Sherry Chandler

First, you have to make oranges

I’ll be straight with you. Under ordinary circumstances I would probably not buy a book whose cover depicted a cow with a huge tongue hanging out of her mouth. But this book, called appropriately enough The Tongue (Wind 2004), has Tom C. Hunley‘s name on the cover, and I’ve been a fan of Tom’s since I first ran across one of his poems in Gumball Poetry back in spring of 2000. In fact, that poem, “How to Make Orange Juice,” is in this collection.

Here is what I said about “How to Make an Orange” back in 2000:

A very good Kentucky poet named James Baker Hall says it’s easy to tell when a piece of writing is a poem. It’s a poem if you want to hear the same words in the same order again. If you want to stop your friends and say “Listen to this!” then it’s a really good poem. “How to Make Orange Juice” is a poem I’d read to my friends. The language flows nicely off the tongue and it is original language.

So that was 10 years ago. I am about ten years more sophisticated a reader now and I think that what I said is not enough.

What I ask myself now is, why would I read this poem to my friends? And the answer is it’s not just the language, it’s the intelligence behind the language.

It’s a little quirky. It views the world from a viewpoint a little bit different.

How do you make orange juice?

It’s a trick question.

First you have to make the oranges.

Duh.

Because obviously you can’t “make” orange juice, you can only extract it.

Having made that little twist, that little jab at our flatfooted thinking, then the logical progression is

To do that, you have to become
an orange tree, which means moving
to Florida or Southern California.

Okay. That’s true. You can’t survive as an orange tree in Detroit.

But there’s another little twist, another side road taken:

If you go to San Diego, the beach
will beckon you, with its bikinis
and its waves, and you will feel the temptation

to take up surfing, which would get in the way
of becoming an orange tree. Stay focused
on your goals.

Okay, now I’m asking myself, where is this twisty path going to take me? Well, to a list of course:

. . . Visualize all things orange:
carrots bursting from the ground,
a field of poppies blossoming all
at once, like some unplanned party,

I love that one.

a haunted house peopled by jack-o-lanterns.
Eat only the orange M&M’s
in each packet. Make friends only

with redheads. Concentrate entirely
on orange juice,

Okay, we’re with the program now. But wait, there’s one more turn in this path

. . . which is not the same
as buying orange juice made from concentrate.

Ah, we’re back to the original question. How do you make orange juice? From concentrate.

But that’s so boring:

Stop looking for the easy way.

So it is with all the poetry in The Tongue: each one brings surprises, little twists and turns that make you laugh and sometimes that make you cry. And along the way, all manner of beautiful images, jazzy musical lines, and some playing with obscure forms.

As Philip Dacey says in the cover blurb,

Like a pop artist, Tom Hunley creates with bright colors and sharp lines. In the face of disaster, he responds with the kind of insouciance praised by Whitman and practiced by a Buster Keaton . . .

Tom’s other books include The Octopus, winner of the 2007 Holland Prize from Logan House Press and the delightfully named chapbook My LIfe as a Minor Character, which was co-winner of the Pecan Grove Press chapbook contest for 2003.. Tom is also the publisher of Steel Toe Books.

Well heck-o, Hoss!

When Mark Twain set Huckleberry Finn on that raft in the Mississippi River, put vernacular speech in his mouth, and used his naive integrity as a prism through which to view the hypocrisy of nineteenth century Southern society, he set the mold for Maurice Manning’s The Common Man (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010). It’s a voice established from the first line of the first poem:

Moonshine

The older boy said, Take ye a slash
o’ this — hit’ll make yore sticker peck out —

That opening gambit can still set my husband guffawing. He loves a good bawdy joke.

And there is some bawdiness in this book. But with Manning you also have to add some John Donne to the mix, for Manning is a metaphysical poet. And reading his work you tend to conclude that’s the only kind of poet there is to be.

The Beet’s Theology

By God, the leaves are frilly things,
though pretty near to naked — you

can see the blood right through the veins!

With maybe a bit of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung rhythm. Though in this collection the poems run a pretty smooth iambic tetrameter. That’s a bold-enough undertaking, a whole book of poems in the meter of the greeting-card amateur.

