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.

Memorials

Ace Weekly’s James Baker Hall Memorial issue downloadable at this link. Or if you want to go direct to the PDF, here.

By the way, in the photo on the Ace site — Wendell Berry, Jim Hall, Ed McClanahan, & Gurney Norman — I just want to add the caption: One of these things is not like the others.

Of course, there are several ways you can group them. Two poets laureate in the group.

Thanks to Ann Lederer from drawing my attention to this issue.

I should also announce the James Baker Hall Memorial that will take place in Gratz Park here in Lexington on July 11 from 4:00 – 6:00. (If the weather is forbidding, the ceremony will move inside the Carnegie Center.) Afterwards, there will be a reception in the Carnegie Center, with food and drink and poetry. Please celebrate Jim, if you wish, by bringing along a poem to read. And please forward this message to any friends. Check the Kentucky Literary Newsletter for updates.

Braintree

For decades now, Richard Taylor, from his seat in the state’s capitol, has provided a strong center of gravity for the literary community in Kentucky. He does this, with characteristic humility and grace, through his teaching at Kentucky State, his work as Poet Laureate, his poetry-friendly independent bookstore Poor Richard’s, and his First Friday readings that provide a venue for writers established and emerging.

Quietly, in the midst of all his generous activity, Richard has also produced a considerable body of work.

Braintree, the work I want to consider today, is a chapbook of 15 poems published in 2004 by Scienter Press. The poems are quintessential Taylor, apparently folksy, maybe a bit rambling, but with a turn near the end that home in on the question. Taylor holds an JD and it might not be stretching the point too much to say his poems are like a well-crafted argument to the jury in a prosody as low-key as the man himself.

Or one long ars poetica. Consider “In Defense of Letters:”

From his farm near Braintree, John Adams
wrote that unless he kept a journal
the events of his life passed like flights
of birds across his vision, leaving no trace…

Because the book’s title is taken from this poem, it would seem to set us up for a meditation on writing or on recording days that are like

…
Thirty-four pigeons I count huddled along the
twin power lines that droop and join
at the river’s edge. They remind me of fonts

of type lifted from the printer’s tray…

My own favorite in this line is “Cattle Song,” built on the epigraph “Nathan Banks, a 22 year old student…painted single words on the flanks of about 60 cows…then let them wander around to see if they could compose poetry.”

Outside my window I see lettered angus
on the hillside composing pastorals,
cantos to clover, a haiku whose theme
this July morning is sweet surrender
to the dark cove of an encompasssing oak,
a deep draught of rainwater in a silver tank…

Braintree is a pretty little book, saddle-stapled with a cover illustration from a woodcut Richard himself did, perhaps in

Wood Engraving Workshop

Huddled over work tables,
we scratch at boxwood blocks,
trying to coax a likeness of this world from wood.
…
Mine is the failed farmstead
choked in its noose of weeds
flooded in a sea of stipples and checks.

An unseen farmer, trapped in the barn…

A bargain at $8.50, you will have hours of pleasure returning again and again to these quiet pieces.

Wind Publications has done us all the great service of re-releasing Richard Taylor’s Girty. Richard will be reading Friday night, February 10, at the Carnegie Center here in Lexington, along with Laverne Zabielski (Garden Girls) , Frederick Smock (Poetry and Compassion), and Joe Anthony (Peril, Kentucky). Festivities begin at 6:30.

Joe Survant

Joe Survant has been Poet Laureate of Kentucky for the last two years. He’s worked hard at to fulfill the duties of the office, which the Kentucky Arts Council state as “promoting the literary arts in Kentucky through readings and/or public presentations…” Joe has travelled hither and thither throughout the state, doing just that – as do all our poets laureate (see a list here). The stipend is not large and, in Joe’s case, I think it was eaten up by expenses in the first year.

Joe’s tenure as laureate ended yesterday, and I can imagine that he’ll be looking forward to the quiet so he can get some writing done. But he will still be active reading around the state. At 2 p.m. on Sunday, you can hear him read from Rafting Rise (University Press of Florida, 2002), at the Kentucky History Center in Frankfort. Rafting Rise deals with the lives of log rafters and flood plain dwellers on the Rough and Green Rivers in Kentucky in 1916 and 1917. The current exhibit at the History Center is “A River Runs Through Us” (through December 2005). “Bill with Horses on Jennings Creek” is from Rafting Rise.

Bill with Horses on Jennings Creek

They stand
at the far end
of the field, just
up from the creek
where Johnson grass
grows shoulder high
and cool air

flows up
from the water.
The black sees me
first. He shakes
his head. The mares
neigh welcomes.
They trot, then

gallop, now run
toward me. I want
to speak. They
clench and unclench
like great fists.
They ripple with light
as they come from the shade.

I envy their strong
impossible bodies.
The air is filled
with their greetings.
I want to answer,
but how to speak
and what to say?

James Baker Hall

James Baker Hall has a new and selected out: The Total Light Process: New and Selected Poems (University Press of Kentucky). On April 7, he will be reading with Mary Ann Taylor-Hall at Fauntleroy’s Café, 640 West Maxwell Street, Lexington. On April 8, he will read at Carmichael’s Frankfort Avenue store in Louisville with the Green River Writers’ own Jean Tucker. Jean will be reading from her new book, First View of Mesolonghi (Grex Press).

The poem below is from The Mother on the Other Side of the World (Sarabande, 1999). It is one of my very favorite “ars poetica” poems:

Ars Poetica

the way a fox slips into one side
of your headlights and carrying his tail
(like a pen running out of ink) slips
out the other —

Poets Laureate

Louisville novelist Sena Jeter Naslund has been appointed the 22nd Poet Laureate of Kentucky, Her induction ceremony will be held in Louisville on April 14. The winners of the Kentucky State Poetry Society’s student contest are invited to read at the ceremony, which means I’d better get cracking. I volunteered, along with several others of the Mosaic poets, to judge the Golden Galleons category and I’m proud to say we have over 90 entries.

Meanwhile, fellow KSPS member Betty Sparks has written Poets Laureate of Kentucky (Wind, 2004) to help us all fill in the gaps in our knowledge about “the official face of poetry in Kentucky.” The quotation is from Elaine Palencia’s review of the book in the new Pegasus. And if you’re like me, the gaps are plentiful and wide. Here’s more from Elaine:

Part II – the meat of the book – contains, for each laureate, a photograph, biographical sketch, and poetry sample. The poet laureates of Kentucky have been chosen from a wide range of professions, from a buyer of a seed and grain company (James Patton, Jr.) to professional writers. As might be expected, educators dominate the list. The criteria have varied widely, with some amateur poets being appointed essentially for one poem, to others who have achieved recognition for a substantial body of work. Two of our laureates, Lillie Chaffin and Lee Pennington, have been Pulitzer Prize nominees; and the fame of others, such as Jesse Stuart and James Still, has permanently transcended the regional.

This book, which began as a scrapbook hobby, contains a fascinating variety of information, from copies of the legislative resolutions appointing several of the laureates to candid snapshots and personal letters. Former Kentucky poet laureate Richard Taylor has written the introduction.

Although the history of laureates in our state and others has its absurd political side, many fine poets have served honorably and worked hard, travelling many miles, to bring poetry to the people. In late years, the center of the poetry universe has diffused and we no longer all orbit around New York City and a small stable of canon poets. For good or ill, regional presses and regional poets have become more important. After all, a Nebraska poet, Ted Kooser, has been appointed national Poet Laureate. In this new order, Betty Sparks has given us an important reference work and an opportunity to contemplate a bit of our own literary history and its meaning in the larger frame of things.