R.T. Smith – Page 7

SHENANDOAH Moving Again

R.T. Smith

Location, Location, Location
Another chapter in the history of Shenandoah has come to an end. During the week of December 15 we will be moving our offices again, this time from our historic brick tower across from the Stonewall Jackson House to the basement of Early-Fielding (sounds vaguely agricultural) Building at the corner of (really) Lee Avenue and Washington Street. It’s also right across Lee from Mattingly House, where we were lodged before moving to our current location.

When classes resume on January 12, we’ll be open for business again with a new set of interns, but our Submittable site will not be ready to receive submissions until later in that month. Stay tuned.

Our current (17 Courtyard Square) address was the launching pad for our on-line version of Shenandoah, and it’s been an eventful three and a half years, sad in the loss of our contributing editors Jake York and Claudia Emerson, but in other ways provocative and challenging. The building is a wonderful example of 19th century construction with huge windows and, partly because it once served as the Commonwealth Attorney’s office, an atmosphere of resourceful professionalism, bolstered by the two walk-in safes. Our previous querencia Mattingly House, which we shared with publishing and communications professionals, had been a fraternity house, and despite the chimney’s penchant for trapping or admitting birds, it had a good feel, a picturesque hearth and one grand room with pine wainscotting. Longtime followers may even recall that in 1995 Shenandoah moved from its first port-of-call with the English Department in Payne (!) Hall to the upstairs suite of the well-known Troubadour Theater. That was on the occasion of my arrival, and my office window allowed a fine view of the First Baptist Church and, at times, an inspiring view of the rising moon. Sometimes it backlit our resident bats. From “17” the winter sunset was the resident spectacle. That old Troubadour building now houses a hair salon and an upstairs apartment. Time marches on.

What to make of all this peregrination? Hard to say. Home is where you dock your laptop? Travel is broadening? Wise to present a moving target? It’s a mystery to me, but James Joyce could have told us more about the joys and sorrows of changing addresses. At the end of Ulysses, reflecting his own brand of musical chairs, he wrote Trieste-Zurich-Paris. Location, location, location. It worked out fine for him. Wish us luck.

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 Considering Fiction, Non-fiction Submissions

R.T. Smith

As of Monday, September 22, Shenandoah will be considering submissions of fiction and non-fiction for the spring, 2015 issue. Manuscripts should be submitted through our submissions management program, which can be accessed by selecting SUBMISSIONS tab on the top tool bar on the homepage and following instructions from there. This window should be open until early December.

The site will open to submissions of poetry and flash fiction in early October and will remain open until early December. In November we will conduct our annual Graybeal-Gowen Contest for Virginia Poets. See contest rules at our website (shenandoahliterary.org).

SHENANDOAH is a 24-7, no-fee journal, but we do pay out contributors, with a minimum of $50 for non-fiction features, flash fiction and poetry and an overall maximum of $200 per piece. Exceptions are made in circumstances where an extended essay is assigned.

[cover art by Suzanne Stryk]

Where’s Archie?

R.T. Smith

When A. R. Ammons died in 2001 he was widely considered (by Bloom, Vendler, Lieberman and other heavy-hitting critics) one of the half dozen most significant and original poets writing in English. By turns unflappable, faux naïve, authoritarian, wry, oracular, jocular and naughty, he was a master of melding vernacular speech with scientific jargon and even better at finding colloquial and seemingly inevitable phrases to clarify the intricate natural and technical world while making the invisible seem tactile and visual. His poems might span half a dozen words or cover the length of a collection. He was shifty, adroit, eccentric and humane. He was an experimentalist escaped from the lab.

For the excellence of his work, Ammons received the National Book Critics Award, the Bollingen Prize, two National Book Awards and a MacArthur Fellowship. An explorer of the natural world, he was the ultimate peripatetic; not even Wordsworth would have gone so far as to declare and argue (even tongue in cheek) that “A Poem Is a Walk,” as Ammons’ essay of that title does. No one could make sentences more sinuous, organic, surprising but coherent than Archie. He was also an accomplished pianist and water colorist who could construct an elaborate a joke or write a botanical manual . . . in a poem.

