I have never given a performance in Savannah, Georgia, but I have given performances, and I have been to Savannah, and that was inspiration enough to write “Singer on River Street, Savannah, Georgia,” my poem that appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. The subject matter here is interchangeable. Instead of a musician onstage, it could be an athlete entering tryouts or a politician attending a PAC meeting. Savannah might be exchanged for Boston, New Orleans, or the metropolis of your choice. Any activity or location that fires your imagination will do. The poem is about starting something, or trying to, and that concept transcends any time or place -- although, if some times and places didn’t particularly bemuse us, Savannah wouldn’t have such a shimmering night life.
 
This poem first appeared in The First Thing Mastered, a book that contains 44 poems advancing chronologically from birth to middle age. With that collection, I tried to eschew cynicism and irony and capture life as it feels in the moment. No emotion is frivolous when we feel it deeply. The lead character in “Singer” (referred to in the poem as “you,” not “I” or “he”) is a college student who has succeeded in booking a small gig in Savannah’s historic district. Perhaps he is a good musician, perhaps not. Perhaps the show will be his last. The future is unknowable, but he relishes his ability to shape the present: He made this show happen, first by learning to play and forming a band, then by texting the drummer who texted someone else. His thumbs on the iPhone started a chain that eventually led to a show being booked and a listing in the newspaper. Now, between songs, he surveys the crowd (however big) and notices a woman who seems interested in him. Has he found a lover, an agent, maybe both? His mind, and possibly other parts of his body, throb with questions. Then he realizes that it’s time for the next song, and he gives his band the cue.
 
I remember that feeling. For years, I operated Moon Tide Press, a small press that published three or four books a year by Southern California poets. (The press continues to operate under the esteemed leadership of others.) When a new title saw release, I felt giddy. The poet was excited; sometimes it was his or her first book. We sent emails to old college friends, press releases to newspapers, inquiries to mom-and-pop bookstores. Any of those outreaches might have led to an interview, a front-page story, a reading with a sold-out book table. Would the Poetry Foundation take notice? Was an award somewhere in the offing? I have never played the lottery, but I understand the appeal that every ticket may be the one worth $1 million. It is the same with any poem, song, painting, short film, text, tweet, or email. Moon Tide Press was small, and so were Elvis Presley's Sun records and Walt Disney’s first studio. If our initiative turns into legend one day, we want to have bragging rights.
 
Of course, “Singer on River Street, Savannah, Georgia” ends before we know if there is anything to brag about. The poem has no resolution, and I wouldn’t want to write one. Let’s indulge the singer, though, and give him what seems to be within his reach at this riverside club: a contract, a wife, the adoration of strangers. As readers, how much more do we want? I think of the words of Byron in Don Juan:
 
        All tragedies are finish'd by a death,
        All comedies are ended by a marriage;
        The future states of both are left to faith,
        For authors fear description might disparage
        The worlds to come of both, or fall beneath,
        And then both worlds would punish their miscarriage;
        So leaving each their priest and prayer-book ready,
        They say no more of Death or of the Lady.
 
A lot comes after death or the lady, and it doesn’t have to be anticlimactic. For every Presley who finds superstardom a trap, there’s a Disney who seems to relish it to the end. Perhaps the key is staying hungry. Years ago, at UCI, I attended a campus poetry reading in which a professor -- 50 years old, at least -- came to listen to the undergraduates read. He shared a piece or two of his own, then gave a short, eloquent tribute to all those gathered. “I’ve always said that I learn more from my students than they could ever learn from me,” he said. In his mind, was he still a fledgling poet seeking the validation of others? Did he feel like his break was still ahead of him? Since “Singer on River Street” is full of unanswered questions, I’ll refrain from answering these questions too. But look -- I have now finished this blog entry, and I am about to hit “Post” on Weebly. This may be the start of something astonishing. If I didn’t believe in that possibility, I wouldn't write at all.

