NEWSFLASH: POETRY IS SMALL!

We were fortunate to enough to be in attendance at the first JARS (Journal Alliance Reading Series) event of 2007 earlier today, when RMR's own Mary Kaiser read from her new chapbook of poems, "Falling Into Velazquez" (Slapering Hol Press, 2006). There were a total of 23 people at the Bottletree Cafe in the lovely, gritty little Avondale neighborhood just east of the Magic City. That's 23 counting the bartenders. And the poet. You could look at that and say, "See...

1) ...poetry is insignificant!" and/or
2) ...the masses are ignorant slobs!"

You'd be wrong on both counts, though, and here's why...

As regards Count #1: Some of the most essential things are relatively small. Germs, for instance. Also kidneys. Wethinks our addiction to big portions stems from an excess of positivistic rationalism (or is that rationalistic positivism?) -- more is better because we can see it, and if we can see it, we can count it, and if we can count it, we can be sure it means something. But poetry's lack of size makes it stealthy, hearty too, and replete with coping strategies. And what is life without stealth and coping strategies? Boring and/or insufferable.

As regards Count #2: Poetry combats ignorance in the only way it can be beaten: that is, hand-to-hand. Sitting with 23 people in what used to be a gay bar, there isn't any such thing as "the masses." That vast shared numbness dissolves away. We will all, soon enough, retake our positions in regards to "the masses" -- among them, stalking their perimeter, etc. The point is 23 people on a Sunday afternoon listened to good poems and good thought and thereby engaged in something not very unlike a worship service. Contemplation. Reflection. Fellowship. Communion. A small moment made larger for its smallness, a brief time to step out of the world, our world: its ignorance, its significance, its sheer mass. Amen.

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RED MOUNTAIN READING SERIES HOSTS POET ALLISON JOSEPH...

...this Thursday, Feb 8, on the Shelby campus of Jefferson State Community College! The reading starts at 11 a.m. in Room 211 of RSH Hall. Allison Joseph is the author of five books of poetry: Worldly Pleasure (Word Press, 2004); Imitation of Life (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2002); Soul Train (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1997); In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997); and What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), which won the Ampersand Women Poets Series Prize and the John C. Zacharis Award First Book Prize from Ploughshares. Her many awards include a fellowship and a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council, fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, an Academy of American Poets prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and an Associated Writing Programs Prize. She is an Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University and editor of Crab Orchard Review.

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500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: KATIE FORD

Whether or not Katie Ford is a "God-fearing soul," we can’t say for sure. We suspect, however, that God has fixed at least one wary eye on her. Somebody’d better -- she’s got the chops to take over the world (at least that small corner of it known as Po-Biz): Harvard M.Div. Iowa M.F.A. Latin honors from Whitman College. Good thing for us slack-ass mortals, she seems pretty benevolent.

Ford is the author of Deposition, published by Graywolf, and her individual poems have appeared anywhere and everywhere that matters. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Prairie Lights Prize, and she has contributed to the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Currently the Poetry Editor of New Orleans Review, she has taught most recently at Loyola University, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and Reed College.

Lucky for RMR, she’s agreed to judge the 2007 Red Mountain Chapbook Contest (!) and -- über–Good Sport that she is -- she’s submitted herself to the inaugural 500 Words (More) or Less [read the interview after the jump!]. This new feature will bring you the insights and musings of various writers, readers, and thinkers of note, all in 500 words (more) or less...

First, a morsel from Deposition:

Last Breath with No Proof

What is unremembered may be lodged she said a child may not
recall but will act it out in play doll on ground face against tile see how he takes it

by the hair by the foot by the tangled legs sweet mind made of tangled legs
and a patterned dress oh to have evidence to have the scent explained

birds trapped in chimney rustle of wings and fire or numbers etched into an arm
show me where you were hurt I am asked but I am simple unmarked remembering how

can one act out what happened in the mind how make the mind alone in a house
how show long silence what clock what song is there for hollowness who hurt you

once the ticking the voices start she did he did my mind did
and the trespass it begins again?

