement), in Boston.

Six months earlier, I’d flunked the draft physical, about six weeks after being run out of B.U. for over-cutting class! There were 4 or 5 college-age kids on the Thanksgiving-through-Christmas crew in adjoining departments at Kennedy’s and each of us had some urge to show off or to perform or to entertain or to make you laugh so you wouldn’t fret at the fact that before sunset 3 or 4 more American kids would wind up dead in Vietnam.

We thought that was normal, because it was our first time being teenagers, but that didn’t mean we liked it, or that we would put up with it indefinitely. Since Bobby Kennedy got killed the previous summer, just a couple months after they gunned down Martin Luther King, Jr., the excitement of being alive was starting to wear off.

Which may be why we creative types put on our little variety shows whenever we thought the coast was clear. There was one guy, a percussion student at Berklee,College of Music who made amazing sounds with the weirdest objects in the necktie department, which was kitty-corner to socks, where I was at the beck and call of Mr. Crystal, who has been there since the Depression.

Across the way was perhaps the most beautiful person I had ever laid eyes on, a seventeen year old girl of Armenian heritage. She was a freshman at Mass College of Art and lived across the Mystic River in Chelsea. Her trick was to do very quick sketches of anything or anyone you pointed at.

We went on a date New Year’s Eve and it was lovely but it would have been more lovely if it had lasted until the start of the 1970s, which happened an hour and ten minutes after the last train left Government Center for Chelsea, which she was on, or I wouldn’t be typing this, according to what I’d heard about Armenian guys, of which she had several brothers.

The only non-college age person in our troupe was the only one for whom performance was old hat – he was a wedding singer with a toupe, probably in his late thirties but plain old to us, and had a repertoire beyond Dylan, Cream, the Beatles or the Stones.

What I could do was riff with words – just let it roll, unabashedly, and some of it, though absurd or at least nonsensical, sounded good, sometimes quite funny. I was, in most settings, reticent, self-conscious, but the word trick was liberating.

My sensibility had been overwhelmed by an explosion of language in the midst of teeny pop and bubblegum rock, set off by Bob Dylan, who masked himself with a dead poet’s name and who used established masters like marionettes in his own traveling circus. He sees Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower and tells us that calypso singers laugh at them.

So would I – I’d identify myself with the calypso singers, who wouldn’t, to see a couple old poets going at each other? And what in hell were they even doing in the captain’s tower – surely we’re not sailing aboard H.M.S. J. Alfred Prufrock?

The records of Bob Dylan sparked in me the liberation of language from school, where language was guilty by association with them, with the man, with the powers-that-be who say “be quiet, sit still, it’s not your turn.” Maybe I took it too personally when the nun in ninth grade accused me of plagiarism after I went rogue in my summer vacation assignment and said the fairway was emerald green? Whatever, I said that for the fun of it, not to pass ninth grade English.

In January 1970, my prospects in the Hub of the Universe, as Boston likes to call itself, were as bleak as New England weather and so, not long after reading Norman Mailer’s travelogue Miami and the Siege of Chicago, I determined to meet up with my cohort in the Sunshine State.

They weren’t there, not in evidence in Miami anyway, and I didn’t know enough to make my way down to the Keys. The majority of college-age kids I encountered in Miami affected a look likely to stand the wearer in good stead at a Nixon rally, whereas we Yankees adhered to S.D.S. guidelines, with blue jeans roots, topped off by a studied un-trendiness.

Not to say that we were the enlightened ones, with standards elevated above those of our peers in their junior exec. garb, not by a long shot. I knew that no shortage of us antiwar peaceniks were in it for the right reasons, but that plenty of us were against the war in Vietnam only to the degree of intensity that our fathers were in favor of it.

Just as every army on the march collects its band of camp followers, eager to be of service to the worthy cause, so too the army of kids mustered in opposition to an immoral invasion. Is that an echo I hear, or a siren’s song? Girls say yes to boys who say no.

Everybody showed up for a Led Zeppelin concert, at the Miami Beach Convention Center, home of the awesome Jackie Gleason Show, but also site of Richard Nixon’s nomination in 1968.

