Dave Etter, the Spring 1987 visiting poet at Austin Peay State University, did not match any preconceived ideas I had regarding what a poet should look like or talk like. Approaching 60 at the time, Etter resembled a former linebacker—squat, husky, and gruff. In the author photo on the back of one of his countless books, he sat in a simple folding chair out in the yard, squinting into sunlight, a pipe in one hand and a glass of Jack Daniels in the other, the half empty/half full bottle on a table at his side. His was the first creative writing class I took as a beginning student. Back then we were on the quarter system (10 weeks), but those two and half months set a tone and an approach toward writing poems that remain part of my DNA. Etter expressed a genuine fascination with our attempts at poems and made writing them feel like the most ordinary thing one could do. For someone like me, coming from a small town in west Tennessee, I had never met a grown man who wrote poems until I stepped onto that campus. Etter was ordinary in the best sense of the word. He didn’t come across as an academic—just a man in love with the marvelous simplicities of existence and this gift of language that could be profound and quirky at the same time. His own poems explored the speech patterns, images, and interior lives of small town people—each a vignette that, taken together, approximated an investigation into the human psyche. Though not a formalist, his poems, at times, have reminded me of the tight, explosive poems of E. A. Robinson, another poet whose portrayals of individual lives have become central to my own. Etter gave himself fully to laughter, even in the middle of class, and found humor in the slightest turn of phrase. Our class sat around a conference table in an historic house—formerly the college President’s house—though by then the mansion housed the Honors program. We were a motley crew of misfits by comparison, a crowd of hoodlums mistakenly let into a museum. Informal and nonchalant, we erupted too often into laughter, and I imagined professors in their offices down the quiet hallways biding their time until the hoi polloi went on their way. Weeks into his term as visiting poet, he gave a poetry reading to a packed auditorium, and he even read a few of the poems he’d written during the preceding weeks, a couple of which he had shared with our class. He wasn’t just “the teacher,” but at all times he gave the impression that, like us, he was still a student, a participant in class, willing to write with us, willing to share new work alongside us. He made us think that the poem to be concerned with, the poem to be excited by, was not the one published somewhere in a literary journal or collection of poems but the poem before us at the moment, the newest work, the language just emerging. In that faculty reading, though, about half way through, out of nowhere he began talking about John Wayne, “the Duke,” the macho man of Westerns that had come to define what a man’s man looked like and sounded like. Then, for whatever reason—maybe for the novelty of it or for the laughs or maybe to make a point about masculinity—he began reading several poems in John Wayne’s voice. Perfect swagger, perfect pacing—a spot-on impersonation. One could imagine him sitting next to Johnny Carson, doing impersonations. The effect was dizzying, hilarious, and perplexing. Maybe the poems had more gravitas, each poem a fictional voice from a small-town life suddenly speaking with a recognizable, authoritative voice. Perhaps we were supposed to reconsider what manliness could sound like. In a letter once, Dave said that only real men wrote poetry and that all the twerps were in insurance and sales. He could be blunt like that, and one could never be certain if he was trying on a statement for the sound of it, to test how true or untrue it was, or whether he really meant the sentiment. Anyway, in addition to studying English, I also studied Marketing, but in the end I steered clear of that world. I gave myself fully to poetry. THE AUTHORIAL VOICE OF GEORGE SCARBROUGH
I have heard poet George Scarbrough described as the best poet Tennessee ever produced. Such pronouncements are subjective, and I am in no position to prove or disprove such a claim. I can, however, claim that several of his poems are absolutely indispensable to my sense of poetry’s power, not the least of which is the title poem to his 1989 collection Invitation to Kim. When I arrived at Austin Peay State University in the fall of 1986, I had scarcely heard of any living poets, national or local, but through the pages of Zone 3, APSU’s newly-formed literary journal, I began to find poems that fueled my own imagination. One of those first poems belonged to George Scarbrough, a poet who lived in Oak Ridge and who, later, would become a friend. In the poem, “Schoolhouse Hill,” the speaker, which I take to be George, recounts the story of a girl who “traipsed townward / To steal the creams and sticks / She bought her friends with.” Scarbrough spends three stanzas painting a portrait of a young girl who “drifted about Benton” and who “flourished / In perfumes like bouquets,” only to turn in the last stanza to an indictment of himself: I stole too for my moment Of attractiveness. Pariah