Stanza the First. [rub icon?]

I have discovered that “Rubicon” now names a style of semi-compact faux-rugged soft-top Jeep and yet another failed TV series about espionage, but not many people in my neighborhood still use the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” to designate an irreversible and risky decision.  “The die is cast” is also fading from the popular vocabulary, and alea jacta est is more a ghost phrase than the conversation spice it once was among baby boomers who were herded into Latin classes.  Romans didn’t really use the “J” anyway.  In fact, the River Rubicon in northeastern Italy was never itself important as more than a border, a no trespassing sign, but it did play a major role in Roman law and the limitations placed on Roman generals flushed with victory.  The law forbade commanders to cross that stream at the head of an army, which might in unsteady times resemble a threat.  Their right to command, their imperium, stopped at the border, where the power of the magistrates activated.  To cross and proceed toward the place where all roads lead in full martial strength was a capital offense.  Maybe this kind of tension the historical moment when Truman and McArthur fell into irreversible conflict.  Mac tried to cross it the border, Caesar did.  Maybe the Romans should have built a wall.

The stream flowing south of Ravenna is called Rubicon because, as with ruby, the word’s root designates something red, like the clay which forms much of the river’s bed and stains the water reddish (but not radish, not even quite a crimson tide).  Once Julius Caesar defied the Senate and crossed with his soldiers on that cold day in 49 B.C.– with only a legion of three or four thousand, but symbolically a horde – war with Pompey and his cronies was inevitable, and much more than that minor river would run red . . . for three years, very red.

You have to wonder what the Jeep marketing wizards (are they still “Willis”?) were thinking when they chose the name.  It looks like an unsafe rugged vehicle, but overpriced and prone to rolling.  But then we’ve already had the Cressida and the Saturn, so the sky’s the limit.  Name away.  (I want an Orion, for winter driving).  And I guess if I had a Rubicon I might feel more decisive and hardened by frontier campaigns sleeping beside my gladius under the stars and facing the war axe and battle cry of the menacing Gauls.  I’d want my 4-wheel drive Rubicon to be red as a fox.

But there must be more to the flight of associations than all this fiddle, and there is.  The idea of crossing into dangerous territory, rolling the dice and making a monumental decision will always be part of our lives, and the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” once carried significant gravity and the weight of historical association.  It was useful.  It was cultural and worldly and a pleasure to pronounce.  It could be employed inappropriately by a Woody Allen as self-satire, but it could also suggest the havoc and suffering Caesar’s domestic conquest carried.  Maybe the convenience of that Siri voice can reverse the loss of such pertinent words.

Once upon a time, straying from some rambling research on Emily Dickinson (no stranger to the irrevocable, heart-scouring decisions – the soul selects its own society – then shuts the door), I found myself reading her brother Austin’s letters and some of his journal entries.  And there it was, without the “crossing,” just the simple signature pronouncement rubicon.  Here’s a code to wrinkle the forehead and throw the brain’s electro-chemical switch.  Not to be left behind by the youthful and beautiful, I thought simply “WTF?” (a favorite FM radio station).

I won’t play coy.  Though it was an unopened door for me, I already knew there is an invisible but not completely clandestine portal in the Dickinson family’s Homestead that reads “Her Brother’s Disgraceful Affair.”  I knew this skeleton-not-really-in- the-closet involved Mabel Loomis Todd, editor marquee, illustrator, promoter who played a role (of debatable value, for editorial and litigious reasons) in bringing to light the work of the genius spinster mystery foremother of American poetry.  I also knew that Mabel (whom I can’t stop associating with pancakes or Black Label beer) was married to an Amherst College astronomer, who perhaps should have looked about him through a magnifying glass or his own specs instead of a telescope, but that’s another story.  The outlaw couple conducted their trysts during the period of their “white as the fresh driven snow” (sere and austere Austin’s words, not mine) affaire de coeur in the downstairs parlor under Emily’s chambers – this I didn’t know.  Though Maple and Emily never actually met, the poet admired the future editor’s deftness on the eighty-eights, requested that the tunes continue and on occasion left sherry and even a poem at the bottom of the stairs for the musician and the mutton-chopped Victorian whose 1890 image reminds me of (a)Lizzie Borden’s father, (b)Lawrence Talbot in half-wolf mode and (c)David Selby (who has published two volumes of poetry himself!) as Quentin Collins in TV’s Dark Shadows, and he never looks in those later pictures as if he’s a dormant volcano ready to spew embers like Krakatoa.  In 1854, however, he had the look of a neutered Heathcliff.  SO . . .  hanky-panky, coded rendezvous in the crepuscular world where poems and love are made.

