May 2014 – Snopes

Scratching the Surface of Place and Space

Ann Persons

Screen Shot 2014-05-27 at 11.59.53 AM — Shakespeare’s birthplace

For my spring term class at Washington and Lee, I was lucky enough to attend an English class in England. The class was called “Shakespeare in Performance,” which, as you can probably guess, entailed mainly plays and site seeing. While I learned a great deal from the sites—particularly in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare’s birthplace is located, I was surprised to find that I felt more awe at simply being in the same physical space as the bard. It wasn’t the plaques or the preserved walls of the Shakespeare sites that struck me; rather, I felt an idealistic sort of second hand inspiration from soaking up the air he breathed, the views he saw from his window, the ripples on the river across from the Globe theater. I began to think that literary place and space are more important to literature than I had once thought.

This notion grew stronger when, while in London, I walked through Bloomsbury square, the meeting place of The Bloomsbury Group. There aren’t any markers or signs designating this lovely but unremarkable park as the hub of literary inspiration (or even just gossip among literary figures), but the knowledge that I was in the same small space that these writers congregated in had more of an impact on me. I imagined I could hear their voices in the trees.

I did, however, find a meaningful plaque in an unexpected place: one day, I made a solo journey to the flat of Hilda Doolittle, or H.D., one of the first poets that I fell in love with, who lived in London for significant periods of her life. I sat shamelessly on her former stoop for thirty minutes before the flat’s current resident walked up and gave me a (deserved) odd look. I am slightly ashamed to say that I asked her to take my picture in front of the flat. As meaningful as the experience was, I walked away wondering if, had there been a plaque on any of the given flats in that area, would I have felt differently? Would I have felt less magic sitting on the stoop of a random strange but thinking it had once held H.D.’s erratic and genius brain?

A large part of our class consisted of this same question: what difference in understanding the original text does seeing Shakespeare in his original context make? I did feel lucky to join the same throng of famous writers and anonymous individuals who have made a pilgrimage to carve their names into the window of Shakespeare’s birthplace, to soak up that same weird presence.

Here’s how I answer the question: even if it was all a hoax, there is something wonderful about knowing that, even if you don’t know for sure, you are in the presence—the same space—as a writer that you admire. It’s sharing the same real world as someone whose textual worlds you have become a part of, and it allowed me to experience those textual worlds in richer detail. I can’t help but think that, ultimately, place does matter when it comes to understanding an author. What do you think?

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.

Summer Reading

Grace Haynes

Summer Reading. The dreaded assignment of elementary to high school students. The last day of school celebrations were halted as the teachers handed each of us our summer reading list. We scoffed at the reading requirements, sticking our tongues out at the teachers and singing the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” as the bus pulled out of the school parking lot. The reading list ranged from three to four required books, none of which sounded particularly interesting to any student but contained a hidden element of “educational value” that our young minds desperately needed. A bit of brain stimuli, if you will, amongst the hours of television, video games, and neighborhood debauchery we partook in during the holiday months. And did any of us read the required books in a timely manner, spreading the novels out evenly over the summer months? Of course not. We neglected the reading until about two weeks before school started when our parents realized that we had not yet started our assignments, and the authority figures took away our outdoor privileges until we finished our reading list.

Every summer I asked myself, why did the teachers pick such boring books? In elementary school we read short chapter books about foreign cultures or American history that strengthened our reading skills. Moving to middle and high school, we read more specific books, meddling in categories that ranged from history to science to foreign affairs. I remember struggling through Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, failing to connect with the historical plot about the Civil War. The teachers chose the books as mechanisms to prepare us for the year ahead and to broaden our outlook on the world at large. Some of the required books did just that, but the fact that they were summer reading books turned all of us off and, being the rebellious teenagers that we were, neglected the books and chose to spend our free time doing other activities. When we returned to school in the fall and the summer reading quizzes and projects were assigned, we panicked and turned to SparkNotes for help. We each had read bits and pieces of the books and from group discussions knew the general plot, so we pulled our resources together to study for the summer reading quizzes and to create a creative project for our teachers. My senior year I struggled to create a soundtrack that coincided with the plot of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, gathering information about the dense text from class discussions and online synopses to develop the subpar playlist that failed to describe the novel.

