Steve

Another World Cup: Some thoughts on the beautiful game

Steve · June 12, 2010 · 4 Comments

jonsoccer — Juggling in a circle. Jon Givens, center. Photo by Steve Givens

It’s the first Saturday in “World Cup Time” and I am watching Argentina and Nigeria play as I write this. Later today…USA v. England in one of the most anticipated soccer games of the last four years.

Soccer is, indeed, “the beautiful game,” and I love the physicality and grace of the players and the overall flow of the match. I love the beauty and the brutality of the competition. I never played organized soccer growing up, although I played with and to some extent learned the game from the Catholic kids in my north St. Louis neighborhood. In the 60s in St. Louis, just about nobody played soccer except the Catholic kids, for whom soccer was the “eighth sacrament.” So I learned to kick the ball around and watched the Sunday morning PBS games from Germany on our tiny black & white television.

But I didn’t really become a fan until we lived in England in the mid-1990s, and it was there that I was introduced to the likes of the Premiere League and Manchester United, the poet/philosopher/rowdy Eric Cantona, and the great England national team of that era. I was hooked.

Memorial Day: Elegy Written in Thomas Gray’s Country Churchyard

Steve · May 31, 2010 · 3 Comments

Here’s a poem I wrote about 15 years ago when we were living just west of London in Buckinghamshire. Only a short drive from our house in Gerrard’s Cross was a little village called Stoke Poges, whose claim to fame is a beautiful little country churchyard in which the English poet Thomas Gray reportedly wrote his most well-known poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which begins with these lines:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

I visited the churchyard occasionally to experience the peace, beauty and quiet of both the churchyard and St. Giles Church, part of which dates to the Saxon era. On one visit, this poem emerged, a reflection on the death of my father just a few years before.

Same Path, Different Light

Steve · May 16, 2010 · 3 Comments

daisy — Daisy fleabane. Photo by Steve GIvens

“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange

I heard this quote about a month or so ago on NPR during a great feature on Dorothea Lange, the influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Google her and look at some of her images – they are simply amazing and you will no doubt recognize one or two of them from history textbooks and documentaries about the Depression. But her quote about “learning to see” is what stuck with me most after I finally turned the radio off (it was one of those “driveway moments” that NPR brags about).

We Been There Before

Steve · May 5, 2010 · 2 Comments

(for the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death, April 21, 1910)

This poem recently won first place in the Big River Writing Contest sponsored by Chesterfield Arts and Stages St. Louis. The contest celebrates Mark Twain & the Missouri River Valley region.

It is you, the spinner and weaver, we see
big and brash and full of life
a painter with the finest and sharpest of tools
a splendid fool
squatting like a tired but ever-watchful sentry
on the corner of a raft of rough-hewn logs
floating freely down the mightiest of American rivers
in the dark of night
listening in on the quiet, guarded, late-night conversation of three boys
fleeing civilization in search of adventure.

[Read more…] about We Been There Before

Help Wanted: Some More Thoughts on the Ghosts of History

Steve · April 27, 2010 · Leave a Comment

window — Window at Old State Capitol, Springfield, Illinois. Photo by Steve Givens

“Marilla says that a large family was raised in that old house long ago, and that it was a real pretty place, with a lovely garden and roses climbing all over it. It was full of little children and laughter and songs; and now it is empty, and nothing ever wanders through it but the wind. How lonely and sorrowful it must feel! Perhaps they all come back on moonlit nights…the ghosts of the little children of long ago and the roses and the songs…and for a little while the old house can dream it is young and joyous again.” – Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne Of Avonlea

I do, in fact, believe in ghosts. But not in fleeting gauzy images and rattling chains and, God help us, ectoplasm. I believe in the worn and tattered memories of those who have come and gone before us. For if we do something with our lives that makes a mark and leaves an impression, isn’t there something to be said for the idea that the maker of that mark might linger, too?

If a person raised their family in an old wooden house in an early French and German settlement just to the west of the Mississippi River, if they gave birth there and toiled there and celebrated there and ultimately suffered and died there, shouldn’t there be something left of them besides a portrait or a name in a Bible? Shouldn’t the echo of their footsteps somehow reverberate down through the stairwell of the ages and find the ear of a willing listener?