Sherry Chandler

Leatha Kendrick writes poetry of such authority that she can tackle the big subjects, from breast cancer to war, without ever seeming shrill or off center.

If I may be allowed an odd sort of comparison, it’s like what I was saying earlier about Sidney Poitier. Poitier can portray characters who are angry or wounded, he may see great trouble and experience great pain, but he is an actor of such self-possession and surety, such innate dignity, that you never doubt but that the core of his person is honest and true.

Leatha Kendrick’s poetry is like that: centered and true at the core.

I am a poet known for edginess. People seem to like a certain kind of assertiveness. They mistake it for courage. In Second Opinion (David Robert Books, 2008), Kendrick moves beyond mere edginess to the great grief that lies behind it. Though she can do edgy with the best of ‘em.

Take this passage from “No Reason” [p. 10]

…
Here we all are hanging
our wounds out to dry, trying to speak
truth to power, as the Quakers say,
while the world goes on,
being exactly what it is.
Somewhere an artist is trying to top Alba,
the green neon rabbit, coaxing some genetic designer
into inserting a jellyfish’s
phosphorescence
into, perhaps, a peacock this time,
and somewhere else men sit
in solitary cages, making poetry to stay sane, writing
with a cracked thumbnail on anything soft, and
women sit by hospital beds
for months,
years, filled with longing

for the ordinary. A boy
learns to build a bomb and a young man learns
to bathe his new baby. They each know
how to laugh. Sometimes
they’re happy
for no reason at all.

This poem moves in and out from the personal to the political, showing that they are all part of the same thing, even the fiddling with life for commercial purposes, and showing it all to us with a great tenderness.

And underlying Kendrick’s worldview is an irrepressible sense of humor, a sense of free play that Stephen Nachmanovitch calls “the imp.” So from “Hey Bud:”

pal comrade life
waiting in its sheath for time
to pull it out pet sweetie
doll you called me while
I smiled and hated it
kewpie barbie raggedy
ann baby baby I’m not your bud curled
leaflet blossom bit tucked in under
your cozy armpit…
my bestbudloverfriend oh
that sweet soil that is flesh that
penis budtip root unfurling hey… [p. 8]

The poems in Second Opinion are mostly written in a crisp free verse, though many have what Roethke would maybe recognize as “the ghost … of blank verse behind what is written,” but Kendrick makes the occasional foray into received forms (”Recycled,” a sestina, “Ghazal for the State of the Union”) and even, in “The Calculus of a Cracked Cup,” a shaped poem. Kendrick is comfortable with experimentation, with what one might call stretching her poetic wings.

In her Courier-Journal review of Second Opinion, George Ella Lyon mentions that Leatha Kendrick was told she had breast cancer almost exactly one year before the disaster that we call 9/11. Two such events in proximity would daunt even the strongest of us. And while I would not say that Kendrick was undaunted, in Second Opinion she looks at both of these events without flinching.

In the title poem, Kendrick shows herself in the radiology waiting room, flanked by her three daughters, and in this place of anxious waiting, they are laughing:

The receptionist gives us a hard look when we laugh.
We’re linked, silvery with a happiness
glinting out even in this waiting place.
I finger the necklace I’ve just bought, touch
the curative moonstone, murmuring “hope”—
I want to believe in sudden remission,
in some way to avert what we are certainly
headed for. What I can believe in
is the healing of their fingers laced through mine.

This is the essence of Leatha Kendrick. She tells us we can face disaster with joy and laced fingers. She is like Naomi Nye in her generosity of spirit.

At Windows Toward the World, Helen Losse featured this quote from Henry Nouwen:

Nobody escapes being wounded. We all are wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not “How can we hide our wounds?” so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but “How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?” When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.

Kendrick’s poetry work offers her wounds in our service.

A Cure for All Diseases by Reginald Hill

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

This semi-epistolary novel is a re-telling of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, Sanditon, as a detective novel. As a gimmick, it’s pretty amusing, though I’d guess the number of people who have read Sanditon is small indeed.

Beyond that, the novel offers Hill’s usual cast of characters: Andy Dalziel, Peter Pascoe, Edgar Wield, and the nemesis Frannie Roote. They blend in well with the resort town characters “rescued” from Austen.

Hill is an intelligent writer who seems to be having fun with the English literary tradition in all his books.