Put all these elements together and you get poems like

That Durned Old Via Negativa

You ever say a word like naw,
that n, a, double-u instead

of no? Let’s try it, naw. You feel
your jaw drop farther down and hang;

you say it slower, don’t you, as if
a naw weighs twice as much as no.

So let’s throw another icon of poetry into the mix — what about a Shakespearean fool? Or maybe just a pure American type, the trickster hick, a Will Rogers sort of poet. So you read a few tales of mules and roosters, hound dogs, possums, and big mountain women, and the next thing you know you’ve read a book of poetry and maybe asked yourself a few questions about the nature of God and humanity.

Since he won the Yale Younger Poets Prize with his first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, it has been Manning’s pattern to write books in a single persona, and beginning with A Companion for Owls, he has stuck pretty much to one blank verse meter throughout. Daniel Boone, as behooved a man of his dignity and time, spoke pretty much in classic iambic pentameter. The rustic of Bucolics and now The Common Man speak in tetrameter, as perhaps befits their lowlier status.

Risky, in this day and age, to put together an entire book of long blank verse poems in what you might call a single mood. And yet a challenge to keep a brilliant intelligence engaged. And maybe, if you’re voice is exuberant — as Manning’s voice is exuberant — a restraint to keep you centered.

Whatever. I think the strategy works for Manning, better in The Common Man than in Bucolics. The latter was maybe a bit too limited. But I just devoured The Common Man. I laughed, I cried, I marveled at some of the tour-de-force strategies, and I thought a bit about the nature of God and humanity.

Where I’m from

In his inscription to my copy of his new poetry collection, Body and Blood (Wind 2010), Charlie Hughes wrote “I hope you enjoy these poems from where I’m from.”

It is an apt statement because, indeed, I did enjoy the poems and because these poems are from a particular place and time. Charlie Hughes is a poet grounded in the physical, the feel, sound, taste of tools and crops, creeks and rivers of rural Kentucky. Here you will find Fords and Farmalls, John Deeres and International Harvesters, Studebaker pickup trucks (my grandfather had one), log chains and wringer washers. You will also find baseballs and cane poles, sparrows and turkey buzzards, cows up to their bellies in pond water on hot summer days. You will also find poems about a farm boy’s mystical link with nature, like “The Stone”

At first the boy did not hear the stone speak.
It was not a large stone.
It was only the wind in the sycamores, the boy thought,
perhaps water babbling in the riffles of the stream.

So the boy lifts the stone out of the creek and puts it in his pocket, where he carries it all his life, for reasons he cannot quite fathom.

As the man grew gray the stone became lighter.
And still each day the gray man listened for the voice
he’d failed to hear that long-ago day by the stream.

The voice of the stone that the boy/man can never quite hear — that he can never stop listening for — echoes throughout these poems.

The collection is in four parts, and each section begins with a poem after George Ella Lyon’s famous “Where I’m From.” I love Charlie’s list poems, they are evocative without being romantic. Perhaps this is more true for me than for others, because Charlie and I had pretty much the same childhood. But I have a keen eye for sentimentality, and these poems, though heavy with sentiment, never fall over into the sentimental. They are also funny, ironic, satiric, and sad:

I’m from the muddy swirl of Cecil’s Creek,
the polluted currents of Salt River
where bare-assed boys swam beneath
dead hogs, flood-beached and bloated . . .
I’m from the aroma of new-mown hay,
tobacco hanging in the barn . . .

— from “Where I’m From”

Reading this passage always makes me think of Crum, Lee Maynard’s tale of boyhood in West Virginia and a novel I love. But Charlie is seldom gritty, more often lyric.

I’m from cold water and aching teeth, a rusty cup
hanging from the pump handle

— from “Where I’m From, II

or humorous:

I’m from brown tarpaper, four rooms
and a path at the end of Rob Road,
muddy ruts too deep
for the ’47 Hudson.

— from “Where I’m From, III”

I’m from Providence Road —
the house that overlooks
the cemetery—the hill that took our sleds
between the limestone slabs
and granite stones
of silent Presbyterians.

— from “Where I’m From, IV”

As Linda Parsons Marion points out in her blurb, Charlie is a man with an eye for the absurd. (See the cover photo.) His humor shows up in poems like “Love,” which compares that emotion to a skunk in the crawl space and “Women Talking,” one of my favorites:

Theirs are not the voices of men.
Their words do not swagger—
they lilt like autumn warmth,
devoid of consonants.

