Childhood in the Milky Way

Brendan Hopes David

Description

How does a young boy discover his vocation as a poet in what is seemingly the least poetical of environments, the industrial Midwest of the 1950s and 1960s? By turns comic and dramatic, at once down to earth and otherworldly in its homegrown mysticism, A Childhood in the Milky Way answers that question, lighting up a special boyhood in one small corner of the galaxy. Part memoir, part meditation on what it means to be a poet in America at the end of the millennium, this book follows the early life of David Brendan Hopes in Akron, Ohio, where the going was sometimes rough and the people rougher, though they could also be fanciful, naive, driven by inarticulate desire, and, on occasion, haunted by the voices of angels and bards. In his growing up, the author found in the mysteries of childhood a way to enter the mysteries of religious and artistic vision.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: University of Akron Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781937378783
• Langue: English

Extrait

A CHILDHOOD IN THE MILKY WAY

Ohio History and Culture
Series on Ohio History and Culture
John H. White and Robert J. White, Sr., The Island Queen: Cincinnati’s Excursion Steamer
H. Roger Grant, Ohio’s Railway Age in Postcards
Frances McGovern, Written on the Hills: The Making of the Akron Landscape
Keith McClellan, The Sunday Game: At the Dawn of Professional Football
Steve Love and David Giffels, Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron
Alfred Winslow Jones, Life, Liberty, and Property: A Story of Conflict and a Measurement of Conflicting Rights
David Brendan Hopes, A Childhood in the Milky Way: Becoming a Poet in Ohio
David Brendan Hopes
A CHILDHOOD IN THE MILKY WAY
Becoming a Poet in Ohio
The University of Akron Press Akron, Ohio
Copyright © 1999 by David Brendan Hopes
All rights reserved
Portions of this books appeared as essays in the following publications or anthologies: The Sacred Place (University of Utah Press), Writer’s Digest, Writer’s Yearbook 1994, The Conservationist, Southern Environmental, Timbuktu, Ohio Magazine, New Letters, Sycamore Review .
All inquiries and permissions requests should be addressed to the publisher, The University of Akron Press, Akron, OH 44325–1703.
Manufactured in the United States of America FIRST EDITION 1999 03 02 01 00 99       5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hopes, David B.
A Childhood in the Milky Way : becoming a poet in Ohio / David Brendan Hopes
p. cm.—(Ohio history and culture)
ISBN 1-884836-45-3 (cloth : alk. paper).— ISBN 1-884836-46-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Hopes, David B.—Childhood and youth. 2. Hopes, David B.—Homes and haunts—Ohio—Akron. 3. Poets, American— 20th century—Biography. 4. Akron (Ohio)—Social life and customs. I . Title. II . Series. PS 3558.06343z464 1999 811´.54— DC 21 [ B ] 99-10712 CIP    
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39.48—1984.∞
This book is for Linda

