Of Peanut Soup & Poetry

Once or twice a year my mother and I make a pilgrimage to share a cup of peanut soup.  To foray into this soup with your spoon is to enter a culinary wild frontier.  Peanut soup is so thick, so cloying, and so intense that I have never been able to eat more than a few spoonfuls.  Forget pie eating contests, if they wanted to really separate the men from the boys, someone should hold a peanut soup eating contest. 

A few spoonfuls tide me over for months, but then I get that hankering for another taste.  Recently my husband took me to the Surrey House for my peanut soup fix.  Even now, the texture and taste of that soup is a distinct and vivid memory.

I feel the same way about poetry.  I can go through life for months contentedly reading books and articles, but then suddenly, I am compelled to seek out and read some poems.  I don’t tend to read many, but the poems I do read, like the peanut soup, make a real and lasting impression.

Poetry is meant to be read aloud.  I imagine Homer chanting the verses of the Odyssey.  My father knew how to draw his children to his side with poetry.  He knew The Canterbury Tales by heart, but he also knew what appealed to the young.  We loved his renditions of the maudlin “Annabell Lee” and “The Raven” by Poe, and “Little Orphant Annie” by James Whitcomb, when my father’s voice would drop down to the softest whisper, and then he would roar AND THE GOBLINS WILL GET YOU IF YOU DON’T WATCH OUT! We would shriek the chorus together and shiver with delight.  When I looked up this poem recently I discovered that it was popular at the time of its publication in 1885, and it was the inspiration for the Little Orphan Annie comic strip which was developed in 1924.   

Many of the poems I learned from my father had sad overtones such as “The Little Boy Blue” by Eugene Fields about the death of a child during the night. Looking back I think that was because he learned them from his grandmother, who was born in 1865 during the final days of the Civil War, and was a true Victorian. The sentimental Victorians embraced their grief, from the custom of wearing black in mourning for a year after the death of a family member, creating sentimental hair lockets, photographing the deceased, and writing tragic poems.

Little wonder, when one considers the infant mortality rate and the diseases that ravaged families and communities.  Verses gave voice to these intense emotions, losses, and memories.  In the evenings families read, gathered around the piano to sing, recite poetry, and share stories.  Poetry was also used intensively in the classroom when learning largely consisted of rote memorization and recitation.

Today, poetry is rarer in our lives, but no less powerful.  Many of us remember footage of an older Robert Frost at JFK’s Inauguration, pages blowing away from the podium, hesitating, forced to recite from memory his moving poem “The Gift Outright”.

The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by…

Even now, that astounding voice echoes in my mind when I read those words. Only four poets have read at Presidential Inaugurations, but it is a grand tradition. Poetry marks an occasion, and adds a depth of emotional and symbolic meaning which resonates beyond the moment, and I routinely weave a reading into library ceremonies.

When we dedicated the WWII Plaque at the South Norfolk Library, Raymond Harper held the audience spellbound with his reading of “That Old Gang of Mine” written about his lost friends after his return from war.  His poem captured the sharpness of loss, friendship, and change far more dramatically than any speech made that day.

I was also mesmerized by the rollicking poem “We Are More” read by Canadian slam poet Shane Koyczn at the opening games of the Olympics.  The words offered up a wild soulful tribute to the diverse people of Canada and reminded me strongly of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”, an epic poem that continues to be treasured by each new generation seeking the essence of the American experience.

 There is another Walt Whitman poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloomed”, that I ferret out every spring from a well thumbed family volume of collected verse.  Traditionally during Easter Dinner, I insist some hapless relative read the poem, urging them to imbue the words with the great emotional intensity they evoke.  Whitman penned the poem to express his grief, and the grief of the nation, at the news of Lincoln’s assassination.

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring; Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,           And thought of him I love…

In Fredericksburg, at the present day National Park Headquarters at Chatham Manor, Lincoln stood after the terrible Battle of Fredericksburg, and gazed down upon the town.  Whitman came to Chatham too, as a nurse, searching for his beloved brother Theo while tending the suffering Union troops.  There are two ancient Catalpa trees that still stand where both men once stood beneath them, the trees hollowed and resembling ancient shells of trees, but they still rain down seed pods each spring.  This year I picked up a pod, and planted the seeds in my suburban backyard.  I like to think that I will start the life of a new Catalpa tree here in Chesapeake, the descendent of a tree that once shaded both Whitman and Lincoln. 

When my late husband’s grandfather, rather magnificently named Theodore Maximillan Nagel III, passed away at just shy of a hundred, people came from great distances to pay tribute to an amazing spirit.  The bagpipes filled the gray November air around the grave, and an elegant older gentleman stepped forward to recite from memory Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar”.   It was a moment of raw power.  Later, I had the same poem read at my husband’s service, and it was my lovely girlfriends, standing at the podium, each reading a different poem with great tenderness, that bought beauty and eloquence to that terrible moment.

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home…

I believe that poetry is a celebration of life and of the endurance of the human spirit.  Each year the Chesapeake Library is home to an “Evening with the Poets” sponsored by the Library Foundation, and hosted by C. Edward Russell Jr.  This year the main event will be Friday, May 14^th at 7:00 pm at the Russell Memorial Library, complete with hors d’oeuvres in a delightful intimate setting of tables (ambience created by the dedicated Russell staff).

The evening will feature two remarkable regional poets, Tim Seibles of Old Dominion University and Jon Pineda, a native son of Chesapeake.  Both men are nationally known and are truly wonderful to experience in person.  So join us on May 14^th for an inspiring evening of poetry and our shared love of the spoken word, but you will have to embark on your own personal odyssey for a bowl of peanut soup.