They do not scuff their words
in gravel.

Body and Blood travels a roughly chronological arc from boyhood to age. I was about to write that it also moves from the nostalgic to the elegiac, but “nostalgia” is too cheap a word and, in fact, the whole book is an elegy with comic interludes. To quote Linda Marion again:

This elegiac collection’s deepening range should surprise no one familiar with [Hughes's] deceptive shallows . . .

There is a passion among poets — writers — of my place and time to capture something precious that is disappearing with a dazing rapidity. I see it in Wendel Berry, in Maurice Manning and Davis McCombs. I see it in Jane Gentry. In Georgia Stamper. And in Charlie Hughes. The loss is most obvious in our missing mountains — and Charlie has his “Lament for Mountains.” But we also feel the loss of a certain kind of community, I think, a time before we could be connected with some one on the other side of the world and so, perforce, we had to love the people next door. Or maybe now we just feel the weight of our years, the loss of our elders that turns us into elders, maybe Charlie speaks for us in his poem “Melding”

Before the current of the Salt River
washes any memory of me away,
I want to say . . .

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

This photograph appeared in Harper’s Weekly for July 8, 1871 under the title “The End of a Commune—Execution of a Pétroleuse.” The poem below was published in The Independent in 1872. For more on feminism and the Paris Commune, see the Wikipedia entry.

The Palace-Burner
(A Picture in a Newspaper)

She has been burning palaces. “Te see
      The sparks look pretty in the wind?” Well, yes—
And something more. But women brave as she
      Leave much for cowards such as I to guess.

But this is old, so old that everything
      Is ashes here—the woman and the rest.
Two years are oh! so long. Now you may bring
      Some newer pictures. You like this one best?

You wish that you had lived in Paris then?
      You would have loved to burn a palace, too?
But they had guns in France, and Christian men
      Shot wicked little Communists, like you.

You would have burned the place? Just because
      You did not live in it yourself! Oh! why?
Have I not taught you to respect the laws?
      You would have burned the palace. Would not I?

Would I? Go to your play. Would I, indeed?
      I? Does the boy not know my soul to be
Languid and worldly, with a dainty need
      For light and music? Yet he questions me.

Can he have seen my soul more near than I?
      Ah! in the dusk and distance sweet she seems,
With lips to kiss away a baby’s cry,
      Hands fit for flowers, and eyes for tears and dreams.

Can he have seen my soul? And could she wear
      Such utter life upon a dying face,
Such unappealing, beautiful despair,
      Such garments—soon to be a shroud—with grace?

Has she a charm so calm that it could breathe
      In damp, low places till some frightened hour;
Then start, like a fair, subtle snake, and wreathe
      A stinging poison with a shadowy power?

Would I burn palaces? The child has seen
      In this fierce creature of the Commune here,
So bright with bitterness and so serene,
      A being finer than my soul, I fear.

— Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, from Palace-Burner. The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, Paula Bernat Bennett, ed. (Univ Illinois Press, 2001)

Paula Bernat Bennett speaks at some length of Sarah Piatt’s Kentuckian/borderland mentality.

As a native-born Kentuckian and daughter of slaveholders, Piatt brought to her Civil War poetry a political subjectivity formed and articulated int he borderland separating North from South. Highly intelligent and fiercely honest, she used this poetry to explore a set of concerns that ran the gamut of the principal social issues of her day: slavery, the war itself, the myth of the Lost Cause, the displacement of Southern blacks, bourgeois corruption in the North, social and economic inequities in the postbellum period, changing gender and social values, and the dubious judgments of god. Driven by her searing knowledge of the war’s waste, Piatt was a profoundly political poet for whom issues of social justice (in heaven as well as on earth) were central. . . . [but] like the speaker’s in her signature poem, “The Palace-Burner,” [the poetry] is never at home in its own contradictions and never able to ignore its complicity in the evil it condemns. [Palace-Burner, xli]

Bennett also points our Piatt’s use of her children, as in this poem, as

. . . “naive” speakers to make “sensitive” adult points. . . . [In "The Palace-Burner], a young child’s naive query to his mother . . . forces the speaker into a contemplation of her own moral confusion and corruption. [Palace-Burner, xlvi]

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

I’ve been reading and reading about Sarah Piatt and, since this has been my subject matter for a while, I thought that I pretty much had to share her poem about Daniel Boone.

