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.”

Stories of Katrina

All summer we have had our eyes on the Gulf shore. So now that the well is capped and we are trying to get some kind of honest assessment of the damage, I hope we don’t lose focus, decide the thing is over, as we have done with Katrina.

Five years since that hurricane, and the still the extent of the damage has not been gaged.

I want to draw your attention to some stories about Katrina.

Natasha Trethewey, a poet whose work I admire a great deal, was on Fresh Air on Wednesday to talk about her new memoir Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Univ Georgia Press). She speaks of her grandmother’s death and burial in a church that had not yet been rebuilt and how the aftermath of Katrina ruined her brother. You can here a podcast and read an excerpt of the book at the link. The excerpt begins like this:

Somewhere in the post-Katrina damage and disarray of my grandmother’s house is a photograph of Joe and me — our arms around each other’s shoulders. We are at a long-gone nightclub in Gulfport, The Terrace Lounge, standing before the photographer’s airbrushed scrim — a border of dice and playing cards around us. Just above our heads the words High Rollers, in cursive, embellished — if I am remembering this right— with tiny starbursts. It is 1992, the year the first casino arrived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and, with it, a new language meant to invoke images of high-stakes players in exclusive poker games, luxurious suites on the penthouse floor, valet parking and expensive cars lined up in a glorious display of excess. Scenes from a glamorous casino someplace like Monte Carlo or Las Vegas — nothing like the gravel parking lot outside the club, the empty lot beyond it, and the small, run-down houses on either side, each with a chained-up dog barking into the night.

The role of casinos in the overdevelopment of the Gulf Coast is one that we need to remember. Trethewey makes it obvious that, though the casinos may have brought prosperity to some, they did only harm to the part of Gulfport where her family lived, that part of the disaster was natural but part was man-made.

When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as “Little Vietnam” because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders — as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden. Even now, it is a place that outsiders assume to be dangerous or insignificant — run-down and low income, a stark contrast to the glittering landscape of the post-Katrina beachfront with its bright lights and neon bouncing off the casinos onto the water. Were North Gulfport not along the main thoroughfare, making it necessary to drive through to get to the beach, it might be easily forgotten.

The poet Raymond McDaniel, who grew up in Florida, has also written a post-Katrina collection, Saltwater Empire (Coffee House Press, 2008). In the writing of it, McDaniel made use of oral histories of Katrina survivors collected and archived on the web at Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster and Oral History & Memory Project.

I haven’t read the book but what I pick up from context is that the “found” poem constructed from these oral histories is only a part of the collection, a poem in several parts that serves as a framing device.

But McDaniel didn’t get permission to use these clips and the poet Abe Louise Young, who worked in collecting the histories, thinks that he has done a great wrong by appropriating the stories of those survivors, who had made it very plain that they wanted control of their own stories since they had control of so little else. McDaniel argues that, because the archive is open access, it has become public domain.

The Poetry Foundation has posted two essays, one from Young: The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I. What are the ethics of poetic appropriation?

And one from McDaniel: The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I. IReflections on found poetry and the creative process.

Because I write historical poetry and because I am interested in questions of ownership on the web, I find the two essays of high interest and recommend that you take a look at them and at the comments they’ve elicited.

Does the quality of the poetry excuse the appropriation? Was it appropriation? Why didn’t McDaniel ask permission? Even just as a courtesy?

I also suggest that you explore the oral histories themselves at the archive Alive in Truth. They will make your heart ache all over again.

And who can tell us where there was an orchard . . .

I wanted to talk a little bit about my reading experience with Kyrie.

It is, in some ways, a difficult book to read, not because the poetry is obscure but because the sonnets are not titled and the speakers are not identified. Some of them, I think, only speak once but others are recurring characters and you have to figure that out from context. Some are fairly obvious, like the country doctor and the young soldier. Others are not so easy to tag. Even a dog has his turns.

Here is a statement Voigt made in her Atlantic interview:

For me, that need for clarity as a first virtue has continued to intensify, until by the time I wrote Kyrie, my first obligation seemed to be to create believably idiomatic voices, an accessible surface. If someone reads Kyrie one time through and thinks, “Is this all?” then fine. That’s the risk, although I certainly hope he or she will read it a second and third time to discover other levels.

I would say it’s necessary to read the collection at least three times, for one to figure out who’s who and for two to watch Voigt play with permutations of the sonnet form. There are a number of ways you can arrange a sonnet on the page.