_____________________________

Q&A

RMR: TRUE or FALSE: Contemporary American poetry is kissin’ cousins with Christian Gnosticism of old, stingy with its secret handshakes, its extinction hard-wired into its own genetic code. Discuss.

KF: The heart of your question is whether or not American poetry will go “extinct” because it is written by a group of insiders — mean, wise, and tight. We should be more concerned that we are writing poems that will last than we are with the movement called “Contemporary American Poetry.” The poems that will last in time, and that move us now, are written because a poet is trying to write something that someone else can utter as if it came from them. When I recite a lyric by Rilke, if I attend to its music and thinking and emotions, it feels as if it is my utterance. That is a form of lyric ecstasy. A fusion, an intimacy. There can be no stinginess in the poetic task. There can be no selfishness. Individual poets might be this way, but they are human beings, so forgive them. Where would we be without T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes”? Yet he was a part of perhaps the tightest, most elite poetic circle of history. But, for the “Preludes,” I would forgive him anything. To be able to have on my lips, “I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling: / The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.” There are extinctions in poetry all of the time—good extinctions. Poems published that are not memorable die off sometimes because of compositional haste, because they are not strenuous in their language, because they are anecdotal, etc. That is an extinction. But poems that will last press against and through this — it doesn’t matter who writes them.

When you are alone, you are with a poem, not with “Contemporary American Poetry.” If the poem slays you, you will be a little more alive, a little less extinguished. When I feel this way, I am full of gratitude toward the poet who struggled and thrashed about to write that poem.

As for the “Christian Gnostics,” their texts were lost to us because they were deemed a heretical threat to the political and religious powers of what was being named “orthodox Christianity.” We have them now because they were discovered centuries later in a sand-buried library in Egypt. They are gorgeous, complicated texts. In the same way, Contemporary Poetry, if it is foolish and threatened by new genius, if it allows power — political and literary — to publish only poems of the inner circle, we could bury the poems that would have otherwise brought us new utterance, ecstasy, and lasting literature.

RMR: A couple of years ago, in the Q&A after a reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City [scroll down to July 20], you explained your decision to pursue the study of Divinity by quoting Tony Hoagland’s poem, “When Dean Young Talks About Wine”:

When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.

But when a man is hurt,
he makes himself an expert.

Interestingly enough -- nearly as interesting as the fact that you know those lines by heart -- you left off the poem’s three-line dismount, which goes like this:

Then he stands there with a glass in his hand
staring at nothing
as if he was forming an opinion

All of this makes me think of Auden, addressing Yeats:

...Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

The same might be said of religion: not a thing but a way; not a noun but a verb. A means of addressing hurt, responding to it. A method of survival.

On the other hand, there’s something calcified in expertise, or perhaps cauterized. Product over process. Safe, confined, contained -- and trapped.

Your work, specifically Deposition, seems more unleashed than that. There’s a helluva lot of roaring involved. Incomprehension, too: the powerful, growling -- yes -- ferocious kind. There’s also huddling, nesting. Indeed, there’s “nothing,” as well -- “...how show long silence what clock what song / is there for hollowness who hurt you” -- but it’s the kind of nothing that won’t suffer to be blinked at dumbly. It demands an opinion, a stance, if only as a mechanism of self-defense.

Messy, yes. Painful and incomprehensible, too. I suspect (who can say for sure?) those things are part and parcel of transcendence: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” pleads the bloody Nazarene (and here’s the kicker) the moment before his spirit ascends. Last breath with no proof.

Here’s something I notice: There’s some measure of resignation in Hoagland’s sentiment, and defeat. Secular and still. But I daresay there’s a roar of religiosity in the Auden, as in Matthew 27:46. And I already said I hear that roar -- lots of them, actually -- in Deposition.

