Exuberance: Poems

By Dolores Hayden

Take flight with these dazzling persona poems telling the stories of daredevil pilots in the early days of aviation—from the author of American Yard.

Daredevil pilots Lincoln Beachey, Betty Scott, Harriet Quimby, Ruth Law, Ormer Locklear, Bessie Coleman, and Clyde Pangborn fly at carnival altitudes to thrill millions of spectators who have never seen an airplane. In a lyrical sequence of persona poems, the pilots in Exuberance wonder how the experience of moving through the air will transform life on the ground. They learn to name the clouds, size up the winds, mix an Aviation Cocktail, perform a strange field landing, and make an emergency jump.

“Intoxicated with the history of aviation, Dolores Hayden has written a work of historical imagination that is vocally energetic, psychologically acute, and musically sophisticated. . . . The movement between lyrical speech and historical reflection gives us not only a portrait of the early years of the twentieth century, but a book in which technological advance is given a profoundly human voice.” —Tom Sleigh, poet, dramatist, essayist, author of House of Fact, House of Ruin

“Exuberance is the word for this expansive and exciting collection, and also the word for the vanished earliest days of aviation it evokes, when flying was entertainment and adventure, not everyday transportation. Hayden brings to life a rollicking cast of birdmen and birdwomen, showmen and stunt pilots, producers and profiteers—and their entranced audiences and riders too. . . . Hayden’s lush and energetic poems give us earthbound readers, used to shuttling from airport to airport, a sense of what that intoxication must have felt like.” —Katha Pollitt, poet and columnist, author of The Mind-Body Problem

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781597096140

Book preview

Exuberance

EXUBERANCE

Also by Dolores Hayden

POETRY

American Yard

Nymph, Dun, and Spinner

NON-FICTION

Seven American Utopias

The Grand Domestic Revolution

Redesigning the American Dream

The Power of Place

Building Suburbia

A Field Guide to Sprawl

EXUBERANCE

poems

Dolores Hayden

Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA

Exuberance

Copyright © 2019 by Dolores Hayden

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

Book design by Mark E. Cull

Cover Photograph: Flight demonstration by Orville Wright, Berlin, 1909. Sueddeutsche Zeilung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hayden, Dolores, author.

Title: Exuberance / Dolores Hayden.

Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2019]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018055876 | ISBN 9781597096041 (tradebook)

Classification: LCC PS3608.A916 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055876

The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, and the Riordan Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition

Published by Red Hen Press

www.redhen.org

The objects on the ground now seem to be moving

at much higher speed, though

you perceive no change in the pressure

of the wind on your face. You know then that

you are traveling with the wind.

— Orville and Wilbur Wright, 1908

Who can do anything better than this propeller?

—Marcel Duchamp, 1912

Contents

Kitty Hawk, 1900

I

Dominguez Field Air Meet

Bird Man

Bird Woman

Flying Lesson: Clouds

Suiting Up

Risk

Drag

Landscapes

Daredevil

Love Life

Flying Lesson: Winds

Accident

Collar and Tie

Postures

Flying Lesson: The Aviation

Packing the Parachute

Panama–Pacific

II

The Wing Walker

Stunt Money

The Barnstormer

Flying Lesson: Strange Field Landings

Feel

Shroud Lines

Heaven

Flying Lesson: Emergency Jump

The Wing Walker in Hollywood

Flying Lesson: Stunting

Lovebird

Safety Second

Flying Lesson: Fields and Flares

The Skywayman

Eternity Street

III

Wedding in the Air

Q & A with Miss Law

White Gate Blues

Flying Lesson: Stunt Pilots’ Price List

Tomboy Stories

Attack on Lower Manhattan

Flying Lesson: Bureau