Notes On the State of Poetry, Part Three
NOTES ON THE STATE OF POETRY, Part Three
by Diann Blakely
Detour: I’m delighted to begin this segment of the series by backing up to Virginia, from whence I mentioned Eleanor Ross Taylor. (The to-the-bone incisive introduction for Taylor's Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems comes courtesy of the inestimable native Virginian Ellen Bryant Voigt, whose most recent published volumes include Messenger: New and Selected Poems and a book of what used to be called "practical criticism," The Art of Syntax. Which happens to be her forte, as it is one of Taylor's.) For some news has arrived that calls for celebration: Taylor has not only been awarded the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America but also Poetry magazine's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which recognizes lifetime achievement and includes--not insignificantly--a cash prize of $100,000.
New Orleans and Nachitoches, Louisiana
Though I love my Low Country cottage here in south coastal Georgia, I’m a newly typical Southerner in that I belong to the region but to no particular place in it: I’ve moved around too much, lived in too many houses and apartments, and spent a decade in New York and Boston besides. Yet I’d once more pack my belongings--which have been pared, after all, to a minimum through these changes of address--and relocate to New Orleans in a Tabasco minute. In the northeast, people initially thought I “talked cute” and I did everything possible to rid myself of my Southern accent. I learned to pass.
“Honey, the thing about New Orleans is that everybody’s passin’,” someone said. And there lies one of region’s most interesting conundra(ums?): the state that had the strictest laws in the country against miscegenation, and continues to have some of the most brutal, racially-tinged crime in the country, also probably had--and has, at least until recently--our highest rates of mixed race residents. Jambalaya isn’t just a meal, in other words: it’s also a metaphor for the influences of Caribbean, African-American, Cajun, and white culture.
How easy it is to disappear into such stewpots. What makes NOLA so interesting to me, as a Southerner, is that it's our Manhattan--it's where people go to disappear, to invent new lives for themselves. Which, as I say, is awfully tempting, except my only financial asset is my aforementioned house during a dismal time for the real estate market; the climate is probably worse, if only marginally, than here; and my husband, who attended grad school at Tulane, is convinced we'd get shot.
Even the most fearless of writers don’t tend to stay in New Orleans; they live there for awhile and then move on, but the place remains in their hearts. It’s where Faulkner wrote his earliest novels. It’s where Tennessee Williams “discovered a certain flexibility in [his] sexual nature.” NOLA, both before and after Katrina, allows people to be who they are. Or put on masks, at least during Mardi Gras season, and be someone they’re not but have always longed to be. Usually with an Open Container in hand.
How lucky I feel to be writing about New Orleans poets during the same period that the initial episodes of Tremé are being aired on HBO, galvanizing interest in the city once again. I’m also very lucky to have the chance to present the feistily maskless and unashamedly word-drunk Barbara Hamby, an excellent example of someone who internalized NOLA at a very early stage in life and taken it with her always and everywhere. Though she lived in NOLA only until age four, when her family moved to Hawai’i, Hamby grew up with a mother who cooked rice and beans for the rest of her life and a father who was Southern-born as well. The African-American woman who contributed to her rearing, a topic which lifts the lids off many saucepans simmering on the stove, was from a musical family, and Hamby says that she “picked [her] up in the middle of musical families.” Hamby herself has picked up NOLA and taken it wherever she has lived, publishing not one but two books this year. The most recent, Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else (Univ. of Georgia Press) an anthology co-edited with her husband, another native Louisianan, David Kirby, and the book has all that its title implies; and Hamby’s verbally pixilated, wild-ass humor isn’t scanted in her newest solo publication, All-Night Lingo Tango (University of Pittsburgh Press). Both books were written from her hometown for the past thirty years, Tallahassee, Florida, which she characterizes as no less truly part of the Deep South than NOLA, and no less peppery with cayenne. Hamby continues:
One thing I love about the South is that the English language hasn't been homogenized. People say the most wonderful things, like I'll bet you a fat man to a biscuit, all the time. And because we're in the Bible Belt, born-again retribution is on every corner, and I love those biblical incantations as much as I love Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsburg, who took them and made them their own. I also love the way art blooms out of junkyards and vacant lots. It's warm down here, so we can get out and about. All-Night Lingo Tango is a tribute to language and all it can and can't do, and I want it to do a lot. I want it to open up the mysteries of the universe, but I find it can and can't, and sometimes it can create mysteries all its own.
