Karen Weyant

Review by Karen Weyant Maknig Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets

MAKING POEMS: FORTY POEMS WITH COMMENTARY BY THE POETS
by Eds. Todd Davis and Erin Murphy

State University of New York Press
22 Corporate Woods Boulevard, 3rd Floor
Albany, NY 12211-2504
ISBN 978-1-4384-3176-5
2010, 218 pp., $23.95
www.sunypress.edu

As a writer, I know that inspiration for a poem often doesn’t come like a bright “ta da!” moment. There’s no glowing lightbulb that appears over a writer’s head. Instead, writing is often tedious, sometimes more of a chore than an interesting activity. The muse is elusive and sometimes even a bit of a tease. As someone who teaches creative writing, this concept is a hard idea to sell to my students, whose own work often eludes them because they believe “I wasn’t inspired.” This is where Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary edited by Todd Davis and Erin Murphy comes in as a handy tool for the creative writing classroom. Making Poems offers a selection of poems by contemporary poets who write brief essays explaining how their works came into being. As one can imagine, some poets are frank and honest, detailing their revision strategies while discussing real life roots of poems. Other poets, however, drift into more scholarly writing, explaining the influence of literary theories and histories. Whatever the birth of each poem, this anthology offers ideas for why the world of contemporary poetry is as varied as each published collection.

Some scholars believe that American poetry is often rooted in place, and thus, it should come as no surprise that many poets discuss sense of place in their individual works. Jim Daniels, for example, discusses his poem, “Factory Jungle” in the context of a job he once held at Ford Sterling Axle Plant. According to Daniels, “In a strange way, the whole landscape resembled the thick underbrush of a jungle.” This landscape is what represents the root of inspiration for his poem, and Daniels goes on to discuss his individual revision process, focusing on his exploration of the jungle as poetic metaphor. Another poet, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, uses place as a source of loss and displacement in her poem, “Leaving.” This work, says Wesley, was “like many other poems I have written, was inspired by the feeling of displacement, dislocation, and the search for home after the loss of one’s original homeland.” She then explains:

It is a poem taken out of real life, inspired, of course, by my son,
Gee, who was not excited about moving away to a new town
just after he settled in the small town of Indiana, Pennsylvania.
He was beginning to connect, but the immigrants that we are,
we were still seeking a place where we would settle down as a family
having moved around for many years during the Liberian civil war
and after we arrived here in the United States.

It is apparent that Wesley does not find sense of place as a comfort in the turmoil of her life. The end of “Leaving” concludes “Someone once asked me why people like us/move around so much; why can’t be balance our feet between// the hills and the sloping crevasses of this new life, between/these old cliffs and valleys, and I say, ‘I don’t know.’”

Besides the exploration of place in poetry, memory and the idea of memory is another popular point of inspiration in much of today’s poetry. Julia Spicher Kasdorf wrestles with the tricky relationship between what an individual remembers and the written word. Her poem, “Double the Digits,” takes the reader to rural Pennsylvania, where the persona tells the story of a group of girls exploring both the open road and life. Her poem, Kasdorf explains, was based on real life antics of the past, of risks she and some friends took while driving the back roads. Yet, Kasdorf is not ready to say that the poem is 100 percent true; instead, explaining with original drafts, “I didn’t want to analyze or think too hard about if beforehand.” In her essay, “Memory and the Problem of What Really Happened” Kasdorf explains the following:

If you think about it, real life is not all that interesting,
filled as it is with tedious and pointless parts of routine;
even the details that may personally satisfying often carry
little meaning for anyone else. Most real life consists of
one dull thing or small thing after another, no narrative rise
and fall, no symbolic resonance or unity of effect. Life is not
literature.

Such words must especially hit home for those of us facing classes of teenagers who believe that they don’t have lives that are interesting enough for possible subject matter for their poetry.

Other poets take their cues from traumatic events that have happened in the world around us. For instance, Ann Hostetler explains that “Sonnets for the Amish Girls of Nickel Mines” comes from the Amish shooting tragedy on October 2, 2006. “My husband and I both have deep Amish roots,” explains Hostetler, “His family lives in Lancaster County and his parents helped found the Mennonite Church in Bart, Pennsylvania, which they still attend.” Hostetler goes on to explain that her sonnets were based mostly on the information she obtained from mass media, an ironic fact considering that Amish traditionally shun the public eye. Still, this poet knows this world and was able to write based on her knowledge of the intimate world of the shooting victims and their families.