Led Zeppelin had knocked us all for a loop the year earlier; I went to the concert especially excited for a distraction from the glumness of the south Florida scene and I had heard about them playing three and four hour shows. Robert Plant sounded excited to tell us that the band were very happy to be playing material from their brand new second album. All around me though, kids only wanted to hear the songs they knew from the first album.

Honest to God, kids my own age booed Led Zeppelin for playing Whole Lotta Love because all they wanted to do was to sing along with Dazed and Confused. The band caught the vibe and called it a night after two hours or so. Get me outta here, time to move on.

As I understand matters now, the kids in Miami were the norm and I was the oddball. They were primarily attracted to a Led Zeppelin concert because Led Zeppelin were all the rage, and they wanted to be able to brag about attending their concert. Sure, they’d delight in sturm und drang of a throbbing rock concert, but they didn’t want to be led anywhere, they weren’t interested in no envelope-pushing.

To my way of thinking, we flipped out back home when Led Zeppelin made the scene because they were good and new or new and good – it was a time when our sense of rock ‘n roll was that it was a stream continually refreshed by new water flowing into it. And when Led Zeppelin hit the scene a year earlier, we almost drowned.

What was unseen, unheard, unknown, to and by my unlucky peers in Miami was of zero interest to them. Half a century later, it looks to me that most of my generation rejected their father’s lives of quiet desperation, only to proceed with their own lives of noisy distraction, instead.

Their fathers had grown up without TV; today, we see the cost to a nation where our innate bias toward lazy and dumb has been exploited by TV, has been manipulated by the corporations who own TV, enabled by office holders, either corrupt or unwitting, who permit TV to be used like a jackhammer, with the public busted into a pile of voting blocs, convertible into the demographic fragments that make marketing and propaganda easy as pie.

A few days later, sitting in the Manpower office near the boarding house where I crashed for twenty bucks a week, I almost exploded when I saw this banner headline above the masthead of the Miami Herald: “Dylan to play Winter’s End Festival.”

What the fuck? Dylan, who played the Isle of Wight the summer before, instead of Woodstock, but who otherwise hadn’t toured since 1966, is going to play at “the South’s answer to Woodstock,” as the Winter’s End Pop Festival was billed.

For weeks there had been stories about the festival, originally planned for Miami, and all the opposition it generated, led by Gov. Claude Kirk, a Nixon bootlicker and the first GOP governor of Florida since the 1800s!

But that was just a lie; who’s lie is anybody’s guess. The governor banned the whole festival, which had been scheduled for Easter weekend in a no-mans-land near Orlando, where Epcot now sits. That scared away many of the advertised acts, and all my pals from Miami U., but Mountain showed up, and so did Johnny Winter, and a local band we Yankees had not heard of called the Allman Brothers Band.

Another outfit not scared away by scaredy cat Kirk was the Hog Farm who showed up with enough peanut butter, rolled oats, and bananas to keep us hopping. Turned out a splendid, if sunburned, weekend.

Too much back-filling, the point is that my first poetry performance was to rap out spontaneous riffs as the 1960s came to a close, but that it would be another half-century before I could concede to myself that, indeed, I’m a poet.

My satori occurred in the midst of a scant acquaintance I managed to establish with Donald Hall during his last six years. His essay Out the Window, which I read in the New Yorker in January 2012, had a strong effect on me. I told a friend about it, who told me she had been his student at Michigan in the 1960s.

After she read the piece and told me she liked it, too, I suggested she send him a note of appreciation. “Oh no, he’d never remember me,” she protested. “So what, he’s an old man, he’d be delighted to know that you remember him!”

Long story short, she wrote, he replied by next post to say “you probably want to take me to lunch.” After she alerted him that I was part of the bargain and he didn’t flinch, we made plans for the first of three visits to Eagle Pond Farm and dinners with a man who had been Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Donald Hall had had a scant acquaintance of his own with Robert Frost, once king of the world of American poetry, especially in the decades before Congress decided, before the outbreak of WWII, that we needed to be more like our old vanquished foe across the pond and established the institution of poet laureate.

I have yet to research the congressional rationale for such a deed, but I’d wager that it bears no relationship to the notion that federal patronage of poetry may have the effect of reining-in those poets who harbor aspirations of laureled loftiness. If he’d been on the scene, wouldn’t future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan have insisted on language that references the Poet’s Rebellion of 1916?

