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Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Writer: Philip Lee Williams, 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu
Contact: Ed Pavlić, 706/542-1261, pavlic@uga.edu
New long poem by University of Georgia poet Ed Pavlić explores the life, talent and inner landscape of noted American soul musician
Athens, Ga.—Donny Hathaway was young, bleak and beautiful. An American soul singer and composer of extraordinary talents, he had just returned that January night in 1979 from dinner at the Manhattan apartment of his sometime singer partner, Robert Flack. Hathaway’s manager was along for dinner, too. No one suspected what was about to happen.
The year before, Hathaway and Flack had scored a huge hit with Grammy-nominated “Where is the Love?” but this was only a small part of Donny Hathaway’s enormous range of talents. He was a composer and arranger, too, and a valued session musician. He had also suffered from depression and been hospitalized for it several times.
Still, no one was prepared for what happened that night. He was 33 years old. And for reasons that are still shrouded in mystery, he apparently removed the window from his hotel room. The door was locked from the inside. And then he jumped or fell—no one is sure what happened—and he landed many floors below, dead on the roof that covers the restaurant and lobby.
His death has haunted his friends and fans for the nearly three decades since. The shock in the music community was overwhelming. Rev. Jesse Jackson performed the funeral, which was attended by, among other celebrities, Flack and Stevie Wonder. Who was this man who created such beauty and yet enduring such apparent suffering?
It’s the kind of thing that keeps Ed Pavlić (left) going as an artist. A slight man with an intense gaze but who is self-effacing and laughs quickly, Pavlić has spent many years as a poet mining the rich intersection between music and words. That intense involvement led him to write Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (University of Georgia Press, 2008), a 180-page tour de force epic poem about the singer’s life and death. After coming out in March, the book drew immediate praise from many quarters.
Joy Harjo, an internationally known poet and musician said, “Ed Pavlić’s tribute to Donny Hathaway is stunning. Pavlić writes the way Hathaway sang. Can you hear it? Terror and joy ride the wave together. This is a song, sung over, sung over a song, sung over another song and another, until it finds expression through a strange angel of a human.”
Other notable poets and reviewers have been universally enthusiastic. In some ways, it might seem an odd subject for a poet with roots in Croatia. But only if you don’t know Ed Pavlić.
It’s a Thursday morning in the first floor of the annex of Park Hall on the University of Georgia campus. Sun streams through the window of Pavlić’s book-filled office in a suite reserved for the Creative Writing Program in the department of English. As director of the MFA/PhD program as well as a busy teaching professor, Pavlić (left) might be forgiven for a smaller literary output than some colleagues. Never happened. In fact, he works all the time, and his stature as a poet of note has been rising steadily since his first book came out from well-respected Copper Canyon Press in 2001. Before the Hathaway book, his most recent volume was only two years ago. Labors Lost Left Unfinished appeared in 2006 from Sheep Meadow Press. And his critical book, Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture came out from the University of Minnesota Press in 2002. Add to that a steady stream of appearance in some of the best literary magazines in the U.S. and elsewhere, and you get a sense of Pavlić’s astounding energy and output.
Perhaps surprisingly, little has been written about Donny Hathaway’s life, and so Pavlić’s decision to make him the subject of a long poem might be seen as quixotic at best. (While the jacket of the book calls it “Poems by Ed Pavlić, it’s clearly a single epic poem broken into many sections.) And yet as he found out when he began research Hathaway’s life, a great many people are just as obsessed with the extravagantly talented musician who died far too young.
“I think one reason Hathaway has retained such a powerful grip on the imagination is that he lived in such a turbulent place,” says Pavlić, who’s wearing jeans and looking every inch the poet, despite the fact that he has a Ph.D. and strong academic credentials. “I’d wanted to write a long poem for a while, and when I’d think about him these [imaginary] `people’ would show up, and I would listen.”
The people, who give voice to many opinions about Donny Hathaway in the book, may in one sense just be a rhetorical or narrative device, but they also speak for thousands touched by Hathaway’s music who want to know what happened—and why.
