September 2013

Footnotes and Frustration in Modern Poetry -Sam O’Dell

Ann Persons

Some poets from the modernist movement seem determined to make me feel as uneducated as possible while reading their work. Of course, this was hardly their intent when they sat down ninety-some-odd years ago to write the poems that I’ve been reading lately. H.D. did not intend to slight me while casually dropping “goddess” into a poem, assuming that I, her reader, could easily infer what goddess she was talking about in the third section of “Fragment 68”. (Most likely Aphrodite, according to my anthology’s footnote.)

Now, whether or not Ezra Pound intended to make others feel less intelligent while pulling obscure outside references into his poems and essays is up for debate. The guy seems the type who may have enjoyed making sure others knew he was smarter than they were. Still, he probably expected at least some of his references to be understood by his readers, and, well…let’s just say I at least got the “winged shoe” one.

As I read these poems, reference after reference flies past me. You can only read so many footnotes before you begin to wonder, “is it me?” I think most of my peers are in the same boat, though. Most of us have not studied a classical language, like Latin or Greek. Most of us can probably count the number of gods, goddesses, and other mythological beings we’re deeply familiar with on both hands. And all that ancient and medieval geography? We’re not experts, to say the least. Certainly there are some people my age with all the knowledge I just listed and more but it’s not as common as it once was.

There are positives and negatives to this sort of reading experience. While I may leave these poems feeling as if they were meant for someone with more background information than I possess, I also learn things. Sure, I may not retain the information of every footnote I read, but some of it has stayed with me. No matter how many footnotes I read, though, I know I am never likely to achieve a level of knowledge that would allow me to ignore those footnotes in the first place.

I think that’s okay, though. No one can know everything, after all. Even when I don’t completely understand a reference a poem is making, I can go on to enjoy the rest of what the author is saying and then come back to the reference I don’t understand and try to make sense of it. In some ways the allusions an author makes are little windows into the past, allowing me a glimpse into the mindsets of people long gone. That brief little transportation into the past is definitely worth reading a few footnotes.

– Sam O’Dell

Annie Persons is currently the managing editor for Shenandoah. She is a junior English major and Creative Writing minor at Washington and Lee University. Her favorite pastimes are reading and writing, and she hopes to continue engaging with literature for the rest of her life.

Conquering Stream of Consciousness Narrative -Katie Toomb

Ann Persons

Last year I took several classes focused on Southern literature and struggled the most to keep up with the books we read by Faulkner. His use of run-on sentences and lengthy descriptions kept me scrambling to remember what the subject of the sentence had been. These sentences were additionally made difficult by the stream of consciousness method he is perhaps most famous for using in The Sound and the Fury (1929). Faulkner was the first author I had read who had used the stream of consciousness method, also referred to as interior monologue, in which the thoughts and thought processes of a character are extensively detailed and written to give the reader perspective into of character’s mind. Having finished last year feeling comfortable with the most difficult literature I had ever experienced, I was not prepared to face the difficulty of an author preceding Faulkner who had also used stream of consciousness in a novel.

This term, I am taking a class called Studies in British Fiction Since 1900. With two books under my belt, Elizabeth Bowen’s Heat of the Day (1948) and Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907), I came into my third week of school ready to tackle Virginia Woolf’s acclaimed novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). I had been forewarned that Woolf used the stream of consciousness technique but I wasn’t worried. After all, hadn’t I just spent an entire year studying Faulkner, a frequent employer of the method? I’ve got to say, Virginia, I didn’t see you coming.

Upon opening Mrs. Dalloway, I immediately realized that it is brimming with interior monologue. Woolf deftly jumps from the mind of character to character, some of which never even cross paths in the novel. In a scene describing an airplane writing an advertisement for toffee in the sky, Woolf gives the reader insight into the minds of at least three different people witnessing the same event from various places around the Westminster area of London. I was prepared for this. Reading Faulkner had taught me to pay close attention to the subject of every sentence, and I found myself able to track these mind-jumps rather well, although I did occasionally have to look back to the beginning of some sentences to reestablish whose perspective I was currently in.

What makes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway so difficult to read is not this constant changing of character perspectives, but rather the lack of definitive breaks. Within the book, which is around 190 pages depending on the edition and formatting, Woolf never breaks up the plot with chapters. While Faulkner is difficult, he at least adheres to some sort of structure, often creating different sections for each individual character. Woolf is not so kind. The book reads from beginning to end with no obvious breaking point, as if the entire novel is abiding by the stream of consciousness technique and continuing on without stopping. In a way, it is almost as if Mrs. Dalloway has a mind of its own.