It is a well-known story that Paul McCartney wrote "Yesterday" after the melody came to him in a dream. Law-abiding Beatle that he was, Paul vetted the tune with his contacts in the music industry to make sure that he hadn't plagiarized it from someone else. He hadn't, and an original classic was born. The moral of the story is clear: As much as we artists pride ourselves on our work, we still get to take credit for pieces that we created unconsciously. That loophole covers dreams, and also words or phrases that we misheard. Exhibit A in the poetry world this week is "Armistice," which first appeared two decades ago and arose from a line that I thought I heard Van Morrison sing. He didn't sing it, in fact, which means that I hold the rights to the mishearing. Given the agonies that sometimes come with being a writer, we can take ecstasies where we can.

The Morrison song in question is "Madame George," an impressionistic ballad from the 1968 album Astral Weeks. Many critics have interpreted the title character as being a transvestite, although Morrison has denied as much in interviews. Regardless, I was familiar with the standard reading of the song before I first heard it, and so when Morrison began the second verse with "Marching with the soldier boy behind," I initially heard it as "Magic left the soldier boy behind." If a soldier boy passes himself off as a beautiful woman, that is surely a magical transformation of some kind. For years, that was my favorite line in the song, until a lyric sheet proved me wrong. My initial disappointment was soon overridden by the realization that the line was now mine, even if Morrison (and his Belfast accent) got credit for the inspiration.

Perhaps you've seen one of those "letter swap" puzzle games. My daughter recently had one as part of her homework. You start with a word and change one letter to make a new word ("life," for instance, becomes "like"), then change one letter of that word ("like" becomes "bike"), and so on until you arrive at something completely new. That Morrison line went through a similar process as I toyed with it in my notebook. "Marching with the soldier boy behind" became "Magic left the soldier boy behind," and then my conscious mind tweaked it again to "Magic left his soldier clothes behind." Three original words, three new ones. Who would leave his soldier clothes behind? In the summer of 2004, when I lived in Connecticut, I overcame a long and particularly brutal stretch of writer's block to answer that question. A general -- "the general," as he's identified in the poem -- strolls into a metropolitan city teeming with nightlife. A war has apparently ended; banners hang in the city square celebrating armistice, while refugees wear black and indulge in wine. Casinos are booming and slot machines provide the soundtrack. The general himself seems mesmerized by the vibe -- flashing the peace sign, treating strangers to drinks, seeking out a church so he can indulge in a spiritual epiphany. At the end of the poem, he vanishes, and the narrator (some anonymous person) retreats to his shabby apartment, still tingling from having witnessed the sublime. Was the general's appearance a dream? A hallucination? A ghost sighting? In the spirit of Van Morrison, who once titled a song "Why Must I Always Explain?", I'll leave that to the reader to decide.

"Armistice" first appeared in Long River Run II, a staple-bound anthology from the Connecticut Poetry Society, in fall 2004. (The title is a reference to the opening words of Finnegans Wake, another enigmatic Irish classic.) It later appeared in my first full-length book, College Town, in 2010, and then stayed dormant until this week, when I submitted it to the Journal of Radical Wonder. Like "City Night," which I blogged about earlier this year, it's an early poem that I look on with fondness, even if I doubt that I would ever write one like it again. I can definitely see a thread that runs through the two poems, plus a number of other ones from that early-2000s period: I was entranced by urban nightscapes, their mystery and danger and titillating promise. College Town begins with a poem called "Night Companion" and ends with "Blues Man," in which a musician passes by the downtown lights after a show. The book opens with an epigraph from Kate Buckley: "I am tall, but not ever so tall as the city at night." Maybe it's no accident that I thought Van Morrison was warbling about magic back then. I may have willed myself to hear it.

One of my favorite movies is After Life, a 1998 Japanese fantasy in which the newly deceased enter a way station between this world and the next. Over the course of a few days, each of them is called on to select his or her favorite memory from Earth, after which a film crew (operating on a modest budget) reenacts it and gives it as a gift. The person then moves on to eternity, carrying nothing but a memory of the moment when life seemed most sublime. I imagine that anyone who watches that film is moved to ponder which memory they would take with them. Of course, I cannot choose one offhand. Perhaps when I was younger, I would have named a moment quickly. With time, I have come to view happiness as the riddle that it is. Do we feel joy most at the moments that seem scripted to offer it: birthdays, holidays, graduations, trips? Do we feel it when we are working hard at our area of expertise? Or does it creep up in disguise during the leaner times, when we face trying circumstances but feel an adrenaline rush at simply being needed by others?

