When I was in college, I did four of my five semesters toward a minor in creative writing with Michael McFee. As part of my recent renewed interest in poetry, I’ve been rereading his poetry collections, and over Christmas, I was given a copy of his recent collection of essays, entitled The Napkin Manuscripts. I read the book while on a business trip to California, and it reminded me of how dear my time studying poems in Chapel Hill was to me. It helped to kindle in me a renewed interest in writing, probably because many of the anecdotes were familiar to me already, because I felt transported back to that period of creativity. One of the essays in the book inspired me to organize what turned out to be a two-person poetry reading I previously announced. It’s a good book that came at a good time for me. The Napkin Manuscripts contains essays about being a southerner, and a southern poet, and having a sense of home; essays about belles lettres and the life poetic; essays about other poets; and the transcript of a conversation between McFee and fellow poet and friend Michael Chitwood held at a conference honoring McFee and his work. It really is a good read.

I’ve visited with McFee a few times since leaving college, once at a reading he hosted at an Asheville book store and once or twice on visits to Chapel Hill, but visits have been few and far between. So imagine my pleasure when I got the following announcement in an email today:

Michael McFee will be at Carpe Librum on Saturday, March 17 at 2:00 pm. A well known author and poet, he is a professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill and director of their Creative Writing program.

The book he will be reading from and signing is The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview. Doris Betts did the Foreword.

He has seven or eight poetry collections to his credit and I am not sure how many more books.

Don’t drink green beer, come to Carpe Librum on St. Patrick’s Day.

Provided my impending son doesn’t gum up the works by making a late appearance, I’ll be there for sure. McFee’s a great reader and a very personable guy, and it’s sure to be an engaging event.

I wrote the following notes in preparation for a group reading on a mailing list I belong to of the stories in David Foster Wallace’s collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It’s not intended to be a coherent essay or polished paper. I volunteered to introduce to the list members the second story of the book, entitled “Death is Not the End.” The story describes a scene wherein a middle-aged poet with much success behind him lounges by his pool. That’s it.

APPEARANCE VS. UTILITY
The following things struck me as interesting details that deal with appearance vs. utility:

• Unwet Speedo. The poet is next to the pool but not using it. The pool is part of a larger depiction of the leisurely life that the poet buys into but doesn’t really belong in.
• The poet’s hair products, which are in theory supposed to hide his receding hair line, actually accentuate it. Artifice poorly executed in this case overrides utility. Ars celare artem indeed.
• He’s not drinking his iced tea. Like the pool, it completes a picture (almost a post-card, in fact). (On the other hand, he does use the iced tea to wet his fingers for page-turning, which avoids a sort of icky habit, so bravo for him.)
• He’s not using the umbrella. Again, it’s part of a picture. (Note that this observation is definitely weak, as it’s clear from his tan that he may not want the shade of the umbrella.) (And yet he sweats and already has a tan, so the shade of an umbrella might be a nice way to enjoy the poolside environment without the discomfort being overly hot.)
• His fancy swimsuit doesn’t accentuate his penis, which is unflatteringly coiled back on itself. The absurdity of the poet’s wearing the Speedo (and his partaking of this lifestyle in general) is akin to the revelation in The Prince in the Pauper that the ruling pauper has had the king’s seal all along but, not knowing how properly to use it, has used it as a nutcracker. (I should admit that I only remember that detail from TPATP because I read it recently in a vastly condensed version of the book that Chick-Fil-A saw fit to give my daughter.)