Regardless of the challenge involved, Mrs. Dalloway is a wonderful example of how an author can utilize stream of consciousness to give the reader an intimate look into the lives of the characters involved. While I never thought I would pick up a book that would stylistically challenge me more than a book by William Faulkner, I’ve got to hand it to Virginia Woolf, she has Faulkner beat.

– Katie Toomb

Rediscovering “Ars Poetica” -Annie Persons

Ann Persons

On Wednesday, I led my first creative writing workshop with sixth graders at the local middle school. As I signed in, nerves that had nothing to do with the school’s stringent security system quickened my pulse. I experienced an alarming flashback to my own pre-adolescent days, which was followed by a wave of nausea. I walked through the halls, trotting at the heels of the kindly but over-worked coordinator, clutching my hand-written lesson plan and feeling smaller by the minute.

Entering Mrs. Johnson’s fifth-period English class, I felt a room full of 12-year-old eyes drill into me, sizing me up. So it was to my surprise that, when she inquired, a handful of the girls and one boy stood up to accompany “Miss Persons” to the other classroom. Miss Persons. My first order of business, after arranging the desks into an intimate circle, was granting them permission to call me Miss Annie.

As soon as we started talking about poetry, my nerves disappeared; it was like another self took over. I didn’t realize until halfway through the session that I had abandoned my lesson plan. Their innocent excitement reminded me of one of poetry’s vital elements: communication. Poetry isn’t just about reading and writing. One of the best things about poetry is its ability to foster discussion and even excitement.

Poet Steve Scafidi affirmed this notion during his reading at Washington and Lee on Tuesday. He said that writing a good poem involves evoking this sense of communication between author and reader, finding that intimate connection that comes from allowing your own mind to venture into the author’s world on the page. He referenced Horace’s “Ars Poetica,” where the speaker describes the process of writing a poem, and how a poem should be a unified and controlled entity:

“…painters and poets
Have always shared the right to dare anything.’
I know it: I claim that licence, and grant it in turn:
But not so the wild and tame should ever mate,
Or snakes couple with birds, or lambs with tigers”

Scafidi proceeded to read a poem of his own that responds to “Ars Poetica.” His poem illustrates dolphins diving through a forest and other disjointed but beautiful images. While he read, I saw those dolphins. Scafidi evoked poetry’s ability to illuminate the odd and unexpected—even within the author. I discovered this creativity and unexpected excitement in my sixth graders. I am looking forward to learning more about them through their poems and joining with them in that artistic communion. With these children guiding me, I want reignite my own sixth grade creativity and excitement. I want to channel this energy into my own writing and let it expand into all areas of my life.

– Annie Persons

Poetry’s Possible Worlds -Annie Persons

Ann Persons

This summer, I worked as a research assistant for Professor Lesley Wheeler, helping her compile sources for her scholarly book about speculative poetry titled Poetry’s Possible Worlds. “Speculative” poetry is a genre encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror, and related “weird” subgenres. My research this summer taught me that speculative elements hide where you would least expect them.

In my twentieth-century American poetry class, we recently read a selection of Robert Frost poems. Frost maintains a reputation as of the most well known American poets of the past century. His poems abound with natural and bucolic imagery; his work seems to deal exclusively with the fundamental themes of marital love, manual labor, and home. However, this summer taught me to see Frost in a new light. Rather, my new speculative lenses illuminate Frost’s darkness. “Mending Wall,” one of his most famous poems, concerns an ambiguity about walls and boundaries. The speaker associates tradition with darkness, and even a weird sense of magic:

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. (35-38)

If elves aren’t speculative, I don’t know what is. Here, Frost utilizes magic’s weird sense of possibility to highlight his uncertainty. The speaker wants his neighbor to recognize the magic force that seeks to destroy the boundary between them, but he can’t pinpoint a name for this magic either.

Frost isn’t the only traditional poet I have noticed employing speculative elements. It seems as though the more I think about it, the more I notice authors toying with notions of uncertainty and possibility that come with magic. It makes sense—a poem is a perfect environment for magic, as part of the poem’s job is to lure the reader into its structural and semantic world. One vein of Poetry’s Possible Worlds discusses how speculative poems demonstrate a marked ability to ensnare readers; poetic rhythm works together with imagery to draw us into the poem’s world through a process called entrainment. I researched the cognitive side of this process, but also dwelled on the concept of how creating an alternate space in a literary work provides the reader not just with a sense of escape, but also with a heightened sense of communion with the author-creator of the alternative world.

