Category: Poetry (Page 1 of 11)

Your Moment of Zen: Frank LaRue Owen’s ‘The Temple of Warm Harmony’

“Afoot and light hearted, I take to the open road.” So begins Whitman’s long poem “Song of the Open Road,” a delightful, meandering meditation on what it means to be human. A theme that Whitman hammers into this poem, without a hint of subtlety, is the familiar “the journey is the destination,” a trope that has had countless iterations over time. Frank LaRue Owen’s new book, The Temple of Warm Harmony, follows in the same vein as Whitman, Homer, and Kerouac, yet he finds inspiration in the Eastern traditions of Zen and Pure Land Buddhism. It’s hard to classify which genre to place Temple: it could be shelved with poetry or with metaphysical studies or Zen meditation. But tacking The Temple of Warm Harmony down into a tidy category is antithetical to the book’s very purpose. Rather than telling us to be something, Owen’s poems invite us to simply be, whatever and wherever we are.

The book is arranged like a classical comedy. Poems at the beginning of the book show the speaker’s struggle with strife, loneliness, and feeling spiritually lost, having lost the tao, or the path, upon which he wishes to tread. In the end, though, we gain hope. “Sometimes the inner and outer/ move along like birds/ gliding in different directions,” Owen tells us in “Teaching of the Seasons.” Even though these “birds” of body and soul are moving in opposite directions, there is a peace to this split. They are “gliding,” unobstructed, to their various ends. Sometimes—often —the physical and spiritual are at opposing ends to each other, yet Owen doesn’t require that our currents be parallel for us to find contentment.

There are times when a reader’s defensiveness might make one look at Owen’s high-minded contentment as arrogance, but nothing could be farther from the truth. “Who is this guy, and why does he claim to have it all figured out,” one might ask. Well, he doesn’t know it all, and this is the source of the book’s wisdom. Part metaphysical self-help guide, part image-driven poetry, part Zen meditative koan collection, The Temple of Warm Harmony offers quiet in a time we desperately need it. When the barrage of news and tweets and noise (literal and otherwise) send us into an overwhelmed, bloated fatigue, Frank LaRue Owen offers us simplicity.

Frank LaRue Owen will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, November 20, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss The Temple of Warm Harmony. He will also be at Lemuria on Saturday, December 21, at 2:00 p.m. in a joint event with Beth Kander, author of Born in Syn.

‘Conversations with Gary Snyder’ reveals prophetic Zen mind rooted in North American earth

By Frank LaRue Owen. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 7)

Some writers move, inspire, or entertain their readers. Other writers create movements of conscience and spark poetic consciousness in whole generations of people that follow them. Gary Snyder is of the latter feather.

In Conversations with Gary Snyder, we are offered a rare glimpse into the inner life of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet through twenty-one interviews from different phases of his esteemed career. Like an archaeological dig that gently brushes away the dust of years to reveal the storied bones of life and culture, the masterful curation of these insightful conversations from different chapters of Snyder’s life reveals a gleaming thread of topics that aren’t just relevant to American literature, but—even five decades later in some cases—are themes that remain deeply pertinent to the times we’re living through.

Readers will find that many of the collected interviews grapple with subjects that require us to look in the mirror at who we are as a society. In this way, the book is not merely about a poet or his poems, but is, all-at-once, a cultural history, an ecological indictment, and a disturbingly visionary statement in the psychological, sociological, and futuristic sense.

Those already familiar with Gary Snyder are in for a real treat. Devotees of his poetry are no strangers to the subtle “fragrances” that hover like incense in the background of his writings. Gathered at the periphery of a Snyder poem or essay, or scampering right through the middle of one, we encounter Pacific Northwest Coast native lore, a flash of Buddhism, stirrings of deep ecological empathy, or an outright protest about the Western world’s assault on the natural world. All of these subjects, and more, rush forward on full display as major features in the interviews editor David Stephen Calonne has compiled.

From his enshrined place within early American Beat poetry (the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums was modeled after Snyder) to his eloquent articulation of his writing process as stemming from an obviously Zen-trained body-mind integration, what may have once been an understated personality silhouette for some readers of Snyder emerges full-force as a three-dimensional profile of an American national treasure.

In each of the interviews—ranging from sources as diverse as Newsweek, Shambhala Sun magazine, an interview at Naropa University’s Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and a truly fascinating dialogue from the late ’60s between philosopher Alan Watts, poet Allen Ginsberg, psychedelic proponent Timothy Leary, and Snyder—we come face to face with the mind-essence of an authentic American Zen man, who is also known to some by his dharma name Chofu (“Listen to the Wind”).

