Testimony

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poetry

Stephen Dunn passed away a few days ago at the age of 82. He was one of my absolute favorite poets. His specialty was seeing meaning in the smallest of things, and his work had immense wit that was also quite expansive. His poems would often take on bigger and bigger meanings as they went along, yet they always stayed grounded in the real and specific. He had such a marvelous way of seeing!

In his honor, here’s his poem “Testimony,” which was published in the New Yorker not quite ten years ago.

The Lord woke me in the middle of the night,

and there stood Jesus with a huge tray,

and the tray was heaped with cookies,

and He said, Stephen, have a cookie,

and that’s when I knew for sure the Lord

is the real deal, the Man of all men,

because at that very moment

I was thinking of cookies, Vanilla Wafers

to be exact, and there were two

Vanilla Wafers in among the chocolate

chips and the lemon ices, and one

had a big S on it, and I knew it was for me,

and Jesus took it off the tray and put it

in my mouth, as if He were giving me

communication, or whatever they call it.

Then He said, Have another,

and I tell you I thought a long time before I

refused, because I knew it was a test

to see if I was a Christian, which means

a man like Christ, not a big ole hog.

Old Hymns and Odd Images

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Bible, hymns, lyrics, music, poetry, Robert Robinson

I’ve made my fondness for old hymns known before. I grew up with them, and even today an old hymn will get stuck in my head for days at a time.

Such is the case with “Come, Thou Fount,” one of the hymns that was an evergreen favorite in my childhood church, and one of those that has maintained a surprising popularity among contemporary pop Christian groups and singers, although as usual they can’t keep from tweaking it to make it more “modern,” adding choruses or smoothing out the lyrics to suit today’s sensibilities.

“Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” to give its full title, was written in the mid-1700s by a 22-year-old English pastor and hymnodist named Robert Robinson. Like most hymns of the era, it came unattached to a particular tune. The tune we associate it with the most is an American tune of somewhat obscure origin called “Nettleton,” named after the Connecticut evangelist and composer Asahel Nettleton, who may or may not have written it. The tune has a kind of thumping, straightforward tread that is one reason it sticks in the mind so easily: de de BUMP BUMP, de de BUMP BUMP, and so forth.

Robert Robinson, from Wikipedia.

But what draws me to “Come, Thou Fount” are its lyrics. They’re kind of a mishmash, really, but in such interesting ways. Take the first lines. “Come, thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy praise. Streams of mercy never ceasing call for songs of loudest praise.” This gives us a hint of what we’re in for. God is a fountain, and also a kind of cosmic piano tuner. The two images are intermingled through the verse. One might say Robinson is mixing his metaphors here, or that this tumbled mix is just what he’s aiming for, in the sense that God is too big to be contained in a single metaphorical framework.

The second verse relies on what to most people today is a very obscure Biblical reference: “Here I raise mine Ebenezer, here by Thy great help I’ve come.” But believers in Robinson’s time would have recognized the reference as coming from 1 Samuel, in a verse in which Samuel erects a monument stone at the site of a victory over the Philistines. Samuel calls it “Stone of Help,” or Eben-Ezer in the English transliteration of the Hebrew, and the word came to signify a place of victory by divine intervention. The legendary Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta takes its name from this passage, as do thousands of other “Ebenezer” churches around the country. So the hymn is a victory paean.

But no, it’s not, for a couple of verses later come an amazing set of lines. “O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be! Let Thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee.” The grace of God is phrased in terms of debt and imprisonment, which in 18th-century England would have been painfully familiar. For Robinson, who was disinherited at age five with ten shillings and sixpence, debt and imprisonment would have been a present concern. And then the desperate plea: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above.” It’s easy to imagine the 22-year-old writer, engaged in his own struggles, pouring out this cry. The whole hymn is a tumbling-out of varied figures of speech, tones, and images, following on each other and sometimes weaving together. No wonder people have felt the urge to clean it up a bit for the audiences of their day!

But I like the tangled, almost synesthetic quality of “Come, Thou Fount.” As the tune goes marching along in steady pace, the lyrics are bouncing all over the place. It’s a mixed-up flow of thoughts for mixed-up minds, and I like it just like that.

Remembering Robert E. Smith

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art, Crystal Payton, Leland Payton, poetry, Robert E Smith, Springfield

Several years ago, I posted a reminiscence of Robert E. Smith, a unique character and “outsider artist” with an unmistakable painting style and a sensibility that was nearly impossible to categorize.

I didn’t know this at the time, but it turns out that my fellow Ozarks writers Leland and Crystal Payton had a much longer and closer relationship with him. They recently posted some thoughts about him on his birthday, on their website, HyperCommon. Here’s a link. They also posted a link to a profile of Smith that they published in 1993, which contains many of his insights and comments about his artwork. Here’s a link to that one.

May they continue to flourish, the outsiders, the uncategorizable, the eccentrics and the oddballs. What a drab world it would be without them!

Making Poetry Matter

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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.

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

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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

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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

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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.