It’s a good read. Maybe not the very best of the Dalziel/Pascoe novels.

View all my reviews.

Trying out this widget that lets me post my GoodReads reviews to my blog. I am not the real Hill fan on this blog and I leave it to, in fact invite, Poppysmatus to give us his take on the novel.

Meanwhile, here is also my GoodReads review of Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife:

Late Wife: Poems by Claudia Emerson

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a clean even eloquent collection of poems that somehow didn’t move me as much as it ought to have. I am willing to admit the fault to be in myself. Sometimes wonderful books come to us at the wrong time.

The book has three sections: Divorce Epistles, Breaking Up the House, and Late Wife. The last section, mostly loosely rhymed sonnets, is haunted by the ghost of the lover’s late wife. This is the section that spoke most to me, though I read it in a noisey cafeteria.

For a long time there would be the small
resurfacing of things you had forgotten
to throw away, or ceased to see at all.
These returned her, not to you, but to me
the way I had seen a spider unknot itself…
– from “Corrective”

View all my reviews.

Long time ago, back in July, a couple of poets considered The Collected Poems, 1956-1998 of Zbigniew Herbert, which had just come out. The issue was that Herbert’s longtime translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter, had not been invited to do this translation. Instead the job had been given to an unknown, Alissa Valles.

Michael Hofmann, writing in Poetry, did not like this decision at all. He articulates his unhappiness in detail. David Orr, witing in the NYTimes is more circumspect.

I have very little knowledge of Herbert and can’t form an opinion of my own but I was interested in the questions the reviews raised about translating. So I pulled the quote, which has been sitting here all this time, waiting for me to get my thoughts together about it.

I had a distracted fall.

But here’s what I had in mind to say.

Hofmann reads no Polish, and yet he had very strong ideas about what made Herbert great based on the Carpenter translations. He makes a very good case that the Carpenters write better poetry but do they give us the real Herbert?

How can we know?

Here is what Orr had to say:

Still, Herbert wrote many poems; mistakes are to be expected. And as always, the central difficulty for any translator lies in conveying words and concepts that lack true analogues in our language. In such cases, is the literal meaning best? Or what you think the poet might have said if he were an English speaker? To understand how complicated these questions can be, consider “On the Road to Delphi.” In this short prose poem, Apollo is shown idly toying with the severed head of Medusa while repeating a particular line. In Polish, that line is “Sztukmistrz musi zglebic okrucienstwo,” to which a Polish-English dictionary offers this translation: “A performer must get to the bottom of cruelty.” The Carpenters, however, render the line: “A craftsman must probe to the very bottom of cruelty.” “Craftsman” is surprising, but it makes a certain sense — the poem is exploring the old idea of art as an essentially coldhearted activity (as Yeats said, “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death”), and Herbert has deliberately avoided the Polish word for “artist” (“artysta”) in favor of “sztukmistrz,” which means “performer, juggler, conjuror.” In doing so, Herbert is emphasizing the side of art that has to do with performance for its own sake — by extension, he’s pointing out the chill at the core of technical excellence. So “craftsman” may help bring that aspect of the poem into English.

But it isn’t what Herbert said. Which is perhaps why Valles gives the same line as “a conjuror must plumb the depths of cruelty.” Aside from “plumb the depths,” which is overdone, this version is almost certainly a better word-for-word translation. But it doesn’t make much sense in English, probably because the figure of the traveling magician doesn’t figure prominently in American consciousness. Consequently Valles’s version, while accurate, has the unfortunate effect of making the casual reader think of David Blaine. Talk about plumbing the depths of cruelty.

So if translation is always a matter of approximating, does it matter that Herbert’s “Collected Poems” has its weaknesses? Well, yes: after death, a translated poet may, as Auden said, become his admirers, but only after he’s become a poet in English who’s interesting enough to attract admirers in the first place. Herbert is now a complete poet in English, and he’s not as strong as he should be.

Here is strong language from Anthony Lewis writing in the New York Review of Books onlline. The book is Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. The subject is Bush vs Gore:

The Court found a denial of the constitutional principle of equal protection of the laws in the fact that counties were recounting votes in different ways. It was a decision that defied reason, since plainly the most equitable way to determine the Florida vote accurately was to recount it everywhere, not to stop where it was being recounted. It was also a decision without legal precedent. Justice Kennedy in his opinion said the legal reasoning was “limited to the present circumstances.” In other words, as another justice said years ago, the decision was like a restricted railroad ticket, “good for this day and this train only.”