In a long, just-published interview with The Cortland Review, Pavlić told interviewer Andrew John McFayden-Ketchum that the book didn’t come quickly or easily.
“[The book] took five years to write,” Pavlić told the Review. “I’d listened to Donny Hathaway for most of my life in one way or another. But . . . the first time I remember being struck with the unique power of his music when I was living with two roommates on Avenue C in New York City . . . One by one, many of his song seemed to get to the bottom of the joy and pain that comes from connections between people. . . I sensed something wide open, almost torn open, in the sound of his band, his approach, the keyboard, and, of course, his singing voice.”
While Pavlić calls the book “a work of fiction executed in prose poems,” many facts from Hathway’s life are mixed with Pavlić’s imagination to create a counterpoint that fits with the actual music like the second theme of a Beethoven sonata. While the central figure of the book is, obviously a “historical person,” the book is filled with “imagined conversations, monologues, dialogues and third-person accounts that distill and falsify the way the world sounds in Hathaway’s music and the way the world has felt while I’ve been a part of it.”
Little in Pavlić’s own life would seem to have prepared him for the world of epic poetry. His father, the fifth of seven children, was a bricklayer born in Canada from Croatian parents who had emigrated. Pavlić’s family was based in Chicago, but because his father’s work with a small, specialized construction company forced frequent relocations, the future poet spent time as a boy in Arizona, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other places. He even worked with his father for awhile, earning good money.
It may surprise admirers of Pavlić’s poetry, but his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin was in economics. He followed that with a master’s degree in African-American Studies as he realized his interest in the literature and music of African-American lives held a strong interest for him.
But how could he combine his many interests into a doctoral degree program? The answer came from the Folklore Institute at Indiana University, where he applied to study the West African cultural role in African American literature. Along the way, he received a fellowship to attend a summer program to learn the Yoruba language at the University of Florida, and while there he discovered he loved the climate and ambience of the South while gaining a clearer vision of his future.
“The year after that, I actually went to Nigeria, and I only started writing creatively when I returned from that trip to Africa,” says Pavlić. “I also took a literature class back at Indiana with Yusef Komunyakaa during his last year there.” Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer Prize-winning African American poet, immediately fanned the flames for Pavlić, who was, he says, “post-malarial” and deeply affected by the violence that had wracked Nigeria while he was there.
That was in the fall of 1995, and it was only then that Pavlić understood that his long apprenticeship had been for something important all along: the life of a practicing poet and literature teacher.
“Within weeks I could see a version of my life taking place with the kind of writing I began that fall,” he says. “I knew it could be a tool to separate what was from what wasn’t mine.”
Still, music was Pavlić’s first love, and he had to find a way to incorporate it and poetry into a seamless artistic expression that could comment on both art forms at the same time.
One problem in writing Winners Have Yet to Be Announced was the obvious problem of Hathaway’s mysterious end at the Essex House in 1979.
“I wanted no part in glamorizing his death,” Pavlić says, sitting forward in his chair. “But I also knew I’d have to deal with it. I simply didn’t think morbid voyeurism had any place in the poem. I knew, though, that I’d have to partake of the immediate sensory reality of a person in that state.”
The solution for Pavlić led to some of the book’s most powerful pages.
“I write poems to explore options in the world,” Pavlić told The Cortland Review. “I hope the book contains invitations to new things.”
The book may well garner important literary prizes next year, but if so they won’t be Pavlić’s first. He was the winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award and the Darwin Turner Award given by African American Review, for example.
Critics seem to agree that the work of Ed Pavlić does contain invitations to new things. In the meantime, with fall semester slipping away, Pavlić is preparing to teach three courses in the spring that one might think come right out of his long poem on Donny Hathaway. One is on connections in African America poetry, the second will help students investigate black music in American literature and the third is called “Writing Behind the Writing”—insights and important critical ideas in the letters of American writers.
In the meantime, the haunting voice and amazing talent of Donny Hathaway will continue to find a new and different outlet in the poetry of Ed Pavlić.
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