Of ordinary hours, I stuck To my desk at noontime, writing Papers for the less authorial, Great dumb brutes I loved. I can’t exactly explain why those words resonated for me when I read them more than 30 years ago. Perhaps the three hard stresses of “great dumb brutes” represented one kind of world to me while the speaker acknowledging that he “loved” these “brutes” represented another kind of world. I wasn’t a scholarly type, and I never wrote papers for anyone. If anything, at that time in my life I was struggling to write my own essays in college. I was the first person in my family to go to college—perhaps I counted myself as one of those “less authorial / Great dumb brutes.” Perhaps I was trying to move from being a brute to being someone who could learn to love. Perhaps, reading his words, I sensed that one part of myself was looking at another part of myself. In the early 1990s, while in graduate school at the University of Alabama, I practically read every new issue of the numerous literary journals in the periodicals section of the university’s library. I can still remember where I was standing when I read a handful of posthumous poems by Howard Nemerov, one of which, “Trying Conclusions,” ended with the following lines: What rational being, after seventy years, When scriptures says he’s running out of rope, Would want more of the only world he knows? No rational being, while he endures, Holds on to the inveterate infantile hope That the road ends but as the runway does. I can also remember standing there on the second floor, holding an issue of The Southern Review, reading a poem of George’s, at which point I suddenly slumped down in the middle of the floor, my back against the shelves, and I tried really hard not to lose my composure. “The Train” caught me off guard, in the way the best poems do. It didn’t just entertain me for a few lines; instead, it revealed something vital to me about the power reading had always had in my own life. THE TRAIN Tandem and straight we sat before the washstand reading, my literate mother and I, while my unhappy father scoffed at us from his bed, restlessly turning in a room so small he could have reached out and torn the books from our hands. “A man can’t sleep with the lamp lit,” he said. “Douse it. It’s late.” It was late. Eleven by the clock. We sat on oblivious of time. “You make,” he said, “a short train with two cars,” meaning the local that ran past our house. “It’ll get you nowhere,” not knowing it had already carried us past all the houses he knew. George grew up in a share-cropping family with an illiterate and hard-driving father, the likes of which—either rightly or wrongly—I came to imagine through Faulkner’s Abner Snopes in the short story “Barn Burning.” In much the same way that Sarty, Abner’s son, must find his own path in life and reject his father’s cruelty (among other things), George, too, had to forge toward his own world; and he did so through reading and writing poems, many of which explored empathetically the nature of his rural, poverty-stricken childhood. In this particular poem, I’ve always been drawn to how the poem portrays size, or scale, as a way to make an argument about the value of reading. Illiteracy is portrayed as occupying “a room so small,” one where both a washstand and a bed are present, indicative of the meager means the family must endure. Rest and enjoyment are pitted against one another, vying for the same small space. The father is exhausted—by exertion, by limited choices—but the mother and child, “oblivious of time,” occupy a larger space, one that is communal, not isolated, as the father appears to be within the family, “unhappy” and restless. One of the products of the father’s small conception of the world is a dismissive attitude that strikes out toward others. The speaker says of the father that “he could have / reached out and torn the books from our / hands.” He doesn’t “reach out” toward them in familial intimacy; he doesn’t “reach out” in recognition of his own need; nor does he “reach out” in empathy or understanding toward what he doesn’t know. Sadly, the smallness of the room seems to mirror the smallness of his imagination for dealing with what frustrates him, producing a response that is destructive instead of creative. The word “torn,” for instance, indicates a mindset accustomed to doing things by force, a mindset accustomed to what the body can make happen instead of what the mind can imagine possible. The small space the mother and son occupy contains an intimacy, though, as well as a vastness, that the father cannot enter. Not only does the father lash out physically—he also lashes out verbally, his words blunt and forceful. Of the light the mother and son read by, he states, “Douse it. It’s late.” The father’s concerns are of the body, not the mind, spirit, or imagination. One can imagine that, given his own limitations in life, his own labor netting him little to show for his exhaustion, he can’t really imagine another life. All he knows is hard labor. Sadly, the father fails to imagine how reading (and therefore education) will benefit his child. He demeans both mother and child, comparing them to a short train, and he says of reading, “It’ll/get you nowhere.” The train, though, changes