Finally, some poets cite the importance of research in their work. In Greg Rappleye’s poem “Orpheus, Gathering the Trees” the poet explains that the genesis of his poem began with the general knowledge that most people know the story of Orpheus and his attempt to bring Eurydice back from the underworld. However, little has been said about what Orpheus’s life was like after this failed attempt. Rappleye searched scholarly literature, as well as field guides for his poem, in order to help search for the emotions of Orpheus. In many ways, the genesis for this poem is found in both research and Rappleye’s own observations of both life and nature. He explains that as he researched, he made lists of elements from the natural world: “As I winnowed my list, stopping now and again to leave my desk to look into the undergrowth, I saw that there were dead and empty places among the trees.” This observation is found in Rappleye’s poem which ends like this:

From the air he called the sparrows
and the varieties of wrens.
Then he sang for a bit of pestilence –
for the green caterpillars,
for the leaf worms and bark bettles.
Food to suit the flickers and the crows.
So that in the woodlot
there would always be empty places.
So he would still know loss.

What is most impressive about this anthology is the wide range of poetic works, both in theme and form. Furthermore, the writing process is varied–in their essays, some poets share drafts, some don’t. Some poets show the messiness of writing; others explain that sometimes inspiration does come in a quick, short burst, with little or no revision for a poem. All in all, this anthology is more about the process than the product, more about the messiness of writing than the clean hard copies we all read in print.

____________

Karen J. Weyant’s chapbook Stealing Dust was published in 2009 by Finishing Line Press. Her most recent work can be seen in 5 AM, The Barn Owl Review, Copper Nickel, Harpur Palate, and Lake Effect. She lives in western Pennsylvania but teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. She blogs at www.thescrapperpoet.wordpress.com

Review by Karen Weyant Unthinkable by Irene McKinney

UNTHINKABLE: SELECTED POEMS 1976 – 2004
by Irene McKinney

Red Hen Press
PO Box 3537
Granada Hills, CA 91394
ISBN 978-1-59709-069-8
2009, 192 pp., $21.95
www.redhen.org

What does one want when reading a collected works by a poet? The obvious answer would be that a reader would expect to see a sampling from all previously published collections, and Irene McKinney’s Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976 – 2004 fills that expectation. Unthinkable is divided into four sections, each one devoted to poems from her four previous collections: The Girl With the Stone in Her Lap, Quick Fire and Slow Fire, Six O’Clock Mine Report, and Vivid Companion. For those who are not familiar with McKinney’s works, Unthinkable allows them to explore her poetry from the beginning—from the coal mines of West Virginia to the Oneida community in New York. For those readers who already know McKinney’s poetry, this book is like visiting an old friend.

I personally fell in love with McKinney’s work a few years ago when I was researching contemporary poetry and coal mining. On the recommendation of another poet, I found and read Six O’Clock Mine Report (well, more like devoured the book—this particular collection of McKinney’s remains one of my favorite poetry books today). Unthinkable reprints almost all of the poems from this book, including the stunning opening work, “Twilight in West Virginia: Six O’Clock Mine Report.” This poem acts as sort of an invocation for this section while depicting a lone miner: “From his sleeves of coal, fingers/from the black half-moons: he leans/into the tipple, over the coke oven/staining the air red..” McKinney ends this poem with a shot of the physical landscape:

The roads get lost in the clotted hills,
in the Blue Spruce maze, the red cough,
the Allegheny marl, the sulphur ooze.

The hill cuts drain; the roads get lost
and drop at the edge of the strip job.
The fires in the mines do not stop burning.

From this poem on, we are able to see the world of the Appalachians, with the backdrop of mining towns and nature juxtaposed with the lives of the people who dwell here. For instance, in “Potts Farm, Summer 1955″ we see “The starched doiles sag/on the arms of the horsehair sofa./Aunt Floss is baking bread and laughing/clacking her false teeth.” And in another poem, “The Ruined House of the Photographer” the past comes alive in old pictures:

And shuffling on the hearth, in broken drawers,
in sooty cabinets, are grainy photographs
of the eccentric dead. A seven-year-old girl,
her blonde hair princked in a mishaped halo
is painted like a fever, high spots

of power pink on her smooth cheeks,
lips touched outside their outline,
the staring drills of impossible blue eyes.

