Category: Poems from the Manhattan Years

A big foot bird
from the time we got him,
he was loud like an opera-singer ordering lunch.
Once delivered out of his hard-luck prison,
he’d slip in only when you weren’t watching, to eat,
and always,
surprising you in doorways
going the other way,
left your hair scattered in a thousand directions.

Bent in a skew-winged angle
before our breadbox,
he’d walk-around the bright reflection,
courting it with chuckles and screams.
And he battled among the birds of the stove
in the stainless steel pots
so they burnt him, and he yelled with fury.

Doting on butter, he stole it off our bread,
took his bath in the water
we were about to drink,
admired strangers greatly,
often coming on with furious hellos,
and explored stupefying mountain passes
of their heads and shoulders.
He would laugh at symptoms of cardiac arrest,
he thought they were little exciting earthquakes.

The dog would commence to shiver, seeing his coming,
watch with disciplined horror as he
paced up to his resting station,
and plucked out the hairs of his nose, one by one.
All of which makes his dying
seem as unaccountably absurd
as that of the dearest friend.
Was it only four years he came to stay?
We buried him under
the newly dead Philippine Orange,
adding a failure of knowledge and intention
onto another, hopefully.

What I really wanted to do
was to make a white-hot charcoal fire
inside the hibachi
set on the back fire-escape,
and send him up in the smoke fume
of a hero’s departure.
Verdi, I swear I’d have heard
your soul of a truck-driver
go up to freedom
passing the top of the sky coping
like a discovering squawk.

© Andrew Glaze 2023.
A previously unpublished poem, which was actually written back in the 1970’s.

The parakeets of my childhood were as follows:
Linda,
Bluie,
Bluie 2,
Tweeter,
Tweeter 2.
By the time we got a new parakeet in my teens, my father announced that HE was naming this one.

Linda, moved to NYC with us from Alabama. Bluie was the early subject of an unfortunate accident due to his love of walking on the floor, and Bluie 2 was a victim of neglect when my parents suddenly separated one summer while I was with relatives and my father wasn’t thinking clearly.  Tweeter was an older bird from a classmate that we adopted, and I can’t remember what the story was with Tweeter 2.

Verdi was the first green parakeet we’d had since Linda, and had so much personality he stood above any dog, cat, or turtle we’d owned.  Although I must admit that Frankie, the guinea pig that lived in our bathroom, was definitely an attention grabber. He’d lurk behind the toilet and come out to greet visitors after they sat down on it, much to their consternation.

Verdi was highly intelligent, fearless, always curious, and had the entire household in his claws.  My father named him after the Italian composer, Giuseppe Verdi. That name, in English, is Joe Green, which actually seemed more appropriate to his personality.

Verdi had free range of our entire apartment, and that is saying a lot.  We lived in what was referred to as a “railroad flat”, which meant that the rooms were laid out like railway cars running from the front of the building all the way to the back.  Verdi could start off in the living-dining room space at the front, fly down a hall, pass through my parent’s room, continue past the bathroom, and reach the kitchen.  He could have gone further and ended up in my small bedroom past the kitchen, but it held no interest for him and the door was always closed.  It was on the fire escape outside my bedroom window, that we would sometimes use our small hibachi grill to cook a steak or two.

Because of the sheer length of our apartment, Verdi quickly realized that he could save a lot of effort if he simply hitched a ride on any of us headed in the right direction. Typically he’d pick a head or shoulder to travel on. If it was a shoulder with convenient earrings to investigate, all the better!. As a ballet student, I often wore my hair in a ballet bun on top of my head. For Verdi, it was an ideal seat for commuting. Sometimes, he’d hop off in my parent’s room, to grab a snack in his cage. Other times he’d choose the kitchen, although, if we passed the bathroom along the way, and the door had been accidently left open, he’d delightedly flit inside there instead.  The bathroom medicine cabinet mirror was his favorite hangout. It was very difficult to get him to leave once he’d taken residence at the top and re-kindled his ongoing romance with the reflection in it.  The billing, cooing, whistles, and chortles could go on for hours. This is why we tried to keep the doors shut. 

My brother remembers him spending a fair amount of time on my father’s head. The attraction was logical since my father’s fly away hair was feather like, particularly first thing in the morning when he resembled every stereotypical mad professor image I’ve seen. 

As my father describes, Verdi also maintained a flirtation with the stainless steel reflection of the bread box, as well as the Revere ware pots and pans.  But his most challenging relationship was with the bird reflected in my stepmom’s make up mirror.  The mirror in question was a round one on a pedestal.  She quickly realized she had to put her makeup on first, and THEN let Verdi out of his cage. Otherwise, they’d BOTH be trying to see themselves in the mirror.  The caveat being that, because of the round shape of the mirror, and his clawed feet, Verdi would consistently start to slide sideways, and constantly have to clamber his way back up to the top with tiny side steps.
Verdi also stole her false eyelashes on a regular basis.

There was one occasion when a visiting friend of my parents brought his girlfriend along, and, as they all sat in the living room, Verdi decided to join in.  The girlfriend turned out to be afraid of birds and panic ensued. 

At night, we’d put him to bed for his own protection. This proved to be challenging. We either had to sneak up when he was in his cage eating, which was not an easy thing to do. Or, do an alternative that I came up with. We’d turn all of the lights out, knowing that he would not fly in the dark, and then point a lit flash light at the cage entrance. This worked 100% of the time.  We also put a cover over his cage, otherwise, he’d wake up earlier than we did and let us all know about it.

The two of us had a little game we played together.  He’d climb on my chest and I would open my mouth.  With interest, he would poke his head in and begin inspecting my teeth, eventually he would reach for my tongue – which I would slowly begin to pull further and further back.  At that point I would keep my teeth open, but gently close my lips while his head was inside my mouth, and he would pull his head back out and furiously berate me for playing a trick on him.  Then we’d do exactly the same thing the very next day.

Verdi loved to give bird kisses, cheek nuzzles, and was very generous with all of us. He was much braver than our black mini poodle, Inky, and would brazenly walk right over to him when they both happened to be on the bed. It is also very true that Verdi loved butter, and would steal any he could get his beak into.  But then I think he also enjoyed eggs and toast crumbs when left unguarded.  Basically, he was a pirate in feathers.

Recently, I’ve been sorting through books and papers that were my father’s.  First, I came across an old book and noticed crayon squiggles on the inside of the cover, with little nibbles along the outer edges. I identify this as proof of my mother’s description of me, crawling beside a bookcase as a baby, pulling all the books out so I could scrawl in them, closely followed by her pet rabbit, who happily nibbled on books left in my wake. 

Last month I came across a folder of older poems by my father, printed on older paper, with little beak bite nips all along the top edge of one page.  I immediately recognized Verdi’s handiwork. He died in the early ‘70’s when I was living in Europe, and I cried when I got the news.
I was touched to discover that his signature still lives on.
I’m thinking about framing it.

—E. Glaze

Verdi preparing to disturb the pet poodle.

Verdi raiding somebodies breakfast

All photos are owned by the Andrew Glaze Estate.

Be rash and alive in your heart.
The worst fate is not having to die,
it’s to be rolled—like sweat–
between the palms of somebody’s weasly god.

There’s a life’s work
under the accountability of so many wonders,
coming to accept the simple truth
exploded all around us by the joy
of our skin and eyes.

Live at the Finisterre of feeling
if you want to think this world
is better than stone.

See, how it’s your breath
puts the breath in the rock?
That you yourself
are the heat of the spring and the fatal sun?
The more of you shows,
the less there is of you for them to hurt.

Soon, you will stir
as though something had broken
will awaken,
your own kiss will at last accept itself.
It will bruise your mouth
with the hateful miraculous passion.
It’s our one gift.

