Something/Someone Old

My Someone Old today is the poet James Wright.

It seems he's little remembered now, but I loved James Wright in college. Interestingly, I found that he and other poets I loved--Theodore Roethke, Gabriel Garcia Lorca, and Pablo Neruda--occupied a known tradition called "deep image" poetry, connected apparently to surrealism. I hadn't known that. I just, heh, knew what I liked.

James Wright was born in 1927 in an Ohio mill town; his father was an assembly-line worker, and he was, shall we say, preoccupied with making sure he never became one himself. He left before he turned twenty, and went to Kenyon College, where he graduated with honors in 1952. He went to Vienna on a Fulbright fellowship. When he returned to the States, he studied at the University of Washington with Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. That year, when he was still a graduate student, W. H. Auden selected his manuscript for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/j_wright/bio.htm

That manuscript became his first book, The Green Wall.

It's pretty amazing when you count Theodore Roethke, W.H. Auden, and Robert Bly among your influences:

What he is best known for is his third book, The Branch Will Not Break, in which he moves from the traditions of formalism currently in vogue in the U.S. and embraces experimental free verse.

One of the poems that made me love him:

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Something New

Meet Tuba Skinny, a new ragtime band hailing from New Orleans. I dig these guys!

Here they are playing Maple Leaf Rag:

This is Storyville Blues:

Something Borrowed

My Something Borrowed today is the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo.

Yojimbo (用心棒 Yōjinbō) is a 1961 jidaigeki film directed by Akira Kurosawa. It tells the story of a rōnin, portrayed by Toshiro Mifune, who arrives in a small town where competing crime lords vie for supremacy. The two bosses each try to hire the newcomer as a bodyguard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojimbo_(film)

Why is this Borrowed? Because Sergio Leone (whose movies I love) took the story and turned it into A Fistful of Dollars:

Ah, the good old days when Clint Eastwood concentrated on acting rather than politics.

Something Blue

Today's Something Blue is the book Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon.

“A man who couldn't make things go right could at least go."

In 1978, after separating from his wife and losing his job as a teacher, Heat-Moon, 38 at the time, took an extended road trip in a circular route around the United States, sticking to only the "Blue Highways". He had coined the term to refer to small, forgotten, out-of-the-way roads connecting rural America (which were drawn in blue on the old style Rand McNally road atlas).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Highways

"On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk – times neither day nor night – the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highways is strongest ..."

It would be accurate to say that it's pain and failure that launch William Least Heat Moon on his travels. This is a time-honored and worthy way of salving a wound, at least in the United States and Canada. If you're in pain, move. Things may or may not be better where you go than where you were, but the process of moving is at least soothing, and sometimes healing. But Least Heat Moon has an additional, though related, motive revealed by his choice of route: he wishes to see, and write a record of, those parts of America that are least regarded.

“With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.”

Least Heat Moon travels 13,000 miles in his van, which he names Ghost Dancing, in honor of the old indigenous rebirth ceremony. He has a few hundred dollars hidden in his van, twenty-six dollars in his pocket, and four gas credit cards.

This is a map of his route, with specific stops:

I highly recommend this book.

How are you all today?