everything. The train goes “past all the houses” and, by implication, suggests the larger world that lies beyond what the father can conceive. The act of reading therefore transforms “a room so small” into something even larger than “houses,” which the train then carries the speaker “past.” Where the father’s life is closed-in upon by his illiteracy, the son’s life seems boundless. While the father remains in a state of “not knowing,” the son enters into another realm altogether. Both space and time are enlarged, as is the self. Two or three years before George died, I visited him in Oak Ridge. I had been to his small home on Darwin Avenue only a handful of times in two decades, but I always enjoyed our visits, which could easily last half a day. Years earlier, in 1994, as I was moving books into my new office at my new position at Columbia State Community College, my secretary informed me, “You have a letter waiting for you.” The letter had arrived on campus even before I had, which seemed hilarious to everyone, and she had been holding it for me. The letter was from George. On that last visit, he told me to go through and pick out any books I wanted to take with me. I tried to refuse, saying that I thought he had planned to donate them to the University of the South’s library. He insisted that he was giving books to his friends and wanted me to find what I wanted. He even pulled a few items from his shelves and handed them to me, a book by Dylan Thomas and a 1st edition hardback copy of Wallace Stevens’s The Palm at the End of the Mind, among others. I told George that all I really wanted was the copy of the Southern Review that contained “The Train,” and I told him of the story of sitting on the floor of the library, trying not to cry, and of how crucial that poem had been for me. We looked and looked but never found that issue. One journal he did give me that day was the January 2002 issue of Poetry, containing three of his Han-Shan poems, part of a larger manuscript (Under the Lemon Tree) that wouldn’t appear for almost another decade. I asked George if he would mind inscribing something right there on page 199, just a few words that I could take with me. I keep that issue of Poetry in my office at Columbia State and often open it to read what George wrote to me, treasuring that moment I watched him write these words: How words have taken us past all the houses our fathers knew. George When I read those words in George’s shaky, near-illegible handwriting, I’m right back there in that university library again, slumped to the floor, reading and rereading a poem that continues to remind me of how large the act of reading has made my small, less authorial life and how—how else to say this?—I have felt love entering into my life, turning it, in sympathy, toward all I cannot—and may never—know. Toi Derricotte selected my second book, Notes for a Praise Book, for Jacar Press’s yearly book contest, and when I got that news, I simply couldn’t believe it. Imagine being a singer and someone like Loretta Lynn or Aretha Franklin plucking you out of an audience to come up onto the same stage. That’s how I felt. Toi Derricotte, I kept repeating to myself, a name both familiar and sacred. I knew her poems from my earliest readings as a student of poetry. A poem like “Blackbottom” (from her 1990 collection Captivity) caught my attention. I was headed off to graduate school in 1990, navigating college with all the uncertainties and missteps that might be expected of a first-generation college student unsure if I belonged in this “new” world far removed from my childhood. In her poem, she writes of being “[f]reshly escaped, black middle class” and of driving with visiting relatives back through the kind of place, presumably, her family had escaped, a place with the smell of barbeque and with “dented washtubs” and “a man sitting on a curb with a bottle in his hand.” All of these images were the images of my own childhood, and I, too, was trying to escape. I, too, had an ambivalence about everything and everyone I was leaving behind. My book appeared in 2013, and in February 2014, Toi Derricotte and I gave a joint reading at my undergraduate college, Austin Peay State University. Barry Kitterman, who directed the creative writing program, floated the idea to me months earlier. I was excited, of course, but at the same time I kept dealing with imposter syndrome hang-ups so difficult to shake. Preparing for that reading made me want to throw away every poem I’d written, none of them good enough to read to a crowd, much less in the presence of Toi Derricotte. She put me at ease, though, with the first words she spoke to me in what I now think of as a forceful compassion. Earlier in the afternoon, when I saw her entering the building where I stood with others, she walked through the door, approached me straight-away, and said, “I love your book.” I’m flushed with emotion just remembering that moment. I had spent more than a decade trying to get that book published, vacillating between belief and doubt, between hope and dejection. Our evening event together, though, would stun me even more. In my mind, a “joint reading” with Toi Derricotte would proceed as follows: Barry Kitterman would say a few words about us both, then I