I Used to Know John Wayne

by Caroline Sanders

WayneMy grandpa was John Wayne. He wore a big tan cowboy hat with a little colored feather on the side whenever he left the house. He was the tallest man I had ever seen, and when he picked me up “like a sack of potatoes” and swung me over his shoulder causing all the blood to rush to my head, I had never been that far off the ground. His real name was Billy, but due to my older brother’s infantile inability to pronounce words correctly, we called him “Bibby”—the greatest imaginable name for the cowboy that he was. He was old and wrinkly and I could never understand why his toenails were stained yellow, but that stuff didn’t really bother me. Cowboys didn’t have any time to devote to the maintenance of their personal beauty. Despite his rough appearance, however, he was friendly. I remember him driving through town, country western (the old kind with the fiddle and the slow drawing voices) droning lazily from dash, waving at everyone we’d pass. “Good to see ya,” he’d say to a car across from us at a four way stop. “How’s it going?” He’d ask to a young man walking his dog on the sidewalk. They couldn’t hear him, but it didn’t matter; he still just liked to say hello to everybody he saw. And when he’d come home and have nothing else to do, he’d lie on the couch in his undershirt with a can of Planter’s peanuts balanced on his round, old belly as he watched westerns on television. In fact, he liked the ideals and ways of life of the Old West in movies so much that for his last birthday, we gave him a life-size cardboard cutout of the Duke, signed on the back by all the children and grandchildren and placed in the corner of the den for him to look at any time he flipped on one of his movies.

But John Wayne died when I was four years old. All of these surface-skimming childhood images I possessed were all I had of Bibby since I was too young to remember who he actually was. As I’ve grown up, I’ve learned that he wasn’t exactly the man I remember: he wasn’t anywhere near the tallest man I’ve encountered, but instead about five foot ten. He was no hardened cowboy: he had never shot a man in his life and to be honest, I don’t know if he’d ever even ridden a horse. He looked and acted almost nothing like John Wayne. As my memories were beginning to develop, however, those movies he loved, his old cowboy hat we keep in a glass case in my basement, and the cardboard cutout that now sits in my attic at home are the only concrete evidence I had of him. And thus, John Wayne was cast to play the part of my granddad in my memory.

This inability to fully remember and recreate a person who was such a huge part in my life and subsequent casting of celebrities and literary figures to play his part in my mind has manifested itself in other ways as well. Nana, my grandma on my father’s side, is still living; I sit by her every Sunday in church. She likes to tell me stories about her childhood in Norcross, Georgia, and although I know her well in the role she currently plays in my life, I do not know the little girl she used to be. She was a spirited, opinionated child growing up on a farm in the mid-twentieth century. Whenever I think about this far-off time and place (although only about seventy years and fifty miles away), I see her as a young Anne of Green Gables making friends, going to school, contradicting those who disagree with her, and getting through life by relying on her imagination. While Nana plays the part of “grandma” in my recent memories and thoughts, little Anne-with-an-e has been cast to play the part of my talkative, quirky grandmother in her youth.

DumbleAnyone who once played a large part in my early life but who I no longer interact with is likely to be cast in my mind by someone else a little like them, but perhaps a bit more famous. My whimsical and silly childhood babysitter is played by Amelia Bedelia. My elderly, well-respected grade school headmaster is played by Albus Dumbledore. These beloved characters come from light-hearted, childish fiction that does not attempt to dig deep into the human soul and reveal man’s shortcomings. Instead, the type of literature that I take these characters from is intended to lift up the human experience, glorify it, tease it, show a few minor faults and failures, but ultimately illustrate what a wonderful experience life can be. All these characters have faults, yet none are abhorrent. All—with the exception of Amelia Bedelia—deal with real-life situations and encounter evil in human nature, but none are scarred by it. Whatever character John Wayne plays will conquer all obstacles with his superior masculinity, dry wit and hardened exterior persona. Anne Shirley will persevere through the challenges of growing up because she has an imaginative and cheery perspective on the world. Amelia Bedelia, as silly as she is, will be loved and Dumbledore will forever be the symbol of goodness and a magnet for admiration.
I could never allow a loved one, no matter how distant, to be compared to a character like Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Meursault from Albert Camus’s The Stranger, or Sydney Carton from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Because I watch my memories like movies, seeing the characters only from the outside and only from my own perspective, I do not imagine their inevitable human struggles. No matter what Bibby or Nana or my babysitter or my headmaster might have done in their private lives or what demons they may have internally fought, to me they will never be a crazed fisherman, an adulteress, an existential murderer, or a pessimistic, self-sacrificing alcoholic lawyer. I’m 99.9% positive that my loved ones were none of these things, but even if they were, they remain idolized in my mind because of the light and cheerful actors and actresses I have assigned to them.
Perhaps this is a naïve perspective. I am running the risk of underestimating their humanity by only relying on light fiction like westerns and children’s literature to mentally paint their portrait. These great people, however, deserve to be memorialized in my mind the same way that John Wayne is memorialized in America’s memory. Although Bibby may not have drunk whiskey in dusty saloons, hunted down and shot outlaws on the run, wooed beautiful women and ridden his horse off into the sunset, he was a great man. Thanks to John Wayne, I can remember him that way.


