Sherry Chandler

Yeats has been digitized at the National Library of Ireland, and reading about it yesterday in the NYTimes lent a certain irony to my opening my volume of Seamus Heaney’s Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995) to his lecture on Yeats and Philip Larkin, “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin.”

The irony, a very mild one to be sure, is that Heaney presents Yeats as a poet over against science in the sense intended by Czelaw Milosz:

As Czeslaw Milosz has observed, no intelligent contemporary is spared the presssure exerted in our world by the void, the absurd, the anti-meaning, all of which are part of the intellectual atmosphere we subsist in; and yet Milosz notices this negative pressure only to protest against a whole strain of modern literature which has conceded victory to it. Poetry, Milosz pleads, must not make this concession but maintain instead its centuries-old hostility to reason, science and a science-inspired philosophy. [Heaney, p. 153]

Heaney contrasts Larkin’s “Aubade” with Yeats’s “Cold Heaven,” both poems confronting the inevitability of death, and gives the laurels to Yeats.

The ghost upon the road, the soul’s destiny in the afterlife, the consequences in eternity of the individual’s actions in time — traditional concerns like these are profoundly relevant to “Cold Heaven” and they are also, of course, typical of the things which preoccupied Yeats for the whole of his life. Whether it was fairy lore in Sligo or Buddhism with the Dublin Hermetic Society or spiritualist séances or Noh dramas which imagined the adventures of Cuchulain’s shade in the Land of the Dead, Yeats was always passionately beating on the wall of the physical world in order to provoke an answer from the other side. His studies were arcane, his cosmology was fantastic and yet his intellect remained undeluded. [pp 149-150]

Well, perhaps after all it is appropriate that Yeats should become virtual. It is sort of the nerd’s version of resurrection.

I myself have been wrestling with a poem lately, on a much lower plane than either Yeats or Larkin of course, that confronts death and whether one will be able to carry through to the end with some dignity and courage. I am not quite ready to say, with Larkin:

…Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

There’s something to be said for “not scaring others” if you love them, but let that go.

Neither am I comfortable, after years of having religious fundamentalism oppose science to our great peril, with the notion that poetry must be hostile to reason and science. A poet like Linda Bierds finds much poetry in science itself, and while I don’t find myself at home in her work, I can recognize its worth. As Gregor Mendel could be both monk and scientist, so perhaps can a poet be both poet and rationalist (without going over to the dark side like Larkin).

I think I understand why a poet like Milosz would feel that way he does. I have read his essays in Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983) and I think I understand that he was reacting to the nihilism that struck Europe in the period between the two world wars and in the post WWII period. But the pendulum has swung too far the other way and now we can see that “belief” can be as absurd and anti-meaning as “reason.”

But let Heaney continue:

Rational objections were often rationally allowed by [Yeats], if only to be imaginatively and rhetorically overwhelmed. Yeats’s embrace of the supernatural, in other words, was not at all naïve; he was as alive as Larkin to the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death, but he deliberately resisted the dominance of the material over the spiritual.
…
Yet it is because of Yeats’s fidelity to both perceptions and his refusal to foreclose on either that we recognize in him a poet of the highest attainment. [pp. 150, 151]

It’s a middle way we see Heaney praise here, not one that rejects reason but one that refuses to be cowed by it. Because

…I have repeatedly tried to establish through several different readings and remarks in the course of these lectures…that the goal of life on earth, and of poetry as a vital factor in the achievement of that goal, is what Yeats called in “Under Ben Bulben” the “profane perfection of mankind.”

In order to achieve that goal, therefore, and in order that human beings bring about the most radiant conditions for themselves to inhabit, it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a print-out of the given circumstances of its time and place. The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them. …The world is different after it has been read by a Shakespeare or an Emily Dickinson or a Samuel Beckett because it has been augmented by their reading of it. …We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. [pp. 158-160]

I am not utterly convinced that humankind is the crown of creation but most of this reasoning makes sense to me.

You can visit the virtual exhibition at this link (broadband and flash required).

Each year, the Kentucky Arts Council award’s a number of unencumbered fellowships to Kentucky artists who have shown merit. The literary arts, to include music composition and dance choreography, alternate with the plastic arts yearly.