The end result can only be a singular conclusion. Snyder is of a rare breed; a veteran “psychonaut” (explorer of consciousness and the spirit of place). In this way, a refreshing portrait is offered of a searingly awake person, born in the U.S. but truly liberated from the constraints, blind spots, spiritual impediments, and cultural biases of mindless consumerism and the modern Judeo-Christian worldview.

Even more important, by the time readers of this work reach the final pages, they will receive the distilled benefits of Snyder’s lifelong journey in the form of an invitation; to be more at home in one’s own skin, to hold an allegiance to the deeper story flowing beneath our troubled national psyche, to be conscious that we all belong to a sacred reality we need desperately to remember—a planetary citizenship that thinks of humanity and nature as one extended family.

Frank LaRue Owen is a Mississippi native, an alumnus of Naropa University, and the author of three books of poetry, The School of Soft-Attention,The Temple of Warm Harmony, and the forthcoming 2020 release Stirrup of the Sun & Moon. He will be a panelist in the upcoming Mississippi Book Festival, August 17, 2019, at the Mississippi State Capitol.

Do the ‘Dead Man’s Float’ with us on March 26 to honor Jim Harrison

If you stick around the store long enough, you’ll hear John talk about Jim Harrison. The average time span for this happening is 5.68 minutes. I’ve timed it.

And if you read any of Harrison’s work, especially, his poetry, you’ll understand why. It’s meditative, but not intimidating. Funny, but not flippant. In his last book, Dead Man’s Float, he thinks a lot about mortality—particularly his own—without being morbid. Let’s take a look at his short poem “Birds.”

The birds are flying around frantically
in the thunderstorm that just began, the
first in weeks and weeks. They are enjoying
themselves. I think I’ll join them.

I like this poem because of how much work it can do, depending on what you’re looking for. It can either be a lighthearted quick glimpse out of a window through which we see a storm-littered yard punctuated with birds playing and a grown man frolicking in a sort of second childhood. And/or/also, we can view Harrison’s signature focus on birds and landscapes as a longing for purity, for a spiritual weightlessness freed from the burdens of life itself: a mashup of Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches on the soul” and Keats’ nightingale that sings because it doesn’t live in a space “Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.” These birds are boundless, and Harrison wants that same freedom. He’s welcoming flying from this earth. Again, as Dickinson says, “from the earth, the light balloon asks nothing but release.”

Jim Harrison knew he was dying when he wrote the poems in Dead Man’s Float. The grace with which he accepts his very end is comforting, but not all of the poems are about his life’s sunset. In another imitating-animals move, the poem “Mad Dog,” Harrison tells us that he “envied the dog lying in the yard,” so he lies down with it, rolling around, unable to find the same level of blissful comfort that his canine counterpart does. We’ve all been here: trying to make ourselves happy but blocked by ourselves. It’s funny, tongue in cheek, light.

On March 26, on the third anniversary of Jim Harrison’s death, fans of Harrison will gather at the bookstore and read aloud from Dead Man’s Float. Join us. You don’t have to read aloud, or even be an expert in poems. Show up and listen. Jim would approve.

Night Hunt
–for Jim Harrison

Through winter-thin trees,
an owl’s empty calls echoes.
No bird to be seen, but
in this near dusk, I hear it—
a clear tunnel of sound.

Branch-rustle and swoop,
the quiet snatch of talons
on ground. One less field
mouse. Silence. Then
the cold song resumes.

-Jamie Dickson

Author Q & A with Frank LaRue Owen

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (November 25)

Frank LaRue Owen’s interest in poetry began to develop in his teens, and his journey to become a poet in his own right has developed alongside his spiritual growth, through years of thoughtful studies of Asian spiritual practice.

His first book of poetry, The School of Soft-Attention, was named the winner of the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize in 2017.

The book puts into words Owen’s reflections on key influences on his life, including the Ch’an/Daoist hermit-poetic tradition, Zen meditation, eco-psychology, and a practice he calls “pure land dreaming.” Shaped by Owen’s diversity of cultural experiences and the depth of his spiritual training, his poems encourage readers to “turn to a new way of seeing, a new way of paying attention to the life within and around us.”

A strategist with a metro area marketing-creative firm, Owen has also completed a second book of poetry, The Temple of Warm Harmony, set to release in fall 2019.

Please tell me about your background and how your many opportunities to experience a variety of cultures in many places has helped shape your life today.

I hail from a family with long-standing roots in Mississippi and East Texas. We’ve been educators, ministers, counselors, attorneys, oilmen, cowboys, poets, and artists.

I spent my formative years in Atlanta and Jackson, with my last year of high school spent in Chapel Hill, N.C., where I was introduced to writing through a creative writing class. That high school teacher sent me to a writer’s conference at University of North Carolina at Winston-Salem. I’ve been writing, in one form or another, ever since.