*
Nachitoches
In the months following Katrina, a subject upon which remain a regional rant-person, I wanted to write an item on contemporary NOLA literature and, my genre biases being what they are, was taken aback by the small amount of NOLA poetry that seemed worth a second read. But I quickly discovered my ignorance after an exchange of e-mails with the monumentally renowned--not to mention generous--Dave Smith. Poet, former editor of The Southern Review, and continuing editor of the Southern Messenger Poets for LSU Press, Smith turned me in the direction of Julie Kane and several others, including Mona Lisa Saloy, whose first book, Red Beans and Ricely Yours, takes its title from Louis Armstrong‘s customary valedictory. (The musician’s new bio, Pops, by Terry Teachout, demands a place on the shelf of any student of American culture, not just Southern or Louisianan, and I can’t grab from my husband’s fingers Kirby’s new book on Little Richard long enough to give you an appraisal except to say that my husband is famously finicky and rarely reads more than twenty pages of his well-worn and better-loved personal canon, one compiled from a forty year career as an author and music writer.) My shelves quickly became crowded by books such as The Zydeco Tablets and Big Muddy River of Stars, by Alison Pelegrin; Make it a Dark Roux, by Sheryl St. Germain; several volumes by Kelly Cherry (I’ve already admitted my ignorance, but how could I have missed reading the well-established Cherry’s work for all of these years?); and This Pagan Heaven, by Robin Kemp. Born in NOLA on Mardi Gras day, Kemp has worked both as a print journalist and CNN correspondent, and, now finishing a Ph.D. at Georgia State, she’s based in Atlanta “until she can get closer to the water,” as she says. Surely she doesn’t mean the foul and bacteria-laden flood that took place in NOLA after Katrina and Rita.
Some of these books were written before the storm and others-- like Katie Cappello’s Perpetual Care, with its introduction by Jake Adam York, who will appear in the Alabama part of this series--after. The best known of such colllections is likely to remain, for a long while, Patricia Smith’s Blood-Dazzler, a finalist for the National Book Award, have appeared, and many more will continue to do so. (Nicole Cooley’s Breach arrived in today’s mail.) But none of those I’ve read quite reach the level of Kane’s accomplishments, begun with Rhythm and Booze and continued in her work with Grace Bauer, her co-editor on Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox, the Alabama native who became the genius locii of that famous gathering spot for NOLA poets, the Maple Leaf Bar; and then made newly apparent in Jazz Funeral.
DB: How did a girl who might have ended up in a Bruce Springsteen song find herself living in Louisiana?
JK: It’s true I was a Jersey girl for my last couple of years of high school. But, actually, I was born in Boston and lived in and around it most of my first eighteen years of life, with a little upstate New York and New Jersey thrown in. My family background is Boston Irish Catholic, which probably explains a lot about some of my poems. I got to Louisiana by marrying a native who had transferred from LSU to Cornell, where we were both undergraduate poets. He had fled the South in disgust at its backwardness, vowing never to return. But then he got a yen to go to law school, and good old LSU Law School was practically free for Louisiana residents, which he still was. So we packed up our poetry books and the cat and moved to Baton Rouge. I was in a state of culture shock for about two years after that.
DB: How many places have you lived in the state? And why?
