Poetry – Snopes

Defining Poetry: Anne Sexton’s “Transformations”

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by Laurel Myers

I must admit before getting into this essay that I had never read a full book of poetry before university. Like my fellow classmate, Hannah Denham, I picked up Leaves of Grass with the intention to read every page. Holding a book of poetry in and of itself felt extremely scholarly and, dare I say it, snooty, that I worried the entire time I had the book people would think I was pretentious. Only a couple pages in, I got lost in the metaphors and otherworldliness of Whitman’s verse. I felt as if I had failed the literary world by not understanding the twists and convolutions of language. Because of this, I never attempted another book of poetry and only read the infamously famous poems passed out by my English teachers and wrote half-hearted stanzas about my trip to Cambodia or how much I love clouds. (I really love clouds.) In those moments of putting words on notebook paper and forcing out iambic pentameter and choosing rhymes from nowhere, poetry was just another homework assignment, a nuisance keeping me from the stacks of science fiction and fantasy novels that said what they meant and meant what they said. At the time, I simply did not understand the purpose of poetry.

That is, until I read Anne Sexton’s Transformations.

When I start a book, I read the foreword (if there is one) and then the last page first. I have received confused stares, angry outbursts, and sheer exasperation for this unconventional practice, which is understandable, but I am set in my ways. Beginning Transformations in this fashion prepared me for the dark humor and surprising intimacy of Sexton’s writing. I was delighted that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. had written the foreword, knowing that if my favorite satirist liked this book enough to write about it, I was in for something good. What struck me in his couple of pages was not something he said, but rather a quote from a friend: “I asked a poet friend one time what it was that poets did, and he thought awhile and then he told me, ‘They extend the language.’” This response partially answered my question of why someone would want to rewrite the Grimm fairy tales. We have the originals, we were read them at bedtime before slipping into dreams, and Disney has animated its fair share. However, there is always more to a story when an author as astonishing and introspective as Anne Sexton reimagines them while still staying true to the earliest versions of the tales. The forward, then, extended my expectations.

The last stanza of the last poem of her collection deserves the coveted spot, because the words linger long after the book is closed. They are the last impression, but just as important (if not more) as the first. Sexton ends “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)” with these lines:

What voyage this, little girl?

This coming out of prison?

God help—

This life after death?

After reading this, I knew an entire journey occurs, but was it through all of the poems or just this one? Is this what the transformation is about? Do the characters go on physical journeys or is the book itself a journey? Why were there so many questions at the end? Does Anne Sexton not even know how the story is supposed to end? Why did I have to read the end first again?

Questions make you look for their answers, and in poetry, the answers are usually found in the patterns. Or are they found when the pattern is broken? Professor Wheeler, who teaches Transformations in her class about speculative fiction in poetry, would propose that poetry is patterned language, and therefore both the existence of a pattern and then deliberately ignoring the pattern are goldmines for analysis. Reading any type of work for the purpose of writing a paper on it changes how you approach the text, and this is more than true when close reading and annotating a poem. Close reading can sometimes make me see the trees for the forest. I get stuck on a color that keeps popping up or the number of times a name appears in one poem. This can cause you to wonder if this was the reason for poetry, to write in the margins and circle motifs and draw arrows connecting ideas or images. Thankfully, discussing my findings during class and listening to my classmates helped me understand why the patterns that stood out to me were important in the big picture and teased the underlying meanings to the surface.

While reading Transformations, you do not have to look very hard to see that metaphors are everywhere. Sexton’s predilection for metaphors extends throughout the book, diving into her dark humor and curiously personal perspectives. Her use of this literary device causes the world of fairy tales and World War II to collide. Her lush comparisons sculpted scenes full of obsession and bizarrerie while constantly juxtaposing characters with delicious food and nature’s foliage. Because Sexton wrote this collection before my time, she also forced me to look up references to Thorazine, Limoges, and the Bobbsey Twins.

But poems are more than structure and what rhetorical devices are used. They are a conversation, an observation, a call for empathy. They are statements about something, be it political, religious, or simply what it means to be human. Poems are examinations of ourselves and of our world, of desires and losses. As Allison Curseen, a visiting professor, put forth with conviction, “Poetry is bodies talking.” Poetry is extended language, is patterned language, is all of these cursory definitions. But Anne Sexton’s poetry transcends all of these descriptions and stands as a stoic and stark reminder that the world may be a messy place, but you can make something worthwhile out of it. You may not get a happy ending—in fact, your ending may by full of question marks—but you are fully capable of creating a fairy tale journey along the way.

