Sherry Chandler

Old satisfactions

from Washing Sheets in July

. . .
The sheets, wet, adhesive
as I hang them, smell
of soap and bee-filled air.

Flags of order in the palpable sun,
how they snap in the new breeze!
Watching them balloon on the line,
I swell with an old satisfaction:
I beat them clean in the Euphrates. . .

I have said that every woman poet has her clothesline poem. These lines are from Jane Gentry’s. She catches the universality of this experience, all the way back to the Euphrates.

It is, unfortunately, an image much sadder now than it was when this poem was published in 1995, though even then there was enough to regret about the area of the Euphrates.

The poem is from Jane’s first collection, A Garden in Kentucky. It was published by LSU Press. I have heard Jane say, perhaps on Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s Accents, that she sent the manuscript to LSU first, not thinking she had a chance to be published there but just because she admired their record of publishing great Southern writers. To her surprise and delight, the press accepted the manuscript. And so her first book was accepted on its first submission by her first-choice of presses.

So excellent is this collection.

I hadn’t read it since I bought my copy 15 years ago at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. I remember standing in line to get my copy signed with a handful of my old English professors from Georgetown College. I hadn’t seen them since I graduated that institution in 1970, and so the occasion was by way of a reunion. Jane was kind enough to inscribe my copy “a fellow poet,” though I had no bona fides as a poet back then except a few pitiful efforts written in Jane’s creative writing class.

For many years, my very concept of a poem was shaped by Jane Gentry.

Like Dorothy Sutton’s Backing into Mountains, A Garden in Kentucky is a book that honors the elders and mourns a loss of culture. In poems like “The Old Place, 1949,” “Grandfather Lights the Gas Stove,” and “Great-Grandfather’s Dog, High, on a Tintype,” Jane shows us the life that is gone. So many of these poems deal with death — four have “cemetery” in the title — but it is a death to rebirth, as in “Maugie’s Heaven:”

Lying deep in spring
lapped in hymns of dirt
beneath the teeth of grass,
she dreams that robins sing
their lust above her empty
house, the bed she made,
among hallelujahs of new leaves.

But love and sex have their place in this collection. Eros is there to balance out thanatos. There is, in fact, a poem entitled “Eros,” and where there is death, there is also birth. And wit, as in these lines from the poem “Susannah,” about the birth of a daughter:

A sac she’d filled
I ricocheted
around that room,
an emptying balloon,
on the loose
caroming
off the cold lights,
batter at the green-
masked faces,
riding the red jet
her body washed
from mine

As Mary Ann Taylor-Hall puts it on the back-cover blurb, the language of these poems is “both restrained and sensual.” Well, the passage above is not all that restrained, which in these deceptively quiet poems, makes its eruption even more of a delight.

Jane is as at home with the Classics as she is with the sweet smell of burley curing in the barn. And so Eros visits the poems, as does Janus, and “Telemakhos at Festival Market Thinks of His Father.”

Jane is most tender in poems of her own father, who shows up here, again and again, in elegiac poems. Here are a few lines from the long poem “For My Father.”

After Rain
He wore weather like an old sweater,
next to his skin. He watched the sky
as one searches the face of a friend.
He heard voices in the rain on the roof.
The wind spoke to him in his own breath.

Many of us here in this farming state knew this father.

I could go on and on. I’m an enthusiast. How to stop?

The book is still in print. You can buy a copy. I will let LSU’s web page take me out of this:

Stark, lovely, elegiac, gently surreal, Gentry’s poems resonate and echo in the vast spaces of the heart; long after being read, lines return, lines like those of the lovely “In the Moment of My Death (For My Father)” that beg to be memorized:

In the moment of my death
may your old happiness light my way;
and the image of your face
smiling, happy at my coming,
be a lantern in the dark.

