Sherry Chandler

A “common man writ large”

I must tell you about one more sequence of narrative sonnets I’ve been reading this summer, Richard Taylor’s Rail Splitter, Sonnets on the Life of Abraham Lincoln (Larkspur, 2009). This collection of 55 sonnets was begun in response to a call from the Kentucky Arts Council that each of the Kentucky poets laureate contribute poems for an anthology celebrating Lincoln’s bicentennial in 2009.

Occasional poems are notoriously difficult, especially about a figure as iconic as Abraham Lincoln. I would hazard that more books, plays, movies, have been produced about Abraham Lincoln than about any other figure from American history. However, I can’t think of anyone better qualified to write such poems about Lincoln. Richard Taylor is a poet immersed in Kentucky’s history. In addition to his several collections of poetry, he has written Sue Mundy (Univ Press of Kentucky 2006), a historical novel about one of Kentucky’s notorious Civil War guerrillas and Girty (Wind, 2006), an experimental combination of poetry and prose about the life of the Revolution’s “white Indian.” With Neil O. Hammon, he has co-authored a historical study of the American Revolution in the west, Virginia’s Western War 1775-1796 (Stackpole Books, 2002).

I have talked here about sonnets as a vehicle for strong emotion, but Richard’s sonnets strike me as more quiet and philosophical. These are not “voice” poems. Impossible to do poems in the voice of Lincoln, whose words are so widely recorded and whose life is so often enacted. The point of view in these sonnets is strictly third person. We are outside, looking in. We are two centuries on, looking back at a time of high passions through the calm lens of the historian. We look not just at Lincoln but at a range of characters: Frederick Douglas, Cassius Clay, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckly, Walt Whitman. McClellan, John Wilkes Booth.

These are larger-than-life characters who talked a lot in their own right.

Richard uses his sonnets almost in the service of anecdote, of parable, of good-humored folk tale, almost in the way Lincoln himself is thought to have done. These poems don’t try to transform our view of Lincoln but they do try to show us glimpses of the real human being. The last five sonnets in the sequence, perhaps the best poems in the book, focus on our mythmaking. Poems with titles like “Theories about Who Knew Lincoln Best,” “The Shaping of an Icon,” “Losing the Diamond in the Stew,” and

The Tyranny of Myth

Lies and fabulations cling to the great of soul
like starlings to fresh excrement of crows. We thrill
in revelation, marvel at the gods we find in things,
each splinter of his natal logs a portion of The Cross.

. . . Myths father myths, Lincoln himself might
tell us, tall tales, tales taller. Truth, in the telling,
extends beyond what can with certainty be told.
The cabin he was born in was any cabin, crude,
the rails in question any that might serve to fence.

Larkspur Press has handset this limited edition book, which was then printed on a hand-fed C & P using Mohawk Superfine paper and handbound. Design, composition, printing and binding were done by Leslie Shane, Carolyn Whitesel, and Gray Zeitz. The book is decorated by wood engravings cut by Wesley Bates and printed from the wood.

Lincoln himself might have felt at home with this book designed, not just for slow reading, not by a great corporate press, but as a work of art made by common folk. Let me end this post with the last couplet in the sequence:

Lincoln, choking on “Great Captain,” might feel
more at home with “common man writ large.”

then . . . something eats the sun

I have been reading Kyrie, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s collection of dramatic monologue unrhymed sonnets about the flu epidemic of 1918. Published in 1996, this volume has become a modern classic, and I don’t think I have anything important to add to what’s been said about it. Except that it lives up to its reputation.

I did wonder why Voigt chose to use the sonnet form. Traditional sonnets are a form of argument, an if . . . then, a question and answer. It is the tension between the problem set up on the octave and the resolution set up in the sestet that gives a sonnet its energy. See for example, this famous sonnet by Milton on the subject of his blindness. Here is the question set out in the octave:

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

and here is the resolution set out in the sestet:

That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.

It overlaps a little but you see what I mean.

So why turn to a sonnet to tell a story?

One answer, of course, is that use of the sonnet form allows her not to tell the story. At least not in a full narrative sense, but rather to come at the story of this stricken community in small, intensely emotional bites.