My attitude towards summer reading has changed completely since being in college. During the school year, I have no time to read books of my personal choice. My summer reading list expands throughout the year as I discover new, exciting books that capture my attention, promising to read each one over the summer months. As an English major, I read all the time—sometimes more than I would like. Reading for literature classes consumes my time, and by the time I have finished my required reading I find that my eyes are too tired to read my personal books when I return home from the library each night. I get through one or two pages before falling asleep with my book on my chest, getting through a chapter a month—if I’m lucky.

Some books on my current list are ones that were assigned in my English classes but that I did not get the chance to finish because of timing and workload. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy earned its spot during my Cowboys and Indians class this winter. I am eager for summer to start so I can finally pick up the book collecting dust on my bedside table that I began reading over spring break but have not gotten the chance to finish since school resumed. I am excited for summer to read a book solely of my choosing without conducting a literary analysis on its plot or rhetorical elements—just to enjoy the book for what it is.

Looking back I wished I paid more attention to the books I was supposed to read in high school for summer reading. I did not know it at the time, but they were actually good books of substantial quality. I remember rebelling against the summer reading list, refusing to read the assigned novels and only selecting books of my choosing, ones that I knew I would enjoy until the last page.

The required summer reading of elementary, middle, and high school worked in reverse. The list I once dreaded so much now gives me great excitement as I turn to my list and decide which book to select first. My list includes a variety of books, ranging from Pat Conroy to William Faulkner. Whether I’m on a beach or snuggled in my bed, I am excited to dive into a new great story. Perhaps it is because instead of reading for form and theme, I am reading for that personal connection with the text, playing more attention to the way the book makes me feel rather than technical elements that comprise it.

So, what’s on your summer reading list?

Grace Haynes is the Submissions Editor for Shenandoah. She is a junior English major and Creative Writing minor from Montgomery, Alabama.

Maxine Kumin, Poet

R.T. Smith

. . . the poet wrote:
life will do anything
for a living.
– “Discrete Activities” from And Short the Season

When I read back in the winter that Maxine Kumin had died, time-sensitive tasks diverted me. There was snow to shovel, wood to tote, as well as submissions to read, students to tutor, a new issue of Shenandoah to proof, but I knew I wanted to find a day to read, reflect on and celebrate her work, which I have followed enthusiastically since I discovered “Woodchucks” in graduate school and began trying to write for myself poems of consequence that questioned my actions as much as others’.

This week, with finals marked and recorded and the new issue of Shenandoah up for the web world to explore or ignore, I saw my window of opportunity and Xed a day on the calendar. Looking over my shelves, however, I was disappointed to see that my various winnowings of books for shelf space had left me fewer of Maxine’s books than I’d expected. I still have Up Country and Nurture, two selecteds, Connecting the Dots and To Make a Prairie, a collection of essays, reviews and interviews, but that’s hardly ample evidence of her industry excellence. Then a new collection, And Short the Season, arrived from Norton with jacket copy that spoke of her in the present tense, as if still among us, which I believe is essentially true.

My intention here is not to praise this new work (which will likely be done by someone else in a forthcoming review on this site) so much as to say what kind of poet she was and to mourn her loss, as well as the loss of her brand of liberal activism among her colleagues and within myself, for Kumin had as many opinions as most poets, but more what I’d call “beliefs,” though not always orthodox or predictable. Maybe she took selfies and wrote blogs on recipes, but I’m skeptical. It has been easy for poets in this age of the academic sub-guild of MFA faculties to let matters of conscience go lax, if not lapse. After all, we work for institutions, entities which tend to have, eventually, as their prime directive their own survival, which confers a streak of conservatism perhaps counter to the exploratory enterprises of education and art. We get caught up in status and materialism – whether they be manifested in new accommodations and cutting edge technology, good scotches and fancy restaurants at conferences, man caves or glamorous travel. Nothing really new there, but the dual obsessions of self-promotion and reporting all manner of effluvia on social media further complicate matters. They are distractions, and they come at a cost.

