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Just to Be There and Just to Behold
Wallace Stevens' poem "Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu" has possibly been my favorite twentieth-century poem since I first read it over twenty years ago, so I want to share it with you, in case you've never gotten to read it.
First, though, I'm very grateful to Swapna Krishna, who calls Hell or High Water "an absolutely gripping read" in her review. I'm grateful to Kate Birkle at The Mystery Bookstore in Omaha, where I get to give a reading on Saturday, September 22nd. And I'm really, really grateful to everyone involved with the optioning of my novel for film, which was reported in Publishers Marketplace today:
So readers: Believe. You never know. Crazier things have happened.
Okay, so here's the Stevens poem, which slays my heart (which, "being hungry, feeds on food/the fat of heart despise"--down, Millay!) and which appeared in Stevens' 1936 collection Ideas of Order. If you yourself are not given to display, you too might like it.
First, though, I'm very grateful to Swapna Krishna, who calls Hell or High Water "an absolutely gripping read" in her review. I'm grateful to Kate Birkle at The Mystery Bookstore in Omaha, where I get to give a reading on Saturday, September 22nd. And I'm really, really grateful to everyone involved with the optioning of my novel for film, which was reported in Publishers Marketplace today:
Sort of amazingly wow. My understanding thus far is that if it goes into production as a feature film, Zoe Saldana herself will play Nola. I dreamed of this.Joy Castro's HELL OR HIGH WATER, where a journalist takes it upon herself to investigate the 800+ sex offenders still missing three years after Katrina, optioned to producers Jane Startz of Jane Startz Productions and Aida Bernal of Spellbound Entertainment who have teamed up with sisters and producing partners, Zoe and Cisely Saldana from Saldana Productions, by Holly Frederick at Curtis Brown.
So readers: Believe. You never know. Crazier things have happened.
Okay, so here's the Stevens poem, which slays my heart (which, "being hungry, feeds on food/the fat of heart despise"--down, Millay!) and which appeared in Stevens' 1936 collection Ideas of Order. If you yourself are not given to display, you too might like it.
Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu
That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without waving a hand.
In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.
To be one's singular self, to despise
The being that yielded so little, acquired
So little, too little to care, to turn
To the ever-jubilant weather, to sip
One's cup and never to say a word,
Or to sleep or just to lie there still,
Just to be there, just to be beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.
One likes to practice the thing. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?
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Thank you, Jimmie Killingsworth.
Earlier this spring, it was my great pleasure to give a reading at Susquehanna University's 8th annual Creative Writing Conference, but an even greater pleasure was hearing the stirring keynote lecture by distinguished professor Jimmie Killingsworth. Dr. Killingsworth has published extensively on rhetoric, the environment, and Walt Whitman (including the Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman) and is regarded as a senior expert in his fields. He's a wonderfully moving writer and speaker, and his current work focuses on the most urgent environmental issues that face us. He also examines how nature writing and other kinds of literature influence (or fail to influence) environmental politics, which is a concern of mine with my forthcoming novel HELL OR HIGH WATER. When he kindly agreed to take a look at it--well, Reader, I was excited, but I was nervous, too, because I admire his work so much.
So you can imagine how excited I am by this generous praise, which he posted yesterday on Facebook:
Oh, wow. I wanna get a t-shirt with that on it. I wanna get a tattoo. When a Whitman scholar says your sentences are incomparable, you pretty much just kind of want to faint with happiness.I was lucky enough to get an advance copy and couldn't put it down. In addition to sneaking political substance into a "guilty beach read," as the article says, Joy sneaks a literary novel past the censors in the guise of a bestseller. Her sentences and especially her tension-laced dialogue are incomparable. The treatment of post-Katrina New Orleans is loving and ironic, evocative as can be.
Thank you, Jimmie Killingsworth. You made my month.
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