ARTIFICE
More or less hand in hand with the tension between appearance and utility in the story goes the emphasis on things fashioned artificially (and where the artificialness is called out in particular, as most things in the scene are fabricated). For example:

• Award-winning poems
• The deck’s mosaic tile (later described as expensive Spanish filigree).
• The poet’s chemically treated sun-glasses (this just seems to fit to me; they’re fancier than regular sunglasses and seem to have more innovation poured into their creation).
• Simulated rubber thongs (emphasis on “simulated”)
• Frosted glass (perhaps a stretch here)
• Hair restoration products (and the restored hair one hopes they produce)
• “Installed” shrubbery. Here we also go back to appearance vs. utility. “The trees and shrubbery, installed years before, are densely interwoven and tangled and serve the same essential function as a redwood privacy fence or a wall of fine stone.” On initial readings, I took this to mean simply that the shrubbery was a privacy shrubbery. Which it is. But how many of us have redwood fences or walls of fine stone? A simple wood fence serves just fine as a privacy fence. The fine quality and artifice of these other fences set them apart. (But in whose perception? More on this in a minute.)

DICTION
Things you see a lot of in the story:

• Brand-awareness: Speedo-brand, Newsweek, Time, Hair Augmentation Systems-brand (as an aside, note the telling acronym HAS), USAir, the many and varied award and foundation names.
• Dates. The story is set on May 15, 1995 (a Monday). The poet is reading a magazine from Sept. 19, 1994 (also a Monday).  The poet will be 57 in four months, so in Sept. of 1995. Why is he reading an old magazine?
• “nearly hairless” (two times in reference to different areas of his legs)
• “simulated-rubber” and “simulated rubber” (typos or significant differences? Note also different usages of “Speedo-brand and “Speedo”)
• “still and composed” (at least twice)
• “enclosed” at least twice
• “still”, “idly”, “silent” and such words that describe in a word the entirety of the scene depicted.
• The first two-thirds of the story are one sentence. In that sentence, references to objects are not made using the possessive pronoun unless the objects are part of the poet’s body. At the end of the first sentence, there’s the very emphatic third-person possessive “reading his magazine in his chair on his deck by his pool behind his home” (that Jack built?). After this sentence, the mood of the story changes. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

ENCLOSURE
In Infinite Jest, we see the recurrent image of circles in squares. It struck me in this story that we see a kidney-shaped pool in a square or rectangular back yard. The first footnote of the story is attached to the clause in a very long sentence about the kidney-shaped pool. The note has no direct relevance to kidney-shaped pool. (It points out that this poet was the first poet to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.) Is Wallace simply adding a sort of extra punctuation here to emphasize the circle-square thing? I doubt it. But what does it mean, the placement of this note?

The privacy shrubbery elaborated on in the second part of the story (after the first sentence) keeps people out but also contains things. One can’t see in unless one is in. (On a perhaps-related side note, isn’t there a Eudora Welty story called “A Curtain of Green” or something about a death in a garden walled in by plants?)

IDLENESS
The story is about nothing if not idleness. The subject of the story is a poet with many years ahead of him (he’s only 56, after all) who has already done it all. Is there anything else for him to look forward to? Accordingly, he lives out his life in a sort of pantomimed leisure that he may not know how to appreciate (see the Speedo comments, the postcardish feeling of the scene absent any real utility of the trappings of the lifestyle). I can’t help thinking here of Wallace’s assessment of the cruise he documented in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” In fact, the postcard I keep mentioning could just about be a snapshot in a cruise brochure. Noteworthy from the last sentence of the essay: “subsequent reentry into the adult demands of landlocked real-world life wasn’t nearly as bad as a week of Absolutely Nothing had led me to fear.”

So then one fairly shallow reading of the story makes of the poet someone who has succumbed to the temptation promised by things like cruise ship ads and real estate brochures for fancy estates that you can retire to after winning all the laurels you can. Death is not the end; the end comes once you fully succumb to this ultimately despair-filled sort of life; death follows only later. Carpe diem, etc., etc.

That’s kind of a boring and pat reading, though. So let’s explore another avenue that’s not quite as tidy.