In my judgment the Court did not even have legal jurisdiction to consider the case, because there was no federal legal issue. The Constitution leaves the counting of votes to the states, and a statute commits challenges finally to the judgment of Congress. Toobin describes the Court’s conduct as “inept and unsavory” and says the justices displayed “vanity, overconfidence, impatience, arrogance, and simple political partisanship.”

Was it pure politics? The justices may have reasoned to themselves, and believed, that they were acting in the national interest—to protect the country from being leaderless during a long election contest. But would they have come to the same conclusion if Al Gore had led by a few hundred votes and had sued to stop a Bush-sought recount? I doubt it.

The country quietly accepted the decision in Bush v. Gore, liking it or not. At the time I thought that was right. We have to be able to look somewhere for finality, and in our system that is the Supreme Court. Today I am not quite so sure. More vocal protest against a lawless decision might have been better for the country and the Court.

Also this:

Judging by what he has done on the Court, John Roberts is a committed legal conservative: not an originalist like Scalia or Thomas but someone determined to read the law and the Constitution to achieve conservative ends. But why would he be in such a hurry? One possible answer is that, given the makeup of the Court, he sees an opening right now to move the law toward what the conservative movement wants, in matters like abortion and affirmative action, and you never know whether that opening will last.

There is another possible explanation for the chief justice’s single-mindedness. He was a litigator in his legal life before he went on the bench, someone who (unlike most lawyers) argued cases in court. He was an exceptionally brilliant one. Litigators have to have a high level of competitiveness. They want to win. Everything they hear and learn is devoted to building their side of a case. They do not have the experience of an officeholder or legislator, who must listen to many viewpoints, or the reflectiveness of a scholar.

In the end the Supreme Court is what presidents make it by their appointments. The framers intended that: presidential appointment was the link of a remote institution to political democracy.

“Presidents pick justices to extend their legacies,” Toobin says. “By this standard, George W. Bush chose wisely.” Future presidents can include in their legacies a concern to rebuild the legal principles on which the Court based its decisions in such cases as Lawrence v. Texas and Grutter v. Bollinger. If we want a different Supreme Court, we have to pay attention to that issue in electing a president.

Much Appalachian poetry tends toward the nostalgic and the defensive. How could it not, when so much has been lost? And when the region has been treated as a national joke? Still these characteristics don’t always make for good poetry.

In Meditation Upon the Invisible Ceremony of Breath (Finishing Line, 2007), Rebecca Bailey has integrated the stuff of Appalachia into a sort of New Age/age-old mysticism mixed with a mountain Zen. Her nostalgia is not just for Granny but for the granny woman: the one who delivered the babies and cured with herbs and knew a little magic, like how to remove warts or witch water. It is these women, the crone aspect of the Triple Goddess, the moon, the earth, that she reaches out for.

She remembers

…Everything imagined and unimagined,
logical and irratrional, nestled, waiting, in the crooks of
           ridges and hollows.

I remember smelling it. I smell it sometimes now.
—from “What I Learned from Grandma Bailey

The grandmother in this chapbook is an invocation of the earth spirit:

Coffee is the way to call the old gods.
Brew as black as Earth…

I call my mother’s ancestors with the patchwork quilt.
O Grandmother, put your arms around me now
and dance with me…
— from “Invocation of the Grandmother”

There is little that is gentle in Bailey’s hills, though there is wild joy:

I say I am of the ground.
I am made from no man’s rib,
but from a giant thigh of redrock
twisted into a gnarled maze indecipherable
by anything as superficial as intellect.
You have to understand rock and dirt,
ground, with the soles of your feet…
— from “Grounded”

And there is ecological disaster everywhere. As, for example, in “The Devil Comes to Rose Fork”

But then the devil came down from the ridge top,
to tap me on the shoulder
as I looked down the well box
because sludge was coming out of the faucets…

or in my favorite poem in the collection “Birth of the River God:”

He sent his maddening brown hair
across the scrappy gravels of the road
the Sunday after my father returned to earth.
His wet hair grabbed tree trunks
and swung crazily, mercilessly,
through low places. Love, he says,
is like water for it flows into the
lowest places and judges not.

Love — of place and family — is of the earth in this collection. Sorrow is of the earth. It is wild but beautiful.