My personal reading experience was complicated by the fact that I read this collection as an “electronic resource” from my local university library. There are a number of ways this can be done. Some electronic book providers supply facsimiles but in this case, there was just one long file of text with page numbers indicated by brackets, e.g. “[page 14]“. I found this really confusing in a work like Kyrie, with no titles or index or copyright page or anything.

I really missed having a volume in my hands, pages to turn.

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.

An “inconsequential” thread

It began at Huffington Post with Anis Shivani’s The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers, which I confess I did not read — well, not all of it, though I did page through to see who he’d pilloried.

I’ll confess to a bit of schadenfreude when I spotted some names on the list. And I was reconciled to seeing Louise Glück’s name there. She’s a writer I like but she’s become, it seems to me, just about every critic’s whipping boy [woman? but that has way too much connotation]. As has Billy Collins.

But still I didn’t read it because I avoid Huffington Post whenever possible, mostly because I find most of the stuff there as inconsequential as Timothy Shaeffert finds Mr. Shivani’s post. It was immediately obvious that this article was intended to be outrageous, to be, to use Mr. Shaeffert’s word, “theater.”

Then yesterday, there was Jezebel’s rebuttal, Literary Critic Hates Vaginas, “Ghetto Volume”. I’m going to begin by saying that I find that site mind-bogglingly over-designed. But I agreed with Jezebel’s assessment that Shivani’s list “was meant to offend, and it succeeds.” Jezebel mostly points out the anti-feminist bias, not so much of the list, as of the so-called reasoning behind the choices: Sharon Olds writes too much and too shamanistically about the female body, Louise Glück is too domestic, etc.

I do notice a bit of a generational thing here. Olds and Glück are now older women, as are Mary Oliver and Helen Vendler.

Today there is the aforementioned Timothy Shaeffert at the Prairie Schooner blog:

It’s a scrumptious set-up, and if the whole subject weren’t so inconsequential, one would be tempted to call it incendiary. (Would anyone approach such a list expecting to see the literary scene coddled and celebrated, with logic, reason, and sportsmanlike conduct?) It’s theater, if not full-on vaudeville, and has been accused of everything from poor taste to political incorrectness to anti-woman bias, all playing nicely into Mr. Shivani’s interactive performance. (I do think the blogger Jezebel does Shivani a disservice by casting him as merely misogynist, when he has labored so to appear misanthropic.)

Ouches all round.

Including me, because I did comment on the Prairie Schooner Facebook post that I would like Mr. Shivani to be logical if he was going to say anything that would be helpful to me.

But, in the end, Mr. Shaeffert comes around to some so Jezebel’s points:

And his distinction between good and bad writing seems fatuous (why does such a distinction need to be defined? Doesn’t the very notion of such a definition contradict his argument? And whose morality dictates a “lack of a moral core,” whatever that is?).

And concludes in a place that makes his post relevant to the conversation I’ve been trying to stir up here:

So . . . all those critics ever in protest of “the prevailing balderdash of the day” . . . seem to call for the return of old-school editorial instinct, a commitment to the task of discovery, rather than to the hem-lines of literary fashion. So while the current electronic fluency seems to suggest the much missed (or much over-celebrated) loss of the gatekeeper, such rants remind us that the gate-keepers make us cranky too.

__________
By the way, today is Erwin Shrödinger’s birthday, which reminds me to remind you that my good friend Alan MacKellar has published a wonderful chapbook through Finishing Line. It is called Chasing Shroedinger’s Cat. Like me, Alan is too low on the totem pole even to be under-rated, but this is an excellent collection. I recommend it to you.

__________
And speaking of gatekeepers, or a lack thereof, how about this: Poetry Drop Boxes Set Up In Long Beach

LONG BEACH, Calif. (CBS) ― One community in Long Beach is turning to poetry as a way to tell a story of the area, and to boost business.

The Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association in Long Beach has partnered with two coffee shops on Atlantic Avenue and affixed poetry drop-boxes outside each in hopes of collecting poetic submissions from the community to ultimately publish as a book.

The boxes went up last week, and today was the first day of collection.

Link thanks to Joanie DiMartino, who also has an excellent poetry collection out there entitled Strange Girls.

Anniversaries

It’s ours, today, but it’s also the anniversary of the first publication of Walden.

In which spirit you might want to read:

“Off the Grid”: The growing appeal of going off the grid

America Goes Dark

What the Great Recession Has Done to Family Life

Failed State

Every time I think I’ve wrapped my head around Whitman

I find something that surprises me:

This Compost

1

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noislessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the door-yards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

— Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1900