SECTION 3, ROW P, SEAT 8, GRAND OLE OPRY

A week’s hiatus in blogging seems like a month to me. I’ve been traveling apace around TN, showing my daughter Stephanie and her husband Brad the sights and sounds of my second home state. As a kick-off and with the heat index over 100 degrees, we engaged in a hot time in Bell Buckle, TN, the day following their annual RC-Moon Pie Festival. Twenty thousand people formed a big crowd on the Main Street of Bell Buckle businesses – the only strip of businesses in this small TN town. At this event, the largest moon pie in the world was cut, and we were sorry we hadn’t gone on the actual day of the slicing, but we were happy we hadn’t been part of 20,000 people milling around the antique shops and trying to get a bite to eat at the one restaurant in town, The Bell Buckle Café. The festival featured a king and queen enthroned on the back of an open convertible, similar to those in a Mardi Gras parade in Louisiana. This royalty threw moon pies to the crowd rather than beads. It was a momentous beginning for the vacation before we departed for Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry the following day.

I’ve been resident in TN for three years, and last week I enjoyed my first introduction to the Music Capital of TN. We stayed at the Gaylord Grand Ole Opry Hotel with its 40 acres of indoor gardens, waterfalls, a river that features a Delta flatboat, and a 27,000 sq. ft. fitness center. We had two rooms in the 2881-room hotel and enjoyed shuttle service to downtown Nashville and to the Grand Ole Opry. Several times we lunched at an Irish pub and at a Jack Daniels saloon in the complex but avoided the Godiva chocolatier, as well as the clothing and gift shops scattered throughout the complex.

I’ve never been a big fan of country music and have memories of being a bored teenager spending Sunday afternoons with the boyfriend of the moment listening to Hank Williams and Roy Acuff and lifting my “above it all” nose, denouncing the music as “hillbilly wailing.” At 74, I admit that I became deeply interested in this American phenomenon called country music and was fascinated with lyrics that recall old English ballads. I was surprised to learn that teenage Elvis Presley made his first and only performance at the Grand Ole Opry and was told by one of the managers that he should go home and continue his truck driving career. Presley swore never to return to the Opry and didn’t.

The Tuesday night performance I saw featured two musicians who were inducted as members of the Grand Ole Opry onstage that night, The Montgomery/Gentry duet, one of whom had emerged from a severely dysfunctional family and struggled ten years to reach the pinnacle of his career. Little Jimmy Dickens, who became popular in 1948, also appeared in his famous rhinestone-studded outfit to share his country humor. Dickens, a country music legend began his career crowing like a rooster on an old W.VA radio show and is famous for his unusual ballads (how about “Sleeping at the Foot of the Bed?”).

The magic for Grand Ole Opry performers is the six foot circle of dark oak wood on the Opry stage that is cut from the old Ryman Auditorium stage, former home of the Opry. New members stand on the spot where performers like Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, and Patsy Cline once stood. A radio show since 1925, then sponsored by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, the Opry was held in a number of homes before it settled in 1943 at the Ryman Auditorium. Ironically, The Ryman was built by a fast-living riverboat captain, Thomas Ryman, who got religion and constructed a huge building to house religious meetings and visiting evangelists! The Opry moved to a multi-million dollar complex in 1974 where we attended a two-hour performance and were enveloped by the sounds of music broadcast on a radio program that is the oldest continuous radio program in the U.S.

The present-day success of star music performers at the Opry reminds me of the success of popular American writers sponsored by media conglomerates and MBA’s who now control the publishing industry. In a book entitled WRITING IN AN AGE OF SILENCE, Sara Paretsky writes: “A star is basically a brand. A brand is… a content provider, whose name on the package guarantees a sale…”However, I have to admit that as I sat in the Opry auditorium, I felt the touch of ghosts of some mighty legends who helped create this phenomenon called “country music,” musicians who were blissfully unaware of marketing that concentrated on “brand,” “package” or “content providers” --with guitar and fiddle, sans electronic equipment, they performed music that expressed quality and individuality – otherwise known as Art.

LOUISIANA CULTURE AND A POET LAUREATE

One of the newsletters I receive online comes to me from The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and I was recently dismayed to read an editorial by Michael Sartisky, editor of “Louisiana Cultural Vistas.” The article was entitled “A Dirge for Culture” and informed readers about budget cuts that would slash the state appropriation for the Louisiana Endowment Humanities to absolute zero! The programs of this association keep alive the Arts and highlight the history and culture of my home state, sponsoring such programs as “Museums on Main Street,” a partnership with the Smithsonian Institution; “Prime Time” programs that target at-risk children and parents; “Relic” programs in inner cities and rural areas that have enrolled a thousand adults in public libraries to read and engage in learning that provides greater enlightenment; “Teacher Institutes for Advanced Study” which graduate 250 teachers who teach 30,000 students annually; grants for cultural festivals such as the Louisiana Festival for the Book, the Tennessee Williams literary festival in New Orleans; a national radio documentary called “American Routes,” which carries music to 125 cities, and many more cultural projects that have contributed to the culture and education in Louisiana which would become moribund if proposed budget cuts are enacted.