I don't know which type of happiness is best. But I have come to realize, over the years, how hindsight sometimes alters those perfect memories. In After Life, the characters are asked to remember the moment at which they felt happiest, and the movie makes a joke about how many younger entrants to the way station choose visits to amusement parks. I have had many moments in the last 44 years, including Disneyland trips, when I lost myself in a state of bliss. I would not necessarily choose most of them as my most prized memory. They lack a certain aura of accomplishment, of euphoria for the right reason. Yes, my self-critic is at work here. I will let him discriminate. In baseball, we talk about earned and unearned runs. Perhaps there's also earned and unearned happiness. Since I just brought up baseball, I'll give an example of the second type. When I was 14, I attended a game in which the Angels trailed by seven runs in the bottom of the ninth. Astonishingly, they rallied for seven runs in that inning, then won the game in the tenth. At the time, I measured my personal well-being by the Angels' success, and when that runner crossed the plate with the winning run, I felt positively out of body -- so much so that (I distinctly remember) I looked up at the night sky above Anaheim Stadium and felt like a miracle had been bestowed.

​I have rarely felt giddier than at that moment, but 30 years later, I have come to question it. Why was I so happy? I hadn't done anything myself, other than sit in the stands and watch someone else win a game. There was no personal epiphany, no long-awaited payoff. I was living vicariously, as I have steadily learned not to do. So that game comes off the list of contenders if I ever reach that way station myself. Along with it go other moments: winning video games as a child, receiving desired toys for Christmas, taunting classmates who taunted me first. None of them were sufficiently earned. On the other hand, I can list any number of memories that retain their luster over the years: graduations, publications, interviews with remarkable people. In 2013, I hosted the launch for my book The First Thing Mastered at a Mexican restaurant in Orange, inviting dozens of friends and sharing food and poetry. In 2017, my daughter crawled for the first time as I sat holding the camera. Those moments were earned happiness. I hope the 1994 Angels still remember that game fondly, since they did the actual work.

Back to The First Thing Mastered. Ah, I love that book. I started it around the time I got married (more earned happiness) and set out to capture the first three and a half decades of life in chronological order. The challenge that I gave myself was to approach every phase of those years without cynicism or ironic distance, reflecting the world as it actually appears to a baby, a toddler, a preschooler, a teenager, and so forth until the dawn of middle age. I aimed for 91 pages of sincerity. Among the poems in the young-adult section of the book is "Welcome Week," which appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. It is one of the happiest poems I have ever written, largely because it's about the first week of college and doesn't know anything that happens beyond that point. Adulthood is exhilarating at times and maddening at others. So is childhood, of course. But those first days in the dorm -- meeting roommates, hanging posters, and creating a ramshackle group identity -- feel like the discovery of an awesome new frontier. It's a momentary rush of the perks of being a grownup, with the responsibilities and hard truths to come later.

For that matter, it's earned. We've worked hard to get into college, passed the tests and done the paperwork. The driver's license is snug in our pocket. Our adult personality is forged, though it will continue to evolve. The campus looks massive around us, countless times bigger than high school, and lockers and permission slips are behind us. All is anticipation, the belief that every step can birth a new beginning. Few things make us happier than the possibility of happiness. My own welcome week in college came in 1998 at UCI, and the memory lingers brightly after more than 25 years. In the poem, conversations in the dorm become "an improvised session / of laughter and half-invented stories"; the freshman residents hang up a banner to assert their independence, "their group name/ in multicolors defying the empty plains." If nothing after September of 1998 had ever matched that feeling, then I could at least say that I had had it once. I count myself lucky to say that I have had it again. Perhaps that's the true definition of happiness: reaching that way station in the sky, and having to resort to picking something at random.