Music coverCaroline Sanders is a junior English major and creative writing and mass communications minor at Washington and Lee University where she serves as a student intern for Shenandoah as well as managing editor of the campus magazine InGeneral. She is a native of Athens, Georgia.

Is There an Antidote for the Anecdote Poem?

poetry manual

“Perhaps poetry in recent years has grown too weak to resist the attractive, familiar, conversational, seductive anecdote, too eyesore for trying to describe actions, too weary of meditation and contemplation, too jaded by trying to present deeper poems to a largely indifferent audience.”
– Ted Kooser in The Poetry Home Repair Manual (Nebraska, 2005)

While I value Kooser’s handbook and often use it with students, I’m troubled by his discussion, which occupies ten of the book’s 158 pages, of the anecdote-as-poem. My dismay even surprises me a little, because when he offers at the end of the “Writing from Memory” chapter his antidote to the anecdote poem (“Think about the speaker’s characteristic voice, the syntax, the rhythm, the form, the selection of details. The story itself is merely the material.)” I pretty much agree, but I would add something about the imagination and not allowing the sparking anecdote’s autobiographical facts to limit the poem’s options. And I don’t agree that the anecdote is “merely the material.” Can’t it also be the springboard, the seed, maybe the inspiration?

It’s possible that Kooser means that, too, but his ten pages don’t suggest that one anecdote or several may be at the necessary heart of many poems we call narratives. In fact, the poem he presents and praises highly as the anti-anecdote is Henry Taylor’s splendid “The Hayfork” (originally published in Shenandoah) a rumination about an anecdote about a brief event, whether imagined or recorded or some complex combination. Taylor’s poem shines from his lapidary attention to “characteristic voice,” “form” and “detail.” It is a seed carefully sown, nourished, sunlit, watered, its stalk, stem, leaf and fruit all tended to, a meticulous and crafty process that most anecdotes do require to transform them into poems. In fact, episodes or memories often require at least a little of that shaping before they can even become successful anecdotes, so probably what Kooser and I disagree about is the degree of likelihood that an anecdote can be cultivated into an intricate and artful poem. My position is that we shouldn’t blame anecdotes but get right to the culprit and call out the poets, who are not willing to work the original material the way Bill Monroe told a young Ricky Skaggs you can get a mandolin to render bluegrass music: “Son, you got to whip it like a mule.”

monkey

If I’m being hard on Kooser for his claim that 90 of 100 poems in literary journals are “mere material” recorded literally in raw form, it’s because I do have a dog in this fight. Plenty of my favorite narrative poems – whether personal or historical, ruminative or dramatic – are born of anecdotes. Not The Odyssey, of course, but Taylor’s poem, “Traveling through the Dark,” some of Kooser’s own poems and the poem of mine he reprints in another chapter to make a point about openings. (“Hardware Sparrows,” in fact, begins in what Kooser calls “anecdotal manner,” which has to be transcended, but also has a role to play). I do love narrative, so I’d argue that instead of warning writers away from anecdotes (which are often tame and amusing), I’d encourage poets to collect them and accept the challenge to discover which ones may render something richer and more ambitious, to give them the attention C. Bronte said went into her sister’s making Wuthering Heights, which was “hewn in a wild workshop.”