As founding poetry editor of the Paris Review, Hall conducted canonical interviews with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. He’d gone drinking with Dylan Thomas, whom he said died owing him two pounds.

I am glad to have been ignorant of all that until reading Hall’s obituary. It would have adversely affected our relationship, especially the Dylan Thomas connection, because I was a big fan of the star-crossed Welshman. And not just his poems, either – when reading the opening speech of Under Milk Wood, I felt as if I were standing outside my own boyhood home, on a hill above Lake Ontario.

Weirdly, 45 years earlier, enrolled in my hometown state college, after completing the poetry courses in the Writing Arts program, my request to do an independent study of Dylan Thomas was denied because the director told me that he lacked the expertise to supervise my study of Thomas.

Today, I am grateful for that refusal, because such a project could have led me to graduate school then a career talking to college kids about Dylan Thomas, at a time when my mastery of whiskey was as weak as his own had been. If you care to know how bad his thirst was, skim through his widow Caitlin’s scant memoir, Leftover Life to Kill.

The other poet on the faculty had an effect on me, too. He wrote a year-end evaluation that blew my mind, “…your talent, by very reason of its considerableness, is difficult to assess…”. Already a couple years behind the kids I started school with, I was a confused young man, with a happy baby daughter, an unhappy wife, and no clue as to how to provide for them.

Lawyering had always been the presumption, since my father was a lawyer, but I couldn’t ask his advice because he died when I was in ninth grade. It didn’t matter who else I would ask, because when my dad left the scene, I admitted no successor authority to my life. I was bound to figure it all out for myself.

But the best I could do was dismiss my professor’s praise as nonsense; even if it weren’t, what practical use could it be? Poetry was not a paying job in the early 1970s, when colleges still professed to be about the individual’s intellectual development. Seemingly overnight, and in response to no public debate, American colleges have transformed into feeder labs for corporate America, as they fain pride in acceptance of that new role.

In the early 1970s, there were fewer than a score of colleges that listed creative writing/writing arts as a course of undergraduate study. Today, that number is around eight hundred. Yes, 800! Of course, poetry would be but one genre on offer, but doesn’t it look as if the ancient vocation of poetry has become a modern occupation, complete with academic hierarchy, governmental, and corporate patronage designed to keep it out of the wrong hands?

Instead, safe from the scent of filthy lucre, I dreamt a dream wherein I lawyer for twenty years, just enough to land me in a happy home with a mahogany paneled conservatory, wherein I compose heroic couplets and lamentations of heroes in their cups.

Just a few years ago I looked for that teacher and found his wikipedia page, but sadly he had died a couple years earlier. It amazed me to read that, soon after I was his student, he resigned his academic position, and accused his colleagues of being “devotees of an obscurantist cult.”

That puzzled me, so I looked at the wikipedia page of his colleague (and boss), the one who’d turned down my request to study Dylan Thomas. It lists him as being on a committee of an “artistic literary movement founded in Turin, Italy, with the patronage of Aeronwy Thomas (Dylan Thomas’s daughter).”.

Midway of my friendship with Don Hall, I had a medical emergency that required a couple weeks hospitalization and three months recovery at home. I was already ten years off the sauce by then, and had found enough discipline to write poetry on a regular basis and to participate in a spate of open-mic type events.

It was thirty years since college; my marriage ended soon after we enrolled in law school, which didn’t result in me doing any lawyering. Year after year, I worked a medley of miserable menial jobs. Early in the Reagan administration, though, I stumbled upon an oasis, in the Berkshires, when I was hired to teach English at a tiny residential school for emotionally-disturbed and learning-disabled adolescents.

It was a blast. One term we produced an Oscar Wilde one-act, another term we read The Dead, with the promise of the John and Anjelica Houston movie sufficient to keep the kids plodding along for months with Joyce. Also, since I had finagled student subscriptions to the New Yorker from the administration, when Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie was published there, we all read lessons taught by America’s war in Vietnam.

I would have contextualized that study by introducing such poems as Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner, In Flanders Fields, and Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.

