National Poetry Month: Shel Silverstein

Shel Silverstein doesn’t just remind me of my childhood. It’s like he is my childhood. As a kid, I was always a little creeped out by his photos on the back of his books – The Giving Tree, Where the Sidewalk Ends, et al – I’m not sure why he freaked me out – maybe his eyes were too intense, the bald head maybe gleamed in a demonic way … and if you remember what those author photos were like, then you know that they were not your basic glossy smiley head shot. He leaned in towards the camera, he wasn’t smiling … etc. but now I look at those intense hippie-ish photos and see my entire past history. I love him. I guess I decided to post Shel Silverstein today because of my tramp through my old grade school this weekend and seeing Keith and all that stuff … the past has been on my mind. And it hasn’t felt all that far away.

Some families were Dr. Seuss-focused families. And while the O’Malleys adored Horton, it is true – we were all about Shel. My dad read The Giving Tree to us when we were little – it was a routine, man – I kept trying to rationalize away the end of the book … but couldn’t he go to another tree? So he doesn’t kill his friend? Why does he need a BOAT? Can’t he go another way? Etc. All avoiding that inevitable last moment. Which is a pretty heavy message for kids, if you think about it. A tiny boy is now a toothless old man? What? Will I be a toothless old lady? Heavy stuff – we loved it. I still get this searing pain through my heart when I read that book! But it’s quite amazing: I read that book now, and it is in my father’s voice.

Here are two of his poems – maybe not the famous nonsensical ones – but ones that clutch at my throat with emotion.

I also found a NY Times article written by David Mamet about Shel Silverstein in 2001 – apparently they were very good friends. It brought tears to my eyes. I’ve quoted it here in full.

Poems below, and a ton of cool quotes from Shel – what a great interview he was. Blunt, honest, no bullshit … amazing.

The Little Boy and the Old Man

Said the little boy, “Sometimes I drop my spoon.”
Said the old man, “I do that too.”
The little boy whispered, “I wet my pants.”
“I do that too,” laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, “I often cry.”
The old man nodded, “So do I.”
“But worst of all,” said the boy, “it seems
Grown-ups don’t pay attention to me.”
And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
“I know what you mean,” said the little old man.

God’s Wheel

God says to me with a kind of smile,
“Hey how would you like to be God awhile
And steer the world?”
“Okay,” says I, “I’ll give it a try.
Where do I set?
How much do I get?
What time is lunch?
When can I quit?”
“Gimme back that wheel,” says God.
“I don’t think you’re quite ready yet.”

“When I was a kid—12, 14, around there—I would much rather have been a good baseball player or a hit with the girls. But I couldn’t play ball, I couldn’t dance. Luckily, the girls didn’t want me; not much I could do about that. So, I started to draw and to write. I was also lucky that I didn’t have anybody to copy, be impressed by. I had developed my own style, I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price and a Steinberg. I never saw their work till I was around 30. By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me. Not that I wouldn’t rather make love, but the work has become a habit.– Shel Silverstein

Question: “Do you shave your head for effect or to be different, or to strike back at the long-haired styles of today?”
Shel Silverstein: “I don’t explain my head.”

“You should never explain the philosophy behind anything either. The philosophy behind it isn’t important. The question is, if your work is weak and lacking so that it needs explanation, it isn’t enough, it isn’t clear enough. Make it so good and so clear that it doesn’t need any further explanation.” — Shel Silverstein

NY Times, October 14, 2001

Shel Silverstein: A Friend Who Lived Life The Chicago Way
By DAVID MAMET

Shel Silverstein, who died in 1999 at the age of 67, was a man of many talents – cartoonist, singer, songwriter, poet and children’s verse writer (“A Light in the Attic” and “Where the Sidewalk Ends” made long appearances on the best-seller lists). He also wrote plays, and on Wednesday,

10 of his one-acts will open the season at the Atlantic Theater Company in Chelsea in the program “An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein,” directed by Karen Kohlhaas. The playwright David Mamet, who helped found the theater, knew Mr. Silverstein, as he describes in this reminiscence.

WHERE I come from, Shel Silverstein was a demigod. I come from Chicago.

