Elvis would have been 85 this January. Imagine that. Young Elvis was always basically my imagination, anyway. You know I wrote a whole book, The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives. (from Carnegie Mellon. You can still get it. )
I used to think that on my deathbed I’d want to hear Elvis singing gospel. The farther I move away from the hormonal triggers, the farther I am from my youth, well, maybe I’d move The King farther down the list. As I was listening to part of an interview with young Elvis recently, I was drawn to him in an entirely different way. I felt tender toward his innocence. A simple Southern boy, the kind I recognize, who called everyone “Sir” and “Ma’am.” He picked up his torso-moves from gospel singers and exaggerated them. He just loved music. He had no idea that he’d swiveled himself into the crux of a major cultural shift, that he was going to be eaten alive by the repercussions of that shift.
“Just because I managed to do a little something, I don’t want anyone back home to think I got the big head.”
A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Robert Chelmick, who has a radio show he broadcasts from his home in rural Alberta, Canada. The Road Home (name taken from a quote by Rumi, “The road home is home.” ) has been running on a community radio network in Alberta (and www.ckua.com ) since 2002 and repeated via www.roadhome.fm .
His show is two hours of music and poetry. He wants more people to hear poetry. He’s a bit a Garrison Keelerish in that way, but maybe more of a researcher in his approach. He said he’d been compiling a file of Elvis-related songs and poems, and he happened to run onto me reading “Gospel,” on the Poetry Foundation website, and found another of my Elvis poems elsewhere.
He sent me the finished show this week. I listened in two segments: two hours is a long time. There’s a lot of good music, with my poems, 6 or 7 of them, interspersed. He read them really well.
You send poems into the world. It’s like teaching. You teach your best. When word comes back to you that you’ve mattered, you’re gobsmacked with joy. And you send poems into the world for no reason except that you felt them and wanted them visible, on paper. You would be thrilled, I guess, to be famous, but the main thing is that the poems have been added to the atmosphere, to color it, to add to its texture. You and your poems are lonely with that thought, but it’s pretty much all you get.
And then here’s Bob Chelmick. He loves the poems. He was the one to use the word “gobsmacked.” They are going to enter the atmosphere again, transformed by time. Did they ever leave? Did Elvis ever leave the building?
It often feels as if I didn’t write my own poems, when I hear them much later. I feel proud of them in a way that doesn’t have much to do with me. “Oh, that’s a good line!” “Wow, a good one.” They’ve left me. My books have left me. They line up on my shelves like relatives I am asked to return to, now and then, to remember who I was.
The Elvis program will air first on January 5th on CKUA (www.ckua.com) with a 8:00 PM Mt. On January 6th it will debut on www.roadhome.fm at 7:00 Mt - and for the rest of January be in rotation on the streaming service. You can listen to it.
Bob says this program is quite unlike most. He suggested I might like to listen to the very thematically focused Road Home Leonard Cohen special, and Mary Oliver tribute as well as full-on radio documentaries on Alan Watts, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Hafiz, and the like, that he’s done for the CBC Ideas program over the years. These programs can be found here: www.chelmick.com/radio .
Some things in this world—at this terribly portentous time—do make me smile. They cheer me up. There’s Bob Chelmick out in his cabin in rural Alberta, putting music alongside poems because he loves that, and thinks others will, too. No motive but love.
P.S. This must be my Elvis month. I just discovered, to my great surprise, that there’s a “Study Guide to The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives.” Of all things! It was put out by Gale in 2004. I ordered it and read it, to see what my poems were about. It’s actually pretty good. It’s short, and not much specifically about the poems, which is good. There’s “Historical Context,” “Themes,” “Style,” “Topics for Further Study,” and so on.