Funny how these things play out, but my study of The Dead, and several screenings of the film, gave me the conversation starter I’d need when I sat down for dinner with Don Hall decades later. It was his seminar on Yeats and Joyce that my friend had attended at Michigan, and so I asked him how to reconcile the Joyce of Ulysses with the Joyce of The Dead?

I referenced the scene in the story where the protagonist senses that he hadn’t been the love of his wife’s life, by way of opening the conversation. Lucky choice, because that scene had some resonance with Hall, too, and he proceeded with such a spirited disquisition on Gabriel Conroy that it would have astonished Mr. Joyce himself!

On the four hour drive home, I pressed my friend for her recollection of everything Don had said, but her interest wasn’t as keen as mine was. The two of them, over the course of our three dinner visits, spun off a conversational stream around psychoanalysis, of which she is a practitioner and he was a long-time consumer.

One scandalous item I was able to overhear clearly concerned an episode when Hall’s analyst talked him out of dropping acid. (Hall wrote a celebrated book about Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis, wherein he “broke the story” that Ellis had hurled a no-hitter while tripping!)

I was happy as a pig in mud with such a level of proximity to such a celebrated and important scholar and poet. It was an honor to be welcomed into his now-storied home, and to get a close glimpse of how and where he worked. My primary concern was to not spook Don, not to appear as a supplicant, or as a poet manque on a quest for his approbation.

I knew in my bones that nobody could validate me as a poet but myself. There is no registry where one applies for a license to make poems. I did, however, do just that during my teaching stint thirty years earlier. After familiarizing the kids with the construct of “poetic license,” I devised a lesson plan the successful completion of which would result in the issuance of poetic licenses. Luckily, there was an apprentice forger in class who was able to design and execute with pen and ink documents that looked exactly like a driver’s license.

The thing that helped me make the call to go all-in with poetry, as my seventieth birthday loomed, was how comfortable it felt to be in the company of someone who so fully and so properly bore the Poet’s mantle. Through the years, I’d made the acquaintance of plenty of poets, and so many of them rubbed me the wrong way, as if they weren’t about the same thing as I was.

And maybe they weren’t? Maybe they followed a road taken by writers under contract to a publisher, or writers under the authority of a dean or a department head, or writers eager for some foundation’s sustenance or patronage? As a young man, Donald Hall followed a backwards road from New England to Old England; he toiled long in the sere soil of English formalism until his own poetic voice asserted itself in New Hampshire.

My college years preceded the appearance of an artificial market in poetry, created by the explosion of Creative Writing/Writing arts programs, combined with the coinage of the American poet laureateship, and by the bestowal of $200 million on Poetry magazine by a Big Pharma heir, and by the promise of genius grants from the bottomless pool of MacArthur insurance and real estate money.

Donald Hall remade himself in the 1970s when he resigned lifetime tenure at Michigan and returned to the first place he loved, his grandparent’s homestead in the shadow of Mount Kearsarge in New Hampshire, in New England, with a new wife, and new poems for him to work hard on.

Following his effusive riff at our first meeting, on Gabriel Conroy, a figment of the imagination of James Joyce, every moment in Donald Hall’s company moved me toward the recognition that the two of us were in the same lane, that we’d submitted to the same sanctioning body, that our utter amusement with the sturm und drang, with the lows and highs of mundane life, were the poet’s ample compensation.

Poets are day laborers, at the beck and call of the muse, who pays well, even if payday is not a thing set in stone. Asked why he chose life in Wilmot, NH – after his Ann Arbor professorship, Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford fellowships, he said “There’s no reason to live here, except for love.”

Donald Hall gave his last reading and poetry talk at the University of New Hampshire in November, 2017, upon the dedication of his Papers there. He reminded us that the best American poetry still is by Dickinson and Whitman. Afterwards, I sent a note to thank him for “…the tuition-free seminar…” that our scant acquaintance had amounted to. And I enclosed a new poem, “Afterparty,” which I thought was pretty good.

His reply, prompt as always, concluded with this tiny paragraph: “I like Afterparty.”