In such an oil-rich state, this seems one of the most insensitive slashes the present administration in Louisiana has proposed. Other programs in the realm of Arts and Culture that I hope the governor leaves intact are those presented by Darrell Bourque, the Poet Laureate of Louisiana. Darrell Bourque is one of the nation’s finest poets (and I continually wonder why the Sewanee Writers Conference has not invited him to teach and read here on The Mountain. His poetic voice is also cogent enough to warrant the position of Poet Laureate of the U.S.). Darrell lectures, teaches, holds readings for the public and in schools, and continues to write his poems about deepest Louisiana in both English and French.

Back in the 80’s, I was privileged to introduce Darrell Bourque and Jeanne Bernard (another fine poet who now lives in Paris, France) at a poetry reading sponsored by the Iberia Parish Library in New Iberia, Louisiana. I introduced them with words of qualification from Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” adding that listeners would experience that kind of sensation when they heard both poets’ read from their work. That night it was clear to me and to the audience that these two performers were two rich voices who could speak to the condition of those who sought good poetry in Acadiana.

Later, in 1989, I scheduled a Creative Writing course taught by Darrell and was inspired to write two journals filled with poetry, a play, and a short story during one semester. Darrell became a friend and mentor, and when BLUE BOAT appeared in 2004, I knew that he had produced a wonderful volume of profound poetry. I hear from Darrell sporadically and am always glad to read his gentle, true lines. I’m taking the liberty of quoting an excerpt from one of his poems in BLUE BOAT entitled “La Toussaint:”

"…my father came to me through the clouds.
I asked the old monosyllabist how it was up there
in his heaven.
“The good thing,” he said, “is that you don’t have to speak.
Something within you, large before it ever shapes itself
as a simple yes or no, is sufficient here.
The bad thing is that everything is tending toward something else.
It is like living in the air.”

In an article written by Susan Larson in “The Times Picayune” last year, Darrell said that he spoke best in his poetry and was trying to get at what we respond to, in a simple way, “a true way, and you get closer and closer to that, the more you make art.”

My hope and prayer is that Darrell will remain Louisiana’s poet laureate for many years and will be able to give us more and more of his true art. Darrell is the author of BURNT WATER SUITE, PLAINSONGS, THE DOORS BETWEEN US, and a special volume entitled WHERE LAND MEETS SKY, a volume issued by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Art Museum, highlighting his poetry from PLAINSONGS along with Elemore Morgan, Jr.’s paintings and drawings. He gives presentations in language studies; bi-lingualism in Louisiana, poetic forms, poetry and landscape, Cajun and Creole cultures, and Teaching Poetry in the Classroom. He is Professor Emeritus of English at ULL in Lafayette, Louisiana, has deep roots in Sunset, Louisiana, and lives in the house in which he grew up. Darrell's poetic voice is both mystical and true as he showcases the Louisiana landscape and culture. His wife, Karen, to whom he dedicates THE BLUE BOAT, is an artist.

THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD

Thirty years ago when the Islamic Revolution erupted in Iran, I had been back in the States four years following a two-year sojourn in Iran. At the time of the capture of American hostages, I remembered Yeats’ words: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” After pondering the situation awhile, I conceived the idea for my book, IRAN: IN A PERSIAN MARKET. The book was a collection of vignettes gleaned from columns by that name which I wrote and sent back to be published in The Daily Iberian in New Iberia, Louisiana. They were chronicles of an American expatriate family’s experiences in this mideastern country.

In the introduction to IRAN: IN A PERSIAN MARKET, I wrote about watching television one day in 1979 and suddenly seeing angry fists waving in the air on the streets of Tehran, and when I turned on my television set yesterday, I thought I was experiencing a déjà vu. Riots had erupted in Tehran because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the election for the office of the Supreme Leader of Iran. Protesters who had voted for the rival for this office, Hussein Moussavi, were rioting in the streets, screaming about election fraud, and officers in the Revolutionary Guard were beating people, attempting to quell the riots. The landscape was torched, a man was killed by the police, and many protesters were injured before the Ayatollah Khaemini, who is the last word on this election, decided to have a recount to calm the protesters. Today, we await word that perhaps there was a mistake in the vote counting, but I doubt that any changes will be made as the Ayatollah Khaemini supports Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As I’ve already said, the scenes that flash across the screen of the television every day this week are eerily reminiscent of the revolution and riots in Tehran 30 years ago.

Coincidentally, this week I should get the proofs for a book of poetry I wrote last year about Iran entitled FARDA, one of two collections in a single volume entitled THE HOLY PRESENT and FARDA. A poem from FARDA that hints at the change in the character of Iran after the Iranian Revolution:

PERSEPOLIS

Persepolis, ruin of the ancient East,
the stones of your palace

gleam like highly polished mirrors
reflecting delicate faces of a vainglorious past;

My children and I stand on this stone of long continuances
of Achaemenian emperors, Darius, Xerxes,

disgraced at the hands of Alexander the Great
who ascended the stone staircase

leading to your country’s dreams;
beyond the wall of date palms

set fire to the State of the free,
the wealth of social accord,

destroying that final bloom
of imperial eastern civilization,

its art now reduced to building missiles,
its architecture to flimsy tents in hot wind,

ghazals about lost battles drifting
across cloudy mirrors.

THE HOLY PRESENT and FARDA will be available from amazon.com or The Border Press, P.O. Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375.