Making Poetry Matter

Tags

art, criticism, poetry, The Atlantic

I’ve been meditating for the past couple of weeks on a recent article in The Atlantic entitled “How Poetry Came to Matter Again.” If you didn’t see it yet, that’s ok. The article is a breezy lope through a half dozen contemporary poets, and it quotes only tiny snatches of their poetry, so it’s really quite impossible to tell from the piece whether their work is any good. From the slender supporting evidence of the article, the way a poet “matters” is by obtaining grants, being appointed to university positions, getting on award lists, and developing a large YouTube following.

Of course, those grants, positions, and awards have been with us for quite some time. These poets “matter,” in contrast to the poets of previous generations, the author tells us approvingly, because “They are immigrants and refugees from China, El Salvador, Haiti, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, Vietnam. They are black men and an Oglala Sioux woman. They are queer as well as straight and choose their personal pronouns with care.” In other words, they are poets who matter because of their identity.

I don’t feel any need to critique the nonsensical assertions of the article (I’ve been choosing my personal pronouns with care for years!), and I don’t know the work of the poets mentioned in it; for all I know, some of them could be quite fine, although the tidbits quoted in the article are uneven. It does trouble me, though, that a magazine which purports to be a champion of culture would give itself over to such shallow assertions. Even The Atlantic feels a need to prove its cutting-edge bona fides, I suppose.

The way that a poem matters – a poet matters – a school of poetry matters – is by actually mattering, across generations and across cultures, by being repeated and quoted in new contexts, spoken by others and taken to heart. Do these poets and poems matter? I don’t know, and no one else does yet, either. For now, I’m going to try to keep my eye on the page and not on the CV entries. Emily Dickinson didn’t have much of a resume, as I recall.

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The History of Tree Roots

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Dallas County, farming, Missouri State University, observation, Ozarks, Phil Howerton, poetry, reviews

I bought The History of Tree Roots, Phil Howerton’s new book of poetry, a couple of weeks ago and have been leafing through it ever since. Like most books of poetry, it’s better read a few pages at a time.

Howerton’s specialty is the brief observational lyric, and his subject is the rural Ozarks. A native of Dallas County who now teaches at Missouri State University-West Plains, Howerton has an intimate knowledge of the artifacts of rural life and teases meaning out of them with understated patience: the rock-lined well, the sprouting fencerow, and as in the title poem, the exposed roots of a tree, “holding in place what little remains / of a soil that once held me secure.”

As that pair of lines indicates, the dominant mood in this book is one of loss. Not nostalgia for what is lost, but simple recognition of the loss and meditation on what is now missing. Howerton’s poems are not sentimental in the conventional sense, but they convey strong feelings by their insistence on attending to what is disappearing from Ozark life and what has – and has not – appeared instead.

The physical objects that are the subjects of many of these poems represent values that we associate with earlier generations of Ozarkers: stoicism, simplicity, family loyalty, and skill in the art of ‘making do.’ The poem “Abandoned Barn” recounts these values in the sad light of the barn’s abandonment. “Store against tomorrow / reap within reason, / return to the soil / more than what was taken. / A sheet of tin / roofing rises and falls / in the wind.”

But the Ozark way of life is not portrayed as a thing of unalloyed virtue; that tight-lipped stoicism can conceal provinciality and loathing of the nonconformist. Several poems meditate on old photographs. What is plumbed in these photographs is often the one who is looking away, the one whose expression reveals hidden longing, or the one who is never in the picture to begin with.

The newspaper where I used to work used to publish occasional poems sent in by subscribers, and the common thread in those verses was always the celebration of Ozark scenes and characters, hound dogs and porch-sitters, broomsedge and bloodroot. Phil Howerton takes these cliché-prone subjects and retrieves them by refocusing, changing the angle of view, and noticing the less-noticed.

“Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself,” Wallace Stevens famously wrote, and Howerton’s poems follow that dictum by paying attention to the ordinary things and people around him. And from his noticing, we discover that even ordinary things have un-ordinary depth.

The book is available from amazon.com, among others.

– Phil Howerton

 

Working Like a Duck

Tags

Arkansas, art, books, creativity, history, Missouri, Missouri State University, music, novels, poetry, West Plains, writing

You know that old saying about how a duck works — calm and still in the visible part, but paddling like heck down below? Well, that’s how I’ve been the last couple of weeks. I’ve been quiet on this blog, on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere, because I’ve been focusing on a couple of projects that have taken a lot of time and concentration.