Poetry Off the Record?

Sara Korash-Schiff

I recently finished two collections of essays by magician and libertarian firebrand Penn Jillette, God, No! Signs You Might Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales and Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday (spoiler alert: Mr. Jillette does not like religion). In both books, Mr. Jillette discusses his love of collecting recordings produced by “song-poem” companies—essentially, scam companies that you could pay to take your poetry, have it set to music, and recorded by otherwise out-of-work musicians. Most of these recordings, Jillette informs us, are completely unlistenable, though he does admit that a few are truly beautiful.

Jillette’s odd choice of hobby aside, the notion of these “song-poems” fascinates me, in no small part because it highlights the odd relationship between what we call “songs” and what we call “poetry.” Where does one begin and the other end? Are all song lyrics poems, or does the presence of music accompaniment automatically exclude a set of lyrics from being High Art and thus Real Poetry?

I’d imagine that if you were to ask any random person on the street if songwriters can be considered poets, they would respond that most do not, though they might concede that a few favorite artists are creative and intelligent enough to earn that title. Bob Dylan in particular has often been called a poet; he has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and no less an authority on poetry than Allen Ginsburg declared the lyrics of Dylan’s 1975 track “Idiot Wind” to be the “great disillusioned national rhyme.” Andre Codrescu, himself a poet and commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, even praised Dylan as “the best living American poet there is, man!”

Dylan himself is surprisingly obtuse about whether he considers himself a poet. In his memoir Chronicles, Volume 1, he notes at one point that in his early years “I wasn’t yet the poet musician that I would become.” When explicitly asked the question “Do you consider yourself primarily as a singer or a poet?” during a 1965 press conference, however, Dylan replied, “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know.” Frustratingly, when the interviewer asks why, Dylan only responds, “Oh, I don’t think we have enough time to really go into that.”

The New York Times ran an entire Sunday Book Review feature on the topic of whether Dylan’s lyrical genius qualified him as a poet. In the article, one of the columnists, Francine Prose, rejects the notion that Dylan can be categorized at all, explaining, “He’s the heir, the unlikely offspring of Arthur Rimbaud and Walt Whitman. But he’s neither Rimbaud nor Whitman. He’s Bob Dylan. Is he a poet or a songwriter? The same answer applies: He’s Bob Dylan.”

Leonard Cohen. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Complicating this issue are those rare artists who wear both hats: they not only write their own song lyrics, but they also take on additional poetry projects on the side. The prolific and influential musician Leonard Cohen is famous for his moving and deep lyrics—if I had to name any single musical artist whose song lyrics I consider to qualify as poetry, I would have to choose Cohen. Interestingly enough, however, Cohen does appear to make a distinction between when he is creating art as a songwriter and when is being a poet. He told Rolling Stone in a recent interview that he writes a good deal of poetry that is not suitable for song lyrics, but that he creates simply because he enjoys the process. This does not mean that Cohen keeps all his poetry for himself, however. In between putting out albums, he has released twelve books of poetry, perhaps the oddest of which is his third collection, entitled Flowers for Hitler.

So does the fact that Cohen releases books of poetry mean that his songs cannot be poetry? The fact that Cohen himself sees them as different pursuits has to carry some weight; I’d personally feel uncomfortable calling a work of art “poetry” if the artist himself did not consider it to be so.

Another songwriter who blurs the line between performance artist and poet is inimitable Tom Waits. Tom Waits’s lyrics are both bleak and beautiful, and I would have no problem declaring them to be “real poetry.” I’m hardly the only one—after the simultaneous release of two Waits albums, “Alice” and “Blood Money,” The New York Times declared Waits to be “a poet of outcasts.” Waits, however, would probably not take so kindly to being labeled a poet, telling an interviewer in 1975, “Poetry is a very dangerous word [ . . . ] I don’t like the stigma that comes with being called a poet—so I call what I’m doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue. “

Perhaps Waits’s attitude toward poetry has calmed somewhat since then, as in 2011 he collaborated with photojournalist Michael O’Brien to create Hard Ground, which unites O’Brien’s photographs of homeless individuals and excerpts of Wait’s poetry to powerful effect. That same year, Waits released a limited-run chapbook containing a single extended poem called “Seeds on Hard Ground.” The poem meditated on themes of poverty and homelessness, and the proceeds from the sale of the book went to homeless services.