We all know the fable of Aesop about the dog who was fortunate to find a delicious bone. As he was crossing a stream on his way home, he looked in the water and saw another dog very like himself with another bone, which he coveted. He opened his mouth to add the other dog’s bone to his hoard, and his own dropped into the water, swirling downstream to be lost. The dog’s mistake was more basic than greed for two bones rather than one. His mistake was forgetting that his central need was not to possess, but to devour.
CONTENTS
Preface,
1. Founders,
2. Fire and Ice,
3. The Queen of the Cowgirls,
4. The Tongue,
5. Among Warriors,
6. Motherland,
7. Lace Curtains and a Portable Education,
8. The Descant Girls,
9. The Serpent and the Grove,
10. Ghostly Sister, Phantom Brother,
11. The Oasis of the Trinity,
12. The Tree of Lights,
13. In My Father’s House,
14. Ground Bass,
15. Getting Down,
16. Roosevelt Ditch,
17. The Wall Between the Worlds,
PREFACE
By the time one reaches adolescence, one is a committee. So many textures of personality have been scratched into the surface, so many accommodations have been made to suit circumstance, employment, companions, that it is difficult to remember who you were when you started out, or who you intended to be at the end. That I began as a goofy kid in the brawling neighborhoods of Akron, Ohio, and ended up who I am, has always been, until now, a paradox not much thought of, even by myself, but much present in dreams and in the strange, interdimensional moments before the writing of a poem.
Commencing A Childhood in the Milky Way allowed me to open pages of my life that the very circumstances of my life had obscured: that I was by phases an intellectual and crudely anti-intellectual; that I was something of a homegrown mystic, and yet, perhaps not surprisingly, wildly contemptuous of homegrown mysticism; at times a predatory voluptuary; that I was, at the base of bases, a poet, an artist without ever thinking much about what it meant to be an artist—all of this had something to do with how and where I grew up, with the city in Ohio I abandoned with alacrity and, of course, to which have I have returned again and again with growing fascination and regard.
When my sister and I were very young, we would load up the car with ourselves and our parents and our grandparents—Mother’s mother and father—and our luggage, and our effervescent expectations, and set out on the new Eisenhower highways for points unknown, certain that however pathetic the Indian fort or Cheese Festival or Mennonite village or presidential monument to which we were headed was, it would be better, more chocked with basic information, than the streets we had left. It never crossed my mind, not once, that if I were living in Twins-burg or East Liverpool, even Chicago or New York, I might long to go to Akron, once, to know what strange things unfolded there.
I was one strange thing unfolding there. Whoever thought that process might turn out to be interesting?
This is a book of memory. Where it deviates from history, you must excuse it. History deviates from history; a poet is simply more honest about it.
This is a book about a rough kid who becomes a poet, a playwright, a painter, having known none of those things in youth, yet somehow sensing how and why to do them through the mute earth under his feet. The book is, for me, a sacrament of remembrance, as I claim in the text that poetry itself is. I have changed the names in the book, to satisfy questions of legal liability, but I think those who might recognize themselves would be joyful, as I am in the recollection of them.
I still seldom bring myself to say in daily life, “I am a poet.” The Midwestern habit of circumspection is too ingrained. But, in the watches of the night, even an Ohio boy can think of what has come to pass and be amazed, not at what he has accomplished so much as what he has stumbled into. The opportunity to embody one’s labor is a blessing, though as an absolute it precludes other equally desirable absolutes. I cannot be a great lover. The problem is not mechanical , mind you, but that my full attention would never be on the beloved’s self, but on what could be made of it all later. I cannot be a saint, and I would like to be. Yahweh and Apollo make absolute demands. You can serve two great masters only if you intend to cheat them both. I am a poet. For the sake of my own sanity, I have stopped enumerating the things that leaves out. We poets flatter ourselves that we can slight the everyday because we shall go glittering through the treetops, useless and gorgeous, singing. The truth is probably much plainer, and much luckier. It is work. Plain work. And the strength for it comes from the ground on which you were born, however surprising that seems in retrospect.
One can begin to sound like a sage by just sitting and recording pairs of mutually exclusive ideals. We cannot both taste and anticipate. We cannot both judge and perceive at one moment, not at once grow and foster growth. We must choose whether to be just or lawful, fanatical or devout. We cannot stand at once for peace and for power. The sword behind our backs negates the outstretched hand. We cannot stand at once for culture and money. We cannot at once champion profit and equality. Justice cannot filibuster; mercy cannot equivocate. If you are filibustering in the cause of justice, equivocating in the cause of mercy, warring on behalf of peace, you need to look at yourself hard, for you are separating means and ends, a division which usually—if not quite inevitably—leads to the creation of monsters. The vocation of the artist is to choose a path to follow, and to follow it with the glittering-eyed dedication of a saint— whether otherwise he be saint or no—realizing that the huddle to whom he will be magnificent will be crowded off most thoroughfares by the throng who thinks he is a fool.
The vocation of the artist involves the putting away of such regrets as are not useful in eternity. Somewhere within must lie the power to call our loneliness chastity, our poverty austerity, our terror faith. This is not merely disguise; it is transformation.

I would like to acknowledge as necessary to the completion of this book the offices of an outstanding editor, Elton Glaser, and the encouragement of John Fleischman of Ohio Magazine . Also, in ways I need not specify, but which they will understand, Nancy Jo Niehoff, Viola Deppen, Helen Otto, Sandra Davidson, Hale Chatfield, David Fratus, Philip Booth, Arthur Hoffman, Thomas Dolce, Steven Maltbie, Carol Donley, Sandra Glass, Ellen Pfirrmann. Also thanks to my colleagues at the University of North Carolina Literature and Language Department, who have tolerated me and encouraged me with time through many projects, not the least the making of this book.
A CHILDHOOD IN THE MILKY WAY
1. FOUNDERS

For an age, and then an age, the waters touched the waters. There was no voice, neither bird nor spirit. Then the waters parted from the waters. We were there in our dry skins and our bewildered eyes. We did what they did not expect of us. We sang .
IF YOU WENT the farthest you could go down Goodview Avenue without your father there to hold your hand, you would look down from the hill that was your whole world into a shallow, wide depression: the valley of the Little Cuyahoga. From the valley by day came the rumble of trains in the switching yards, and flashes from the sides of automobiles running Mogadore Road to Market Street and on downtown. Far to the west, the smokestacks of Goodyear Tire lofted a cloud that only later would cry ecological calamity, but which was then the roof under which your father and the fathers of everyone you knew earned your bread. The Tower Building, Saint Bernard’s, the massed cylinders of the Quaker Oats elevators were sometimes visib