Fred Smock has published a very nice review of Leslie Shane’s haiku collection, Point of Rock (Larkspur Press, 2007), in last Saturday’s Courier-Journal:

These days, a book of haiku is an especially welcome gift to the spirit. We live in an age of excess — of spending, wasting, killing. Haiku poetry practices a strict economy, and it is a model of careful, respectful attention paid to the natural world. Shane works in the classical Asian mode: poems about nature, in a 5/7/5 syllable count, with often a surprise or clever turn in the last line.

“You can write poetry without being able to write haiku, but you can’t write haiku without being able to write poetry,” observes James Baker Hall in his foreword.

Shane is well-practiced in the art.

My review of Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s chapbook Unbound & Branded is up at Rattle E-Reviews. This Finishing Line chapbook, like Joanie DiMartino’s Licking the Spoon, is a good example of how to use this short form for a tight collection of poems on a single subject.

I hope you enjoy the review and I would recommend the chapbook. As are all of Finishing Line’s books, it is well made and attractive.

While you’re over at Rattle, read the other E-Reviews. They range from A. R. Ammons to d’bi.young.

The NYTimes (or at least Virginia Hefferman) loves Kevin Kline and so do I:

Mr. Kline delivers Jaques’s beloved “All the world’s a stage” soliloquy to images of nature and the sound of chirping birds. (A lion later intrudes in a scene between Orlando and Oliver; nature is fully incorporated into stagecraft here.) This is odd, and it misuses Mr. Kline, who seems unable ever to hit a false note. As a thoroughgoing depressive here, he brings some clairvoyance to melancholy, which suits him.

Mr. Kline has, without fanfare, become a kind of elder statesman of American acting, with no taint on him. His face is so kindly and his voice so unforced that viewers can’t help wanting the satisfaction of seeing him cover the big hits; it’s not fair to deny us his face during this speech.

Kenneth Branagh, however, does not love Rosalind and so has cut Ron Howard’s daugher’s part in his production that airs tonight on HBO.

“She does go on a bit,” Mr. Branagh said, blandly explaining his resizing of the part to a reporter for The Los Angeles Times.

Alas! I have no cable. Not that I often regret this. And I don’t seem to be alone. According to Harry Shearer, about 20% of the country still grabs its television programming from the air waves.

Still I’d like to see this production if only to see Kevin Kline do Jacques. It also has Brian Blessed, whom I have loved since his days playing Augustus in I, Claudius.

Maybe it will be offered by Netflix later on.

Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak (Univ Iowa Press), reviewed by Dan Chiasson:

“The Detainees Speak” is this book’s subtitle: but putting aside the real question of whether lyric poets ever “speak” through their art, in the sense of revealing a historical person’s actual life story (they have rarely done so through poetry’s long history, and often poets “speak” least revealingly precisely when they claim to be telling the truth), in what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by “linguists with secret-level security clearance” but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale — “speak”?

Given these constraints, a better subtitle might have been “The Detainees Do Not Speak” or perhaps “The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak.” But the best subtitle, I fear, would have been “The Pentagon Speaks.”

Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press), reviewed by Janet Maslin:

The abundant doomsday plotlines in “The World Without Us” make it a useful conversation piece, if a grim one. Traveling down many different avenues of scientific research, Alan Weisman postulates the complete disappearance of mankind from planet Earth. Then he extrapolates about what would happen without us. By his estimate most of our leavings would rot and crumble; much of our damage would take eons to undo. There’s one tiny bit of good news. Depleted sea species might recover if we would do them a favor and go away.

Over all, this book paints a punishingly bleak picture. Entries in its index indicate the scope of its pessimism. For instance: “Birds, plate glass picture windows and”; “Central Park, coyotes in”; “Earth, final days”; “Embalming, arsenic and”; “Human race, robots and computers as replacements”; “Great Britain’s shoreline, rubbish along”; “PCBs, and hermaphroditic polar bears.” “Dessication,” “Meltdowns” and “Slash-and-burn” also play their roles here.

Mr. Weisman speaks to the darkest parts of our collective imagination as well as some of the strangest. Consider the lowly exfoliant. These lotions contain tiny plastic particles that are meant to scrub. But they wind up fulfilling other purposes, like clogging the innards of the tiny sea creatures that ingest them. This book cites research on bottom-feeding lugworms, barnacles and sand fleas as evidence of the damage the particles do. All three species became terminally constipated from ingesting this man-made microlitter.

