Wellsprings and Eloquence

Been reading an interesting piece in the new NER about the King James Bible (no, not him) and its influence on Western literature. It makes me feel a bit guilty it's taken me so long to get to this essay as I've had the issue for over a month now, but I suppose it's symptomatic of how I read journals. I almost immediately read all of the poems (in this case, familiar names abound). Then, I put the journal on my nightstand and each night I'll give the stories a try, usually only finishing if I'm compelled to (in this issue, more often than not). And then, the thing will generally malinger on the nightstand until it's moved to my "find a good reader to give this to" box. But in this case, fortunately for me, the issue hung around and I finally stumbled across Robert Alter's essay "American Literary Style and the Presence of the King James Bible."

This is an issue I've thought about a lot, one of the reasons I feel I frequently align myself with Southern writers even though I was born and raised in Ithaca, New York. I have even called myself a Southern writer--I mean, my parents hailed from North Carolina and Oklahoma (close!), I've lived in North Carolina and Virginia for 7 years now, my drawl grows deeper every month I spend in Appalachia, and I have an unrepentent beard. I remember a quote by Flannery O'Connor in which she states that the cadence of Southern literature is the cadence of the King James Bible, but couldn't find it today when I went a -googling. The closest I saw was an interview with Barry Hannah that expressed a lot of how I feel about my own writing. He's responding to a question about whether or not his religious upbringing affected his writing style:

"The preachers did not, but the Bible itself has. I just, the rhythms of the Old and New Testament, the King James version, are just as solidly set in a person of my era who went to church as a moral foundation. I make sentences, I'm sure, from Biblical rhythms."

Growing up as the son of two ministers, attending 2 seperate church services every Sunday, liturgy was a constant in my youth. Even if I wanted to (which I don't), I don't believe I could extricate my relationship to language from the Christian mythology in which this relationship was borne. The formative texts of my childhood are the all biblical, though healthily interspersed with my parents favorite writers (on my dad's side: Faulkner, Walker Percy, Carl Sandburg; on my mom's: Marge Piercy and Annie Dillard). I'm often thankful for the presence of these texts as I feel as though they add an (unintentional, though welcome) weight to the language and syntax of my poetry that would otherwise be absent. As Alter notes, while discussing the speeches of Abraham Lincoln:

"The grand concluding movement of the Second Inaugural Address aims to engage the audience in a vision of justice and healing and peace after four years of devastating warfare, and the vehicle that makes this possible is the language of the Bible. At a cultural moment when the biblical text, verse and chapter, was a constant presence in American life, the idioms and diction and syntax incised in collective memory through the King James translation became a wellspring of eloquence."

All this makes me wonder, both as a writer and a teacher of high school students, whether our youth have access to the same wellsprings. Or rather, what evidence of eloquence can they find in 140 characters. It's true, there's much less memorization in classrooms today, much less exposure to classic texts, and much more cogent statements have already been made about the age of instant media and it's affect on education; but all of this only to say: I'm extremely thankful for the rhythms of the King James Bible, which will be celebrating it's 400th anniversary next year. If you told 13-year-old me that 24-year-old me would say that, he would have kicked you in the shins and laughed in your pain-wrought doubled-over face. But today: yes, thanks, KJB, keep up the good work.


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Posted a new poem on Ink Node. This one comes from the fall 2009 issue of Tar River Poetry and is a sonnet in the "Aerials" sequence of my manuscript. All of these poems are sonnets in the loosest sense of the word (i.e. 14 lines, a volta after the 8th, and slant rhymes all over the place). There are more of these forthcoming in Greensboro Review and Crab Orchard Review.


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Killer first line of the moment:

"At 3 PM she feeds the penguins"

from Molly Peacock's "A Kind of Parlance"
(Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems, W.W. Norton, 2002)


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Finally, after months of below-average Sunday night television, The Pacific has rescued HBO. And with Treme on the way (from the creators of The Wire), things are only going to get better...


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Jon Stewart is amazing.

Will Schutt @ linebreak

Just a quick shout-out to close friend and great poet Will Schutt. His poem "Sussing Out" is up this week at linebreak. Talk about making every piece of language do work.

All for now.

Back Like Cooked Crack (Maybe Not Quite THAT Back, but Close)

Back in the Blue Ridge after an amazing two-week spring break. Great to spend some time with old friends in North Carolina and Seattle, though, it's definitely nice to be back in my house, with my hound-dog, my mountains, my bed. We've only got 8 weeks left of school, which seems surreal, especially with a 4-day weekend for Easter and my own 4 day weekend for AWP. I imagine it will all happen pretty fast, which is sort of exciting. I'm ready for Summer, for a new place, for whatever comes next. I might talk more about my desire to leave my current gig (which includes housing, meals, and health insurance, yikes.) later, but then again, I might not. Suffice to say: it just seems like the right thing.

