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Application for a Grant Noble executors of the munificent testament Of the late John Simon Guggenheim, distinguished bunch Of benefactors, there are certain kinds of men Who set their hearts on being bartenders, For whom a life upon duck-boards, among fifths, Tapped kegs and lemon twists, crowded with lushes Who can master neither their bladders nor consonants Is the only life, greatly to be desired. ' There's the man who yearns for the White House, there to compose Rhythmicalljsts of enemies, while someone else Wants to be known to the Tourd'Argent's head waiter. As the Sibyl of Cumae said: It takes all kinds. Nothing could bribe your Timon, your charter member Of the Fraternal Order of Grizzly Bears to love His fellow, whereas it's just the opposite With interior decorators; that's what makes horse races. One man may have a sharp nose for tax shelters, Screwing the IRS with mirth and profit; Another devote himself to his shell collection, Deafto his offspring, indifferent to the feast With which his wife hopes to attract his notice. Some at the Health Club sweating under bar bells Labor away like grunting troglodytes, Smelly and thick and inarticulate, Their brains squeezed out through their pores by sheer exertion. As for me, the prize for poets, the simple gift For amphybrachs strewn by a kind Euterpe, With pei"haps a laurel crown of the evergreen Imperishable of your fine endowment Would supply my modest wants, who dream of nothing But a pad on Eighth Street and your approbation. Freely from Horace Anthony Hecht, ((Application for a Grant " from The Venetian Vespers. Copyright © 19 79 by Anthony E. Hecht. Reprinted with the permission of Atheneum Publishers, Inc. Mr. Hecht is fond oflight verse. "I know a lot of limericks by heart, and have even written a few," he says. "I find it very easy to be lighthearted and frivolous from time to time. Even in my moods of gloom." The subjects Mr. Hecht has taken for some of his poems have led critics to occasionally describe him as a poet "of darkness. " An infantryman in World War II, he fought in Czechoslovakia and Germany, where his unit discovered mass graves filled with thousands of charred bodies. He was one of the soldiers who liberated Flossenburg, an annex to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He has written about the Holocaust in a number of poems. 18 "The subject matter of poetry is the experiences of our lives, both the most terrible and the most wonderful," he says. "What I experienced in the war was not anywhere near so terrible as having been a prisoner in one of those camps, or having died or lost a family in one. So even I am considerably distanced from the calamities that happened to so many there. Yet my sense of it is much more alive than that of the average American citizen, and I feel somehow under an obligation to not let anyone forget how terrible that was. "So I write about it, but not obsessively, I hope. It comes up from time to time, and probably will never entirely disappear from my own consciousness whether I write about it again or not. " From the number of students enrolled in creative-writing programs to the number of small presses and journals specializing in poetry, it appears that more poetry is being written now than at any other time in our history. Does the Consultant in Poetry think that we have more good poetry to show for it? "I would suppose, on nothing more than vaguely informed instinct, that as much good poetry is being written now in the United States as has ever been written," says Mr. Hecht. "Whether any of it is as good as Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman is another question. But there's a great deal being written, and as much good stuff as was written in the modernist revolution of the twenties. "Now it may be that in 200 years it will be decided that America has really only produced three or four great poets, and that two of them may still be Whitman and Dickinson," he adds. "But what is being done now is not shameful. T he best of it is extremely good. And the quality of the work will continue to be high, simply because poets establish their own high caliber and keep it there, and anybody who gets into the field must know who the best poets are and hope to be able to do as well." Mr. Hecht acknowledges that the audience for poetry is not very large, as some of his experiences while Consultant in Poetry have demonstrated. The only disappointment during his term that he admits to is the poor attendance at some of the literary events at the Library of Congress. He does not expect the audience for poetry ever to be much bigger than it now is. But he praises that audience. "Though small, it is a faithful and a good audience," Mr. Hecht says. "Well-educated and conscientious. And undoubtedly committed in a very special way-the way in which the special audience for chamber music is committed, for example. "It's not the great, mass public," he adds, "but it's a big enough audience to keep art going at a very high level of performance and of practice. " Copyright © 1984 by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Reprinted with permission.
The Calderone Way By Gary L. Stockman "Truth can never go too far," says Mary Steichen Calderone '39M, "pepperpot" greatgrandmother and one of this country's leading authorities on sex information and education. During a recent campus visit she brought with her a collection of home truths about raising children. T eaching kids about sex the Calderone way," read the headline Campus Times staffers gave to a report on a talk by Dr. Mary Steichen Calderone. And what is "the Calderone way"? Let's just say it starts informing kids early. "Children are born sexual," Calderone told a crowd of attentive listeners at Hubbell Auditorium in Hutchison Hall. The talk was one in a number of presentations Calderone gave before students, health professionals, campus counselors, faculty, and the news media during a visit to the University earlier this year. Calderone has been talking about sex, frankly and in public, for over thirty years, since she first started working for Planned Parenthood. N ow one of the world's foremost authorities on human sexuality, Calderone, after her graduation from Rochester's medical school in 1939, went on to take a master of public health degree at Columbia University three years later. She was named medical director of Planned Parenthood in that group's fledgling years, then left to found the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) where, as executive director and president, she became one of the country's leading advocates of sex education for youngsters. ("She's one of the great figures of our era who opened people's minds," says Dr. Karl Menninger, chairman of the famed Menninger Foundation.) She also, as more than one journalist has pointed out, "made the words 'sex' and 'sexuality' OK to say and OK to print. " Calderone returned to Rochester with a substantive message to students, many of whom would be starting their own families within a few years. Parents, she said, must take charge of their child's sexual education early. "The commonest question is, 'How do I get over my embarrassment?' Well, that embarrassment was laid on them by their parents, who had had it laid on them by their parents. "What's more important to you, your embarrassment and its protection, or your child's. future welfare as a husband or. wife?" With that understanding, Calderone went on, in her presentations, to touch on a wide range of subjects, including the development of her own sexuality. "I was about two or three, I think. And I grew up in a world that tried to stop my growth, which did me a lot of damage." In her adult life, Calderone said, she has maintained that "children are entitled to the truth about everything, and they're entitled to it when they need it. And when they need it is in childhood. It's too late in adolescence. " Though critics of her approach insist that such attitudes breed promiscuity, Calderone demurs. "They [the critics] have said I'm advocating sex. Sure I am! I'm advocating the basic sexuality of every human being, and the right to knowledge about it. "But I'm not advocating free sex, heaven help me. That would be stupid. " Instead, Calderone told audiences, she favors an open, truthful attitude. That way individuals can develop the confidence to be selective about their sexual experiences. "The very first time you begin really informing your child about sex is when you are naming the parts of the body with the child, and you carefully skip from the umbilicus down to the knee -and you never name those intervening parts of the body. " In a short time, she said, a child of four or five may point to that area and say "That's not me." "But everything changes once you accept the initial premise, and the initial premise is, 'My child is born sexual and has been sexual in the uterus.' This is part-and I say this now as a believing Quaker-this is part of God's plan, if you will. "This is the way babies are. Who are we to deny it? How dare we?" Feisty-some people call her a "pepperpot"; a colleague puts it more gently: "Mary tends to be a very positive person" -Calderone has continued on page 43 19
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