April 2012 – Snopes

Art, Heart, Habitat: Craig Pleasants’ show “Volume”

R.T. Smith

A couple of years ago I ambled into a field on the property of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and sat down on a bench incorporated into the shelter of a tall stacked- slat structure with elegant lines and a satisfying prospect of woods and meadow. The summer sun encouraged me to lie down for a spell, and soon I had dozed off.

I didn’t realize that I was, as I appreciated the shape and then availed myself of the shelter, in tune with the builder’s intentions – merging an aesthetic experience with a practical one. The construction was a product of the imagination of Craig Pleasants, and Tuesday evening I had the opportunity to see slides of more of his artful vernacular habitats and to hear him speak about the political and soulful nature of what he calls an “aesthetics of necessity.”

A veteran of the post-modern reassessment of what constitutes art, Pleasants has designed and built many site-specific pieces and engaged in performance art, as well as traditional genres. Many of these – from rookeries to a re-telling of the “Three Pigs” tale from folklore, can be found at his website: http://www.craigpleasants.com

For two reasons I recommend Craig Pleasants’ new art, even for those who are unable to visit his current exhibition, “Volume,” in the Staniar Gallery at Washington and Lee. First, his art, which my vocabulary doesn’t do justice to, is arresting, provocative, surprising and beautiful, and a two-dimensional acquaintance with them is inadequate. The gallery exhibit concentrates on a free-standing tent constructed of red shirts of many sizes and styles, all sewn together. Ancillary to this centerpiece are ink and watercolor drawings and sketches related to the tent. To walk through the show is to re-open questions of dwelling, home and sanctuary.

The second aspect of the show, demonstrative of Pleasants’ activism, is a statement we’re to imagine is being sent from George Washington, whose own sympathies exhibit more than one dimension. On the one hand, Washington donated canal stock worth $20,000 to the struggling Liberty Hall Academy, which later became Washington College, then WLU. On the other, Washington while president sympathized with Haitian slave-owners whose chattel were rebelling against them in 1791. Pleasants has produced a document which channels Washington (in fact borrowing from his prose style and habits) suggesting that Washington and Lee donate $20,000 for housing materials to the current generation of Haitians left homeless by recent earthquake and storm. Such a donation would be, the artist says, an act of atonement for “an act that seemed to me to sully his otherwise stellar reputation.”

Although I admire Washington, recent scholarship has already demythologized him, made us see him as a man with virtues and shortcomings, but Pleasants’ humanitarian impulse and the art arising from it serves to remind us of the complexity of our culture and of our own often unconscious engagement with questions of what is shelter, what habitat, sanctuary, home, that “aesthetics of necessity” that permeates this artist’s work and reminds us that “art for art’s sake” has probably never been a very meaningful phrase unless it’s accompanied by a sense of “art for heart’s sake” and “art for mind’s sake,” both of which are in play with Pleasants’ creations.

R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

Alyson Hagy’s BOLETO

R.T. Smith

“She had a good head. There was nothing goat nosed or weak chinned about her. Her jaw was a fine crescent that transitioned into a neat, clean mouth. Her throat arced gracefully away from her jaw into a long, but not too long, neck. She’d fill out moere in the neck as she aged, but he could already tell she’d never be too thick there. And she’d never be spindly either. He was surprised by the hue of her neck and face. She was one of the deeper blood bays he’d laid eyes on in a long time. He realized he had never asked Campion what color she was. The question hadn’t even come to mind. Color wasn’t important to him. But her color — if she kept it — would make her one to remember. Oxblood to old copper, that’s how he would describe it.”

Alyson Hagy knows words the way that Will Testerman knows horses, from the inside out. She knows people, too.

Coming soon to our Recommended Reading column in the current issue: a brief but enthusiastic explanation of why you should read this new novel right away. For another exhibit of evidence, see Alyson Hagy’s “Self Portrait as a Trailer Full of Mules” in Shenandoah 61, No. 1.

Yes, Bruce Springsteen Counts as Poetry

Timothy McAleenan

Most people would probably argue that “I love you” are the three most powerful words in the English language. At the risk of being a complete jerk, these people are wrong. The three most powerful words in the English language are: “Bruce Springsteen Live”. Given the fact that my iTunes regularly reminds me that I’m coming perilously close to hitting the 1,000 mark for some of the Springsteen songs I get stuck on repeat, and given the fact that I’m going to be spending a decent chunk of change for Springsteen concert tickets this summer, I feel the need to step and defend Springsteen’s work as being equal in quality to the poetry and fiction that we read in academic settings.

