Sherry Chandler

Jesse Stuart, the Appalachian Hugh MacDiarmid?

It struck me that the following passage, from Seamus Heaney’s essay “A Torchlight Procession of One” on the Scottish nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, could also describe the man who might be called an Appalachian nationalist poet, Jesse Stuart. Both men were what you might call vernacular poets. McDiarmid’s work preceded Stuart’s by about ten years:

He was very clear-headed about his productions and in the 1960s wrote to a BBC producer as follows: “My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit’s egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame, but a lot of rubbish.” From a person of less abundant capacity and with a less compulsive appetite for overdoing things, this could have sounded like an excuse; from MacDiarmid, however, it emerges as a boast. With him, the speech from the dock is sure to be a roar of defiance. No wonder Norman MacCaig suggested that the anniversary of his death should be marked each year by the observance of two minutes of pandemonium. “He would walk into my mind,” MacCaig said at the graveside in Langholm in 1978, “as if it were a town and he a torchlight procession of one, lighting up the streets…”

Still, although his vitality was epoch-making, MacDiarmid has probably written more disconcertingly than any other major twentieth-century poet. Anybody who wishes to praise the work has to admit straight away that there is an un-get-roundable connection between the prodigality of his gifts and the prodigiousness of his blather. The task for everybody confronted with the immense bulk of his collected verse is to make a firm distinction between the true poetry and what we might call the habitual printout.

— Seamus Heaney, “A Torchlight Procession of One: On Hugh MacDiarmid” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), pp 104-105

More coincidence

Who knew Jesse Stuart ran away with the carnival? As best I can tell, this was sometime in the early twenties when Jesse was in his late teens. Nobody seems to be really sure how long his career as a carnie lasted or how far it took him.

from Jesse Stuart — The Heritage by David Dick (Plum Lick, 2005):

Ladies and gents, let’s just put it down as the sorriest pack of starved carnival dogs ever was rounded up for the animal shelter. There might have been Henrí, the flame-swallower from Pittsburgh with his rapeseed oil-covered throat and a mouthful of kerosene to light the torch, gurgle the flames, and spew out the fire. And there, in imagination, might be a George, dear soul, the knock ‘em down kewpie doll warhorse from Wheeling. You remember old George, don’t you? He was the right man for the carnival: down on his luck, loser to the ladies, health eaten up by the constant cigarette dangling from the left side of his mouth, ashes growing so long they curved. Sure, you ‘member ol’ George.

and from Jesse Stuart himself in Beyond Dark Hills (Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1996):

The street carnival was a fascinating place to me, the painted showmen, the dancing girls, the vagabond life and the old dull music of the merry-go-round — the whole thing was fascinating! I made up my mind t get a job and follow it. … Where a man settles in one place, his life would someday become empty, I thought. I would follow the merry-go-round.

Not quite serendipity

I have these little episodes in my life that are not quite serendipity, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.” The word comes from a Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip,” by the way, and entered the language via Horace Walpole in 1754.

But these little blips of mine are more like coincidence. The fact that they show up at the same time or in rapid succession looks like it ought to have some meaning …

Take yesterday. First, I went over to Rake’s Progress and learned:

On this day in 1923, James Joyce wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver, that he had just begun “Work in Progress,” the book which would become Finnegans Wake sixteen years later…

The Rake himself picked this up from Today in Literature, along with the fact that not Harriet Weaver, nor Joyce’s wife Nora, nor even Ezra Pound cared much for this new style of writing. Their putdowns are funny and I suggest that it will be well worth your while to take a look. But the money quote for me came from Samuel Beckett, the dissenting voice in this crowd:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read…. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

A little later, I followed a link over to Slate, where, in an article called “The Instruction Manual,” Meghan O’Rourke had this to say about John Ashbery (the fact that Ashbery is showing up a lot is not even coincidence – it’s his new books):

At the center of an Ashbery poem isn’t usually a subject (à la Philip Larkin) but a feeling (à la Jackson Pollock). That feeling is conjured up by the interplay between aesthetic conviction and amiably bland bewilderment; amid all the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life is the enduring hope that, as one speaker puts it, “at last I shall see my complete face.” The best thing to do, then, is not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music. It’s only then, for most readers, that the meaning begins to leak through.

And finally, Anastasios Kozaitis, who makes a Poem of the Day appear in my in-box every day, sent “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” a John Ashbery catalogue of rivers that I confess to getting bored with about half the way down. O’Rourke gives me permission to do this – one of her recommended strategies for reading Ashbery is to quit a poem when you get bored with it. Anyway, I found this catalogue as dull as any Homer ever wrote, except that it contained this line:

…the Ebro is blue / and slow

Coincidentally, we own a Spanish-made tractor, brand-name Ebro, which my husband calls “the only tractor Caesar mentioned in his commentaries” and which is in fact “blue and slow.”

Now, if you think that maybe this string of coincidences means that I should run out and catch up to The New York School or even read Finnegan’s Wake when I have yet to get through Ulysses, then I have one more of yesterday’s facts to point out. According to David Dick, in 1926 when William Faulkner published Soldier’s Pay and Earnest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises, Jesse Stuart was at what was then Camp Knox longing to be Robert Burns or Edgar Allen Poe. We tend to run a little behind the curve here in Kentucky.

Am I just being silly here? I do believe poetry, and for that matter prose, should be musical, a pleasure to hear, as I’m sure did Stuart, Poe, and Robert Burns the lyricist. I love reading aloud and my family has suffered through many a listen-to-this. And, being involved in this collaborative exhibit, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the link between poetry and the plastic arts (see Secrets and Used, New and Out of Print). Mostly, I guess I think there are a lot of people who try to be Jackson Pollock before they have learned how to be Grant Wood. I’m still working on Edward Hopper.