This communion has power. By engaging in the immersive process of reading speculative poetry, the reader engages with the mind of the poet, often reemerging changed in some way. Poetry’s ability to change the way I see things and provide momentary escape from the chaos of reality is why I love it. Poetry, especially speculative poetry, changes the way I see my own world. Even if you are skeptical of speculative genres, I encourage you to look for the magic hiding in unexpected places, not just in poetry, but also in your own life. Look for walls. Notice elves.

– Annie Persons

Possibilities in Poetry -Katie Toomb

Ann Persons

And my junior year begins. While I will admit that I was anxiously awaiting summer vacation by the time May rolled around last year, I have to say that I have never been more excited for a school year to start up again than I am this year. Along with having the opportunity to participate in creating the upcoming issue of Shenandoah, I am also taking classes for my English major that I have absolutely loved so far. One of these classes focuses on twentieth-century American poetry.

This poetry class was the course I was both excited for yet nervous about in equal measure. Poetry can be intimidating, and after a four-year break during which I took solely literature based courses, I found myself feeling extremely anxious as school crept closer about the prospect of re-immersing myself in the vastly different world of poetry. After taking so many literature classes, I am now comfortable with its format and the various ways in which one can seek to interpret meaning from a novel. Poetry, however, is a whole new ballgame, full of new terms and aspects to be analyzed. The scariest of these new realms that I have been attempting to familiarize myself with has been meter. After taking a Shakespeare course last winter, I have found myself unconsciously attempting to force all the poetry I have read thus far to fit the only meter I am currently comfortable with: iambic pentameter. Obviously, this method isn’t working out too well for me so far. After only two days of this poetry class, the sheer expanse of poetic knowledge that I have yet to comprehend is somewhat daunting. However, I find myself looking forward to expanding my limited knowledge despite my nerves.

Even though my knowledge of the technical side of poetry is limited, I have always loved reading it. I am fascinated by its ability to mean something different to every person who reads it. With literature, there is a basic message built into the plot that the author lays out for the reader to find and relate to. With poetry, finding a message is much more personal. While literature is based upon an idea created in an author’s mind, poetry seems to be the product of a poet’s soul. Reading poetry feels a lot like I imagine reading a person’s diary would feel like. The characters and events don’t seem make-believe, but feel very grounded in reality. This intimate aspect of poetry is what I love most about it, as I find myself emotionally engaged in the words I am reading in a way that the distant, “movie-like” view present in literature prevents. With poetry, I am living the words rather than viewing them as an outsider. While being so emotionally engaged in the thoughts of someone else can be overwhelming, the contemplative nature of poetry is also what makes it so exciting.

I cannot wait for a term full of introspection.

– Katie Toomb

Poetry in the Wake of Tragedy -Sam O’Dell

Ann Persons

Yesterday marked the twelfth anniversary of 9/11, a day when most Americans take at least a few moments out of their hectic lives to reflect on the horrific events of that day. More than anything, I think 9/11 reminds people that you cannot predict what will happen tomorrow. Cherishing every moment we have with the people who are important in our lives and seizing every opportunity we are presented with is one of the best ways to live a fulfilling and meaningful life. I believe that another component of a meaningful life is the literature we read. This literature has a way of making us feel so deeply about things we might not have experienced directly. It can also help those who directly experienced such events come to terms with what they have lived through. Finding literature that speaks directly to such a situation can be incredibly tricky, however.

One of my favorite authors, John Green, posted a poem by Czeslaw Milosz to his Tumblr blog yesterday. Although the poem, “Were I Not Frail and Half Broken Inside,” was written before 9/11, it does an excellent job of conveying the randomness of death on such a large scale and the sometimes overwhelming despair that comes with the knowledge that we are all “frail and half broken,” all one swift blow away from death. Not all poems about tragedies are as elegantly done, whether written for a specific event or not. It makes me wonder what makes a poem about such a difficult subject good.

It helps, I think, to start with a poet that is already a good writer. I think many people are often inspired to write in the wake of such tragedies because they are trying to come to terms with what has happened. Writing poetry definitely forces you to work through your emotions about whatever you’re writing about. However, amateur poets with little or no prior work often end up producing poetry that is, at its best, badly written, and that at its worst, exacerbates the negative feelings surrounding the situation. Philip Metres wrote an article for the Huffington Post about exactly this situation in the wake of 9/11. He also wrote about the popularity of another poem that was written prior to 9/11 and passed around on and after that date: W. H. Auden’s “September 1st, 1939.”

