Winter: the hope in our discontents

"Falling snow, boy in window," Paul Himmel (1949)

Studies show this week of January is the most depressing week of the year. The holiday bills have come flooding in, snow has become something to be battled against, and it's a long two weeks until the Superbowl, America's most pagan mid-winter holiday -- in balmy East Rutherford, NJ.  After that? Well, we should all be glad February is a short month.

Such doom and gloom, however, is positively un-American. After all, next Monday is the annual political ritual in Washington when the President assures us that no matter what else may be awry, "the country is strong." This we know to be a bit of political hand-holding but it's comforting nonetheless to be told once again that all is well, even as we suspect (as we do annually) that this is the winter of our discontent.

Here's Morgan Meis writing at The Smart Set site about giving into the wintery thoughts that can somehow make the season bearable.

It is a time of dreariness and decay. I'm speaking of winter, of course. I always think, when thinking of winter, of the opening lines of Richard III. Richard, the king-to-be, is musing upon the ascension to the throne of his brother, Edward IV. He says, in lines that are burned into the deep pathways of our neural networks, "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York."

These opening lines of the play are actually quite hopeful. The first word, "now," looks forward to the "made" in the next line. ... But the phrase "now is the winter of our discontent" is so powerful that it often gets picked out of context and made to stand alone. When you do that, it seems as if "now" is the winter of our discontent. The winter of our discontent isn't going anywhere. It is simply the way it is right now.

Winter, in its dreariness and decay, is the season of wanting things to be otherwise.

And yet, some part of us wants winter, some part of us glories in the winteriness of winter. Some part of me does, anyway. I was raised in the perennially pleasant environs of Los Angeles but moved, at 18 years of age, to New York City, where I've been ever since. I did it partly for the weather. I wanted to experience the seasons. I remember telling people that explicitly, even as a young man. I felt that I was going to gain something important in experiencing a genuine cycle of four seasons. ...

It is in the willingness, maybe, to have your winters and to have them in their dreariness and decay, neither surrendering completely to that discontent nor pretending to solve it. The cycle of the seasons is, after all, utterly pointless. It just goes round and round. I do not think any meaning can be found in stepping outside that cycle to explain its purpose from afar. Winter can't be made glorious, can't be transformed into endless summer.

I drove on an empty road just south of Albany the other day early in the morning. Moisture had frozen on the barren branches of the trees. My feet were cold and the joints in the upper part of my legs were throbbing painfully. I find that happening sometimes in the winter as I get older. A wind blew up from the Hudson River and the flaky slivers of ice were dislodged from the tops of the trees. The slivers fell to the ground slowly, twirling strings of tinsel glinting in the sun. Sharp daggers of light falling across the blue and the white. I was hungry and my jaw muscles were tensed from a night of grinding my teeth through unremembered dreams. I don't think I will ever forget the icy tinsel in the morning light during this, the 38th winter of my discontent.

Is there pleasure in giving in to this season of discomfort? One can bar the door and think of the phrase calm blue ocean as a mantra but the sun still sets darkly by 7 o'clock on a icy and frozen scene at worst, at best (as here in the South) cold and wet. The real pleasure we can allow ourselves is to think that even winter will fade away and be replaced by the first flower of Spring.

(Morgan Meis is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for The Believer, Harper’s, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.)

“You ought to drink beer, Williams, ’cause you got a beer-drinkin’ soul.”

Miller Williams

The Oxford American magazine has always had a unique twist on its Southern vision, equally at home with arcane politicians and bourbon makers, poets, charlatans and preachers, and the miseries of the disenfranchised. Its online content is always a surprise, too, with worthwhile features not found in the OA's print quarterly.

A recent online interview with Arkansas poet Miller Williams discusses his meeting with Hank Williams before delving into his career as a translator, while making the broader point that for Williams "the music of poetry" is more than a phrase. "I think the kinship is real," he tells Jackson Meazle.   Here's an excerpt from "A Tenth Anniversary Photograph, 1952" (1999):

... People walked alone in parks.
Children slept in their yards at night.
Most every man had a paying job,
and black was black and white was white.

Would you go back? Say that you can,
that all it takes is a wave and a wink
and there you are. So what do you do?
The question is crueler than you think.

