Screens of Life Through the Eyes of a Poet: Volume Ii

By Norman Nathan

This two-volume collection presents the poems Dr. Nathan wrote from the 1970s through 2012. The first set of poems, titled East/West, was inspired by viewing the painted oriental screens exhibited at the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC. Moved by these images, he used the medium of poetry to capture the feelings the screens evoked.

Dr. Nathan thought in big ideas. His poetic screens in this volume explore such recurring universal themes as spirituality, hope, illness and aging, fading of memories, friendship, and family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524502126

Norman Nathan

A professor emeritus of English literature at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), Dr. Norman Nathan published more than 550 poems, 6 books, 39 short stories, and 62 scholarly articles during his prolific writing career. Dr. Nathan’s poems and works of fiction covered a wide range of topics, including, to name a few, the seeming contradictions between the principles of physics and human experience; his childhood growing up in the New York City and Hoboken, New Jersey, areas; aging; politics and economics; biblical themes; English literary themes; and overpopulation.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Norman Nathan.

Portrait of the author used with permission. ©Lifetouch Inc.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016908108

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5245-0214-0

      Softcover      978-1-5245-0213-3

      eBook         978-1-5245-0212-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 02/27/2017

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

730844

Contents

Norman Nathan (Author’s Biography)

Foreword

Introduction

Yearly Collections (Continued)

Poems From 1998

Poems From 1999

Poems From 2000

Poems From 2001

Poems From 2002

Poems From 2003

Poems From 2004

Poems From 2005

Poems From 2006

Poems From 2007

Poems From 2008

Poems From 2009

Poems From 2010

Poems From 2011

Poems From 2012

(Volume I contains poems from the 1970s through 1997.)

Norman Nathan

(1915–2013)

Dr. Norman Nathan, Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), published more than 550 poems, 6 books, 39 short stories, and 62 scholarly articles during his prolific writing career. This publication and several others—including his novella and a short-story collection—are intended to fulfill his formal request for his unpublished work to be published posthumously.

His works were published in literary magazines, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other magazines, journals, and newspapers. The FAU library maintains an extensive archive (from the 1930s through 2012) of many of his papers in its Norman Nathan Faculty Papers Collection (see http://fauarchon.fcla.edu/?p=collections/controlcard&id=135). The Special Collections of the FAU Library Archives are located physically in Boca Raton, Florida, and Dr. Nathan’s materials occupy nearly 16 linear feet of space.

Dr. Nathan’s poems and works of fiction covered a wide range of topics, including, to name a few, the seeming contradictions between the principles of physics and human experience; his childhood growing up in the New York City and Hoboken, New Jersey, areas; aging; politics and economics; biblical themes; English literary themes; and overpopulation.

Norman Nathan was born on November 19, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York, to parents Michael and Fannie Nathan. He had an older brother, Leonard Post, and two older sisters, Sylvia Kurtzman and Dora Bernstein, all of whom predeceased him.

Dr. Nathan graduated from A.J. Demarest High School in 1932 and received his BA in English from New York University in 1936. In 1938, he earned his MA from NYU, and in 1947, he defended his dissertation on Blake and earned his PhD in English from NYU.

On July 21, 1940, he married Frieda Agin of Union City, New Jersey, to whom he was devoted until her passing in 2008. Together they had three daughters. Their oldest, Linda Kuzmack (Richard), gave them two granddaughters, Stefanie Lynn Kuzmack and Tricia Kuzmack Stering (Jonathan). Their second daughter, Michele Nathan (K. Lee Herring), gave them three grandsons, Julian Keir Herring-Nathan (Vrunali Pushpa), Evan Ross Herring-Nathan (Sharon Nakhimovsky), and Damian Joel Herring-Nathan. The family has continued to grow with (thus far) the births of great-grandson Emerson Reed Stering and great-granddaughters Samantha Blake Stering, Rosalie Noa Stering, and Reve Anya Vrunali-Herring.

In 1949, Dr. Nathan moved his family from West New York, New Jersey, to Utica, New York, where he began a long career as an English professor at Utica College of Syracuse University. In 1968, the family moved to Boca Raton, Florida, where Dr. Nathan continued his teaching career at FAU. In part because of his failing vision resulting from macular degeneration, he retired from FAU in 1993, at age 78. The title Professor Emeritus was conferred on him in 1994. In 1996, he and his wife moved to Arlington, Virginia, to be near their two oldest daughters. He passed away peacefully on June 11, 2013.

