As I filed through papers twice, sometimes thrice, weekly, I noticed that the number of fiction submissions, for the most part, dwarfed the poetry submissions. Not having any standard of comparison, I figured this was pretty much normal and, for the first few weeks, went about my paper clipping, labeling, and enveloping duties without much regard for the inconsistency. It was not until a few weeks in, however, that Professor Smith corroborated what I had not long since pushed in the back of my mind, that volume of fiction submissions, more than ever before, is beginning to surpass that of poetry. As a part of a generation that, I perceive, is not especially fond of poetry unless it is set to music, this is not an especial shock to me, but I must note, however, that such a shift does have greater implications for the character of a generation, particularly with respect to the literature it might be expected to churn out. While the literary complexion of our generation of authors is yet undiscovered, I think, with the aforementioned fiction-poetry discrepancy in mind, that we will see a few things. That fiction greatly outnumbers poetry is, I think, an effect of the proverbial helicopter parent. We have all grown up believing that we have a story to tell, and while that is not necessarily untrue, we’ve grown up believing that it is the only story worth being told. So, by my estimations, not only will fiction continue to outpace poetry, but fiction will continue to take a nonfiction bent, with the lead character based almost exclusively on the author’s image of him- or herself, or the image of the person whom the author would like to be or to avoid becoming. Research for stories will take the form, more and more, of simple introspection. This, to me, is the great irony of literature born of the Information Age.
The Dark Sublime
I recently wrote a term paper on the poetic and philosophic conception of the sublime. It was an examination of Wordsworth’s poetry in light of Edmund Burke’s treatise on the subject. Burke believed that the sublime, far from being an experience purely of pleasure and enlightenment, was essentially an incarnation of terror in the face of the incomprehensible. In order for an observation to trigger the sublime, the vision at hand had to be, beyond any other characteristic, obscure. When faced with the obscure, the imagination is given free range to grow beyond the realms of the senses and rationality, and conceive of something otherwise bound by physical reality as infinite.
Some have termed this as the ‘oceanic sense’, so I find it only natural to use the ocean as an example. Objects of great proportions have always been a source of the sublime for poets. What makes the ocean such an excellent source of the sublime is that we can perceive no limitations to its scope. Facing out over the water, once can almost feel the curvature of the earth, and since the opposite shore is beyond our ability to see, our imagination fills the blank space with endless blue. This solved for me a riddle I had encountered in Wordsworth: his preferential fascination with what he could not see over what he could. Wordsworth idolized the imagination, and coupled with Burke’s philosophy it is apparent that the obscure, the dark, and the abyss provide the imagination with its most powerful ability. Seeking to grasp the infinite, it was such obscure images as chasms in a sea of mist, or mountains larger than any mind can logically cogitate, that brought Wordsworth closest to extrasensory experience.
Poetry has always been preoccupied with the sublime, and it seems to me, preoccupied also with those forms and presences that our senses fail to reveal. The Romantics wanted to believe the boundlessness their imaginations conjured from the obscure and the vast was reality—that they were imagining something that is there. But extending this principle to its extreme indicates a dangerous leaning towards solipsism. I now see this struggle in every fragment of great literature I come across: a conflict between the collective, rational reality and the individual, imaginative surreality.
Then again, it’s an acute possibility that I am simply imagining this conflict into the obscurity of artistic language.
An Update On Contests
Today (December 9th), we mailed notices of selection to the finalists of the 2011 Graybeal-Gowen Prize! We’ll be posting more specifics on the finalists later; while the USPS delivers whether snow or rain or gloom of night, they are not so speedy as the internet, and it’s only fair the finalists be the first to know. Hopefully, the postman is quick and we can make a more detailed announcement very soon.
For those that don’t know, the Graybeal-Gowen Prize is an annual contest hosted by Shenandoah through the generous gift of Mr. James Graybeal W&L ’49 and his wife Mrs. Priscilla Gowen Graybeal. The contest focuses upon Virginian poets and poetry- entrants must either have been born in Virginia or have established Virginia residency. In 2011, Shenandoah was very pleased to have received approximately 300 submissions. While submissions for the 2011 prize have closed, there’s always 2012! If you’re a Virginia poet, think of it as ten months to prepare a great poem for us to consider! For full details on the Graybeal-Gowen Prize, please visit the prize’s page here.
The contests don’t stop with the Graybeal-Gowen, either. Shenandoah is also preparing to announce the 2011 winners of our annual prizes in Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry. We have just a little more to do, and hope to have the announcement available soon. These awards are selected from work published in Shenandoah in the last year. More information on these awards can be found on our prizes page.
