December 16, 2013

The good folks at Bedford St. Martins sent me an e-mail last week, asking me to sign a permission form to use my little piece of memoir, "Winter Count, 1964" for the eleventh edition of their college level Reader for writing classes, Literature, The Human Experience, Reading and Writing. The piece has been in the last few editions of this excellent Reader, edited by Richard Abcarian, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen, and I'm honored to be in it. "Winter Count, 1964" is in the "Love and Hate" nonfiction section and I'm right behing "1 Corinthians 13," by Paul, and "No Name Woman," by Maxine Hong Kingston. Not bad company! I posted "Winter Count, 1964" back in September when I talked about an e-mail exchange that I had with an MFA student about the "truth" of creative nonfiction, but so you don't have to go hunting for the that post, I'm going to go ahead and repost the story below.

Winter Count, 1964

      When Sherri Luna rammed Jerry’s Kruger’s crew cut head into the handball court wall at Kester Avenue Elementary school on February 15, 1964, I knew she loved him, a swirling butch, embarrassed sort of love that denied itself even as it was expressed. She loved him the way a 9-year old beefy-ankled, white socked, scuffed-up saddle shoed, valley girl Chicana loves a drawly red necked, red haired, red freckled, cracker son of a Pentecostal preacher from Oklahoma who wouldn’t let his kid slow dance in Miss Arlington’s A4 class, not because Miss Arlington was a wafer thin woman with a 2-foot high beehive hairdo that made her look like an alien from some planet of white porcelain doll people with blood red lips and finger nails long and sharp as steak knives, but because Jerry’s preacher pa didn’t believe 9-year olds much less anybody should be cradling another’s body in their arms and breathing softly on their necks as they swayed to music. Nosiree, Sherri Luna didn’t love Jerry that way, the slow dance, fandango way, where holding someone close is as sweet and natural as lying on your back in the back yard watching the clouds and letting the sunlight kiss your cheek, but she loved him just the same. I knew it when I first saw her rub her body up against Jerry’s blue jeans as she slugged him in the arm by the water fountain the first day he came to class that winter. Plus, she didn’t want to slow dance, not because she didn’t believe in it, but because she was constitutionally against any request that curled out of Miss Arlington’s pouty lips.

      “Just do it, honey.”

      “No.”

      “Please?”

      “No, I said!”

            So, “Ka-Chunk,” went Jerry’s head, cradled in Sherri’s gentle headlock when Miss Arlington was putting on a scratchy waltz on the mono record player that Ricky LaConte had lugged out onto the playground after lunch. Ricky, a fat kid who liked to have us punch his stomach in the boy’s room until his bubbly flesh was filled with blotches like lesions, liked to do such favors, his arm shooting up like a rocket ship out of its socket every time Miss Arlington asked with those pouty lips just who would like to do this or that for her. And that’s a sort of love, too, don’t get me wrong, only it wasn’t Sherri Luna’s sort of love. She needed to touch the someone she loved, even if she didn’t understand what the yearning in her heart was asking her nine-year old body to do.

            So, “Ka-Chunk.”

I was breathing my face into Melinda Coates’ blond ringlets, getting hairs twisted in my glasses’ hinges and imagining myself in heaven and then feeling embarrassed for even thinking such a slack-brained thing as that when I heard it.

            “Ka-Chunk,” echoing into the mauve plastic handball court wall that rose out of the blacktop playground surrounded by bungalows, chain-link fence, and honeysuckle rustling in the winter breeze like our breaths on one another’s necks as we danced.

            “Ka-Chunk.”

            “That was fun,” Jerry laughed. “Do it again,” with “again” drawled out so long, so slow, that it slobbered and dribbled out of his mouth into a dopey-grinned, three-syllabled, shrieky “a-gaaa-in.”

            “Do it a-gaa-in.”

            Poor Ricky. He was right next to me, swaying sort of sad-like, out of time and out of step with Louise Dolan. He wanted to be in that headlock, too, I guess. Maybe he thought that the bumps on his forehead would go with the blotches on his stomach. I don’t know, but I know this. Sheri would have none of him. Ricky wasn’t Jerry in any way, shape, or form and Sherri Luna loved Jerry. That was that, end of the story. We were dancing that Strauss waltz you see in 2001 when the ship docks with the space station, and I swear I saw her gently bend over as pretty as you please and nibble out a tongue-licked hickey on that sun-burnt, freckly red neck of his when she thought no one was looking. We stared and stared. Not even the creamy touch of Melinda Coates could keep me from it. No one in Miss Arlington’s A4 class in 1964 had ever seen such a thing.