There’s the next book, which is rounding the turn toward home at last, and I’m very excited about that. You hit a moment when things start coming together, when the plot threads that you put down months ago in earlier chapters finally start tying up, and it’s an exciting passage that makes all the groaning of earlier months feel worthwhile. Still some distance to travel, but the finish line is in view.

I’ve also been working on my presentation for the Ozarks Cultural Symposium, which is next week in West Plains. I was honored this year to be asked to be the keynote speaker. I’m hoping to live up to that honor with a talk that will also draw together a lot of the threads of thought that I have about the Ozarks, its image, and its representation in creative culture.

If you’re near the West Plains area, you should definitely come to this symposium! It’s put on every year by the branch campus of Missouri State University there, and they always draw a wonderfully diverse group of presenters from Missouri, Arkansas, and elsewhere. It’s interdisciplinary and includes creative presenters (poetry, music, fiction, etc.) as well as scholarly ones.

Restoration

Tags

art, history, Jonathan Edwards, music, poetry, shape-note, This Old World

Here’s an image of the shape-note hymn that is the basis for “This Old World,” the hymn from which I took the title to my new book.

Like many shape-note hymns, it’s drenched in the helpless state of humanity and the abject dependence of the human on God. Shape-note lyrics make me think of Jonathan Edwards, although they typically were written after Edwards’ time. But they have the same bracing theological feeling. You have the sensation of standing on a precipice, with the void below you and the wind blowing hard.

Sorry that the image I reproduced is somewhat blurry. Here are the lyrics, if you can’t make them out:

Mercy, O thou Son of David! Thus blind Bartimeos pray’d;

Others by thy grade are savéd, O vouchsafe to me thine aid.

(Accent added for clarification of rhythm.)

Favorite Ozarks People – 7

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art, creativity, Missouri, poetry, Robert E Smith, Springfield

Robert E. Smith

I met Robert E. Smith in the 1970s, when I was publishing Ozark Review along with Doug Pokorny and some other great folks. We had sent out a general call for submissions, and one day in the mail came an amazing package stuffed with poems, personal essays, and other writing that defied categorization. Accompanying many of the poems were snapshots of paintings. It turned out that the poems originated from the paintings and were essentially descriptions of what was happening in the painting.

To say the least, they were unusual. “Where Is Santa?” was a painting/poem about Santa being abducted by aliens. “Bloodshed in the Butchershop” recounted a butcher who got, uh, a little too enthusiastic. And “Birds Taste Good” was . . . mmm. Let’s not go there.

The paintings were flat-out amazing, filled with color and action from corner to corner. The wild subject matter only added to their appeal. There was something about the abandon of the paintings–even from the snapshots, we could tell that they were colorful, thickly laden with the brightest acrylic paints possible, and utterly original. We published a poem called “Nighttime in the Forest,” which included the memorable line, “The dog howled, and a dinosaur walked by.”

Later that year, we threw a picnic at Montauk State Park to celebrate the magazine’s launch and invited all the writers and artists. Robert showed up; if memory serves, he had hitchhiked from Springfield. And he had a gunny sack full of paintings for sale.

I remember thinking, “Well, he’s kind of shabby, probably needs the money,” so I bought a painting for $50, the price he quoted me. It was called “A Winter Adventure,” and it involved another spaceship, plus a sleigh with some drunks tumbling out of it, a burning log cabin, a parrot, a bear, a deer, and several other items.

Imagine my surprise, a few years later, when I visited the National Museum of American Folk Art in Washington, D.C., and there was a painting by Robert E. Smith on exhibit! It turns out that Robert had developed quite a following among artists in southwest Missouri, devotees of visionary art, and people who liked unique viewpoints. Robert was later commissioned to paint a mural in downtown Springfield, was the subject of a book, and even acted in a movie!

“A Winter Adventure” still hangs in my house, and I love to gaze at it.

The mural in Springfield

The Missouri Writers’ Guild – Part 1

Tags

art, books, creativity, fiction, Missouri, Missouri Writers Guild, novels, poetry, writing

I’ve just returned from the annual meeting/conference of the Missouri Writers’ Guild, an organization I have had the privilege to serve as president for the last two years. I came away with several reflections that I will be sharing over the next few posts.

First, and most important from the personal perspective, I was reminded that all writers–all writers, I repeat–need to continually sharpen their craft. At the conference, we had beginning writers and authors with multiple books. But I think every one of us came away with something to remember. It’s easy to get stuck in a stylistic rut, or to grow insensitive to one’s weaknesses. A conference, with its wide variety of sessions and viewpoints, is a great way to pause and reexamine old habits. I was in a session this weekend with an insecure beginning writer who in the space of two minutes told us the most amazing and moving story, reminding  me that inspired thoughts can come from the most unexpected sources and that everyone deserves to be listened to.