In an interview with Steven Cramer, originally published in The Atlantic November 24, 1999, Voigt said:

The problem for the poet, I think, is to determine what structure is available to accommodate the materials the poem is going to need. I came to see a huge difference between a narrative structure and a lyric structure. The lyric, of course, has always included various parts of what we think of as story. They’re sort of “back story.” They lie behind every lyric: that sense of an utterance, a character, a voice in a particular circumstance. But with the lyric structure, the arrangement of the materials is very different.

. . . Narrative isn’t the structure I see when I look at the world.

. . . A lyric is entirely about intensity. It’s about all of it spiraling in, and holding that intensity, and not relenting.

. . . I came to suspect the orderly structure of narrative — beginning, middle, and end.

. . . In the lyric you can stop time; you pick that moment of intensity and hold it. The narrative moves through time.

So what we have in Kyrieis a medley of “voice[s] in a particular circumstance” that do not, in fact, tell the story, but rather leave the reader to experience the emotions of a story already known, at least in its broad outlines. The matrix out of which Voigt writes is formed on the tension between the necessities of narrative and the necessities of lyric.

In the interview, Voigt speaks of setting herself challenges. I rather suspect it was the challenge of Kyrie that both kept her interested and drove her craft to a higher level.

I have friends who implore me to explain why I insist on working in form, especially when writing persona poems. There is an old dictum in poetry — you should always be writing the poem you aren’t quite good enough to write. Form challenges me to find that poem, to get better at my craft.

Dissonance

The existence of Scienter Press in Louisville seems to me to be a well-kept secret. I only found out about it because I went looking for a copy of Richard Taylor’s Braintree, which they published in 2004. It’s an fine little volume in more ways than one. I talk about it here.

So when Maryann Corbett sent out a notice that her second chapbook, Dissonance, had been published by Scienter Press, I was eager to get my hands on it for two reasons. One because, having a web acquaintance with Maryann, I wanted to get to know her work. And the other was that I was curious to see another work from Scienter.

Certainly I was not disappointed with the work. Maryann’s chapbook contains 19 elegantly formal poems, a device that you might call harmonic, on the subject of dissonance.

Causes of dissonance are as diverse as divorce and the slow death of elm trees. “Bluejay, Singing”

One note—then it descends
a major third— then two.
Splashed on the ear, it blends

the feel of wet and dry.

sent me clicking through to All About Birds to discover that, indeed, jays do have a song. (I knew they squawked and mimicked hawks but not that they trilled. Now I need to listen for that in my backyard chorale.)

This yoking of dissonance with harmonies works well for Maryann. In this essay, Blank Verse and Blinders, she mentions that blank verse comes as automatically for her “as water from a spigot.”* Thus, as you might expect, her lines and sentences are relaxed. Her rhymes are also unforced, as in “After the Divorce, I Hold a Yard Sale”

They come in slowly, poker faced.
Such laying bare of earthly failings—
spread on folding tables, draped
on porch railings—

is sad and awkward . . .

But such smooth craft does not dull the poems’ edge. Rather, as in some music, the dissonance and the harmony work together. Listening to some of the tributes to Mitch Miller that have been airing this week, I am reminded that too much harmony is a bland and boring thing. As with the blues, there is a certain wryness in these poems, a catalyst to blend the harmony and dissonance.

Form in the hands of a poet as fine as Maryann Corbett is not a prettifying device, like a doily on an endtable, reducing emotion to mere rhetoric. Sometimes a sonnet is a “Fist:”

It looks like knucklebones, the way the lines
fist up in fours, each rhyme a hardened stud
under a leath glove. Or meat-fork tines.
You stab with them, the puncture holes ooze blood.

And what of the physical book? Dissonance is not as pretty as Braintree, which reproduces a bucolic woodcut on the cover and uses a font face with, now I look at it again, maybe too many curlicues for readability. (One is called Poor Richard. Too tempting.) Dissonance has an orange cardstock cover and the title looks like it’s maybe about to rub off. No decorations. I don’t think I’d buy this book for its looks. On the other hand, the font face is clear, readable, and unpretentious. I’ve seen enough of Scienter chapbooks to think the art of this book is in its plainness. Nothing here to come between the reader and the poems. The poems are enough.

__________
I wish I could say the same. My blank verse line, if you want to call it that, stumbles and lurches around like Sunday morning coming down.