In person he could be quick, erudite, acerbic, cracker barrel punny, mercurial, owlish or foxy. When he died at seventy-five, he was still writing poems nearly every poetry lover would want to read for the puzzlement, the wit or the exhilaration. But after he passed his reputation began to fade, his work ceased to be essential to any conversation about American poetry. Or so it has seemed to me. James Dickey, another of my favorites, died four years before Ammons, but his work still appears in anthologies that declare themselves “contemporary.” Is his work more alive than Archie’s? What I hope to do here is to awaken the curiosity of younger readers and provide older ones with a reason to look again at the spiraling, elegant, jittery, rattletrapping, challenging and rewarding poems of A. R. Ammons. First, I’d like to indulge in a touch of personal reminiscence, then to offer one of his poems I keep returning to, not because it’s typical of his work – what would be? – but because it’s irascible and indelible, daring me to be offended or bewildered, but never allowing either to happen.

Almost forty years ago I was one of twenty poets invited to a two-week retreat at the Reynolds family’s historic homestead near Critz, Virginia. I was still green, next-to-youngest in the cadre, which included Kathryn Stripling Byer, Ann Deagon, James Applewhite and other poets who had published books, won prizes, made a name. And Archie. The rest of us stayed in a one-room barracks bisected by a long curtain for gender segregation. Mosquitoes, noise, involuntary proximity – when the sponsoring foundation decided to pull together an anthology of participant work, they called it The Gritloaf Anthology. Archie stayed in a cottage with his family, and twice a day we sat in a circle and talked of poetry. It was the closest to a workshop I’d ever be in, but when most of the participants have creative writing degrees and are poetry teachers, the ante goes up, the games and dynamics become byzantine. Nuance and innuendo occupy every pause in the talk. I was way out of my depth.

Two moments from one particular afternoon provide me with the benchmarks of what I would come to know of Archie in our correspondence and few encounters over the next thirty years. First: on my way out to meet the other the merry campers for volleyball, I walked by Archie, who was sitting at the piano staring at his hands. When he asked me where I was going, I responded, “Out to create a sequel to Sphere.” (One of Archie’s award-winning and very demanding books was Sphere: The Form of a Motion). He scowled and said, “Not in this life.” He was in a raspy mood, and I felt, well, scolded but not quite scalded.

Later that afternoon we were sitting alone discussing one of my poems. I was discussing; he was listening. When I realized I was wasting a great opportunity and shut up, he began to anatomize in detail the opening stanzas, in which the narrator sitting on a diving board high above a lake at night marvels at the stars, both above and reflected in the water. I had written something like, “I can watch constellations twice, once in natural sky, once caught false,” and Archie raised his eyebrows and said, “What if you said ‘truly caught false’? How would does that mesh with the overall project of this poem?” The proverbial light bulb came on, and after a couple of other comments he winked and said the rest was up to me.

A dozen years later he was (unknown to me) judging an annual contest for the best poetry collection by a North Carolina writer. When I learned he had chosen my From the High Dive for the prize, I wrote him expressing my gratitude but also said that I thought that an eligible book by another of the Critz Gritloafers was probably better. He responded that he’d made mistakes in his life, but that prize wasn’t one of them. I could imagine his grin and his gentle Eastern N.C. voice, as well as a twist of ironic mirth.

More importantly, though, I remember his poems, which were often daring and introspective but also alert to the nuances and wonders of the natural world. Here’s a keeper with a tasty pun in the title and a periodic sentence even John Lyly would envy:

The City Limits

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breath of such calmly turns to praise.

[from Briefings: Norton, 1971]

Try that slight-of-hand anaphora, diagram that sentence, say that paragraph with quiet precision and feeling, feel “the dark work of the deepest cells,” see how much light will accept you and “consider that radiance.” Reading him will reward a wide audience, for despite Yeats’ claim that things fall apart, Ammons as Puck, Caliban and Prospero could make poems that hold in any wind.