Of course, I could talk about how Springsteen’s work is filled with just as many literary allusions as that of any poet—he became obsessed with Flannery O’Connor in his mid-twenties and titled “The River” album after Flannery’s short story by the same name, and he claimed that the song “Nebraska” was inspired by the Flannery theme of “taking on the meanness in this world.” And in the ultimate sign of respect for Flannery, Springsteen wrote a song entitled “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. But it’s not just O’Connor that Springsteen fell under the influence of—there are elements of the Richard Lovelace poem “To Althea, From Prison” in his song “Living Proof.” Lovelace wrote the famous lines “Stone walls do not a prison make / nor iron bars a cage”, but Springsteen answers several hundred years later with, “You showed me my prison was just an open cage / There were no keys, no guards, / Just one frightened man and some old shadows for bars.” Springsteen is well-read, and almost every song I hear from him draws some kind of parallel with a great literary work or offers a deep historical allusion of some kind.

But most of all, Springsteen manages to merge poetry and prose together in a highly unique way—he captures and condenses the strong narrative elements of prose by using a disciplined and creative vocabulary that encompasses the beauty of poetry. In fact, Springsteen is a modern-day Wordsworth in his ability to use common language to express emotion through unadorned lyrics—but whereas Wordsworth looks to nature for his inspiration, Springsteen finds his inspiration in the common man. How can you listen to a live 1978 performance of the song Racing in the Street and not “feel it” when Springsteen breaks into a guttural scream, crying out, “I got sick of waking up in a world that somebody else owns”? He captures this emotion equally well in the song Badlands when he shouts, “Poor man wanna be rich / rich man wanna be king / And a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything.” These are great commentaries on class struggle and the link between ownership of one’s soul and the ownership of material goods, and I absolutely believe these lyrics are as good as anything a traditional poem might offer.

But Springsteen also captures the mystique that often seems to be a prerequisite of good poetry. T.S. Eliot once remarked that if he understands something the first time, it can’t be much good. Eliot’s point was that it is best to feel a poem before understanding it. That’s how I feel about the lyrics in the song Jackson Cage, “Every day ends in wasted motion / Just crossed swords on the killing floor / To settle back is to settle without knowing / The hard edge that you’re settling for.” This strikes me as a perfect example of what Eliot’s talking about—you feel something happening as you listen to these lyrics, but yet it’s difficult to pinpoint it with any type of exact precision.

But there’s a playful side to Springsteen as well that captures the spirit of an independent youth, and I don’t want my commentary to neglect that aspect of his music. He tells his lover in No Surrender, “We learned more from the three minute record baby / than we ever learned in school.” But it’s not just dialogue where Springsteen expresses his playfulness; he does it in his descriptions as well, such as the opening verse of the song Jungleland, “There’s a barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a dodge / Drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain.” And he ends the song Spirit in the Night with the howling sound “Me and crazy Janie were making love in the dirt / Singing our birthday sooooong.” I love Springsteen’s versatility in this regard—he can shift from talking about broken dreams to pranking a lover within a verse, and this is yet another part of what makes his work so poetic.

Sometimes, I get asked to give an example of Springsteen at his best—the moment when his lyrics are so overwhelmingly good that I can have that “Q.E.D” moment in my argument—and my honest answer is that it can’t be done. You don’t regularly ask parents what child is their favorite; you shouldn’t ask Springsteen fans what song is the best. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s take a look at the poetry that can be found in the last verse of “Backstreets” that I’d be semi-comfortable resting my case on:

“Laying here in the dark you’re like an angel on my chest
Just another trampled heart crying tears of faithlessness
Remember all the movies, Terri, we’d go see
Trying to learn how to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be
And after all this time we find we’re just like all the rest
Stranded in the park and forced to confess
To hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets
We swore forever friends, on the backstreets until the end.”

Obviously, the only way to do this right is by listening along, and you can do that by clicking on this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ksDUUkaoqY

Should You Experience What You Write About?