would read my work for 15-20 minutes, then I would weep my way through trying to express my gratitude for Toi and her work, then she would read her poems for 30-40 minutes, and I and everyone else would sit enraptured. That's how I had envisioned the evening. That’s not what happened. Toi read first. In what world could this order make sense? Shouldn’t I be her opening act? There she stood, though, reading her poems. I was rattled, humbled, in disbelief. If that wasn’t enough, when she finished her poems, she had prepared an introduction discussing my book, my poems. To my profound regret, sitting there trying to hold myself together, I don’t remember anything she said about my poems except that she hoped I would read the title poem, which I had not planned to do because of its length (3 pages). I had cobbled that poem together from several days’ worth of fragments found in a journal and had often wondered if the poem was worth all the effort I had put into shaping it. Suddenly, reading it aloud for the first time, I suddenly “heard” the poem. Or maybe I heard it through her approval of it, her generosity toward me, the magnanimous embracing that I felt inside her own poems. I’ll always be grateful that she asked me to read that poem that evening. Afterwards, I didn’t even think to ask her for a copy of her introduction of my poems. Sometimes I feel so paralyzed, unsure of the next move to make. The next morning I agreed to drop her off at the Nashville airport on my way back home to Columbia, TN. First, she, Barry, and I met for coffee and muffins. Some people are just so radiant that you feel as though you’ve always known them and always now wish to be in their presence. In a moment of lightheartedness, I asked her if she might permit me to be the first white person to attend the Cave Canem workshops. I like to joke that I almost had her talked into it. So many of my favorite poets—so many of the best poets of my generation—have attended that workshop, which she and Cornelius Eady founded in 1996 as a safe space for African-American poets to work within the company of their peers. The family of poetry is so much larger now thanks to their cultivation of voices. Many of those voices have influenced and come alongside my own, and I can't imagine my life without them. Obviously, I didn’t expect her to say yes to my request. I only meant to express (awkwardly) my appreciation for what has emerged from her influence on American poetry. Who wouldn’t want to be near such radiance? “We wanted our sufferings to be offered up as tender meat, / and our triumphs to be belted out in raucous song,” she says near the conclusion of “Blackbottom.” Suffering, triumph, song. An ever-widening, enlarging, in-gathering of voices sure makes this praise book of American poetry worth where we’ve all come from and where—together—we may still yet find our singular and entwining ways toward belonging. A QUIET FROM THE CORE OF TIME: AN INTERVIEW WITH JEFF HARDIN BY LANA AUSTIN
Lana Austin: You write about a profusion of topics, but the natural world, and your sense of wonder about it, is a reoccurring motif. Do you think your family’s long history in bucolic Hardin County, Tennessee is a catalyst for that? What else continues to draw you to the natural world? Jeff Hardin: Much of my childhood was spent in the woods, sometimes for weeks at a time. Family friends owned 2000 acres, and we camped, hunted, fished, and walked all over that corner of southeast Hardin county. Being in nature—far removed from town—imprints upon the mind a deep silence as well as a sense of time as both passing and abiding. In Restoring the Narrative, I have a sonnet about riding an inner tube downstream. A few lines into the poem, I say, The moments felt like retrospect, and my form was fitted to the changing place I made of water heading someplace else. No voice to answer or to reckon with. A quiet from the core of time. And me. So when I speak, sometimes I speak from there, that sense of drifting through surrounded on all sides by wilderness and nothing said. That “quiet from the core of time” stays with me always. It haunts my words. It haunts my heart. What does the self mean? Or, for that matter, what does the mind mean? What does meaning mean? Why am I me, and for how long, and for what purpose? What is this vast quiet through which I drift and out of which I “speak”? If anything, the woods (we never called it “the natural world”) have always been a reminder of eternity eavesdropping on my passing through. Austin: Can you remember the first poem you fell in love with and why? Hardin: I can remember being in the sixth grade and standing on a ladder in my elementary school library, reading poems by William Wordsworth. I’ve returned many times to those opening lines of The Prelude, lines which talk about a breeze and about “blessing.” I grew up in church, so “blessing” was part of my vocabulary even if a lot of other words in Wordsworth’s poem were not. Early on these lines appear: the soft breeze can come To none more grateful than to me I sometimes tell my classes that we are descendants of language—that we issue out of specific words we have read or heard in our lives. Words take root in us. Their seeds bear fruit. I suspect that whoever I have grown