© Andrew Glaze 1991 from his book, Reality Street

I was alone with my parents for 8 years until my brother was born.  It was long enough to bond with both of them, but when they divorced in 1961 I chose my father’s less transient household as my primary address and we grew even closer. 

I first discovered I was the subject of a poem when an early version appeared in a 1963 Alabama Festival of the Arts booklet called The Token.  One year later, an untitled and improved version appeared in an artisan folio book (Lines/Poems) that combined my father’s poems with etchings by the Colombian artist Umaña. 

For one of the etchings, Umaña came to our apartment to draw a portrait of me. At the time I had goals of looking like a mid-60’s British fashion model. That image shattered when he held up a drawing that reminded me of Alice in Wonderland, — not the Disney version, but the original with a two foot long neck.  At the time I was horrified and fled to my bedroom mirror for reassurance, but my appreciation for the drawing has matured over the years.  The sketch now hangs in my home. 

The poem was written as I transitioned from child to pre-teen to teenager.  However, it wasn’t until I dated a former English Major and he pointed out the gentle allusion to Sleeping Beauty/Snow White’s spell being broken by a first kiss from someone of the male persuasion that I finally understood it.  

It has always surprised me that it took until 1991 for the poem to appear in its final version in the book Reality Street.  The lesson from that would have to be, never rush a perfectionist, particularly when his daughter is involved

—-E. Glaze

With me as a baby, 1951.
Property of the Andrew Glaze Estate.

Birmingham Post Herald party group photo. 1954?
Property of the Andrew Glaze Estate.

Photo by Peggy Avadon. Summer 1961
Property of the Andrew Glaze Estate.

Visiting me in Bryn Mawr, PA.  1990
Photo property of Elizabeth Glaze.

In 2013, he became the Poet Laureate of Alabama. In 2015, he was inducted into the inaugural class of the Alabama Writer’s Hall of Fame and presented with a medal.
Photo by Adriana Glaze, property of the Andrew Glaze Estate.

Drawing by Umaña of Elizabeth (“Betsy”) Glaze, daughter of Andrew Glaze. 1964.
Property of Elizabeth Glaze.

It’s a great comfort to know this country had a father
and that he was as crazy as my father.
That with a presumption of faultless logic
he was able to get involved in a lifelong attachment to that Potomac mud
trapped in the horseshoe bayous around his farm.

Damn it, he thought (I presume), his fields could feed on that thick black
almost edible slime!  And like the rest of us easy-to-humbug men
he thought anything he was able to reason out
was possible. A most endearing fallacy like any number of mine.

Up in his workshop he contrived a machine
for making the river move-to float out the gravel
and leave the dirt. But he was as pragmatic as he was visionary.
While reason plotted, he worked a crew of slaves
in a sort of holy war on behalf of the land.

Of course he was always just about to be almost finished (and happy)
till he caught the pleurisy that made him a finished monument.
The congressmen swarmed in out of the patronage lines
preparing posthumous lies to be brought out
about the honors, etc., appointments, the general had or should have confirmed.

And they came trotting over when he seemed about to speak, saying “any advice for the nation sire?” not wanting any, really
but willing to listen to the man.
Well, he sat up of course and made the fools get out of his way like flies.
His last anger went off like a cannon.
It burst with a splash above the river bank.

“Look at that, gentlemen! –Look at that glorious mud!
That’s what life is about, that mud!
And I shall get my hands on it, or perish!”
Which brought on a fatal convulsion and perfected his vow.
So he had a good death, happy, involved,
convinced he had just been washed by the logic of his century
to a glorious death in the battles of tides and erosions and rivers.

©  1966 by Andrew Glaze, from his book “Damned Ugly Children”.

I have no idea how my father learned about George Washington’s flirtations with collecting mud from the Potomac River.  Apparently, Washington’s fascination began with an invention titled “The Hippopotamus”, which was invented by a Mr. Donaldson. According to the Mount Vernon website, Washington loved the concept, and there was a flurry of correspondence with Mr. Donaldson, but he never actually purchased the contraption.  Instead, he did his own experiments of ways to bring mud up from the Potomac River to his farm fields.
—–E. Glaze
The machine created by Mr. Donaldson is shown below.

“The Hippopotamus”, an invention by Mr. Donaldson.  It was used to bring river bed mud up from the river to fertilize farm fields.  I believe the drawing shows a view from the air.

Sometime, along the way,

though love poems may flap and squawk, then escape,

along in years, with luck,

the ghost of one, somehow may come skittering back.

Liquid as mist, its phantom will rise,

the stinks you’ve remembered as bitter

will be dried and perfumed like wild grass.

Long forgotten names and places

will ache to come spilling out

and the hosts of oblivion once more will speak.

Old songs will mutter themselves into life

remembering dreams, and when that time awakens,

you’ll come to swear to yourself

that something has shifted weight

at the earth’s center.

While the harmony lasts

what you dream you will seem to touch,

what evanesces will seem to endure forever

Though it takes life for only a moment or so,

as it awakes from its wraithy home

you’ll once more shudder and sing,

and out of its  ghostly enchanted world,

remember the miracle of speech.
Copyright Andrew Glaze 2015, from Overheard In A Drugstore

This was originally included in a 1973 love poem anthology titled Loves, Etc. from Doubleday Press.  Surprisingly, it didn’t appear in any of my father’s own books until 2015.  The earlier anthology of love poems was compiled by my father’s friend Marguerite Harris.  “Maggie” was the only poet/Ad photography model I’ve ever met.  Her photo career began when she accompanied her daughter to a modeling agency, only to be told that the agency wanted to sign her instead. Far from a glamorous fashion type, they viewed her as the perfect motherly, grandmotherly type. When I was 17, my father pointed to a subway poster of a white haired lady sitting in a rowboat with a parasol. “That’s Maggie” he said. Even at my age I could appreciate the photographic evidence that adventures and opportunities did not end after a persons hair turned white.

 As for the poem, there are probably many possible interpretations for it.  I feel it’s about the ability of the human heart and mind to recover from disappointments, appreciate the good times by re-framing the memories, and find love again.

This was certainly true of my father and the three romantic loves of his life.
The first was Linda Allardt, to whom he was briefly engaged when they met at the 1948 Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She was very young, and their long distance engagement was short, but he never forgot her.  They got back in touch twenty years later, when they both had poems appear in the same journal.  She also arranged for him to do a reading of  his poems at the University of Rochester, where she taught.  At some point, Linda discovered her neighbor had a good friend in Birmingham. The friend turned out to be my aunt.  Through it all, my father and Linda maintained a supportive long distance poetry exchange. Eventually, he dedicated a book to her, and she dedicated a book or two to him; the most recent being a 2016 collection titled Under Construction. That love was one of a shared interest in poetry and memories of youth.

Next was my mother, Dorothy, who was ten years younger and broke his heart when she asked for a divorce after eleven years together. Forced to continue the relationship for the sake of myself and my brother, he managed to look kindly upon her, and shift gears into a love of shared children and mutual past experiences.

Lastly was my stepmom, “Cusi”, who spent 53 years of marriage with him, helped raise my brother and I, and loyally looked after him until the end of his life. Theirs was a loving relationship based on mutual interest in the arts, dance, books, murder mysteries, medical and legal TV dramas, theater, music, and periodic weeks of cabin camping in upstate New York. He dedicated two of his books to Cusi, and wrote one of his best poems for her. (You can read “You and I Make A Movie” in an earlier blog).

—E. Glaze

 
Left:  Linda Allardt in 1948 at Bread Loaf Writers Conference.  Right: Dorothy Elliott (Glaze) Shari in 1952 with daughter Elizabeth Glaze.

1961, Adriana Keathley Glaze in the wings during  a performance of “Camelot”, as a dancer in the original cast.

Wolferl, young friend, what about
all this fal-lal and hoorah?
Oh, you’d love the performances,
no doubt of that!
You wrote somebody once
that on taking a theater seat,
hearing the orchestra begin to tune,
immediately, you were beside yourself.