THE NARRATOR
As I began reading the story more closely, I noted that in the first 2/3 of the story, the tone is almost one of jealousy or envy. Note the brand-awareness, the emphasis on construction/purpose of fine fences (as touched on above) and the attention to the fine accoutrement of a life of leisure, the nearly-full C.V. given for the poet, the rather snide insight in footnote 2 about the poet’s failed applications for Guggenheim fellowships, the repetitive awareness of the poet’s age, the return to phrases of honor given the poet (e.g. “the poet’s poet”), and finally the direct derision of the poet for things like missing leg hair, a less-than-flattering penis arrangement, the hair thing. Then there’s the closing of the first sentence, which rings with an almost childish, pouting accounting of possessions: “his magazine in his chair on his deck by his pool behind his home.” These observations are of a sort that might be made by someone speaking of someone he either detests or is jealous of (or both).

Further, the story is very much a depiction story. It describes with some precision the physical layout of the scene, the (few) sounds. Wallace even uses the word “tableau,” which has definitions (OED) including “a picturesque or graphic description,” “used elliptically to express the sudden creation of a striking or dramatic situation, a ’scene’, which it is left to the reader to imagine” (!), and “a table, a schedule, an official list” (see the catalog of honors, the attention to dates; this is incidental, I think). It’s hard not to think of tableaux vivants (compare to death in the title), which depict some other scene (which is sort of contradicted by the final sentence and its footnote, which probably means that there’s some literary or historical reference that this tableau plays out pretty well). The point I’m finally coming around to is that the way the scene is described combined with the sort of jealous tone of the first part of the story makes it very voyeurish and pretty disturbing.

Which brings us back to enclosure. If I stretch just a little, I can imagine some jealous grad student or colleague (or anonymous would-be-poet wackjob) peeking in through the elaborate shrubbery fence. Does he want to confront the poet or hurt the poet or kill the poet, or has he already killed the poet, pausing now to view and synthesize the scene?

In the first reading I suggested, the title speaks of lingering nullity: The poet’s value ended long ago and he’s just hanging around basically being useless until he dies. Death is not the end (because succumbing to despair-inducing complacency is). In this second reading, perhaps the poet’s not such a vacuous guy after all. Why should we be tempted to assign to someone clearly in possession of a great voice the sort of emptiness depicted in the story? Perhaps the poet is simply having a morning off before going into his office to write more wonderful poems. Thus the observation that death is not the end and its attendant (de)valuation of the poet belongs to the observer and not to the broader world of facts. That is, if we adopt the first reading, we take the story as a sort of moralization. If we adopt the second (or something more like it), we read the story as one about a hideous person looking in on a valued poet and acting based on his own narrow understanding of the facts of the world. Within the context of the collection, something closer to the second reading may make more sense, and from where I’m sitting (lounging idly?), it’s more satisfying than a pat moralization by an author whom I know can do much better.

A post I wrote a week ago about modifying my approach to reading poems provoked a brief exchange with one of my friends about the importance of the music of poetry . Perry insisted that poems should be read aloud, and while I agree that poems that are really and truly intended to be read aloud should be read aloud when possible, I hold that there are many poems that seem not to care too much about how they sound, and these I don’t generally bother to read aloud. In any case, our exchange provoked in me a yearning to hear poems read aloud.

I ripped my Poetry Speaks CDs to my iPod, thinking they’d be better fare for running at the gym than Fox News and ESPN have been of late. Unfortunately, they’re too quiet to hear very well over the gym’s sounds. I suggested to Perry that it might be fun to get a few people together to read aloud poems they find especially well-suited to such a presentation (and written by others than themselves). Of course, I’m prone to stage fright and don’t typically like to put myself on display, and I don’t know that I’m an especially good reader. This state of affairs is made worse by the fact that I’m terribly self-conscious for a number of reasons about being interested in poetry and especially about being public about my interest.

