Category Archives: People

by | November 26, 2012

Carol Ann Davis, Poet of Exactitude and Beauty

My friend, poet Carol Ann Davis, has two poems in The American Poetry Review this month: “After a Painting by Ruth Gutmannova” and “Safety,” as well as gorgeous review of her first book Psalm in “The Art of Losing, Four Contemporary American Women Poets and Grief” by Jacqueline Kilosov. I decided to post my review of her book Psalm, first published in October 2007 in The Post & Courier.  Carol Ann now teaches at Fairfield University in CT.

Carol Ann Davis, Poet of Exactitude and Beauty

 I have waited a long time to read the first book of poems by College of Charleston Associate Professor of English Carol Ann Davis.  Ms. Davis was runner-up for the esteemed Dorset Prize offered by Tupelo Press, and her book Psalm was just released by this well known literary publisher.  It is, without a doubt, the best first collection of poems I have ever read.  Each poem is its own exquisite reliquary, and the poems require the kind of reverence one associates with a reliquary.  It is a book called Psalm, after all.  It is also a beautifully designed book.  The cover is edged with a bit of the painting St. Agnes, by Domenchino. Like the poems in the book, the cover is dipped into a painting that expresses faith.   Art, photography and music are the cultural well that Ms. Davis draws from to process the intense emotions contained in her poetry.  She makes associations with a number of visual artists, and in the process she connects us with the culture that ultimately defines us.  Part of art’s function is to express the inexplicable, and in this way it enables human beings to survive and make sense of all experience. The poems, paintings, and music that ultimately endure are the ones that teach us how to cope and find joy in places we did not expect to find it.  Our faith serves the same the function.  Psalm is filled with poems accomplishing all of these things.

 

It is no surprise to learn that Psalm is actually the third book of poems written by Ms. Davis.  She attributes the successful publication of this manuscript to the inherent narrative arc of the book, which moves between the death of her father and the birth of her first child Willem.  It’s as if the poems bridge the gap between the two extremes. None of us are exempt from loss and grief, and we all experience the wonder of birth whether directly or indirectly. Sometimes it happens all at once.

 

In  the  poem “Listening to Willem Squeal while a Selmer Guitar Reminds Me of the Existence of All Things”  Ms. Davis begins with a description of the psalms and ends with the lines “….our world quickly made/of stones and river water/and grief transmuted into fire.”   Willem, named for Willem de Kooning, is Carol Ann Davis and Garret Doherty’s oldest son.  This poem, which is so grounded in the things of the physical world – a baby squealing while music is playing in the background…the water and the stones of the earth, ending with the emotional state literally “transmuted into fire”, is a literal description of the aesthetic approach taken by Ms. Davis. Her work, which springs from the personal and emotional details of her own life, is lifted into the rarified aesthetic realm of a poem. John Donne’s description of “spiritual things, of a more rarified nature than knowledge” could be an epigraph for this collection.

Many of these poems are elegiac in nature.  Three, entitled “Grief Daybook I” “Grief Daybook II.”, and “Grief Daybook III” are placed at intervals in the book and hold the other poems down like ropes through a sail.  “Grief Daybook I” begins with a meditation on the things that preoccupy the poet in her daily life – “orange juice, on the table/papers still heavy/with requests.” Then comes the longing that comes with grief -

 

This morning I want to drive the six hours home

just to touch the stone

 

over my father’s heart,

his name chiseled into vowels

 

and consonants. I want to camp there,

to sleep there

 

where other mourners

come looking for someone else

 

and cross over us.  What is the heart

but a request?  What is it

 

to be long dead, dead a week,

 

a year?

 

“Grief Daybook II” refers to a Walker Evans Photograph taken in Ms. Davis’s home state ofFloridain 1934. This is home, the place her father is buried.  The third poem in this trilogy ends -

 

Where you’ve gone, there will be a night sky of psalms –

a cello’s goose neck. Fingers waiting

above a stalled note.

Oh, ear of my ear,

there’s hardly anything

left of you now.

 

The poem on the page facing “Grief Daybook III” is entitled “An Understanding Between Living and Dead.” It could be kind of subtitle for Psalm, which ends with the poem “Corn Maze Afternoon.”  This poem, inspired by a visit to a corn maze with her family, is a hopeful vision of our capacity absorb grief and experience ordinary and extraordinary joy.  “Nothing but grass and the three of us/ adrift in the orchard. Much as we will be……”

 

(Sections of poems reprinted with permission of the author, taken from Psalm, Poems by Carol Ann Davis, published by Tupelo Press in 2007.)

