Poetry in the Wake of Tragedy -Sam O’Dell

Yesterday marked the twelfth anniversary of 9/11, a day when most Americans take at least a few moments out of their hectic lives to reflect on the horrific events of that day. More than anything, I think 9/11 reminds people that you cannot predict what will happen tomorrow. Cherishing every moment we have with the people who are important in our lives and seizing every opportunity we are presented with is one of the best ways to live a fulfilling and meaningful life. I believe that another component of a meaningful life is the literature we read. This literature has a way of making us feel so deeply about things we might not have experienced directly. It can also help those who directly experienced such events come to terms with what they have lived through. Finding literature that speaks directly to such a situation can be incredibly tricky, however.

One of my favorite authors, John Green, posted a poem by Czeslaw Milosz to his Tumblr blog yesterday.  Although the poem, “Were I Not Frail and Half Broken Inside,” was written before 9/11, it does an excellent job of conveying the randomness of death on such a large scale and the sometimes overwhelming despair that comes with the knowledge that we are all “frail and half broken,” all one swift blow away from death. Not all poems about tragedies are as elegantly done, whether written for a specific event or not. It makes me wonder what makes a poem about such a difficult subject good.

It helps, I think, to start with a poet that is already a good writer. I think many people are often inspired to write in the wake of such tragedies because they are trying to come to terms with what has happened. Writing poetry definitely forces you to work through your emotions about whatever you’re writing about. However, amateur poets with little or no prior work often end up producing poetry that is, at its best, badly written, and that at its worst, exacerbates the negative feelings surrounding the situation. Philip Metres wrote an article for the Huffington Post about exactly this situation in the wake of 9/11. He also wrote about the popularity of another poem that was written prior to 9/11 and passed around on and after that date: W. H. Auden’s “September 1st, 1939.”

It is interesting to think that the best works to consider in response to a particular tragedy may in fact have been written years before. Which poems written today will be shared in the wake of some future disaster? What is it about responding directly to such polarizing events that can make even the best poets stumble? These questions are not the kind with easy answers, of course.

Metres goes on to challenge the negative assumption that the contemporary poetic response to 9/11 was lackluster. To demonstrate his point, he shares several moving 9/11 pieces, my favorite of which was Wisława Szymborska’s “Photograph from September 11.” I love the repetition and the poet’s choice to leave her work unfinished, allowing the victims to have the last word in some small way.

Although it can be difficult to find works that meaningfully address such tragedies, many poets have succeeded in doing so. Whether or not you find yourself drawn to works specifically about 9/11, or to works that were written for another occasion entirely, there are several poems that are well worth pondering on a day like yesterday. I hope you will spend some time with the poems mentioned above and walk away better for it. Do you have any poems that come to mind in response to 9/11? Feel free to link to them in the comments section below.

– Sam O’Dell

_911_in memoriam

 


Annie Persons is currently the managing editor for Shenandoah. She is a junior English major and Creative Writing minor at Washington and Lee University. Her favorite pastimes are reading and writing, and she hopes to continue engaging with literature for the rest of her life.

Shenandoah Volume 62 Number 1, Fall 2012

As of this past Tuesday the third, entirely online and open issue of Shenandoah is out on the virtual stands. This issue features a host of impressive poetry, fiction, flash fiction, nonfiction, reviews, and recommended reading. What’s more, this issue features an brand new audio category that highlights works across all genres that have the authors reading their work aloud.

While I’d like to try and take credit for how the site looks, that is all Billy Renkl. Renkl’s work adorns this issue and his aesthetic is absolutely compelling. I really love his work. In fact, Rod Smith and I liked it so much that we re-themed Shenandoah’s homepage to remain consistent with this issue’s visual theme, we just changed up the colors a bit.

I have some more work to do on a few features for Shenandoah: namely making Poem of the Week postings more streamlined, including select blog posts on the homepage elegantly, and optimizing the site across all mobile devices. Being part of brining Shenandoah online over the past two years has been one of the more rewarding experiences of my professional life, and I look forward to making the platform much better over the coming years.


