Austin Kleon

Tomas Tranströmer at the piano

Here’s a video of Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer playing the piano just a few years before he died, accompanied by an early recording of him reading his poem, “Allegro.”

I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.

You’ll notice he’s only playing with his left hand: he suffered a stroke in 1990, at age 59, and lost the use of his right arm. (It also took out much of his ability to speak.) From his NYTimes obit:

Mr. Transtromer’s poetry production slowed after his stroke, but he took refuge in music, playing the piano with just his left hand. As a testament to his prominence in Sweden, several composers there wrote pieces for the left hand specifically for him.

There’s actually a whole subgenre of piano music composed or arranged for the left hand alone. Brahms arranged some Bach works for Clara Schumann after she suffered a hand injury. Paul Wittgenstein (older brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) commissioned several works after his right arm was amputated in the First World War. Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, and Maurice Ravel all wrote compositions for him. (Most famous being Ravel’s “Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.”)

But back to Tranströmer: we’re Wintering in the North this season, so I brought along my copy of The Deleted World, which I bought several years ago (at the recommendation of Nicole) and never cracked until now. Here’s a beautiful verse:

In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is being sewn on the sly.

And here’s a beautiful verse from “Preludes,” quoted by Teju Cole at the beginning of his appreciation for the poet (although I prefer this May Swenson translation):

Two truths approach each other
One comes from within,
one comes from without — and where they meet you have the chance
to catch a look at yourself.

Thoreau on winter

“I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold, for it compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources.”
—Thoreau, journal, Dec. 5, 1856

Photo taken on Lake Erie yesterday.

All that was left


I’m moving studios. On the morning before the movers showed up, the first copy of Keep Going arrived in the mail. In the evening, after the movers had loaded the last box on the truck, this was all that was left on the garage floor: a pencil stub and a vellum doodle of the memento mori I’ve been drawing for the past two years, who make several appearances in the book. Strange. And perfect.

Hello, beautiful

Just held the first print copy of Keep Going in my hands. I love how this book turned out and can’t wait to send it out into the world.

Winter in America

Album art by Eugene Coles

On Spotify I came across a live version of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Winter in America” (from Tour De Force) that starts with an opening monologue that isn’t included on the record cut:

There’s only one season lately. There used to be an agreement between the seasons, that they would all stay for three months, and then go wherever seasons go when they’re not where we are. Lately there has been no spring, no summer, and no fall. Politically, and philosophically, and psychologically. There has only been the season of ice. It is the season of frozen dreams and frozen nightmares. A scene of frozen progress and frozen ideas. Frozen aspirations and inspirations. They call the season “winter.” We call the song “Winter in America.”

The song is followed by another monologue that’s a little lighter and funnier:

People say to me, “Gil, we cannot find your records.” I say, “Go to your record store. Go down to the left. Take a turn, go to the right. Look on the bottom shelf. You will find a box called ‘Miscellaneous.’ We are miscellaneous. We did not mean to be miscellaneous. Somehow it happened.”

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets


Four Quartets is a great book of poems to read when you’re traveling, or moving from one place to the next (when aren’t we?):

A summary from an episode of The Diane Rehm Show dedicated to the poems:

By the late 1920s, poet T.S. Eliot was regarded as one of the great literary figures of the day. His “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” were widely read and admired. But Eliot’s personal life was in turmoil. His marriage to a depressed woman was unraveling and he began a spiritual journey that led to religious conversion. As Europe moved toward war, Eliot wrote the first poem of what would later become “Four Quartets.” Inspired by Beethoven, every poem contained imagery of four seasons and four elements. Each was a complex meditation on time, redemption and eternity.

Eliot said he thought they were his best work, and that each one was better than the other. (I like numbers two and four, “East Coker” and “Little Gidding,” the best.) Each poem is named after a place with personal meaning to Eliot:

“Burnt Norton” (1935) was named after a house and garden on the edge of the Cotswold Hills in southwest England that the poet had once visited, the extraordinary beauty of which had left a lasting impression on him; “East Coker” (1940), after a Somerset village in which the poet’s family could trace its lineage to the late 1400s; “The Dry Salvages” (1941), after a group of rocks off the coast of Cape Ann, Mass., that the poet had navigated by as a young sailor summering in the Northeast; and “Little Gidding” (1942), after a humble chapel steeped in history to which the poet, a convert to Anglicanism in 1927, had made a pilgrimage.

Eliot said that the poet’s “direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve,” and good portions of the quartets are him writing about writing:

The man who said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” was obsessed with taking old ideas and old thoughts and bringing them alive by saying them in a new way:

You can listen to actor Jeremy Irons read the quartets, or listen to T.S. Eliot read them himself.

Highly recommended.

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