They’ve got a thing at Salzburg
involving the house where you were born.
Probably you felt about the place as fiercely
as anyone does about the place they were born.
It’s a place.

But we’re speaking of serenades—
And three companies recording the same opera
in the same hall, with different people,
in six weeks. Remarkable!
Too bad you won’t get any of the royalties.

It is bound to come to someone
before the year’s over, to dredge
Vienna’s Central Cemetery like a potato farm
Wanted: medium skull, with small cerphalic index,
probably Alpine; prominent nose, tracery upon
the brain pan in C clefs.

A useless labor, certainly, the climate and all.
They’d some to-do, a while ago,
to re-unite the lower Papa Haydn
with his wandering head-piece.
Probably it’s just as well you’ve lost.
Some enthusiastic zealot might bite off your finger,
as some idiot bit off St. Francis Xavier’s toe.
Rest your bones.

How? Rest? Well, possibly not.
Certainly they laid you out by force.
That and Papa’s religious prejudice about
vaccination. I doubt if you care to rest.
But it’s true you sang a bit of the requiem
there at the end.  Still, I think it was,
as always with you, the enjoyment of pathos.
Life as the dramatist!
Always the man standing behind the man
standing behind the mask.
You probably thought of death
as postlude-prelude; paying the price,
settling yourself in a cheap seat somewhere
to listen for the tuning of the orchestra.
On hearing it, you’d be
beside yourself at once.

© Andrew Glaze 2002, from the book Remembering Thunder

My father had an amazing memory for music.  In 2015, when he was 95, I happened to stumble across an old family scrapbook and notice a theater program for a 1948 Birmingham production of Romeo and Juliet.  According to the credits, my mother had a role, her mother made the costumes, and my father composed music for a song in the play.  Initially, when I showed him the program he claimed to have no memory of the production. Five minutes later he was humming the tune.

My grandmother once said my father blamed her for allowing him to drop out of piano lessons. “He really seemed to hate them, but later said I should have pushed him more and insisted.”  He mentioned the same regret to me.  And yet he was one of the most musical people I have ever known and music was second only to words and poetry in his world. As a child in a local boys’ choir, he was the only member able to hit high E above C and was rewarded with solos. At Harvard he became a member of the Glee Club. As a young man he joined the Hugh Thomas Choir at Birmingham-Southern College, just for the sheer joy of singing.  It was there that he met my mother. One day she was waiting for a bus, and he zoomed around the block so he could casually pull up beside her and offer a lift home.

For as long as I can remember, the first thing my father did every morning was turn the classical radio station on. From that point on, Mozart and company would entertain us all day long until my father climbed into bed at night and turned the radio off.  “Name that composer” was a favorite private hobby, and occasional shouts from his corner desk in the living room would announce that he’d accurately guessed the origin of a piece of music he’d never heard before.  At some point he remarked that as a boy he’d presented his father with a boxed set of Mozart recordings for his birthday, knowing full well that it was actually something he himself wanted.  Mozart remained a lifelong favorite.

In the early 70’s, a burgeoning friendship with classical composer Alan Hovhaness resulted in a collaboration for a Light opera-musical called, “The Most Engaged Girl”.  (Read the post “Life of a Gnat” if you’d like to learn more about this).  At the same time, my father had a play in the works titled, “Kleinhoff Demonstrates Tonight”.  As one of the lead characters was a singer, it was a natural progression for my father to write songs for him.  And they were GOOD!  The New York Public Theater did a Live Reading of it and asked the performer known as “Meatloaf” to play the role.

My father’s love of music proved to be an inheritable trait. However, when music entered my brain it evoked an irresistible urge for movement and I became a classical ballet dancer.  In my brother it evoked an urge to sing, play instruments, and compose. Entirely self-taught, at this point he has learned guitar, ukulele, banjo, mandolin, piano, and finds it difficult to sit still in free moments without an instrument in hand.

The New York City classical station was and still is WQXR. For my father, who later lived in Miami, and then returned to Birmingham, no other station could compete.  Near the end of my father’s life, when he was bedridden in Birmingham, my brother and I set up a laptop to livestream broadcasts from New York for him. He’d close his eyes in bliss and wave his hands in time with the music for what seemed like hours.

For 90 plus years, my father’s life, and our life as a family, had been accompanied by classical music.   Experts tell us that when we die, the very last sense to leave us is the gift of hearing.  So it seems incredibly appropriate that when my father finally took his last breath and slipped away into the next world, his exit was accompanied by WQXR.

Interesting Facts Mentioned in the Poem:
Yes, as a child his name of Wolfgang was shortened to the nickname Wolferl”.
Yes, Mozart’s father chose not to vaccinate his children for small pox. At age 11, Mozart nearly died of the disease. He suffered through a long series of other serious illnesses over the course of his life and died at age 35.
Yes, it’s true that grave robbers managed to sever composer Josef Haydn’s head and steal it.  Ten years later the thieves were caught and gave authorities a skull that was placed in his grave, but kept the real thing to themselves. 145 years later, Haydn’s genuine skull was finally reunited with his body.  To this day, there are two skulls buried with Haydn’s body. One is genuine, and the other a mystery.
Yes, it’s true that a fan of St. Francis Xavier was so overcome by grief at his funeral that she bit off his big toe.  It was later rescued and encased as a relic.
Yes, it’s true that Mozart’s birthplace is now a museum in Salzburg, Austria.  The family lived on the 3^rd floor from 1747 to 1773.  There is also a building in Innsbruck with a plaque stating that Mozart lived there as a child for a while. The one in Innsbruck currently houses a very subdued McDonalds fast food joint.  Truth is, Mozart traveled so much, from a very young age, that his trail resembles the American adage “George Washington slept here”.
Yes, the poem was published in 2002, and Mozart’s 254^th Anniversary was not until 2010.
Yes, near the end of his life Mozart was visited by a mysterious masked man who commissioned him to compose a Requiem. As Mozart worked on the piece he became increasingly ill and began to feel that he was writing it for himself. Tragically, he died before it was finished.
Yes, Mozart was buried in an unmarked paupers grave and therefore is unlikely to suffer the same fate that Haydn did.

—-E. Glaze

It’s safe in my head—clacking that typewriter, striking and singing
across my temple—belonging nowhere else on earth anymore
but my press room, my courthouse, being enlarged in my amazement.
Yes—Sheriff MacDowell is there
looking out the wide window of his basement,
resting both rough-shod feet on a 50-year-old roll-top
imaginary desk, hiccupping amidst the cigar smoke.
He is thinking—all over this county
deputies are serving warrants, five dollars a service,
in mud-spattered old Fords,
investigating murders, socking the suspects,
thinking up dumb answers to give
to smart defense attorneys showing off for juries,
buying Camels from bootleggers
in falling-down general stores covered with Retonga signs,
the sinks of galvanized iron set
on tanks of seething smelly mash.
He’s thinking of this network of crime
sluicing for miles to Warrior and Birmingport–
as he watches—his eyes closed, he knows all,
like the Sphinx, he does nothing, thinks everything.
Like the Sphinx, his nose is eaten away by acne.

Every morning the black ladies in blue domestic,
the white-trash ladies in phony leopard-skin
are hurrying past in my head, twittering like barnswifts
in the flyway, blocking the passage to Judge Boner’s court
getting ready to call each other “bitchy,”
to stand in a circle shouting “yessir” to the prosecutor,
puffing out his throat there, glaring power,
his skinny rump on the desk of the shorthand clerk.
This is his lily pad, from which he addresses
a green pond of obedient bullfrogs.  They crouch out front,
waiting for him to signal.  Then they will sing.

