Sherry Chandler

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.

Eclectic Living Room

The Eclectic Living Room meets at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning one week before every Kentucky Great Writers reading to discuss and “celebrate” the work. The discussion is led by Leatha Kendrick, who is a wonderful appreciator of other people’s work and who, as a friend just said to me, reads like a writer. Most of those who attend the discussion are also writers. So, participants have an opportunity not only to explore the work that they will soon be hearing but also to hone their own writing skills. Each session ends with a writing prompt or exercise.

The Morris Book Shop is there to give participants a chance to look at and buy the books in question.

And sometimes, as last night, the group is privileged to have the publisher present to add his insights to both the writers and the publishing process.

At last night’s session we discussed the work of Normandi Ellis, Dorothy Sutton, and J. Stephen Rhodes, all three of whom have books out from Wind Publications and all three of whom will be reading next Tuesday, February 9, at the Carnegie Center as part of the Kentucky Great Writers Series (funded by LexArts). The featured readers begin at 7:30; the open mic begins at 6:30. Local folk, mark it on your calendar.

That address is 251 West Second Street, Lexington.

I consider all three of these fine writers personal friends and I have featured work by Steve, Dorothy, and Normandi here on the blog. I can attest that they are all great readers. It will be a fine evening.

I guess this reads a little bit like an infomercial, and I guess that’s all right. Who can you praise if you can’t praise your friends?

J. Stephen Rhodes

Beulaville, NC — 1969
          — For Suzanne Cleary

The time I didn’t know what to do next
I arranged my furniture in the little frame house

that sagged in the middle like an ark—
just three pieces really: a mattress, chair,

and desk made from a filing cabinet,
an old door, and some concrete blocks.

One stoplight town, diploma in hand, my bosses
instructed me to start the revolution, empower

the poor. I possessed no more than numbers
and facts, such as the pregnancy rate

for teenagers and median age, high, income,
low, for the place I now called home.

I knew no one. The neighbor who topped
and suckered tobacco for a dollar an hour

or his wife who made bologna bacon, bologna pie
and stew from surplus food, laughed in her kitchen,

This surplus cheese is good. Take some
peanut butter and mix the two together.

Her can-do cooking blew my must-do master
plans out the window—newspaper stories,

five year schemes, and charts and graphs,
the kind that lined our family business walls.

I called my father to say how helpless I felt,
he clicked his tongue, the sound of one hand clapping.

In the telephone booth, it was just the hiss of the line,
an encouraging “Goodbye,: then the sound of wind

across tobacco fields and nearer,
blowing through bean vines. I didn’t know

what to do next, so I did next to nothing
except sit in the kitchen and listen.

— J. Stephen Rhodes, originally published in The Time I Didn’t Know What To Do Next (Wind Publications)
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Steve Rhodes lives and writes on a small farm near Berea, Kentucky. Of his writing he says:

“I want to write in a way that offers hope for people like myself who are more than a little overwhelmed by modern life. I want to be honest about the brokenness that besets us, but I am also looking for beauty in the midst of that brokenness.”

Steve has an M. Div. from Columbia Theological Seminary and a Ph. D. in Theological Studies from Emory University. He is currently working on an MFA in creative writing at the Unversity of Southern Maine-Stonecoast. He’s one of the best readers I know, by which I mean he is a critic fully aware of the music of poetry and with an uncanny ability to home in on a poem’s strengths as well as its weaknesses, and also that he reads poetry out loud with skill and passion. If you get a chance to hear Steve read, don’t miss it. He’ll be reading at the First Presbyterian Church in Somerset (200 N Vine St) at 7:00 PM on Wednesday May 6th.

The Time I Didn’t Know What To Do Next is his first full-length collection of poetry. You can read my comments on Steve’s book here.

J. Stephen Rhodes

I’m privileged to call Steve Rhodes my friend. I’ve participated in many workshops and critiquing groups with him, and I’ve seen many of the poems in his first full-length collection, The Time I Didn’t Know What To Do Next (Wind, 2008), in their draft stages and expressed my opinion as to their strengths and weaknesses. So in the spirit of full disclosure, I must say that nothing I say about this collection can be viewed as an objective review. In Facebook terms, I’m a fan of Steve Rhodes.

Steve is a man of God, a preacher he calls himself, but he is not like those polemicists who bloviate on the television news. Steve knows that the path of faith is difficult, often raising many questions and providing few answers. Leatha Kendrick expresses it beautifully in her Introduction:

These poems do not profess the easy belief that passes for faith. They possess a distinctive voice that trusts the grace of an awkward and impassioned questioning.

. . .

“Repent, Enjoy.” These are the two poles of a collection that seeks the divine everywhere. These poems invoke desert saints and ex-wives, an imaginary mother and two views of a dinner with French bread. They dance in Heaven with all manner of celebrants, including Aunt Maxine, who “is sure I’m doomed, together with the Taliban.”

Steve doesn’t deal in black and white, and he certainly doesn’t believe in a prosperity gospel. On the contrary, in the poem from which he chose the volume’s title, “Beulaville, NC — 1969,” Steve presents himself as a young man who has come to a small southern town to “empower the poor” only to find that doing good is not always as simple in fact as it is in theory:

The time I didn’t know what to do next
I arranged my furniture in the little frame house

that sagged in the middle like an ark—

. . .

One stoplight town, diploma in hand, my bosses
instructed me to start the revolution . . .

I knew no one. The neighbor who topped
and suckered tobacco for a dollar an hour

or his wife who made bologna bacon, bologna pie
and stew from surplus food, laughed in her kitchen,

. . .

Her can-do cooking blew my must-do master
plans out the window. . .

I love that poem for its view of earth and this one for its view of “Heaven:”

Last night I dreamed I saw girls
in gray hijabs spinning with Hassidim,
monks with bowls in hands, a priestess
with an upraised cup. I was in the circle
with Aunt Maxine from Perryville,
whose son was killed last year in Kandahar,
who thinks I am too soft on sin,
the evil them and all unholy things.

Steve is a poet with a sensitive ear and a compassionate heart. His first book reflects both.

I recommend it.

__________
By the way, the Wind Publications catalog is filled with great Christmas gift books at reasonable prices. These include Steve’s book and also that of my friend Georgia Stamper (You Can Go Anywhere). And many more!