Timothy McAleenan

In Professor Wheeler’s “Poetry & Place” class this semester, we had about five or six occasions where the class discussion went from the level of “good” to “damn good”. One such occasion came up when Professor Wheeler mentioned that some writers engage in code-switching in their novels and personal lives—that is, they speak much differently when speaking to a guy at a gas station than a fellow member of the English department.

Of course, this might seem to be an obvious application of common sense—you’re not going to use the same tone of voice and vocabulary with your lover that you would use with, say, a Dean (unless you’re trying to live out the Bob Dylan song “I Shall Be Free No. 10”). Different circumstances call for different sides of ourselves to emerge, and this does make sense practically. I’m not going to reference Langston Hughes’ “A Dream Deferred” while watching a football game in the frat house. But the class conversation got very interesting when we started talking about the ethics of switching our vocabulary in relation to our peers—is it a dishonest, manipulative practice to change our personality to try to win favor with others? This idea of a split personality can be somewhat unsettling because the chameleon-like demand of adjusting to our surroundings suggests that we might act like someone we are not, which puts us at risk of becoming, in Holden Caulfield’s immortal words, “a phony.”

Professor Smith mentioned this trend to the class earlier in the semester—many stories about people coming from disadvantaged backgrounds are written by people who did not experience the disadvantageous circumstances that appear in the story. Certainly it is not necessary to experience something in order to write about it well—just look at the plethora of Civil War novels that have come out in the past thirty years to find proof of that—but surely this does raise some questions about the authenticity of experience. If all things are equal, is it better if a person writing about an auto mechanic comes from a blue-collar background, or would it be perfectly all right if Mitt Romney penned the narrative?

My opinion on the subject matter would be this—if you have an inventive imagination and the ability to craft sentences like a Charles Dickens, then of course you can write about anything you want. But if you choose to write about someone or something that you have never experienced, then you are much more at risk of resorting to caricatures and stereotypes of the people you are depicting, and you should constantly guard against this if authenticity is a primary objective.

Kudos to Amina Gautier

R.T. Smith

In the current issue of The Georgia Review reviewer Greg Johnson says of Amina Gautier’s story collection At-Risk (Georgia, 2011): “Richard Wright or James Baldwin might well admire and nod their heads over such a passage. In general Gautier’s depictions of the problems of black teenage boys in America seems dead on, and she pays equal to the plight of teenage girls.” In a later passage, Johnson adds: “Throughout this collection, Gautier employs detail to powerful dramatic effect, so the reader can easily see her people and their world. In Hemingway’s parlance, there are no holes in her stories….”

For Gautier’s short short “Love, Creusa,” see the flash fiction in this issue of Shenandoah.

R. T. Smith on SHERBURNE

R.T. Smith

Chloe Bellomy interviews Washington and Lee Writer-in-Residence R. T. Smith on his new collection of stories, Sherburne.

http://vimeo.com/39848442

R. T. Smith reading from Sherburne:

http://youtu.be/Q0VSJRNND6g

Working at Shenandoah

skitskoc12

For my last blog I thought I’d talk a little about some of the things we interns have been working on for the past twelve weeks – mainly reading manuscripts sent in for the magazine. Each one of us has had our own roles to play, but everyone has spent at least some time reading over some hopeful stories. At first it was very hard to be critical (with of course some exceptions), for how could I criticize another person’s work when I myself have never been published? Professor Smith helped us out with that brain buster by asking us two simple questions. First: Are you ever critical of professional sports teams? And then, after everyone nodded their heads: Have you ever played on a professional sports team? Finally it became apparent to us that what we really needed was to take ourselves out of the game (hah). We could not just say we didn’t like the piece and then offer no explanation. We had to justify both our likes and dislikes. To make it easier to vocalize these justifications we came up with a list of criteria that each piece accepted into Shenandoah should contain. The list included things such as inventive style, unique (but familiar) characters, wit, ingenuity, character development and many others. This type of list was extremely useful when trying to pin down the thing that made the story feel just slightly off to you or, better yet, made it unbelievably successful.

The more manuscripts we’ve read the easier it has gotten to categorize them, but it is interesting to see how the interns disagree from time to time. When we comment on manuscripts we leave a few detailed lines on a sticky note for Professor Smith to look over. Most of the time those post-its read pretty much the same, but there have been several occasions when that was not the case. I suppose that’s to be expected though because tastes in writing do differ and we are bound to disagree every once in a while. I am just glad that ultimately, here at Shenandoah, we are not a democracy or else we’d be here all summer long.