Today, the judge tells him—you—be quiet now–
the judge is going to speak–
it’s Decoration day, he will deliver the annual oration.
All year long he crouches behind that bench.
Now we shall see what he looks like!
Resting his pear-shaped paunch like a ripe fruit
on his blotter, he does not mumble,
“case dismissed for lack of evidence”
or “$25 and costs, pay the clerk.
Today, instead, he remembers how he was a doughboy,
and what a privilege, to be this crowd of citizens we are
star-spangled over by that mighty, motionless
banner gathering coal-smoke there!
We gawk.  He spits, then sits down.
The Chairman of the Democratic Committee
is now to be bound over for rigging election returns–
and the drivers of two tow trucks are standing there to be fined
for shooting it out at a traffic accident with signal flares,
and standing together to punch the highway patrol.

Here comes the governor’s nephew, charged with sodomy!
Hooray!—case dismissed for lack of evidence!
Still, there is much more ready to be brought up
in the cockpit of my divided remembrance—how, far up–
past the tallest elevator, each with its paraplegic doughboy,
veteran pilot soaring like a hawk, we fly to the solicitor’s aerie!
His office with its weary view of stars and coke convertors,
of Woodrow Wilson Park below and beyond, the lair
of his gloating nemeses across the way in City Hall.
There’s nothing between us and Heaven but the jail,
with the prisoners overhead to keep us humble.
(He requests them not to sing.)
We never hear them but always know they’re there.
This is our Mr. Perry, he spares a moment for us always
in our dreams, out of his jinxed war with evil and Bull Connor,
senility and Judge Wheeler, all those multiple
assaults of intractable human nature,
the surprises of the hundred kinds of dumbness
ready to fall on you from behind with a leaded weight.
And I think—it’s the burden of being too bright
gives him wrinkles and tired soft patches about the eyes
–that he cares about things—that he softly, kindly
asks us what can be done for us today.  Being honest
he knows there is nothing much
either of us could ever do for the other.
Both of us wonder why.

In a quiet corner of the imagination there is a press room,
filled with black machines.
Out the window is a giant lintel, over the east door.
A workman is innocently embracing a farmer, and both
rest and malinger under the knee of the brawny lady
blindfold, and by that token, called by everyone Justice.
Press Room!—my heart folds under—den of ancient
falling apart clickety-clackety typewriters.
Place of never resting more than a minute.
Always we hurry again down yellow, terrazzo, Talladega Marble floors
clacking our heels, to the Deputy’s washroom
—off to read the latest graffiti–
which tells me somebody—is sleeping with his own daughter,
that’s today’s news—and has since she was thirteen,
and she’s a wonderful screw,
would anyone else come along to join and let him see?
And after that we stop for coffee to talk with a Chancery Judge.
He just today disposed of twenty-five million dollars.
–We come away all silvery feeling toe to chin.
–And sit and think about it all, over lunch –.
There in my head these persons and places
take on their own life, assort themselves
in their appointed directions and positions–
to the east, the jittery plaster faced highway patrolman
checking new drivers, hoping they’ll not
collapse him beneath a turning postal van.
To the north, Jimmy, the Deputy Coroner,
driving to work with photos of gunshot heads and slashed throats.
–Through the revolving door of the courthouse
junior clerks escaping for coffee with plump legal typists,
and even this moment, perhaps, the Chairman
of the Personnel Board—meditating whether to call the County Auditor
–dolt—bindle headed ass!—for a front-page fight!
Off to the west, the red and white calla lilies
nod shyly under the tulip and locust trees
whispering like so many bored distracted gentry.
The litigants burp and wad the paper from lunch.
To the south, Miss Frances Mallom’s students
sing see-saws and ladders up in the Ridgeley.

Unchanged, in that Press Room I have by me,
Ed Strickland is busy typing out a scoop.
He’s scooping us, what do we care?
Tomorrow we’ll scoop him.
The creaky machine is flying,
cranking out the lies and appearances,
the happenings that have nothing to do
with what is really going on that you can see—
I sit there and make the novel of my memory.
We are all the plots.
Innocent of compassion or desire or greed
–see, we’ve finished, we type two stars
at the bottom of the page.  Life!  Life!
Captured at last, tied with an inky ribbon.
We exult and crack our heels.
Something is knocking upon our head upon the door.
Laughing, the copy boy comes in and cracks his gum.

© 1981, by Andrew Glaze. From I AM THE JEFFERSON COUNTY COURTHOUSE

In an interview with Steven Ford Brown, my father said, “I wrote that poem as a sort of rhapsody. A time when I was happy, young and filled with a sense of joy, humor and perversity of life. I could not experience the same events now with such a sense of flying over them. I would inevitably be drawn into the suffering which those external events signify. I would experience more of the pain. One has to choose the tone of a poem of course. This one I wanted to be a flight of joy. A memory.” Brown then described the poem as “Panoramic”, which seems extremely appropriate, like a movie camera scanning and capturing a period of time in history.  

 But how the heck did a poet end up working in a Birmingham Courthouse?

Having arrived late to WW2, my father had to wait to be shipped home again. Once home, he initially accepted an invitation to do graduate work at Stanford in California as part of a program run by Wallace Stegner. After six months he concluded he did not want to become a teacher, and returned to Birmingham.

 Figuring the logical thing to do with his writing skills was to work for the local newspaper, he became a Junior Reporter.  “Through editor Jimmy Mills, I got a job as a reporter on the old Birmingham Post, later the Post-Herald.”

Strangely enough, his first major story was one he couldn’t write.
“When Robert Frost came through for his annual reading at Birmingham Southern, he asked if someone could contact me and invite me to spend a day with him. The good Professor, who called me, was obviously baffled. Who in the world was Andrew Glaze? Why in the world would Robert Frost want to see him? Frost was notoriously impatient with younger poets, but he was kind to me, I’ve always suspected, because I never asked him to read my manuscripts. And he knew I’d never write a news feature about him. It was treacherous to my responsibilities as a reporter, but anyway, it made for a nice day.”  (To learn more about my father’s relationship with Robert Frost, you can read the poem and blog entry titled, “Mr. Frost”.)

 Clearly, my father worked for the Newspaper Entertainment Desk at some point. We have press photos of him interviewing both a parakeet and a movie star German Shepard. For many years my father regaled us with his story of interviewing a teenage aerialist gymnast  visiting Birmingham with a Circus. “We took her up to the roof so our photographer could capture action photos of her. The next thing we knew, she hopped up onto the parapet wall and nearly gave us heart failure.” 

Oddly enough, that didn’t turn out to be the end of the story. In 1971, for 9 months, I came home from dancing in Europe and joined the (no-longer existent) ballet company of Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. “Radio City”, showed one movie at a time for several weeks, four to five times per day, and offered a live show in between movie showings. Each show had a main theme running through it and offered a mishmash of ballet, singers, guest performers of all types, and The Rockettes (a synchronized tap dance and kick line of statuesque and long legged females who are all over 5’7” tall).

Dancing at Radio City Music Hall was a quick and easy way to make extremely good money, without a long term contract, although doing 4 to 5 shows per day made it challenging to do ballet classes and stay in condition.  At one point we did a circus themed show. A Las Vegas choreographer was brought in to teach us a jazz routine in which we were supposed to be tigers. Our unusual but creative costumes had stripes, headpieces with black feathers that shed all over the place, and skin toned fishnet tights. As for the rest of the show, I vaguely remember an act involving spinning plates on sticks, and then there was a trapeze aerialist.  She didn’t swing on the trapeze as much as creatively and gracefully hang by one leg, one foot, one arm, one hand, and so forth, all without a net below her (granted she wasn’t more than 9 feet off the ground). Pretty, with a lovely figure, she was foreign born and very pleasant to talk to. 

 My parents always came to see me in each of our productions, but after this particular show my father was very animated and excited. “That’s HER!  I’m sure that’s the girl I interviewed on the roof of the Birmingham Post Herald building, the one who suddenly hopped up onto the parapet!”  I confirmed this with her later that week, to my father’s great satisfaction.

