But what about this sleeveless, rickety LP
at the bottom of my father’s dusty stacks?
—Alessandro Moreschi, The Last Castrato,
The Complete Vatican Recordings.
What takes me at this tender age of twenty-eight,
what spirits me and drags me to the attic,
unearths the turntable, restarts the record,
what dials down the volume knob to 1?
Ave Maria. Just imagine: this voice,
the last of its kind, so the only of its kind—
limitless pitch, limitless in time. Hallelujah.
And meanwhile, outside, a century later,
my father finishes mowing the lawn.
Faith by Anthony Carelli
Literary Abandon
Trinity played host to two amazing writers last week, Anthony Carelli and Maaza Mengiste.
Anthony Carelli is a poet who grew up in Poynette, Wisconsin. His first book was published earlier this years as part of the prestigious Princeton Series in Contemporary Poetry.
Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa, but now lives in Brooklyn New York. Her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze was set in Addis Ababa in 1974 on the eve of the revolution and was published in 2010 to great critical acclaim.
Both authors read excerpts from their books, which were incredible. For an idea of what I mean, see the following posts.
Signed,
Jenna, editor - the Mill the blog.
Why Wallace Stevens (Deceased Hartford Resident) Would Dig The Mill
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879-August 2, 1955) was a resident of our beloved Hartford from 1916 until his death, and made his living as an insurance lawyer. He’s also one of the great poets in the American literary tradition. Insurance lawyer: Boring. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: Sweet.
Weird, right? An insurance lawyer and…a poet? His first volume of poetry—Harmonium—wasn’t published until 1922, when he was thirty-six. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955. He woke up one day, realized he was a little bored down at the insurance firm, decided to spend his free-time writing some poems, ended up reshaping the state of American poetry, and became a stand-out figure in Modernism. I think they call that “Bringing it On” in the cheer-leading world.
So, what does Wallace Stevens’ life have to do with The Mill? Why would he dig The Mill? This sounds cliché, but most clichés start as truths—that’s why they’re used so often—so screw it: No matter what your label is—in Stevens’ case, his label was “insurance-lawyer”—there’s always space to defy the expectations that your label implies. Oh, and he was from Hartford so, like, he probably would have come by one of our shows or something.
Here’s a poem that gets at what Wallace Stevens thought poetry (or, maybe, a place like The mill) could do for someone like, say, a bored man in an insurance firm who wanted to shed the expectations of his “label”:
“The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain”
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