Anyway, I decided to take the plunge, and I invited Perry and another friend who has previously expressed an interest in poetry to join me in reading poems aloud. So tonight, we three grown men will convene and read poetry to one another. I’ll be reading the following:

• “Strand” (by Atsuro Riley, whom I’ve covered here before)
• “Inversnaid” (by G. M. Hopkins, covered with Riley above)
• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (by T.S. Eliot)
• excerpts from “Green” (by a guy I used to know named Jim Standish)

powered by performancing firefox

I have a confession to make. Although I have a degree from a million years ago in English literature with a minor in creative writing (poetry), I have heretofore not found very much poetry I’ve enjoyed reading. Sacrilege, I know. Former would-be literati like me are supposed to wet their pants with excitement at the first hint of anything vaguely poetic, and yet I’ve long harbored this dirty little secret that I don’t really like poetry. Most of it leaves me cold. Much of it is puzzling or is simply blah: Oh, this writer saw a bird flying. I’ve subscribed to Poetry Magazine for years and have, with rare exceptions, been more interested in the prose criticism and the letters to the editor than in the poetry, which I read dutifully if not enthusiastically. Of course, there’s the rare poem that grabs me by the jowls and makes me really appreciate it, and these (along with a dire need to hang on to some tiny portion of what was a modestly illustrious period of study and creativity on my part) are what keep me slogging through dull poem after dull poem.

Just recently, I was thinking a bit about my being something of a cold fish when it comes to poetry, and it occurred to me that perhaps my expectations of the poems are too high and of myself too low. Perhaps I’m a product of the culture of passive entertainment-consumption that I’ve grown up in. TV moves and talks, letting you slump on the couch with your hand making unconscious peregrinations between your bag of chips and your mouth. It’s a lively medium. Even fiction, because it tends to move along a narrative line with pacing that draws you in, is often almost a passive medium. But poetry — often episodic, observational, compressed, snap-shotty — requires in many cases that the reader invest something more of himself, of his sense of wonder. I read recently something about the difference between reading music on the page and hearing it, and I’ve finally, after more than a decade of academic interest in poetry, realized that a similar difference may apply to poetry. If you read it passively and expect the writer to have done all the work for you, you might as well just be looking at notes on a sheet of music. But if you strive to enliven the poem with your own experience and search for what good may be encoded among the lines, the payoff is likely to be bigger, rather more like hearing a piece of music performed. I have always expected poems to dazzle me and have sniffed at those that didn’t; to get more from poetry, I need to be more engaged as a reader.

I’ve been trying lately to be a more active reader while rereading the work of an old mentor of mine whose mentoring was outstanding but whose work had rarely excited me, and I’m discovering that he’s a much better poet than I’ve given him credit for in the past, and I’m by and large enjoying the reading.

I’m aghast that it’s taken me a decade to figure this out. In part I blame an education that taught me to dissect poetry rather than to enjoy it. It’s taken some time and distance to suppress (to a large extent) the urge to instantly take a poem apart and to try to enjoy nuance and diction and devices and cleverness rather than simply to notice and document them dispassionately.

Which is not to say that I suddenly fancy myself a great lover of all passable poetry. But I’m self-consciously trying to get at the stuff a little differently now, and I’m hoping that by trying to pull more from poems rather than expecting them to push all of their payload to me complete with fireworks and confetti and a singing telegram, I’ll begin to derive more enjoyment from reading them.

powered by performancing firefox

A couple of weeks ago, I was in the driver’s seat for a Flock meetup here in Knoxville. My pal Mike has since begun organizing a Knoxville bloggers meetup to discuss blog tools more generally. Details (straight from Mike’s blog):

When: Wednesday, August 23rd 7:00pm
Where: Mike’s Place (directions when you RSVP)
What: Knoxville’s local bloggers get together to talk about tools and services that help bloggers.
Who: Anyone who has a blog, wants a blog, or wants to learn about blogs.
Why: We don’t need a why!

You can RSVP to me or go over to Mike’s site to RSVP. Mike’ll give a little presentation on some image hosting/manipulation tools, I’ll give a half-assed demonstration of some of Flock’s features, and Perry will talk a bit about video blogging tools. From there, we’ll talk amongst ourselves about the tools presented and figure out where to go from here with the meetup group.