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After an encouraging note from long-time dream journal The Southern Review, I'm energized to send out some poems, something which I've been much more lax about doing in the recent months. Some places I really dig that I haven't sent poems to in a while: Boulevard, Hayden's Ferry Review, Massachusetts Review, Cave Wall, Pleiades, Western Humanities Review, and Cincinnati Review, just to name a few. Side-question for the blogosphere: how soon is too soon to send some poems back to Southern Review, or, any editor who offers encouragement?

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Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.”

(from the NYT)

Interesting article. Though, since I'm blogging, giving you only a brief out-of-context quotation, does that mean I'm part of the problem?


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Killer first line of the moment:

"Day wound to a heel-spur in the yellow light of winter,"

from Judy Jordan's "Prayers to My Mother"
(Carolina Ghost Woods, LSU Press, 2000)

Loving this collection, by the way.

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Roethke's Microfilm

So I'm out here in the Pacific Northwest, getting my tourist on, trying to see and do as much as I possibly can (spring break, whoooo). Up to this point, things have been sort of amazing. I got a chance to chat/booze with fellow poet-blogger-all-around-good-dude Matthew Nienow, I had 2 poems accepted to appear in 32 Poems (a journal I super-dig that you should all be reading/subscribing to), my interview with mentor and poet Kevin Boyle went live at storySouth, I've been treated to great tours by great old friends, and, lastly and not leastly, I got a chance to poke through some of Roethke's notebooks in Allen Library at the University of Washington.

It was sort of surreal to see them and surprisingly easy to do. His scribble is nearly illegible at times (read: frequently), but after about an hour I started to get the hang of it. So, for your viewing pleasure, I offer my favorite fragments of Roethke's notebooks (these dated from 1960-1962). I may go back later this week to try and see some of the correspondence (they have letters between him and Auden, Cummings, Lowell, and Stevens, among others). For the most part they're just the phrases that I could read, though there were poem fragments, quotations of other writers (a lot of Yeats, Pound, and Donne, I noticed), and drafts. I've separated bits taken from different pages with asterisks. Often, on the same pages he'll draw lines between thoughts and I've tried to recreate that here. My comments are bracketed, everything else is TR. I printed out some pages from the microfilm copies of the notebooks and I'll post some pictures of those once I get home, but for now, bits from Roethke:

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the adjective is not where I live

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Love is no consolation, but pure Right.

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When I think of him, I feel a terrible sense of competition. [the 'him' is never named]

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Poet and Saint, to thee alone are given
the two most sacred names of Earth and Heaven.

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in that black tangle where we first began
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If he isn't a shit, he's at least a wet fart.
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Who, with but two eyes,
can take all this rich glittering,
the brown shade of the creek-bed
alive with liquid at last
as the sun comes out after the flash-flood.
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The beautiful pain, all anger and destruction


[by far my favorite page]
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The ugly parents with a beautiful child.
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I have received gifts.
--From whom?
From the father in us all.
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A carpet of woodchips in the yard.

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Scoop-the-Poop Jackson, an errand boy for the Boeings

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the flame-wrapped father

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"We need eternity"-Rilke

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who can escape the spell of blood

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that form that curled and turned and rolled away
like a young puppy in its morning play

[this was circled on a page full of other crossed out lines]

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Only the soul is truly circular:

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"If the writing of poetry is harder than breaking stone in the road, as Yeats."
-Robt. Graves: a semi-friend

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Let there be this declaration of deeds

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spired a mountain-spring
wild phlox

"A male dog will never attack a female dog"
--Mrs. Kennedy


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All for now, more later, perhaps.

On Not Applying for an NEA

Been seeing lots of facebook stati and the like bemoaning the difficulty of the NEA grant application. I thought about applying, but I'm really barely qualified to send, publication-wise, and after seeing how much others are struggling with the system, I figure I'll just wait until next go round when most all these forthcoming poems will be out and usable. Anyway--good luck to those are applying: weather the storm! I want to be able to say I know an NEA grant recipient, so some of y'all better win! (Selfish motives, as always...)

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Killer first line of the moment:

"How they loved us"

from Alan Shapiro's "Last Wedding Attended By the Gods"
(Old War, Houghton Mifflin, 2008)

I'm not sure if I love this first line as much as I love this poem (which is, quite a bit). I want to re-print it in its entirety, though I'm not sure what the rules are on that. I've done it before, but always felt a bit sketchy about it. Is it okay to re-print published poems on blogs and the like? It's not against the rules or anything? Anyway--the more I read of Alan Shapiro, the more I buy in...

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There's a snapshot of a my poem drafting journal up at Di Mezzo Il Mare. Love this project, it's neat to see what people put down in long-hand, what gets crossed out. This particular poem was written while I was living in a tent this past summer in West Virginia. The poem has changed since then, and the revised version will be published soon on Di Mezzo Il Mare, which I think is neat, to have some record of the poem's evolution on the same e-zine. Anyway--send your journal snapshots, your poems, their way.


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A new-ish poem, to disappear in the not-too-distant future:

*plish*


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This video is crazy. Pharoahe Monche is crazy.