Life at the newspaper in Birmingham had its moments, some entirely unintentional. My mother used to tell a story of a colleague of my father’s whose name she remembered, but I do not, who was sent to write about a Mario Lanza concert in Birmingham. For some reason, he ended up downstairs or below the stage, opening doors in search of a telephone. Instead, he stumbled across a young fellow manning a tape recorder. They chatted briefly and the young man said he was playing a tape of Lanza for the performance. The reporter didn’t think much about it (my mother said he’d never been one of the brightest employees), left, wrote his story and casually mentioned the fact that a tape recorder was being used. All hell broke loose, because up to that point Mario Lanza had managed to hide the fact that he’d lost his voice and was lip syncing his concert tour. It quickly became an international scandal.

 By the mid-1950’s, my father was assigned to report activities at the Jefferson County Courthouse.  Some of the time he covered things like, “Beechwood Homeowners Go To Court, to block expansion of airport, by Andrew Glaze Jr, August, 1956”.  But by the mid-50’s the Civil Rights Movement was evolving and Birmingham was at the heart of it. Alabama still had very specific Jim Crow laws of segregation between black and white citizens. Blacks were relegated to their own bathrooms, benches, water fountains, restaurants, the back of the public buses, and the balcony of churches that were run by whites.  Having them march in large groups, day or night, even peacefully demanding to be treated as equals, was considered illegal and threatening. “Bull” Connor was a fervent anti-segregationist who held the political position of Commissioner of Public Safety, and he was arresting protesters on a constant basis. My father was reporting on these events both inside and out of the court room.

The effort to suppress Civil Rights Protesters was just as futile as the effort to keep the airport from expanding, but as part of his job, Connor was allowed oversight of both the Fire and Police Departments and he used that power to his full advantage. According to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, “He became an international symbol of institutional racism. Bull Connor directed the use of fire hoses and police attack dogs against civil rights activists; child protesters were also subject to these attacks. National media broadcast these tactics on television, horrifying much of the country. The outrages served as catalysts for major social and legal change in the Southern United States and contributed to passage by the United States Congress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964”. 

But in the mid-1950’s, Connor could be as much of a bully as he wanted, and the Birmingham Post-Herald newspaper was one of the few places that maintained independence and complete honesty.  “My boss, Duard LeGrand, the City Editor at the Post Herald, was one of the best people I’ve ever known. When my days as a courthouse reporter brushed up against the race issue, and I had to give controversial testimony, he snatched me out of what he thought might be a dangerous situation, and gave the courthouse beat to another reporter.  But that couple of years was fun.”

The “controversial testimony” was as a witness to the beating of a black man, by white police. Afterwards, my father said a sheriff who was involved plaintively reproached, “Now, why did you have to go and do that Mr. Glaze?”  He seemed genuinely perplexed.  In 2010, a book titled, Speak Truth to Power; the story of Charles Patrick, a Civil Rights Pioneer, was written about the racial turbulence of that time and my father was interviewed both about newspaper articles from the Times-Herald at that time, and his testimony at the trial.

My parents decided this was a good time to get out of Dodge. By the following summer, we were living in New York City. 

In closing, I should mention the Art Deco facade of the Jefferson County Courthouse, which has a controversy of its own.  In 2010, my brother created and posted an audio recording of my father reading, “I Am The Jefferson County Courthouse” to Youtube.com.  It featured a photograph of the courthouse.
One day he received a question,
“Will you tell me about the swastikas on the court house?”
!!!!!!—————Swastikas???????
After a bit of research he replied:
“The broken cross images on the courthouse were carved in the late 1920s and are actually a Native American symbol that was used by a tribe that had inhabited the area. The symbols were placed in tribute to that tribe.”

Considering the fact that the original Native American residents from that area were displaced to begin with, I guess the phrase, “Karma will eventually catch up” might be considered appropriate when referring to the design debacle.

The left side of the marble base on the left shows the Native American design that causes controversy, despite the fact that it was built in the 1920’s. These are the steps to the main entrance of the building, although the brass facade is a relatively new addition.

“Interview with a Parakeet”. Birmingham Post-Herald press photo, mid-1950’s. I’m pretty sure this was a parakeet that talked and belonged to an acquaintance of my father’s.  I remember him talking about a parakeet that sang a popular Hank Williams song.

……E. Glaze

“Christy’s Song” from THE MOST ENGAGED GIRL,
music by Alan Hovhaness, book and lyrics by Andrew Glaze.
© 1969 music,  © 2015 lyrics in Overheard in a Drugstore by Andrew Glaze

The life of a gnat is so simple and straight
as she crawls in the palm of your hand.
She’s born in the dawn, at the heart of the dew
and she dries out her wings in the sun.
Then she flies with her love,
tiny, tiny love
with her love, only hers,
tiny love but true.

The moon rolls around through the sky in the night
all alone in the wind and the dark.
She knows where she goes she has only got one
and revolves in the light of her love.
Once a year in his arms
reeling round the sky
with her love, only hers
clasped in the arms of her sun.

The life of a girl is nothing like that,
though I wish and I dream that it were.
I look for the one that will set me afire
or dance me all day in the wind.
I would swim through the sky
if I thought he were there,
I would fly through the air
to capture my lonely desire.

You can listen to the audio of the song using the link below, made in 2014 with the help of Ned, a friend and Music History student at the University of Pennsylvania.  I offer my sincere apologies for the non-professional vocal portion.

In the mid-60’s, my father once confided a pet peeve of his, “I can’t stand it when people refer to John Lennon or Bob Dylan as POETS! No, they aren’t! They write songs and lyrics, dammit”.  He then explained that poetry is a form of writing that follows very specific rules and format protocols, even if it doesn’t rhyme.  

So I chuckled years later, when I opened the initial manuscript for his 2015 poetry book Overheard In a Drugstore, and realized it included his lyrics for “The Life Of A Gnat”. It was his subtle way of fighting back.  The song is from a 1969 project he’d worked on with composer Alan Hovhaness that never went into final production.

It all started with an invitation…

Alan’s wife at that time was from Birmingham, and she brought him into our lives. Elizabeth Whittington Hovhaness was an accomplished pianist and the daughter of Dorsey Whittington, the conductor of the Birmingham Civic Orchestra.  Her mother Frances and sister Barbara were also musicians. Both parents were college music teachers in Birmingham, and family home life included two grand pianos in the living room.  My father knew her as “Betty”, and Alan called her “Naru” a Japanese name that means “become”. Married in 1959, she was 19 years younger than Alan, his fifth out of an eventual six wives, and a champion of his work as a composer.

So when Betty unexpectedly phoned our home one day to say they’d recently moved to Manhattan, my father immediately asked them over for dinner.  When they arrived, both were tall and slender. Betty had dark hair she pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck and a vaguely Japanese style of dress-robe. It was an interesting evening. We talked about music, ballet, theater and my father’s first poetry book— which was still relatively new.  Soon after, my father became a serious fan of Alan’s music.

Apparently it was a case of mutual respect at first meeting, and the visit triggered something in Alan’s thought process as well. A few weeks later he suddenly called my father with a question. “Do you think it’s possible to write lyrics and a plot for music that already exists?” My father replied, “Sure”. A few days later Alan brought him an already completed score for a small scale musical/light operetta that he and another student had written in college. Alan still liked his own end of it, but said he’d never been satisfied with the plot and libretto. 

Intrigued, my father got to work and came up with a turn of the century small scale musical comedy about boat racing in the mid-West titled, “The Most Engaged Girl”.  Since my father was highly musical, but not a musician, Alan made a reel to reel piano recording of the full score for him to refer to. Initially used to help him memorize the musical score, it later became the background accompaniment to his song lyrics. At one point, in need of an unpretentious female soprano, he asked me to sing “The Life of a Gnat” into a cassette tape recorder, with Alan’s piano recording playing in the background. I was all of 18 and did my best.  At the time I had no clue why, but I now realize this must have been how my father presented his efforts to Alan.