So here, finally, is the question -- loaded and unanswerable though it might be:

Where would you locate your study of Divinity and -- if I may be so bold as to ask them to join hands -- your poetry on the continuum of secular to religious, of sacred to profane?

KF: Divinity School and Deposition were part of the same time period in my life, but there is a distinction between them, and that is why I quoted Hoagland’s beautiful lines, “But when a man is hurt/he makes himself an expert,” when asked why I went to Divinity School. Expertise is a pursuit of the intellect, and, in some cases, the body. So, yes, it holds itself at a distance, a distance religious seekers don’t usually want. They want intimacy, submersion. Studying theology (trying to gain some intellectual expertise) was a way for me to contend with the powerful and destructive elements of religion, elements I had experienced in my earlier, younger religiosity. Deposition stems from those emotions, which were, I believe, flamed a bit by things I was learning in my intellectual studies. For example, I began to find clear correlations between the ways theologians and religious leaders wrote and spoke and the ways humans perpetrate violence. Both forcefully define the reality of another person, both control another, both thrive by moments of threat and moments of mercy. I have a long essay on this and can’t go into it all now. I used up too many words above! But, having this theory made Deposition even stormier. My work engages the metaphors of my tradition — God, world, human, salvation, etc. — and in that way, my work is not fully secular. If being called a “religious” poet means the questions I most often contend with in my poems concern those metaphors, then I lean towards what you call the sacred. That said, the human is included in my list of metaphors.

I am not a Christian poet. I am just a poet, and it means very little to me to say or not say I am religious. I don’t believe in God, I do believe in God. I have no interest in reading poetry that claims to be Christian or religious, in the same way I have no interest in surrounding myself with people who are eager to claim those things.

RMR: Ten Either/Or’s. (Explain or not.)

Barack or Hillary? Barack.
Clooney or Johansson? This is not an interesting either/or.
John or Paul? Small parts of both.
Psalm 23 or Sonnet 18? The psalm, I dare say.
East or West? Northwest near the East.
Elvis or Frank? Elvis.
Emily or Walt? Emily.
Martin Luther or Martin Luther King? MLK.
Audrey or Katharine? Katharine in “Bringing Up Baby.”
Loaves or Fishes? Fishes, currently Japanese varieties.

RMR: You are poet-king for a day. Make a to-do list.

KF: 1. Depose some people.

RMR: Katie Ford poems as prophecies, as tongues, as baptisms, as ablutions, as all or none of these. Discuss.

KF: One becomes ugly when one claims these things. I will say this: there are rhetorical and musical techniques in the voices, liturgies, and manners of speech you list in your question. Sometimes I use them.

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AND THE WINNER IS...

Annie Proulx, for Brokeback Mountain!

No, no. We kid.

THE 2006 RMR CHAPBOOK CONTEST WINNER...AS CHOSEN BY RODNEY JONES...IS...

ON U.S. 6 TO PROVIDENCE

BY LOU SUAREZ!!

Jones told us he was drawn to On U.S. 6 to Providence not just for its intelligence, humor, and confidence, but for its emotional risk as well. Those are meat-and-potatoes attributes, that's for sure, and we're confident readers won't push away from the table hungry after sitting down to sample what Suarez has to offer in these poems.

Thanks to those who submitted -- more than double the volume of last year's contest! -- and we sincerely hope you'll try us again. Lots that was very, very publishable in this batch.

Encouraging and daunting at the same time -- so much good work, so few good venues.

But we're fighting the good fight and we encourage you to join us!

Submit!

Subscribe!

Most important: Write! Read! Think!

