Biography For The Ages Poem by Frank Avon

Biography For The Ages



Query

If you were David McCullough
or Doris Kearns Goodwin
or Peter Ackroyd
or Jon Meacham
or maybe Douglas Brinkley
or another Robert Caro
or the spirit of James MacGregor Burns

whom would you choose
for your next work,
a biography for the ages
for all time to come?

Someone to rank up there
with many already written up:
Washington and Jefferson
Jackson and the Adams
Benjamin Franklin
Abraham Lincoln
the three Roosevelts
Martin Luther King
good ole Harry Truman
(yes, LBJ, the Kennedys)
and authors by the dozens
(e.g., Doctor Samuel Johnson,
Shakespeare, Keats, Byron,
Walt Whitman, Henry James,
xxxxx, Orson Welles
and all of those many others) ?

It's the way we canonize
the 'chosen' of our times,
the ones whose stories
lead on to other glories,
yet who lived their dramas
through crises and traumas,
mated, procreated,
sometimes hesitated
longer than they should've,
sometimes anticipated
eras long before them.

Whom would you choose?
Who would be your heroes?

I have a preference
for unfortunates - losers,
men who should have been
President, but weren't:
William Jennings Bryan,
Robert M. LaFollette,
maybe Estes Kefauver,
maybe Adlai Stevenson,
Hubert Humphrey, for sure
back in 1960,
maybe Nelson Rockefeller,
certainly Howard Baker,
Mario Cuomo, or Bill Bradley;
and those losers who became
winners of the Nobel Peace prize:
the honorable Jimmy Carter,
who has earned his place in history
at Camp David and as ex-president,
whose very versatility lifts him
into a whole new strata among his colleagues;
and the honorable Albert Gore, Jr.,
saturnine, has given us our future:
he named the Information Superhighway,
and wrote 'Earth in the Balance'
and 'An Inconvenient Truth.'

The shaping of an age
is the making of the future,
and the one who sees its shape
is the one who writes its history.
But the ultimate crux of history
lives in the lives of its people,
for it's its people, after all,
who give the age its shape.
So to reflect the era I've lived in -
the latter twentieth century,
if I were a star biographer,
I should choose these THREE:


1.

'You do not have to be a painter
to be an artist.
You may be a shoemaker':
words of Alfred Stieglitz.
Always his inspiration:
images of Georgia O'Keeffe.
Their love, their partnership,
their eyes, their tensions
were the sources - the deep wells -
of what we call the Modern,
of how we see American.

First came 291 - the gallery.
'291 is greater than the sum
of all its definitions....'
someone said (and meant it)
'an intellectual antidote
to the nineteenth century....'
Steiglitz discovered
Charles Demuth and John Marin,
taught us Picasso and Matisse,
Rodin, Rousseau, Cezanne,
and Marcel Duchamp
were not only for Europeans.
Then, of course, perhaps
of greater importance:
Edward Steichen, Paul Strand,
and finally Ansel Adams,
but first himself,
first he discovered himself.
He gave us his camera
as a paintbrush with light;
as a broad palette, all
the shades of black and white
and the grays that make them mean.

Then came the Intimate - his 'Room' -
and the intimacy
of Stieglitz and O'Keefe,
an intimacy that grew.
He drew her with his letters,
his voice, his flesh, the heart;
he drew her with his lens,
her nude, her hands, her face;
what he was drawing was her grace
(it was not only me, she said;
it was also someone else) .
They knew each other - themselves -
more they they each knew themselves.
Their intimacy grew:
in the beginning, adolescent
(he fifty-four, she twenty-eight) ,
growing more intimate - and less,
more independent, more distant,
more mutual, less immediate:
a collusion, it's been said.

Together they gave us the Modern;
they gave us intimacy and
independence and distance.
She gave him her grace - his.
He became the Eloquent Eye.