In any case, Alan loved it and they got to work. Meant for a small cast on a small stage, they brought the finished work to Joseph Papp, the highly successful producer and director of The New York Public Theater. Papp was the brilliant visionary who guided the musicals “HAIR” and “A Chorus Line” into production and world success. He immediately agreed to take it on, began working on script edits, and proclaimed he’d produce it at The Cubiculo (an off-Broadway theater at 51st street and 9th Avenue, until 1990).  Then negotiations on details began. Unfortunately they quickly ground to a halt at that point over how the music would be presented. Papp insisted that a very small orchestra would be necessary, and Alan insisted that the production be accompanied by two pianos.  Neither of them would budge on that point, and the whole thing fell apart. My father was hugely disappointed, but remained nonjudgmental. For my part, knowing that in 1980 Papp went on to produce a very entertaining version of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance”, with minimal orchestra, which ended up moving to Broadway, I think Alan made an enormous mistake.

Meanwhile, back on the poetry side of things:
In 1969, Betty’s father passed away and she used her inheritance to enhance a record company, titled Poseidon Society, that she and Alan originally founded in 1963. Apparently she was quite gifted at the recording process and had a great ear for it.  I am guessing this helped the two of them introduce Alan’s work to classical music radio stations in the USA, as well as potential orchestras that might be interested.  However, Betty did do at least one side project. In the early ‘70’s, she used the company to create a record of my father and Galway Kinnell reading their poems.  She titled it, “Poets reading their Poems”. It is numbered Poseidon Society 1003. I remember my father saying that she’d asked him about poets for the other side of the album, and he’d replied, “I like Galway Kinnell’s poetry”.  In the last year of his life he mentioned in passing that Betty considered it a “secret project”.  I have no idea why. There weren’t many copies, but they still turn up here and there.

After a while, Betty and Alan moved from New York to Seattle, possibly because Alan was obsessed with all things Japanese and it was easier to commute from Seattle. It was an enthusiasm that Betty enjoyed and shared with him. Alan also enjoyed the mountains around Seattle, and regularly spent time in Lucerne, Switzerland, because he found the landscape highly inspiring. In 1977, I happened to visit Richard Wagner’s former home “Tribschen” just outside of Lucerne.  Converted into a museum devoted to Wagner, a fair portion of the museums musical instrument collection was donated by Alan.

Sadly, Alan’s obsession with Japan eventually led him to divorce Betty. According to my father, Alan’s request for a divorce involved him telling Betty, “I don’t love you any longer. I don’t think I could truly love anything that wasn’t Japanese”. Betty was crushed and heartbroken. She retained the rights to the record company after the divorce and later sold them. In 1977, Alan married his sixth wife, a Japanese soprano who remained with him until he died in 2000.  

Alan still continued to contact my father off and on whenever he visited New York City.  There was a general sense that Alan still felt guilty over the collapse of negotiations with Papp.  At some point before 1988, Alan contacted my father to say he was coming to Manhattan, and wanted to meet with him. When he arrived he brought the score for “The Most Engaged Girl”, saying that he wanted my father to have it in his charge. I believe that was the last time my father saw Alan in person, although I spoke with Alan myself briefly in 1990.  At the time I was on the board of a chamber music trio that was searching for music suited to piano, French horn, and viola (a surprisingly beautiful combination). My father had Alan’s contact information and so I wrote and asked if he’d be interested. Lo and behold, my phone rang one day and it was Alan. We spoke, he asked how my father was,  and said he would definitely be interested and that I should have the trio call him. They did and Alan said they’d need to talk with his wife about commission, as she was his business manager. Unfortunately when it got down to money they couldn’t afford his fee, so that was the end of it.

My father’s music career didn’t end with “The Most Engaged Girl”.  He went on to compose both the music and the lyrics for his 1974 play “Kleinhoff Demonstrates Tonight”, a play that Joseph Papp produced at the Cricket Theater in Minneapolis. It has had various readings and productions since then.  In 2013, by looking at the internet, I discovered that the singer known as “Meatloaf” played the lead role in a reading of the play in Manhattan, and a theater group in Denver, Colorado performed the play in 1988.  My father had no inkling of either of those events.  Apparently, like prodigal children, when you send creative works out into the world, they can end up in surprising places.

But that’s another story.

—–E Glaze

Feeling all at once imprisoned, I stalk for the door,
as I go, closing my coat up. Three gin and tonics–
no, I never should have allowed myself to have them.
But the hell with it,
Go–get out! Get through the blunt glass
and off into the incalculable darkness.
Sure enough: as I burst out, there it is —
freedom! freedom! freedom!

It seems I am going to explode out of my skin,
to shout! By some miracle, I keep my silence.
The lights are amazing and flashing– Fifth Avenue!
The cold is like being struck by a soprano bell:
clear, fine, trembling, penetrating.
An Irish policeman outside Canada House supports the dusk
like a dark column or pedestal.
Shuffling his slow black feet, he looks at me warily.
Am I too happy, too feverish? Might I be the camouflage
for our next I.R.A. bomber? Shaking with careless excess,
I push my bike across the south corner
toward 53d Street, past St. Thomas Church.
This morning three young French artists
had drawn in chalk near the staircase Delacroix’s
portrait of a peasant girl. It is almost half walked-off now,
ragged in the sodium vapor light mixed with late sun,
but somehow still thumping with life, like an angry heart.
Suddenly I look up and have
stepped into a furious cockpit of battling cacophonous music.
A bagpiper on the church steps is squalling “Scotland the Brave”
The clanless Highland vestment is Macspinningmill tartan.
“Help me get hame”, says his sign. A boon he’s been asking six months.
There’s talk he lives on East 76th Street with a Neapolitan mother.
Tonight he will not have the street to himself.
Six yellow trucks across the way–
pasted prow to taffrail with signs–squall, screech,
swarmed about by crowds of little men in beards,
tieless shirts, black coats. The speakers jitter and skid,
throwing away horas between the Chassidic hymns.
It is the Lubavicher bringing us messages from the Rebbe.
They inquire of every soul who passes,
“Are you Jewish?” They shout after us, “Wear phylacteries!
Observe dietary laws!” Shy little men with burning eyes,
they pop like skyrockets showering down on us with
flashing religious courage.
And straight ahead on the corner by the Tishman Building
the steel band won’t give up: it hammers wildly, dexterously,
mellifluously pouring out, over the already earthquake-torn ears
of our intersection, “Yellow Bird.”
It is battered to fragments by horas,
diced in the knives of the pipe chanters,
shot down over the crossway by up-to-date piety.
Enough! I run to the corner, almost throw the bike
ahead of me into the street,
fling myself on it like a demon.
A taxi klaxons by, coughing in my ears “Get out!
Fly from the hell of this music, fly! fly!”
At the end of such a day, give me a wonderful gift.
It is given. It’s as though a door closes–
silence–all the madness trapped in the intersection
turns in upon itself. Only a hundred feet away
a single violinist scratches at Bach arpeggios
under the beggars’ arcade at the back of the church,
uninterrupted, watched over by one serious girl.
And the Museum of Modern Art on the right gleams and billows
like a wave of quiet illumination. Through the ground-floor window
Marilyn Monroe’s enormous lips poise to eat
a nameless art student looking somewhere else in a timid beret.
And now, up the left of the street advances that old beggar
who looks like Khrushchev. He bangs his vicious
steel cane upon the sidewalk like a shoe.
He pierces you with malevolent eyes, snarls.
“Hee!” he whines “Hee!” jabbing his hands like a threat.
Now I’m gathering speed, everything begins to hurry into a blur,
the people in red, purple, yellow-green, violet
sew themselves along the quilt strip of the sidewalk like checks.
My time of day! Excitement and events
bob in and out of windows like winking eyes!

