Tim Grove is chief of museum learning at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. He has worked at three Smithsonian museums, at Colonial Williamsburg, and on the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Exhibition. I’ve found that … Continue reading From the desk of Tim Grove

I’m not a Game of Thrones fan, but the show came to mind the other day when I was talking about my memoir, Young Widower, with a friend who had just read it. We ran into each other in the baby aisle at the grocery store. I was comparing mashable fruits. He was picking up diapers and formula. We nearly missed each other. As I like to do when I’m running errands, I was plugged into my iPhone, catching up on old podcasts. I looked up to say hello just as a talking head summarized the immense appeal of the HBO series: “Come for the nudity. Stay for the dragons.”

It’s a particular challenge to describe Young Widower without at least touching on a whole range of difficult contexts and explanations. I’ve run into this problem at book readings, in email exchanges with editors and agents, and even while following Facebook posts about the book by well-intentioned in-laws. Someone who knows me as a husband and father replies to a link to an excerpt from the book. They are so sorry, by god, they had no idea. A brown bear. Rural Romania. What the hell were we thinking, hiking in the middle of the night? (We got stuck on the mountaintop with a lost hostel reservation.) How does a person ever get over seeing such a thing? (He doesn’t.) Wait—you were married before? (Yes.) Did your wife now know your wife then? (Yes.) Man, that must be strange being married again. I’ll bet you never expected that to happen. (Well, yes. And, no.)

Young Widower is a quiet and thoughtful memoir of grief, but it has at its heart a sensational fact. My first wife, Katie, died under those heartbreaking and graphic circumstances, which continue to resonate in my own life, but to nowhere near the scale or pitch they did during the year following her death. Beyond the attack itself, Young Widower spends far more time with the events of our ambitious life together—Peace Corps volunteers in Bangladesh, teachers in Chicago, graduate students in Miami, public-health work in Romania—my own fragile sense of a recovery, and the year of living with Katie’s family in Indiana after her death. And yet, for all of the reflection that Young Widower undertakes, from its intimate portrait of affection and marriage, to my guilt and self-incriminations at not having saved her, to the affections and frustrations of trying to grieve with other people, readers seem drawn to the book first because of that violent occasion. “Come for the bear attack,” I might mimic the talking head. “But, please, —stay for the honesty, heartbreak, candor, messiness, love, sorrow, and absence, as well as the arbitrariness of a natural world that, for us at least, seemed to lacked all reason.”

Continue reading “From the desk of John W. Evans: Stay for the Dragons”

Jared Carter has received the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Poets’ Prize, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and two literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His newest book, Darkened Rooms of Summer, is a collection of poems that conjures the landscape of the Midwest and the lives of everyday Midwesterners.

I have no prior experience with National Poetry Month, but I did do a bit of promotion for poetry back in the 1980s. In those days I had an old tan-colored Volvo station wagon that I drove around the Midwest, occasionally giving poetry readings to just about anyone who would listen.

This in itself is not remarkable. But on the Volvo’s rear bumper I had affixed a sticker I had found in some flea market that read, in bold capital letters, I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ. The 1980s was an age of catchy bumper stickers but still, I was convinced that I had one of the most mysterious and at the same time one of the most appropriate bumper stickers an aspiring poet could ever wish for.

Looking back on those days, I realize that my only other attempt to promote poetry in general may have been the choice of location for my various book launches, all of which, curiously enough, took place during the month of April.

In April of 1981 my first book was launched at a cocktail party in Greenwich Village, hosted by my agent. The book was published by Macmillan and my agent got me an advance of a hundred dollars, which wasn’t bad in those days. It was a nice party, too. Courtesy of the publisher, all of my East-Coast friends attending were given free copies of the new book, which I was told was an old New York publishing custom. I can assure you that no freebies are passed out at book launches today.

Continue reading “From the desk of Jared Carter: Braking for Poetry”