He gave us her art,
her womb of the world;
she gave us the world as art:
her black iris, her purple petunias,
her reds and reds and reds,
poppies, cannas, amaryllis,
hills, mesas, canyons, shells,
gray lines and blue lines,
ram skull, deer skull, steer skull,
a horse's skull with white rose.
She explored her world
and gave us worlds to explore.
(That's what art is for,
isn't it?) And her world -
velvet folds, soft and fresh,
was always flesh, earth's vagina -
enveloping us in the here and now,
and in the ever after everywhere.
And still there was her face,
not a woman's face later, a man's,
aged, expressive, epitome of grace.
O'Keeffe & Steiglitz,
Steiglitz & O'Keeffe,
what they gave us
can never be replaced.


2.

I wish that my century
had always been a century of art,
but first it was, and thereafter,
a century of wars.
Ours a century of thinkers
who were weary of thinkers:
Charles Darwin and Karl Marx,
Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein -
we were encapsulated by ideas.
We knew we needed to know,
but we needed to know what we knew.
Enter the Talking Head:
the phonograph, the radio, cinema
television, the Internet.
Talk, talk, talk;
war, war, war.
Fine Arts, we told ourselves,
after all were frivolous;
Communication Arts was the thing,
Let Communication Arts ring.
But in all the communicating,
opinionating and insinuating,
seldom was there the art.
Where, where the art?

'THIS is London, ' Edward R. Murrow said,
and we listened. For what he said,
we knew, was what we needed to hear,
what we heard him say, was what
we needed to know - at least, that day.
It was the era of Hitler's blitz.
Poet Archibald MacLeish said, Murrow
'burned the city of London in our houses
and we felt the flames that burned it.'
Murrow and 'his boys' remade the news,
remade us, gave us expectations:
Eric Serareid, Howard K. Smith,
William L. Shirer, Charles Collingwood,
Daniel Schoor, Robert Pierpoint....

If I were his biographer,
I would want to ask three questions:
how did he become this voice for the people?
how did he shape our sense of what is worthy?
how has his influence - his vision -
waged and waned in the aftermath?

Born in Polecat Creek, North Carolina,
in a lob cabin, on a farm that brought in
a few hundred dollars a year in corn and hay,
homesteading in western Washington
just south of the Canadian border,
early on asserting leadership, speaking,
at first redefining, then presiding over
a federated students' movement,
his first employment, working on behalf of
displaced Germans in early Nazi domination.

Then brand new feats of broadcast journalism:
covering the 1938 Anschluss, Nazis over Austria,
the Munich Agreement, fall of Czechoslovakia,
the war years in London and flying on US bombers,
the liberation (the disaster) of Buchenwald;
and afterward, a hero in Washington:
'The Case for the Flying Saucers, '
I Can Hear It Now, See It Now,
Alliance for Peace, People to People,
Small World, CBS Reports,
'Watch on the Ruhr, ' 'Harvest of Shame.'

Then he was shoved off commercial television
by 'The $64,000 Question.'
What we have left in television, he said,
'insulates us from the realities
of the world in which we live.'

He was determined to tell the truth
no matter how much it might hurt -
us, or himself. He was the first
to report about the connection
between smoking and cancer. He said,
'I doubt I could spend a half hour
without a cigarette with any comfort.'
Always it was his image: his Camel
dangling from his lips, casually:
65 a day, about three packs.
He developed lung cancer
and lived for two years after
an operation to remove his left lung.

Journalism is dead.
Today instead
we have 'talking heads.'

Talking heads? The best of them -
he was their predecessor, he was
their mentor: Walter Cronkite,
Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw,
Keith Olbermann, Leslie Stahl, Diann Sawyer,
Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper.... -
have they enhanced the reputation
of the Newscaster, of Edward R. Murrow?


3.

I wish I could see which public servant
will have shaped the United States
leading this world into peace and liberty.
I cannot.

Mine has been a century of wars,
yes, crisp modern images, informative words.
It has not been an era of peace
of world-wide freedom or of equality.
No, is hasn't.

So whom shall I choose for my third biography?
Whom would I lift up for our posterity?

I must still rely on words and images;
The person I've selected - not a loser -
has been neglected. He's capable
of stimulation and most worthy of emulation;
He writes stories and essays, and of ecology;
he works the soil and speaks for the earth;
the seeds he plants will help feed his world;
he's an unacknowledged legislator of his age;
his greatest gift, the life of his life
is simplicity - the images and words of poetry.

