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After the murder of Renee Good, editor and publisher Fin Hall issued a call for poems responding to the event and honoring Renee.* Early on, he realized he was being inundated with poets speaking out on behalf of our fellow poet. So, he writes, “I decided to set a short deadline, 4 days, and in that time received in excess of 150 submissions. I accepted them all, as it is not for me to judge what is good and what is not, but just to let the world have its say in poetry” (Broad Daylight, 2). |
When I first heard about her murder, I had no poetic response. I am so constantly filled with loathing for this regime and everyone who has assisted it that it is hard for me to identify a poetic inspiration in each new atrocity. What inspires me to produce a poem is something that moves me in a new way. Ongoing atrocities, while they anger me, do not always give me a jolt that I feel compelled to grapple with in a poem. Also, sometimes I need time to see how the poem should take shape. |
Both those requirements came together for me when I saw the picture of Renee’s son’s stuffed animals in the glove compartment of her car. I looked it up in response to then-representative Eric Swalwell‘s reference to it on the House floor. I’m aware that Swalwell has had to step down in response to credible accusations of violent sexual assault. I disagreed with many of his votes, and even in this speech, I found his statement that the toys were for “bribery” and to manipulate the kids into behaving disconcerting. But the basic idea that the toys were central to Renee’s identity was effective. |
I hadn’t seen the picture before because I almost never watch the news–I just read it. I encountered a clip from Swalwell’s speech in a newsletter and could not see the images clearly. When I looked up the photo online and saw the animals, they seemed to be trying to get out of the glove compartment to help. I thought of Winnie-the-Pooh and the research I had done on transitional objects when I wrote on A. A. Milne. Like Swalwell, I found something peculiarly moving in these toys, who appeared to embody children’s innocent striving to fix things. |
So I wrote a little piece after Milne (mostly The House at Pooh Corner). I think of it as a fable, but I guess you could call it a prose poem. It’s not perfect, but I think it is a unique perspective on Renee and her death, and some people have found it moving. Many thanks to Fin Hall for producing this tribute anthology and including my work in it. |
David Maslanka, another composer who studied with my dad, is eminently relevant to this post because Maslanka’s reading led him to take up the study of violence, which in turn led him to conclude, “You cannot hate while making music.” He also gives illustrations of how his reading on violence affected his creative work: |
The death of fifteen million Jews is impossible to grasp; it becomes merely a number. But the death of one is a tragedy that can open our hearts. Shiver related the story of a town of 5,000 Jews who were systematically slaughtered. Among them was a small family group, a father with his eight-year-old son, and the boy’s grandmother holding a year-old baby. The father was trying to give his son courage in the face of what was about to happen; the grandmother was holding and bouncing the baby to make it smile. In the next moments they were machine-gunned to death. I was deeply drawn into the story without knowing where I was going or why. I am in it; it must be spoken through me in musical sound. The piece that came, Remember Me for solo cello and 19 players, is for that little baby. |
I urge you to take seventeen minutes to listen to Remember Me. Indescribably beautiful and sad. |
Furthermore, in explaining how he learned to get in touch with his creative “unconscious,” Maslanka writes, “Some years ago it occurred to me that in his television program, Mr. Rogers was bringing his young audiences to this kind of inner travel through his imagination trips to the ‘land of make believe.'” So we have, as in my response to Renee Good’s murder, violence, children, and “the land of make believe.” |
As far as what I hear in Maslanka’s music, in the introductory segments of movements in Remember Me, Maslanka, like Dennis Kam, explores less or differently teleological music than that characteristic of the western art music. In Remember Me this seemed like a way of drawing listeners into the creative frame of mind where we can be more receptive to the piece. This is done partly through minimalism, repeated, simple motifs layered on one another, and partly through nonwestern motifs and techniques. |
He mixes this with western, folk, and sometimes pop traditions, an approach he characterizes as a way of creating a culturally resonant musical language. I believe this idea may be rooted in his graduate study with H. Owen Reed, renowned for La Fiesta Mexicana. But Maslanka’s reverence for Bach chorales? That had to have been at least encouraged by Dad. Similarly, though all three of these composers are superlative orchestrators with a keen sense of drama, there is something about the way Maslanka marks the climaxes that seems to me to have some Joe Wood in it…. |
What are you still doing here? Go listen to Maslanka already! Or read a poem to honor Renee Good. |
*Though normally I’d go with the last name, using “Renee” feels like reasserting her humanity in the face of fascist assaults on it. |
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