It’s tempting to just start in here and praise Kumin for right reason and right attention. She was a meticulous gardener, mushroom hunter, equestrian, friend of the winged and the four-legged. After all, she was sometimes saddled with terms like “Roberta Frost” and dismissed or diminished because her querencia was rural, fecund, elemental, and not (in the popular mind) so nuanced nor cerebral as the domestic and social lives of academics and literary gadabouts. But when Kumin turned her attention to the fundamental human drama, even as manifested in the news headlines – war, famine, gender politics – she retained her curatorial instincts for precision, order and freshness of phrase. She honored her “calling, [which] needs constancy,/ the deep woods drumming of the grouse ….”

I think back to some of the poems we always need but which our current world would be without if we hadn’t had Kumin to say, “Now look here”:
her moose poems, her bear poems (Cherish/ your wilderness”), her hermit poems and Henry Manley poems, “How It Goes On” (O lambs! The whole wolf-world sits down to eat/ And cleans its muzzle after.), the swimming poems, the many horse poems, the political poems (whether about Bosnia, capital punishment, torture, fracking or driving birds to extinction), her elegies for her friend Anne Sexton (especially “How It Is,” with its final transformation: “leaning my ribs against this durable cloth/to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death”), and of course “Woodchucks” with its weighing of various “humane” actions, its self-indictment and respect for adversaries, guilt and confession amid the recognition of necessities and its moment of lovely elegy and regret – “He died down in the everbearing roses.” She knew that love and death are the two great subjects, but also that they subsume all.

But I do Kumin a disservice to imply for a moment that the subjects and attitudes of the poems are the marks of her “gift” (too light a term, but “genius” is worn out; maybe I should just say “of her light”). She was a formidable wit and a poet of form who understood that, as Sexton once said, “Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.” A necessary trick. And her absolutely focused threshold of attention and verbal resource (or call it “damn good sense and the knowledge to keep working the tune”) kept her interesting and surprising. She knew, with Milton, that “purity comes through trial, and trial is by what is contrary.”

When Kumin read the poems of others (say Frost’s “Provide, Provide”) she brought both ingenuity and conscience to the task, continuing to pursue her responsibilities as witness, and some of her essays about her art, especially the “Three Lectures on Poetry” in To Make a Prairie, are rife with ore. I’m really happy to have whole books on topics like tone by the erudite Ellen Bryant Voigt, but I wish there were corresponding books by Kumin to set beside them on the shelf. She had, however, other promises to keep and wrote fiction and children’s books instead of abundant essays.

I did meet her once and spent a couple of evenings in her company, along with my wife and others. It was less than a decade back, and she was still suffering from neck injuries incurred in a buggy accident. She was not performing the glib celebrity reel many writers cultivate but seemed a genuinely serious person who believed in her calling and took others seriously, but she was also a good yarner and a wit who didn’t pause for applause. I thought she was tough and generous and saw that the poems I knew as written by her were her as fully as any poet I’ve met. Right up with Heaney, Warren, Merwin, Wilbur. Grit and patience were stitched into her nature. She seemed, as Henry James recommended, “one upon whom nothing is lost.”

I find myself wishing I were more like her in determination and steady practice, not so prone to inertia and frequently profitless reflection, but I want to think Kumin would have approved of my delays in writing this, try to imagine her saying, “Chores are not diversions. First clear a path, split the kindling, feed the creatures and read the student papers. Do it all with sensitive enthusiasm and a skeptic’s squint, the keen attention that amounts to prayer. Then find the words you need and put them to work.” As she showed us again and again, poems get made that way, and meaningful life.

[Anyone looking for a quick and spirited summary of Kumin’s career should consider reading her essay “Metamorphosis: From Light Verse to the Poetry of Witness” in the Winter 2012 (Vol. LXVI, No. 4) in The Georgia Review. It’s more personal/thematic than aesthetic, but it’s a marvel of candor and a valuable counterweight to the histories of poets who remained in university settings and whose work evolved as a result of critical fashion and the demands of tenure and vitaphilia.]

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.