If you’re already a blogger or are just curious about what all this blogging stuff is all about, this first meetup should provide a good introduction to some of the tools and services available to you.

I’ve been slowly reducing the size of my book collection. There’s a big used bookstore in Knoxville called McKay’s that I’ve patronized for years (along with the rest of literate Knoxville). When I first moved here and was getting into ebay, I spent some time buying up cheap batches of sci fi and mystery novels there and reselling them for a decent profit at McKay’s. Naturally, I always opted to get store credit instead of cash because you get a much higher return that way. Until this weekend, I had five sets of bookshelves in my office. For a long time, they’ve had books crammed in every spot and then stacked up sideways in front of the shelved books and in some cases stacked on the floor and in other spots of the house (there’s usually a stack of four or five books on my nightstand). Several times in the last few months, we’ve taken big boxes of books down to McKay’s to resell, just to help get rid of some of the clutter. We’re considering selling our house, and as part of an effort to do even more cleanup, I stayed up very late Sunday night cleaning up the office. In the process, I eliminated two bookshelves and produced the stack of books pictured here, some of which I’m having a really hard time getting rid of. It just bothers me to get rid of Yeats’s collected poems, for example, though I haven’t picked that book up more than five times in the last seven years. The same goes for a book of Hardy’s poems (and several novels) and the book of Restoration and Augustan poets and of that Chekhov I’ve been meaning to read for years. And then the books of Renaissance theater history and literary criticism I cling to with a special urgency even though I’ve cracked none of them since college.

But it’s time to pare down. I’m finally admitting to myself that I’m not the literary consumer that I used to be and have always wanted to be. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m keeping the books that are the most important to me (DFW, Gaddis, Pynchon are going nowhere; nor is Melville; nor are my old, old volumes of Longfellow and Jonson and Byron). But I am finally sloughing off the books that I’ve held onto for years almost out of a sense of (not necessarily premeditated) pretension or self-importance (”If I have all these books on my shelves, people will think I’m well-read and smart”). As hard as it is to get rid of some of these, it feels good to eliminate some of the clutter from my life.

A discussion mailing list I belong to has flared up this week over US politics having to do with Iraq. Liberals continue to cry out indignantly about the injustice of the war; conservatives continue to suggest that the war was justified and that liberals are appealing to emotions rather than to facts for their positions. I stay out of the discussion for the most part because I think being informed enough about the matter from unbiased sources is pretty much impossible for average Joes, so my input is only so valuable. But when somebody posted the following message, I had to respond.

There was a vote in the House on Friday. The vote was on H Res 612 “Expressing the commitment of the House of Representatives to achieving victory in Iraq.” Believe it or not, 108 Democrats voted no. Think about it, 108 Democrats are now on record as opposing victory in Iraq. There’s your “loyal” opposition…

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll648.xml

And here’s how I responded:

Try reading the resolution. The summary you provide is one of eight major points, several of which I can see people not being comfortable voting for. You can read the full text at http://thomas.loc.gov (it’s a short resolution and an easy read). [Note that I actually pasted in a URL that didn't work b/c of the way the site handles search queries; to get the actual bill, go to the url linked and do a search on "HR Res 612".] Problem clauses to my mind include at least the following:

• setting an artificial timetable for the withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq, or immediately terminating their deployment in Iraq and redeploying them elsewhere in the region, is fundamentally inconsistent with achieving victory in Iraq;
• the House of Representatives has unshakable confidence that, with the support of the American people and the Congress, United States Armed Forces, along with Iraqi and Coalition forces, shall achieve victory in Iraq

In the first case, many representatives have already expressed opinions to the contrary and so couldn’t vote yea on this resolution in good conscience. In the second, it seems clear that many representatives think we’ve botched this thing and that there’s not “unshakable” confidence that we’ll win. It’s a stupid resolution whose aim is to make those voting against it look bad by putting them in a corner so that they feel as if they have to vote for it or look like they’re not in favor of victory because that’s the controversial point everybody’ll zoom in on.