But first Wendell Berry was an activist,
his only weapons words.

02.10.1968
'We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war,
or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships,
or to 'win the hearts and minds of the people'
by poisoning their crops and burning their villages
and confining them in concentration camps;
we seek to uphold the 'truth' of our cause with lies,
or to answer conscientious dissent with
threats and slurs and intimidations....
I have come to the realization
that I can no longer imagine
a war that I would believe
to be either useful or necessary.
I would be against
any war.'

02.09.2003
'The new National Security Strategy
published by the White House in September 2002,
if carried out, would amount to
a radical revision
of the political character
of our nation.'

03.09.2011
'We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses
forthrightly the problems of soil loss
and degradation, toxic pollution,
fossil-fuel dependency
and the destruction of rural communities.'

on the death penalty
'As I am made deeply uncomfortable
by the taking of a human life before birth,
I am also made deeply uncomfortable
by the taking of a human life' afterward.


But mainly he is a Kentuckian,
a farmer on the banks of the Kentucky River,
in a community he calls Port William in his fiction.
He farms with horse-drawn implements;
his only technology is four solar panels,
a push-button telephone and a CD player;
he owns no television and avoids all screens.
His vocation is husbandry:
he is the husband to Tanya, devoted and faithful,
and responsible for his land, its crops and livestock.
'Eating is an act of agriculture, ' he says.
Among the values he espouses
vigorously and continually
(and espouses is quite the right word) :
sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies,
small-time farming in healthy rural communities,
the pleasures of good food, (yes) husbandry, hard work,
the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence,
and the interconnectedness of life. What threatens
his simple way of life (what threatens us all) are
industrial farming and the industrialization of life,
agribusiness run by giant, absentee corporations,
chemical pesticides and fertilizers, eroding topsoil,
depletion of ancient aquivers, ignorance, hubris,
greed, violence against others and against nature,
global economics, and environmental destruction.
'Today, ' he says, 'local economies are being destroyed
by the 'pluralistic, ' displaced, global economy,
which has no respect for what works in a locality.
The global economy is built on the principle
that one place can be exploited, even destroyed,
for the sake of another place.' So there you have it.

But first and foremost Wendell Berry is a poet.
He has returned American poetry to Wordsworthian
clarity of purpose. Even his titles suggest his
simplicities: 'Broken Ground, ' 'Openings, ' 'A Part, '
'The Wheel, ' 'Farming: A Handbook, ' 'A Timbered Choir:
Sabbaths, ' 'The Country of Marriage.' Most
are pastoral, many are elegiac,
but all are celebratory of the wheel of life.
His fiction, short stories and novels,
are poetry in prose, likewise elegiac
of a lost way of life. One critic encapsulates
the emphasis he places 'upon the rightness
of relationships — relationships...elemental,
inherent, inviolable....cadences of the hymn....
the voice of the elegist, praising and mourning
a way of life and the people who have
traced that way in their private
and very significant histories.'

What Berry gives us
is ourselves, the way we used to be,
the way we mustrevive, if we are to survive
the catastrophic century, its cultural complacency,
and renew ourselves in perspecacity.
He calls himself
'a person who takes the Gospel seriously'
'Blessed Are the Peacemakers, 'i
s the title he gives one book:
'Christ's Teachings About Love,
Compassion and Forgiveness'
and that, I believe, is his key
to our future, to all eternity.


Coda

These three biographies:
are they the best that's yet to be?

Stieglietz and O'Keeffe gave us
modernity: the beauty of our world
intimacy and distance - clarity.
Edward R. Murrow gave us
information and empathy, challenges
to audacity and arrogance - clarity.
Wendell Berry has tried to give us
the world we've lost, the world we must
restore: husbandry, fidelity - clarity.

What can we ask more?
Who can speak for us - to us -
with more authentic charity?
Theirs is an iconography
to bear us up, to give us hopes,
to urge us to explore
how to respect our earth
how to rid ourselves of war,
how to love ourselves once more.
After all,
that is what
biographies
are for.

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