This year’s Al Smith Fellowship Awards for writers went to:

• Nancy Bowden, fiction, Whitley City
• Dianne Aprile, creative non-fiction, Louisville
• Kenneth King, creative non-fiction, Somerset
• Thomas Southerland, playwriting, Lexington
• David Cazden, poetry, Lexington
• Marianne Worthington, poetry, Williamsburg

Along with the Al Smith Fellowships, a certain number of applicants are chosen to receive smaller Professional Assistance Awards. This year’s awardess are:

• Bev Olert, fiction, Paris
• Paul Prather, fiction, Mount Sterling
• Merle Bachman, creative non-fiction, Louisville
• Olga-Maria Cruz Smock, creative non-fiction, Louisville
• Denise McKinney, playwriting, Berea
• Elizabeth Orndorff, playwriting, Danville
• Lorraine Nickole Brown, poetry, Louisville
• Adam Day, poetry, Louisville
• Kathleen Driskell, poetry, Louisville
• Tom Hunley, poetry, Bowling Green
• Jeffrey Skinner, poetry, Prospect

One of my serendipity moments in reading. Today I found this in William Stafford’s “Introduction to Since Feeling is First,” from Writing the Australian Crawl (Univ Michigan Press, 1979):

You could look at reading a poem this way: if you are thinking and there is a window nearby, you may look out—far. Your thinking will connect now and then to the scene, whenever something out there strikes your attention. Or, even more aptly, you might have a friend with you, and you would interchange, offer beginnings, slanted ideas, linked progressions. There would be a series of mental incidents, not predictable, never to be fully anticipated without experience that comes about through following the sequence onward, point by point. Your experience would be richer—more would happen—than if you had been alone.

Reading is like that. It is not all your own ideas, and not all the other person’s ideas. You toss back and forth against a live backboard. And, particularly if it is a congenial poem—or friend—you are reading or hearing, you furnish a good half of the life. The travel circuit of an idea or impression is a sequence of rebounding between you and the companion, between you and the page.

And yesterday, I read this from the preface to Heather McHugh’s Hinge & Sign (Wesleyan Poetry, 1994):

But writing, like reading, implies in any case a very peculiar form of presence. It is presence at another moment. In this anachronism, this unsettled time, the intimacy between writer and reader (unlike other intimacies) seems the closer for its definition in deferral. Taking up any book to read it, how am I with the writer? The with is without the usual conversational confronting; for I identify myself as (I don’t identify myself over against) the unfolding. I am with the writer not en face, as an opposite respondent, but á tête, as a kind of mind-reader.

And as a writer, how am I with the reader? This is an engagement with a very non-particular someone, an other very like a self, unseeable, a grounding figure which, when I do take the trouble to imagine it (for one need not imagine a being to have one), I imagine as a fellow-imaginer: as an understanding—even an underwriting—inmate. Any engagement in acts of reading, between that figure and myself, is engagement without argument, engagement without preliminaries, engagement without (in any of the usual senses) even a meeting of the minds: there was never, after all, a separation. To be a writer “with” a reader is rather like being, oneself of two minds, at every turn: hinge and sign. By comparison with this intimacy, the fondest act of physical love takes place between strangers.

from Gregor Mendel and the Cats

Up the monastery wall, the brewery’s yeast-scent
huffles. And the dusty cat, stretched high
over warm stones, swings her blunt snout this way
and that, yeastward and monkward, from
release to salvation. In the bright sun
her irises, like shutters, close,
leaving just a strip of liquid glint, the pupil’s
vertical box.

I am sleepless today, the cats of my childhood
mewling all night, their phantom shapes
alit on my ceiling. Cat backs, stretched, flexed,
cat tails in counterpoint. Such mystery,
to be of the body perpetually …

— Linda Bierds

This poem is from Linda Bierds’s First Hand (Putnam’s, 2005) of which Bierds says in her “Author’s Note and Acknowlegments:”

As they trundle through the centuries, swaying this way and that, from wonder to foreboding, the poems in this book rest most frequently at the inscape of science. It is there, in that innermost space lit by the nature of human achievement, that their interest and questions lie, their praise and disquietude.

An inquiry such as this, which moves from third-century-B.C. theories of buoyancy to twenty-first-century biochemistry, must acknowledge what are for many the global and spiritual implications of a science increasingly adept at creating, extending, and annihilating life. To help me with that task, I turned to the character of Gregor Mendel, whose work on the hybridization of peas forshadowed genetic cloning. …”

Bierds’s biosketch at Poets.org reads in part:

Because her poems are often laden with historical references and challenging language, Bierds is often described as a difficult and overly-intellectual writer. In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bierds responds to the notion of obscurity by saying: “In grade-school classrooms, there’s this notion that a poem is similar to a mathematical problem and that it has a solution. That’s very off-putting to people. They remember back to fifth or sixth grade and how they didn’t ‘get’ poetry then and probably never will. But they did get it, just in a different way. Much of the reputation that ‘poetry is difficult’ comes from this mistaken thinking that a poem has one answer.”

