John Kuzma's Podcast

The title of this poem is written in Greek. I had to argue with my formidable staff members about it being in Greek because the person reading it might feel at a loss (we all know the saying “It’s Greek to me!”). However, when I explain this word it changes into a revelation. Because the Greek word for Jerusalem means “The Holy City” and as you read this poem in my book The Fire of Prometheus, you will see, by the end of the poem, that the word is truly irreplaceable. I hope you will forever say “Yes, it is Greek to me!”

In this poem I try to contrast anger with elegance. The angry young people and the elegant Spreckles Organ...the antidote to destructive violence is always pure beauty.

These two poems belong together, because they each contain a teaching through the murkiness of truth directly communicated. In the first poem, we have a man speaking the simple poetry of class struggle with a knowing wink. Where, in the second poem, the simple truth is spoken by a fool (me!). Both poems are examples of how simple information and truth can be spoken clearly if one sees the facts.

The great glacier would have been too misleading to the truth behind this poem. The great glacier stopped at Cincinnati, depositing a glacier’s worth of evidence for about anything one wished to prove about geology. Having to clean the candle wax out of the candles was a humbling task for an altar boy. One day, carrying part of the burnt wax outside, I chose a final resting place for it because I made an artifact of the “used up” (ritually speaking) candle wax.

The setting is Pete’s Fine Fruits & Vegetables and the poem has to do with the humiliation of standing in line and waiting...and waiting more. Finally, Pete’s son Theo is ordered by his father into a repudiation of all the anger that spilled over the edges and redeemed the situation by a simple act of kindness toward a frustrated woman and her boy.

The message of this poem is to respect the need for solitude in friends and family. We live in an extroverted, thinking, sensation culture. The need for silence and solitude will always be understood when honestly and knowingly granted.

We have all had the experience described here. That is, a person delivers verbal poison while hiding in the tall grass. The antidote to this poison is to ask the person, “Is that a poison dart gun you have there?” My experience has been that the person in question, hiding their poison dart gun, will say, “No, not I,” in which case I can reply. “Well now, I could have sworn that you blew a dart at me! But I’m glad to know of your honesty.” With so many dart blowers in the world I normally let them off. However, in that rare case where the dart blower admits to his actions, I find that useful conversations about inflicting evil on another can happen.

Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” stands alone as an achievement of the human spirit. I have heard that in the former Soviet Union classical music was played over the radio to quell political unrest. For that reason it seems appropriate for any holiday to play music of universal peace and reflection.

This poem gives a very good narrative of a memorable night with our godson Christian. The one thing I can tell not told in the poem is the Deustches Reich salute. My Grandfather used to sit silently and had the family nickname “The Pope,” because of his taciturn way. Taciturn always, he would occasionally, at a perfectly timed moment, loudly enunciate “Deutsches Reich!” in mock adoration of Adolf Hitler.

And, as I was talking with Taylor about “Drafts,” I wonder how many of you in my audience feel about, well, drafts. Because the wind is something we never see, but that everyone has an opinion about. In fact, I should have called this poem, “The Man Who Could See the Wind.”

Dedicated to my friend Earl Grace - The Sage of Kearney Street.

With apologies to those who could really do justice to a French accent.

One of the hardest things to get right in a poem is who the speaker is. With me, and I don’t know about other poets, it is rarely I who speak. This poem tells us right away who is speaking: not I, but an observer. And as I think about it now, the account of events of Christmas night is told by a nameless observer.

"Pondering My Finitude at 70" is about two innocent boys playing in the cemetery. And, the irony of this is that my whole family is buried there. In 6th grade, I innocently played at St. Joseph Cemetery with my friend Charles. We'd been playing like two young boys might do, exploring imagined mysteries as we dug a cave of sorts in a huge mound of dirt. What follows is an account of what happened at what almost became my grave site.

I chose a military march - Scotland the Brave - as the music for this podcast. It is a military march of the Scottish people. And this confrontation at the supermarket seemed to me like a "military" confrontation. I have people coming at me almost like tanks. I have this man with a kid who is, as I call him, an "indefatigable nose picker." This characterization is perhaps harsh but accurate. And this military march setting, brilliantly performed by the Denver Brass, seemed at the time to be with me as I confronted my own fantasy on a typical day at the supermarket.

Music for this podcast is from my Requiem. It is called "The Rending of the Temple Veil," and its ominous mood seems appropriate to me now. 

He is a lovable guy but he had something in his heart that came out in this conversation with him. He said at the very end, you get the WM Discount, the White Man's discount. This gave me pause. I ended the poem on that emphasis because one never knows when you deal with someone in that context what they're hiding. I got an insight into where the doors shut with John -- was over race. And come to think of it, I never saw a person of color in that store. I don't know where John is now, but if he is listening to this and recognizes the story, he should give me a call.    My arrangement of "Erie Canal" is performed here by my choir boys in the American Boychoir with me at the piano.  

This poem is in the form of a Platonic dialog with the speaker in the poem and his student, referred to (as Plato does) "Glaucon." The point here is that, in our psychological inflation, we think that God can be caught off guard and that we can outwit him with our clever arguments (such as Occam's Razor). But in fact, this is the folly of all artists - to claim divinity as his own and to manipulate art in any way he likes. This is the seduction of the artist.

Pete's Greektown Cafe where murals depict Achilles' humiliation of Hector’s corpse and Pericles' orations amidst modern examples of eternal common talk.

Overwrought anger shows itself in an otherwise peaceful day.