Sherry Chandler

And who can tell us where there was an orchard . . .

I wanted to talk a little bit about my reading experience with Kyrie.

It is, in some ways, a difficult book to read, not because the poetry is obscure but because the sonnets are not titled and the speakers are not identified. Some of them, I think, only speak once but others are recurring characters and you have to figure that out from context. Some are fairly obvious, like the country doctor and the young soldier. Others are not so easy to tag. Even a dog has his turns.

Here is a statement Voigt made in her Atlantic interview:

For me, that need for clarity as a first virtue has continued to intensify, until by the time I wrote Kyrie, my first obligation seemed to be to create believably idiomatic voices, an accessible surface. If someone reads Kyrie one time through and thinks, “Is this all?” then fine. That’s the risk, although I certainly hope he or she will read it a second and third time to discover other levels.

I would say it’s necessary to read the collection at least three times, for one to figure out who’s who and for two to watch Voigt play with permutations of the sonnet form. There are a number of ways you can arrange a sonnet on the page.

My personal reading experience was complicated by the fact that I read this collection as an “electronic resource” from my local university library. There are a number of ways this can be done. Some electronic book providers supply facsimiles but in this case, there was just one long file of text with page numbers indicated by brackets, e.g. “[page 14]“. I found this really confusing in a work like Kyrie, with no titles or index or copyright page or anything.

I really missed having a volume in my hands, pages to turn.

then . . . something eats the sun

I have been reading Kyrie, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s collection of dramatic monologue unrhymed sonnets about the flu epidemic of 1918. Published in 1996, this volume has become a modern classic, and I don’t think I have anything important to add to what’s been said about it. Except that it lives up to its reputation.

I did wonder why Voigt chose to use the sonnet form. Traditional sonnets are a form of argument, an if . . . then, a question and answer. It is the tension between the problem set up on the octave and the resolution set up in the sestet that gives a sonnet its energy. See for example, this famous sonnet by Milton on the subject of his blindness. Here is the question set out in the octave:

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

and here is the resolution set out in the sestet:

That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.

It overlaps a little but you see what I mean.

So why turn to a sonnet to tell a story?

One answer, of course, is that use of the sonnet form allows her not to tell the story. At least not in a full narrative sense, but rather to come at the story of this stricken community in small, intensely emotional bites.

In an interview with Steven Cramer, originally published in The Atlantic November 24, 1999, Voigt said:

The problem for the poet, I think, is to determine what structure is available to accommodate the materials the poem is going to need. I came to see a huge difference between a narrative structure and a lyric structure. The lyric, of course, has always included various parts of what we think of as story. They’re sort of “back story.” They lie behind every lyric: that sense of an utterance, a character, a voice in a particular circumstance. But with the lyric structure, the arrangement of the materials is very different.

. . . Narrative isn’t the structure I see when I look at the world.

. . . A lyric is entirely about intensity. It’s about all of it spiraling in, and holding that intensity, and not relenting.

. . . I came to suspect the orderly structure of narrative — beginning, middle, and end.

. . . In the lyric you can stop time; you pick that moment of intensity and hold it. The narrative moves through time.

So what we have in Kyrieis a medley of “voice[s] in a particular circumstance” that do not, in fact, tell the story, but rather leave the reader to experience the emotions of a story already known, at least in its broad outlines. The matrix out of which Voigt writes is formed on the tension between the necessities of narrative and the necessities of lyric.

In the interview, Voigt speaks of setting herself challenges. I rather suspect it was the challenge of Kyrie that both kept her interested and drove her craft to a higher level.

I have friends who implore me to explain why I insist on working in form, especially when writing persona poems. There is an old dictum in poetry — you should always be writing the poem you aren’t quite good enough to write. Form challenges me to find that poem, to get better at my craft.

Every time I think I’ve wrapped my head around Whitman

I find something that surprises me:

This Compost

1

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noislessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the door-yards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

— Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1900

To ‘cast or not to ‘cast

At DMX Zone, Linda Goin asks the question, Why Use Audio in Your Blog?

In the context of her article, she makes these observations:

To hear a poet read his own words is like watching an artist explain all the elements and principles of design in a painting or illustration.

. . .

Unless poetry can be made accessible through sight and sound, poetry and the poet could easily slide into oblivion, marking modern and historic poets less accessible than fossils.

Linda highlights several blogs and web sites where poetry and audio are joyfully melded, and I might mention that she gives a very nice plug both to Sheri L. Wright’s radio broadcast From the Inkwell — I love this statement about Sheri:

Her blog doesn’t reflect her poetry as much as her trains of thought – and some of those trains are powerful, with locomotives that could push you back a few feet with the blow-back from their passing.

— and also specifically to my interview with Sheri, which is available in the archives. In that interview, I talk about my enthusiasm for poetry podcasts.

And, by the way, you can find some audio files of me reading poems linked from my poetry page. Here for example, and here, and here, and one of my favorites here. And leave us not forget my own reading at qarrtsiluni (see below).

Linda also provides several links to how-to files on creating podcasts, so I suggest you click on over and give her article a read.

You might also want to read Dave Bonta’s Literary podcasting made simple with WordPress.com

Dave is an editor at qarrtsiluni, an online magazine that publishes a podcast along with the text of the poems they feature. Lately, he’s been reading the print edition of their Economy issue, and he fell to contemplating the effect of hearing those poets read:

I continue to feel that the combination of text and audio players on the same virtual page is a wonderful thing, even if not every author is the best interpreter of her own work. . . .