For any reviewers out there, Shenandoah will be inaugurating an annual prize for reviews in 2012. The prize will operate in the same fashion as the previously mentioned ones for Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry, i.e., selected from material published in Shenandoah. The current issue of Shenandoah contains five reviews; to see the sort of piece we’re looking to publish (and therefore considering for the prize), please visit the current issue.
Happy Holidays!
The Unsaid
Recently I have been scrolling through the “Words of Wisdom” at the bottom of the Shenandoah website (an activity I recommend with enthusiasm), and I came across a couple ideas that sparked my interest. The first is a quote from Logan Pearsall Smith: “What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.” The other excerpt, which I find to be more profound, comes from Louise Gluck’s essay on poetry entitled “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence.” Gluck writes “The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: I often wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary.”
Both these writers assert that perhaps a hidden theme or a vague notion can be the most unsettling part of the written word. This theory immediatly draws my memory to Percy Shelley’s poem, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” which starts out, “The awful shadow of some unseen Power/Floats though unseen amongst us.” This unidentifiable power, Shelley insists, is, “Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.” In this first stanza, Shelley demonstrates that poetry about a vague subject can still evoke vast concepts (and chills) in the reader.
Does a poets lack of exactititude add to a poems effect? Is there not something to be said of beautifully descriptive poetry? I will save you the lengthy essay that could ensue and instead leave you with the unsaid.
Dedications
Not odes, not apostrophe, not epigraphs, not allusion, not acknowledgments pages, but those little italic tags under some poems’ titles: how do dedications rewire the writer/reader circuit? (I’m putting aside book dedications for the moment; they’re worth discussing but inflect reading much less directly, I think.) In performance the author might gloss that “for M.” or whatever it is, or even point out a smiling friend in the audience. When you’re sitting around perusing print, though, you might have one of the following responses:
- Electric recognition: I know who that is! Maybe it’s the name of a musician whose work interests you, maybe you have some personal information on the poet’s family, but in any case, you now have an angle on the poem before you even start reading it. This is ekphrastic, this is a love poem, this one’s about that stupid politician. The upside AND the downside of this knowledge is a sense of command. Advance intelligence means you’re less able to surrender to surprise.
- Guilty half-recognition: That’s the name of a famous philosopher, I think, or was it a historian? Now you have homework to do and just have to decide if you care enough. You read the poem daring it to be worthy.
- Cluelessness. That single “M.” is only intelligible to the initiated and no one inducted you. Or perhaps the dedication gives a full name, date, place of birth, but it’s the poet’s niece or some other obscure figure. Does this make you irritable? Or do you feel cozy, invited to listen to a lullaby over the baby monitor?
Before Google, cluelessness seemed like the natural state of things, although it was problematic for a teacher-scholar. When I read “Howl” for fun at fifteen, I could care less who Carl Solomon was. In college, what wasn’t in the footnotes seemed like it wasn’t important anyway. When I was a graduate student trying to write a chapter on Gwendolyn Brooks, though, “to Marc Crawford, from whom the commission” posed a research problem—I was going to have to sift through a lot of prose before learning who Crawford might be. And in my first years as a teacher I was in a perpetual state of fear and trauma: someone would ask, and I wouldn’t know the answer, and I would therefore be exposed as an ignorant imposter. I’ve relaxed since, having learned that everyone is an imposter. I can always answer a student’s question like a psychotherapist: “How does it make you feel not to know?”
That sounds smirky but I actually want to know: how does the apparatus of a poem affect a reader’s response? There’s never a universal answer; we read for different reasons and approach our reading with different temperaments. I may feel attracted to poems by their ambiguity or difficulty, but if I can see there’s a key it drives me crazy not to possess it (Bluebeard and I would have had serious marital conflicts).
A colleague says the clubbiness of dedications puts him off. I can imagine their attractions, though—dedications reminds you that poems are instruments of communication, that language is motivated, however obscurely, by human relationships. I can’t find any literary theorist or critic who has opined about them (I was hoping for an illuminating essay or chapter somewhere, along the lines of Jonathan Culler or Barbara Johnson writing about apostrophe). So, dear reader, I pose this question—how do dedications change poems?—
TO YOU
Lesley Wheeler
Lesley Wheeler is the author of Heterotopia, Heathen and Voicing American Poetry. She is the Henry S. Fox, Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University and a recent Fulbright winner..Poetry, Pedagogy, and Ectoplasm
I was just outed as a ghost-whisperer in Amy Balfour’s article about campus spirits. Balfour recounts several spooky stories about the building I teach in, Payne Hall, on the south end of Washington and Lee University’s historic colonnade, in a Civil-War-haunted town where garage doors are left open for spectral horses. My involvement in the local supernatural scene is entirely the fault of a certain formalist poet, friend of former Shenandoah editor James Boatwright.