Part two coming soon

In the Estonian-Georgian film Tangerines, which I recently viewed on Netflix, the central character Ivo, at an impromptu evening picnic in a near-deserted war-torn village, can think of only Death to toast. His three companions, all deeply scarred by the 1992 conflict – two of them enemies, rescued casualties from a firefight – demur, but Ivo persists, telling the soldiers Ahmed, a Chechen mercenary, and Niko, a Georgian volunteer, that they are the children of Death and its servants. For the past year I have been disheartened and almost willing to raise a glass in that desperately defiant and ironic salute to the grim reaper, but after an hour and a half with Tangerines, I began to feel ashamed of myself.

The last decade has been hard on my friends, and I have counted the afflictions and fatalities, nursing my grief like a private, secret, even prized, possession. I’ve been unable or unwilling to attend memorial ceremonies, keep in contact with families, participate in written tributes. Those who found solace in the sorrow dance suddenly seemed like strangers. The result has been a self-righteous isolation: these public rituals fell so far short of what I believed my profounder-than-thou feelings of loss that participation would seem, I reasoned, like an understatement. My misery didn’t want company, as I didn’t want to overdramatize my sorrow nor to minimize it, so I withdrew from any potential community of mutual solace and bore down, pulled in my outposts, concentrating on daily survival, sequestering when possible with my wife, staring at the TV’s festival of horrors – extreme weather, national and international political sniping and lying, terrorism, insurrection, economic threats. The collective grievances all served to distract me from examining my own grieving inertia, which amounted in the end to misconduct.

Eager to deny that we’re immersed in self-pity, we’re capable of excavating a sanctuary of distraction and numbness, only to discover that it soon becomes a pretty effective grave. We harden, accentuate the practical, minimize the emotional. We soldier on, eyes front. But then, if we’re very lucky, something breaks the trance. In my life the awakening agent has often been the discovery (or rediscovery) of a work of art – film, poem, story, song, painting – and I won’t go so far as to claim that art heals me like some medical prozac panacea, but it speaks to me in that thunderous and irresistible whisper with which the bust of Apollo said to Rilke, “You much change your life.”

Of course, timing is crucial. Back before Christmas, I would have kept my mind too distracted to really engage with Tangerines, and even last week I probably wouldn’t have been quite ripe for a face-to-face encounter with Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to help me start rescuing myself, but Tangerines (Mandarinebi in Estonian) came as a surprise and provided just the summons I needed. I suspect I was not alone. After all, the film received, I’ve discovered, nominations for best foreign language film in both the Golden Globes and Academy Awards last year. . . though on second thought, those may be suspect credentials. Fortunately, I often find the decentering element of foreign films can bring from the periphery some topic or imagery that I can see with my direct gaze clearly for the first time. Maybe it’s the subtitles, but I suspect it’s more a matter of non-American filmmakers being not so inclined to “entertain,” to both exploit and encourage our shallowness. They demand more.

I don’t want to tell too much about this film. Its story is an old one, its trajectory nearly guessable, but what follows is just a hint at how the small story of four men working out their salvation with diligence plays against the backdrop of the “large” stories of war, sectarian hostility, displacement, harvest.

In Zaza Urushadze’s film (his as writer, director, producer), the grandfatherly Ivo and the younger Margus remain in their evacuated village to bring in the precious tangerine harvest, despite war’s rapid approach. Ivo makes crates, his friend picks fruit, the landscape teems and shimmers – with both sea and mountains close, the forest deep and the sky deeper. The setting is vital in all senses, and the men robust, disciplined, dedicated to their task, stoically good-natured, given the circumstances. But the savagery falls upon them, and soon they witness a firefight and rescue a pair or survivors, whom they nurse as the two sworn enemies taunt each other, threaten and engage in vitriolic dispute. I’m paring this down in an embarrassing way, but I don’t want to interfere with readerss chances to see the film afresh.

