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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Christmas Memories

Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, December 20th, 2007. I'm Curtis Fox. This week: "Christmas Memories." I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but I don't think it's any accident that our most festive holiday comes smack in the middle of the dreariest time of year. The trees are dead. The days are ridiculously short. It's dark all the time. Cold. So we huddle together at holiday parties. We drink too much. We listen to and sing familiar songs. We cling to family. Dysfunctional or not. We're going to hear two Christmas poems today that open the door on all that domestic coziness and let the winds of the world blow in. The first is by Ed Skoog, a poet originally from Kansas who now lives in California. He has published a few chapbooks, and his first book, Mister Skylight, is coming out next year from Copper Canyon Press. His poem is about neighborhood Christmas carolers. About halfway through, the carolers and the poem take a strange turn. "The Carolers" is read by Mary Testa.

Mary Testa:

"The Carolers

in scarves, boots, drinks,

turn around our neighbor's pine

spilling grog into snow,

approaching our porch with

O Come All Ye Faithful.

A few stumble or sing wrong,

open the door, Jim, for

let us adore him.

Annual Christian, pipered

by their pied joy, I lean

to follow when they go back.

A hand holds me back.

The lead caroler, encountering

our Ford glazed with ice,

undeterred, opens the door

and crawls right through,

knees on the seat, gloves

on the dash and headrest.

The rest follow, pulling

We Saw Three Ships

through the car like a rope.

Soon I am falling asleep

in vast winter bedroom silence,

part of me caroling further

through local traffic, houses and towns

and lives, and years

and years of night.

Ed Skoog: Hello.

Curtis Fox: Hi, Ed.

Ed Skoog: Hi, Curtis.

Curtis Fox: Hi. So we just heard this wonderful actor named Mary Testa read your poem, "The Carolers." And I wanted to ask you a few questions. You got a moment?

Ed Skoog: Absolutely.

Curtis Fox: Where are you right now?

Ed Skoog: I'm at Canters Deli on Fairfax and Melrose in Los Angeles.

Curtis Fox: A-ha.

Ed Skoog: One of my favorite places in the world.

Curtis Fox: Ah. So I remember recording this with Mary a couple of years ago, and I remember us both being fairly baffled by what happens in the middle of that poem.

Mary Testa: "The lead caroler, encountering our Ford glazed with ice, undeterred, opens the door and crawls right through."

Curtis Fox: What's happening there?

Ed Skoog: Well, it's from a childhood memory of watching some carolers, uh, sort of process through a kind of deep snow at my friend David Hardy's house. And...

Curtis Fox: Back in Kansas?

Ed Skoog: Back in Kansas. In Topeka, Kansas, where I grew up. And the carolers came, and having that childish delight at carolers, at adults kind of acting goofy, and loving it. And that feeling of wanting to join the parade as it passes by. But then David's parents had to restrain me. They said: "They're drunk." These carolers had had too much Christmas cheer and were loaded. And so they stopped at the house, sang briefly… And then, because the snowbanks were high, there was a car that was in the driveway. And instead of climbing through the snow and around the car, they opened up the car door, and the whole group of carolers just went right through the station wagon from the passenger to the driver's side.

Curtis Fox: Now, when I read that, I thought you were just being fantastic and surreal. I didn't realize that you were actually recording a real event, that is...

Ed Skoog: Yeah, well, it was fantastic and surreal and completely true. I mean, it's one of my introductions to the sense that the world is highlit, occasionally, by drunken genius. And so I remember them singing as they went through in a kind of conga line through it, you know, climbing over the seat and the gear shaft and then moving on to the next house.

Curtis Fox: And then there's a dream aspect to it. You talk about falling asleep in a vast winter bedroom silence. Is that the kid that you were, falling asleep after the carolers have gone away?

Ed Skoog: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think it's that night after this experience, going back home and going to bed in the gigantic winter nights of childhood, and trying to process the memory and the way that a song lingers, that still being with them in some way. Some part of me having gone with them through the car into that other world on the other side of the car of song and revelry, in some part of me going off with them into the future.

Mary Testa: "Soon I am falling asleep in vast winter bedroom silence. Part of me caroling further through local traffic, houses and towns and lives and years and years of night."

Dylan Thomas: One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

Curtis Fox: That, of course, is Dylan Thomas reading his classic story "A Child's Christmas in Wales." Wyatt Prunty obviously had it in mind when he came up with a poem we're about to hear, "A Child's Christmas in Georgia, 1953." In spite of the title, it's a far cry from Dylan Thomas's celebratory nostalgia fest.

Wyatt Prunty: The source of this poem, the reason it's written, is… The little boy is trying to figure out why Christmas is supposed to be such a happy time. And really, what he runs into more is things that cause his parents to remember those who are no longer with them.

Curtis Fox: Wyatt Prunty teaches at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is associated with the New Formalist movement, which for many years now has been reviving traditional poetic forms. This poem, however, is not rhymed, though its five-line stanzas are in loose iambic pentameter.

Wyatt Prunty: "A Child's Christmas in Georgia, 1953."

Marching through Georgia to bed, he stopped, listened,

And heard, "While shepherds washed their socks by night."

Later, he sang the same skewed line off key,

And his parents howled; until getting it wrong,

He decided, beat getting it right.

But Christmas Eve they read about killing

The first-born, fleeing the land, and returning

By another country, till he couldn't sleep

And had to check so slipped from bed to stare

The darkened height by which the wise men steered.

Downstairs there were his mother's stacks of albums

And, mantle-high, her unblinking gallery

Of gold-framed graybeards gazing, and matriarchs

In black, scowling the generations back

Into place; and then there were the others,

His infant older brother who never

Came home, two cousins lost in war, an uncle

Who captained his ship over the flat world's edge,

And one fleece-lined pilot lost years now inside

The stilled weather of a relative's box camera.

And then there were the lines he'd heard in church,

"Pray that your flight may not be in winter,"

So that was how the pilot disappeared?

And "Woe to the pregnant and nursing," so

That explained his brother, or their mother?

There was one thing he knew by heart by now:

Rubella cooked, cleaned, and scolded her way

Through the house tuning the news and talking back,

Though she didn't vote, and said her baby

Died because he wouldn't come out in Georgia.

Still standing there and staring up, he pressed

His face till the cold glass fogged and hurt his nose,

Though there was only the street light yellowing

The side yard and his father's dormant garden

And the Talmadges' coiled drive and empty house.

So what were they singing about, the records

And radio? And why all these presents

When over drinks his parents grieved those missing?

What was given if you had to go away

And wound up framed like a silent question?

In the morning Rubella would light the stove;

The paper boy would whistle up Milledge,

Tossing the new day high over one hedge

Into another by the porch for parents

Who ignored their food and read to themselves.

So, still at the window, he studied the sky,

Figuring Pontius Pilate flew for Delta

And that the two parts to the Bible were

The Old and New Estimates, which like Christmas

You read out of the names of those missing.

Curtis Fox: Wyatt Prunty reading "A Child's Christmas in Georgia, 1953." His book Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems, is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. We're going to take a break over the holiday, but we'll be back in January with more podcasts. In the meantime, check out all the new podcasts: the Poetry Magazine Podcast, hosted by editors Christian Wiman and Don Scherr; Avant-Garde All The Time with Kenneth Goldsmith of UbuWeb; the New Poem of The Day podcast; and Poem Talk with Al Filreis of the Kelly Writers House and PennSound. All of them are on iTunes and on poetryfoundation.org. The music used in this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.

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