elixir press – Snopes

Diann Blakely (1957-2014) was for twenty years a steady and valuable supporter of and contributor to Shenandoah. When she passed in August, her loss was no less shocking for the fact that she had been ill for some time. Although we had met only twice, Diann and I had carried on a considerable correspondence since I accepted four of her early poems for Southern Humanities Review about two dozen years ago. Those poems appeared in Hurricane Walk (BOA Editions, 1992), which was followed by Farewell, My Lovelies (Story Line, 2000). When I moved to Shenandoah, she began sending me new work, and our ties were further strengthened when my wife Sarah Kennedy selected Diann’s third book, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, as winner of the 2008 Elixir Press Prize.

Her early work was always delicate but bold, highly aware of the body’s blessings and curses. About the quietly intense lyrical pieces of her debut collection William Matthews wrote, “[Blakely] knows everything she knows all at once, word by word, line by line, poem by poem. These sly poems are spare and ample both. They’re cool and passionate, frank and opaque, artful and true.”

In Farewell. . . Diann moved to a more narrative mode, telling her life and our lives, going public with her bewilderment, understanding and affection for the culture of the American South. A new density and commitment to realistic, historical details emerged, and she began to perform diagnoses and autopsies on the dying and dead aspects of the South which refuse to lie down and often find their manifestations in oppression, negligence or cruelty. It’s no accident that many of these poems carry a kind of Dixie Noir undertone, and Carol Muske Dukes wrote of them, “These poems are side-of-the-mouth Chandleresque . . . truly lovely, musical, steeped in a farewell eloquence, making transitory but persuasive order of the chaos of the heart.” Mark Doty’s take was: Blakely’s noir style has the urbane, anxious glamour of jazz, but there’s nothing cool about these fevered poems . . . a poet of dark and bracing powers.”

A poem from that collection appearing first in Shenandoah, “Hound Dog,” considered “the perilous erotics of flux” and cast Elvis as a new world Orpheus who “drove those country housewives mad” until they wanted to “tear him to bloody bits.” The poem is rife with humor, but the tragic mode eclipses the light and shows Diann at her adroit, observant and imaginative best.

Music, especially the blues, was becoming very important to Diann, and she began sending me poems based on Robert Johnson’s songs and life. In fact, I was surprised to discover the poems of Cities of Flesh . . . when I first saw the manuscript. I’d been fascinated with the Johnson poems and didn’t even know she had another entire, equally mighty, river running in her simultaneously. Sarah Kennedy wrote in her introduction that Diann “always promises entrance to a tragic, beautiful world . . . render[ing] the gritty details of Southern girlhood.” In-progress, the ms. of Cities of Flesh . . . had received the Alice Fay deCastagnola Award, and judge Baron Wormser’s citation called her “a master of evoking the beauties of loss while embracing the wayward joys of what is unaccountably found.”

Many poets, notably the late Lynda Hull and Eleanor Ross Taylor, have lost a passionate advocate in Diann, as she was a tireless critic and literary journalist, a gadfly and a fan at once, a poetry editor at Antioch Review, a fierce and hungry heart. The one thing I may miss more than her unpredictable, challenging and spirited e-mails will likely be the fully finished and polished sequences of blues poems she had been working on for years: Rain at Our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson. I hope there are enough of them in complete enough form that someone will see them into print as a unit. What follows is one of the four published in Shenandoah as the opening selections in our Traditional Music Issue in 2006. I could not get enough of them then and still can’t. She knew how to hammer the blues to silver, and my only solace is that the pain of the process is over. What’s left is to celebrate her words and live our own blues.

COME ON IN MY KITCHEN

Just one kiss, post-belles know, can linger sorghum sweet
Or curdle men’s cafes-au-lait with blood and spit,
Thus we listen to rain charm our screen doors,

Whose rusty hiinges leak the blues each humid dawn,
And watch for uncoiled snakes. O don’t redo the kitchen
Because there’s gonna be rain at our door

Like the last century’s flood, where moss-wreathed cemeteries
Released their dead while bluesmen tortured guitar strings
To dissolve thoughts of ragged, last-drawn breaths

And rambling loves, or those fled to the half-breached levees
Who’d stay past tomorrow. Like those eye-lined Pharoahs
In pleated nighties, spices on their breath,

I’m a believer-o, burning dried sweet moss to cleanse
This house of kisses fouled. Come on in my kitchen
Although the radio nailed to the high shelf

Growls low at night to warn me, sounds buried deep as bones.
Or as deep as your voice denouncing God? You knelt
To bark, they say, against the juke-joint shelf

Of bodies that surrounded you, crazed by the poison
Curdled in your whiskey. Come on in my kitchen . . .
Should we release the ragged dead with kisses

And stir love’s bones among my perfume-pots? If not,
There’s gonna be rain at my door long past second thoughts,
Past levees, screen doors, rusted empires’ kisses.