Donald Hall died in June 2018 and in August 2019, I read Afterparty at a bookstore in Cambridge, perhaps ten miles from the site of the old Kennedy’s Mens Store, from an anthology called Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall. (Order from the publisher.)

~~~
Afterparty
We don’t bid our dead Godspeed to the afterlife
the way we did, in churches, where weeping echoes
off walls or gets absorbed by pipe organ blasts,
while incense spirals from an acolyte’s censer,
and the minister intones his woeful sound.

After we lowered our dearly departed into the ground,
back at the church hall there would be baked ham,
casseroles, and pies, supplied by neighbors and aunts.

Today, in function rooms, where event planners
have laid out aromatherapy diffusers and flowers,
we get right on with the afterparty and mingle,
nibbling fruit, veggies, and tiramisu, while a playlist,
synced to a slideshow, loops in the background.
– Dave Read

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, June 2023 – Fealty to the Toronto Maple Leafs may be the only thing from childhood that I’ll carry to the grave. I got it from my father, who died when I was fourteen, before I would begin to make up my own mind about who/what to root for. Not only had he been born in Toronto, but his father Frank was business manager of the Syracuse Stars, their top farm club, while he was student manager and last man cut of the hockey team at St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto, which sent scores of alumni to the Maple Leafs.

My fealty has maternal ties, too, because my mother’s father was a friendly rival of Leafs’ founder Conn Smythe in the sand and gravel business, and a sub-contractor on the construction of Maple Leaf Gardens. A few months after my father’s death, while visiting my mother’s family at Easter, I was brought to a game there and saw the Leafs hoist the Stanley Cup, after beating Gordie Howe and the Red Wings, 3-1. Two goals by St. Mike’s alum Davey Keon, the other by Eddie Shack, who the team had sent to St. Mike’s for remedial reading!

(My father David J. is the civilian on the left; his father, Frank J. is the one on the right above.)

From one garden to another

The next time I would see them in person would be some four years later, when I was in college at Boston. During the Bobby Orr era, the way to get tickets to a Bruins game was to go to North Station/Boston Garden on the first Sunday of the month, and hang out until 9 a.m. Monday, when obstructed-view tickets went on sale.

During the preceding summer, my mother had told me that Frank Mahovlich had recently married one of her Toronto cousins, and that two of my cousins had been altar boys at the ceremony. I managed to overcome my inherent humbleness long enough to share this interesting coincidence with my obstructed-view hockey friends, Dapper Dan and Harry the Hippie. Obstructed-view tickets were sold in threes, one on either side of a beam. Dapper and I were hockey nuts, Harry was just along for the party, which always began with drinks in his dorm room.

Then there would be nips from flasks and cups of suds during the game and as this one progressed, my pals goaded me into admitting that I was a big fat liar about the Big M being my cousin-by-marriage. The Leafs and Mahovlich had rather poor games, and while I was happy to let the issue go, my pals practically pushed me down to the visitor locker room. Out walked the Big M, who appeared to be twice as big as me, in a great overcoat and Slavic fur hat.

Just barely within earshot, I muttered something about it having been a tough loss and announced that the two of us are related by marriage. He scowled and proceeded toward the bus; my friends chuckled and pushed me toward him, as I wracked my semi-conscious brain for the name of my mother’s cousin. All I could think of was the names of my cousins, McCabe and Walsh, which were the married names of her sisters. Stumbling toward him, I blurted out a suggestion that his wife may have one of those names. He stopped in his tracks, so that I almost bumped into him, then, staring into the vacuum of my eyes, he asked “Kid, are you trying to tell me who I’m married to?”

All’s well that ends well

My mother had a sympathetic chuckle when I recounted a milder version of the story, then told me about her cousin Marie Devanney, whose mother was her mother’s sister. Apparently my little fiasco seeped into family lore because decades later, my cousin Kate Crawford Briscoe mailed me a photo made when her husband Doug was Military Attache to the Canadian Embassy in Washington. They were hosts of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Mahovlich (and Ambassador M. Chretien), in D.C. with an exhibition of art from the Hockey Hall of Fame, where the former Ms. Devany was director of exhibitions. When cousin Kate mentioned that her mother was from Toronto, Mrs. Mahovlich asked her name, then exclaimed, “we’re cousins!”