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking), reviewed by Luc Sante:

Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated — merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. The scroll is slightly longer than the novel as it was finally published, after three subsequent conventionally formatted drafts, in 1957. The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product, though, is that while we know “On the Road” as a novel — the great novel of the Beat Generation — the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary.

Billy Collins, in the introduction to Best American Poetry 2006 (Scribner 2006):

Once Walt Whitman demonstrated that poetry in English could get along without standard meter and end-rhyme, poetry began to lose that familiar gait and musical jauntiness that listeners and readers had come to identify with it. But poetry also lost something more: a trust system that had bound poet and reader together through the reliable recurrence of similar sounds and a steady dependable beat. Whatever emotional or intellectual demands a poem placed on the reader, at least the reader could put trust in the poet’s implicit promise to keep up a tempo and maintain a sound pattern. It’s the same promise that is made to the listeners of popular songs. What has come to replace this system of trust; if anything? However vague a substitute, the answer is probably tone of voice. As a reader, I come to trust or distrust the authority of the poem after reading just a few lines. Do I hear a voice that is making reasonable claims for itself—usually a first-person voice speaking fallibly but honestly—or does the poem begin with a grandiose pronouncement, a riddle, or an intimate confession foisted on me by a stranger? Tone may be the most elusive aspect of written language, but our ears instantly recognize words that sound authentic and words that ring false. (p. xxii)

Answered by The Constant Critic:

Picking on the Best American Poetry series is like shooting a fish in a barrel. Picking on the Best American Poetry series as edited by Billy Collins is like shooting a minnow in a shotglass.

So despite the fact that the subsequent criticism doesn’t even really require Rocket Science Powers and can be more graphically appreciated via the brutally, brilliantly maladaptive cartoons of Jim Behrle, I’m going to criticize anyway, because I want to clarify the distinction between judgment and taste and demonstrate the potentially degrading consequences of pretending that the latter can ever replace the former, even if the former does in part depend on the latter…

Collins then commences to assemble a shaky approximation of argument as to why his tastes are, in fact, something more than a peevish expression of his own private literary utopia. The term on which his standard seems to hinge is voice, even though he never bothers to qualify or explore what voice is, or how it might operate. Like a biblical seer or pyramid-scheme confidence man, Collins simply trusts that those who have ears to hear will do so, and assumes that for those who do not “speak” to him the fault is theirs alone, and no prejudice or inadequacy on his part. He is thus happy and comfortable to report that he would reject a poem because “he failed to hear a human voice speaking,” all the while knowing that what he describes as a “failure” is in fact a patronizingly polite way of declaring unworthy the poem he’s allegedly failed. Elsewhere, he explicitly pines for “the recognizable sound of a human voice…” and finally defines his “process” as characterized by the following question: “Do I hear a voice that is making reasonable claims for itself—usually a first person voice speaking fallibly but honestly – or does the poem begin with a grandiose pronouncement, a riddle, or an intimate confession foisted on me by a stranger? Tone may be the most elusive aspect of written language, but our ears instantly recognize words that sound authentic and words that ring false.” Would that we had ears of such surpassing precision and wisdom! Our poetry might be as bland as Collins hopes, but our political culture would be much improved. Fortunately and un-, the belief is false.

And yet, despite narrowing the range of his taste to admit what is, essentially, only one kind of poem, Collins insists that the poems he’s chosen represent the art as a “wild hodgepodge of verbal activity” and reassures us that he is … “bored by poems that are transparent from beginning to end…”, thereby implying that we won’t find any of those poems in the following pages, no sirree, only wildness of the varieties both hodge and podge.

Okay, okay, I know all this is old news. But I’m just now getting around to reading it. I haven’t yet read the poems — from the TOC, I figure they’re probably “some fairly decent poems” with no great surprises. But the introduction strikes me as it strikes the Constant Critic — as patronizing. Collins, to quote the Critic again, opines that most poetry (he even estimates a literal percentage) is crap, and hoping against hope that those from whom such crap issues will take it upon themselves to shut the f*** up.

Not that I think all poems are created equal, by any means. But if you are going to tell me that I’d be better off learning to tat lace doilies, I want the advice to be based on something more than your (no doubt superior) taste.