Print or iPad?

blackeyd12

With graduation on the horizon, a number of questions are burning and a subsequent number of decisions will soon need to be made. One such decision I have already begun to probe is in what form will an English major graduate like myself continue her reading.

As I have maneuvered through my college courses , I have made myself very familiar with the pros and cons to reading both printed texts and texts on an iPad. Now, considering my future financial insecurity, I realize the days are numbered where I have the luxury of utilizing both forms of text.

In line with nearly every print advocate, I find the physical tangibility of a text enjoyable and comforting. Additionally, through my studies it has been essential to be equipped with a physical copy of a text to highlight, underline, and annotate. Yet, next year, I do not see myself writing many notes in the columns to bring up during class discussion or see the need to mark important quotes that I will not be later incorporating into a paper. Plus, printed texts are just more expensive.

For me, all signs point to the iPad. Not only is it just one, small device equipped with an endless library of texts, it can do things a printed text simply cannot; it can read to me , it can look up a word I am not familiar with, and if I do want to mark a page that I find particularly interesting, it allows me to do that as well. It seems that while nostalgia may tempt me to hold on to the printed text, the iPad is the answer for now.

Adrienne Rich 1929-2012

R.T. Smith

Adrienne Rich’s work so often demonstrates that poetry and politics are as close in nature as currents in a river. She began as a poet of strict measures and understatement (though already unwilling to be “mastered by” the ordeals inflicted upon women) and moved to an expansive vision of language as a “common dream” necessary but not sufficient in the quest to eradicate sexism and other bigotries. Her ingenuity, gravity and integrity has been the gold standard for more than one generation of poets. The following is a poignant statement about Rich from Washington and Lee poet and professor Deborah Miranda:

Adrienne Rich is one of those Ancestors who found me by accident, when I didn’t know I needed to be found. Another way to put this: she was one of those guides I was looking for (desperately) when I didn’t know I was looking. Either way, she caught me unawares and off-guard when I came upon her poetry in my mid-thirties, just as my life as a wife was ending and my official journey as a scholar and poet began. Rich was more than a role model for me (an intellectual who wrote poetry! a poet who was a mother! a feminist who was a lesbian!) – she was a rock on which I could set my feet and push outward, a validation of my dreams, a comfort, a holy terror to live up to. Indeed, she was a rock for many women in many ways. How were we so lucky to have her for so long? “No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone,” she wrote in Love Poem XVII, “The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, / they happen in our lives like car crashes/ books that change us, neighborhoods / we move into and come to love.” Yes, accidents happen – like the gift of coming to full womanhood with Adrienne Rich in the world. I believe in accidents.

Late Ghazal

Footsole to scalp alive facing the window’s black mirror.
First rains of the winter morning’s smallest hour.

Go back to the ghazal then what will you do there?
Life always pulsed harder than the lines.

Do you remember the strands that ran from eye to eye?
The tongue that reached everywhere, speaking all the parts?

Everything there was cast in an image of desire.
The imagination’s cry is a sexual cry.

I took my body anyplace with me.
In the thickets of abstraction my skin ran with blood.

Life was always stronger . . . the critics couldn’t get it.
Memory says the music always ran ahead of the words.

Reprinted from Dark Fields of the Republic (1995). Permission granted by the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

April Fools

Mary Olive Keller

In light of yesterday, I thought a post honoring some of my favorite tricksters in literature couldn’t be more appropriate. At an early age, my parents would rock me to sleep with tales of Brer Rabbit and Puss and Boots. In middle school, I first met Shakespeare’s Puck, whose clever schemes single-handedly convinced me that the playwright wasn’t as boring as he seemed. Last year, I was surprised to encounter these folk in my course on Medieval Literature. As we read Sir Tomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, it seemed like almost every quest contained at least one disguised knight. None of these examples, however, compares to the tricks conjured up by Twain in Huck Finn (at least for me). The Duke and the King’s cons, among others, will forever make the novel synonymous with trickery.

Enough about me. Do you have any other favorite trickster characters, novels, or films? Has anyone ever played a memorable joke on you?