How often I’ve heard the phrase “with a heavy heart” as a place-keeper while someone seeks fresher words to express grief and the plea for comfort. I usually flinch when I hear the phrase, yet right now its drumbeat seems the measure of my pulse and breath. News of Jake York’s death came like a fist to the chest, and the shock lingers. But “came” isn’t right, because it’s still coming, new again every few minutes. I suppose this is how denial operates, my consciousness and body saying “no” every time I allow my mind to linger there. This is what they mean by “bereft.”

Pretty melodramatic, I realize, but I knew Jake for nearly twenty-three years and, even though he had been a brother-at-arms and friend for a quarter of a century, a contributing editor to Shenandoah for a decade, I still remember him as an Auburn undergraduate – willowy, inquisitive, empathetic, intellectually restless, evangelistic in his belief that reading and writing poetry will make our hearts better. He was a skilled classical guitar player, an active member of St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, a soft-spoken, almost shy young man who would not allow his bashfulness to inhibit expression of what he valued and believed. I taught him in five courses and directed his honors thesis, a chapbook of poems called “Masters of None,” and I knew that I had a live one on my hands.

We had many conversations in my office about the history of the South, Warren and Faulkner, O’Connor and Wilbur Cash, Jim Dickey, but also Aquinas and St. Paul, Euripides and Dickinson. Eventually, he grew a little embarrassed about coming so often, because he feared he was monopolizing my time. My pleasure in his company also began to be complicated, as I sometimes experienced a little dread about what new inquiry or discovery he might lay at my threshold next, what crystalline insight he’d had about things I hadn’t even considered. He was the sharpest and most insatiable student I ever had, and because of that, my best teacher.

Many others can speak of the excellence of his poetry, the evolution of his craft until his words seem shaved from a bar of silver, the honing of his instincts toward a few central issues – how to repair the damage one man will do to another, how to makes the words of elegy serve as actions, how to navigate the flood of injustice in a way that will redress and rescue, all while still making the language dance. Central issues, but never in isolation from the question of how to be an ethical and useful human being.

For Jake’s first book, Murder Ballads, I wrote the following passage, and in my current unsettled state of mind, I doubt I can improve upon it:

Viewed through the polished, complex lens of Jake York’s demanding poetic, the shackles and red-clay rhetoric, banjos and catfish of the Old South emerge new-fangled and political. York’s “harmony almost gospel” is precise, demanding and exciting, and whether he is rendering “the ember burrowing/like a mite in the dead bird’s wing” or wind shaking the willows and scorched corn, he lets us know that it is not business-as-usual in Deep Dixie. Readers of Murder Ballads will witness the transformation of landscape and language as fireflies, Orion and sparks from the Magic City’s Bessemer furnaces conspire to light even the darkest secrets, and few will escape this wonderful book unscathed and unblessed.

Jake was not afraid to follow his quest for disclosure, justice and healing no matter how far it took him nor into what swamps and among what how many injuries. I will admit to having misgivings about some of the manifestations of his mission, but I never doubted the conviction behind them or failed to trust the candor and skill. He was an activist for poetry, a real barnstormer for it, but also an agent of change and bringer of light. Yet I never saw him setting the fierce issues of craft aside, as he struggled to bring mind, heart, force and finesse to every poem. As a result, his poems are not just written but wrought, which in my scheme of things is what makes words last.

Yeats wrote in “The Fisherman,” thinking of the man he watched angling and the ideal Man beyond that one, that he hoped “Before I am old/I shall have written him one/poem maybe as cold/and passionate as the dawn.”

For all his heat and fervor, Jake never abandoned this demanding aesthetic, which is never for me separate from “spiritual.” When I look at the poems in Murder Ballads, A Murmuration of Starlings and Persons Unknown, I see how often he struck the mark. I will be in all ways poorer for his absence as a voice and a presence and will never again sit down to write without summoning his spirit. In that respect, I’m sure I am one among many and hope to find some consolation in the place where our lamentations and splendid memories of him collect, all of us scathed and bereft, but blessed.