to become is, at least in part, traceable to that word “grateful” in Wordsworth’s poem, an idea I later came to know as central to Lou Gehrig’s famous speech, and a word which—when I read it in Mark Jarman’s introductory description of my first book, Fall Sanctuary—literally brought me to tears. From Wordsworth we learn, too, that the child is father to the man, and I often think about how the child I once was, the child I still am, has become a kind of father figure in my life, teaching me how to exist in the world, impressing certain values upon my mind and heart that I am—in unfathomable, incalculable ways—still growing into. Austin: What other poets and poems have been the most influential? Hardin: While in high school, poems like “Fern Hill,” by Dylan Thomas, “Kubla Khan,” by Coleridge, “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by cummings, and “The Road Not Taken” by Frost were among the poems that first mattered to me. Their music, I now see, was what held me in a trance. I think they offered me a different way to conceive of myself in the world, a different way to imagine what language could do or be. Once I went to college, though, I found so many poets whose presences of mind have become part of my own being. Among the first influences I found—through literary journals—were poets like Albert Goldbarth, William Kloefkorn, Dave Etter, Richard Jackson, William Stafford, James Wright, and Mary Oliver. Over time, I found poets like Tomas Transtromer, Wislawa Szymborska, Pablo Neruda, Wendell Berry, Gerald Stern, Carl Dennis, Dave Smith, Yannis Ritsos, and countless others. In graduate school in the early nineties, I read Czeslaw Milosz with great affection. In fact, my first book, Fall Sanctuary, begins with a poem that is a response to his poem “A Task.” He says, In fear and trembling, I think I would fulfill my life Only if I brought myself to make a public confession Revealing a sham, my own and of my epoch: We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons But pure and generous words were forbidden Under so stiff a penalty that whoever dared to pronounce one Considered himself as a lost man. My poem, “In Fear in Trembling,” (with echoes of Kierkegaard and the Bible) is a way of establishing, to one degree or another, part of what my own poetry hopes to be. I want to speak “pure and generous words,” even if they are “forbidden,” even if they are dismissed or ridiculed; and I refuse to consider myself “as a lost man” in doing so. I’ve written about the idea of joy in a previous interview, but maybe the idea bears repeating: in many ways I think that my own poetry, for almost thirty years now, has been a way to explore joy as if it were a philosophy, as if it were the deepest wisdom we finally reach. In fact, I wrote and then delivered an essay many years ago (at Hillsdale College) about joy as wisdom in literature. Frost says that poems should begin in delight and end as wisdom, but I think that, given the right circumstances, delight is wisdom. Joy is wisdom. Humility, empathy, forgiveness, tenderness—these, too, are wisdom, and sometimes poems can become a way to explore their dimensions. Looking back through my five collections, I might venture to say that joy is the sanctuary within the fall; joy is one of the notes I wish to emphasize within my praise book; joy is one of the ways to restore the narrative; and joy plays a central role in the small revolution I’ve been working to advance for three decades. In my most recent book, No Other Kind of World, why can’t joy be the substance of no other kind of world I can possibly imagine, if only as a way to push back against the world’s horrors, griefs, injustices, hypocrisies, diminishments, disappointments, and decay? When I was 14, my favorite song (“Scarlet” by U2), had only a single word: “rejoice.” I suppose so much of my mind’s structure has been shaped by that song’s arrangement of drums and piano around that defiant and illogical and holy and immense word. Austin: Another compelling facet of your poems is your references to a non-judgmental faith background. How has your faith influenced not only individual poems, but your aesthetic as a totality? Hardin: I’ve always thought that truth is an invitation, not a condemnation. Whatever I am about as a writer obviously has roots in my faith and in my life-long reading of the Bible. Philippians says to think on whatever is true, honest, just, pure, and lovely, and I like to think that anyone who studies my poetry might find evidence that I’ve taken up and meditated upon these words.I’ve done the opposite, of course, as everyone has, but overall poems are a form of prayer for me. The epigraph to Fall Sanctuary is a favorite passage from Luke 24, which states: And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad? This moment occurs on the road to Emmaus after Jesus has risen. In addition to the power of what occurs within the passage, I’ve always thought the language was particularly beautiful and haunting. I chose this passage as a way to frame the argument my poems hope to make—that our language, our communication with others, is incomplete and lacking intimacy because we don’t recognize that we walk in the presence of the divine. In the poem “Non-Person” (from Small