We high school kids would see him on State Parkway and say, “Do you know who that is …” And we all knew who it was.

He was Hugh Hefner’s sidekick, he was the great cartoonist, he lived with Hef at the Playboy Mansion, in a riot of delight. He wrote songs for Johnny Cash, he wrote the world’s most popular children’s books, he did the liner notes for “Gibson and Camp at the Gate of Horn,” the world’s best folk album.

I met him when he took up writing plays.

We were in Chicago, at the Goodman Theater, and Greg Mosher was staging an evening of one-acts: one by me, one by Elaine May and one by Shel – three expat Chicagoans, back in Chicago.

We went out to some fish joint, and closed the joint. In the dawn, Shel and I walked up and down North Michigan, walking, now one, now the other, back to his hotel, and quoting Kipling to each other.

He came on my honeymoon. My wife, Rebecca, and I retired to Martha’s Vineyard, late September. Shel had a home there, and he met us one morning for breakfast. Breakfast became lunch, and then dinner, and we saw him most of all day every day.

We went back, summers, to the Vineyard, and spent most of the days with Shel. He had a quarter-sized fantasy house in the Tabernacle, a 19th-century enclave of gingerbread houses around a Methodist prayer pavilion. We would sit out on the porch and pass the guitar back and forth, and he’d get hysterical, relating the amorous intricacies of the natives’ lives on the island.

While we sat, every day, fans would find him out. Every day, women would come with their children, and their arms full of books. Not one book, but 10. And they would, sheepishly, ask him to inscribe the books. And Shel would say, of each one, “Who is this for?” The woman would tell him a name, and Shel would fashion the name into an animal and inscribe the book to the kid.

I’d sit by, watching him. And I never saw him hesitant, or put-upon, or at all reluctant. I asked him, “Shel, don’t you ever find it an imposition?” And he smiled and said, “Are you kidding … ?”

Rebecca and I would walk our daughter, Clara, aged 2, 3, 4, through the labyrinth of the Tabernacle paths, until we’d find, always by accident, Shel’s house. We’d encourage Clara forward, and she’d, tentatively, get up on the porch and go to the door, and she would scratch the screen.

“Who is that?” would come this voice, impossibly high and gruff at the same time, “Who is that, out there, scratching at my door … ?” And Clara would recoil in delight, as her pet Ogre and Godfather improvised a fairy-tale encounter for her.

He loved good food. We’d go to Jimmy Seas’ joint on the Vineyard, and they’d usher us in to his special table, or upstairs, and the waitresses, some, or indeed all, of whom must have known him quite well, would fuss about, and beam at his attention, and duly note his commands: “ … like Jimmy makes it, but not quite that much oil, and more tuna than pasta … ” et cetera.

I was at restaurants with him where he sent back everything but the booth, and would have done that, too.

He adored Da Silvano’s (who does not?) on Sixth Avenue, and would, at the drop of a hat, take off Silvano, and his recitations of life in the Italian Army’s Armored Corps, and he’d giggle that high laugh. There was nothing better.

I’d call him up, just about every day, and we’d trade jokes, or fix jokes – a favored activity. “I heard a joke today (insert joke).”

“ … Yeah …,” he’d say, thoughtful … long pause. “What about if instead of Irishmen, it was dogs, or something, or buffalo … ?” “No,” he’d say. “That’s not it. Tell me the joke again, no: wait wait wait … !,” and he’d come upon the solution.

As he would when I’d call – as I did regularly – with a personal or professional problem. I’d lay the mess before him. “O.K.,” he’d say, “here’s what you got to do …,” and, inevitably, it was.

Or, to sum up, I loved him. My family loved him. We all felt that being with him was an unexampled privilege. And when he died, we, and his other friends, said to each other, “Well, at least we can’t say we didn’t appreciate him when he was here.”

He had no tolerance for society. He wouldn’t go to a party, didn’t want to meet new people. He came to my wedding in the same oufit he wore everywhere: impossibly baggy, vaguely military trousers, a sort of Indian shirt, unbuttoned to the navel, a 1970’s down-market leather jacket.

He once told me he’d been invited to receive some rather impressive honor. I thought he would relent and accept, but he said no.