It’s an old story: each combatant slowly and perilously begins to recognize the other’s humanity, and as they do, their allegiances, losses and griefs are revealed, along with those of Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak) and Margus (Elmo Nuganen). The Chechen mercenary Ahmed and the Georgian volunteer Niko begin to shed their prejudices and indoctrination. (There’s an old Twilight Zone episode, “Two,” along this line with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery, and such stories usually begin with the “last two standing” premise, as does the song “Wooden Ships” or Hardy’s “The Man He Killed”). Empathizing as they learn to share their sorrows, they assist their hosts with the work around the farm and promise to assist with the harvest. To watch them guardedly gravitate towards one another is to be reminded of Faulkner’s “human heart in conflict with itself.”

You don’t want to be told how the inhumane obstacles arise, as that would spoil the dramatic tension, but before they do, much is exchanged among fatalist, Christian and Muslim – questions of mortality and duty, fathers and sons, harvests accomplished and harvests thwarted, honor and fairness. The rough bucolics provide a powerful backdrop which helps to keep sentimentality at bay; the wounds are all deep, the treatments severe, the dialogue authentic. Perhaps the hardest element of the narrative to embrace is: of the four survivors holed up in this front line village, all four are actually good men, but none a duplicate of the other. I wish I could believe in that ratio as representative. As the story develops, the men’s plans and needs twist together like the vines of a wisteria, braiding strength. Soon they are engaged in word and communion, at war with the war, but the story, the time, requires sacrifice in order that disaster be averted.

At the end, the titles rolled, as did the landscape and plangent music, and I pondered the cost to each of those men to understand and express his own dreams and miseries. Dire circumstances and the guidance of the sardonic Ivo brought them out of the solipsistic (or numbed) refraction of their feelings and into a vital relationship with their pasts, their destinies and their companions.

The acting was moving, the script running from grim to wry to droll. An allegory, perhaps, with its journeys and meetings, its dark night of the soul and the inexorable silent progress of the citrus crop – ripe for picking but with only a brief window of opportunity.

From start to finish, I saw actors portraying the kind of man I had forgotten how to strive to be – resourceful, stoic but sympathetic, receptive and centered and generous. Art had done its job again; a made-up but believable story had nurtured and stimulated me and said, “try harder; you have that responsibility.” The influence of Tangerines has lasted for days, and I hope it will continue to do so, but I’m sure I’ll eventually need another fix, which I can’t get from buying a rapid-fire weapon, nor from cursing and threatening a whole culture or a band of sojourners or a gender, not even from being rude or dismissive. Tangerines won’t banish pettiness or melodrama any more than “Mending Wall,” A Hundred Years of Solitude or “Trois Gymnopedies” will, and I continue to need booster shots, but I remember now where to seek them, and it will not be in a toast to death.

Tangerines reminds me that I owe a debt to what has been and what will be to shake off my sense of defeat, understand my losses and weave the grief tightly into my personal tapestry of human strength and vulnerability.  I must change my life.

When I slipped out of the Georgia sunlight and into the Rex that Saturday in the fifties, I was not prepared for all the varieties of darkness I was entering.  The film I Walked with a Zombie, produced by Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tournier was over a dozen years old and making the scare matinee rounds.  It had not been so successful as Lewton’s The Cat People, in which the techniques of noir mystery meet inexplicable, panther-transforming beings.  Lewton and Tourneaur were already notorious for their shadow effects and enigmas, melodrama and legerdemain, but if they and the writers (Siodmak and Ray) were much aware of either the Bronte overtones or cultural/historical implications of their zombie narrative, they didn’t deploy the connections with systematic vigor.  As for me, I wouldn’t have known Emily from Bramwell, but I was still very much in my impressionable phase, a little uncomfortable over even the cosmetic gargoyles leering from high on the theater walls.  I swallowed my popcorn and RC and chewed (or threw) my Red Devils with a devotion unreminiscent of communion, but I’d heard this movie had a creepy ugly zombie and a beautiful semi-zombie who had been an evil woman in ways the film only dared hint at, so my curiosity drew me into the dark.