Highlighting the one point without even acknowledging that there are others that might complicate things strikes me as being pretty dishonest. I’m sure there are many conservative pundits and propagandists who’re doing just this sort of thing. Sadly, liberals do it too.

The moral, of course, is that headlines and blurbs don’t tell the whole story, and you can’t usually trust either the left-wing or the right-wing source from which you got a given controversial snippet.

I’ve just started reading Animals in Translation (by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson) for my book club. The book club purports to be a skeptic’s book club, though we hardly focus on skepticism it often seems, and in most cases, the bulk of the meeting attendees haven’t read the book. I haven’t read one of the books in probably close to two years, though I go to most of the meetings to listen to the discussion (to my credit, I typically don’t speak up, figuring I haven’t really earned the right to do so (I also happen to be painfully shy about speaking up, even among these people many of whom I’ve known for years)). So, Animals in Translation. The subtitle is “Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.” Basically, the primary author has autism and so thinks in ways that allow her to make life better for animals in slaughterhouses.

It’s a fascinating read so far (after just a little more than a chapter) in part because it provides a view of what autism is like. I’m always fascinated by things like this. When I took an abnormal psych class in college, I was very disappointed to discover that we covered indicators of conditions (”in order to be diagnosed with X, the patient must exhibit nine of the following fifteen boooorrring behaviors”) rather than what went on in the heads of the sufferers of conditions. So to read an autistic person’s accounts of how she thinks really floats my boat. The way she thinks is relevant within the scope of the book because she claims to think in much the same way that animals think, and this similarity of thought process gives her an outlook that helps her make life more comfortable for the animals she works with. For example, she can walk into a chute that directs cattle to the slaughtering floor and figure out very easily what’s making animals balk inexplicably.

She describes in the first chapter how she thinks not in words and sentences the way many of us do but in pictures. When someone talks of macroeconomics, for example, she says the picture in her head is of a macramé potholder. So she can’t talk intelligently about macroeconomics. The prospect of thinking solely in pictures is astonishing to me. I can’t imagine life without the voice in my head that represents my thoughts. Grandin suggests that images are a key part of animals’ approach to the world as well. And since she shares this with them and can often see details that might bother animals (e.g. a sudden change in the lighting of a pathway), she can suggest changes to slaughterhouses that not only make life better for the animals but that enhance production for the slaughterhouses.

Initial (skeptical) thoughts on the book are that much of what she says is very speculative. There’s a lot of “I’ll bet that X if Y” with not much in the way of evidence to back up her assertions. Of course, she’s writing something vaguely related to popular science in a narrative style, so there should be no expectation that she’d be especially rigorous with her facts. But it does stand out to me and bother me a little bit from time to time. Another example that comes to mind that seems a little weird to me is her statement that when she thought of the dot-com boom, her mental image was of rented office space and unused computers, and that when she saw this, she knew not to invest in any of those stocks. This seems too prophetic to be credible. (And the dot-coms seem to be booming, or at least ramping up for a boom, again, by the way.)

These little issues aside, the book is so far absolutely fascinating, and it’s an easy read, almost folksy at times in the ease of its narrative. This tone wouldn’t suit some books, but it seems to work for this one. Grandin has written a number of other books, some of which focus more on her autism, and given my interest in that sort of personal narrative, I imagine I’ll look into getting one or two of those if I have time after finishing this one. So far, the book gets two thumbs up. I hope over the next two weeks as I read it to record here a few more impressions.

Wallace Stevens wrote a now-famous poem entitled “Anecdote of the Jar.” It goes as follows:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
and sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

I’ve always had problems with this poem and with Stevens generally, though he did write plenty that is, if not especially coherent, at least interesting lexically and from the standpoint of imagery and tone. When I think of Stevens, I think of a man reciting nonsense in very serious tones. Because it’s hard to make much sense of lots of Stevens’s stuff and because his diction is diverse and often unexpected, I read some of his stuff to Lennie a few months ago. I figured it was just a way of exposing her to sounds other than my usual vocabulary at little risk of getting bogged down in meaning. Strange, I guess.