I’ve never managed to shoehorn James Merrill’s whole Ouija-inspired opus, The Changing Light at Sandover, into a syllabus, but I have taught its first, best section several times. Once I assigned “The Book of Ephraim” in a first-year composition course during Hell Week. I do not recommend this. In upper-level courses, though, it works brilliantly. There’s a lot to talk about: wizardly formalism, genre slippage, occult collaboration, and all the fascinating ways U.S. history intersects with the book’s central romance, Merrill’s partnership in love and séances with David Jackson. One spring term, I threw the sequence into an island-of-misfit-toys seminar, something devised to fill a gap in our English offerings. I brought in a Parker Brothers Ouija board to illustrate the work’s structure. Pleas ensued: “Professor Wheeler! Can we have a séance?”
Dizzied by visions of parents protesting my satanic lesson plans, I agreed to a strictly voluntary spiritualist date with several students. We met after a lecture one May evening in what was then Payne 21, the spacious second-floor classroom where Robert E. Lee was inaugurated president of the college. I thought my skepticism would dampen the party but Aisha promised results. Andrea assumed the role of note-taker; she’d promised her mother never to touch a Ouija board. Eric, on the verge of academic suspension, seemed subdued. Allison, Briana, and I were giddy. As we sat on the floor in the dark, breathing loudly, our fingers touching on the planchette, I thought, This is really inappropriate.
Then the pointer started lurching around. I was surprised by everything it “said” and wondered if someone were consciously pushing it or if our involuntary movements and secret wishes might be driving the game. I never figured it out, but either we became more proficient or the spirits became surer, faster. As I told Balfour, we “talked” to a soldier who admired Stonewall Jackson’s daughter, then to Jackson himself, who grumbled about teaching cadets but who had cheered up significantly in the afterlife. I didn’t reveal that Merrill showed up and Allison asked him to be reincarnated as her firstborn (he seemed agreeable).
I also withheld information about the final voice. Someone asked if there were any unhappy spirits around and the skittering pointer landed on YES. The interrogators circled in on his identity through a series of questions: was he a student? Had he taken a class with Wheeler? Suddenly I was thinking of a young man I taught in Payne Hall years before these ghost hunters enrolled. When I learned of this student’s death, my own son had just been born. I never wrote the bereaved parents about what a bright, funny, promising kid their son was. Was the board reminding me of how guilty I felt? Maybe Eric’s struggles had jogged the memory loose?
NO, this visitor didn’t like any of the readings I’d assigned; this amused my current students, but I was indignant. I couldn’t remember what I’d been teaching that term. When someone asked the topic, the planchette zoomed around so fast I couldn’t follow it. The group broke into laughter; I looked into each of their shadowy faces, waiting for someone to tell me what he’d said. Finally, Andrea sheepishly read from her notes. “He said, ‘FAG ENGLISH.’”
You can see why I never pulled off a decent poem about this incident. That’s a lousy punchline for an iambic pentameter Merrill imitation by a straight woman. I checked afterwards and the course was a single-author seminar on Emily Dickinson. “Fag English” could refer to Dickinson’s sexuality, or Merrill’s, or it could mock our own alienated nerdiness—we were, after all, spending our evening trying to talk to a dead poet—but in any case, that’s an obnoxious answer. You can’t just leave it there. And Aisha channeling Jackson talking about Obama in the heart of the Confederacy—there’s clearly a racial current in this anecdote. I can’t write a good poem about it, though, if I can’t imagine that current’s outlet, its destination.
My spiritualists are out there delivering on all their nerdy potential, though. Eric worked hard during his suspension, graduated on time, and is in law school; Briana will soon have an M.D. if she doesn’t already; I’m pretty sure Allison has not yet procreated. Meanwhile, I disposed of the silent record albums long stored in a Payne Hall closet and we all cleared out for the building’s renovation. The building is light and peaceful now, and I’m teaching Rafael Campo in the séance room. My connection to this batch of students is a little staticky and I’m plagued by echoes of the ones who have moved on. Still, even though I’ve just been called back from sabbatical paradise, I’m happier than the ghost of Stonewall. We’re at that point past midterms when the best conversations happen—looser, but better-informed and smarter than in the early weeks. The planchette just flies around, as if I’m not in charge at all.
Lesley Wheeler
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.