Light and darkness, prosperity and poverty, goodness and wickedness, different kinds of physical and psychic confinement — all these were bound up in a cadre of characters I was learning to believe should be watched and understood.  In short [spoiler alert!] a virtuous Canadian nurse is hired to travel to the mysterious Caribbean island of San Sebastian, where she is to tend the mysteriously ill wife of a sugar cane magnate.  Soon the viewer discovers that the family is torn not merely by an unnamed riff (a wife, two brothers, a mysteriously guilty mother, suggestions of incest I didn’t get for years), but the island is even more dramatically divided between luxuriant affluence (white) masquerading as civility, and afflicted poverty (black) perhaps reinforced but certainly excited by nocturnal forces involving drums, ecstatic dancing, chants and spells and trance states.  Unfamiliar and threatening as the voodoo followers are, they come across as the good-hearted party, even with their priest (Sabeur) wielding swords.

Almost as soon as Nurse Betsy arrives on the boat from Antigua, a cart driver tells her that the Hollands (cane magnates now imprisoned by fear in their fortress-like compound) “brought the colored folks to the island, the colored folks and Ti Misery, the old man who lives in the garden.”  It happened “long ago . .  . the folk chained to bottom of the boat.”  Willfully naive, it turns out, Nancy remarks that the imports were certainly brought to “a beautiful place.”  “If’n you say,” is the driver’s response.

So the oppressed cane workers, deprived of authority, autonomy and so on, have taken to other avenues to power, and these forces thrive in the swamps beyond the cane rows.  It’s easy now to see it unfolding, but Nancy/Jane Eyre, when we see her fall for Mr. Holland while caring for his near-catatonic wife, still seems innocent, and the woods are dark and deep but not so lovely.

Ti Misery, by the way, is the prow ornament from the ship that brought the slaves, an image of St. Sebastian, arrows and all.  He means more to the cane workers than the cane owners, but the writers miss many great chances with him yet manage a couple of brilliant images of the statue.

But the Euro-folk don’t much rely on their religion, as they have science, modern medicine, and the downtrodden workers have their more mysterious forces and sympathetic magic.  No one will quite say what Jessica Holland did that earned her the curse of madness, but insinuations mount up — something about the brother she isn’t married to, but also suggestions of cruelty, perhaps towards workers.

It never quite parses or unknots, but the voodoo scenes are what I “got,” was chilled by and remembered — controlling people with dolls and needles, a stabbing of the accursed woman without her flinching or shedding blood, the grisly animal parts hanging from trees and bone altars on the ground.  The film opposes the members of the two races but isn’t clear in its imagining of voodoo and Christianity as contrary forces, so maybe it’s time for someone to remake this story. . . but no, they’ll never get the poetry right, the atmospherics, the night walks into the cane fields, the zombie  servant of Damballah with his huge eyes, the sound of the blown conch through the ground fog.

Near the end of the film, a family member admits of the poor mad wife, “Jessica is not insane.  She’s dead.”

So undead, really.  And how do you cure that or rescue someone from it.  The fact that only one large problem is resolved by the end of the film left me unsettled.  It was a little like reading “Young Goodman Brown” before I was ready for it.  I wanted to know what was right, what was kind.  It was years before I understood that I had also been placed in the midst of a dangerous dynamic.  Good or bad, the former slaves were portrayed as dealing in unnatural forces.  Bad or good, the former masters (now drunks, quarrelers, liars and abusers) were still the ones with the trappings of culture.  It took the Sixties to even set my mind in the right direction on this dilemmas, but by then I wasn’t thinking of zombies so much as night riders and attack dogs, and though I’ve given it a lot of thought over the past decade, I’ve yet to go back and unpack that whole film to see which of its narrative and imagistic  roots were insidious, and which of my own . . . .

 

 

A Visit from Poet/Editor Will Wright

by Isabelle McAlevey, Shenandoah Intern

When I learned William Wright was coming to sit down with the Shenandoah interns I was unsure of what to expect. I did what I could online to get a sense of his poetry. Rich with imagery evocative of earthiness and rooted in the American South, I found Wright’s poetry a delight to read. I was interested to hear him discuss what inspired him and what he looked for in poetry as a poet, anthologist, and reviewer (amongst other things I am sure).

He had many intriguing and thoughtful ways to answer the range of questions produced by our group, from the recommendation of A Canticle for Leibowitz, to his description of using a “pebble in a pool” approach to effectively review a piece of literary work. What most stood out to me during our time with Will Wright, however, was his mentioning that he has synesthesia and feels a desire to put particularly sound-dense words or language in his mouth and taste them. This got me thinking about how the average reader experiences poetry, and the difference in effect poetry can have when just read on a page, versus recited aloud.