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by | November 24, 2012

The Loss of Jim Rigney, author Robert Jordan

My son just told me that there is going to be a conference early in 2013 at The College of Charleston about the work of our friend the late Jim Rigney, author of The Wheel of Time Series and the subject of a documentary film that my son is working on called “The Wit of the Staircase.”  In celebration of his life and work I wanted to post the piece I wrote for the newspaper here the week that Jim passed away.

 

The Loss of Jim Rigney

My youngest son Taylor put it best:  “All over the world people are mourning for Robert Jordan, but here in Charleston we grieve for the loss of Jim Rigney.”  In this small city of great writers, we lost a giant not only as one of the greatest writers of fantasy fiction – but also a giant of a human being.

On a personal and professional level it seems appropriate and necessary to honor this brilliant man whose generous spirit never ceased to inspire me.  Jim’s inclusion in the community of Lowcountry writers brought considerable legitimacy to the city’s current literary renaissance.  Although Jim was often quite private, he embraced and supported writers – especially this writer. I used to tease him and say that he was more excited about my appointment as South Carolina Poet Laureate than I was!  This isn’t true, of course, but the sense of it is true.  At readings and celebrations, Jim was always there cheering me on.  When a writer of his caliber and reputation encourages you it means so very much.

Great author photo of the late Jim Rigney

Jim loved poetry and could recite a verse appropriate to the occasion.  This may have been expected when his beloved wife Harriet was a former President of the Poetry Society of South Carolina and a poet herself.   Jim attended and participated in many poetry events.  During National Poetry Month a few years ago, Jim and Harriet came to a Poetry Extravaganza at Barnes & Noble in Mt.Pleasant and each read a favorite poem.  Other well known Charleston writers participated – Dottie Frank and Jo Humphreys come to mind… But when Jim recited the poem by A. E. Houseman that he had had taped inside of his hooch when he was a young soldier during the Vietnam War, the audience reaction was unforgettable.

Both Jim and Harriet served on the Board of LILA, the Lowcountry Initiative of the Literary Arts. They embraced this fledgling organization designed to promote and connect writers and readers throughout the state, in ways that embody their generosity and sense of humor – creating an actual character named Lila – who was a young woman with various amusing attributes.  This kind of commitment to writers and community has created a supportive environment that encourages and nurtures the young more inexperienced writers.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat children and young people, and Jim was especially generous in that way. His famous writing studio behind the house was a kind of museum – filled with weapons collected from all over the world and artifacts that fascinated my sons. All of these things were references for the objects Jim created and described in his fiction, of course, but he would explain each item in great detail to my sons and treat their questions with enormous respect.  Kids are funny – they know when someone genuinely cares about them. They know when someone is really listening. And when they really like an adult, they will call the adult by their first name in the same they would call a friend by his or her first name. From the beginning the Rigneys were Jim and Harriet. In some circles this might be considered disrespectful, but the Rigneys were flattered and encouraged it.

I am overflowing with stories and memories – the week before Christmas when I discovered a box of signed Robert Jordan books beside the front door of our house – a gift for one of my high school creative writing students who was suffering from pneumonia and happened to be a huge Robert Jordan fan……. The round-trip shared limo ride (courtesy of Jim’s publisher) to a book event in Winston-Salem, and the subsequent discovery that a limousine can’t fit through the drive-through lane at Burger King….. a ceremony with guests, and hors d’oeuvres, to release my son’s turtles, which had outgrown our fish tank, released  into the pond in Jim and Harriet’s backyard  …..the courage he showed in the face of devastating illness and always the humor – referring to the nurses who drew his blood as vampires and ….the way Jim looked at Harriet……..

This week we mourn his tenderness and genius.  He will live forever in the hearts of those who knew him and the collective imagination of millions of readers whose lives were touched by his words.

 originally published in The Post & Courier September 2007

 

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by | November 24, 2012

Mourning Jack Gilbert

I was so sad to hear of Jack Gilbert’s recent death. What a truly great poet he was. I am posting a review of his book Refusing Heaven that was published in The Post and Courier in March 2005.