I might not have remembered every nuance of every poem and story in the Economy issue, but to my surprise and amusement I did remember many of the poets’ voices, and heard them in my head as I read through the print edition. Of course, a Scottish accent is pretty memorable for a Yank like me, but I found I remembered the accents of many of the other poets too: Alex Cigale’s precise consonants, Tom Sheehan’s age-mellowed Boston accent, Eileen Tabios’ hilariously seductive reading of “Post-Coital,” Monica Raymond’s world-weary, vatic cadence in the closing piece, “Economies.”

I think the fact that I was still able to conjure these up a year later is a pretty strong testimony to the power of audio to focus attention. The [Christian Science] Monitor article mentions Socrates’ dismissal of written language in passing, as a way to call into question the seriousness of these new criticisms of electronic media, treating it as self-evident that Socrates was just a conservative old fart. But Socrates was right, as any number of studies of contemporary oral societies have shown: dependence on writing systems has harmed our memories and fundamentally altered our ability to listen and thereby internalize language. Heard speech is alive in a way that printed words are not, though our ability to record and now digitize it does alter its ephemerality, if not quite its relationship to time. The druids too opposed literacy, for much the same reason as Socrates, but they took a huge gamble in doing so and essentially lost: what we know of them today is largely what was written down by their enemies. And would anyone remember Socrates if not for Plato?

Dave draws no conclusion here as to whether slow reading or micropoetry is the salvation of humankind. Like me, he samples all of it and finds different joys in the different media. One thing I really like about internet publishing, as I mentioned in my interview with Sheri Wright, the one that Linda Goin was kind enough to recommend, is its capacity to present a reading of the poetry with the text.

A couple of other places where poets are using audio in creative ways:

Mike Snider is podcasting poems from his book manuscript Other Voices. Mike works in form and you’ll find some rare ones in this collection, like the rubliw.

Brenda Clews is a Canadian poet and dancer who experiments with audio multitracking and video to produce some fascinating performance poetry.

Dissonance

The existence of Scienter Press in Louisville seems to me to be a well-kept secret. I only found out about it because I went looking for a copy of Richard Taylor’s Braintree, which they published in 2004. It’s an fine little volume in more ways than one. I talk about it here.

So when Maryann Corbett sent out a notice that her second chapbook, Dissonance, had been published by Scienter Press, I was eager to get my hands on it for two reasons. One because, having a web acquaintance with Maryann, I wanted to get to know her work. And the other was that I was curious to see another work from Scienter.

Certainly I was not disappointed with the work. Maryann’s chapbook contains 19 elegantly formal poems, a device that you might call harmonic, on the subject of dissonance.

Causes of dissonance are as diverse as divorce and the slow death of elm trees. “Bluejay, Singing”

One note—then it descends
a major third— then two.
Splashed on the ear, it blends

the feel of wet and dry.

sent me clicking through to All About Birds to discover that, indeed, jays do have a song. (I knew they squawked and mimicked hawks but not that they trilled. Now I need to listen for that in my backyard chorale.)

This yoking of dissonance with harmonies works well for Maryann. In this essay, Blank Verse and Blinders, she mentions that blank verse comes as automatically for her “as water from a spigot.”* Thus, as you might expect, her lines and sentences are relaxed. Her rhymes are also unforced, as in “After the Divorce, I Hold a Yard Sale”

They come in slowly, poker faced.
Such laying bare of earthly failings—
spread on folding tables, draped
on porch railings—

is sad and awkward . . .

But such smooth craft does not dull the poems’ edge. Rather, as in some music, the dissonance and the harmony work together. Listening to some of the tributes to Mitch Miller that have been airing this week, I am reminded that too much harmony is a bland and boring thing. As with the blues, there is a certain wryness in these poems, a catalyst to blend the harmony and dissonance.

Form in the hands of a poet as fine as Maryann Corbett is not a prettifying device, like a doily on an endtable, reducing emotion to mere rhetoric. Sometimes a sonnet is a “Fist:”

It looks like knucklebones, the way the lines
fist up in fours, each rhyme a hardened stud
under a leath glove. Or meat-fork tines.
You stab with them, the puncture holes ooze blood.

And what of the physical book? Dissonance is not as pretty as Braintree, which reproduces a bucolic woodcut on the cover and uses a font face with, now I look at it again, maybe too many curlicues for readability. (One is called Poor Richard. Too tempting.) Dissonance has an orange cardstock cover and the title looks like it’s maybe about to rub off. No decorations. I don’t think I’d buy this book for its looks. On the other hand, the font face is clear, readable, and unpretentious. I’ve seen enough of Scienter chapbooks to think the art of this book is in its plainness. Nothing here to come between the reader and the poems. The poems are enough.

__________
I wish I could say the same. My blank verse line, if you want to call it that, stumbles and lurches around like Sunday morning coming down.

And the answer

Ah but we always have to come back home from the beach. The poem I posted yesterday is part of a famous pair. Here is Sir Walter Raleigh’s reply to Kit Marlowe’s pastoralism:

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten
In folly ripe, in season rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.

— Sir Walter Raleigh

In a pastoral mood

I’ve been neglecting the blog here lately. Just in a lazy mid-summer state of mind I guess — sort of at the spiritual beach.

So when I ran across this golden oldy today, I thought why not share it. It’s good sometimes to revisit our old friends.

The Passionate Shepher to His Love

Come live with me, and be my love;
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy-buds,
With coral clasps and amber-studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

— Christopher Marlowe