Back in 2000, what was then Ace Monthly was briefly affiliated with the Village Voice. During that time, they published a quarterly literary supplement called Voice.
I was privileged to be the only woman writer featured in the premier issue of Voice, though two women artists made the cut.
Unfortunately, this accomplishment mostly just got me relegated to “and others” — as in the front-page headline that read: “Frank X. Walker, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, and others.” Ace celebrated the inaugural isse of Voice with a readiing at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, and I was the only reader not listed by name. I laughed, somewhat bitterly, and said I was going to change my name to “and others.”
Two other writers relegated to “and others” status in that issue, writers I knew nothing about at the time, writers I didn’t pay much attention to in my state of high dudgeon, would later turn out to have considerable influence on my writing.
Those men were Maurice Manning and John Lane.
I had no idea at the time what heady company I was keeping. I was chopping in high cotton.
All of this bragging is by way of introducing my remarks on a book I’ve had on my desk for some time: John Lane’s Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems (Mercer University Press, 2010).
I’ve put off writing about this book, not because I didn’t like it — my copy is a rainbow of Post-It flags marking favorite poems — but because it is a “new and selected” and as such seems to beg a sort of summing up of the poet’s career. Unfortunately, I didn’t really start following John’s career until I attended his workshop at Wildacres in 2009. And anyway, I’ve never been much of one for summing up a person’s life. This Nin Andrews interview with John at Best American Poetry will give you some idea of the amazing things John has done in his lifetime, from learning letter press design at Copper Canyon to founding the Hub City Writers Project and publishing the Kudzu Telegraph.
Me, I don’t want to sum up. I just want to share a few of my favorite passages from this overview of John’s poetry — my selected of the selected of a career spanning from 1978 to the present.
From Quarries (1984), my flag rests on “At Cherokee Ford, South Carolina:”
Power lines wading the shallows
on treated pine poles could
be Whitman’s cavalry crossing
the ford . . .
And then “Tony Dorsett and his Band,” a loving portrait of a troubled mother:
Now this morning, as I return home
one more time . . .
a brass section swings in pleated-skirt,
seamed hose, dark-haired style you lost
too soon to a cotton-mill shift.
In the past year, my sister says you’ve taken
to calling this one Tony Dorsett and his Band.
You cheer, “Do it, Tony!” in drunken enthusiasm
like he sees a hole he could walk
his big band through — . . .Without applause, I take you in my arms
and drag you in a slow dance we both remember
from other years and houses . . .
my mama, myself in the wrong light.
From As the World Around Us Sleeps (1991), the poem “Seeing Wild Horses:”
And to realize I’ve seen a wild horse the first
time, a swift knot of freedom, and I fight
some need to call it from that animal world,
then lose it in the shock of its leaving:
I call this the greed of human caring,
and count all my losses among its history.
From Midnight on the Water: Four Mark O’Connor Improvisations (1998) — these poems, the notes explain, appeared in the liner notes to Mark O’Connor’s Sony Classic Midnight on the Water — the poem “Delta Morning Blues.”
I’m driving forever, a forlorn, four-on-the-floor
Four-barrel-roaring, fat-wood fool
Fill my misery with the mingled, misted memories
of old towns, old gowns
Old growling hound dogs
A hill boy’s best evening sound
From Noble Trees (2003), a poem I should have quoted in my Tree Year # 49, “Plant Community:”
I want to go to the wood lot and walk
where the walnuts fall, where rain water pools
in the darkening skins of black walnuts
rotting in the grass . . .Deep in the woods I want to note the oak’s burl,
how it curls tight against the passing weather.
Noble Trees is a collection much appreciated in this household of wood carver and wife. I did quote “How the Wolf Tree Survived” in Tree Year # 20.
From the New section of this new and selected, “High Meadow Poem” with an epigraph from Kim Stafford “Stories can save your life.”
To be bathed here in no stories. To sprawl
back and miss the narrative structure
of a stand of timothy. Trucks below on the highway.
No denouement. No complex characters
among the jays and their free fall through a day of foraging.
Stretch out your arms and you are your own crop circle.
John is perhaps better known these days as an environmental writer than a poet, and as Scott Owens points out in his review of Abandoned Quarry:
All four blurbs on the back of John Lane’s Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems mention “nature” or “landscape.
But, like Scott, I find that while
. . . nature plays a vital role in Lane’s poems, . . . it’s not exactly the primary thing I experienced or reflected upon as I read them. I may be splitting hairs to some degree, but they’re important hairs to me, and what comes out most strongly from Abandoned Quarry are revelations not about nature per se but rather about human nature and about the relationship of human nature and the larger concept of nature in general.
For all that humans have troubled and are troubled by their relationship to “nature,” I am one who finds a landscape static without a human presence. To quote Scott again, the questions John Lane struggles with are these:
What are the consequences of human presence on the natural world and subsequently on human being? How can the needs of human nature and nature be reconciled? How can the human need for nature continue to be met without resulting in the destruction of nature and the eventual destruction of man? Absent from nature, man suffers. Present in nature, nature, and eventually man, suffer.
I like John best, I think, as a poet of human nature. I haven’t mentioned here my favorite of all his books, the limited edition chapbook The Dead Father Poems, illustrated by Doug Whittle. This book is now out of print but a selection of the poems can be read in Abandoned Quarry.
My Dead Father Puts in a Garden
My dead father gets off the couch, and suddenly says
he’s headed back to the farm to see his brothers
and sisters, to eat some fresh greens and taters.
I tell him to sit back down, the family farm’s been sold
for twenty years, all his brothers and sisters have passed
but one, and it’s dead winter there. For a moment
my father looks like he understands, something
like grief shadows his face. “You’re dead too,” I say.
“Well, times I have felt better,” he smiles.
John’s father committed suicide when a bypass highway ruined his small-town gas-station business. “So I believe now it was speed killed my father,” says “My Dead Father’s Bypass.” These poems are both funny and heartbreaking, a combination that marks John’s best work.
I want to close this meandering essay with another quote from the Andrews interview. I haven’t found a way to work it in to my review, if you can call it a review, so I’ll just tack it on here:
[Donald Hall] said somewhere that publishing a book of poems can feel like clapping in an empty room, and even though I like to quote that, it’s never felt that way for me. Of course I’ve never gotten the kind of attention we all crave as ego-driven artists (“Love me and please love my poems!!”) but when a new book comes out there are always notes from friends and fans who show up at readings and usually a few reviews and things like this interview to show that the room may not be full, but there are people out there hiding behind the furniture who still love poetry.