At the risk of sounding like a snob, I think it’s fair to say that most music you hear on the radio today would not under any definition qualify as poetry. But amidst all the sound and fury, I believe that true poetry can be found in the best lyrics of talented songwriters like Dylan, Cohen, and Waits.

–Ryan Scott

Sara Korash-Schiff is a senior English and journalism and mass communications major at Washington and Lee. She has served as an intern for Hachette Book Group in Nashville and a reporting intern for The Springfield Republican. After graduation, she plans to travel throughout Europe and attend a graduate creative writing program in fiction.

The Art of Spoken Word

Sara Korash-Schiff

The first time I heard spoken word, otherwise known as slam poetry, I was not impressed. Now, I’ve even tried my hand at writing my own. So, to the summer camp counselor reciting his slam to 14-year-old me, I apologize for finding it boring and kind of strange. My view of poetry mainly focused on the “roses are red” variety, and I had never heard of a poetry slam. Fast forward a few years to seeing my first live slam at Brandeis University, and I was a completely different audience member, snapping at the snappiest lines and laughing at the more adult poems–much to my older sister’s chagrin. After that I occasionally looked at videos others showed me, but I still remained pretty clueless.

Then, one magnificent day, I discovered the vast collection of poets featured on YouTube. Searching “slam poetry” on YouTube garners a whopping 324,000 vi hqdefault deos of the passionate rhymes, personal stories, and well-placed f-bombs that general characterize a slam poem. Some nondescript night last year, I began a homework-avoiding binge of YouTube slams that led me to Dylan Garity’s “Friend Zone,” posted by an organization called Button Poetry. The language was beautifully sculpted, and the tone and pace picks up in the middle to transition from funny and light to serious and heavy and important. The video has over 11 million views (to which I have contributed maybe a hundred). Try finding an open mic night that allows for an audience 11 million.

YouTube is the perfect platform to popularize spoken word performances. Rather than having to show up in a specific coffee shop in a specific city in a specific state and even country, anyone can stumble upon a performance from the comfort of their own home. They can listen to it once. And then again. And again. And then watch other performances from the same poet, or the same subject matter, at any time. Because of this, slam is growing more and more popular, and the conventions and subject matter have adapted with that growth. Relationships, social issues, and character flaws are common topics, and hundreds of thousands of views prove that people find them relatable and touching.

Slam poetry is a performance art—the works are written to be read aloud, and the conventions of the style appeal to a large audience. Good luck finding a poem devoid of slang and cursing, or a pop culture reference. A billion people watch videos on YouTube every day, and anyone can upload. There are also tons of benefits to an online performance that make it even better than a live performance:

You can watch it as many times as you want, and show your friends, and download the written transcription. And then watch it again.
It’s sharable. You could tell your friend, “Hey, come to this open mic venue and maybe the same poet will be there this week that I saw last week and he’ll recite the same poem in the same perfect inflection that really connected to me last time,” but we all know this is a one and a million chance, or you could just tell your friend to click here.
Videos can add more performance to the performance art. Artsy setting? Check. Mood lighting? Check. Improved sound quality? Check.
Poets can become famous. A few years ago, my counselor was the only slam poet I had ever heard. Now I have favorites that I follow and even fangirl over.
Part of the draw towards slam poetry is how these poems can appeal to and inspire empathy in a wide range of people. Snaps for the sassiest or best-crafted lines, and tears for the most personal. The Internet grants a huge audience of age ranges, demographics, geographic locations, everyone.

The Internet is an amazing platform for arts of all kinds, from visual art to music, to even online literary journals…

But, I’m not trying to write a hidden advertisement or convince anyone to flock to the web here. 44f81e6577055ad230466ddac42379e6 I simply have such an appreciation for a medium that can so transform the way people see and become influenced by the arts, that I want to share it with others. I spend an immense amount of time finding videos and pictures and content on the Internet finding art. Sites like Pinterest, Stumble Upon, Tumblr, and yes, YouTube make arts more available, popular, and most importantly, experienced. I don’t have to visit a museum or gallery to appreciate a painting, because what’s most interesting to me is discovering a whole new art through the vessel of the web.

Certainly many lovers of poetry would argue that popularity does not make a poem valuable, which is true, but I admire that the Internet can help a very modern and unique form of poetry become something completely different.

Thanks to my WiFi connection, my feeble experience of slam poetry rocketed off into an extreme love for the art, and it is only continuing to grow.

