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America 1968
For some time, I have wanted to create a piece about
1968. To think back on that year today is to be flooded with
powerful images: two assassinations, the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Apollo 8
orbiting the moon, the black power salute of John Carlos and Tommie
Smith on the medal-stand of the Mexico City Olympics. The particular
vision of our nation expressed in America 1968 may seem, to some, a
bit unusual. It is, at times, disturbing; at times even violent.
Still, it is a true, if difficult, view of our country during a
volatile time. Ultimately, the vision is positive and encouraging,
but the journey to that positive conclusion is harrowing - or at
least I hope it is.
I found in Robert Hayden's eloquent poetry a bridge to my memories
of the time - and to my own ambivalence about the era. In Hayden's
poems, the redemptive powers of art and nature can assuage the
reader even when "the news from Selma and Saigon poison the air like
fallout." But the rhythms and cadences of urban violence can be
heard in Lord Riot, and the casual, misdirected cruelty of those who
have themselves been victims finds its expression in The Whipping.
Those Winter Sundays is perhaps Hayden's most famous poem. In it,
one feels, belatedly, an appreciation for the sacrifices of another,
as one does, perhaps even more viscerally, in Frederick Douglass. To
me, Hayden is at his most moving in The Point, celebrating a
transcendent meeting of light and water, a moment when people are
"held in shining, like memories in the mind of God."
While tonight's performance marks the world premiere of the complete
piece, two of the songs in America 1968 were composed earlier. A
version of Monet's Waterlilies for chamber ensemble and baritone was
written in 2004 for the new-music group Sequitur, and The Point was
originally part of my song-cycle Climbing: 7 Songs on 8 Poems by
African-Americans.
I would like to express my deep appreciation to the Virginia Center
for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and Copland House - the sites where
America 1968 was composed. --Tom Cipullo |
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poems by Robert Hayden
Monet's Water Lilies
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy
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Hey Nonny No
Lord Riot
naked
in flaming clothes
cannibal ruler
of anger's
carousals
sing hey nonny no
terror
his tribute
shriek of bloody class
his praise
sing wrathful sing vengeful
sing hey nonny no
gigantic
and laughing sniper on tower
I hate
I destroy
I am I am
sing hey nonny no
sing burn baby burn
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The Point (Stonington,
Connecticut)
Land's end. And sound and river come
together, flowing to the sea.
Wild swans, the first I've ever seen,
cross the Point in translucent flight.
On lowtide rocks terns gather;
sunbathers gather on the lambent shore.
All for a moment seems inscribed
on brightness, as on sunlit
bronze and stone, here at land's end,
praise for dead patriots of Stonington;
we are for an instant held in shining
like memories in the mind of God.
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The Whipping
The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.
Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias,
while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.
She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather
to woundlike memories:
My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hateful
Words could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved . . .
Well, it is over now, it is over,
and the boy sobs in his room,
And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged--
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear. |
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Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
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Frederick Douglass
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
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"Monet's Waterlilies," IV from Words in the Mourning Time," "The Point," "The
Whipping," "Those Winter Sundays," and "Frederick Douglass" from COLLECTED POEMS
OF ROBERT HAYDEN by Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Copyright 1962,
1966, 70. Copyright c 1985 by Emma Hayden. Used by permission of Liveright
Publishing Corporation. |
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