Grow Old Along with Poetry

By Paul Kleyman

Few televised offerings could be less inviting than a public-television soporific consisting of handsomely aging thespians intoning dusty lines of classic poesy. The very title, "Grow Old Along With Me: The Poetry of Aging," from Maryland Public Television (MPT), Owings Mills, Md., droops the eyelids, suggesting sleepy thoughts of brocade shawls. Despite some syrupy moments, as we screened this thoughtful and sometimes deeply affecting production a friend could not help but utter, "This is beautiful."

The hour-long program, produced for MPT by John Ankele and Anne Macksoud of Old Dog Productions, New York City, aired on PBS stations nationwide in December and is now available on videocassette. For more information, call (800) 733-2232, or e-mail johnankele@aol. com.

FRESH CONTEXT

The video includes five thematic segments on creativity, being alone, intimacy, the gift of seeing, and death. Presented as discrete sections separated by blackouts, the 10­15 minute segments would lend themselves well to discussions in senior centers or other settings. An afterword consists of a brief anthology of poems by Emily Dickinson, John Keats and others.

The old saws that might seem dowdy in another producer's hands--"Rabbi Ben Ezra" by Robert Browning (source of the program's title) or William Butler Yeats' "When You Are Old"--are given fresh context in the company of more recent verse, such as poems by Elizabeth Bishop and Mary Oliver. Muriel Rukeyser's "In Her Burning" provides a bracing homage to a "randy old women's" defiant hunger for a human touch before she dies. Popping up among verses by expected poets like Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay is the occasional surprise, such as "The Little Boy and the Old Man," the late Shel Silverstein's ironic but warm view of the bond between young and old.

The poems are set amid thoughtful observations by writers, artists and performers. Hosting Grow Old Along With Me are actors Julie Harris and the late Richard Kiley, to whom the program is dedicated. Joining them are other famed performers, such as Hume Cronyn, James Earl Jones and opera diva Shirley Verrett, as well as those not widely known.

Why should anyone care about the musings of such a collection of personages? Our skepticism melted away with the richness of their insights. Photographer Leni Sonnenfeld, age 93, explains that she is laser-printing images of family members killed in the Nazi Holocaust not to dwell on the past but to grow from confronting the pain she had long denied. The clarity of thought articulated by members of this vital ensemble--by Jones on being alone but not lonely, by Kiley on his impending death or by artist and Zen of Seeing author Frederick Franck, interviewed at age 93, on sex and love--succeed in enriching the carefully selected poems. Ankele and Macksoud have lovingly crafted a film about old age that is both uplifting and honest.

The production is being promoted with a companion book, Grow Old Along With Me, the Best Is Yet to Be, edited by Sandra Haldeman Martz (Watsonville, Calif.: Papier-Mâché Press, 1996).

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