Farewell, Our Lovely

R.T. Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

COME ON IN MY KITCHEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shall We Gather at the River?: The Chatter around Charles Wright and His New Laurels

R.T. Smith

Part the First:
My wife has been keeping me up to speed on the Farcebook chatter concerning the appointment of Charles Wright to become our new poet laureate starting in the September now rushing our way on heat waves, and I notice that many commentators and wags — mostly poets, werepoets, poetasters, ranters, humblebraggers and poetry lickers — are both taking the announcement quite personally and responding quite cagily. As a longtime reader of Wright’s elegant wrestlings with ultimate questions and immediate circumstances, his pilgrimages in words and his evasions, confessions, explorations and cautious approaches to ecstasy, I take it all personal, too. If there’s any one poet who can address the ineffable in lively concrete terms and tease a response out of it in ways I yearn for but can never manage myself, it’s Charles Wright.

I take for my title a phrase from the cover of one of James Wright’s books, but the New Wright (like “The New Poem”) seems as much consumed by the problems of “we” and “gather” and “river” as vexed questions as the late James Wright was. Charles said many years ago of the “new poem” that it will not be able to save us, but he can’t get shed of the question “what will?” and the hope that there’s an answer and, like the hymn the title also refers to, involves matters of the spirit.

In the first part of this improvisation, I want to say something on the record about Charles Wright’s history. In the second, more focused post I want to try to find words for what has transfixed me about his themes, methods and hypnotic, you-can’t-not-listen voice for over three decades. I hope you won’t hold it against me that, even thirty years ago, I was late to the dance of Wright’s music. I’m still reeling and jigging, trying to catch up.

This is Charles before I encountered his work. I’m guessing it’s a photo from his Irvine days or before but not an official U. S. Army photograph from his Italian period. It might be the image of the character behind The Grave of the Right Hand, but by the time he’d written “Dog Creek Mainline” and then Black Zodiac this stance has faded, only to be revived as self mockery. I think.

This photo is the update I enjoy looking at as I consider the paperwork on why Charles Wright is a natural choice, the natural choice, to stand for us poetry addicts in such a fraught, conflicted and tangled (emotionally, spiritually, aesthetically) era as we have conjured in our desperation to do and think and feel something of consequence (without missing a single tweet, text, post, tag, like, rant, reality series scuffle, foodie swoon or sniffle.)

It would be foolish to make book on who the next poet laureate will be or the one after that because the mist-covered (“shrouded” wouldn’t be right) committee who make the selection seems, even as new invisible voices replace old ones, to favor two or three sets of criteria. Think of Dove, Hass, Trethewey — all at the time of their election young, energetic, newly arrived at the center of the poetic conversation, recently tapped for a major prize. Then think of Levine, Merwin, Wright — veterans of many decades, oft-laureled, widely anthologized poets whose published books fill whole shelves. A third category might be popularity — Billy Collins, who is, like the others above, an original, which I hope is an important consideration. He is also widely read and imitated. I have no suspicion that the laureate search anyone’s idea of a process for declaring someone “the best American poet this morning.” And this scheme I posit makes good sense to me, though one can never be certain that the younger laureate will bring more energy to the vaguely-described “job” or that the older campaigner will bring more dignity to it. Some of the honorees over the years have written poems that now live deep in my heart’s core, and others have not, but if this distribution according to weathering and career stage is in operation, I trust it in the long run, which is not to say I wouldn’t volunteer right now to be on next year’s version of the committee. And I’m pleased that (as best I can recollect) none of the poets who aim their poems at people with no interest in deep study of the art of poetry have been appointed to the post.

What criteria dictate that this poet should be tapped and knighted or crowned or burdened with this responsibility, which is “high profile” only in the poetry world (which can occasionally resemble Wayne’s World), but small potatoes to the NASCAR crowd, J Lo’s fans, Honey Boo Boo’s followers, the Freemason Brotherhood or the Episcopal Church? We civilians will never know, but we can say some things about the poet’s work and impact.