“How can you refuse?” I said.

“If they want me to show up and do my Shel act, let them pay me,” he said.

And I was chastened. He was right. He had elected that the writer must live in retirement; that we are weak, and susceptible to blandishment, flattery, and the way to resist temptation was to avoid it.

He was scrupulous. There were those things he would always do, and those things he would never do.

He would always help. I would call in a tight spot: I needed a joke, a plot, a song, a favor, and he always said, “Sure.”

Rik Elswit, a member of Shel’s band, Dr. Hook, relates a dispute about a song. The group had a big hit, Shel was the writer. One of the band members said, “You know, Shel, I hate to say it, but I contributed (whatever it may have been) to the song, too.” Shel, Mr. Elswit relates, took out a piece of paper and assigned his bandmate half of the royalties, with which, we are told, the band member bought a lot of real estate in California.

In short, I suppose he was my hero.

I remember, just before he died, he came to Boston, and we were going to go book shopping along Newbury Street. I got out of the car, at the Ritz-Carlton, and palmed a $20 bill with which to bribe the doorman.

Here came the doorman, and I walked toward him, “Hey, can I talk to you a minute?,” I said, and looked over at the sidewalk to see Shel doubled over and howling.

When I got to him, he was literally wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Oh, Dave,” he said. “That was the Old Style. That was beautiful, that was the Old Chicago Way.” What a compliment.

Excerpt from 1963 interview with Shel Silverstein – Aardvark Magazine:
AARDVARK: Have you read the Realist’s article on the arrest of Lenny Bruce?
SILVERSTEIN: No. I was there.
AARDVARK: Krassner came to the conclusion that Bruce was not arrested for obscenity, but for blasphemy.
SILVERSTEIN: I don’t think that much about what Paul Krassner has to say about it. He spends his whole life looking up Lenny’s asshole, anyway. I can’t really be as concerned with the whole thing as he is. If you want to know the whole story, you should really talk to Lenny.
AARDVARK: He won’t talk to us. We’ve tried. He only talks to God.
SILVERSTEIN: He talks to me. He’s as direct and honest about the whole situation as a man could possibly be. It’s his followers that get a little fanatical and start jumping all around, but Lenny’s very straight about the whole thing. The day after he was arrested, he said, “They had a right to bust me. They had a warrant.” So the guy comes onstage with a warrant for Lenny and Lenny realizes the man has a warrant and he’s legally arrested, so he said, “Fine,” and everybody else starts jumping up and down and protesting.
AARDVARK: Did he think he was guilty of obscenity?
SILVERSTEIN: I think he thinks he is guilty of obscenity as far as our laws go, but he does it anyway because he believes he’s doing right. I don’t think he’s against any law; he’s just for what he’s doing. I think about what he does onstage rather than the overall thing. I don’t find much of it objectionable.

“[Silverstein] resists reading a moral into The Missing Piece, in which a sort of wheel with a slice taken out of it rolls along, singing a song, looking for the missing piece. After rejecting several bad fits, it finds a compatible wedge, only to realize it can no longer sing its happy-go-lucky song. ‘I could have ended the book there,’ he says, meaning where the piece seems to have found its mate. ‘But instead it goes off singing: it’s still looking for the missing pice. That’s the madness of the book, the disturbing part of it.’ ” — New York Times Book Review, April 30, 1978

“In all the art forms, I’ve had trouble finding acceptance in new areas. I’ve done a lot for Playboy magazine, so people say, ‘Oh, you’re the Playboy cartoonist.’ But I write music, too, and children’s books. . . I had a place in cartooning for a while, I guess. I created a certain style and it was well received. Now I’m interested in finding out about the music industry. I used to think I was above it all, that I’d just write the songs and that was it. Now I want to find out more about the business. . .I don’t think I have a real “place” in it. For that, you have to have a great acceptance for what you do. As long as you’re underground, you don’t really fit into any slot.” — Shel Silverstein, 1973

“It’s just a relationship between two people; one gives and the other takes.” — Shel Silverstein on “The Giving Tree”, 1978

“I’m sure Hefner gets more tail per square inch than other guys do.” — Shel Silverstein

More on Shel Silverstein here.