“Future readers,” Kooser speculates, “may likely conclude that most of our own poets were attempting to elevate the everyday personal anecdote to acceptability as a work of art,” and sometime when I see the one-page anecdote with flaccid cadence, hackneyed figures of speech, imprecise descriptions, mini wow at the end and so on, I fear that’s the case, that they’re trying to show that poetry is already inherent all things and that all utterances may be considered poems. Anybody can do it, almost by accident. But mostly I think some writers are lazy or unskilled, which is what my own failures (more frequent than I like to think about) often imply because I just didn’t bring, couldn’t access, my A game. I haven’t stared hard enough, dug deep enough, imagined fiercely enough, and the problem is not that I’ve produced an anecdote poem but that I’ve made a crappy poem, a result I can wind up with just as easily when anecdote isn’t part of the equation.

Kooser continues by suggesting that these anecdoters (or anecpos?) are “amusing each other with the warm and comfortable crossroads of the literary quarterly.” As if this were a team effort to dumb it all down so the ambitious and deft poets will have to yield ground (and pages in magazines, books, websites) to cheapjack, slipshod, unhoned, unhewn poems. Then our reading matter will be supplied by “poems in which some personal story has fleshed itself [?] out in the guise of a poem and demonstrates no aspiration to be anything greater.”

Instead of offering a real, live awful anecdote poem as an example, Kooser – maybe out of tact, maybe out of uncertainty how to acquire rights to reprint a poem just to say “bad dog” to it – creates a hypothetical that’s just a thin puppet non-poem. The one he makes is really (intentionally) skunky and closes, in an attempt at profundity, on the single word last line “ker-chunk!” meant to suggest a zinger which will resonate dramatically. When he makes a brisk 15-line chopped prose specimen to show what Taylor’s poem might have looked like in the hands of an anecpo, he uses that “ker-chunk!” at the end to signify a hayfork falling from its elevated track and stabbing the ground right in front of an unwary worker. Maybe Kooser isn’t being quite fair to the anecpos who are trying to tell a story but don’t know how to give it muscle and force. Taylor’s poem is sixty lines long, none of them as brief or tone-deaf as the puppet anecdote, so the comparison seems less instructive than it might have been. Compare Stafford’s encounter on the Wilson River road to a mere dead animal anecdote of about the same length and framework and the point might be clearer.

poetry lettersMaybe Kooser and I don’t disagree so much about the nature of these masquerading anecdotes as differ on what should be done with them. He suggests (though perhaps tongue-in-cheek) creating a new genre outside poetry for these anecritters, and he thinks that if creative non-fiction can become part of the canon, the anecdote can be canonized too, though he doesn’t nominate any particular examples or actual (not lined out like poems) anecdotes to sit beside, though in a separate box, other kinds of poems like “Upon Julia’s Clothes” or “The Woodpile,” a couple of real poems which a perverse wizard could quickly thin out, dessicate and anecdoodlize.

I’m not so concerned that our era will look like the era of the anecdote as that it will look like the era of poem as riddle, as political oath, sensitivity documentation, blur of impressions, far-fetched associational lyrics, critical theory exercise, or what Jahan Ramazani has called in a Norton anthology note “incongruous equations in metaphor,” as I often find in poems with names at the bottom like Ashbery, Graham, Carson, Brock-Broido, all of whom have, admittedly, written some moving and provocative poems.

Fred Chappell, who shared the 1985 Bollingen Prize with John Ashbery, often writes narrative poems – about cleaning a well, burning a church, plinking empty whisky bottles or receiving wisdom from an elder – fully leafed and flowered stories which readers can, if so inclined, whittle back and imagine – once the language is neutered, character sapped, description made ordinary – the anecdote that may have been the first flash of memory or imagination, which Chappell then had to put his mind and heart to, savoring the labor.

If a lot of the anecdoters were shown what might be done to breathe life into their limp (or even snappy or shocking) raw anecdotes, as writers like Rodney Jones, Kay Byer, Brendan Galvin, Rita Dove, Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Wrigley do, they might give up at the prospect of so much toil before them, or they might start thinking about how to enrich the soil, stake the stalk, sucker the leaves. I catch myself using gardening terms while really thinking more about childrearing. The anecdotes need to be raised up with much attention and skill and not just sent as toddlers into the world to do the work of men and women.

I suppose I’ve come around to agreeing with Kooser about a particular serious deficiency in much contemporary poetry, but my take on how to treat it is a little different. And by the way, if writers bear much of the burden for this deficiency, editors must shoulder a significant portion as well. Shame on us. We need to hold out for more passion (as Merwin remembers Berryman telling him in “Berryman”), though that doesn’t mean it has to be explicit. Human heat and craft will help. If we need a mantra, maybe it’s as simple as this: “Son, you got to whip it like a mule.”


recent-meR. 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.