Anyway, in the last couple of months, I’ve read two tributes or parodies or something relating to the poem, and they’ve both irritated me because it was as if they were trying to be more clever than they in fact turned out to be. It was as if they were trying to get by with an inside joke, but the Stevens poem is so well known that it’s not really an inside joke. It’s like being very proud of a painfully obvious punchline. What’s more, both have a sort of titular pun clanging around in them, making the arm-waving “look at me, this is my version of Stevens’s poem” feel of the poems that much worse.

The first example I encountered was by Robert Wrigley in Lives of the Animals, which I treat here. He also seems to wink in the direction of Yeats in the stanza I quote below:

And though I wander around it, my widening gyre,
my careful forensic finds no line, no
other post anywhere, only this, which,
because it is wood, will fall,
the slovenly wilderness at last
avenging its mystery, its jarring illogic –

In retrospect, I actually like the poem, and it provides a pretty decent sort of answer or response to Stevens’s poem, but the “jarring” pun and the self-consciousness of it sort of turn me off.

Similarly, in the April 2005 volume of POETRY (which is uncharacteristically thick and full of poetry in comparision to volumes from the last year or two, which have been prose-heavy without any extra thickness), Lauren McCollum acknowledges Stevens openly but goes on with the not-oblique-enough-to-be-subtle punning, as follows:

His spare hand tore at the wilderness
as if it were a metaphor or something
that couldn’t be as it seemed

…

I was jarred with the whole of my state…

It’s still an ok poem (Wrigley’s is better), but would have been better without the obvious references, which seem rather like somebody stating the obvious without knowing it’s obvious and thinking they’re pretty darned smart for having managed it.

As noted elsewhere, much of what I’ve managed to write over the past few years has been animal-centric. When I showed some pieces recently to a former teacher and still-mentor of mine, he recommended a book by Robert Wrigley entitled Lives of the Animals. Because our themes are at times similar, I was keenly interested in reading the guy, but I found myself disappointed upon a first reading. I could tell he wrote skillfully and carefully; I knew that much of what he wrote was good. But it just didn’t resonate with me the way somebody like Andrew Hudgins does (especially in Saints and Strangers). I put the book down, a little disappointed.

The other day, a friend and former coworker whom I was talking to about doing some contract work for my company mentioned that he was involved with the Knoxville Writer’s Guild. I’ve known for years that the KWG was around but have never looked into the organization. Whether I neglected to do so because I figured they’d all be either hacks or schmoozers or just because I didn’t have time or energy I don’t know. At any rate, I perked up this time around and signed up for their mailing list. I almost immediately received notification of a reading by Marie Howe, one of whose books (What the Living Do) I had actually read in college. My reading the book started out as my thumbing through it because it had an interesting cover. I ultimately sat down and read it cover to cover, probably a couple of times. It’s a good book. Stoked at the prospect of going to the first reading I’ve been to in years, I wanted to read some more contemporary stuff, so I went back to Wrigley’s book the other night. And I liked it much more. It’s much stronger at the beginning and becomes a little droning toward the end.

Wrigley writes very tautly. There’s very little in his poems that doesn’t need to be there. And he writes with a sort of country elegance. I don’t mean that I fancy him to be a good ole Southern dandy but rather that he writes of the woods, of chasing snakes, of ticks on hunting dogs, of burning a dead horse, but he does so elegantly. His poems are smooth and flowing. They address rustic things but are themselves by and large not very rustic at all. It’s an interesting combination.

Wrigley writes in a very evocative way. Reading through the book, I felt constantly as if I was being reminded of things I had experienced. It eventually hit me that very few of the experiences he describes were ones I had first-hand knowledge of. In other words — and I think this captures one of the best things good poets do — he reminded me of things I hadn’t experienced as if they were very familiar to me, surely a testament to his talent at evocation and description.