So suppose Charles Wright is a selection from the senior crowd (my generation) who somehow escaped election back when he was the Next New Thing. The critical community reaches consensus on almost no one, but evidence and testimony accumulate, and Wright has written about a score of poetry collections and enough public-fare journals and articles (counting interviews) to fill two U. of Michigan Press books in the Poets on Poetry series. He’s received the Pulitzer (and been “bridesmaid” multiple times — 4?), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Griffin International Prize, a couple of Library of Virginia annual prizes and their Lifetime Achievement Award. Chancellor of this, archon of that. He’s been written about by enthusiastic admirers like Helen Vendler, Peter Stitt, James Longenbach, Henry Hart, J. D. McClatchy, Mark Jarman, Willard Spiegelman and Lee Upton. Joe Moffett has written a book for the University of South Carolina’s Understanding Contemporary American Literature series called, pro forma, Understanding Charles Wright (though that’s a boast few would make, or want to, as “grappling with” is more to the point). Robert Denham has published a two-volume companion to Wright which explores the poems one-by-one up to 2007; it’s a project seemingly dedicated to the idea of drawing the reader closer to the poems with background information, but again, “understanding” would seem simplistic and somehow misplaced. Perhaps the best companion to Wright’s work is High Lonesome: On the Poetry of Charles Wright, edited by Adam Gianelli, dedicated to his “undisputed importance” and filled with reprints and news essays and reviews. There are others, plenty of exhibits in the evidence locker, and they’re worth perusing.

This is a quick sketch of the public record for those who have posted their disapproval or a cunning “interesting” or “well, well” upon the announcement of Wright’s appointment and who would want to know why it’s only natural to consider him, has been for years.

In my next post, I’ll make a more personal statement about why I’d be willing to buy a bumper sticker that reads “Honk if Charles Wright’s Poetry Rocks You.” I promise not to say he always writes the best poem ever or that I never turn away from a Wright poem wondering what has just happened or not happened on the page. I’ll try to articulate what he’s serving that I have an abiding appetite for, though I cannot rustle such dishes up myself.

2014 Library of Virginia Literary Finalists

R.T. Smith

*
Nonfiction:
Barbara Perry, Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch
Elizabeth Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia, 1772-1832

*
Fiction:
Lee Smith, Guests on Earth
Virginia Pye, River of Dust
Carrie Brown, The Last First Day
(Honorable Mention: Kathryn Estes, Seeing Red)

*
Poetry:
Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed
Margaret Mackinnon, The Invented Child
R. T. Smith, The Red Wolf: A Dream of Flannery O’Connor

Winners will be announced October 18.

Maxine Kumin, Poet

R.T. Smith

. . . the poet wrote:
life will do anything
for a living.
– “Discrete Activities” from And Short the Season

When I read back in the winter that Maxine Kumin had died, time-sensitive tasks diverted me. There was snow to shovel, wood to tote, as well as submissions to read, students to tutor, a new issue of Shenandoah to proof, but I knew I wanted to find a day to read, reflect on and celebrate her work, which I have followed enthusiastically since I discovered “Woodchucks” in graduate school and began trying to write for myself poems of consequence that questioned my actions as much as others’.

This week, with finals marked and recorded and the new issue of Shenandoah up for the web world to explore or ignore, I saw my window of opportunity and Xed a day on the calendar. Looking over my shelves, however, I was disappointed to see that my various winnowings of books for shelf space had left me fewer of Maxine’s books than I’d expected. I still have Up Country and Nurture, two selecteds, Connecting the Dots and To Make a Prairie, a collection of essays, reviews and interviews, but that’s hardly ample evidence of her industry excellence. Then a new collection, And Short the Season, arrived from Norton with jacket copy that spoke of her in the present tense, as if still among us, which I believe is essentially true.

My intention here is not to praise this new work (which will likely be done by someone else in a forthcoming review on this site) so much as to say what kind of poet she was and to mourn her loss, as well as the loss of her brand of liberal activism among her colleagues and within myself, for Kumin had as many opinions as most poets, but more what I’d call “beliefs,” though not always orthodox or predictable. Maybe she took selfies and wrote blogs on recipes, but I’m skeptical. It has been easy for poets in this age of the academic sub-guild of MFA faculties to let matters of conscience go lax, if not lapse. After all, we work for institutions, entities which tend to have, eventually, as their prime directive their own survival, which confers a streak of conservatism perhaps counter to the exploratory enterprises of education and art. We get caught up in status and materialism – whether they be manifested in new accommodations and cutting edge technology, good scotches and fancy restaurants at conferences, man caves or glamorous travel. Nothing really new there, but the dual obsessions of self-promotion and reporting all manner of effluvia on social media further complicate matters. They are distractions, and they come at a cost.

