We recently spoke with author Paul Mariani about his new Slant book, Sing Me a Song, She Said
Your book’s Part II, Sing Me a Song, She Said: A Verse Drama is a portrait of your childhood and early family life, especially the character of your mother. What drew you back to reflecting on these themes for this collection?
As I grow older and hope I see things a bit more clearly and being married now for over sixty years to a wonderful wife, one thing that keeps haunting me is how often I didn’t adequately see the love and generosity in my mother (or in women) when I was growing up. Forty years ago, she asked me to write a poem for her, but I missed the opportunity to do justice to her request.
Smart as she was, she’d only gone to tenth grade, what with the Depression, then became pregnant with me when she was sixteen, and was there for the family. Once, exhausted with it all, she tried taking her own life by sitting in the car in the garage attached to our home in Mineola—though I convinced her, handkerchief over my nose, to unlock the door and please come back inside. She was gone at sixty-five, having raised seven children and worked nights for a book publisher and later as a nurse caring for Vietnam vets with PTSD to help feed our family. Then, after thirty-five years, came my parents’ divorce and the kids quickly scattered. In Part I, I write about my early years in New York City back in the 1940s, my first world, really (which keeps haunting me) and then the last several years, retired now, looking to travel, then slipping on the ice here in town and breaking both hips, first the right, and a week later the left. Then going through the long process of recovery, which turned out to be my own Walden, in a sense, as I took in the world around me, grateful for the care my wife and caregivers gave me, savoring it all—each day and night—the way a monk does.
Sing Me a Song, She Said has also been performed under the title Family Album with musical accompaniment. What inspired you to branch into this artistic form, and what comes through in the medium of a verse drama that perhaps could not be communicated any other way?
For several years, back in the early 2000s, I wrote the words for a musical with my friend, the composer Steve Schoenberg. It played in New York and in Santa Fe, but it was never completed, and other projects—like biographies—took over. But the script was still there, and in truth I had poured my heart into what I wrote as I recalled the tragedy of my family breaking up, and I had my own family now to take care of. Then, when I read Dana Gioia’s powerful Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry, I wrote him, and he suggested I write a libretto. And there it was, in a folder, tucked away, needing only to be scaled down, brushed up, and set at the heart of this new collection, while there was still time. Here, in fact, was that song I promised my mother before she died.
Many of the poems in Sing Me a Song, She Said deal with the problems of aging with open-eyed realism—a panic attack, breaking both your hips, the long slog of physical therapy. But as you write about these realities, you remain hopeful. If you had to spell one out in prose, what is a lesson that age has taught you?
One of the things aging has taught me is just how precious life is. Every little bit of it. Those sparrows and goldfinches and mourning doves out there by our birdfeeders, the return of those crocuses and daffodils and tulips out in our garden, the yellow forsythia, the wind sifting through the bare branches, acting the sous chef with my dear wife, the love I have for my sons and their wives and my five loving grandchildren. Laughter and friendship and the giving and receiving of love in so many ways. And then there’s my chance every day to thank my dear Lord and His Mother Mary and St. Joseph—especially dear to me as a reminder of what being a father means—and my own guardian angel—each for their mysterious, abiding presence, felt every day.
This poetry collection deals directly with contemporary issues like immigration and the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. It also paints a picture of an earlier America, particularly an earlier New York—one that was gritty and flawed, to be sure, but which has a poignant beauty in your retelling. What do you want to communicate to your readers, especially young readers, about our country?
Yes, all these issues are very much on my mind. The weirdness of the political situation as we are experiencing it now—through Covid, the news as it explodes and simmers into our consciousness each day, the strange directions many of our leaders take, even as I constantly study our history, wondering how we have gotten to where we are, and where we are headed, praying for sanity, listening closely to what Pope Leo has asked us to do as Christians. Hold on. Hold on, the chant unfolds, as it did in Minneapolis with those ICE agents on the street, bringing not peace but havoc and death. My dear ones, here comes the dawn.
As for New York in the 1940s: that was my first world, and it will stay with me as long as I breathe. An apartment five stories up with old rickety stairs. Memories of my father in his Army uniform drafted in the spring of ’44, walking with his duffel bag over his shoulder as we waved goodbye. The only (half) Italian family on a street surrounded by Irish and German families, a six- and seven-year-old chased by bullies. Looking from the tarred rooftop south toward the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings or walking along the East River by Kipps Bay or alone at six years old walking to the RKO movie house on 57th and Third beneath the El to see a strange movie starring Edward G. Robinson, which made no sense. Or my teachers at the local Public School on First Avenue, near where the patriot Nathan Hale was hung as a spy. A hundred memories. All with a kind of gold dust now.
The thread of your faith weaves through this entire collection, both implicitly and explicitly. As you look back on your extensive poetic career, how does your creative work relate to your faith life?
The truth is there wouldn’t be much poetry without my faith. It all began when I was living in Beacon in a proto novitiate for young Marianists back in 1956-7. There was a poetry contest given by an order of nuns, with first prize being ten dollars. No one knew much about poetry, so I took out a book which explained scansion and wrote a sonnet focused on Good Friday. Then, at Manhattan College, poems about John the Baptist. And when, as a rector of a three-day Cursillo retreat in ’74, when Christ seemed to ask me what I would like in return for my work, and I said nothing, really, and He said, “Just ask.” And I said, “To be a poet, so that I can praise You and your love.” And so, it’s turned out, it seems.