And then she counted to three. And then she did it again.

And then she did it again. And I swear she didn’t miss a beat, not a one, not a single one.

One of the things that I love about the piece being in Literature, The Human Experience are the "For Analysis" questions at the end of the story. I was never very good at answering those sorts of questions when I was a student, and I at first I was amused when I read the questions for my piece. But on further reflection I found them pretty smart and intriguing. Here they are:

1. Why does Sherri Luna bang Jerry's head again the ground? Why does he ask her to do it again?

2. Why does Ricky let people punch him in the stomach? What about the 'blotches' left by the punches parallels the hickey Sherri leaves on Jerry's neck?

3. A "winter count" is a story or oral history used by certain Native American tribes to mark individual years in tribal history by retelling an event from that year that is memorable or significant. Why do you think the incident retold in this essay is significant enough to mark its year?

"Winter Counts, 1964" is in large part about the inarticulate need  kids have of expressing physical intimacy towards one another, and these "For Analysis" questions get at that, as does the first of the two "Writing Topics" prompts that follow them:

In what other way do people (of all ages) manifest the combination of desire for and fear of physical intimacy. Reflect on ways in which you and people you have observed or read about deal (or don't deal) with this tension.

By now I'm thinking these editors are really smart! One often writes, as Frank O'Hara wrote, on one's "nerve," and, while we might intuit these larger ideas in our poems and stories, we often don't fully articulate them as we're writing. At least, I don't. And so I'm happy, and also a bit humbled, that Messrs. Abcarian, Klotz, and Cohen have made these connections in my work.

In between the "For Analysis" questions and  the "Writing Topics" prompts are two "Making Connections" questions, in which they ask students to compare my story to a poem by one of my favorite contemporary poets, Galway Kinnell (I wrote my senior thesis on his work when I was at Reed College many moons ago), and one of my favorite fiction writers, Toni Cade Bambara. I thought that was pretty cool, too, as was their final "Writing Topics" prompt:

"'Ka-chunk,' went Jerry's head" (para. 6). Write a short essay in which you relate an incident or a moment, using the vivid transcription of sound."

It all makes me wonder, how would I answer these smart prompts and questions? How would you?

I hope your writing is going well this week.

All best,

S.D. Lishan

December 12, 2013

I've just finished reading and grading the last of the portfolios of poems written by students in my Poetry Writing II class this past autumn semester at The Ohio State University. It was a good class, and I love my students, but all semester long I feel that I've been haranguing them about their lack and misuse of punctuation in their poems. Some of my students, of course, use punctuation well, eloquently even, but others seem to take it as a point of pride and of their right of personal expression to eschew the use of commas, periods, and the other tools they have available to them in their grammatical toolbox.

I'm all for their right of personal expression, of course, and I've told my students so. And we've talked about poets who eschew the use of punctuation and who write beautiful and extraordinary poems that have no punctuation at all. For example I've shared with them poems like this one by W.S. Merwin, from his book, The Vixen (published by Knopf, 1996), on p. 69:

Vixen

Comet of stillness princess of what is over
     high note held without trembling without voice without sound
aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets 
     of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences
never caught in words warden of where the river went
     touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished
window onto the hidden place and the other time
     at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting
in the moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born
     you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me
you are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you
     even now you are unharmed even now perfect
as you have always been now when your light paws are running
     on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you
when I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer
     when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars
from the creeds of difference and contradictions
     that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications
as long as it lasted until something that we were
     had ended when you are no longer anything
let me catch sight of you again going over the wall
     and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures
guttering on a screen let my words find their own
     places in the silence after the animals.


On might even say that the lack of punctuation in Merwin's fine, fine poem is crucial to what Frost called "the sound of sense"; that is, in this poem in part about the slipping away from the "creeds of difference and contradictions" that separate the "I" in the poem from the female fox s/he espies in the moonlight, part of that process of becoming a part of that something greater beyond the self is to slip away from the halters of punctuation, that peculiarly human invention.  Punctuations, with its pauses and divisions, plays no part in the more interconnected world that the "I" in Merwin's poem desires, a place where his/her "words find their own/ places in the silences after the animals."

