Some Instances

To be free of situations,

To live from day to day without events

And to be free from the need to narrate them.

One small detail, the blossoming crab apple,

For example, on the lengthening boulevard

Of the stanza, this very one,

That parallels the perturbation of the waves

Mid-April—the Mississippi flowing above the locks

Of Minneapolis, once called St. Anthony—

Two blocks away, the river high with snowmelt,

And where this morning I heard the call

Of what I took to be a sparrow, white-throated,

The leap of a minor third

Two octaves above middle C.

Four birds outside this afternoon. Four distinct calls

In a dispirited late daylight.

And you? “You”? Waiting to experience a moment

That has no precedent. The wish to be a child,

Or the wish to be outside of time,

The craving, that is, for a kind of death

In which one stays somehow alert...

Listening to the Schumann Violin Concerto:

Written in that last period as he descended into the madness

Brought on by syphilis when he heard the singing

Of the angels, this piece was thought to be unplayable

Until the metronome markings were ignored;

In the second movement a brief passage comes and goes

Like the frenzied clustering of bees, pure monotony,

Like madness gathering its forces. Clara, Schumann’s wife,

Asked that the piece never be performed, but one musician

Said of his music that all madness contains a kind

Of vulgarity, but even after he went insane,

Schumann’s music retained that odd nobility.

Outside, sounds of traffic, a woman’s cry from down the street.

Idea for a frightening story:

Last week I heard a scream so distant that it

Had lost its call-to-rescue and its horror—dim vehemence,

Like an auto accident seen from a train,

The blood grown small, and the outcries

As soundless as a branch in wind,

Or like a child in snow straggling behind his parents,

The drifts so deep he has trouble making headway,

Being five years old, and so he calls out to them,

“Hold!” because he cannot think of the proper word—

Probably “Wait” or “Stop,”—and when they hear

Him begging them to slow down and to wait for him,

They turn around to laugh. Their laughter makes the child

Sad and enraged, so he stops to cry,

Whereupon his parents, still amused, bring out a camera

To snap a picture of him as he wails.

He understands that his unhappiness

Was a diversion to them both, that they were bored

By children and therefore found him comical,

So there they are, laughing with delight.

Today, sixty years later, he is

Photographed, bundled in his winter coat.

Oh, and the bored laughter, behind the camera,

And the impossibility, the inconsequence

Of any sympathy.

Translator's Notes:

Q & A: Charles Baxter

The speaker in this poem seems to want “To live from day to day without events//And to be free from the need to narrate them.” For a fiction writer like yourself, can poetry be an escape from narration? Is the escape successful?

My answer is a respectful “No” to both questions, but in saying so, I feel as if I’m strolling onto a battlefield where trench warfare has been going on for several decades and there’s evidence of mayhem everywhere. The problem of narrative linkage in poetry is at heart a matter of aesthetic ideology, and in order to answer your question I have to weigh in on it. Like many fiction writers, I began my writerly life as a poet, and what I sometimes miss in my own fiction is the high-velocity association of ideas and events and imagery that poetry makes possible. “Some Instances,” if it is about anything, is about expressions of pain or suffering and the problems (and purpose) of such expressions. In other words, I don’t want to escape from narration; as soon as the speaker of the poem says that he wants to be free of the need to narrate events, he begins to narrate them. What I want is a quick movement of thoughts in which the transitions are left out, and the poem can make its own case about a subject that is never explicitly named or stated.

Classical music becomes a sort of soundtrack to both of these poems. Could you say more about Schumann’s “unplayable” concerto?

In Schumann’s Violin Concerto, the last movement is marked “Lebhaft, doch nicht schnell” (lively, but not fast), and if there’s anything that violinists want in the last movements of violin concerti, it’s something fast and flashy, which will open up the heavens and bring down the house. Schumann’s piece has a very odd final movement, a slowish polonaise, like someone dancing with lead weights in his shoes. Very few musicians have wanted to play it because it’s not showy, but the recording I have, by Gidon Kremer, has a performance in which it’s played at the marked metronome speed, which gives the music exactly the really weird feeling-tone that it deserves—like a birthday party seen underwater.

Source: Poetry (December 2010)

Q & A: Charles Baxter

The Sun and Shadows