Sherry Chandler

Lisa Williams

Maenads

It traveled over the tall gates of our gardens,
our threshold stones,

his song about something done,
gone, lost, a body not touched again,

not like our bodies. We made him reckon them:
receptive flesh—our flesh!—he left behind

as flashes through the forest’s deformations
though he drew the animals near him

with that bodiless voice,
though even the trees leaned down,

even the stones crept close,
even the dead turned, groaned,

even Persephone,
half her life’s light drained

—that wisp!—was pricked to sympathy.
Sepulchres quaked.

A ripple rocked in the underworld’s black veins
as a rain floods roots.

For something done,
for a girl who was far too simple,

who saw only a surface, not the peril
underneath, who ranged the fields

For loveliness, with a maiden’s erring sight—
just this, and this,

not what unwinds below
the wash of flowers on the meadows knoll.

Beyond the surface it is dark
and after you have seen it

you can’t go back.
It was his clutched mistake,

the dream that slid out of his arms.
Should he blame the dream?

Her own delight in the meadow?
The hell, or world, that underscores delight?

The blame attached to nothing. But his voice
took shape. For years we listened,

trying to turn his sight. How ignorant!
He had no more a body for a woman

than stones did. He surrounded himself with boys
as if returns to boyhood

would yank him out of time.
—Yet his song was about a girl

he loved as skin and bones.
It maddened us

to sense the pool of feeling in his song
denied by flesh.

By the time we tore it from his voice,
his body had already vanished.

— Lisa Williams, from Woman Reading to the Sea (Norton, 2008)
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Lisa Williams’s second book of poetry, Woman Reading to the Sea, was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for the 2007 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her first collection The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State University Press, 1998), which won the May Swenson Poetry Award

The list of Williams’s awards is long. It includes the Rome Prize in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters . a Henry Hoynes fellowship in poetry from the University of Virginia, an Elliston Poetry Fellowship and the Elliston Poetry Prize from the University of Cincinnati.

Lisa Williams is Associate Professor of English at Centre College.

“The Maenads” is the Poem in My Pocket this April 30, and a fitting close to my month of Kentucky poets. I hope you’ve enjoyed this wonderful variety of voices as much as I have. And I hope you’ve discovered at least one poet you want to read.

Balance

One of the highlights — there were many — of the 29^th Kentucky Women Writers Conference was a panel discussion at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Lisa Williams, and Crystal Wilkinson. Subject: Poem or Story: Finding Your Subject’s Form.

I got a real impression that Oates had a prejudice for narrative. From my hastily jotted notes, I quote her as saying something on the order of (and not necessarily all at one time):

I’m sure many of you are poets. There are more people writing poetry than reading it. There are 40 million people writing poetry right now…outbursts of emotion…divorced from narrative…having little weight. …Prose fiction has to have something to say.

I don’t want to give the impression here that Joyce Carol Oates was completely negative about poetry. After all, it was she who picked Lisa Williams’s volume Woman Reading to the Sea (Norton, 2008) for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Oates was witty, charming, and very intelligent on this panel. Still, such statements, which are not rare, make me want to burn my papers and break my pens. What point in adding to this glut of lightweight emotional indulgence?

As happens, however, this afternoon I picked up the winter 2007 issue of Rattle and opened it to Alan Fox’s interview with Arthur Sze and read the passage below, which restores the balance a little bit for me:

I think poetry has a crucial role to play in our society. We’re in such a hurry; we live in such a consumer culture. Yes, it’s a common complaint to say that the readership of poetry is small and to lament that. I can’t change much about the numbers; all I can say is, we as poets feel this is worth doing—we’re committing our lives to it. It’s not about making money; it’s about nourishing the human spirit.

If, like the monks who pray at Gethsemane to restore balance to the world, I choose to spend my life as an obscure poet, nourishing my own human spirit and with luck a few readers’, then who is to say that is not a worthy thing to do, whether or not I leave an individual mark on the world at large.

Added: This from William Stafford from Writing the Australian Crawl (Univ Michigan, 1979), an essay called “Writing:”

One doesn’t learn how to do art, but one learns that it is possible by a certain adjustment of the consciousness to participate in art—it’s a natural activity for one not corrupted by mechanical ways.

preceded by:

In my area, the coyotes are still the best poets.