Paula Bernat Bennet includes this poem, published in 1872, among Piatt’s Civil War poems.

Piatt treats the past as if it were always with her, writing in multiple time frames at once. In the complicated perspective enjoined on her by this three-dimensional view of time, not just her home state of Kentucky but all of America was a “Dark and Bloody ground”: and at its center stood Piatt’s enigmatic kinsman, Daniel Boone, pioneer, Indian-killer, slaveholder, the quintessential American, the man with a gun. She could not escape this relationship; it was written into the past and into her living blood and into the blood of her sons and daughter as well. [Bennet, xlii- xliii]

I feel constrained to point out here that Daniel Boone was not much of an Indian killer. He may have killed three in his lifetime. It is out mythology that had to make him such a thing — the quintessential American, the man with a gun.

The Grave at Frankfort

I turned and threw my rose upon the mound
      Beneath whose grass my old, rude kinsman lies,
And thought had from his Dark and Bloody Ground
      The blood secured in shape of flowers to rise.

I left his dust to dew and dimness then,
      Who did not need the glitter of mock stars
To show his homely generalship to men
      And light his shoulders through his troubled wars.

I passed his rustling wild-cane, reached the gate,
      And heard the city’s noisy murmurings;
Forgot the simple hero of my State,
      I looked in the gaslight, thought of other things.

Ah, that was many withered springs ago;
      Yet once, last winter, in the whirl of snows,
A vague half-fever, or, for aught I know,
      A wish to touch the hand that gave my rose,

Showed me a hunter of the wooded West,
      With dog and gun, beside his cabin door;
And, in the strange fringed garments on his breast,
      I recognized at once the rose he wore!

—Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, from Palace-Burner. The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, Paula Bernat Bennett, ed. (Univ Illinois Press, 2001)

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

A Tragedy of a Night
(At an Edinburgh Street-Crossing)

She started suddenly from the moving mass,
      The wind sprang up and caught her by the shawl,
And held her like a thing that dared not pass—
     Then shook her for an instant. That was all.

Once beautiful and still almost a child!
     She wore her wet hair round her with a grace.
I saw the great eyes staring black and wild
     As the scared lamplight shuddered from her face.

Upon her track there followed such a cry:
     Will you come back, or no?” was all it said.
“Will you come back, or no?” The Voice wailed by;
     On—to the Pit?—the girlish phantom fled.

—Sarah Piatt, from Palace-Burner. The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, Paula Bernat Bennett, ed. (Univ Illinois Press, 2001)

Sheri’s castaways

Here is what I wrote in my cover blurb to Sheri Wright’s Finishing Line chapbook The Courtship of Reason:

Sheri L. Wright has stolen fire from the gods and she’s not about to say she’s sorry. To the contrary, she wants us all to come over for the wienie roast. I assure you, the guest list is fill with characters well worth meeting . . .

The Courtship of Reason is like a volume of highly condensed Southern gothic short stories — the shorter Lewis Nordan perhaps or a flash Flannery O’Connor.

There is, for example, “Diehlia Dyer,” who soaks her dentures in the toilet tank::

those blue tablets
that keep the bowl so clean
do a beautiful job on teeth.
Porcelain is porcelain.

She uses the money she saves on denture cleaner to buy bird seed

. . . gotta put something back
into the world for being in it.

And then there’s Cliffy Edger who thinks seagull droppings are holding his shingles on, and “The Projectionist” who thinks of the movie audience as an orchestra with himself as conductor, controlling the music of their oohs and aahs.

These are brash and sassy poems that Sheri herself describes as my quirkiest book yet. She knows that the earth is in a fast spin and, like Superman, she wants to fly fast enough to

. . . catch up and hold on,
swing past frost
before it etches its fingers
over the last buds,
and I will be there
just ahead
to always watch them open.

But Sheri is not without her lyric moments, as in the poem “Beggars and Buskers,” which I will quote in full because it is short and because I think it states the theme of Sheri’s work.

Beggars and Buskers

And don’t we all
have our tin cups
to rattle at passers-by,

our crippled parts
to drag behind us,

songs of sorrow
that plead
listen,

spare a coin
so we might sit
someplace warm

if only for a while.