It’s tempting to just start in here and praise Kumin for right reason and right attention. She was a meticulous gardener, mushroom hunter, equestrian, friend of the winged and the four-legged. After all, she was sometimes saddled with terms like “Roberta Frost” and dismissed or diminished because her querencia was rural, fecund, elemental, and not (in the popular mind) so nuanced nor cerebral as the domestic and social lives of academics and literary gadabouts. But when Kumin turned her attention to the fundamental human drama, even as manifested in the news headlines – war, famine, gender politics – she retained her curatorial instincts for precision, order and freshness of phrase. She honored her “calling, [which] needs constancy,/ the deep woods drumming of the grouse ….”

I think back to some of the poems we always need but which our current world would be without if we hadn’t had Kumin to say, “Now look here”:
her moose poems, her bear poems (Cherish/ your wilderness”), her hermit poems and Henry Manley poems, “How It Goes On” (O lambs! The whole wolf-world sits down to eat/ And cleans its muzzle after.), the swimming poems, the many horse poems, the political poems (whether about Bosnia, capital punishment, torture, fracking or driving birds to extinction), her elegies for her friend Anne Sexton (especially “How It Is,” with its final transformation: “leaning my ribs against this durable cloth/to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death”), and of course “Woodchucks” with its weighing of various “humane” actions, its self-indictment and respect for adversaries, guilt and confession amid the recognition of necessities and its moment of lovely elegy and regret – “He died down in the everbearing roses.” She knew that love and death are the two great subjects, but also that they subsume all.

But I do Kumin a disservice to imply for a moment that the subjects and attitudes of the poems are the marks of her “gift” (too light a term, but “genius” is worn out; maybe I should just say “of her light”). She was a formidable wit and a poet of form who understood that, as Sexton once said, “Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.” A necessary trick. And her absolutely focused threshold of attention and verbal resource (or call it “damn good sense and the knowledge to keep working the tune”) kept her interesting and surprising. She knew, with Milton, that “purity comes through trial, and trial is by what is contrary.”

When Kumin read the poems of others (say Frost’s “Provide, Provide”) she brought both ingenuity and conscience to the task, continuing to pursue her responsibilities as witness, and some of her essays about her art, especially the “Three Lectures on Poetry” in To Make a Prairie, are rife with ore. I’m really happy to have whole books on topics like tone by the erudite Ellen Bryant Voigt, but I wish there were corresponding books by Kumin to set beside them on the shelf. She had, however, other promises to keep and wrote fiction and children’s books instead of abundant essays.

I did meet her once and spent a couple of evenings in her company, along with my wife and others. It was less than a decade back, and she was still suffering from neck injuries incurred in a buggy accident. She was not performing the glib celebrity reel many writers cultivate but seemed a genuinely serious person who believed in her calling and took others seriously, but she was also a good yarner and a wit who didn’t pause for applause. I thought she was tough and generous and saw that the poems I knew as written by her were her as fully as any poet I’ve met. Right up with Heaney, Warren, Merwin, Wilbur. Grit and patience were stitched into her nature. She seemed, as Henry James recommended, “one upon whom nothing is lost.”

I find myself wishing I were more like her in determination and steady practice, not so prone to inertia and frequently profitless reflection, but I want to think Kumin would have approved of my delays in writing this, try to imagine her saying, “Chores are not diversions. First clear a path, split the kindling, feed the creatures and read the student papers. Do it all with sensitive enthusiasm and a skeptic’s squint, the keen attention that amounts to prayer. Then find the words you need and put them to work.” As she showed us again and again, poems get made that way, and meaningful life.

