The Garden Song from 2008

Listen to the May 3, 2008, show

This week on A Prairie Home Companion, the show comes from the Civic Center Auditorium in Bangor, Maine, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin and the David Mallet Trio, along with the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band and The Royal Academy of Radio Actors. Listen to the show.

Maxine Kumin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1925). She grew up in an affluent family — her father owned the largest pawnbroking business in the city. Even though she was Jewish, her parents sent her to a Catholic school because it was so close to her house. She said, “Jesus entered my life casually but insistently and some of that sanctified passion has stayed in my bones.”

She wrote poetry in secret from the time she was a child, and when she was a student at Radcliffe, she finally got the courage up to show her poems to a professor. The professor handed back comments on her poetry that read: “Say it with flowers, but for God’s sake don’t try to write poems.” She didn’t, for a long time, until she got serious about it again in her 30s, in the middle of her third pregnancy. She said, “The grit of discontent, the acute misery of early and uninformed motherhood worked under my skin to force out the writer.” Kumin, who passed away in 2014, authored of many poetry collections, including Up Country (1973), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Singer-songwriter David Mallett was one of America’s true original troubadours. In a career spanning more than four decades, he recorded 17 albums, had several hundred covers of his songs, including the American folk classic “Garden Song”. His songs have been recorded by over 150 different artists, including Emmylou Harris, Allison Krauss, and Marty Stuart, among others. He passed away this past December.

Here are the lyrics to “Tenderness,” which Garrison sings with backing from The Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band during this classic show:

We make our way with urgency
From concourse A to concourse B
Through the mall and exit lane
In St. Paul or Bangor Maine
Surrounded by a surging sea
The moving tide of humanity
I love to find as I progress
The little signs of tenderness
A little flash of soul and mind
That shows compassion for our kind
Amid the daily storm and stress
A little warmth and tenderness
Upward, onward, outward press
But show a little tenderness
We all are human more or less
So show a little tenderness
Would I like a drink? No, I guess
I would prefer some tenderness.
Stop and look around and bless
The world with signs of tenderness.
I wish you fortune and success
But try to show some tenderness
Do your business, prosper, yes,
But take time for a little tenderness.

Living with Limericks

Limericks are the poems that can be written in the empty spaces between life, and this compact book illustrates the full range of the form’s utility: thank-you notes to doctors, odes to Prairie Home performers, postcard greetings from exotic places, succinct biographies of favorite writers, and scribbles in the margins of Sunday church programs.

Here is a limerick Garrison wrote about his mother, Grace:

My mother whom I adored
Is in heaven where, with one accord,
Saints clang their balls
In heavenly halls
As they fall on their knees to the Lord.

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Serenity at 70. Gaiety at 80

Described by The Saturday Evening Post as “a 90-page self-­published masterwork about the inexorable decrepitude that accompanies old age — but, more importantly, also the manifold pleasures that accrue as you arrive there,” Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80 is a playful yet deeply felt meditation that ought to be a standard in the literature of human aging. Asked how she’d characterize the work, Kate Gustafson (who heads up Keillor’s production company) paused for a while and then ventured this brief summation: “It’s a novelty book, a gift book.” No, no, Keillor corrected, it’s actually “a memoir with an essay wrapped around it.” Whatever, Serenity at 70 is a must-have humorous take on getting older, complete with rules for aging.

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