Beer, Poetry & Happiness

Maine Beer Company combined two of my favorite things: beer and poetry. More specifically, really good beer and an iconic poem by one of my heavies, my all-time favorite writers, William Carlos Williams. Red Wheelbarrow Ale has climbed among the leaders in my favorite beer crew.

Beer and poetry are two things that I like to imbibe daily that spin my mind and soul a bit. They can reshuffle the deck, and spin the compass in myriad directions. "Red Wheelbarrow" the poem is short, simple and confounding. Check the technique:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

I've written about Williams here before. He was a physician, who had a lifelong medical practice in Rutherford, New Jersey. He was not an ivory tower academic. He didn't much dig T.S. Eliot, who he felt was too stock in Europe--history, culture, tradition, allusion--and Williams looked to dial poetry back to more common, everyday language, and write about things and people that were more everyday life.

Some of his poetry, "Red Wheelbarrow" included is about the image it creates, like a still life painting. You can just sit with it, like you would a good beer on a deck in the sun on a spring evening, sun going down behind tall pine trees. It's a scene. You can also play with the Zen idea of the interconnectedness of the Universe. Hell, you can do just about anything you want--the thing about poetry, like beer, is not all tastes are the same, not all interpretations are the same, and you can sit and ponder that shit for a while.

I found good poetry before I found good beer. I'm not sure what the first "good" beer I drank was. But I do know that it was Carl Sandburg that slammed down the strong man mallet and lit the poetry neon sign up for me, when I was 15.

Sandburg dug and wrote about Chicago. So that became the first city I thought about when I thought about poetry. Dude, Chicago has their own poet; a cat that writes all about them and their people, the blue collar folks. Sandburg and Williams had that in common, the common.

Sandburg made his point for me, especially, in a poem called "Happiness:"

I ASKED professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
      me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
      thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
      I was trying to fool with them.
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
      the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
      their women and children and a keg of beer and an
      accordion.

Thank you, Carl. It's not the academics or philosophers who know happiness. It's not the business people, who are too clever to get caught in that game. It's the families, sitting along the river, with a keg and music.

When I think of Chicago today, I think of happiness. Not that Chicago is a happy city, but that image resonates. I think of a trip I took there and running along the lake, to Navy Point, going to the Field Museum, the Art Institute, the Adler Planetarium. I think about Wrigley Field and Soldier Field and digging the Bears after the Colts left Baltimore. But those are details, memories.

Today, it's beer, poetry and happiness.

Beer, Conversation, God, Repeat

Bryan Berghoef is clearly on to something. He's coined a term for something I've been doing since I had my first beer with friends (at age 21). But it's not about the beer. I'm thinking of times and conversations at Pope's Tavern in Oxford or Greenshield's in Raleigh, N.C., where the the superfluous sloughs away and you are pondering Life's big questions over a pint.

I can remember walking to philosophy class at N.C. State (a rarity, given), and thinking about some question or another and having it addressed in class while discussing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" or Bertrand Russell. Philosophy seemed to cut through the details. Which is why I studied it at Washington College and why, had the ball bounced differently for us, I would have been a PhD philosophy graduate student at Duquesne University and likely teaching it now.

It's why when the ground feels shaky under my feet, I pick up Thomas Merton or Thich Nhat Hahn or Alan Watts or Chogyam Trungpa or Frederick Buechner to help calm it down.

Church services are not discussions, generally speaking. They wouldn't work too well that way. You sit, you stand, you sing, you pray, you reflect. If you have young kids, you might be equally focused on making sure they aren't crawling under the pews or coloring in a hymnal. But dialogue is largely absent.

Not to mention, if your spiritual lineage includes Buddhism, Fritjof Capra, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walt Whitman and Sunday morning trail runs, well, I'm still trying to figure out what all the means.

It's also true that you don't want to be the guy, or girl, at the bar watching the game or celebrating a birthday, who wants to scale the walls of existentialism. That guy doesn't get invited to happy hour.

Berghoef figures it out with his idea of "Pub Theology." Beer, conversation, God. All backgrounds and beliefs are welcome. Open, honest discussion, each week (don't most churches meet weekly?). If you are a narrative cat like me, you can read how he describes it for the Huffington Post. If you look at how many places are starting their own version of pub theology groups, Berghoef isn't alone in his thinking. And that makes me happy.

That's why a pub theology group has kicked off in Easton. Every Wednesday, at the Washington Street Pub, at 7:30 p.m. A place, an outlet, for pondering Life's big questions, in a casual environment, possibly over a pint.