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POETRY WITHOUT GIMMICK: BETH ANN FENNELLY'S TENDER HOOKS

A review by Elizabeth Buckalew

If Muriel Rukeyser first wondered what would happen if a woman told the truth about her life, poet Beth Ann Fennelly has offered an answer. To read Tender Hooks, Fennelly's second book, is to encounter Fennelly herself, who throws open the doors of her life and invites readers inside. She introduces herself and others: her husband, fiction writer Tom Franklin; their young daughter, Claire; and poet-friend Ann Fisher-Wirth show up regularly, and the poems flow directly from Fennelly's life. As she explains on the jacket, Fennelly wrote Tender Hooks "to figure out what [she] was experiencing," and her poems proceed as explorations rather than proclamations. Fennelly demonstrates great versatility: she writes heroic couplets, sonnets, prose poems, and free verse. Some poems span eighteen pages; others, such as "First Day at Daycare," contain a mere fifteen syllables: "My daughter comes home smelling like another woman's perfume." Just as Fennelly's daughter carries the scent of another woman, these poems hold traces of other poets. However, they never allow their literary forbearers to overshadow their own poetics. Fennelly demonstrates an acute awareness of things literary, but she defines herself within this context rather than being subsumed by it.

Tender Hooks chronicles Fennelly's explorations, and its poems often juxtapose her life with people in it or with the outside world. "A Study of Writing Habits," for example, travels from Fennelly's composition classroom to her experience at Wrigley Field, from the papers of Ogden Nash to the poems of Moore and Bishop. Each stop raises questions; at Wrigley, Fennelly enjoys watching the umpires clean home plate, then wonders, half playfully and half self-consciously, "Does this make me a domestic poet?" Subsequent poems explore Fennelly's sensitivity to the impossibility of language, a theme introduced in her first book, Open House. She rigorously investigates miscommunications and misnomers, as in the prose poem "Waiting for the Heart to Moderate," which begins, "Adults had a drink, they said, to take the edge off, so that's how she came to understand growing up: erosion."

"Telling the Gospel Truth," a stunning, ten-section poem originally published in The Kenyon Review, links reflections on faith and writing to the realities of being a mother. Many of Tender Hooks' poems explore parenthood; Fennelly discusses childbirth, miscarriage, nursing, and child-rearing. Though these themes are common, Fennelly addresses them without melodrama and with fresh insight. Fennelly's role as a parent also allows her a fresh perspective on language and its acquisition, and the poems often discuss Claire, Fennelly's toddler, learning to speak. Readers see Claire master the word ball and then use it on every round object she encounters, but we also see language from Fennelly's perspective. Her descriptions are always exact, as in "Why We Shouldn't Write Love Poems, or, If We Must, Why We Shouldn't Publish Them," which reads, "We fall in love, we fumble for a pen, we send our poems out like Jehovah's Witnesses--in time they return home, and when they do, they find the locks changed." Fennelly makes writing appear effortless, "the way thin people seem naturally thin."

There is a risk inherent in such talent and ease, of course; models of the poet as untouchable sage abound, and they often repel readers. Fennelly, however, is wise enough not to be such a poet. She reveals her questions and uncertainties, and she does not assume a self-righteous posture. She crafts poems from rejection slips, weeps before her students, pokes fun at herself and her jealousy of Claire's "Daddy Phase," confessing, "I would like to pitch a fit when she ducks my kiss." Fennelly's poems are candid and welcoming. They are works likely to make readers long to invite her to dinner.

In Tender Hooks, Fennelly accomplishes what few poets ever master: she roots her poems in the specifics of everyday life, but she does so without banality and with great intelligence and wit. These poems are frank without relying on shock value; they are smart without being pompous. Although the title comes from a phrase Fennelly misunderstood as a child, it provides an apt glimpse at the volume's contents. Fennelly's poems offer a warm, generous protagonist who embraces challenging topics. Her poems explore the people and things that bear tender hooks, those entities that simultaneously compel and confound, bind and barb, those things that enthrall us.

Elizabeth Buckalew received her BA from Davidson College in North Carolina and is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Alabama. The book is Tender Hooks by Beth Ann Fennelly. W.W. Norton, 2004.

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THE VOICE-DRIVEN LYRIC

A review by Mary Kaiser

Take any sequence of lyric poems, say Keats’s five great odes. Try not to read them as the story of a twenty-four-year-old poet confronting his own death. Try reading Sappho’s ecstatic fragments without stitching them into a series of erotic encounters. Try reading Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection Ariel without looking for clues to her suicide.