Wright said Gerard Manley Hopkins was a poet he particularly enjoyed when it came to poetic diction and sound-density, and so I thought perhaps I would read some of Hopkins’ work aloud to see if I felt similarly. I selected at random from a list of poems I found, and read first “The Starlight Night.” Right away, the title indicated to me a sense of playful magic in its rhyme. Lo and behold, the poem did contain elements of fairy magic, and lines such as “Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!/The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!” did not disappoint when it came to texture and the savory nature of the words as they departed my mouth.

I had never really thought before of a desire to taste words, to want to put them in one’s mouth and experience them in an entirely new dimension. Maybe we can fulfill some iota of this desire by speaking the words out loud, but when I reflect on it, it does seem sort of a shame that we cannot replace the words to our mouths and taste them, jumble them around with our tongues, and pass them over our teeth. Although I do not have synesthesia, I think I was mostly able to grasp what Wright meant when he said he wanted to put words in his mouth and taste them. I could not determine exactly what type of synesthesia this might fall under, but given that the word stems from the Greek words for “together” and “sensation,” I would say it is safe to say the urge to taste a word is a synesthetic notion.

Other than discussing Hopkins’ poetry as a source of inspiration, and his passion for the sound of words, Wright said it was Leon Stokesbury’s The Made Thing that first shifted his focus from short stories to poetry as a young writer. He said he swiped the book after class one day, and it was one of the best things he ever did. I really enjoyed when he shared this story and was able to pinpoint a turning point for his interest and career. Overall, it was fun and engaging to hear Wright talk about his work and what he admires in the work of others. His identity as an author is authentically Southern, and it was fascinating to hear him talk about how the South and sounds influence his writing. Ultimately, it was his mention of his desire to taste words and language that really stood out to me, and got me thinking about the way we experience literature.

Posted by Sam Bramlett

Is a man with no senses alive? He is in the same way that people know what’s going on in each other’s heads. Fiction isn’t limited to books or anything else in the sphere of entertainment. “I think, therefore I am,” does not mean “you think, therefore you are,” but what I think can exist between us, whatever we may be.

Humans are physical things, their emotions created by the chemicals and electricity whirring through little grey wrinkles. Within the mass of gray wrinkles in our skulls however is a seemingly infinite capacity to generate the nonexistent.

Why do you think a God would create a world? Entertainment. Drama, like opening the pages of a conscious novel and watching the people inside collide with each other. As Vonnegut said in Breakfast of Champions, “I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of nothing better to do, we became fans of collisions.”

This may seem a bit much for a simple explanation as to why Fiction is valuable to me, but the world itself is a remarkable work of fiction. My own life is the greatest story I’ve ever known, all other stories are simple distractions from the main body of work that exists inside my head. Perhaps my parents should have kept me from playing so many videogames, since now I so vividly understand that someone else could very well be playing the game as me. I have to hope my life would be a good videogame. Would there be enough backstory and characterization? enough drama and struggle to form the basis of a compelling plot? I would like to think so, but who can be sure. There’s no answer to something like that. My life could be as simple and fictitious as the book I’m going to read before I go to bed. It doesn’t matter; what does matter is that I see the story through. That’s how I rationalize it anyway.

Fiction has depth. It has emotional impact. Through the careful setup of characters and events it creates enough friction between relations that new actions or developments create a sense of wonder or despair. Revelations become biblical or humorous, somber or jubilant. It hinges on what’s already been said, allowing the connection to have an impact on whatever audience.

Fiction is a tease. Nothing is more unenticing than a book that always gives you what you want. The good stuff isn’t what’s easy, and the expected is never the answer. This is a spoiler if you’ve never read Game of Thrones, but a prime example is the beheading of Ned Stark. George R. R. Martin has since made such a habit of brutally murdering main characters that it’s become expected, but the thrill of not knowing whether your favorite character will die or not is what keeps you reading. Situations need weight. It must be possible for the hero to fail. Should the hero always win, I will eventually cease to read.

Fiction must not act as a mirror. If whatever is read does nothing but confirm the preconceived notions one has, it is worth next to nothing. Unless of course you enjoy talking to yourself, and only yourself. Fiction opens minds to new experiences and possibilities; it challenges your view of the world and forces you to see yourself in a new light. An example of this is Dr.Manhattan’s monologue from Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, “But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget… I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.”

These elements I find valuable in fiction, though not always. There are always exceptions when it comes to fiction. Rules can never contain the infinity of what does or does not exist in the mind.

