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.

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?

What is redeemed by life?

David Harrity’s Finishing Line chapbook, Morning & What Has Come Since (2007), contains a jewel of a sonnet “Hail Mary in the Courtyard,” which seem to me to cut to the heart of Harrity’s work here. Standing before the statue, the speaker asks:

. . . I wonder if your words
fall like marbles from the pocket of some
boy, roll into the burnt grass, never found.

This sonnet follows a long, multi-part poem entitled “Prayers for the City” which begins

This place is a blanket of sound.
How can we pray? How can we pray?

and ends

City you are loved,
      city, you are loved,
             city, you are loved
                        so I lift my voice
                                  to keep asking what you cannot.

Harrity’s poems wrestle with faith in a way that harks back, not to Donne — whose work really seems to me to be all about Donne and how clever he can be — but to Herbert and Hopkins.

In “October Psalm”

I ask the words I cannot pray.
I ask again—what is redeemed
by my living?

Although I find the poems a little uneven — as what poets are not? — I invite you to keep an eye on Harrity and to take a look at this chapbook, which was nominated for a Pushcart and a Kentucky Literary Award.

Cool light from a soul at the white heat

Luminescence is cool light, an excitation of atoms not caused by heat, a physiologic or chemical glow. It is a light that does not consume.

Such a cold light, such luminescence, may seem an odd thing to associate with Emily Dickinson, who asked “Dare you see a soul at the white heat?”

In The Luminescence of All Things Emily (Wind Publications, 2009), Elizabeth Oakes looks at Emily Dickinson’s life but she looks at it slant, mostly from the perspective of the supporting players: Emily’s sister Vinnie, her brother Austin who lived next door and supported the sisters after their father died. Austin’s lover Mabel (who edited Emily’s poems) and his wife Sue (for whom many of the poems were written). Tom Kelly and Maggie Maher, the hired help.

The Dickinson household was an odd mix of cold and heat. The distant parents, the two unmarried sisters, the sexually estranged Sue balanced over against the affair between Austin and Mabel, who sometimes trysted in the parlor of The Homestead, with, one has to assume, the collusion of Emily and Vinnie. The once-popular notion of Emily Dickinson living a cloistered sort of life vanishes with any kind of close reading of her poems. Oakes, by shining the light a little wider, illuminates just what white heat lurked “Beneath the Amherst Calm:”

Conventionalism,
Austin wrote to Mabel,
is for those not strong
enough to be laws
unto themselves.

Oakes is obviously steeped in the Dickinson papers and she knows her stuff. She also knows how to find the poetry in the stuff. She writes a plain free verse style of poetry, no pyrotechnics of technique, but her way with an image is masterful, from the first poem, which defines agoraphobia as a snow globe:

There’s a medical name for it now,
but a snow globe will do as well.

Tell us how you know so much
in your quiet world . . .

We shake and shake that snow
globe, and the snow just falls
faster.

to the antepenultimate, “Emily’s Room”

Emily’s niece tells this story.
Emily stood before her bedroom
door, mimicked turning a key,
and said, “Freedom, Mattie.”

Going up the stairs was like leaving
the eye of a storm. . . .

In between, nuggets of delight, as in the ending lines of “Mabel in the 1920’s: from a Photograph:”

Only the memory
of Austin’s hands holds
her waist in now.

Or these lines from “Standing before a Copy of Emily’s white Dress”

Sometimes words are enough. Sometimes
they rub against each other like a hired
man warming his hands before a fire or
the thighs of a woman gone plump.

There’s a quatrain I wish I’d written.

One of the most arresting poems in the collection is the portrait of “Emily’s Hands.” Her hands “meant to . . . scrub clothes on a washboard, to shuck / corn in a cold barn” send my mind to Melverina Peppercorn and the other tough farm women of the 19^the century. Of course, that was not the life Emily led, but still

. . . the pens they used in those
days must have looked
so small in Emily’s hands

How that stands our mental picture of Emily on its head.

Katerina’s book of charms

The poems in Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s The Air Around the Butterfly fill me with bright delight at the same time that they break my heart.

How is this possible?

It’s magic, I think, and I think I don’t want to analyze magic too much, don’t want to find the man behind the curtain.

I read the poems in English. On the facing page is the same poem in Bulgarian, a language for which I don’t even know the alphabet. So I think perhaps these may be the runes, the cabalistic writing that distills these gemlike poems from the chaos of the air around the butterfly. Except of course that we have dark associations with the notion of a cabal and there is nothing dark about these poems.

Nor anything secret. They are all as open and vulnerable as a child and as filled with wonder.

So the delight comes from the simplicity of the language. Like the best of haiku, Katerina makes simple statements in simple sentences. Nothing compound or complex in this collection.

Some of the poems are only three or four words long, including the title.

And yet —

Just as the best haiku will surprise you with an unexpected yoking of ideas, so do Katerina’s poems. Take, for example, “Reluctance,” which you will find in its entirety here (along with other sample poems). It begins like this:

The Spare Tire
Is constantly afraid
That one day
It will be his turn
To start carrying the weight
Of the car
In which
He has been riding

It’s like a Aesop fable with a spare tire instead of a crow.

The heartbreak is easier to explain. These are poems of great loss, loss of country, loss of family, loss of mother.

In a section of the book called “E.T. and I Phone Home,” we find the poem “Phone Calls”

In a forest
tall and gentle
in our respective meadows
on an appointed night
E.T. and I phone home.