REFUSING HEAVEN Poems by Jack Gilbert, Knopf. 92 pages. $25.00

Many years ago, poet Rainier Maria Rilke wrote a famous piece called FOR THE SAKE OF A  SINGLE POEM, in which he describes the value of living your life to its fullest and waiting for the wisdom that time brings before you seriously attempt to write poetry.  “You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime”, he instructs, ”and a long one if possible, and then, and only then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.” It’s as if Jack Gilbert has lived his life, according to Rilke’s teachings .  Gilbert’s latest  book, REFUSING HEAVEN, is full of poems that could only have been written by  someone who has lived his life intensely and honestly and then had the courage to report back all the suffering and joy that this rich life has brought.  Luminous and profoundly moving, Gilbert has written  the kind of poems that you copy on a little piece of paper, put in your pocket  and carry around with you just in case you need to remember what it is you’re doing here in the first place.

The poems in REFUSING HEAVEN are wise and spiritual.  The message of the title weaves the poems together.  Nowhere is this message clearer than in the first poem “A Brief For The Defense,” which begins with the honest reminder Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If  babies / are not starving someplace, they are starving / somewhere else….and moves toward the conclusion that  We must risk delight,  and accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world  knowing that  there will be music despite everything.”   This kind of  affirmation is the reason we read the greatest poets and the wisest prophets.  We are all broken.  We are all hurt.

Sometimes we need someone like Jack Gilbert to remind us that despite everything the world can be a beautiful place and that love in all of its manifestations is still the very best thing about being  alive.   We are lucky that Jack Gilbert is among us.  Who else would remind us:  We are given the  trees so we can know/ what God looks like.  And rivers/ so we might understand Him.    

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by | November 24, 2012

The Power of Language, the story behind Marc Cohn and Michael Silverstone’s song “Live Out the String”

The Power of Language

Poetry is one of the only situations when language is scrutinized for more than meaning.  The sound and juxtaposition of words matter, as well as the magical combination of words.  In poems, words have a kind of power and resonance that they don’t necessarily have in another context.  There is something enormously satisfying about the way poets find just the right words to describe powerful truths.  This is part of the inherent joy in reading a poem.

I was reminded of this power quite recently, in a very unexpected way.  It happened in a song.  Song lyrics are like poetry, and some songs quite literally are poems.  The song is called “Live Out the String,” and it was written by singer/song writer Marc Cohn and my friend Michael Silverstone. The origins of the song are poetic and embody the power of language in ways that warrant explanation.

It all begins with a powerful friendship forged by a creative bond. Both Michael and Marc went to high school together in Ohio, where they played in the same garage band.  The both attended Oberlin College, where they were roommates.  They continued to play in a band together.  They both wrote songs.  After college they went their separate ways.  Marc stuck with music and Michael pursued writing. Michael and I worked together in publishing in New York when we were in our 30s.  We have been friends ever since then. Michael is the author of 6 books.  Marc Cohen became a nationally known Grammy Award winning singer/song writer (“Walking In Memphis.”)

But life took an unexpected turn for Marc Cohn when he was shot in the head in Colorado during an attempted car-jacking in 2005.  He survived the ordeal, and in the days and weeks that followed he received get well wishes from countless friends and fans.  He says that Michael had always been his most supportive friend in terms of his career, so it is no surprise that in a time of crisis Michael sent Marc an e-mail that was the most moving of all the notes Marc received.  In subsequent interviews Cohn praised the poetic quality of the language and the meaning of Michael’s message.  Here are some samples of passages that found their way into the song “Live Out the String” :

Who knows if we have angels on our shoulder right now with the devil in the street who knows if it means we got more work to do Hey baby don’t the air taste sweet and just when a meteorite has fallen in the chair when you got up from to answer the phone will you live every moment like it just might be the last…..

“The inspiration came from specific found art that is now in the song,” Michael explained, “Each word had a reason for being there.  Marc turned what he felt was the essence of what he got from this note into a song using phrases, but repeating certain ones, (such as “live out the string” and “sometimes you have to get down on your knees”) putting them into a different order, and putting himself into it, and making that personal to him.” The song literally opens with lines Michael wrote to Marc, “Maybe life is curious to see what you would do/With the gift of being left alive.”  Michael wanted to articulate the unique possibility Mark had to cherish and celebrate life in ways he possibly hadn’t considered.