[Anyone looking for a quick and spirited summary of Kumin’s career should consider reading her essay “Metamorphosis: From Light Verse to the Poetry of Witness” in the Winter 2012 (Vol. LXVI, No. 4) in The Georgia Review. It’s more personal/thematic than aesthetic, but it’s a marvel of candor and a valuable counterweight to the histories of poets who remained in university settings and whose work evolved as a result of critical fashion and the demands of tenure and vitaphilia.]

Holy Ghost Horrors

R.T. Smith

Through the brief interval between grading papers and judging a contest with 1000 entries, I find myself flinchy and belligerent, unable to relax, despite the mild weather, DVDs of the first season of “Maverick” and just a taste of excellent scotch every time midnight rolls around. My newest irritation involves a movie that should never have been made because it renews old prejudices, distorts an already beleaguered and willfully misunderstood group of marginalized people and substitutes cheap B-movie conventions for much more intricate and interesting actual information. It also hijacks the title of an underappreciated documentary from half a century ago. Given all this fidgetation and flusterment, what could I do but share?

In the five-dollar bin of my local Wal-Mart, heaped up with all the Wayne westerns and Sandler travesties, the zombies and X-Men and adorable lost pet odysseys, I saw a startling DVD entitled “Holy Ghost People,” its cover displaying a raised hand gripping a rifle, the crucifix-tattooed forearm wrapped by what might be a rattlesnake. Pit-viper head and hooked fangs protruded from the reptile’s open jaw, however unrealistic, testifying to the creature’s lethal nature without arousing any real alarm.

I had to do a double-take because I’ve long been familiar with Peter Adair’s documentary “The Holy Ghost People,” shot in Scrabble Creek, WV and released almost fifty years ago. That film, now in the public domain, is a valuable resource in the on-going efforts to understand the Signs Following believers who speak in tongues, drink toxic liquids, heal by the laying on of hands, cast out demons and handle serpents. These feats the members of small congregations concentrated in the southern Appalachians believe they can achieve when the spirit is on them, which is a matter of faith, though there is no scriptural guarantee they will heal anyone instantly or that the deadly snakes, usually native pit vipers, won’t bite them. The worshipers take their lead from a passage in The Gospel of Mark and have long been reviled, persecuted and even celebrated as fascinatingly mad.

Weston La Barre explored the history and psychology of these believers in his They Shall Take Up Serpents, which treats them as a crisis cult like the Plains Indians’ ghost dance. The handlers have been studied and analyzed sympathetically by Dennis Covington in Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Tom Burton’s Serpent-Handling Believers, by Robert Schenkkan in a stage play. Photographed by Shelby Lee Adams, they’ve been brought to fiction by many, including Lee Smith in Saving Grace. You can even find them in a tent with Pastor Billy in the first season of “Justified” and in many dozens of poems by witnesses (like Charles Wright) and fantasists alike. Some of the churches have recently constructed websites to combat misinformation, and the National Geographic Channel in 2013 followed the lives of Pastors Coots and Hamblin in their reality series “Snake Salvation,” declaring a break when Jamie Coots died from a rattlesnake bite.

In our current century the practice, still illegal or marginal anywhere but eastern Kentucky, continues but is not on the rise. Tired of being maligned, the Signs Following people have come out of the shadows to offer interviews in order to help us understand their fervor and strange courage, and although I find their services and favored Biblical texts unsettlingly selective, I still find it impossible to dismiss Christians whose sincerity is not superficial and who are not seduced by flashy media presentations, mega-churches and cutesy piety. I know they’re tired of being ridiculed as idiots and hicks, and I sympathize, which does not mean I’d like to join or even visit any of the churches again, but they are not jokes or idiots and follow a long tributary of unorthodoxy that often replenishes the mainstream of American religion.

This new movie, which claims to be “partly inspired by” the Adair documentary, looks to me like an attempt to take some steps backwards, to accent the spectacle and novelty while returning the dirty glamour to the stereotyped “hillbillies” as they torture themselves and one another on behalf of purity and the old ways (the practice is, in fact, just over a century old). Or maybe it’s just an attempt to make a quick profit from passing counterfeit bills.

