Mark Strand

I always feel slightly guilty about writing poetry while I am not an enthusiastic reader of poetry. On our last trip to America, three months ago by now, I went into a huge bookstore in a shopping center near our daughter's house, and browsed through the poetry section. Compared to the number of books about achieving salvation through better orgasms, there were relatively few books of poetry. I ended up picking out four, including David Ferry's translation of Gilgamesh and New Selected Poems by Mark Strand.
I have only begun to browse through that rich volume, and I expect to stay with it for a while. I am enjoying the way Strand brings out the strangeness of experience and his almost plain, almost clear language: "Nothing will tell you/ where you are./ Each moment is a place/ you've never been."
Last week my friends' twenty-year-old son died in a diving accident, a meaningless and devastating stroke of terrible misfortune. I have a good idea how heavy the burden of grief will be for them, year after year. Such tragedies make it impossible to find meaning in life, just as they make it imperative to do so. Poetry dwells in the chasm between impossibility and necessity.
In a poem of my own I wrote:

The Company of Misery, March 2011

I watched a dying hedgehog stagger on short legs.

Troubled by that sick animal, whose pain
Was nothing to the pain of Japan at that moment –
Earth heaving like water,
Water pounding harder than rock.

Japan is distant,
The hedgehog is right here at my feet,
Too feeble to flee.

I could no more help the being near me
Than the people dying far away.

Does Anyone Need Five Saxophones?

Aspiring amateurs (who can afford it) invest in equipment. Maybe Mr. X takes boring pictures, but he has six cameras and seventeen lenses and a gadget bag full of filters and a closet full of tripods and lights. So I have five saxophones, two clarinets, four or five recorders, and a bunch of ethnic instruments.
Of the five saxophones, I mainly play two: the baritone and the alto. I play the baritone in a big band, and I practice on it a lot, because I'm not exactly the strongest player in the band, and I have to keep my level up. I've been playing alto because it's in the same key as the baritone, so if I learn a song on one instrument, I can play it easily on the other, without transposing it again. I bought an inexpensive soprano about a year ago, and I play it on and off. My tenor has been in the hands of an instrument repairman for ages - that's another story. The fifth saxophone is an old C Melody saxophone that's sort of for sale, but no one in his or her her right mind would buy it, so I plan to take it back from the shop where it's been on sale, and maybe I'll try to overhaul it myself. If I do, I'll also invest (finally) in a C melody mouthpiece rather than use a tenor mouthpiece.
As for the clarinets, one of them is a metal G clarinet that I bought in Turkey, and I can barely play it. The key system is an old-fashioned one, even older than the Albert system that German clarinetists use, and the finger holes are so far apart that I have to stretch my fingers to play it. The other clarinet is an ordinary French wooden clarinet that I bought used a few years ago, and I play it now and then - I'm always surprised that I can play clarinet at all, but that was my main instrument 50 years ago, and your fingers don't forget.
Oh yes, I almost forgot my EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument), a wind-controlled synthesizer with 100 built in sounds. I've been playing it fairly regularly with my wife (who plays piano) and our friend, a flautist. We play trios, from early baroque through classical. If I tried to play the trios on a saxophone or clarinet, I'd have to transpose, and, since we're mainly sight-reading, I couldn't really play well enough. With the EWI I don't have to transpose. It has flute-like and oboe-like sounds that fit in pretty well with piano and flute. I can even play a cello part on the EWI (it has a 7 octave range!), though reading bass clef is hard for me. Oddly, I can read bass clef easily on the piano, but not on an instrument that usually uses treble clef. When the cello part is written in tenor clef, I really lose it.
For quite a while my strategy was to concentrate on the baritone, to decide that was my main instrument and to work on it. But when I pick up another horn, I find I enjoy playing that one too, so I'm thinking of adopting a different strategy: going from horn to horn every day that I practice. Two days ago I played clarinet, yesterday I played the soprano, and today I plan to play the alto or the baritone.
Even though a saxophone is a saxophone, as Gertrude Stein ought to have said, there is a big expressive difference between the soprano and the baritone - obviously - and each of the horns offers something different to the musician.
I find that playing the EWI is essentially different from playing my acoustic instruments, probably because neither the sound nor the pitch depend on my embouchure. There's something abstract about playing it, and I conceptualize the music differently.
I certainly don't need five saxophones and an assortment of other instruments, but if I had to sell all but one of them, I don't know how I'd choose.