“The Long Moment,” “The Torch of Enthusiasm,” “The Travesties of Aging,” and “Missing the Superfluous” by Michael Salcman appeared in Issue 35 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about “The Travesties of Aging.”
The title of the poem, “The Travesties of Aging,” pretty well explains the motivation for writing it. I turned 75 on November 4, 2021 and on that very date underwent biopsy for “a low grade cancer” of the prostate gland, a terrible birthday gift if there ever was one. I was already undergoing physical therapy for chronic leg pain, a problem of recent years brought about by my survival from a childhood bout with polio; the latter is truly the gift that keeps on giving. The title and the text of the poem share a grim sense of humor about the process of aging. The shape of the poem is sort of a “stretched” sonnet with three stanzas of equal length (in 5 lines rather than 4) and a closing couplet. Humor is the best defense against despondency.
What was the most difficult part in writing this poem?
Telling the truth and clearing away any possible sentimentality.
Recommend a book which was published in the last decade.
As a teacher of modern and contemporary art history I have to mention Mary Gabriel’s wonderful book Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art (2018) about the most important female contributions to Abstract Expressionism, America’s most significant art movement.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
The Irish novelist John Banville, about one year older than I am, twice nominated for the Booker Prize (The Book of Evidence was short-listed in 1989 and The Sea won it in 2005), and repetitively nominated for the Nobel Prize; “the heir to Proust via Nabokov,” who also writes mystery stories under the name of Benjamin Black. His lush use of language comes out of Yeats and Henry James;
there is a 10 or 20 page section in The Sea in which his description of the main female character is paralleled with references to major 20th century artists: it will take your breath away. My heros are Proust and Yeats and I like talented people who have “attitude.” Banville’s interviews are very entertaining.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
Necessary Speech, (Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 2022) came out five days after my prostatectomy. I am currently writing individual poems for a collection tentatively titled Crossing the Tape, about my usual subjects. I want it to come out before I turn 80. My big dream is to find a sponsor so that I can do a definitive anthology of poems about artworks and artists (i.e. ekphrastic poems), with each poem faced by a color photograph of its subject, whether painting, sculpture, or photograph etc. The reproduction rights for artworks are quite expensive; this was also true for the many classic and contemporary poems I included in my best-selling anthology of poems about doctors, patients, illness and recovery, Poetry in Medicine (2015).
Our thanks to Michael for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Swimming for Shore” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/four-poems-by-michael-salcman.
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Michael Salcman poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Café Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, a popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness and healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After (2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize), and Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022) was recently published by Spuyten Duyvil.