We all wish that it didn’t take a crisis or near-death experience to fully appreciate our lives, but that is the gift we are given sometimes.  A song or poem that articulates such appreciation is a way to make us all count our blessings.  “Live Out the String” is Marc and Michael’s gift to us.

 

Live Out the String

Maybe life is curious to see what you would do
With the gift of being left alive
How love, how give
Spread the higher purpose
And cut through all the shuck and jive
It’s only natural, maybe superstitious
To try and find the meaning in beating the odds
Cause sometimes you gotta (get down on your knees)
Sometime (could you get down on your knees)
Sometimes baby (maybe get down on your knees)
And thank the whole wide universe of God’s for letting you…

Live out the string
A little longer boy
Raise your voice and make a joyful noise
Ain’t no guarantee of anything
Live out the string

Now that a meteorite has fallen in the chair
You just got up to answer the phone
Will you live every moment like it just might be the last
Or will you still just bitch and moan
Fate is kind, fate is cruel, fate is terminally cool
It’s a random interruption in the middle of your groove
But sometime (won’t you get down on your knees)
Sometime (get down on your knees)
Sometimes baby (better get down on your knees)
And find yourself a deeper groove, yeah…

Live out the string
A little longer boy
Raise your voice and make a joyful noise
Ain’t no guarantee of anything
So live out the string (the string)

Who knows if we got angels on our shoulders (move on)
Right now with the devil in the street
Who knows if it means we got more work to do
But hey baby, don’t the air taste sweet

Written by Marc Cohn and Michael Silverstone, from the album JOIN THE PARADE, Decca Records

   

 

 This article was previously published in The Post & Courier 

 

 

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by | April 16, 2012

He Taught Me How to Love the Blues, Memories of Writer Buddy Nordan

He Taught Me How to Love the Blues

Like everyone who knew Lewis “Buddy” Nordan, I was so sad to hear of his passing on Friday April 13th. Buddy was one of the truly great southern writers, and his novels and short stories were intensely original.  He has a sense of humor that crossed over into his writing. But his best known book, Wolf Whistle, deals with the murder of Emmett Till. I think it’s one of the best American novels ever written.  Born and raised in Mississippi, his work was characterized by what you might call “Mississippi magical realism.”  No one in the world wrote like Buddy Nordan.  He didn’t get a book published until he was 45, which is inspirational to say the least.  He got his PhD from Auburn, where his focus was Shakespeare.

When I think of Buddy I remember his stories, his endless collection of blues T-shirts, his charm and his wit. He dressed in jeans like a teenager, and he talked about music and film more than he talked about books. The first time I met him we were on the same program doing a reading for a fund raiser.  I had a migraine aura and was having a hard time seeing the poems I planned to read. “Stick with sex and death darlin’,” he said with his a sweet southern accent, “you’ll do just fine.”  I loved him the minute I met him. The last time I saw him was at The Virginia Center for the Arts. The last night of the residency, a bunch of us stayed up all night to watch movies like kids at a slumber party. I can’t remember what movies we watched; I just remember how much fun we all had together.  I always thought I’d see him one more time, but I count my lucky stars for all the wonderful memories I have of this completely irreplaceable man.

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by | November 3, 2011

Atsuro Riley

I recently had the privilege of introducing my friend Atsuro Riley at the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia, SC. As South Carolina’s Poet Laureate I was particularly pleased to be able to welcome him home. Atsuro lives in CA, but he was raised in the Lowcountry, which is readily apparent in his work. His mother seemed to always be in the kitchen baking biscuits or pickling okra – poem “Skin” Dawn is cracking, and Mama’s fingering flour in a bowl…..and his father was doing classic low country fatherly things, as in the poem “Map” Daddy goes./Trolling and trawling and crawfishing and crabbing and bass-boating …creek-shrimping and cooler- dragging and coon-chasing and dove dogging and so on…

The poems in his first collection Romey’s Order (just out with University of Chicago Press) are filled with black rivers, and all the creatures, plants and people that inhabit what he refers to  as his “blood home.” The poem sequence told by a boy named Romey, is the most original collection of poems I have come across.  Atsuro’s friend, US Poet Laureate said “When you put this book down, American poetry will be different than when you picked it up.”