During his long academic career, Dr. Nathan enjoyed visiting professorships at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, College of the Virgin Islands, and Nevada Southern University (now University of Nevada, Las Vegas). He also taught for a semester at Florida State University’s program in London. In Utica, he became a local TV personality through his popular two-year weekly program on Shakespeare. While at FAU, he developed and hosted a 10-part lecture series on Shakespeare that aired on a local TV channel. Courses taught by Dr. Nathan from the 1940s through the mid-1990s included 18th-Century Literature, the Bible as Literature, Blake, Creative Writing, English Composition, English Literature, Foreign Literature in Translation, History of the English Language, Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Masterpieces of Literature, Poetry, Public Speaking, Shakespeare, and Time & Motion Study.

Books published by Dr. Nathan include Though Night Remain (poems; Golden Quill, 1959), Judging Poetry (textbook; Putnam, l96l), The Right Word (vocabulary textbook-workbook; Houghton-Mifflin, 1962), Writing Sentences (textbook-workbook; Houghton-Mifflin, l964), Short Stories (anthology-textbook; Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), and Prince William B.: The Philosophical Conceptions of William Blake (literary analysis; Mouton, 1975).

Foreword

I first met Dr. Nathan in 2006, when he was 90 years old. Despite his advanced age, he wrote poetry daily, and many of those poems—some of which are included within this work—were published in prestigious journals. At age 96, Dr. Nathan celebrated 2012 as one of his most productive publishing years.

On my first day working for Dr. Nathan as a literary assistant, after a conversation about my writing background (I was a graduate student; my writing was but a speck compared to Dr. Nathan’s oeuvre) and a discussion about his blindness—his eyesight had been failing him for years—Dr. Nathan directed me to a handheld tape recorder he referred to with a smile as his Fat Boy.

Rewind and hit ‘play,’ he said.

I did this and heard his distant deep voice over the cracking and popping of an old audiotape. I wish I could remember the exact words, the images from the tape, but I remember Dr. Nathan telling me that the words were the ideas that came to him in the middle of the night. These ideas had surfaced the night before.

I might just have the start of a poem, he said. He was eager to get to it.

Sitting next to Dr. Nathan at his computer, I copied those words, those lines, into a computer file. I read the lines aloud over and over, Dr. Nathan responding with questions, adjustments, edits, cuts, and additions. Before long, a draft of a poem began to take shape.

When Dr. Nathan walked me to the door three hours later, he said with a smile, Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have two new ideas recorded. Or three! His passion and enthusiasm for writing, for discovery, was profound. I would come to learn over the three years working for Dr. Nathan that writing—an act of creation—brought him absolute joy.

Dr. Norman Nathan wrote three hours a day nearly until his death on June 11, 2013, at 97 years old.

Dr. Nathan—or Doc, as I began calling him near the end of my time working for him in 2009—thought in big ideas. He wrote poems and short stories about childhood memories (growing up in the New York City area), Heaven, the Earth becoming too crowded, and his love for teaching (he would have taught long past age 78, when he retired, if not for his failing vision); he wrote about his deep love for his wife Frieda, about getting old, about memories fading. He questioned religion, politics, his own musings, and the beliefs that we all hold so dear. His mind was the universe. In his poems, stories, and conversations, he told honest stories that came from his experiences: stealing fifty cents from his mother to buy a hot dog, courting a wild woman who flirted with every man in a row of seats in a movie theater as they went to their seats, a student who tried to seduce him and became the model for a character in seven stories; he gushed about his wife Frieda’s accomplishments, one of which was graduating first in her NYU class as a mathematics major. These stories and poems read together tell Doc’s life.

Doc was not only remarkable and prolific on paper. He had hundreds, maybe thousands, of jokes and anecdotes that he could pull out for nearly any occasion. After moving from the Washington, DC, area following graduate school in 2009, my wife Rachel (who also worked as one of Doc’s assistants) and I would dine with Doc in his Arlington, Virginia, retirement home’s dining room every time we returned to the area. On occasion, we’d sit with other members of the retirement facility; Doc would always have the table smiling with doctor jokes, waiter jokes, and stories from his youth.

Up to a few years before his death, Doc would also give hour-long lectures at his retirement home on The Bible as Literature, Hamlet, other plays by Shakepeare, and his own poetry. I remember sitting with him at the front of a crowded room on a few of those occasions, with thirty, forty people in the audience. His audience sat in rapt attention as Doc, his eyes normally closed, stood at the front of the room and quoted the Bible or Shakespeare verbatim. He would tell jokes. He would ask audience members questions. He spoke with a reverence for the text as if it were alive. He never thought himself above his audience, but as I watched him orchestrating these lectures, I believe he hoped—and knew—that the questions he raised, the themes he highlighted from the works, were powerful signposts on how to live life.