It takes much time
to dial all the digits
to press each button
then release it
in a long row of
unforgiving numbers. . .

Home is so far away — as it is for all of us in a way — and the poem taps in to our great loneliness, our great homesickness. But the whimsy of it, the chutzpah of taking an image worked to death and somehow making it fresh. That is what charms.

Like magic.

During this first year of grieving for my mother, I have mentioned several times my appreciation for the poems of grief that I’ve encountered in my reading. Reading them taps into my own grief, lets me cry and share and heal a little.

That is what the best poetry is for.

One of the things.

So the poem in this book that shatters my heart into the tiniest pieces and for which I am most grateful is this one

Last Time

Last time I saw my mom
she was entering the earth.
Entering the earth on a cold day
without a jacket.
Without a hat or a scarf. . .

There it is, stark and loving and oh, so sad.

The Air Around the Butterfly is a pretty book. My copy has textured card stock covers, is printed on heavy cream-colored paper. Occasional title words are picked out in red. The chaos on the cover was drawn by Inna Pavlova. The book has a nice heft, it is satisfying to hold in the hands, easy on the eyes.

Reading the poems is a little like eating peanuts. A simple act, a small bite, and so you turn the page. And the next thing you know, you’ve eaten the whole jar.

Except that once in a while you have to stop and look out the window at the birds and let the poem sink in. They stay with you, these poems.

__________
On Saturday, February 6, Katerina Stoykova-Klemer is conducting a free workshop at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. The workshop is called “Bigger Than They Appear: How to Write Very Short Poems.” This is a thing Katerina really knows how to do, so if you are in the area, you should grab the chance. Hours are Noon to 2 p.m.

“a hurtful glory”

There are poems in Kathleen Driskell’s Seed Across Snow (Red Hen, 2009) that delight, lines that electrify. “Blue Heron” comes to mind:

When she asks, I will tell my daughter
I lost my virginity in the blond grass
beside a quick-moving river . . .

and “Nude Model,” in which the art class of mostly young women is presented with a model who

. . . looks pretty

good for her age and I should know because
she’s about my age . . .

. . . I portray her
as turned land and falling water,

though I know even if it were
possible for these fallow girls to imagine

it, this is no garden
they would choose to enter.

Another is “Yellow Boat,” which was a featured poem on Verse Daily. It’s a poem in which we experience

undeniable glee of it

caught showing it’s not
what we all know
it to be.

Thiis poem, the first in the collection, may well be a statement of theme. On casual reading, Seed Across Snow may seem to be a collection of poems about suburban angst: art classes, bored and complacent kids on long car trips, snakes that swallow frogs beside backyard goldfish ponds. But a closer look will show the poems, like the yellow boat, are “not what we all know [them] to be.” They have “sass,” as Molly Peacock has it on the cover blurb.

The braid that holds this collection together seems to me to be the tale of two marriages, one that fails and one that lasts. (Let me say here that all these failures may not be literally the same failure — may not even be a literal in-the-church-type marriage — though the success is definitely all the same success.) Images of wedding veils whipped away by a stiff wind are portentous, perhaps for a good outcome, as in “To the Outdoor Wedding,” or of an ending, as in “Opening.” a poem in which the persona “knew I was leaving. / I suppose I had known it for a long while.”

Two poems on this theme seem to me to be especially powerful. The first is “First Hours Married,” in which the bride sits alone by a hotel pool “white full dress / hitched and wet to my waist, / and kicked my bare feet // through the warm water.” A black champagne bottle floats in the pool. The party is over and this bride is not quite ready to enter to door, set ajar, so that its light shines invitingly out into the courtyard.

The second is “Prayer to Stone,” a long poem about a couple that move into, try to renovate, an old house that is literally a nest of vipers. And black snakes. The house is infested.

This poem plays a turn with both the Medusa myth and also that of Orpheus and Eurydice. (Eurydice steps into a nest of snakes and is bitten, which is what sends her to the underworld.) In this case the persona does not look back, does not turn to stone, does not make the sacrifice of self that would save the future from its “hurtful glory.”

Balancing out these failures is the success of a marriage that lasts, that brings a new sanctification to the old church in which the poet lives. The sanctity of this marriage is spelled out in the poem called simply “Blason.” A “blason” is a 16^th-century love poem that catalogues the lover’s attributes. Driskell’s blason plays a bit with the old “here’s the church, here’s the steeple” finger game.

Even a non-believer like me remembers
that Jesus held a church isn’t a structure,
but its people. . . . I reach for your hand, intertwine
our fingers, know here are the people . . .

As Claudia Emerson says, Driskell’s “poems about love in the context of a long marriage, something all too rarely experienced and even more rarely well expressed, are finely wrought and particularly beautiful.”

Kathleen Driskell blogs here, where you will find a transcription of Mark Brown’s close reading of “Why I Mother You the Way I Do,” one of the poems from Seed Across Snow. The article was originally published in the newsletter of the Green River Writers where Mark’s “Beyond the Words” column is a regular feature.

__________
Added: Diane Lockward features Cecelia Woloch on the blason/blazon:

. . .a poem of praise for a beloved, from the French tradition, which is a kind of catalog or list poem enumerating the physical attributes of the beloved and using a metaphor to describe each of those attributes. The poem I used as a model was Andre Breton’s blazon, “Free Union,” which is full of astounding metaphors like, “My woman with her shoulders of champagne.”