Douglas Barbour wrote:
> I was going to say 'nicely balanced,' Ken, but it's really savagely
> balanced, on a knife edge of hope & despair, belief & cynicism, etc,
> which gives it its spark.
>
> But then, there's always Hollywood, eh.
It came out the way it did AFTER I'd pasted the "pre-version" (shades of
Dr. Strangelove) into a blank mailer. I read it over and the language
clanged. It was originally "hardwood" because my inner visual was of
Jesus as a 10-day contract player in the NBA, a disposable substitute
who could be removed at will. I always felt for those guys on real
short-term contracts because they were playing their brains out with
almost no certainty except becoming castoffs the moment player X's wrist
healed. Then I was looking at the Send key and the "blacklisted actor"
idea just appeared. I didn't *want* to change the thing but I could not
avoid it. Who could have been more destroyed than an actor from the '30s
and '40s who was suddenly unemployable because of his (or her) real or
imagined political associations? I remembered Bromberg, and indeed
worked with a man who was a personal friend of J. Edward Bromberg's
(Group Theater) son Conrad. So perhaps arrogantly I felt a connection
and heeded one of those inexplicable "directives" to recast the poem's
central images around blacklisting. Oddly that seemed to make the
reference to Stalin's refusal to ransom his son work better.
For what it's worth, I take religion seriously enough (duh, Ken) to get
very upset with it's varnishing over of morality by excursions into pain
as a measuring stick, as though recounted stories of martyrdom will make
me want to be a "better person."
And Josip Dzhugashvili so loved Russia that gave his son to die in a
Nazi POW camp....
When I read that Stalin used to write poetry during his days in the
seminary I was doubly ill.
ken
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