Working at Shenandoah

For my last blog I thought I’d talk a little about some of the things we interns have been working on for the past twelve weeks – mainly reading manuscripts sent in for the magazine. Each one of us has had our own roles to play, but everyone has spent at least some time reading over some hopeful stories. At first it was very hard to be critical (with of course some exceptions), for how could I criticize another person’s work when I myself have never been published? Professor Smith helped us out with that brain buster by asking us two simple questions. First: Are you ever critical of professional sports teams? And then, after everyone nodded their heads: Have you ever played on a professional sports team? Finally it became apparent to us that what we really needed was to take ourselves out of the game (hah). We could not just say we didn’t like the piece and then offer no explanation. We had to justify both our likes and dislikes. To make it easier to vocalize these justifications we came up with a list of criteria that each piece accepted into Shenandoah should contain. The list included things such as inventive style, unique (but familiar) characters, wit, ingenuity, character development and many others. This type of list was extremely useful when trying to pin down the thing that made the story feel just slightly off to you or, better yet, made it unbelievably successful.

The more manuscripts we’ve read the easier it has gotten to categorize them, but it is interesting to see how the interns disagree from time to time. When we comment on manuscripts we leave a few detailed lines on a sticky note for Professor Smith to look over. Most of the time those post-its read pretty much the same, but there have been several occasions when that was not the case. I suppose that’s to be expected though because tastes in writing do differ and we are bound to disagree every once in a while. I am just glad that ultimately, here at Shenandoah, we are not a democracy or else we’d be here all summer long.


Putting Recreational Reading to “The Flannery O’Connor Test”

Flannery O’Connor once said that she stops reading a book the moment that she “would not feel a sense of loss if she were to quit reading.” Professor Smith has mentioned that he regularly reads a twenty to thirty page story and thinks something to the effect of, “This story really begins on page eight.” For the past four years, the English majors have been living in a bubble in the sense that we do not get to decide whether we want to continue reading the work or not—if a teacher assigns a work, we’re obligated to finish it.

But what happens when you enter the realm of recreational reading? If the book isn’t interesting, should we stop reading and turn on Mad Men, or should we work our way through it, and earn our way to the meat of the novel, as if we’re eating lobster? In my personal experience, I feel that way about William Faulkner’s work. I really like the idea of William Faulkner, and I have a great interest in many of the themes, motifs, and sense of nostalgia that animates his texts. But with the exceptions of the short story A Rose for Emily and The Sound and the Fury, I haven’t particularly enjoyed the experience of reading a William Faulkner work—getting through Flags in the Dust felt more like a chore to me than an exhilarating reading experience. Yet, once I was done with the work, I was glad that I read it.

I was willing to slog through Flags in the Dust because I was aware of Faulkner’s reputation and I had a good idea of the subject matter at hand before I even read it. But what happens when we’re dealing with no-named authors writing on topics we’re not familiar with? At that point, it’s like picking a piece in the box of chocolates, but some of the options…aren’t chocolate.

If you’re fifty pages into a novel that’s yet to impress you, what do you do? Do you work your way through it, hoping to find the nugget that makes the experience worthwhile, or do you adopt the “life’s too short mentality” and simply give up on it? My attitude on the matter is this: if the author has a well-earned reputation for quality, I’m going to be charitable and give the book a couple chances to capture my interest. But if I’m doing the equivalent of perusing a book on the rack at a bookstore by some Johnny Come Lately, then I’m much more inclined to move on to the next option, as if I’m cable surfing on the television.


Movies and Literature

We have recently been talking quite a bit about Young Adult Fiction, both in our blogs and in class. In her earlier blog “When Young Adult is too Adult” Lauren Starnes questioned whether the Hunger Games was an appropriate book for the age group which it targets. I have both read the Hunger Games and seen the movie. The movie appears to be geared towards a similar age group, with a rating of PG13 and yet all ages have been clamoring to see it. It was interesting to see how the film makers managed to make the movie both appropriate for the younger ages and appealing to the older ones. The violence was definitely more subdued on screen than it was on the page. Peeta’s leg that has to be amputated in the book is miraculously healed. The muscular Katniss does not look at all to be on the brink of starvation when Peeta throws her the burned bread. We do not hear the agonized screams of Cato as he is being savagely ripped apart for a seemingly never ending amount of time. The children watching the movie are somewhat protected from all of the unpleasantness that the Games suggest.