— Emily Danzig

“Romantic Moment”-A Poem by Tony Hoagland

Christian Kennedy

After the nature documentary we walk down,
into the plaza of art galleries and high end clothing stores
where the mock orange is fragrant in the summer night
and the smooth adobe walls glow fleshlike in the dark.
It is just our second date, and we sit down on a rock,
holding hands, not looking at each other,
and if I were a bull penguin right now I would lean over
and vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved
and if I were a peacock I’d flex my gluteal muscles to
erect and spread the quills of my cinemax tail.
If she were a female walkingstick bug she might
insert her hypodermic proboscis delicately into my neck
and inject me with a rich hormonal sedative
before attaching her egg sac to my thoracic undercarriage,
and if I were a young chimpanzee I would break off a nearby treelimb
and smash all the windows in the plaza jewelry stores.
And if she was a Brazilian leopardfrog she would wrap her impressive
tongue three times around my right thigh and
pummel me lightly against the surface of our pond
and I would know her feelings were sincere.
Instead we sit awhile in silence, until
she remarks that in the relative context of tortoises and iguanas,
human males seem to be actually rather expressive.
And I say that female crocodiles really don’t receive
enough credit for their gentleness.
Then she suggests that it is time for us to go
Do something personal, hidden, and human.

Tony Hoagland is an American poet and writer from North Carolina. I was first introduced to Hoagland’s poetry by his poems included in the recently published Ecopoetry Anthology edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street. I found Hoagland’s poetry to be thoughtful, humorous, but also very thought provoking. His poem “Wild” featured in the anthology explores human behavior as group of bears migrate into a small valley town, putting them in the place of the human residents. In a similar way, his poem “Romantic Moment” connects human and animal behavior in regards to affection, challenging what we would consider “normal” affection.

“A Romantic Moment” challenges our typical view of human affection by providing an animal contrast, using descriptions of place in the poem to mark the difficulties in connecting human behavior to the behavior between animals. The poem places the behavior of a young couple on a date, illustrating their reaction to images of different species engaging in displays of affection and interest. The boy on the date describes that a bull penguin would, “…lean over / and vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved” (7-8), to express affection. Hoagland provides many explicit images like this throughout the poem in contrast to the simplicity of the human affection of “Holding hands, not looking at each other” (6), challenging the reader to think about the normality of certain human behaviors in contrast to other species. Hoagland uses the very last line of the poem, “Do something personal, hidden, and human”(27), to illustrate the disconnect with nature that is the overarching problem throughout the poem. The couple’s last words display a bias in judgment about what acceptable human behavior is but also more importantly displays the fear of being connected to the complex and sometimes wild aspects of nature.

Hoagland’s poems often challenge human views of behavior, and this one in particular causes me to think about the human display of affection in a new way. Poems that challenge the typical social or structural constructs are often found to be the most interesting and thought provoking types of poetry. Which poems do you find similarly provocative?

Christian Kennedy is an English and Accounting and Business Administration double major at Washington and Lee. He enjoys writing music and loves spending time outdoors exploring the Shenandoah Valley.

Do Feelings Speak Louder Than Words?

Laura Berry

The sum of my failed attempts at writing stories is far greater than my number of years on this earth. But I assure you, it’s not for lack of trying. I’ve certainly felt moved to write stories on various occasions—happy, tragic, confusing, exciting—only to find that I eventually lose my focus. I’ve had an extremely difficult time figuring out the science, embarking on writing a short story only to find that my idea is much more extensive than the allotted number of pages, or deciding to write a longer story and losing momentum early on. I seem to be more successful with poems. When I imagine the beginning of a poem, I am usually able to envision the ending as well. For this reason, poems are an easier way for me to express emotions, an easier way to encapsulate a feeling without trying to represent it through the lens of a plot. When I read, I am searching for something raw. More often than not, I am able to find this in poems and better able to recreate it through poetry.

Last fall, I was introduced to Natalie Diaz, a Native American poet of the Mojave and Pima tribes. I fell in love with her poetry. Apart from writing beautifully, Natalie Diaz is honest and reflective, using words as vehicles to express the emotions generated by her traumatic experiences. Her book When My Brother Was an Aztec is a collection of poems centrally focused on her relationship with her brother, a drug addict, as well as her family’s struggle with poverty. Rather than telling the story of her brother’s addiction through one specific narrative voice, Diaz writes poems that simulate photographs, capturing moments that have made an impression on her. When I read her poetry, I feel like I’m reading the pages of her diary.