I’ll leave you with one of my fondest interactions with Doc and his writing. On a Saturday in late March 2008, he told me, I have a job for you. I want you to read something as a whole. He sat close to me as I opened on the computer a large document of his poems written in an Oriental style. He told me he had written these in the 1970s. He’d visited a Smithsonian museum that contained a room full of painted Oriental screens.

The images moved me, and I wanted to put the images into words, he said as I scrolled through the document titled East/West. Because these images were painted on screens, he continued, the artist couldn’t paint over mistakes. Every stroke was final.

For three hours, I read aloud dozens of poems as Doc nodded along, his eyes closed: images of bonsai, bold mountains with snowcaps, Buddha, sun and sunlight, light, fields, peasants, the mystery of the peasants’ thoughts and meditations in the fields; he described the point where the mountains peak and fall to rise to other mountains, and how the sun and shadow meet at this point. One poem, screen, stands out. Ma Yuan, an early 13th-century artist, drew objects, often villages and trees, in one corner of his canvases. The rest of the canvas, the majority, remained empty of objects.

Doc writes: …the few brush strokes / jut out / fractured arms of / an aging village / my story is almost lost / in white / i have painted a screen of / emptiness

Reading this delicate language aloud, his light-touch brush strokes, I didn’t want to stop. I have never seen these screens, but now I have. Chances are, reader, you have not seen these screens, but in the following pages, while reading about Doc’s devotion to his intelligent, caring wife Frieda; his reflections on hope, religion, questions of humanity, and the universe; you will experience seeing these screens as well.

Dr. Norman Nathan’s kindness, generosity, humor, far-ranging and twisting intelligence, openness, ability to question everything (especially himself), and to think in ideas live on in the following poems. Let them paint for you the life of a wonderful man and a true friend.

Casey Wiley

Penn State University

August 2014

Introduction

The first set of poems (titled East/West; see Vol. I) in this collection is Dr. Nathan’s own grouping of poems begun in the 1970s and revised over time. The rest of this two-volume collection, primarily dating from 1982 through 2012, is alphabetized by title within chapters organized chronologically. Poems written prior to 1982 are presented here if Dr. Nathan revised them in the 1980s or later. (The East/West poems are repeated in the chronological chapters to provide a more comprehensive view of each year’s creative output.) In addition, many of the poems Dr. Nathan wrote through the 1950s are available in Though Night Remain, which was published in 1959 by Golden Quill Press.

The organization of this collection by year derives simply from Dr. Nathan having stored his poems in this manner in his computer files, but the organization does not necessarily reflect the years in which the poems were written, or last refined. He even revised some poems after they had been published. As best can be determined, the author began inputting his poetry into computer files in 1982, upon his first access to an IBM personal computer; thus, a small number of poems contained in the author’s personal computer folder labeled 1982 Poems actually were written in earlier years.

Poems that have previously been published appear with the known citation (below the poem), but are not necessarily identical to the published versions, as it was not always possible to access them. However, I attempted to verify the current versions against the author’s paper files of publication reprints. Because he became legally blind late in life, student helpers recorded publication information for him. The citations that appear here were taken from those records, which varied in their detail.

This collection is a representation of the poet’s work over time rather than a book of finished poetry. Some poems share a title but vary somewhat in content, as the poet revised them over time. When a poem in the computer file for a given year had the same title as one that had been published in an earlier year, I treated them as different versions of the same poem, rather than as completely separate poems, and therefore included the original publication citation, even if it was not possible to verify that the poems were related.

Missing from the computer files, and therefore the present publication, are chapters for poems from 1987, 1990, and 1996. However, Dr. Nathan’s manuscript poems from 1987 are available in the Special Collections of the Florida Atlantic University Library Archives in Boca Raton, Florida, in its Norman Nathan Faculty Papers Collection (see http://fauarchon.fcla.edu/?p=collections/controlcard&id=135).

K. Lee Herring

Yearly Collections (Continued)

Poems From 1998

Appearance

Some say I am an optimist, no doubt,

I laugh and joke to crowd the sadness out.

70735.png

Daydreams

Daydreams flow without memories,

leaving no wake;

They see no goal,

The sun never rises or sets;

They warm without burning,

They feed without gaining flesh,

soothing the body while they take control;

Caressing gently, they extort no price,

but when you wake they die

to your despair.

Dead Books

The world is filled with dead books,

paid for by the author

to gain fame within the family,

and the remainder

donated by lesser relatives

to the local library

to be sold for ten cents;

others are published for profit

by a firm that reads nothing

but bottom lines;

then there’s the philanthropist

or the university press

that must scatter money somewhere;

all meet the same fate:

the paper yellowing

towards slow cremation,