Usually, these omissions would make an older audience shy away. They want the gritty stuff. But in this case it doesn’t. Critics adore the movie; people are raving about it. One of the main things the movie had made is to make the characters more mature. Katniss Everdeen is no longer the young stripling she is in the book. In the movie she is played by Jennifer Lawrence, whose 22 years makes her much more of an adult that 16 year old Katniss. All of the actors are older than their counterparts in the novels. This makes their emotions and their actions suddenly more believable (especially Katniss’s). In trying to make the movie more attractive to all ages, the film company has actually done the books a favor. They have brought the series and entirely different audience who will now want to read the rest of the series, for with an established cast of mature characters in mind, adults will not think of it as reading a children’s book- the Hunger Games becomes more appropriate for their age group as well.

What other movies have you seen that you thought made the book better?


The Best of the Best…or Not?

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking with the Maori poet and scholar, Alice Te Punga Somerville. Alice was born and raised in Aotearoa, New Zealand and she is currently a visiting Professor of Aboriginal Studies at the University of Toronto. I have been studying poetry from the Pacific in my Twenty-First Century Poetry class with Professor and Poet, Lesley Wheeler, so it was exciting to meet a real poet from this portion of the globe.

In her lecture, Alice Te Punga Somerville mainly talked about the current condition of New Zealand poetry. Over the past decade, Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins have compiled annual online collections of the Best New Zealand Poetry. Recently, they published The Best of the Best New Zealand Poetry, which contains what these individuals considered to be the absolute best from the past years online collections. Somerville pointed out that in both of these anthologies there was a disturbingly small number of Maori and Pasifika poets included. Although Manhire claims that this was because there are not very many Maori and Pasifika poets; this does not make sense because there are almost 80 such poets featured in Mauri Ola, which is an anthology of contemporary Polynesian poems published in 2010. The lack of Maori and Pasifika poets included in these collections results in a sort of chain reaction. Manhire, who is the first poet laureate of New Zealand, and Wilkins both exert a lot of influence on who gains admittance to MFA programs and who ultimately gets published.

This information made me wonder what minorities are not being represented in American poetry anthologies, or Canadian or even Spanish anthologies? This question relates to several issues that we have previously discussed on the Snopes blog. For instance, the Tucson book ban and The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, are both connected to this question.

What are your thoughts? Do you believe that it is the editor’s duty to feature minorities in a national collection? Why or why not?

Check out the R.T. Smith’s past posts “Buried Antipathies: The Dove Anthology, Second Wind” and “Top Ten Reasons for Banning Books by Ethnic Minorities” for more information.

 


Senior at Washington and Lee University. Originally from Chattanooga, TN. Majoring in English.

“My Only Swerving”

As I recently reread William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through The Dark”, I made the connection between one line and a song title by an electronic group I really like called El Ten Eleven. The title of perhaps the group’s most famous song is a nod to the main guitarist’s favorite poet, William Stafford. Below is the poem and you can hear the song here: 01 My Only Swerving.

Traveling Through The Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason–
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all–my only swerving–,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

“Traveling through the Dark” was originally published in 1967 by Weatherlight Press as the title poem in the collection of that same name.  Copyright belongs to Stafford’s son, the poet Kim Stafford, a fine writer worth looking up.


Illustration and literature: Can they mix?

We are studying the genre of memoir in my four-person capstone class currently. The course began with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home—the title ironically encapsulates the story of a dysfunctional family and its funeral home business. The graphic novel is something I have had very little exposure to before reading Fun Home. Perhaps it is due to my constant inclination toward words, but I found myself skimming and sometimes wholly ignoring the illustrations that ran through and around the text.  The multidimensional technique behind Fun Home as well as Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby is no doubt laudably crafted and intriguing. The illustrations, however, distract me. They too often make it so that the words are not presented on the page in a discernable order. Dialogue jumps around ambiguously, and there are sometimes a dozen frames of pictures to comprehend. How close of attention should the reader pay to studying the succession of illustrations? What is a good ratio of time spent on the words versus the visual?