But such was not the case for some of my students. Too often the lack of punctuation hindered the sound and sense of their poems. For these students, as they talked about it in class, punctuation was a hassle, a bother, something that, because it needed to be attended to, prevented them from fully entering the unfettered worlds of personal utterance that they so ardently desired. These students kept to these beliefs even as I pointed out what they were giving up by avoiding punctuation: the ability to create and control their meaning, to create more nuance, to be more expressive in their tone, to have, in effect, an even more powerful personal utterance.

As an example of how punctuation, even at the level of an addition or deletion of a humble comma, can make a difference in a poem, I shared with my students Robert Frost's "Stopping  by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Here's the version of the poem that you can find on the Poetry Foundation's website (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171621):

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.


To the Poetry Foundation's credit, this is the version of the poem that was printed most often during Frost's lifetime. But after his death in 1963, Frost's publisher, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, brought out a collected edition of his poems, The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. This was the edition that most general readers of Frost encountered in the years after the great poet's passing, and the edition from which many anthologies took their texts of Frost's poems. However, as the poet Donald Hall wrote in a now famous article,  "Robert Frost Corrupted," which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in March, 1982, "the text is corrupt: the editor has altered the rhythm of Frost's poems by repunctuating them." You can find the whole of the article reprinted online at the PN Review (http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=6740>).

Hall cites Lathem arguments that he was regularizing and tidying up the punctuation in Frost's poems for the general reader, but Hall is still critical on the grounds that Lathem messes up the music of Frost's poems. Here's an excerpt from the sixth paragraph of Hall's article:

Frost cared for the sound of verse. He went so far as to claim that words existed in order to make noises: 'Words are only valuable in writing as they serve to indicate particular sentence sounds.' Frost seemed not to have cared much for assonance, lush vowels rubbing against each other. He cared most for the cadence of talk, with the nudge and thrust of intelligence in pace and pitch. In his work he continually referred to a semantics of noise. 'Remember,' he told us, 'that the sentence sound often says more than the words . . . . 'There are tones of voice that mean more than words.' Another phrase he liked was 'the sound of sense', the way cadence makes sense and sense makes cadence.'. . . if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skilfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre.'

Nicely put, but Hall is most critical of Lathem's changes to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," particularly of the comma that he added in line 13 of the poem, not so much because the sound of the line was altered, but because the meaning was. Hall writes, "Frost wrote the line 'The woods are lovely, dark and deep'. We do not find this line in The Poetry of Robert Frost. Instead we find: 'The woods are lovely, dark, and deep'. To say that the woods are 1) lovely, 2) dark, and 3) deep differs considerably from claiming that they are lovely in that they are dark and deep. In Frost's line, the general adjective 'lovely' is explained by the more particular modifiers 'dark' and 'deep'. In the editor's line, the egalitarian threesome appears to be parallel, but of course it is not -- it is as if we proclaimed that a farmer grew apples, Mclntoshes, and Northern Spies.

In other words, Frost meant "dark and deep" as an appositive, "a word or group of words that renames the noun or pronoun that comes before it," as Lynn Quitman Troyka and Douglas Hesse write on p. 341 of Quick Access, Reference for Writers. "Dark and deep" are what "lovely means, Frost tells us; they're not separate from it, as Lathem's grammatical change claims. Big difference!

I think it's precisely the lack of that comma between "dark" and "and" in line 13 that helps make "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" so great. It enables the poem to rise into the realm of deeper, more profound meaning. To be "Dark and deep" is to be "lovely." Lovely. Happily, Hall's article had an effect, and, as the Poetry Foundation's example above shows, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is now more often than not printed as it was in the poet's time. Also lovely.  

And so I've been thinking of my dear students and of Donald Hall and Robert Frost, and of poor, misguided Professor Lathem, and I've been on the lookout for beautifully punctuated sentences in my reading this week. I could of course go to favorites like Jane Austen, but here's one more recent, in the first volume of Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative, which I've been having a gas reading to help me bone up on my Civil War history as I work on my novel, Miss Emily's Book of Spells.  In this paragraph on pp. 166-167 that ends section 2 of the book, Foote is describing the end of the first year of the war, 1861, and of how, as the year ends, the two presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis are peering out their respective windows one hundred miles apart, keeping their vigil on the war from opposite directions. "At the far ends of the north-south road connecting the two capitals they strained to see and understand each other, peering as if across a darkling plain," Foote writes. And then he writes the following two sentences:

Soon now, that hundred miles of Virginia with its glittering rivers and dusty turnpikes, its fields of grain and rolling pastures, the peace of generations soft upon it like the softness in the voices of its people, would be obscured by the swirl and bank of cannon smoke, stitched by the fitful stabs of muzzle flashes, until at last, lurid as the floor of hell itself, it would seem to have been made for war as deliberately as a chessboard was designed for chess. Even the place-names on the map, which now were merely quaint, would take on the sound of crackling flame and distant thunder, the Biblical, Indian, Anglo-Saxon names of hamlets and creeks and crossroads, for the most part unimportant in themselves until the day when the armies came together, as often by accident as on purpose, to give the scattered names a permanence and settle what manner of life the future generations were to lead."