The taste of desire, the pang of remembered loss, the sorrow of leaving a house-Jane Gentry has found a way to make these things new. A Garden in Kentucky is a place of mystery, terror, beauty, and wonder, a garden to which readers will find themselves retuning again and again.

Dorothy Sutton

Women writing in Kentucky today share two themes.

One is a loss of culture. Not nostalgia precisely, though it can look a little like it. Rather an urgency to record what was of value about the older skower ways before they disappear.

The second is an honoring of our elders, a need to record the extraordinary heroism of their ordinary lives (a phrasing I think I may have stolen from my friend Georgia Green Stamper).

In Backing Into Mountains (Wind Publications, 2009), Dorothy Sutton explores these themes with extraordinary grace, whether it be the Appalachian schoolbus drivers and mechanics of the title poem:

Your life depends on brakes and lights
up here in these Kentucky hills.
The school bus whines and groans to climb
through hollers, with creek-beds the only roads.
. . .
We try to maintain machines that can roll
without crashing, hold the young ones
back from the edge . . .

or Uncle Lester in “No Man’s Land”

One day he was husking the corn,
feeding the greedy, muddy pigs,
. . .
the next day halfway around the world
in Paris with the prostitutes of Pigalle
. . .
The next day mired in confused
trough trenches of muddy slop
. . .
the next day back in Pike County
slopping the hogs, begging the world
to stop . . .

This selection shows not only Sutton’s great compassion but also her craft: the circling around the sounds and images of pigs and slop in a way that is both humorous and heartbreaking.

Sutton explores far and wide in the matter of Kentucky, from Gorgeous George and Casey Jones to Robert Penn Warren and George Keats.

“Casey Jones” is one of my favorite poems in this collection. Having grown up in a singing/strumming family, as many of us here in Kentucky did, I love the play on the theme of this most famous of all train ballads (not to be confused with the Grateful Dead’s Casey Jones) .

We’re the children of “Casey” Jones
from Cayce, Kentucky. In 1900,
Casey Jones died trying
to find the time he’d misplaced somewhere
between Memphis and Mississippi.
. . .
They dug him out, one legend says,
one hand on the throttle, to increase his speed,
the other hand firmly gripping the brake.

Here is the central dilemma of the theme of loss of culture. We tend, us older folk in Kentucky, to come from timeless sorts of places but now we are very much caught up in the rush of time. Our roots are in the folkways, our branches embrace Richard Dawkins and Picasso.

And right about now, Uncle Lester is crying “Whoa, damn you,” not just to the mule of the twentieth century but also to that last metaphor. Both of ‘em kind of got the bits in their teeth and took off.

Here’s a much better extended metaphor, from the Richmond Register:

Dublin poet Eileen Casey said recently of Sutton’s work: “The title poem of this collection pays tribute to the tenacity of the bus drivers of Appalachia, a cultural region in the Eastern United States, forced to breathtakingly negotiate very difficult terrain. In the same way, Dorothy Sutton takes each poem (and us) from one imaginative location to another, by the sheer force of her deep and intimate knowledge of what it is to be human. The poems are exquisitely crafted, steering through words, like those Appalachian bus drivers, trying to maintain machines that can roll without crashing, hold the young ones back from the edge, carry them all the places they need to go. These poems are a joy to read, in terms of capturing the cadences of lives lived and voices heard in the Kentucky of her childhood, different and yet the same as mine in Ireland. An emotional bridge is formed between Kentucky and the rest of the world, indeed a breathtaking reading experience.”

Dorothy Sutton is reading this Tuesday, March 9, at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning’s Kentucky Great Writer series. It’s an evening to celebrate Wind Publications. Her fellow readers are J. Stephen Rhodes, author of The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (my remarks here) and Normandi Ellis, author of Fresh-Fleshed Sisters. The festivities begin with open mic signups at 6:30, featured readings begin at 7:30.

Blood simple

Every now and then over the past several years, when I have cried out “I need escape reading,” my husband has proffered me a copy of Dashiell Hammet’s Red Harvest.