As is true of every term as an upper-level English major, my classes have intersected in their content and conversation. In one of our Shenandoah intern meetings we discussed the Virginia Quarterly Review and some of its peculiar facets. What struck me was its incorporation of lots of color, more modern and “hip” typography, pictures, and even comics. A few of my peers voiced opposition to the comics, saying things like they cheapened the review and made it less serious or less academic. I tend to agree with this view. When I read a novel or a literary review, I primarily want words. Occasional photographs and art are wonderful, and can even help transition, set the tone, or change the pace. But I have found I do not mesh well with comics or graphic novels. Maybe a reader like my brother and his Calvin-and-Hobbes-filled childhood would have a different opinion. Or maybe I need more practice and exposure.


What Editors Want. . . ?

 What Editors Want: A Week of Fresh Catch Wishes (as opposed to the old reliable, workshop-safe, combed-and-scrubbed, A+-in-deportment, even par  poems & stories)

Day 1
Funk, something hybrid and loamy, misbehaving
like a snake that’s twined a wild vine
scabbed bark and lush blossoms
flagrant, ghastly
rumpled surface, tightly wrought structure and texture
crow-cawking, naughty (but dodging the obscene)
or something wholly serendipity and green

Day 2
A fairy tale subverted, myth twisted, old saw with new teeth
Grimm written as history
“Boldness has genius.” – Goethe
creepy-compelling (maybe ogres, but no vampires, werethings or zombies of fashion)
in hock to Angela Carter
madness with method to it

Day 3
urgent as a mystery, piquant, desperate even
channeling some kind of Anthony Burgess’s Little Alex-like primal embellishment
Catullus, undated again
what Sicorax said to the storm
a form deformed – sestina scrambled or writ as prose or camouflaged
OK – what The New Yorker seems to think is de rigueur, sine qua non
– but just this one day

Day 4
comic, but not mild or confectionary

Day 5
what the redwing blackbirds would say, could they be resurrected
feral, not floral nor feeble
angry, cranky
a fool’s errand successfully achieved

Day 6
a non-literary genre (menu, invitation, Christmas letter . . . ) yoked to literary ends

Day 7
work authentically, persuasively set in times with no (or few) cars, phones,
quickburgers, Brazilian waxes
or in places not predictable (Guatemala?  the Caucasus? a barber shop in Saigon?)
       but rendered untouristy
or, finally, work about characters whose occupations (luthier, Rotor-Rooter woman,
      jockey, surgeon) or preoccupations (luna moths, the Spanish-American War,
      hopscotch, scotch, hail, tetherball, mantel clocks, tomatoes, doubloons,
      funerary customs) provide them with a perspective and jargon that makes them
      refuse stereotype)

 Now that would be a week of discovery and re-configuring glee.

[lagniappe] quirk, swoon, horror, dazzling pizzicato

scarred bark and astonishing blossoms of the crape myrtle
pipsissewa suddenly arising under the river birch
and yes, there is the obligatory carpentry, but it’s not scrabble or
Betty Crockery


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

To Record or Not to Record: A Question

In the past, one of the only ways you could only hear the words spilling out of your favorite author’s mouth was if you braved the masses and attended a reading. And even though you got to see said author in person, you only got the story once. No repeats. Now, because of the ever-growing world of the online literary journal, you can listen to a new or well-known author time and again, with the added bonus of being in your own home. Sure there are some earlier examples of author’s recordings such as ones of Yeats and those collected by Caedman, but none of these are so easily accessed as those on the internet.  Shenandoah is featuring a couple of them in their newest edition. Both “Love, Creusa” by Amina Gautier and “Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail” by Kelly Luce have audio versions of the stories.

Audio recordings and readings affect me in different ways. The author can either completely ruin the story for me or make it entirely better. Either way, it always changes the way that I will read the story in the future. Sometimes, if the author has a bad reading voice, hearing one of your favorite stories being read aloud is like seeing your favorite book being made into a movie: shocking and somewhat disappointing, nothing as you had imagined it.

I usually find I am more receptive to an author’s own telling when it is one I have never read before. That way I have had no time to imagine the voices of the characters in my own particular way. I can more easily see them as the author sees them.

Typically, once I can get past the initial shock of another person’s voice grabbing hold of what I have come to think of as my characters, I can see the benefits.  For example it is an extremely useful tool if you wish to have a greater understanding of the work as a whole. Good recordings allow you to get more of a glimpse into the author’s intentions. Hearing the story aloud, with the author’s own particular inflections and breath, adds an entirely new level of depth.

So what do you think of audio recordings of stories? Good or bad?