POEM OF THE WEEK: “Married” by Jack Gilbert

 

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from  the drain,
the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came
there was no way to be sure which were
hers and I stopped.  A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
this long black hair tangled in the dirt.

 

Jack Gilbert’s wife Michiko Nogami died in her thirties from cancer, and in this moving poem, lacking many of the trappings of elegy, he overwhelms by understating.  It occurs to me the proper response for a reader is awe, rather than analysis, and I feel fortunate that I can still hear Jack’s voice in it. A critic once referred to Gilbert as a “lyric ghost.”  Seems right.

This poem originally appeared, as far as I can tell, in Columbia, then in a Tamarack Editions chapbook (1984) entitled Kochan, which may carry a range of meanings between “cutie” and “beloved.”  If I’m off there, someone sing out.  By the way, Michiko means “passing child” or “child of wisdom.”

Gilbert received the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Views of Jeopardy, and his Collected Poems was a runner-up for the Pulitzer.  I also highly recommend Monolithos.  Fortunately, his books are available on Amazon and other outlets.

RTSmith 6/1/18


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.

 

“Carving the Salmon” by John Engels POEM OF THE WEEK

I shape this piece
of curly maple into the rough
form of a salmon on

my bandsaw, s fine, sour sweet smell
of sawdust. a hint of scorching and smoke
because the blade is dull, cut

the side shape first. then the top.
And then it is recognizable, a fish,
and ready for finishing.  It quivers

a little at the skew chisel, flinches
at the spoon bit.  With the straight gouge
I give it eyes, and with the veiner, gills,

and it leaps a little in my hand.  Now
that it sees and breathes, it starts
to flop and suffocate.  It becomes

much harder to hold.  But it will be
a long while before I learn
to fashion the blood.

 

This poem of John’s appeared in The Hollins Critic and can still be found in Sinking Creek from The Lyons Press in NYC and his huge collected (600 pages) Recounting the Seasons from Notre Dame University Press.  I post it not to make commentary but to bask in its simple beauty and sense of the magical and natural as one.  John could play the trombone, the autoharp and any trout you ever met, but he crossed over the river a decade back.    This week the mayflies are darting and lighting in my house, especially at night when all the lights are out but my lamp and its reflection in a glass of Aberlour.  How could my usual thinking of him not increase and overwhelm?  Wherever he is, corporeal or not, I hope the trout are leaving the grassy shallows to rise at an artfully tied fly.

— RTS


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.

 

Spring Issue and Annual Prizes

On April 30 Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review will release its spring, 2018 issue (Volume 67, No. 2) on its website shenandoahliterary.org. The magazine is also announcing the winners of its annual prizes, the retirement of its long-time editor R. T. Smith, plus the hiring, through the WLU English Department, of new editor Beth Staples.

The new issue includes five stories, five essays and two dozen poems.  Contributors include Shenandoah veterans David Wojahn, Stephen Gibson, Sarah Gordon, Alice Friman and Thomas Reiter, as well as newcomers John Glowney, Amy Reading, Paul Daniel and April Darcy, whose short story about the perils of modern love, “Free Fall,” is both her first publication and the winner of the magazine’s annual prize in fiction.

Highlights of the issue include poems about hawks, Puritans, a toad, swarming bees and a poignant consolation from Plutarch to his wife.  Short stories deal with a child’s discovery of compassion and a bizarre look at the shadowy side of the art collecting world.  Essays consider whales (in the sea and in Moby-Dick), poetry that resists the temptations of fake news and the winner of the annual Thomas Carter Prize for Nonfiction, Daniel Paul’s erudite and witty “Significant Otters,” which is about the life and charm of otters.

The winner of the annual Boatwright Prize for Poetry is Lisa Beech Hartz for her poem “Portrait of Sherwood Anderson, Ripshin Farm, Doris Ullman, 1928,” which depicts a meeting in Virginia between acclaimed author Anderson and renowned photographer Ullman.  The poem was published in Volume 67, No.1 last fall.  Hartz lives in Tidewater Virginia and directs the Seven Cities Writers Project, a non-profit cost-free workshop.

Daniel Paul is pursuing a PhD at the University of Cincinnati.  April Darcy lives in New Jersey and holds an MFA from Bennington.  Honorable mentions in poetry are Lisa Russ Spaar of Charlottesville and Austin Segrest of Alabama and Georgia, now pursuing a PhD at the University of Missouri.  Lynn Sloan’s essay “Nature Rules” from 67, No.1 is the honorable mention in fiction.

Shenandoah’s prizes are not the result of a traditional contest with a submission deadline but instead have for several decades been chosen from among the work selected for publication in the journal across a volume year.  All works published in Shenandoah are eligible for the prizes in their appropriate genres, but special submissions are not considered.  The prizes come with  honoraria of $1000.

Smith has been editing Shenandoah since 1995, when he left Auburn University and the editorship of Southern Humanities Review.  Staples comes to WLU from UNC-Wilmington, where she has been editing Ecotone and directing Lookout Books.  She has previously edited Hayden’s Ferry Review for Arizona State University and will be an assistant professor in WLU’s English Department.  The new schedule for submission of work to Shenandoah will be announced on the website in mid-summer.


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.

 

Beth Staples to Become SHENANDOAH Editor

     Shenandoah is pleased to announce that Beth Staples, currently a senior editor at Ecotone, editor at Lookout Books and instructor at UNC-Wilmington, has accepted the position of Editor of Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review.  Ms. Staples, who holds degrees from LaSalle and Arizona State University, will join the WLU English Department as an assistant professor in June.  Her first issue of Shenandoah, a 68-year-old journal on-line since 2011, will be published in the fall.

Staples brings to the position a wide range of experience as editor, teacher of editing and fiction writing and as a writer of both non-fiction and fiction.  At Ecotone, Lookout Books, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU (where she edited Hayden’s Ferry Review), she has built a formidable reputation as a scrupulous and imaginative advisor and guide, as well as an astute reader and canny publisher.  An astonishing number of stories and essays Professor Staples has edited have been reprinted or cited for excellence in prize anthologies such as the O’Henry Award Stories, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and others.  She also directs Ecotone’s diverse and professional blog.

 

Shenandoah (shenandoahliterary.org) will soon announce the new editor’s initial calendar for submissions to the journal, and Ms. Staples will begin to reveal her early plans at that time.  In addition to her editing duties, she will also teach writing courses and the literary editing courses at WLU.

Retiring editor R. T. Smith says that he is “excited to see Shenandoah turned over to such a skilled editor and lover of language that is exact and evocative.  Any writer whose work falls under her scrutiny is bound to learn and grow from the experience.  Any student who signs on as an intern under Ms. Staples will be taking a significant step toward literary professionalism, as well as narrative delight.”


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.

 

SHENANDOAH Editor to Read Poems on April 3

Smith to read poems about dogs, fishing, dulcimers, owls and murder most foul.


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.