The nectar in the bottom of the cup

I am not sure how a person is supposed to read a poem in Alicia Ostriker’s collection The Crack in Everything (Pitt Poetry Series, 1996) — a poem for example like “The Boys, the Broom Handle, the Retarded Girl,” and then turn a page and read another poem.

There is so much anger and pain in these poems that reading just one is difficult. Reading another and then another is devastating.

Harold Schweizer in Literature and Medicine 16.2 (1997) 273-277 considers what he calls Ostriker’s “poetics of pain” and finds redemption:

It is a redemptive, but paradoxical principle that structures the poetic vision of this book. The incurability of history, the violence of cities, the randomness of illness, the incomprehensibility of pain: these are the cracks. And while they elicit Ostriker’s warning against “the old myth that suffering is virtue” (“The Russian Army Goes into Baku,” 27), in her poem titled “The Class” the light nevertheless gets in:

Against evidence, the teacher believes
Poetry heals, or redeems suffering,
If we can enter its house of judgment.

So the redemption is in the act of poetry itself, the writing of it, the reading of it, the witness. Poetry heals the poet. The last section of this fairly long collection is titled “The Mastectomy Poems.” It’s a series of 12 meditations on Ostriker’s mastectomy, from diagnosis to a sort of tremulous reconcilation. The question here for Schweizer is:

. . . how will her own cancer speak, how will she follow its instructions?* Has she learned the lessons she wanted to teach her students? Can she decipher the hieroglyphs of pain? Can she believe against all evidence that poetry heals or redeems?

The answer I think is yes.

Tucked into all this pain are a few moments of joy. Dogs playing in the surf “For absolutely nothing but joy.” A depiction of a sweet biracial marriage called “The Vocabulary of Joy.” Right after “After Illness*” comes “Middle-Aged Woman at a Pond”

. . . This is the nectar
In the bottom of the cup,
This blissfulness in which I strip and dive.

Let my questions stand unsolved
Like trees around a pond. Water’s cold lick
Is a response. I swim across the ring of it.

A few days ago at the Green River Writers’ retreat, I picked up a copy of the latest issue of The American Poetry Review. On the back cover was a long poem, “Relax,” by Ellen Bass which incorporated a tale of a woman running from predators who goes over a cliff. She catches herself by a twig growing out of the cliff. Looking down, she sees more predators snapping at her heels. Then she sees that mice are chewing on the little plant she clings to. And, growing in a cranny in the cliff, she spies a single strawberry. I am recounting this from memory and have lost details but I did jot down the poem’s ending lines;

She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat . . .
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

Forgive me for quoting (badly) one poet to gloss another, but this is, I think where we are with Ostriker’s The Crack in Everything. We are grabbing these moments of sweetness when we can.

Suffer we all must, but as Schweizer says:

. . . Ostriker’s poems, thus, become a plea for the right to suffer and mourn in one’s own time and on one’s own terms.

____________
*A reference to an earlier poem in this collection, “After Illness,” in which the speaker has gone on retreat with a few swiftly chosen books, looking for

the mind’s gradual
Deceleration, as if I
Took my foot off the gas
And the Buick rolled to a stop.

It’s a four-page poem in three sections that ends with the poet lying on a blanket at the edge of a woods:

Hush. Quiet the mind. Leap motionless.
The Tao that can be spoken
Is not the true Tao.

. . .

Look, I’m just going to turn
Over on my back, on the blanket, nothing
Between here and the sky,

What I want
Is to listen, what I want
Is to follow instructions.

The wrecking ball swings

Haiku is a poetry form that escapes me.

Even after more than a year of more-or-less continuous practice of writing haiku-like (haiku-ish) micropoetry, I wouldn’t say I hit more than one time in ten producing anything I’d call poetry, let alone a haiku. Though my readers sometimes express appreciation for posts I’d call complete failures.

Which leads me to wonder whether there’s something I just don’t get.

I would quote about the same odds for haiku I read — about one in ten hits, fewer than that are really powerful defined by the Basho standard.

But even classic haiku sometimes leave me feeling a little so what. Issa’s famous radish haiku, for example:

Harvesting radishes,
he points the way
with a radish

It’s a small charm, like a feather. Maybe I want something heavier, something to chew over like a mouthful of taffy.