Though he entered college as double major in English and foreign languages, an aptitude test revealed “absolutely no aptitude in the handling of words,” Williams has said in interviews. He changed his major to hard sciences to avoid “embarrassing my parents.”  He taught science at the college-level for many years before securing a job in the English department at Louisiana State University, partly with the help of his friend Flannery O’Connor.

“We became dear friends and in 1961, LSU advertised for a poet to teach in their writing program. Though I had only had three hours of freshman English formally, she saw the ad and, without mentioning it to me, wrote them and said the person you want teaches biology at Wesleyan College. They couldn’t believe that, of course, but they couldn’t ignore Flannery O’Connor. So they sent me word that said, ‘Would you send us some of your work?’ And I did.”

Here's a brief excerpt from the online interview.

OA: You have written somewhat extensively in argument for rhyme and meter in poetry. How has music informed your work? Arkansas, like many Southern states, has such a rich musical heritage. Has music always been of interest to you and your work? 

MW: I do believe that poetry is more satisfying when it has a pattern similar to those of songs. I wish that I could sing well, as I'm sure you know my daughter Lucinda does, and writes her own songs. Hank Williams (no kinship there) told me that since he often wrote his lyrics months before he set them to music, they spent those months as sort-of poems. I think the kinship is real. 

OA: Did you ever meet Hank Williams in person? 

MW: Yes, [in 1952] I was on the faculty of McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he had a concert there. I stepped onstage when he and his band were putting their instruments away and when he glanced at me I said, "Mr. Williams, my name is Williams and I'd be honored to buy you a beer." To my surprise, he asked me where we could get one. I said there was a gas station about a block away where we could sit and drink a couple. (You may not be aware that gas stations used to have bars.) He asked me to tell his bus driver exactly where it was and then he joined me. When he ordered his beer, I ordered a glass of wine, because this was my first year on a college faculty and it seemed the appropriate thing to do. We sat and chatted for a little over an hour. When he ordered another beer he asked me about my family. I told him that I was married and that we were looking forward to the birth of our first child in about a month. He asked me what I did with my days and I told him that I taught biology at McNeese and that when I was home I wrote poems. He smiled and told me that he had written lots of poems. When I said, “Hey—you write songs!” he said, “Yeah, but it usually takes me a long time. I might write the words in January and the music six or eight months later; until I do, what I've got is a poem.” Then his driver showed up, and as he stood up to leave he leaned over, put his palm on my shoulder, and said, “You ought to drink beer, Williams, ’cause you got a beer-drinkin’ soul.” He died the first day of the following year. When Lucinda was born I wanted to tell her about our meeting, but I waited until she was onstage herself. Not very long ago, she was asked to set to music words that he had left to themselves when he died. This almost redefines coincidence. ... 

OA: What has it been like to be a poet in Arkansas? It sometimes seems a bit lonely because poetry is not valued as much as other art forms. Did you ever have a notion that it was impractical to write poems, or does the poem’s strength lie in its impracticality, its mystery? 

MW: I've enjoyed all the years I've lived in Arkansas, and was pleased—once I started writing—at how well my poems are received here. A reviewer said, a few years ago, that "Miller Williams is the Hank Williams of American poetry because, though his poems are discussed in classrooms at Princeton and Harvard, they're read, understood, and appreciated by squirrel hunters and taxi drivers." 

OA: One tool the poet likes to keep in her belt is an ear for spoken language. Do you believe that Southern idioms and turns of phrase are an advantage to Southern poets? 

MW: I do, so long as every phrase in the poem is understandable to everyone who speaks English. ...

Williams has edited  a dozen poetry collections, such asHalfway from Hoxie: New and Selected Poems (1973); Living on the Surface: New and Selected Poems (1989), which received the Poets’ Prize; Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems (1999); and Time and the Tilting Earth (2008). He is also the author ofMaking a Poem: Some Thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It (2006).

Martin Luther King, Jr.: "the bleakness of corroding despair"

My dear fellow clergymen,

... You may well ask, "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing Thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration.

We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?" when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" men and "colored" when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title of "Mrs." when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. ...

The "Letter From The Birmingham City Jail" was a response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama (Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter, Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop Holan B. Harmon, the Reverend George M. Murray. the Reverend Edward V. Ramage and the Reverend Earl Stallings) and handwritten by Martin Luther King on April 16, 1963. It was then slipped out of the jail, turned over to his assistants on the outside, typed, copied, and widely disseminated to various organizations and individuals as an "open letter" in order to generate public support for Dr. King and his civil rights activities.