Ahead, Sixth Avenue, and the hour
and the kind of weather that makes me take a fierce breath.
The sky is full of clouds weighing hundreds of millions of tons,
overwhelming us like a wonderful painting.
Down southwest, vast new buildings glow with strange colors
like ice colored blocks of honeycomb candy riddled with yellow bees.
Now they fall over toward me under the weight
of enormous lilac and puce cotton cumuli streaked with smoke,
and salmon edges sliding along between upper surfaces of hazy blue.
I put my hands up to protect my head.
I look out and nothing has moved–
and yet–don’t I know absolutely everything has moved?

So it’s all right. On! On! Across the street
fresh kitchen odors from the Hilton:
shrimp and cinnamon from this imitation New Orleans,
bay and thyme, garlic  and parsley from that pretension of Paris,
and a smoky broiled steak from a mock Kansas City.
The kitchen ducts snuffle over the marquees like wet commercial noses.
I glare at the animal doctor’s office across the way.
My wife stood there the other day shouting at the nurse,
who would not ask her boss to look at Peter’s gerbil.
Poor thing, with a paw swollen the size of a raisin,
all the local blood stopped by a tangled thread.
What kind of vicious snobbery chooses pet cats over pet mice?
On the second floor above is a sign
“Stairway to the Stars Bellydance Studio.”
I imagine them practicing their Phrygian birth dances,
palpitating from shaking diaphragm to the splay of the groin,
bent over backwards like some antique climax,
an ancient Busby Berkeley Musical improvidence
with thousands of finger gongs tingle-ringing,
thousands of stars in galaxies ascending
out of silver quivering up into the black empyrean.
Where are they now?

I am buffeted by the wind past the Americana Hotel.
I wave to the doorman of the old CBS building.
proving his manhood, he sneers back.
Why is it I am slowly encroached upon by I don’t know what?
The immense trenches of something going to happen
are about to swallow me.
It’s after six, I go home like this every day, but still
my heart pounds like a riot policeman’s feet, rapidly, gloomily.
By the side of Roseland stands the old black man
I see here often slapping his tennis ball
off the back of the Dance Palace,
catching it again on his worn racquet through the weft of traffic.
His T-shirt says “Old Men Need Love too”
He holds back his arm till I’ve passed by.
Thank You!  I shake my head to drive away the fear
that relentlessly extends its wires.
Eighth Avenue at 6:15, and traffic like Ney’s final
cavalry charge at Waterloo.  Stupid, enormous, brutal,
meaningless–you can almost see the empty-headed marshal
whacking the brass guns with the furious butt of his sword.
And now I know something is happening. From across the boulevard,
it catches my ear and eye.
Underneath bilious street lights, some vast mob
is pouring out of the church in the center of the block,
each carrying a vespers candle.
And over them the sky has poured closer
as the buildings droop, against a half-darkness
of invisible sunset in front of which the clouds
dip and rise, stately, like great black-and-orange whales
spuming with anger.
Beyond the choir and the escort of police cars
I hear a flapping torn screaming,
a red banner of fire sirens and police cars
pasting together toward me across the extremities of sound.
What’s happening? Is the Last Judgement arriving?
On a ragged spring evening when we know it’s impossible
to put up with one more day of the old winter’s ugliness?
No!–No!—I get down, I hurry my bicycle
along past the army of illuminated penitents.
I drift beside them watching, presided over
by a sky full of brooding, distant, frightened wails.
Their soft faces over the candles are peaceful,
even earnestly fatuous, overborne with importance and duty.
“What we are doing”–they shine–” is so
very urgently necessary for this city–for us!”

But now I hurry past the
to the place where there are sounds of everything burning up
and thieves coming through all the windows.
Vast rivers of candles are turning north.
I wait, biting my lip as they pass by me to the last baby.
I catapult my imagination
to the front of the Bodega Garcia,
where twenty-five of my neighbors wait quietly
standing on the sidewalk with beer cans.
It’s cocktail hour.
Frantically I urge them, look up at the windows of my house!
Find out what’s happening!
Is everyone there broken on the floor?
Is my kitchen crammed with policemen
looking at cut throats? Or are they–is everyone gone?
Snatched away to Little Neck or Patchogue?
“Wait! Wait! Christ, don’t go, even if you are dying,
wait for me! I’m coming, I want to go too!”
My heart crowded with catastrophes, I vault across,
half running, half riding,
thick with foreboding and excitement,
pick up my bicycle and stumble up the stairs,
face full of tears.

© Andrew Glaze 1978, from the book The Trash Dragon of Shensi.
(Originally published in The New Yorker, which buys all rights, and
therefore requires special mention each time a poem is reprinted.)

My father always told me “Fantasy Street” and “Reality Street” were published in the opposite order of how he wrote them. Although written first, “Fantasy Street” was published by The New Yorker three years after Atlantic Monthly published “Reality Street”. In both cases, the poems were the longest that either magazine had published up to that date. I don’t know if that record still stands or not.

In an interview my father explained that he was inspired by 17^th century poet John Milton.  “I was trying to figure out how Milton would tackle “L’allegro” and “Il Pensero” if he were doing it in the second half of the twentieth century”.  My father referred to “Fantasy Street” and “Reality Street” as “Two Odes”. They are genuine bookends; “Reality Street” follows his bicycle route to work in the morning along eastbound 54^th Street, and “Fantasy Street” is his return route home along westbound 53^rd Street. Since he often bicycled home for lunch as well, it was a well wheeled path

In 1978, “Fantasy Street” was one of many poems in my father’s newly published book, The Trash Dragon of Shensi. That December, a wonderful review of the book appeared in The New York Times, written by Peter Schjeldahl. In it, he highlighted the poem as a favorite.
“The best rarely provide such companionable pleasures as “Fantasy Street,” a long, lush, windy rhapsody of a New York dusk, in which the poet, slightly drunk, went out on his bicycle. His bicycle? It’s an every so faintly ludicrous, cartoon touch (the poem fittingly appeared in The New Yorker), but it’s perfect Glaze. Just like his muse to catch him aboard that civilized vehicle.”

 Amusingly, before The New Yorker agreed to publish the poem, they sent an employee out on foot to trace the route. His assignment was to fact check 53rd street between 5^th and 9^th Avenues and make sure the poem was geographically accurate. In August of 1978, my father mentioned this in a WNYC radio interview before reading several of his poems from The Trash Dragon of Shensi. The link to WNYC’s podcast of the interview is at the bottom of this post.

At the time the poem was written, my father’s personal office at British Tourist Authority overlooked 54^th Street at the corner of 5^th Avenue. Occasionally I would find myself walking past, stand across the street, and wave frantically until he or someone visiting his desk would notice my presence. They’d wave back.

“BTA”, as it was commonly referred to, originally had a two level storefront on 5^th Avenue, but eventually consolidated on the 2^nd floor. The organization was owned by the British government and most of the employees were English, but the PR department was an anomaly of US citizens. “The British don’t understand how to write PR for Americans” was my father’s explanation. At one point his job involved taking a British policeman (“a bobby”) on a tour of the US. At other times my father led US journalists on tours of the UK. I seem to remember something involving a visit from the Sheriff of Nottingham as well. Even now, online, I stumble across press releases with his byline in archived newspapers from all over the country.

Our British connection had unexpected benefits. In 1959 my mother was cast as Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest. To help her perfect an English accent, one of the BTA secretaries agreed to read the lines into a reel to reel tape recorder. My mother played it over and over again. By the end of the month, all three of us had the entire play memorized with a British accent.

 In 1963, when the Beatles were to arrive at the Warwick Hotel at 54^th Street and 6^th Avenue, I divided my day between cheering at the barricades with other fans, and taking breaks at the BTA office. Co-workers of my father would pop into his office to get an update from me. Ironically, when the Beatles did finally arrive, they drove the wrong way up 54^th street to avoid a riot of fans at the opposite end, and passed directly below my father’s office. Sadly, I was at the barricades at that exact moment.