I do find these poems difficult but the fault is mine entirely, in my ignorance of science. On the other hand, while I seldom “get” a whole poem in the way the teacher might have liked, I often find passages like the one quoted above that are just exquisite, and very clear and simple.

Edward Byrne in Valparaiso Review says of First Hand:

Presenting Gregor Mendel as a primary subject in her poetry, Bierds provides readers with a persona representative of the conflicted scientist, whether historic or contemporary, seeking to unlock mysteries of the physical world while maintaining a vigorous faith in the mysteries of the spiritual world. By extension, this poetic persona and his actions also show evidence of the intrinsic clash — often attendant and sometimes inevitable — between a search for knowledge and a trust in one’s religious beliefs, a pair of pursuits at constant risk of incompatibility with each other for inquisitive people who maintain a great faith.

…

Elsewhere, in “Gregor Mendel and the Cats,” Mendel speaks of painting blue the backboards of the monastery’s bookcases. The poem discloses Mendel’s thoughts on the importance of using the mind (“We are minds here,” he begins) as well as the body (“And hands,” he continues), stretching one’s intellect for both practical knowledge and imaginative purposes.

In talking about the poem “Sunderance,” Byrne leads me to hope I am not the only reader not quite learned enough to keep up:

At times, comprehending archival information in Bierds’s poetry does demand a greater degree of active intellectual involvement, perhaps even firsthand research, by readers. Nevertheless, while searching for information is sometimes required for a full understanding of clues embedded within the content of the poems in each of Bierds’s books (and may be a contributing factor that hinders her ability to attract a larger audience), when engaging in the process one can achieve a certain amount of satisfaction and delight, not to mention enlightenment about some lesser-known facets of historical events or individuals.

Bierds’s wanderings in scientific history takes her from Mendel to Newton back to Galileo, forward to Hedy Lamar and on to James Watson and Dolly the cloned sheep, with a detour to some fishermen stranded on breaking ice near St. Petersburg. Oh yes, and Marie Curie makes an obligatory appearance who is paired with the artist Paul Cadmus, working on a WPA project.

When a genetic scientist uses the term expression, s/he is referring to the action of a gene in the production of a protein or a phenotype, the gene expresses itself. When a poet speaks of expression s/he has something perhaps more lyrical in mind. In First Hand, Bierds shows us how to experience both kinds of expression firsthand.

An independent woman, milliner and poet. Here from Ellen and Jim Have A Blog, Too, a snippet of her poem “A True Tale” of receiving an offer of marriage from one who “thought to’ve found my person more amiss.” Mary had some kind of deformity, which may be why she became an independent businesswoman, but apparently was not why she remained one:

Much more, he spake, but I have half forgot:
I went to bed, but could not sleep a jot.
A thing so unexpected, and so new!
Of so great consequence—So generous too!
I own it made me pause for half that night:
Then waked, and soon recovered from my fright;
Resolved, and put an end to the affair:
So great a change, thus late, I could not bear;
And answered thus: ‘No, good Sir, for my life,
I cannot now obey, nor be a wife.
At fifty-four, when hoary age has shed
Its winter’s snow, and whitened o’er my head,
Love is a language foreign to my tongue:
I could have learned it once, when I was young,
But now quite other things my wish employs:
Peace, liberty, and sun, to gild my days.

Read more of Mary’s poetry and a bio at Ellen and Jim Have A Blog, Too.

I was somewhat delighted to find an 18th C poet named Mary Chandler. My sister-in-law of fifty years is named Mary Chandler and she is just about this feisty.

of the Great Flydini!

Hattip to Charlie Hughes.

It’s Saturday night. I have a glass of merlot. Time to unwind!

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.

From Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965)

The principle is that every technical gesture in a poem must justify itself in meaning. Which is to say that the free-verse writer can proclaim, with Ammons, that he is “released from form,” but he’d better not be. In free verse the abandonment of capital letters and punctuation must say something consonant with what the predications in the poem are saying. The sudden shortening of a line must say something. The degree of line-integrity or enjambment must refract the rhetorical status of the poem’s address. And any momentary deviation into meter must validate itself, must appear not a lapse but a significant bold stroke. [pp. 88 -89]