I also sometimes have problems with reading collections of haiku, whether a one-author book or a journal. It’s somewhat like eating rice cakes. (There are some notable exceptions.)

All this established, I will now tell you that I read Barry George’s Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku (Accents Publishing, 2010) with considerable delight.

I am willing to entertain that it is the urbanity of these haiku that give them an edge — you are free to read that statement at least two ways.

Maybe the urban landscape of homelessness and politics offers a fresher field.

Nevertheless it takes a keen intelligence to find turns like this:

Labor Day rally —
the candidate turns toward
the glare of autumn

followed on the facing page by

autumn field —
two sides of the same flock
taking off, landing

These two poems stand alone well enough but I love the way they play off one another. I don’t know, maybe that violates the nature of haiku but for me, it adds depth.

And, in fact, though the haiku in Wrecking Ball don’t all relate so directly one to the other, they nevertheless resonate with one another to create a portrait of city life.

Barbara Sabol interviewed Barry George at Public Republic, and I found his discussion of the form helpful. He talks about his process and the ways in which his poems both are and are not haiku.

It amazes me, sometimes, how much controversy can rage among people who write haiku about what is and is not legitimate. For myself, I don’t think I’ll ever actually try writing something I define formally as haiku, but my encounter with George has helped me clarify a bit what is going on with me when I write the micropoems.

I will give him the last word:

our culture’s appreciation of haiku has been hamstrung by the mistaken idea that their primary characteristic is seventeen (5-7-5) syllables. The fact of the matter is that the Japanese and English languages are so different that most writers and translators of haiku in English (and other Romance languages) don’t write according to any fixed syllable count.

Instead they – we – emphasize haiku’s brevity, immediacy, imagistic language, and intuitive quality as distinguishing characteristics. Furthermore, the fact that haiku’s power lies in its subtly and suggestiveness – in apprehension by intuition rather than through logical explication – makes it easy to discount in an academic culture that tends to celebrate intellectual and linguistic brilliance. What I think is probably most important, though, is a misperception that real haiku – as opposed to 5-7-5 Internet spam – is merely a highly specialized form of meditative nature-poetry. In short, people don’t realize the range of subjects, experiences, and emotions haiku can express.

As the “pioneering” haiku poet in the [Spalding MFA] program, I knew in advance that two of Spalding’s faculty members valued the Japanese short forms, but feared the rest of the faculty and my classmates might not take my work seriously. To my delight, what I encountered, instead, was a great deal of interest in and support for what I was doing. In fact, the response I received most often was something along the lines of Wow, I didn’t know that you could do so much with haiku; I didn’t know that it was such a contemporary form.

I may also dwell among the converts.

A chapbook on the level

I’ve probably made it clear here that I find Emerson difficult to read. It seems to me that he is long on words and short on meaning. Not only that, but in light of subsequent events his high-flown language and high optimism seem like so much moonshine. Take these excerpts from “The Poet”:

Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. . . . The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own patent.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. . . . For poetry was all written before time was.

It was stuff like this that discouraged me for many years from even trying to become a poet.

So when I have had too much of such bombast, it is a comfort to turn to a poet whose work is quiet and grounded. Such a poet is Dave Bonta and his Odes to Tools (Phoenicia Publishing, 2010). The twenty-five poems in this book contemplate the contents of the workshop, whimsically, philosophically, but never with self-aggrandizement.

Some samples:

from Ode to a Shovel

Digging with a shovel
always makes me hungry.
It’s too much like a spoon, I suppose,
& the soil is too close
to food here: heavy, brown,

& as full of foreign objects
as any stew.

from Ode to a Bucket

As a bucket ages,
its galvanized surface
takes on the look
of new ice — that blue-
white jigsaw puzzle —
or a flock of cranes.

Humble objects, a bucket and a shovel, as are the other tools considered here: a spirit level, a socket wrench, a hive tool. Yet it is a joy to see these simple objects through the eyes and language of this intelligence.