It is interesting to think that the best works to consider in response to a particular tragedy may in fact have been written years before. Which poems written today will be shared in the wake of some future disaster? What is it about responding directly to such polarizing events that can make even the best poets stumble? These questions are not the kind with easy answers, of course.

Metres goes on to challenge the negative assumption that the contemporary poetic response to 9/11 was lackluster. To demonstrate his point, he shares several moving 9/11 pieces, my favorite of which was Wisława Szymborska’s “Photograph from September 11.” I love the repetition and the poet’s choice to leave her work unfinished, allowing the victims to have the last word in some small way.

Although it can be difficult to find works that meaningfully address such tragedies, many poets have succeeded in doing so. Whether or not you find yourself drawn to works specifically about 9/11, or to works that were written for another occasion entirely, there are several poems that are well worth pondering on a day like yesterday. I hope you will spend some time with the poems mentioned above and walk away better for it. Do you have any poems that come to mind in response to 9/11? Feel free to link to them in the comments section below.

– Sam O’Dell

NOW CONSIDERING FICTION AND FLASH FICTION

R.T. Smith

SHENANDOAH is now considering short stories and short stories for publication in the spring issue. For submission guidelines, go to the Prizes/Submit link on our home page and follow directions. Writers can submit via Submittable platform or via USPS.

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.

Death of a Naturalist: R.I.P. Seamus Heaney

R.T. Smith

How do you make mischief with grace? Touch the heart with a glancing blow? Find the moral in the menial, the dark in the star, the light in the abyss? These were among the hard-won gifts of Seamus Heaney, a natural poet who knew that artifice and discipline were no less crucial for those born to the laurels. Add to these qualities the “wild strength” Heaney’s translation of Beowulf ascribes to Grendel, but in Heaney that wildness (necessary, Frost wrote, to have a poem) was always honeyed with courtesy and a strong Catholic sense of ceremony. Which is not to say the man’s fierceness of intent and practice never showed.

Now we will be inundated with elegies, many of them eloquent, all of them inadequate to lessen the loss of Heaney, dead at seventy-four. I am tempted to claim that Heaney was the greatest poet of our age, but such a stance would likely invite contention, and who can say so soon how any river or stone or lark song will weather? I’ll settle for saying that he has been for me the most nourishing and sustaining poet of the last half century, his originality and mastery of the craft, his structures and improvisations, over and again providing the necessary language to fuel me as a reader and writer.

Two months ago or fifteen weeks or six days ago I might have divined that I should pick up Opened Ground (Poems 1966-1996) and read it through, muzzle to scut, so it is, in part, sheer sentiment that just now I should decide to begin that regimen with a shadowed glee, then venture again into the later books to relive those poems of beauty, consequence, lilting or rough music and conscience, earth and air, Ariel and Caliban at once, and at times Mercutio, and the Lear of the fifth act. I’ll do it slow but steady and listen to the tapes of him reading, and I’ll be, once again, a better man for it.

In “The Forge,” written in the sixties, Heaney begins with “All I know is a door into the dark.” In the farrier’s world “the speaker” (that prevalent, recognizable voice of young Heaney) knows the beauty of process, “the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,” as well as the “fantail of sparks/ Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.” His mind’s eye is on the blacksmith, forceful and artful, but it’s clear that he also understands that all makers “expend [themselves] in shape and music.” The sonnet is too visceral and focused on the gritty reality of physical labor to present a simple equation, and too suggestive, Hephaestus/Vulcan both invited into our associations. Still, it’s a small and instructive introduction to Heaney’s project to be both earthy and worldly, as well as canny. Readers learn pretty early that the humility of “All I know” has to be looked into, as what follows reveals that the speaker knows much more than the door and even what’s behind it, including the sparks and the genius loci. He knows the light inside that darkness, and Heaney went on to bring us with him as he discovered all the shadows and glimmers of the language in his word hoard, which was considerable, and managed with a vitality which will not fade so long as we have an appetite for the hard work of reading him and the sometimes shocking, sometimes genial shining reward. Yeats told us that “the worst are full of passionate intensity,” but Heaney’s legacy is the testimony that some of the best are filled with the same, and that is the justification of our mirth and passion and hope.

I am tempted to construct a kind of funeral pyre for Heaney, just to help me imagine the gods of the classical texts and the God of the Beowulf poet are paying close attention and that the human and divine ceremonies still matter. Heofon rece swealg, wrote that Anglo-Saxon poet. In Heaney’s straightforward translation, “Heaven swallowed the smoke.” And may his fine self be with the blessed five days before the devil knows he’s dead.

R. T. Smith 9/1/13