Ed note: I've been corresponding lately with poet Tom Healy because around here we're excited about his new book of poems What the Right Hand Knows and we're working out the particulars of his November guest blogging week. Tom had the good fortune to know Senator Kennedy and sent this message, which he agreed to let me post below:
If today had been my blog day, I would obviously have
celebrated Ted Kennedy. He gave Fred and me giant bear hugs, laughs
and a kiss whenever he saw us. It was the inimitable embrace he gave
all of America — an intensity of respect and love and belief in
everything we could imagine for ourselves, as well as a little
good-hearted elbow in the ribs always to keep it real.
And
I might have done a post on the kind of sonorous, big heart,
tear-in-the-eye poetry Ted Kennedy liked and frequently quoted from
memory at dinner parties and on public occasions. It was often famous
work — Frost, Yeats, Hardy, Blake — that edged toward uplift,
sacrifice and self-effacement: the kind of poems that make you go quiet
while ice cubes clink in the glass. (After all, niece Caroline
anthologized many of these "family" poems into bestsellers!)
what was strange on the few times I heard Kennedy quote poetry was
how the meanings of individual poems often blurred and what lingered
was a warm feeling that probably has its own long word in German
meaning "how the great man quoting poems makes you feel more fleetingly
ennobled than had the poet herself actually spoken." Well, sure,
Kennedy comes out of that not so subtly clan and class-affirming
Victorian aesthetic tradition of aristocrats in public service, where
kitsch glides against humor on the lubrication of drink and Marx stands
in the corner of the room glowering at the whole sentimental mess.
Fine,
call me sentimental. I'm Irish. I like to drink. I loved Ted
Kennedy. And I loved that he loved poetry, even if it didn't always
quite seem to matter what poetry he loved at the time he was loving it.
Thank you, Tom
— sdh