And I’ve always said some version of “I’m not that desperate.”

Published in 1929, Red Harvest is the granddaddy of what you might call American bloodbath fiction. It is the story of a man with no name, known only as the Continental Op, who goes into a town called “Poisonville” and triggers a gang war in which all the baddies kill one another off.

This same plot, more or less, also drives Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, and Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing. The Coen Brother’s Blood Simple takes its title from one of the Op’s lines

This damned burg’s getting me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.

Since I have enjoyed most, if not all, of these movies, there is some argument that my cultural education is incomplete if I refuse to read the source material.

That seems like a good enough reason to give for the fact that this week I finally gave over and read the thing.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett worked for the Pinkertons through some pretty rough stuff between 1915 – 1921, especially their strikebreaking activities. He was possibly himself the model for his most famous detective, Sam Spade.

Certainly the Continental Op has more in common with Humphrey Bogart than with men like Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis. In Red Harvest, the Op describes himself as 40 years old, about 5′ 6″, weighing 190 pounds, and not really in shape to walk several blocks.

Hammet served in both World Wars and there’s no doubt that, having worked for the Pinkertons, he had some knowledge of the mean streets. After 1934, he gave up writing and became a left-wing activist. He spent time in prison and was blacklisted for his activities and his refusal to testify to more than his own activities.

Hammett was not highly educated but he’s a great stylist. Red Harvest is lean and quick-moving and there’s none of the male sentimentality in it that I sometimes see in Hammett’s followers, like RAymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. At Time magazine. Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo included it on a list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 to 2005, along with The Great Gatsby, The Invisible Man, and Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret.

So it’s a very readable novel, engaging in the beginning. (The version I read was published by Vintage Crime in 1989.) But the more I read, the less interested I became. The novel isn’t really about solving a mystery. It’s more like the old Renaissance revenge dramas, something by Thomas Kyd or Kit Marlowe. For all the theme goes all the way back to Seneca, it’s not a genre I’ve ever cared much for, Hamlet being the exception that proves the rule.

And by the time we get to the final puzzle — did the Op do it? — and the dying man’s confession, the suspension on my disbelief is completely sprung. The explanation is rigged and silly.

(Added: I do have to say somewhere in here that the Op has qualms about the violence he has unleashed. He is not blood-simple. And because of the violence, he is compromised and loses what you might call the moral high ground if you spoke in such clichés. His position becomes ambiguous.)

Good enough for whiling away a rainy afternoon. Not as nuanced as The Maltese Falcon (but there I may be influenced by the Bogart performance). Not as contrived as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I wouldn’t put it on the same list with The Sound and the Fury and Mrs. Dalloway.

A formalista valentine

Cover art: A Cabillero Valentine by M. Styborksi

Valentine
      (After Kate Light’s “Saf-T-Man”)

I never handed over my whole heart,
although I gave you use of one big chunk.
Indulge imagination. Let’s depart
from romantic ideals of self-sacrificial bunk,
my former Valentine: honeyed words, inside
a private envelop that cuts the tongue . . .
— Robin Kemp, from This Pagan Heaven

I confess. I wanted to talk to you about Robin Kemp’s This Pagan Heaven (Pecan Grove Press, 2009) on this particular day just so I could use a snippet of her anti-Valentine sonnet.

Robin was born in New Orleans (on Mardi Gras day, which, that being a movable feast, tells us both much and little) and I first “met” her during the Katrina disaster. I later met her in the flesh at West Chester, where she is known to hang out with others of her persuasion — a type of poet one might call post-modern formalists. Or even feminist formalists. Robin is listowner of Formalista, a list dedicated to women who work in form.

“Owning” such a list is a political move. Many strongly feminist poets think women should eschew form because of its association with the dead white European males of the literary canon. But then Robin is an activist poet and many of the poems in This Pagan Heaven are political. The title “Pantoum for Ari Fleischer” might be a give-away.