The company which made this 2013 film, which has little of the documentary about it, is Macabre, and one promo blurb, quoted from a Heather Wixson of Dread Central (no subscription suggested), touted “A mesmerizing, intoxicating southern gothic thriller” in letters as red as the title and the caption along the bottom edge, appropriated from the beloved hymn: “There is power in the blood.”

This film is, however, a cold-blooded production, placing the snake-handling cult in a compound akin to Waco where thirsty seekers are dominated by a vicious Brother Billy who abuses and intimidates his captive audience with rhetoric and volume, as well as firearms and a whip. It’s directed by Michael Altieri and aims to be a hostage thriller, a torture horror tale and a serious lost girl quest tale in which a self-destructive vet morphs to an action hero. What it omits is any semblance of theology, though a Bible is used as both prop and weapon. The most interesting aspects of this production (which features decent music, some respectable acting and plenty of gore, including snakebite, for all comers) are the parasitic adoption of a title nearly identical to the documentary (which it excerpts from to add a few moments of credibility) and the deletion of a crucial scene, which can be viewed on the DVD Extras.

In the deleted scene, we watch one of blessed Billy’s henchmen/apostles at the Church of One Accord read the passage from Mark that enumerates the five signs such Holiness believers follow. This is real information and crucial to any view of the movie in which interest in the real sub-culture even competes with the shock and aw-shucks awe. It’s the most revealing and provocative moment the camera caught, as the lake baptisms, marriage, prayers and other services are thin and unconvincing. But they left it on the cutting room floor, serpentine, I suppose.

The script was written by Altieri and a committee, and the whole carnival is rated R for language and some drug use, but the flagellation, gunfights, titillation and smirking evidently weren’t of much interest to the rating board. Likely they just saw all that as mainstream, or necessary for a film whose DVD case text begins with “BURIED DEEP IN THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS, mysterious preacher man . . . snake-handling misfits. . . Billy’s dangerous game . . . face her own dark past. . . .”

OK, I’ve made my point, and then some, whether it amounts to righteous indignation or just secular irritation. The result is kitsch worse than any proposed Beverly Hillbillies (or “Hollywood Hillbillies”) reality show. And I’m not so naïve as to believe that a fictional story must be true or that “entertainment” is required to be authentic. But here was a director/writer/entrepreneur whose knowledge of the original film could have inspired him to explore and reveal something important about passion and action, belief and bedevilment. Too bad either the artistic staff or the financial backers weren’t going for that.

Now on to the contest, where I expect to find more gravity, levity and maturity at every turn.

The Bevel Summers Contest

R.T. Smith

Thank you for your overwhelming response. The Bevel Summers Contest is now closed.

Meriwether Redux

R.T. Smith

“I fear O! I fear the waight of his mind has come over him, what will be the Consequence?”
– William Clark

Although I’ve never seen any persuasive evidence of it, I keep hearing rumors that Meriwether Lewis attended school at Liberty Hall, the forerunner of Washington and Lee University. I’d like to know the facts of the matter, but I’m more intrigued by the controversy surrounding the unfortunate explorer’s death than his education, which was probably at the hands of a couple of Virginians who were tutors, independent contractors and not employed by institutions.

As we know from the Journals of Lewis, Clark, Ordway and their traveling companions (and more recently, from Ken Burns’ documentary “Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery”), Lewis was a brave and resourceful man, a master of logistics who could also shoot, draw, heal (after his mother, an herbalist), negotiate and take risks. And he was a serious depressive whose post-safari life was neither prosperous nor fulfilling. But he could write up a storm – narrative, description, speculation. No wonder Jefferson hired Lewis on as his private secretary; no wonder the President selected his protégé to travel to territories as uncharted and mysterious back then as the moon. The story of the search for a water route to the Pacific is one of our most astonishing, almost the American Arabian Nights, but when the rivers were mapped, the treaties established, the grizzlies and candlefish and mosquitoes discovered, described, catalogued and shipped home, Lewis had to move among and discourse with the earthmen again, and he was not cut out for that.