Many of McKinney’s poems record the worlds of others—but there are several that provide moments of self reflection, rooted in the natural environment. For instance, in “Before Spring” the poet observes a bumblebee that arrives before spring and who has fallen in “through the open door with a nimbus of cool air.” The poet notes how she is like this lost insect, “inexact, out of place, inappropriate again/in my bad timing and repeated, cyclic lack/of synchronization.” In another poem, the poet likens a personal relationship to the earth below: “Listen: there is a vein that runs/through the earth from top to bottom//and both of us are in it./One of us is always burning.”

As mentioned in my introduction, Unthinkable contains poems from all of McKinney’s collections. I was not familiar with McKinney’s work that was published before Six O’Clock Mine Report, so reading much of this collection was like reading a whole new work from a favorite writer. Still, I was not surprised to see McKinney capture rural landscapes in The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap (originally published in 1976). In many ways, poems in this section act as a prologue for the work that has yet to come, capturing the rural life of the Appalachians. Most of the poems revolve around the themes and ideas found in “The Durrett Farm, West Virginia: A Map.” This prose poem catalogs the poet’s observations of place and memory, explaining, “The farm is 150 acres of some tillable land, stands of timber, hay meadow, cow pasture, rocky hillsides of blackberry briar and sumac.” This poem also establishes a foundation for many of the other works found in this section including the eerie and beautiful “Summer Storm in The Animal Graveyard” a work that depicts a place where wind “stands up and walks” and a storm “breaks out, galloping” but also offers a litany of buried animals including cows “who died in labor” and a horse “who died at the plow.” In the short poem, “Potatoes,” an unknown figure moves through the ground and chronicles a brief history: “The potato field at night/has a memory of trees./The crickets mention something/and forget, a rustling in sleep/between crisp sheets.” In spite of the forlorn, often lonely images, “Open Road” suggests that the narrator, in her travels, may not find anything else:

Eighteen groundhogs from here
to New York, a screech of cats
a pulpy lump of dogs, red griefs
of the earth, newly broken open.
Whatever I went for, I don’t want.<

In Quick Fire and Slow Fire (originally published in 1988) the rural landscape is still present, especially in such poems as “For Women Who Have Been Patient All Their Lives” which opens with “There is anger in the stiff bedsprings/and under the house in the black powdered dirt/ground into the blunt cracked hands of my father.” Other works deviate slightly from McKinney’s Appalachian landscape with poems that share more private moments and self reflections, often with thoughts regarding the passing of time. For example, in “Self Portrait at 19″ the poet describes a young girl (presumably herself) sitting on a front porch with a “notebook in her lap” because “she’s writing a villanelle, the third she’s tried this week.” Later, the poet notes “She will fill this notebook, and the next/in that deep-dyed purple ink, trying/to learn to type and know rejection.”

Unthinkable ends with selected poems from Vivid Companion (originally published in 2004). Parts of Vivid Companion do echo self reflections found in past works; however, many of the poems found in Vivid Companion are devoted to the retelling of the history of the Oneida Community, a religious community founded in upstate New York in 1848. Those in the Oneida community practiced Complex Marriage (which generally means that every person is married to every other person) and many of McKinney’s poems look at this world through the eyes of those in this religious sect. For example, in the voice of Catherine Baker, one of the first to arrive to the Oneida Community, she claims, “All that winter we worked in the cabin, three families/The men came in from the snow, and the air swirled/in our skirts. Beans, then. Strong coffee.” Hardships may have abounded in this rural community, but according to Catherine, “It was hard but I was in a warm place./The warmest I have known.” In another poem, “The Testimony of Harriet Worden, 1850″ the narrator describes her first sexual experience with a man, who promises “that the deepest motion/need not hurt, and he would stay with me until/my pleasure came around.” McKinney’s poems about the Oneida Community may seem to be a sudden departure from her work that is rooted in the Appalachian Mountains, but a closer look reveals that there are similar themes: the struggle to survive against outdoor elements and to provide self examination of personal lives and pasts.

For those of you who have followed McKinney’s work since its beginnings, you won’t find anything new in this collection. After all, the book is subtitled Selected Poems 1976 – 2004, not new and selected poems. However, I hope that perhaps some readers will be a bit like me—familiar enough with McKinney to read favorite poems again and again, while discovering the new works we may not yet know.

____________

Karen J. Weyant’s chapbook Stealing Dust was published last year by Finishing Line Press. Her most recent work can be seen in 5 AM, The Barn Owl Review, Copper Nickel and Lake Effect. She lives, teaches and writes in Western New York.

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

January 10, 2011

February 15, 2010