Formalista, with its overtones of subversion, is an appropriate term for Robin. She uses the sonnet to satiric purpose throughout this, her first collection, on subjects of love. politics, and “The Lady Poet’s Auxiliary.” Okay, that last one is not a sonnet, but with its rhymed couplets and triplets, it is very formal.

Meanwhile have you used your mind today?
We caught and candied it so it would stay:
Remember, you’re a girl. So write that way.

Stil the heart of This Pagan Heaven is a series of poems about New Orleans, the pagan heaven of the title, during and after Katrina. Robin is a fierce poet, she looks right at things, especially in the ten-page, nine-part jazzy free verse poem called “Bodies”

3.

yellow plastic butterfly barrettes
floating in dirty brown water
their pigtails dangling below
growing into the scalp
of a girl floating face down
at the corner of Piety and St. ______

“this is my south”

where is this baby’s mama?
where is this baby’s Officer Friendly?
where is this baby’s National Guard?
where is this baby’s America?

And I have to quote section 9:

will the last President to leave New Orleans
please leave the lights on?

For all its fierceness, the collection also contains tender poems of love, like “Dreaming of your Hair” and “Kissing in the Carwash” and tributes to nature, like “The Pelican Sonnet” and “Red Moon,” a poem about watching an eclipse of the moon.

My favorite love poem is in rhymed couplets, “Moving the Rose,” which has as its subject not only Robin’s long-term commitment to her partner but also their removal to Atlanta, an inland place where they have to learn how to live.

Roses do not do well close to house,
our Georgia guide to gardening discloses:

. . .

We have to move the new, still-healthy rose
before it enters some corrupted phase.
You dig around the base, I hold its tendrils
stretched overhead, two green canes thin as pencils.
Teamwork, mujer. Roots settle in new loam.
Together we bear the living away from home.

Turning birds into words

I’m holding in my hand a small chapbook by James Brush called a gnarled oak. This chapbook is a very limited edition. James published a few copies himself to give as gifts and I snagged a copy by the time-honored ploy of asking for one.

It’s a classy looking little book, just plain white paper but with some of the sharpest black and white photos I’ve seen. They’re almost pellucid in their use of light — and the same adjective could be used to describe the micropoems in this chapbook.

These poems are from James’s micropoetry blog a gnarled oak, “where birds turn into words.” I love that subtitle. The poems are cross-posted at identi.ca, where I “met” James.

a gnarled oak includes four seasons of poems that James wrote as a daily meditation on what he observed walking neighborhood trails in and around Austin. James says:

My favorite neighborhood trail follows a north-running stream down to a pond. There are ducks in winter, herons in summer, and songbirds year-round. Besides birds, I’ve watched snakes, deer, rabbits, turtles, and butterflies going about their business. There’s also a Red-shouldered Hawk who likes to pose but doesn’t want his picture taken.

In January, I started doing weekly counts to see what birds we have and when they’re around. As of now, I’ve recorded almost sixty species. In addition to birding, I wrote haiku and haiku-like poems to add substance to my observations and also as a way of focusing and paying closer — deeper — attention to the wild lives going on all around.

The result is a gift to us all, because — though the chapbook a gnarled oak is a very limited edition — the micropoetry blog a gnarled oak is there for us all to read.

Hard to excerpt micropoems, so I’ll just give you the full text of one of my favorites and hope I have James’s blessing:

Goldfinches and sparrows
hold still as statues;
A falcon has stopped time.

James also blogs and posts longer poems at Coyote Mercury. He has self-published his novel, A Place Without a Postcard He writes about the decision to self-publish here.