He was especially not possessed of the right temperament to be the Governor of Louisiana, and though he’d been a wonder of frugality and accountability on the great expedition, finances or at least financial records down on the bayou went awry. Amok, really. Reimbursements and receipts, bids and balances, debts and conflicts of interest – he was out of his element and attracted rivals and enemies like honey draws ants. He took strong measures of brandy and laudanum. He began to speak to phantoms and mists. In the autumn of 1809 he headed east to try to explain himself to his mentor and benefactor, the Wizard of Monticello.

A companion named Neely, some servants and hard roads. Rain and more rain. Early in the journey he tried to take his own life. Maybe twice. Then on the evening of October 10, traveling the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, he arrived at a dogtrot tavern called Grinder’s Stand, offering bed (or pallet) and meager fare for beleaguered wanderers amid the border ruffians and hard weathers of the frontier. The owners were Robert Grinder (away on business) and his wife Priscilla (present, and later, suspected, though not officially accused). There were other guests; reports on their number vary. He had a purse that disappeared. He was almost incoherent (as Mrs. Grinder later said, like a man recently returned from the moon). Anyway, nocturnal events transpired. In the morning, Captain Lewis was dead, certainly shot, maybe cut, perhaps in his room or just outside, maybe on the bank of the nearby creek. Though shots had been heard in the night, horsemen passing (not uncommon), no one had mounted a rescue attempt or even a curious inquiry. Assassination? Quarrel, followed by murder? Suicide? Stephen Ambrose and a whole cadre of historians have passed the verdict of self-murder. It’s the story taught in the schools, and if the election were held today, I’d vote with that party, as did William Clark and Jefferson (who would later write that Lewis suffered from “hypochondriacal affection”) when the grim news reached them. The more recent Vardis Fisher murder-most-foul contingent has never convinced me.

Still, the common thread amid the conflicting reports is that he was shot at least twice, once in the chest, once in the head. He may also have been slashed with a razor.

The core of the controversy is a set of documents, which I’ve seen only excerpts from and which relate the multiple and contradictory testimonies of Mrs. Grinder, who could not seem to settle on the number of bullet wounds or the location of the body and who had no persuasive explanation for not investigating the shots in the night. She was either rattled by the investigation or keeping secrets; we’ll never know. Why her husband, miles distant on that peculiar night, was actually charged is a matter for forensic historians to dance around for years. Frontier record keeping has never been an art. I do not believe for a moment accepted that the premise that the husband came home to catch Priscilla and Meriwether in flagrante. That was not the Governor’s inclination nor the likely outcome of a frightened and frightening night, which early evening guests described as akin to a mad scene in a play. Lewis was haunted; he was looking back, and something was gaining on him. His history of misery is impressive. His circumstances at the time made him right for despair, and he was like an evangelist spreading the gospel of panic.

Campaigns for exhumation in the name of justice or truth have never been successful, and now it’s a little late for the most astute cold case coroner. So here’s my spin, which ignores much of Ambrose’s narrative of the end, as he seems to be extrapolating, right down to inventing dialogue). Convinced that assassins dispatched by an enemy in Louisiana were hovering and that his mission was doomed, deep into self-medication with incompatible substances, fatigued and ashamed, he lay sleepless and fretful on his bison pelt pallet and aimed his pistols at his own head and heart, a strategy reasonable for a man whose earlier attempts had failed, a man who felt his soul was broken and who did not intend to fail again.

He was thirty-five.

Did Lewis attend the precursor of Washington and Lee before its financial boost from the former and the charismatic leadership of the latter? If so, he left no mark, no signature. But the dregs of his dust have long blended with earth beneath a monument in what is now called Lewis County, Tennessee. An inscription on the south face of the stone records “his melancholy death,” but the indelible and inspiring story we still tell revives that part of his life spent suffering the deprivations of the wilderness, smoking in the lodges of Mandans and Shoshones, mapping and naming botanical specimens, hunting game and stars for celestial calculations, and enduring all manner of ailments, eating countless dogs and roots and boiled jerkins, and through it all anxious and haunted by his own unshakable inner shadow, nonetheless forever amazed.