June 22: Dreams, "Ives" Dip, Poet of the Week, Louise Gluck, "Forbidden Music"

I have been thinking a lot about posterity--what I'm going to be remembered for when I shuffle off this mortal . . . Well, you get the idea.

Ever since I was a kid, I've dreamed of being a famous author.  While other kids were idolizing Superman and Clint Eastwood, I had a different set of heroes:  Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee.  I wanted King's fame and Salinger's mystique.  I wanted Vonnegut's reputation and Lee's good fortune (a Pulitzer Prize for my first book).  I've never really lost this streak of literary hero worship.  I still want to be Flannery O'Connor and Robert Frost and Cormac McCarthy.  Preferably all three at once.

Of course, I've had to adjust my ambitions.  I can no longer be the youngest author to ever win the Nobel Prize in Literature (the title still belongs to Rudyard Kipling, who won at the age of 42).  A little concession.  Yet, I still sit down almost every day to write.  Some nights, it's just a blog post.  Other nights, I take out my journal and scribble in it for a while after I'm done posting.  It's a matter of holding onto a dream.  Dreams provide hopes for something better.

So tonight my Ives dip question is this:

Will my dreams of becoming a famous author ever come true?

And the answer from Oscar Hijuelos (who was 39 when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction):

. . . Her "goodness" was something of a curse.  As a person of principle, who had put many years into her efforts, she could not turn her back on anything.  And yet, at the same time, she had become caustic in her approach to teaching--it took her a long time but the old indifference of the system had caught up to her.

Okay, Annie Ives eventually loses her youthful enthusiasm.  She no longer dreams of changing the world one student at a time.  I'm not quite there yet.  I still think there's hope for me.  Poem by poem.

I have chosen Louis Gluck as the Poet of the Week.  Gluck's latest collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night, won the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry.  At the age of 50, Gluck won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Wild Iris.  She knows a little bit about making a name for herself. 

Saint Marty still has a few years to beat Gluck to the Pulitzer.

Forbidden Music

by:  Louise Gluck

After the orchestra had been playing for some time, and had passed the andante, the scherzo, the poco adagio, and the first flautist had put his head on the stand because he would not be needed until tomorrow, there came a passage that was called the forbidden music because it could not, the composer specified, be played.  And still it must exist and be passed over, an interval at the discretion of the conductor.  But tonight, the conductor decides, it must be played--he has a hunger to make his name.  The flautist wakes with a start.  Something has happened to his ears, something he has never felt before.  His sleep is over.  Where am I now, he thinks.  And then he repeated it, like an old man lying on the floor instead of in his bed.  Where am I now?

Rumor has it that Kipling slept with the King of Sweden to get the Nobel