Revolution), I state, “If I have set as my task/the overthrow/of a language…” I’ll admit those words sound grandiose, but I’ve always been drawn to the small and large ways that one person’s language can literally change another person’s language. There is a Bible story about how, after a period of time, once the church of Sardis moved in, the Lydians had all but forgotten their old language. That’s an interesting premise to consider. How can a people forget a language? Or does the story mean that they forgot a certain way of speaking, of approaching the world? In “Naysayers,” I say the following: I know we’re long past words like fulfillment, revelation, goodness, humility, but we could always revisit them to see what might have been overlooked. I like the idea of overthrowing a language, of finding a new way to speak to one another, of stepping closer and closer to a boldness about speaking “pure and generous” words within a shared intimacy. As the description on the back cover of Fall Sanctuary states, “These poems demand to know whether joy, reverence, gratitude, and empathy can exist with fullness in an age that privileges irony, suspicion, cynicism, and ridicule…Such is Hardin’s sanctuary, with hymns and prayers voiced unabashedly.” Unabashedly. Again, I refuse to consider myself “as a lost man.” Two decades ago, my wife returned from a conference and told me that one of her colleagues had said, after finding out that I was a poet, “Oh, how wonderful. He must write you love poems all the time.” My wife replied, “No, he doesn’t write love poems.” Of course, I objected and said that all of my poems were love poems! That conversation led to my writing a whole series of poems with titles like “Love Poem for the Absolute,” “Love Poem for the Beginning and End of It All,” “Love Poem for Moonlit Backyard,” “Love Poem for My Being Here at All,” and spacing these throughout Fall Sanctuary. I can’t believe almost two decades have passed since I began those poems, but in recent years, I’ve seen a lot of poets using similar titles with “Love Poem for…” as a stem. At least four books that I know about have featured them as a structuring device. Maybe, in some small way, I altered the language toward love! Austin: You have a recent book out, Small Revolution.Can you discuss the genesis of that book conceptually? How long did it take you to put the book together, from the first poem you wrote until the book came to fruition as a tangible finished product? Hardin: The earliest poems in this collection—several in fact—were written in 2000. The majority of the others were written between 2000 and 2005, with only a few coming along later. The ideas and poems in this collection always mattered to me, even when more than a decade passed and they remained unpublished. I referred affectionately to the book as my subversive naiveté book. I wanted to write poems that began with a small but ultimately complicated premise, a poem that sounded simplistic, even playful, while moving along through considerations and implications and then leaving an aftershock, a torque, an undercurrent. Of course, I tinkered with the book’s arrangement off and on. For years the first poem in the book was “To Fellow Poets” because I liked a particular question in the poem: “Are we burnt out yet on being burnt out?” The poem begins with the idea that “so many of us want despair,” as if out of pain and suffering, out of struggle, we find wisdom. In the poem (and in the book’s arc), I saw myself as a quiet voice asking if we could “be naïve enough/to be naïve again.” That was what I considered to be the “small revolution.” It would begin in being naïve—it would begin with a different language. It would begin with “Yes,” a word of affirmation, a word of agreement, a word of acceptance. Since it would be a “small revolution,” very likely it would go unnoticed. It would be subversive. It would, as I say in the poem “Non-Person,” be whispered, an “insinuation/set loose” and moving freely throughout the world. Somehow stillness would be rhymed “with every other word.” It would fall “in love/with everything/[we] couldn’t see.” It would belong to those who “read by lamplight,/fingers poised to turn a page, lingering there/in the premise-rich quiet between two worlds.” It would blow “seeds into everything” and alter how we live and move and have our being. Later, I liked the idea of beginning the book with “these hostile times” and moving through “the realm of the possible” with stops along the way to visit finches and Neruda’s questions and “so many plurals in a singular self” and all the things that might “aid in our beliefs.” Yes, I’m aware of “the obvious decline/of civilization toward malcontents,” but I still believe in hymn books and all the space inside a Hopper painting and “the hopeful care of others.” I still believe that the great fiction of our “true story” is that we are surrounded by serendipitous moments, which we tell no one about. Instead, we sit down in city diners and speak of sports, weather, and politics, but we don’t say “one word/about moonlight over cornfields/or that small bloom fish make/kissing the sky of their world.” We exist between this world and the next one, yet there is “a gladness” inside us only sometimes we listen toward. I