[Being not quite a re-run, but a revisiting of a persistent question.]

As the population of writers, editors and literary journals increases faster the number of Kardashian spin-offs, it never seems profitless to address the question many new or just frustrated writers ask me: How can you possibly read that many stories and make wise choices? The honest answer requires me to say something they don’t want to hear, even though the existence of terms like “over the transom” and “slush pile” should prepare us all for the bad news.

Sidebar: I should say that I rarely solicit work, unless I’m working on a special issue and don’t have the patience or optimism to believe it will take shape naturally and on my publication schedule. Certainly over 90% of the poems, stories, flash fictions and essays in Shenandoah are unsolicited, and more than 50% are by writers we have not previously published, which means that a large proportion of the fiction appearing on our site arrives as a surprise and is discovered by an intern or the editor in the midst of a Ms.-reading session. In other genres, it’s the editor alone who peruses the manuscripts. But fiction is the mode of most of the words that come our way across the dark mysteries of the digital world.

Now to the raw answer to that question. Most stories we receive are not read from beginning to end. Right now I have five undergraduate interns, all new to the job this fall, no managing editor or professional assistant fiction editor to lend a pair of seasoned eyes. I’m the first reader for about 60% of the stories, and the students deal with the rest, though I will examine any story that receives high recommendation from them, as well. I try to assign two students to each of the stories designated for intern examination, but sometimes the volume of incoming prevents that. If a story does not receive a positive review from the student(s) it has been assigned to, it is declined with regrets.

I know this is pretty dry and procedural, but for the most part, people who ask this question about reading mss. are not asking for entertainment or diversion, so I’m taking my lead from the directness and urgency of their question.

How do I prepare the interns to assist me? We discuss in class stories already published in Shenandoah and some previously submitted but declined. As we do so, we compile a pair of lists – what appeals to us or excites in stories, what displeases us or irks us. No two classes arrive at the same lists, but I make certain each class deals with matters of freshness in style and plot, conciseness, characters we have strong feelings about, concepts behind the plot, pace, conflict, precision, consequentiality. This semester’s class was quick to say that when the conventions of a sub-genre like romance or horror outweigh the originality and fundamental seriousness (even in a humorous or witty narrative), we are not drawn to the piece. I always insist that I want to see a story not only written but wrought, so we do some phrase-by-phrase analysis, substituting words, asking what’s essential, what’s subordinate and what’s downright ornamental.

After we’ve had this discussion, each intern is assigned a group of stories on our Submittable page, and each has the opportunity to record comments and vote in favor or against. If I find divided opinion, I bring the story before the entire class, and we discuss it. I’ve more than once been persuaded to accept a story I had limited enthusiasm for to begin with, and I’ve also been put off a story I had previously favored.

We’re not going to publish more than 10-12 full-length stories a year, not more than a dozen flash fictions, so we have to sift scrupulously and grind fine, but I admit that there’s a serendipitous element that can’t be dismissed. It’s often a question of timing. Say we find a fine story concerning a bickering couple who find an injured owl, and trying to save it provides a healing insight. If we’ve just published a story with a prominent bird or a couple who are brought together through finding someone or something damaged, that story’s chances are not good.

Two principles hold me on a steady course throughout all our deliberations. The first is triage. Like emergency room doctors, I want us to quickly sort out the unsalvagable stories, the engaging but flawed ones and the truly exciting one. It’s that third category we need to concentrate on, and they go into a basket with a two hundred year old etching of a trout above it. The works that land there are said to be “under the fish,” and I’ll revisit that reservoir of writing. Some pieces will come to seem indispensable, others like part of a catch and release program. I spend a lot of time with the contents of that basket and do the best I can.

But doesn’t that take forever and a half? It could, but there’s a second principle in operation. About the abundance of written words begging for our attention, Flannery O’Connor said that she could give a poem a couple of lines, a story a few paragraphs and a novel a few pages, but that she would stop reading when she felt she could do so without experiencing a sense of loss. The already-too-familiar, clichés of style, character, situation, formulas and reiterations – even if lifted from famous writers and classics – are likely to make me feel that quitting will not be followed with regret. O’Connor went on to say that she didn’t have very much time. Her reason was the lupus that was killing her, my reasons are the steadily-multiplying number of submissions, deadlines and the hundred other tasks that the editor of Shenandoah gets to practice.