These poems do come from the center, and they show you where it is more convincingly than does Emerson. Makes me understand why I prefer Thoreau, a man who seemed much more grounded and aware of the world around him. After all, Dave can speak in a bit of the Emersonian style. Here he is describing how these poems came to be:

I think they were an attempt to come up with a lyrical critique of teleology — the belief that nature or history can be explained by some sort of ultimate purpose or design. Sometime in my late teens, when, like a lot of earnest young people, I was wrestling with questions about the meaning or purpose of life, it occurred to me that that line of questioning itself might be flawed, because it assumes that we are somehow tools, products of a toolmaker — someone with an ultimate plan for us. This notion, comforting as it may be to some people, fills me with dread: to think that your role in life is intrinsic, unalterable, utilitarian!

But then with these poems, I was asking, what if one actually IS a tool? Doesn’t a favorite tool often become more than just an instrument of the worker’s will?

These poems were originally posted on Dave’s blog Via Negativa, and they can be read there still. They can also be read from an image of the book through an interactive tool at the publisher’s site, where you can also hear Dave read a sampling.

So really, there is no need to buy the book. It is licensed under Creative Commons, in line with Dave’s belieft that poetry should be free for all. And yet, at the thoroughly reasonable price of $4.95 $6.95, why would you deprive yourself of the joy of this attractive volume, an artifact, a tool, in its own right. (I confess, though. I traded for mine. Dave is open to trade.)

I do want to mention that the book is written

For the veined octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) and the biologists who documented its tool-using behavior

First, you have to make oranges

I’ll be straight with you. Under ordinary circumstances I would probably not buy a book whose cover depicted a cow with a huge tongue hanging out of her mouth. But this book, called appropriately enough The Tongue (Wind 2004), has Tom C. Hunley‘s name on the cover, and I’ve been a fan of Tom’s since I first ran across one of his poems in Gumball Poetry back in spring of 2000. In fact, that poem, “How to Make Orange Juice,” is in this collection.

Here is what I said about “How to Make an Orange” back in 2000:

A very good Kentucky poet named James Baker Hall says it’s easy to tell when a piece of writing is a poem. It’s a poem if you want to hear the same words in the same order again. If you want to stop your friends and say “Listen to this!” then it’s a really good poem. “How to Make Orange Juice” is a poem I’d read to my friends. The language flows nicely off the tongue and it is original language.

So that was 10 years ago. I am about ten years more sophisticated a reader now and I think that what I said is not enough.

What I ask myself now is, why would I read this poem to my friends? And the answer is it’s not just the language, it’s the intelligence behind the language.

It’s a little quirky. It views the world from a viewpoint a little bit different.

How do you make orange juice?

It’s a trick question.

First you have to make the oranges.

Duh.

Because obviously you can’t “make” orange juice, you can only extract it.

Having made that little twist, that little jab at our flatfooted thinking, then the logical progression is

To do that, you have to become
an orange tree, which means moving
to Florida or Southern California.

Okay. That’s true. You can’t survive as an orange tree in Detroit.

But there’s another little twist, another side road taken:

If you go to San Diego, the beach
will beckon you, with its bikinis
and its waves, and you will feel the temptation

to take up surfing, which would get in the way
of becoming an orange tree. Stay focused
on your goals.

Okay, now I’m asking myself, where is this twisty path going to take me? Well, to a list of course:

. . . Visualize all things orange:
carrots bursting from the ground,
a field of poppies blossoming all
at once, like some unplanned party,

I love that one.

a haunted house peopled by jack-o-lanterns.
Eat only the orange M&M’s
in each packet. Make friends only

with redheads. Concentrate entirely
on orange juice,

Okay, we’re with the program now. But wait, there’s one more turn in this path

. . . which is not the same
as buying orange juice made from concentrate.

Ah, we’re back to the original question. How do you make orange juice? From concentrate.

But that’s so boring:

Stop looking for the easy way.

So it is with all the poetry in The Tongue: each one brings surprises, little twists and turns that make you laugh and sometimes that make you cry. And along the way, all manner of beautiful images, jazzy musical lines, and some playing with obscure forms.

As Philip Dacey says in the cover blurb,

Like a pop artist, Tom Hunley creates with bright colors and sharp lines. In the face of disaster, he responds with the kind of insouciance praised by Whitman and practiced by a Buster Keaton . . .

Tom’s other books include The Octopus, winner of the 2007 Holland Prize from Logan House Press and the delightfully named chapbook My LIfe as a Minor Character, which was co-winner of the Pecan Grove Press chapbook contest for 2003.. Tom is also the publisher of Steel Toe Books.