Reviews: Lee's Go Set a Watchman & Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical

Harper Lee and her novel cover for Go Set
a Watchman (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/
Getty Images. Courtesy of VICE & HarperCollins)

As I wrote yesterday, during my quiet stretch here I have been writing for other publications, and just before my last July blog entry, the double obit for E. L. Doctorow and Ornette Coleman, I posted a review of Harper Lee's new (old) novel at VICE, "Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman Reveals the Limits of the Liberal Imagination." Two paragraphs:

As a counterpoint and complement to the compelling fantasy of Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman possesses real value. What was often latent in the later novel is on full display here, ranging from the middle-class whites' classism, self-absorption, and entitlement to a racial-epithet-packed screed that would not appear out of place on a forum like Stormfront. Reading Go Set a Watchman also made me wonder how it might have been received by critics and the public if it had appeared in the late 50s, and whether there exists another work of fiction from these years by a young white Southern writer that so baldly lays bare the complicity of the mass of white Southerners, particularly the social elites and middle class, in maintaining white supremacy.

In its focus on liberalism's limitations, and its conclusion in Jean Louise's sentimental emotional accommodation with her father's and family's views—"I can't beat him, and I can't join him"—the book also feels very contemporary, since we still encounter unironic invocations of America as a "post-racial" society in the public discourse, despite constant  indications to the contrary.

There's more at the link above. Oh--and I definitely recommend reading Lee's new (old) book.

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Ensemble and Lin-Manuel Miranda (at right)
in Hamilton (photo by Joan Marcus)

Recently I had the excellent fortune to see Lin-Manuel Miranda's masterpiece, Hamilton: An American Musical, which has made a smooth transition from the Public Theater, where it debuted to acclaim, to Broadway, at the Richard Rogers Theater. I could rhapsodize about Miranda's artistry at length, but VICE fortunately has word limits and editors, so you can read my distilled thoughts about this work at "The Best Musical of the Year Is a Hip-Hop Show About Alexander Hamilton."

Not only do I talk about all the kinds of hip hop (from freestyle to chopper) Miranda manages to incorporate, but I also devote a few paragraphs to the multiple political implications of this work. It's not a long review so please do check it out.

One quote:

Hamilton also offers one of the best and most compelling counternarratives to the increasingly extreme conservative rhetoric around immigration. Alexander Hamilton, Miranda never lets the audience forget, was an immigrant from a small island, with a sketchy education, no money, and few prospects, and became the target of constant social and political antagonism. Even factoring in the neoliberal undercurrent of the hardworking, self-made man the musical espouses, Hamilton artfully hammers away at the idea that power should be concentrated in the hands of an elite, or that opportunity should not be extended as widely as possible, repeatedly connecting this thread to larger ideas about race and class. Many of the musical's catchphrases, including "We are a movement," "Rise up," and "The world turned upside down," would sound as fitting at a protest as they do on Broadway.

Above all, GO SEE HAMILTON! It just may rock your bells, and your world.

Charles Wright Named US Poet Laureate + Poem

Charles Wright

Congratulations are in order to the newest Poet Laureate of the United States, Charles Wright (1935-), now Souder Family Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, and one of the most important American lyric poets of his generation. Wright, a native of Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, is the author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry, beginning with The Grave of the Right Hand (Wesleyan University Press, 1970), and including Country Music: Selected Early Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1982), which received the National Book Award for Poetry; Black Zodiac (FSG, 1997), which received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Scar Tissue (FSG, 2006), which received the 2007 Griffin International Prize for Poetry; and Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems (FSG, 2012), which received the 2013 Bollingen Prize.

Charles Wright found his subject matter and method as a poet in the 1980s with Southern Cross, and has, since then, circled around a series of themes, references, and related styles, which bring together meditations about human and natural existence, often with a gently philosophical tone; judicious use of figuration and imagery drawn from the natural, especially that of the various places he has lived over the years, and in particular, his native South and Charlottesville; citations and elaborations on the work of Dante, Tu Fu, and other figures from the past; and careful use of poetry's rhetorical and musical resources, to produce verse that is indelibly Charles's and yet which bears the ring of the universal.

Given the vibrant public engagement of our most recent US Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, I am curious to see in which direction Charles takes this post. He is a warm, generous person--that has been my experience with him, going back to my two-year stint at U.Va.--but also somewhat quiet and publicity-shy. And, like several recent poet laureates, he is an elder and may not choose (or even be able to sustain) the peripatetic approach that some other poet laureates, such as Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Billy Collins, and Natasha have undertaken. Any vocal, public advocacy for poetry would be wonderful, though, as will the fact that through this appointment, more readers will come to know about Charles Wright's poetry.

Here is one of his poems borrowed from the Academy of American Poets' website. It is the quintessence, at least to me, of what Charles Wright's work looks and sounds like. Read it aloud and it will reveal even more.

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Body and Soul II

(for Coleman Hawkins)

The structure of landscape is infinitesimal,
Like the structure of music,
                            seamless, invisible.
Even the rain has larger sutures.
What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together,
Is faith, it appears--faith of the eye, faith of the ear.
Nothing like that in language,
However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms
Blown by the wind.
                 April, and anything’s possible.

Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang.
A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India
And back--on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on 
                                                               foot.
Ten thousand miles it took him, from 629 to 645, 
Mountains and deserts, 
In search of the Truth,
                    the heart of the heart of Reality,
The Law that would help him escape it,
And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.
                                               And he found it.

These days, I look at things, not through them,
And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get.
The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral,
The neighbor’s back porch light bulbs glow like anemones.
Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead.
This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark,
                            when everything starts to shine out,
And aphorisms skulk in the trees,
Their wings folded, their heads bowed.

Every true poem is a spark,
              and aspires to the condition of the original fire
Arising out of the emptiness.
It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite.
It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by.
Shooting stars.
April’s identical,
             celestial, wordless, burning down.
Its light is the light we commune by.
Its destination’s our own, its hope is the hope we live with.

Wang Wei, on the other hand, 
Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River 
Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,
                                                     and lived there,
Off and on, for the rest of his life.
He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it,
A part of nature himself, he thought.
And who would say no
To someone so bound up in solitude,
                           in failure, he thought, and suffering.

Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small 
Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge.
Getting too old and lazy to write poems,
                                      I watch the snowfall
From the apple trees.
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.

Excerpted from A Short History of the Shadow by Charles Wright. Copyright © 2002 by Charles Wright. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. All rights reserved