Do these practices and precautions allow me to sleep at night?  Sometimes.  Do I wish we had other options at our disposal?  Certainly.  But we soldier on, try to be good stewards of the work entrusted to Shenandoah and wish all our would-be contributors good luck in proportion to their careful and original writing.

by Chuck Dodge

The famous final sentences of A River Runs Through It form for me what is one of the most memorable passages in American literature. And truly, they deserve appreciation beyond the dreams of aspiring and infatuated fly fishermen.

“Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.”

(Norman Maclean)

Have better words been chosen? I think Maclean writes in such a way that we are bombarded by truth, wonder, scenery, and depth both literary and tangible in one fell swoop. And this is what makes each phrase so memorable or each thought so valuable that easily distracted people like me find it tough to forget the words as we go about our daily lives.

Over the past summer I was haunted by the words (yes, like Maclean by waters) in the sense that they continued to flow through my head. Especially, that is, when I fished in the Rocky Mountains during the closing weeks of August. At one point I felt moved to hang the words above my bed, but eventually thought better of it to avoid appearing obsessed. Needless to say, I thought about them often and am lucky now with a space to discuss my findings.

To someone who has never stood in a cold Western river, I recommend this passage as the closest possible understanding of the phenomenon that a river is. For the rest of us, or at least for me, it describes the river in a way that makes the inexplicable all but tangible. It is one of those rare occasions when you ask someone how he would describe something like the color orange to a blind man and impossibly they manage to illustrate the concept to a pixel.

Maclean makes the river sacred in the passage, and that is exactly how it feels. The rocks beneath the surface are ancient. Old as time and shaped by the flow of endless water, they are historians through and through. Beneath them, Maclean says there are words, which I interpret to mean the stories of all time. Everything that has occurred in the presence of such stones is in some way transcribed to their memory. “And some of the words are theirs,” Maclean writes, likely as a reference to his brother and father, both passed away. Some of the history, in other words, belongs to the people in our lives. Walking through a river and sensing the various rock shapes press into the soles of your feet feels in some way profound, and having read the novella I finally understand why. Walking on the rocks is to walk through one of the world’s oldest museums, and maybe its greatest. Each step that you take, to extend the idea, is a step that will make its mark on history, imprinting itself on the given rocks forever.

There is the river, then, and there is everything else. Maclean writes, “all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.” He jams these items together with “and’s” which somehow unify them despite their obvious dissimilarity. In hindsight I always felt this way about the river, but subconsciously and not in a way that I claim I could describe. It takes on such a meaning given Maclean’s observations that in its presence, your thoughts, feelings and everything around you are subjugated into one object. It is you and the river. That isn’t to say that your life holds less weight. Not at all. Instead it illustrates the reverence that we have for the river, turning itself into a point of undivided attention. In some moments, our only conscious capacity is to marvel.

Norman Maclean was both a writer and a fisherman. As an interesting side note, I went to thinking about Maclean, and whether I could draw a reasonable correlation between writing and fly fishing: two hobbies that I enjoy as well.

First, I think, a thoughtful understanding of rivers such as Maclean’s makes fly fishing an awe-inspiring activity. The best way to understand anything, of course, is to be able to verbalize it in a way that perfectly strikes the way you truly feel about it. Good writers, then (or those who think they are), are good at understanding. And because understanding generates appreciation, it makes sense that writers can experience a unique connection to fishing.

But there are other connections as well, rhythm among them. The four-count rhythm of a fly cast is a motif that occurs throughout the novella. It even displays variations, as Maclean’s brother is said to create his own tempo. Good rod tempo is essential to successful fly fishing, especially as you tie more flies onto the line. A poor stroke can twist the tippet, the strand attached to the dry fly, into a hopeless mass of knots. Rhythm also lies at the core of writing, manifesting itself in everything from paragraph length and arrangement down to sentence structure and word flow. Every writer can develop their own tempo, so long as their message remains untangled. And the more ambitious a piece of writing is, the more critical it is that the writer executes an easily accessible form, just as the rod tempo becomes paramount when you have more than one fly on the line.

Good writing also hooks the reader by the gill. In fly-fishing, better-disguised or more obnoxious-colored flies tempt the most bites. I’m going to leave the truth of that analogy as a subject for consideration.

“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.”

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.

Maybe 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.”