In “How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs,” Diaz describes taking her brother out to dinner, an event that is really more of a complicated process than a recreational activity. The tenth stanza reads: “Not long ago,/your brother lived with you./You called it, One last shot, a three-quarter-court/heave, a buzzer-beater to win something of him back./But who were you kidding? You took him in/with no grand dreams of salvation, but only to ease/the guilt of never having tried.” The last two lines of the stanza are so poignant. I’m struck by Diaz’s honesty, her admission that she “took him in” to relieve her own guilt rather than try to save him. I admire the clarity of her confession more than a stanza full of beautiful metaphors.

Diaz’s reasoning for taking her brother in, while expressed simply, is complexly human. It captures her internal moral struggle as well as an articulate sense of herself. Am I on to something here? Do you agree that the best poetry directly addresses emotions, or does it use metaphor to depict them? Do you prefer poems that maintain elusive representations of emotions and focus on language? No matter your preference, I encourage you all to explore Natalie Diaz’s poetry. She’s sure not to disappoint!

Laura Berry is a senior English major and Poverty Studies minor at Washington and Lee. She is from Madison County, VA, where she spends most of her time with her dog, Russ.

Jake

R.T. Smith

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.

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.

SHENANDOAH and Literary Community Mourn

R.T. Smith

Shenandoah and the rest of the American literary community mourn the loss of Jake Adam York, who died Sunday after a massive stroke. He was 40. Jake had been a Contributing Editor to this magazine for over a decade and studied with me at Auburn University, where he wrote a collection of poems for his honors thesis. I’ve never taught anyone else who so swiftly surpassed me and gave the full measure. I’ll say more when I can get collected and words come back to me.

2011 Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Contest

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Shenandoah is pleased to announce the winner of the 2011 Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Award. A $500 prize awarded to a poet born or residing in Virginia, this year’s award was judged by the Poet Laureate of Virginia, Kelly Cherry. The winning poem, “Writing on the Window” was written by Margaret Mackinnon.

Mackinnon’s work has appeared in various journals, including Poetry, New England Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Quarterly West, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her new work appears in the South Carolina Review and is forthcoming in Image, RHINO, and Midwest Quarterly. Mackinnon completed the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Florida, and she has been awarded scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. For the summer of 2010, she was awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Currently, Mackinnon teaches literature and creative writing at a private high school in the Washington, DC area, and lives with her husband and daughter in Falls Church, Virginia.

Said Cherry of the winning poem:

The winning poem, “Writing on the Window,” delineates credibly and movingly Sophia Hawthorne’s marriage to Nathaniel. The poem shows us their house and garden, the couple’s financial difficulties, the husband’s creative imagination, and Sophia’s serious engagement with painting and her sensitivity and intelligence. Humor, sensuality, and sadness are almost equally weighted. I particularly applaud the poet for retaining linear integrity in her narrative. Finally, what cinched my choice was that I read it aloud (to my husband): the music of this poem is wonderfully persuasive!

Congratulations also to the Graybeal-Gowen finalists:

Patsy Anne Bickerstaff
Matthew Blakley
Sarah Crossland
Anna Journey
Charlotte Matthews
Marielle Prince
Audrey Walls
Kristin Zimet

Thank you to all those who submitted work, we encourage you to enter next year’s Graybeal-Gowen contest, and the Bevel Summers Prize for the Short-Short Story, accepting entries from March 1st to March 31st, 2012.

The winning poem and all the finalists will appear as a Feature on Shenandoah‘s homepage in February.

Buried Antipathies: The Dove Anthology, Second Wind

R.T. Smith

In her introduction to The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry Rita Dove cites exorbitant reprint costs as the reason for omitting work by Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath. In her rebuke to Helen Vendler she suggests that her selections from Wallace Stevens and other unspecified omissions were also a matter of financial exigency. In that same document Dove asserts that “buried antipathies” may provide the motives for omissions of other authors. As one of the readers who is having difficulty understanding the full aesthetic agenda behind her choices, I can imagine an Editor’s Afterward which could clear the air.