JK: During those first two years in Baton Rouge I worked as a grant writer and grants administrator for an antipoverty agency. When my marriage fell apart, I was all set to flee back North—but then I thought maybe it might be fun to live in New Orleans for a year. I landed a job as a technical writer at a nuclear power plant that was under construction upriver from New Orleans, and I moved to New Orleans in 1978—first to the west bank, across the river in Jefferson Parish, and then into the city itself. I lived in the Carrollton neighborhood, where the Mississippi River bends like an elbow, just a few blocks from the Maple Leaf Bar. Beginning in 1991, I started studying for my doctorate in English at LSU. At first I was commuting back and forth from New Orleans to Baton Rouge for my classes, but in 1995 I up and moved to St. Gabriel, a tiny little river town near Baton Rouge, so that I could finish my dissertation without distractions. I had a job as the managing editor of a science journal based at LSU, which gave me nights and weekends free to write. I lived at the end of a gravel road, across the road from a swamp, with crawfish chimneys in the yard. [what are crawfish chimneys?] One time the UPS man kindly removed a water moccasin from my front stoop. Then I graduated and landed a teaching job at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, which is in the north-central part of the state, closer to Dallas than it is to New Orleans. You can more or less follow the progression of cities in my National Poetry Series book, Rhythm & Booze (University of Illinois Press).
DB: As I’ve said, I was introduced to your work while writing a series of articles about Katrina. I began to be profoundly puzzled about the lack of memorable verse that had come from the Crescent City and then discovered what I thought it lacked—form. Poets too often relied on atmospherics and clichéd phrases or moody reveries rather than trying to render the place, to make us feel we were there. You, on the other hand, wrote most of Rhythm & Booze in the highly difficult and repetitive French form called the villanelle, and your new book, Jazz Funeral, is composed of sonnets. Another way of putting this might be to say that the poets who heard the city’s music in their heads didn’t create work that embodied that music. Would you care to comment?
JK: I was more surprised than anyone when I started writing villanelles around 1988. Though I’d always loved Frost and Millay and Yeats, as well as song lyrics, I was a product of the free verse 1970s—my teachers had included A. R. Ammons, William Matthews, Anne Sexton. Formal verse was not just out of style in the 1980s—it was ridiculed, attacked, demonized! But I was beginning to realize that I was caught in the grip of destructive and repetitive patterns—my own drinking, my relationships with alcoholic men, my family’s history of alcoholism. My dear friend Everette Maddox died homeless and alcoholic at the age of 44 while I was writing those villanelles. The villanelle’s circling, repetitive form was a perfect fit for the subjects I was grappling with. The beauty of the villanelle is that extra line in the final stanza. To me, it’s like a re-entry rocket firing on a satellite stuck in orbit—it has the power to break that cyclical pattern, to move everything to a new level of awareness or transcendence. My foray into formal verse was sort of like my foray into New Orleans—I thought I was just visiting, but I wound up making a home there for two decades. Jazz Funeral is all sonnets, but the motivation for writing in that form was entirely different. It’s a post-September 11th, post-Katrina, post-cancer, post-parental death, post-midlife book. Those experiences aren’t private and obsessive—they are public and shared with various communities of which I am a member. I think the sonnet lends itself to a public, rhetorical sort of voice—it’s a rational form, a little box of thought that comes to a conclusion. I haven’t written another sonnet since the book manuscript was turned in, though—I may have exhausted that form’s possibilities for me. I am eager to see what’s coming next.
ARKANSAS
Most, when they think of Arkansas, think of the longevity of the graduate department in creative writing which was founded by Lucinda Williams’ father, Miller, among others. In 2008, the press’s annual publication series established a $5000 prize in his honor, both under the direction of much-lauded poet, fiction writer, and hands-on editor Enid Shomer. Shomer, who published three books with Arkansas, gives what she calls as, from her home base of Tampa, what she calls “the equivalent of a seminar is his or her own book” from her home base in Tampa. (In the interests of full disclosure, my favorite title in recent years has been R.T. Smith’s Outlaw Style, which will be obvious to anyone who glances at the back cover.) And then there’s C. D. Wright, one of the country’s most interesting and formidable practitioners of the craft--indeed, she may be inventing a new variation on the genre we called “poetry”--whose latest venture is titled Rising, Falling, Hovering. With her husband, the poet Forrest Gander, she established Lost Roads press, which has kept in print the magnum opus of the suicidally talented Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. The book is frequently read in marathon sessions on college campuses and his death, to move in the circular fashion that lyrics tend to do, prodded Ms. Williams into the pain that produced one of her best-known songs and frequent show openers: “Pineola.”
