The Death of Nick Charles

This is my first post of 2013! This isn't really the post that I want to start the year off with so let's play catch up. For New Years I went to church, shot my first gun and drank champagne with my cousins. I was pretty excited to get back to work for the Spring semester. One reason being because each semester serves as a fresh start. Another reason being because I had a class that wouldn't start until February, so my load this time around is much lighter.

I enrolled into an acting class. Our first assignment, and the reason for this post, is to pick a poem that could be delivered in a minimum of 2 minutes in length. I don't follow poetry too much so I chose the first long poem in Black Voices. It's called The Death of Nick Charles by Everett LeRoi Jones, who I later found out is Amiri Baraka. I heard of the author but never heard of the poem.  Not having a clue who Nick Charles was I did a search and found out that he was a sportscaster that died recently. This was clearly not the Nick Charles that Baraka was referring to. The only information that I found was that Nick Charles was a detective in the five part series Thin Man.  I later found out that this poem was an excerpt from a larger series    Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.

All of this information, very little of it allowed me to develop a context to the poem. So here I am about to perform a poem I have very little background on. The idea for our scene is to think of a person that we would be reading the poem to and deliver it to that person in a way that we'd speak it.  I'm about to get a little transparent without naming any names. The person I have in mind is someone that I loved that never made the space to reciprocate it. It's funny the more I read the poem with that in mind, the more I see my story in it. Here it is.

. . . And how much of this can you understand?
I hide my face, my voice twisted
in the heavy winter fog.
If I came to you, left this wet island and came to you; now
when I am young and have strength in my fingers
To say I love you and cannot even recognize you.
How much of me could you understand? (Only
that I love colour, motion, thin high air at night.
The recognizable parts of yourself?

We love only heroes. Glorious
death in battle. Scaling walls, burning bridges,
destroying all ways back. All retreat. As if somethings were fixed.
As if the moon would come to us each night &
we could watch from the battlements) As if there were anything
certain or lovely in our lives.

Sad
long
motion of air pushing in my face.
Lies, weakness, hatred of myself.
Of you for not understanding this.
Or not despising me
for the right causes. I am
sick as, OH, the night is. As
cold days are,
when we much watch them grow old
& dark.

I'm thinking of a dance. One
I would invent if there were music.
If you could play for me some light music.
Couperin in yellow hillsides. Ravel
as I kiss your hair. Lotions
of Debussy
I am moved by what? Angered at its whine
The quiet delicacy of my sadness. The elements.
My face torn my wind, faces, desires, lovely chinese ladies sweeping the sidewalk.
(And this is not what I mean. Not the thing I wanted for you.
Not, finally.
Music, only terror at this lightly scribbled day.

Emotion. Words.
Waste. No clear delight
No light under my fingers. The room,
The walls, silent & deadly. Not
Music
If there were a dance. For us
to make; your fingers
on my face, your face wet
with tears (or silence. For us
to form upon this heavy air. Tearing
the silence, hurting the darkness
with the colour of our movement! Nakedness?
Great leaps
into the air? Huge pirouettes; the moon
blurred on ancient lakes. Thing horns
and laughter