The decision to include so many writers who were hardly peaking in the twentieth century remains mysterious to me, but I suspect that any venture by various editors in that direction would produce heated disagreement about the most promising candidates. In fact, I don’t want to consider erasing any of the poets she includes; since we’re in virtual space, for now, hurrah for abundance. Let them stay; we can simply agree to disagree about who the rising stars might be. I think Dove should, however, come clean about two categories she refers to – the too-expensive poems and the buried antipathies. It would be valuable for me to know exactly what poems and poets were disqualified for economic reasons. It must have been frustrating to know that, although she was engaged to render a personal, rather than a consensus, anthology, she would be constrained by inadequate funds. If she would reveal those expensive works, we could see more clearly what her ideal anthology would have looked like. I would really love to see her ideal Table of Contents.

Secondly, it would be useful to know which poets were excluded (or limited) due to “buried antipathies.” I don’t even want to know what those antipathies are; that an editor employs them in her selection is probably TMI, but now that we have this shadowy category, might as well name the names.

Just as Dove includes many poems which are skillful and widely appreciated but just don’t rank as indispensible to me, she also omits some poets whose work seems to me seminal, not just in my private court of taste, but (if Pulitzers and other acclaim really mean anything) in the court of public opinion. Some of these poets, like Marie Howe and Charles Bernstein are not part of my private anthology-of-the-mind, not on my bookshelves, but I am convinced of their accomplishments and influence. Clearly Dove has done some of the same wincing while selecting.

The following list, I am convinced, belong in such a garden at least as much as more than half of those in the book. Maybe someday a Walrus or Caribou Press will invite me to muster an anthology, and then I’ll explain my quirks, some of which hinge on subject matter, others on prosody, narrative force, cultural position, God-knows-what.

Robert Penn Warren and these other poets from the past: John Crowe Ransom, Donald Justice, Kenneth Rexroth, as well as these established contemporaries, many of them winners of Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Bollingens and so on: Ellen Bryant Voigt, Dave Smith, Eleanor Ross Taylor, Claudia Emerson, Where there’s a pattern, there’s an agenda, and you can likely get a fix on mine. But also: Tim Siebles, Bob Hicok, Charles Bernstein, Marie Howe, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Wendell Berry, Brendan Galvin, Linda Hogan, Robert Wrigley, Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregerson, Lyrae Van Clief Stefanon and Louise Glück.

And there’s one significant demographic of consequence that I’d especially like to see represented in such an anthology, whether through Lynn Powell or Kay Byer, Byron Herbert Reese, Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan – the rising tide of Appalachian writers. Dove gives us Charles Wright, but the early poems she selected (reprint costs could have played a role here) for Wright camouflage his Tennessee mountain roots fairly well. This community of writers are not provincial nor isolated and should not be invisible.

It’s hard to ignore the absence of so many Southern poets of serious accomplishment without concluding that they are the casualties of a corrective impulse running through the anthology, a desire to counterbalance previous anthologies which may be tied to the buried antipathies and which I can’t much fault Dove for, knowing I would be inclined to do something similar on behalf of a group of poets I value and believe have been given the sharp end of the stick. Showing all the cards face up would help readers along, allow them to look straight into the light of the featured work and the omissions, instead of guessing at “buried antipathies,” and more easily understand how Dove sees this anthology fitting in with others – the Norton and Vendler’s The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry for instance.

If controversy sells books and sales yield readers, this Penguin may open doors for some potential readers who previously saw walls, and bravo to that. It does not seem to have been constructed as a textbook, though it can certainly be used as one, with some provisos, and it will surely be handy to many for honey dipping and savoring. And it has put the bees in the bonnet and left many of us asking with renewed urgency, “Just what does make a poem a wonder?” There’s an old joke: “What do you get when you cross a Mafia don with a modern poet?” Pause, pause: “Somebody who makes you an offer you can’t understand.” Some days I hear the truth behind that and don’t want to see any more products of a guild that has become to some degree and industry, but other days I read Komunyakaa or Justice, Kumin or Henry Taylor, Warren or Kizer or Mark Doty and say “amen” and “encore.” Like Stafford’s justly famous narrator, I am “listen[ing] hard for all of us,” and whatever’s out there rattling the saplings and trampling the brush, extending the range of that great song roared by Whitman and whispered by Dickinson, it’s moving along various paths, and it’s not all manufactured or conjured from stagnant air, as many non-poets are quick to say about modern verse. Truth is, it’s alive, and who’s surprised that many scholars and poets are willing to scrap over questions of quality and ownership? Maybe a dispute that’s already giving off plenty of heat will also grant Goethe’s dying request for “more light, more light.”