By Stuart Mitchner

I’m as American as April in Arizona.

—Vladimir Nabokov

Fresh from the library, I pull out of my spot on Sylvia Beach Way, easing into Princeton in its springtime glory of bud and bloom, the world warm and bright, then bliss — driving down Jefferson Road with the Beach Boys singing “That’s Why God Made the Radio.” Or does that make the morning a cliché? Sure, maybe if it were mid-summer, but this is the third week of April, and three books by a Nobel-prize winning poet are occupying the passenger seat, one of them 634 pages long (Louise Glück Poems 1962-2012, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2012).

Every week I play my own warped version of the Dating Game; when I push a button the screen lights up with the dated destination, Wednesday, April 22, which is underscored by the fact that April is National Poetry Month. Which makes sense. Spring begins with Chaucer’s pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, plus the fact that England’s all-time poet laureate Shakespeare was born on April 23. After making note of April 22 birthmates Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) 1707 and Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason) 1724, I land on April 22, 1899, Vladimir Nabokov, bells ring, it’s a Dating Game jackpot, a favorite book (Lolita 1955) and film, the all-time great black comedy directed seven years later by Stanley Kubrick with James Mason, Peter Sellers, and Sue Lyon. By all rights Nabokov should be my subject, except that a poet born on April 22, 1943, just showed up at the door.

Blind Date

Last week I had dates with Rachel Owlglass and Oedipa Maas, the female heroines I met in Thomas Pynchon’s V and The Crying of Lot 49. This week I have a legitimately blind date with a poet I hardly know who stirs memories of a grade school romance with a Louise I’ve kept close at hand ever since in an old photograph tacked to the bulletin board above my desk. Posed behind me on the front steps of a two-room southern Indiana schoolhouse with 20 fifth and sixth graders all smiling for the camera, she’s smiling for herself, almost laughing, seemingly the happiest, brightest kid there. The wonder is that every smile looks genuine in this mix of city and country kids seen so many decades after the fact, nobody faking it or being coy. Yet with Louise the poet in mind I can imagine my Louise seeing beyond that moment to a poet’s sun, moon, stars, visions, prisms, lakes, migrations, landscapes, myths, omens, and seasons. That childhood crush lasted for less than two semesters of fond furtive glances before she was suddenly gone, no warning, no farewell, no return address. Only today, on a poet’s birthday, during National Poetry Month, have I wondered what became of her.

The Dancing Omlaut

Flashing forward is easy online — zoom, and Louise is 72 looking overwhelmed as President Obama presents her with a 2015 Medal of Freedom. In another photo, Barack appears to be hugging her, whispering in her ear, and she’s looking strangely younger and prettier. The picture is accompanied by a facsimile of her signature that comes off looking like “Louis Glahh” and hovering over the self-imposed travesty of Glück, there it is, there they are, two marks dancing above the scrawl, the omlaut that forces her to politely correct every other pronunciation of her name. In signing herself she performs a visual poem, animating the omlaut, setting the dots dancing.

April to October

From Glück’s 2006 collection Averno, dedicated to her son, consider what’s going in the first part of the six part poem “October,” the way she seems to be twisting grammar back on itself in a run-on sentence that would have frustrated or maybe fascinated my sentence-diagramming father; if you run it all together, this is how it looks — “Is it winter again, is it cold again, didn’t Frank just slip on the ice, didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted, didn’t the night end, didn’t the melting ice flood the narrow gutters, wasn’t my body rescued, wasn’t it safe, didn’t the scar form, invisible above the injury terror and cold, didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden harrowed and planted —”

And didn’t I go back to the schoolhouse and the girl and the day on the playground when she gave me the smile I’ll never forget when I kicked the football so high it seemed to vanish in the sun? And isn’t my instinctive fondness for this poet based on the fact that, whatever her age, she reminds me of the British actress, Nicola Walker, who I first saw as a delightful ghost dancing with her detective partner in the BBC series River, and whose warmth and humanity I admired when she played Ruth Evershed in MI-5.

Louise Brooks

The only other Louise in my life until this week’s blind date was Louise Brooks, rediscovered decades later as Lulu in Pandora’s Box (1928). Before celebrating my fellow Kansan on several occasions here, I had a poem, “Louise Brooks as Lulu” in the August 1995 issue of Poetry (“Under the skin of every surface she touches, stars appear”). I did my best to see every film she made, including the silent with W.C. Fields, and two keepers among my books are her essay collection Louise Brooks in Hollywood and the excellent biography by Barry Paris.

Why the Beach Boys?

I’ve been haunted by the death of Brian Wilson ever since June of last year. From “Surfin’ Safari” to “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” Beach Boys lyrics have been predictably and often justly scorned or patronized or laughed at, which is one of the obstacles disdainful or doubtful listeners have to overcome before submerging themselves in the wondrously sustaining element of the music. The first Beach Boy record I ever bought was Smiley Smile, the 1967 version containing the leavings of the infamous recording studio debacle at the heart of the Brian Wilson-as-mad-genius legend (with quirky, sometimes clever-to-a-fault, lyrics by Van Dyke Parks). Also on that LP was “Good Vibrations,” the three and a half minute masterpiece that dominated car radios all over the land all through the heart of the sixties. Though Pet Sounds (1966) is still generally considered to be Brian Wilson’s finest hour, Sunflower (1970) is the record I feel closest to, the pinnacle being the 1:58 minutes of “This Whole World” (the transition at 1:40 is still no less thrilling to hear 42 years later, even with the om-da-did-its and lines like “When girls get mad at boys and go/any times they’re just putting on a show”).

Sunflower also provided the most effective music to rock our child to sleep to until the arrival of the, for him, aptly titled, The Beach Boys Love You (1977), upon which his bedtime was so dependent that I had to rush out to the Walmart to buy an emergency duplicate copy when we were visiting my father in Key West.

I should mention the man without whom there would be no Beach Boys. Murry Wilson, father of Brian, Dennis, and Carl, was born in Hutchinson, Kansas (as was I, strange to say), before moving to California at age 5. By most accounts, he was the stage parent from hell, a tyrant who bullied Capitol Records on behalf of the group and is said to have hammered Brian in the head with a 2×4, causing a loss of hearing in his right ear. As recently as a 2004 interview with The Independent, however, Brian says of Murry, “He was the one who got us going. He didn’t make us better artists or musicians, but he gave us ambition. I’m pleased he pushed us, because it was such a relief to know there was someone as strong as my dad to keep things going. He used to spank us, and it hurt too, but I loved him because he was a great musician.”

“Departure”

In “Departure,” Louise Glück writes:

“My father is standing on a railroad platform.
Tears pool in his eyes, as though the face
glimmering in the window were the face of someone
he was once. But the other has forgotten;
as my father watches, he turns away,
drawing the shade over his face,
goes back to his reading.

And already in its deep groove
the train is waiting with its breath of ashes.”