          Twentieth century, go to sleep.
                  --R.E.M., “Electrolite”
 
The 20th century is fast nodding off. The Greatest Generation approaches single digits. Print newspapers have become a relic. VHS tapes and Life magazines line the shelves of antique stores. A centenarian who was born in 1899 could speak firsthand about a century that turned race, technology, and social mores upside down. I am certainly not that person. But as one who came of age in the century’s last two decades, I remember how it more or less stood at the end. (I am focusing on arts and culture here; politics and other matters may be pondered elsewhere.) If I could compare the coda of the 20th century to anything, it would be a painting in which the original pencil marks were visible behind the flamboyant splotches of color; there was a sense that we had accomplished something remarkable, and we could still trace the steps. Movies were barely a century old, and we could view The Matrix at the multiplex and then stop by Hollywood Video to pick up a classic with Rudolph Valentino. The early days of television were a recent enough memory that The Simpsonscould parody them. And perusing a record store, for those with the right knowledge, felt like entering a story that was still giddily in progress.
 
For those who, like me, devoured each edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, the story went roughly like this: At the dawn of the 20th century, recording technology came into being. America was a fledgling country divided into booming metropolitan cities and shadowy back roads, and as brittle 78 records began to circulate, voices from those shadows were preserved on wax. America won the war and its economy boomed. Freeways linked the small towns together. The Civil Rights Movement broke down cultural barriers. And then metropolis met small town, blues met country, and amplifiers birthed a shocking new movement. As Muddy Waters put it, “The blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll.” For the latter part of the 20th century, we were still browsing the baby pictures. It felt like journey of discovery to go to Tower Records, pick up a recording of the Rolling Stones covering a Robert Johnson classic, and then slap it on the counter with a box set containing Johnson’s original.
 
In 2024, how many people still thrill to an experience like that? Some, no doubt, but probably few of them are teenagers. As time passes, older times become condensed, and the average Justin Bieber fan would likely group Johnson and the Stones, however respectfully, together in the category of “old music.” The styles that first emanated from scratchy vinyl remain the roots, but the tree has grown far above them. The 20th century is going to sleep. Fine, let it. Enough horrible things happened between 1900 and 2000 -- not least the segregation that helped to birth the blues in the first place -- that we can set our sights on doing better. What remains, if we want them to, are the artifacts themselves. Taken out of the context from history, they can still thrill us aesthetically. I am thinking of the last few songs that I cued up on Alexa: “Stop! In the Name of Love" by the Supremes, “No Woman No Cry” by Bob Marley, “Smoky Places” by the Corsairs. They’re among the gifts that the last century gave us. It would be nice if that were all we could remember, but of course you can’t take the yin without the yang.
 
My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, “Blues Man,” is an elegy for that wonderful and awful century. This is both among my favorite poems and among those that were hardest to write. It started a couple of years into the millennium with the opening lines, which never changed: “One century (which time let go) / lives on stubbornly in this room.” That was the guiding concept, and I quickly sketched an elderly blues musician playing at a club for a young audience. Why was the musician still playing? What did the audience think of him? The answers to those questions varied through years of drafts. In the final version, the club resides in a college town, and the sparse crowd consists of young people who alternately empathize for the musician’s hard-luck songs (“You’re healed now”), feel bad about not being able to tip (“I’m out of change”), dance romantically to the beat, or sit up front and eagerly take notes on their idol. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards once did the same.
 
As for the blues man, he’s glad to be wanted. After another night of validation (“Their pens sustain him”), he heads to the bus for his next gig, noticing the images of his past embalmed around him: the bootleggers of the 1930s painted in the art gallery, Chicago now the subject of a film at the multiplex. Of course, the blues man has no name. He represents an idea, the notion of an era that refuses to die as long as it’s revered. As the twentysomething writer who began this poem years ago, I clearly revered it myself. By now, Tower Records is long gone, and CDs are fast joining vinyl in those antique shops. At the same time, the past endures, and more accessibly than ever; all it takes is a shout-out to Alexa or the punch of a few keys on YouTube to bring up Ma Rainey or Mississippi John Hurt again. Perhaps that's one blessing of this new wonderful and awful age. We let the old centuries sleep, but not die.