As for the landmarks mentioned in “Fantasy Street”, the Americana Hotel on 7^th Avenue became the “Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel” in 2013.  The Museum of Modern Art still occupies a plot of land between 53^rd and 54^th streets, and their sculpture garden faces 53^rd street.  The Marilyn Monroe picture my father mentions seeing inside the museum is the famous 1967 Pop Art version by Andy Warhol.  At some point in later years the Stairway to the Stars Bellydance Studio made it’s final ascent to heaven and vanished, but the owner (“Serena”) is considered a pioneer of the art form in the US.  Roseland Ballroom finally closed in 2014.  Originally built in the 1920’s as an ice skating rink, it survived several wars, hosted concerts ranging from Sinatra to Lady Gaga, and outlived nearby Studio 54.  A need for mammoth structural repairs killed it in the end. “The old CBS building” is at Broadway and 53rd where it housed The Ed Sullivan Show for many years, and is the second location I haunted as a teenager when the Beatles were in town.  Now titled, “The Ed Sullivan Theater” it has a long side brick wall on 53rd street with an unmarked stage entrance for performers. The back of the Roseland Ballroom was directly across the street. 

The “Bodega Garcia” mini-market that my father mentions near the end of the poem eventually went on to inspire a poem titled “Garcia’s Store”. It further describes the street life below our apartment window and highlights the owner of the store. That poem is included in the 2015 poetry collection, Overheard In A Drugstore.

“Garcia’s Store” and “Reality Street” have been discussed on this site in earlier entries. You can find them in the Poem Index on the Home Page.

Below is the link to the WNYC podcast mentioned earlier:
National Public Radio WNYC, August 21, 1978, New York City
“Andrew Glaze discusses his collection of poems, The Trash Dragon of Shensi. He reads some poems from the book including “Lights,” “Choir,” “Becoming,”and “Fantasy Street.”
http://www.wnyc.org/story/andrew-glaze/

—E.  Glaze

Andy Warhols 1967 Pop Art vision of Marilyn Monroe, at the Museum of Modern Art.

The poster says “Nottingham  Festival ’71”. My father is in the middle, “Maid Marian” is on the left, a coworker is on the right.  The photo was taken in 1971 at the British Tourist Authority offices, as part of a public relations campaign. My father was renown for wearing bow ties on a regular basis. 

Among the Chou,
who ruled in China after the Shang and before the Ch’in,
there were an Accomplished King and a Martial King:
who came out of the land of Wei
in the far west.
They gave new laws.
But most of all there was among them
a marvelous exaggerated respect
for books and bronzes.

Scholars could do anything they liked!
And they carried everywhere tablets and brushes
suspended at the waistband
so they could write about it–
write down everything–
gossip—dirty jokes–grocery prices!
They were so proud of being able to say things
with their fingers!  Oh, it was new!
And a serious consequential joy,
saying it ceremoniously,
saying it at all!  With holy black calligraphy!
What pleasures!
They loved writing so much
they were buried with their books.
One king had himself interred with twenty
cartloads of classics on bamboo slivers.
That was a funeral fit
to make being buried worth thinking about!
I had always thought of being shot out of a cannon
into the mountains,
But no!  This is the way I shall have it.

I’m resolved that if worst comes to worst
and I have to die,
well, I will insist on being buried with my books.
Now, first of all—in a rough cedar box
lined with broadsides, and funny poems.

Ugh!  Spare me your bassinet linings
of pink artificial silk.
Spend the money on a good workable lamp.
If I should wake up, let me spend
the time reading.
Let my head lie on Sake,
let Yeats and Whitman and Cervantes,
Mark Twain and Chaucer, my pockmarked
pencil-scratched edition—lie somewhere about my fingers.
Emily Dickinson I shall have cast in bronze cartouches
to lie on my tongue.  Put Hopkins on my chest.
He won’t be heavy, he floats like hydrogen.

Thesaurus, wretched book!
Put that over my eyes.
Shakespeare, I will be all new-dressed
in your blue Yale edition.

If there should be room, throw in Su Tung Po,
Tu Fu, Dante, Joyce, and of course Basho and Issa.
That way I shall never get restless.
I shall never be tempted to come back
and twine about the chimney pots
of the still alive, jealous and
trying to make them uncomfortable.
Oh, I’ll be quite happy, thank you,
for as long as you like.
What’s best, when someday
they dig me up for my bronzes
to put my bones on exhibition
in a brightly lighted museum case,
I shall have come home
to a theatrical way of thinking,
and lie among minds moving about
in a place of learning and repose.

© Andrew Glaze, from the book REALITY STREET , 1991

“Book Burial” is a poem from my father’s “Asian Period”. It was written around the same time as “The Trash Dragon of Shensi”, and “To A Little Han Horse”.

My father came from a family of book lovers and he never read fewer than three books at a time. His side table in the living room always housed a pile of the ones he was working his way through.  In addition, one was always reserved for bedtime reading and two others sat at various spots in our apartment. A fourth consisted of one he read to my stepmother in the evening (they gradually worked their way through the entire series of “Jeeves The Butler” books).  And while I still lived at home, a fifth involved “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings Trilogy”, which he read to me over the course of my High School years.  He successfully instilled a love of books in both my brother and myself.

 His tastes varied from poetry to plays, murder mysteries, political topics, and everything in between. At one point he read The Double Helix, followed by my stepmom, followed by me. Then we all read In Cold  Blood by Truman Capote. One of the stand outs for me was Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. My stepmom read it after my father. I was next in line.  In 2007, I was pleased when I managed to continue the cycle. My daughter came home from school one day with instructions to “Read a detective novel” as homework. I promptly presented her with The Daughter of Time.  If you’ve never read it, it’s about a modern day bedridden detective who becomes obsessed with figuring out the truth about King Richard the Third.  I figured she’d get a murder mystery, and an English history lesson, all conveniently rolled into one story! 

Near the end of his life my father handed me a biography of John Adams by John Ferling saying, “This is one of the better written novels I’ve read recently”. Knowing that this was high praise indeed, I brought the book home with me.  He’d always been picky.

All of the books listed in “Book Burial” graced the bookshelves of our Manhattan apartment and later residences.  As a teenager, I remember reading some of them on lazy Sunday afternoons. We really did have the entire blue jacketed Yale series of Shakespeare. A complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories sat nearby.  One shelf held the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. My mother told me that, as a baby, I would pull books off of their lower shelves and draw in them with crayon. My partner in crime was a large white rabbit named “Bunny” who would follow and nibble the edges when I moved on to the next book. We still had those books too!

The year before he died I personally went through his book collection together with him and we narrowed it down considerably. Whitman and Dickinson remained on the shelves, along with Homer, Cervantes, and all of the other authors mentioned in the poem.

 Since his passing, I’ve discovered that he was often in the habit of making marks or comments in the margins of books whenever there was something he particularly liked,…or disliked. Sometimes he would argue with the content, or the author. Humorously, this was even true for spare copies of his own poetry books. Ever the editor, he would cross out entire lines to make his already “finished” poems even tighter.

 In the end, since he’d long before made up his mind that he was donating his body to medical research when he died, an Asian style burial along with his books was not in the cards.  In theory, we could have set up a sacrificial pyre, burnt his favorites to a crisp and mixed the remnants with his ashes, but he probably would have looked at that as a huge waste of perfectly good books. We decided that, given a choice, he’d have said, “Good gracious, no, please donate them somewhere!”  And so that’s exactly what we did.
—E. Glaze

Andrew Glaze in Miami, 1991. The table beside his favorite chair is covered with a typical pile of books.  Photo property of the Andrew Glaze Estate.