Less known among the poets--and for no good reason--is a native of Forrest City, Patricia Spears Jones, who was educated at Rhodes and then moved to New York with several friends to study with Mabou Mines and “make art.” Jones has largely remained in NYC for thirty-five years, while continuing to follow her peripatetic nature. Her last book, Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press, 2006), rightly indicates that there are many locales where she has visited but never quite come to rest. In a review of the book, Janice Hammill wrote that Jones wears a kind of armored travelling suit, one which allows her to keep going, allows the poet's "knotted heart" to untie itself. Hammill also points out, quite rightly, to Jones's world-weary sense of humor, one that sufficiently creates just the right barrier, in a "life held together with wishful thinking and krazy glue," to see and feel "jazzmen in the falling stars." Jones herself writes, “adding that Femme du Monde is about travel but really about autonomy--my essential nature moving to space.” Consider yourself lucky to know well in advance that Jones’s third book, Painkiller, has just been accepted for publication by Tia Chucha Press, and begin looking for it in the spring or summer of 2011. Warm seasons in which this poet, who lives in a Brooklyn flat whose super is mighty stingy about heat, seems to thrive.
1994: I was sitting in the shadows of tall buildings across from Battery Park on a Sunday when thousands of gays and others were marching past the U.N. In Philadelphia, Mississippi there were programs honoring "Freedom Summer." Across the globe men, women and children were eating, killing, making love. It's near the end of the 20th century and poetry is still alive in me and thousands of other women and men with language in our hearts and passion in our minds. We have a passion for history or story or jokes as we try to interpret the "dream of a common language" to quote Adrienne Rich.
I am fortunate to have grown up an American of African descent. I am someone native to Arkansas, to the United States of America in the 1950's and 60"s-- a time of extraordinary change. As with any fortune, this one demands a great deal of study: to the nuances and subtleties of speech and dream; to the demands of politics and blood; to the struggle to fully make my vision comprehensible to those who still cannot perceive an autonomous African American woman in this world.
2008: I admit to my desire for authorship; for telling my version of the world; for breaking silence. To write poetry is to make art, whether the poem is out of personal pain; political rage; or deep spiritual trekking. I am grateful for words.
Berkeley / Chapel Hill /Bossier Parish, Louisiana
I am grateful too, for the chance to give advance notice not only of Jones’s new title, but also that of Rachel Richardson’s début volume, Copperhead (Carnegie-Mellon). This young woman’s work first struck me when I came upon “Leadbelly in Pin-Striped Suit” in an issue of Shenandoah (edited, perhaps coincidentally and perhaps just by good ol’ juju, by the aforementioned R. T. Smith) and when I first got my hands on the manuscript of the book, I didn’t know where to put her. North Carolina, where she received part of her education? Louisiana? The deeper south the better, I decided, though, trained as a poet as well as a folklorist, she has taken for her own certain aspects of C. D. Wright’s, [aspects of what? poetry?] particularly the documentarian ones. Some of the richest and best poems in Copperhead will soon be published in New South, whose name, and those of its poetry editor, James Thomas Miller, you’ll hear more about in a couple of weeks.
RELATED ARTICLES
Notes On State Of Poetry: Part One
Notes On State Of Poetry: Part Two
Notes On State Of Poetry: Part Four
Alabama Poet Diann Blakely
Best Music Books of 2008
In The Sanctuary of Outcasts: A Memoir
Currently there are 8 comments. Leave one now!