Two sentences, the first 84 words, the second 74, with their clauses building upon clauses, showcasing Foote's affection for the people and of the land, sentences parsed by commas that lead each of these sentences onward to their next clause and poetic utterance, and that help the sentences become a road of connections, too, like that road connecting Washington and Richmond with Lincoln and Jefferson at its ends. Foote reminds us, if we needed it, that there's a sound and sense, as well as a poetry, in prose, as well.

And so I've been thinking about punctuation in my own work as well, too, as in this little poem that I've been working on recently, as the cold has descended on much of the country these past few weeks:


Midwinter

Since noon you've sat

on a sofa's pillow,
like a drowsy cat
by a sunlit window.

You stretch and purr

and walk about,
inmate in stir
who can't get out.

Outside it snows;

the wind bends
its touchless touch

toward what it knows:
the endless ends,
its hush-less hush.

Just as that comma in Frost's 13th line in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" caused such consternation in Donald Hall, I've been fretting on the comma in the 13th line of my little poem. What indeed does the wind know in midwinter? And is what it knows truer with the comma, or without it? "The endless ends/ its hush-less hush," or, as the comma suggests, is "its hush-less hush" that which comprises "the endless ends"?  Not quite what the definition of "lovely" is perhaps, but still beguiling I hope.

Which version do you prefer?

December 3, 2013

Tomorrow night I'll be one of the judges in the finals of Centennial High School's Poetry Out Loud competition. Sarah E. Barry, who along with her fellow English teacher, Lynn Taylor, coordinates the program at Centennial, has asked me participate. The Poetry Out Loud program was piloted in 2005 and since then millions of students from across the country have participated. Over the years thousands of poems have been learned, memorized, and taken to heart. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarship money has been awarded to deserving students. The Poetry Out Loud Program is a big deal. I'm honored to have been asked. 

Centennial is ranked one of the best high schools in the Columbus City School system, and Ms. Barry and Ms. Taylor, both of whom are National Board Certified teachers, a very difficult-to-earn certification awarded to the nation's best K-12 teachers, are two of the reasons why. It is primarily through their efforts that Centennial has entered into this national recitation contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. They've been doing this for three years now, and more than one of their students have advanced the finals in the state competition, whose winners advance to the National Finals in the spring, where $50,000 in awards and school stipends will be awarded.

So a lot is at stake, and Ms. Barry and Ms. Taylor have been working hard with the twenty-six students who will be participating  in tomorrow night's competition, helping these winners in the classroom competitions to select and understand the two poems they'll be reciting in the school-wide competition, working with them as they memorize their "lines," pushing them, inspiriting them.

As judge, I have to evaluate each student for her "Physical Presence," her "Voice and Articulation," her "Dramatic Appropriateness,"  her "Evidence of Understanding," her poem's "Level of Complexity,"and her "Overall Performance." They'll be around five of us judges, and I'll be sitting next to my good friend and fellow writer and teacher of poetry at The Ohio State University, Mike Lohre. It will be a fast-paced night, and the energy in the school auditorium where the competition is  held will be electric.

The students will be all dressed up, excited and nervous, and they'll come up onstage, one by one, stand alone at the microphone, and perform their first poem choice to the audience spread out below them. From that first round, five students will be selected to move on to the second round. Now the judging really gets tough. Only one can more on to the next level. The students will be reciting everything from contemporary favorites like Maya Angelou's "Caged Bird" or Philip Levine's much anthologized poem, "They Feed They Lion," as well as poems by other contemporary poets such as Joy Harjo, W.D. Ehrhart, Amiri Baraka, Gregory Pardlo, Eaven Boland, Mark Strand, and Ai, to poems by more canonized poets like Walt Whitman, Christina Rossetti,  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Hardy, Countee Cullen, Robert Frost, Anne Bradstreet, Wilfred Owen, and Emily Bronte.

As you might imagine, the pedagogical fruits from gaining such intimacy with great poems are many, and in the auditorium the sweet words will soar. It will be a great night, a memorable evening. I can't wait.