Appreciation

A friend has drawn my attention to Poets’ Quarterly, and I in turn would like to point you in that direction. This recently launched online publication features interviews and reviews of books and chapbooks. From their “about” page:

Poets’ Quarterly publishes in-depth reviews of poetry books and chapbooks, recognizing new works from both emerging and established poets. The interview series aims to showcase the overall scope of work poets contribute to their society. Through these avenues, Poets’ Quarterly aims to emphasize the importance of poetic contributions to the literary community – and the community-at-large – and to recognize both the diversities and commonalities expressed through this art form.

And from their guidelines page:

Also, please note, Poets’ Quarterly has no interest in overtly negative reviews. If you don’t care for a book, there’s no obligation to submit a review for it. There are far too many quality books deserving of our readers’ attention; while we offer critical analyses and ask questions, Poets’ Quarterly prefers to only cover books we want our readers to seek out. There simply isn’t enough time or space to cover anything less than a recommended book/poet.

The current issue contains reviews by poets whose work I know, including Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Penelope Scambly Schott, Patricia Smith, and Scott Owens. And some familiar names also show up on the contributors’ list. So I think it’s well worth a look.

My friend sent me the link because she knows I write reviews and she thought it might be a good venue for me. And so it might. I certainly like their philosophy.

I have published reviews in magazines in the past (and you can find links to them in the nav bar above the header), but I’ve backed off the practice of sending reviews out. I experienced several frustrations with getting reviews published. For one thing, a number of publications limit reviews to about 500 words, and that’s constraining. And then we all know that response times are slow and most authors would like reviews of their new books to be timely. I would like that, provided I ever have a new book to be reviewed.

But the thing that really stopped me was my experience with Rain Taxi. I admire Rain Taxi and for a while I harbored an ambition to be one of their stable of reviewers. I submitted to them several times and I found them to be responsive and even receptive to my work.

But there was always a catch, and most often the catch was conflict of interest. My relationship to the poet I was reviewing was too close. My objectivity was questionable.

I admire this integrity, and thinking about it, I had to admit that the editors at Rain Taxi are right. For the most part, I don’t write objective reviews. I write appreciations of work I’ve sought out, either because I know the poet or share a publisher or a discussion list with the poet.

Like the editors at Poets’ Quarterly, I see no reason to be negative about work. I try to understand what the poet is doing and talk about where I think s/he has succeeded. In some venues, this would be looked upon as a sort of extended blurbing but it’s the way I operate.

For one thing, I’m not confident of my scholarship or my taste that I would want to go negative on somebody’s work. And for another, I know how much hard work goes into writing a book of poetry and how little reward there is in it.

And anyway, I promised myself a long time ago, when I started to put myself out in the world as a poet, that I would always practice generosity.

So I put my reviews on my blog where I can say what I want at whatever length I want and if there’s conflict of interest, well it’s my blog. That’s all about every Joe Schmoe or Jane Doe mouthing off about things they don’t really understand, right?

But go read Poets’ Quarterly.

What is redeemed by life?

David Harrity’s Finishing Line chapbook, Morning & What Has Come Since (2007), contains a jewel of a sonnet “Hail Mary in the Courtyard,” which seem to me to cut to the heart of Harrity’s work here. Standing before the statue, the speaker asks:

. . . I wonder if your words
fall like marbles from the pocket of some
boy, roll into the burnt grass, never found.

This sonnet follows a long, multi-part poem entitled “Prayers for the City” which begins

This place is a blanket of sound.
How can we pray? How can we pray?

and ends

City you are loved,
      city, you are loved,
             city, you are loved
                        so I lift my voice
                                  to keep asking what you cannot.

Harrity’s poems wrestle with faith in a way that harks back, not to Donne — whose work really seems to me to be all about Donne and how clever he can be — but to Herbert and Hopkins.

In “October Psalm”

I ask the words I cannot pray.
I ask again—what is redeemed
by my living?

Although I find the poems a little uneven — as what poets are not? — I invite you to keep an eye on Harrity and to take a look at this chapbook, which was nominated for a Pushcart and a Kentucky Literary Award.