may begin my book with an awareness of “these hostile times,” but I end with “a mouth full of syllables/endless as the leaves from which/I learned to hear applause.” I still believe there is “good news” as the book’s title poem says, and it, too, is part of the small revolution. Had I read only one poem—“From the Pulpit: For the Minister at My Memorial Service”—by Connie Jordan Green, I would consider myself fortunate. The fact that I read it in her presence as she (along with the forty or so fellow writers on the final morning of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival) sat under a tent and sang hymns together will always be a holy moment for me. I can still access the feeling I had as I read a few words, looked up to see her smiling, singing face, looked down to read a few more words, looked up again, on and on until I finished the poem and the song continued. Among such friends, I don’t think anyone noticed my misty eyes or, if they did, there was nothing out of the ordinary about such emotion. Some groups of writers are more like far-flung congregations who gather back together once a year, and Mountain Heritage Literary Festival has its share of “evangelists.” Connie Jordan Green is one of its most important.
FROM THE PULPIT: FOR THE MINISTER AT MY MEMORIAL SERVICE Say here lies someone who was ordinary as maple trees, who went out and came in all the days of her life glorying in the repetitive, hoping for the unexpected, who loved a summer storm rippling the pond’s surface, who sought refuge in the garden, weeds and vegetables numbered as companions, one to test her soul, the other a gift that deceived with joy, wearied with its exuberance. Say she had a spiritual side hidden from the overly religious, her prayers a dirty floor and a stiff, soapy brush, her hymns the daily laundry lifting its arms to the wind. Say she is grateful for earth’s brief sharing, less than a wave against the endless yaw of ages, the wearing down of mountains, rush and toil of oceans. Say finally that she died praising the power of breath, the endless stretch of conscious into unconscious, of making into being into merging into rising. In this poem and others in her collection Household Inventory, her “spiritual side” goes about its business of learning how to “step softly on earth’s bed,” as she says in “Winter Rides the Mountains.” She writes of everyday things like apples, reeds, poppies, tomatoes, blackberries, cicadas, deer tracks, corn stalks, and potatoes. These manifold things of the earth form the grounding of her vocabulary, but she also writes of abundance, memory, beneficence, lost hope, and hallelujahs. The “mutability of season/into season” brings her to a gladness, even if “[i]n another week,/the garden will stand desolate.” In fact, the garden as metaphor is present throughout her work, perhaps harkening back to the garden of Eden, which she imagines “two figures” leaving: LEAVING EDEN Perhaps it happened in September, here-- the two figures, back to the green garden, stumbling over rocks-- the hillsides suddenly wounded with the bruised hues of all-- the two awake for the first time to the fierce beauty of decay. Green’s poems enact again and again this feeling of being “awake for the first time” even though, in many ways, we still move through our lives in a kind of unknowing, unsure if the soul is “a mockingbird/singing from the deck chair” or “breath flowering/in our lungs, blossoming/into the morning air.” Nevertheless, there is a celebratory tone to Green’s voice—pastoral, close to rain and steep hills, steeped in family lore but also in what’s just outside the window, along the next trail, or “beneath/the sky’s/blue tent.” Like Han Shan who “wakes delighted,” so does Green, “grateful for earth’s/brief sharing.” “I want to find/joy in change, to build a house of fallen/leaves, to burrow in the dry/odor of all that was once alive,/to know the mutability of season/into season, and be glad,” she says in “November Again.” Like the cicadas she describes as “armored warriors,” she signals her gladness to the rest of us, continually bringing our minds to how brief our days are, how alive we have all been in the presence—the miraculous presence—of each other. The last three participles of her imagined pulpit memorial—being, merging, rising—seem like the perfect and holy rendering of what this living truly feels like: we exist, we join with others, we rise in togetherness. The congregation praises, clutches at the passing years, endures, mourns, shines and withers, “glorying in the repetitive,/hoping for the unexpected.” In Green’s inventory, each of us is invited in, wonderfully becoming part of her household, and suddenly “a multitude of voices have only just begun/their blending, their notes ascending.” |
Jeff Hardin is professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN. He is the author of six collections of poetry, including Fall Sanctuary (Nicholas Roerich Prize, 2004), Notes for a Praise Book (Jacar Press, 2013), Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Poetry Prize, 2015), Small Revolution, No Other Kind of World (X. J. Kennedy Prize, 2017), and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being.Categories
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