There’s an epigraph by Seamus Heaney at the front of the collection, and there is much about this book that reminds me of Heaney’s work – the intense imagery and musical use of the vernacular that evoke a particular place, (Heaney’s Ireland, Riley’s Lowcountry – 2 very different places but each collection of poems equally and uniquely evocative of a place).

It is so rare that a poet is equally gifted in terms of imagery and musicality –  almost unheard of actually. As Kay Ryan said – I don’t know how writing can be at the same time so visceral and so aesthetic. There is a density to these poems, a kind of clustering of objects and sounds so that the poems themselves seem like something pulled from the earth – like glitter filled rocks that have spent centuries being formed.

Brief Bio:

His work has appeared in Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets. He has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the Wood Prize from Poetry magazine.  He just won a 2010 Witter Bynner Fellowship.

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by | October 22, 2011

Taha Muhammad Ali

I was deeply saddened to hear of the recent death of  the poet Taha Muhammad Ali. He was a great spirit, and his poetry will endure through the ages. I was privileged to meet Taha and spend time with him when we both taught at the Block Island Poetry Project several years ago. The following essay appeared in The Post and Courier in April 2008.

 
 
Taha Muhammad Ali, Poet, Storyteller, Survivor
Sometimes one person’s story can illuminate history.  Palestinian poet Taha Mohammad Ali’s life is that kind of story.  In Adina Hoffman’s new biography about Taha, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, published by Yale University Press, the life of this gifted poet unfolds against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book reads like a novel and balances the personal story of Taha and his family with his fascinating literary development. I was astonished to read in the prelude to the biography, that “no one has ever written a biography of a Palestinian writer before, in any language (including Arabic)… Adina lives in Israel, and her research and open minded approach to the material imbue the book with a heartfelt and accurate portrayal of historical events most of us no very little about.
I was fortunate to meet Taha, Adina, and her husband Peter Cole; who translates Taha’s poetry, when we taught together last year at The Block Island Poetry Project in a series of workshops called “Poetry, Resilience, and the Human Spirit.”  Peter is a prize winning poet and translator. Adina is a renowned essayist, critic and author. They are both Jewish Americans who have lived in Jerusalem for many years. Taha, well into his seventies, is one of the most charming people I have ever met in my life. He is a born story teller and fills every room he enters with laughter. He couldn’t stop talking about the brief ferry ride over to the island, because he had never been on a boat before. Amazing! When Taha does poetry readings, Peter reads his poems in English. If you met these three incredibly gifted people you would guess they are family. Their love for one another is palpable.  In the context of the Middle East, it is a most extraordinary relationship.  At times the situation in that part of the world seems like a tangled knot that no one can unravel, but this story is a hopeful reminder of the power of the arts to cut across political, religious and cultural differences.
Taha’s life story reads like an epic novel. Born in 1931 in Galilee, Taha and his family were forced into exile from their village of Saffuriyya during the 1948 war which resulted it the founding of Israel. They traveled on foot to Lebanon where they lived for about a year before returning and settling in Nazareth. Saffuriuyya was virtually destroyed in the conflict, and young Taha, who had run a small shop since he was teenager; began to operate a souvenir shop for tourists near the Church of the Annunciation. He married and began raising a family under extremely difficult conditions. (Israeli Arabs lived under martial law until the mid 1960s.) Although he had very little formal education and his wife was illiterate, Taha began to study classical Arabic texts after work. He taught himself English and read American literature. He began writing and publishing stories before publishing poetry, which didn’t appear in periodicals until the 1970s.
His poetry eventually landed him in the US, where he and Peter read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in front of thousands. In 2006, Copper Canyon Press published an excellent collection of translations of Taha’s poetry in So What, New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005, which introduced Taha’s poems to a large English speaking audience. His poetry is often narrative in nature and uses colloquial speech, which is an innovative approach for one writing originally in literary Arabic. Like Adina’a biography, the poems alternative between the personal and public sphere; between intense sadness and overwhelming joy. The poem “Twigs” embodies Taha’s joie de vivre and wisdom in the face of the tragic times he has lived through.
Twigs
By Taha Muhammad Ali
Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.
My love for you
is what’s magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.
My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
beyond the realm of women.
And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.
After we die
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we’ve done,
and on all that we’ve longed for,
on all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to putrefy
within us.
(“Twigs,” from So What, New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005 by Taha Muhammad Ali – translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin – is reprinted with permission of Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2006.)

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