The formalists cautioned against it, but we can’t help reading a series of poems as story. The narrative-hungry imagination reads any group of texts as a beginning, middle and end the way a magnet aligns a jumble of iron filings.

Maurice Manning uses this narrative magnetism to great advantage in his latest collection, A Companion for Owls:Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, &c. Roughly two-thirds of the poems are dramatic monologues, but interleaved among them are lyrical poems. Taken out of context, the lyrics, like the first poem “On God,” can be read as the product of a contemporary American poetic voice. But within the narrative force-field of the collection, the lyrics are energized with the voice of “Long Hunter, Back Woodsman,” Daniel Boone.

Why Daniel Boone? Because, Manning writes in the essay that closes this collection, “if ever there were a Noble Savage, surely it is Boone.” In fact, he goes on to argue that Boone could plausibly have been the image of English Romanticism’s solitary man in communion with the wilderness, free of the class conflict and political turmoil.

The Daniel Boone in Manning’s poems, however, is no Byronic hero. He might be disaffected by Jeffersonian democracy, but he is neither alienated nor alone. Married, the father of twelve children, friend of the Indian, he is an alert observer of his fellow men, and makes no claim to transcend the common human condition. In fact, in “To the Discovery Corps,” addressing Lewis and Clark, Boone inveighs against pride, calling it the most dangerous of all temptations, “of which I know/ no greater darkness, none.”

Manning gets the voice of Daniel Boone exactly right in these poems. It’s clean, sensuous, rigorously rational, rising to lyricism from a firm foundation of observation laid on bedrock of healthy skepticism. The voice of Daniel’s brother Squire appears in letters, the idiosyncratic spelling functioning as dialect: “What her you of Jeffersones kinsmen/ who bucherred and burnt up a Slave/ the night God so fercely shook the Erthe?” Manning’s faithfulness to the language of Boone’s time extends even to titles that resonate with the formal candor of eighteenth-century poetry, as in “On the Property of Magnetism,” “Advice to Rovers, and “A Description of a Crude Machine.”

If Maurice Manning’s Boone foreshadows the English Romantics, he also presages the Transcendentalism of Thoreau and Whitman. When Boone concludes in “On Being Raised Quaker” that “I never saw the need to make my peace with God,/ since I never felt we disagreed,” he’s paraphrasing Thoreau’s words on his deathbed.

Although he lived through the American Revolution, Daniel Boone participated very little in the debates of that period; he seemed more interested in the actual landscape than in theorizing about America. Manning’s Boone, who asks “What in the name of Shadrach, Meshach, and that other one/ is an inalienable right?” might agree with Thoreau that “it is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world.”

Boone also echoes Whitman throughout the collection, with one poem, “A Contemplation of the Celestial World,” a beautiful homage to Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” At a deeper level, Boone’s embrace of physicality, his celebration, with Whitman, of “the flesh and the appetites,” pervades these poems, as for example in these lines from “Sheltowee”: “Captivity/ is not the word that I would use when women/ place a string of beads around your neck/ and giggle to themselves.” When Boone compares a landscape to the “taut thighs of a woman giving birth,” we can see in this language the slippage between the historical Boone discussed in the closing essay and the imagined Boone of the poems. As a poetic creation Boone can appropriate a frank rhapsodic diction unavailable to his historical counterpart.

Maurice Manning’s Daniel Boone is a big man, with one foot in the frontier imagination of the eighteenth century and the other firmly planted in a post-modern consciousness of all that would be lost–magnificent herds of bison, free bands of Indians, undiscovered landscapes, and most of all the chance, when all your schemes come to naught, to light out once again for the territories.

Mary Kaiser serves as poetry editor for Red Mountain Review. The book is A Companion for Owls:Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, &c. by Maurice Manning. Harcourt, 2004.

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