I was reminded as well that writers, for the most part, are generous people with their time and thoughts. Throughout the conference, people gathered in hallways and side chairs, conversing and sharing. That’s where the real conference is taking place, as much as in the formal sessions and workshops.

It’s an ongoing, evolving art form, this act of writing, and a gathering of writers both humbles and refreshes. How much there is yet to know. How much there is yet to write.

Poetry, memory, mystery

Tags

Current River, favorite_places, Missouri, nature, Ozarks, poetry, St. Louis, writing

photo by Kbh3rd, uploaded from Wikimedia Commons

I had the great pleasure of spending Tuesday on the Current River, and while drifting along, I remembered a poem I had published in Ozark Review many years ago. Poetry has an amazing capacity to stick in the mind; I hadn’t read this poem in years, maybe decades, but I could still remember its last few lines.

But I couldn’t remember who wrote it! Looked it up this morning and remembered that it was James S. Harris, who was from Kirkwood. Then I remembered further that he and I had enjoyed a long lunch one afternoon in the late ’70s, talking about the Ozarks, publishing, and poetry.

Oddly enough, I can’t find any information about what became of him. His poem was a lovely, finely structured piece that used a float trip on the Current River as a metaphor for the fragility of life, so I can’t imagine that it was the last thing he wrote. At the time of publication (1978), he was 32, so that would make him around 67 by now. But I can’t find any listings of books. If anybody has information about the creator of this lovely poem, please let me know! Here’s the poem, which was entitled “The Tree Will Fall”:

It always seemed to me —

the clear green pool, the leaning tree —

as changeless as an illustration in

my copy of Huckleberry Finn,

as the crack in the churchyard wall.

And the stream itself, more

each time like the perfect time before,

till at last the landmarks of a float trip seemed

the features of a faithful dream,

endless, vivid, still.

And yet I have wakened to find

the president’s men have all resigned;

arteries a pinpoint more congealed

and a mind, therefore, finally sealed

that once outshone them all.

There is oil, I hear, beneath —

Canoers, hang another wreath —

and I see the gap the fissure will become,

for as surely as the Current runs,

the sycamore will fall.

 

Missouri Libraries

Tags

Ellen Massey, libraries, Missouri, Missouri Writers Guild, novels, poetry, Springfield, writing

As part of my role as this year’s president of the Missouri Writers’ Guild, I got to set up and work a booth at the annual conference of the Missouri Library Association. I’ve already expressed my fondness for libraries and librarians elsewhere in this blog, but I’ll just repeat it here…..librarians are one of civilization’s jewels! They uphold our American ideal of free access to ideas. It was a great pleasure to sit in our booth and visit with those who stopped by.

A special shout-out to other members of the Writers’ Guild who also held down our booth for a shift – Deborah Schott, our treasurer (pictured below), Laura Valenti, Ellen Gray Massey, Debbie Blades, T. W. Fendley, Lawrence Iles, and Betty McLane-Iles. Thanks for your participation!

The Writers’ Guild booth

Misty, Moisty Morning

Tags

ballad, England, history, poetry, rural

One misty, moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather….

That’s a nursery rhyme my mother would repeat on mornings like this….overcast and foggy, rainwater dripping off trees.

The first verse is all I ever knew, but it turns out that there’s a whole series of verses. The old man that the narrator meets in the first verse disappears, and the rest of the poem deals with the narrator meeting a milkmaid named Dolly a little farther down the road.

The narrator immediately sets to courting Dolly, and “with many kind embraces, I stroked her double chin.” And for once the ballad is not about seduction and abandonment: “Her parents then consented, all parties were agreed, her portion thirty shillings, we married were with speed.”

How do you do, and how do you do, and how do you do again!

Whitman’s Noiseless Patient Spider

Tags

art, creativity, indirection, poetry, Whitman

A noiseless, patient spider,

I mark’d where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;

Ever unreeling them–ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,

Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,–seeking the spheres, to connect them;

Till the bridge you will need, be form’d–till the ductile anchor hold;

Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

I’ve always been fond of this poem, its image of the spider flinging pieces of itself into the unknown as an analogue to the poet’s s effort. It’s a good encapsulation of the creative act, even though I do have to say that Whitman gets a little too obvious about it in the second stanza. But that’s Whitman for you — I love the guy’s work, but indirection is not his strong point.

My tendency in my prose is toward excessive indirection — so perhaps I should take a lesson from Whitman occasionally and lay my meanings out there for everyone to see.

Mmm, nah.