My moving around so much is largely due to my academic journey and my cultural and spiritual explorations. I spent three years in northern Wisconsin at a small environmental college called Northland College where I had an opportunity to study Asian religions, anthropology, psychology, writing, as well as environmental studies at the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, named for Sigurd Olson, who lived from 1899 to 1982, and was a renowned author, wilderness defender, and teacher.

I attended graduate school at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., North America’s first accredited Buddhist university, which houses not only a graduate school in mindfulness-based counseling psychology, which I graduated from, but also the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, also known as the MFA in Writing and Poetics, founded by the late Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and other poets of note, including one of my poetic mentors, the late Jack Collom.

The School of Soft-Attention, your debut book of poetry, was named the 2017 winner of the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize. Did this honor surprise you?

It was a total surprise to win. Poetry had always been more of a personal exploration, an extension of spiritual practice, and not something I sought to formally publish. I created and maintained some online poetry blogs starting around 2000, but never thought it would lead to actual publishing. In 2016, with a lot of encouragement from various quarters, I gathered up what I considered my best work and entered it in the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize for review.
I still consider myself a ‘work-in-progress’ as a poet, so it was unexpected. But it has resulted in a wonderful publishing relationship with Homebound, which is continuing beyond The School of Soft-Attention.

Which came first–the discovery of your talent for writing poetry, or your serious interest in Eastern philosophies?

I dabbled in poetry as an art form in my teen years, and even read some of the poems of Japan’s greatest poets at that time. But I never really developed it. My involvement with Asian spiritual practice really came first, initially through my study of the Japanese martial art of Aikido starting in 1989, and then study of Zen meditation shortly after. I studied Chinese and Japanese religions academically in my undergraduate years with Thomas Kasulis, a scholar of Asian religions, but quickly realized my interest was that of practitioner and not limited to the academic.

Tell me about your journey with doña Río: who was she, and what did she teach you about life, spirituality, and, ultimately, poetry?

Her name was Darion Gracen, a psychologist, wilderness guide, and practitioner-teacher of Ch’an, or Zen, meditation. She was known by many names, “doña Río” among them, and she served as a mentor to many. Initially, I met Darion in an academic setting, but eventually I studied with her in other contexts. She would host circles of people in the mountains of Colorado where we studied an array of subjects with her rooted in meditative awareness in the natural world. Later, after she moved to the Santa Fe, New Mexico, area, I continued studying with her one-on-one for another decade. She embodied a kind of “curriculum” that combined silent illumination, or meditation from the Ch’an or Zen tradition, the practice of dreamwork, a spiritual approach to experiences in the natural world, and poetics as way to process experiences with all of the above.

Ultimately, what I learned from her was how to make one’s heart-mind an ally, how to attend to the creative process, and how one’s essential connection to the Dao, or, the sacred, transcends conditions.

You dedicate this book to Río and to your parents. Please tell me about your parents and their influence on the direction of your life and poetry.

Although rooted in the social justice tradition of United Methodism, my parents have always been very supportive of my journey of cultural investigation and spiritual inquiry, even if this took me into traditions other than their own.

In large part, I attribute to my parents my curiosity about life, my creativity, my love of nature and history, my ability to ascertain value in the world’s cultures and wisdom traditions, and my open mind. Each in their own way has been shaped by Jungian thought and a love of nature. My father continues to study Jungian psychology and the work of a Jungian named James Hollis. My mother–an artist herself–also taught me from a very young age to consult the Chinese I Ching, or “Book of Changes,” and to pay close attention to dreams as a source of life guidance and wisdom, which dovetailed nicely with my studies later in life.

Explain the term soft-attention, and its meaning in your poetry.

There is a dynamic contrast between urban modernity, with its high-velocity pace and incessant barrage of information and bad news that assaults the senses, and the natural world, which has a slower rhythm and a healing power that restores balance in a person, body and mind. The latter isn’t just a quaint idea. As clearly demonstrated in a book titled Forest Bathing by Dr. Qing Li, it is verified by vast studies by medical science.

As I say in one of my poems, it’s possible to “get too much of the world on you.” When this happens, we may find our consciousness becoming harsh, hardened, disfigured. Too much time lived in such a state is detrimental to our health, both physically and psychologically. So, the turn of phrase, “the school of soft-attention,” is a poetic way of referring to the natural world, what we call “the realm of mountains, forests, and rivers” in Daoist and Zen traditions. Time spent in this “school” invites, invokes, instills a very different quality of consciousness, one characterized by a “soft-attention.” From my point of view as a poet, poetry is about observation and perception. For me, the craft of writing poetry has become inseparable from this “soft-attention.” I essentially can’t write unless I’ve entered that level of awareness.

What do you mean when you describe yourself as a hermit-poet?

In a nutshell, it’s a solitary leaning. I require a lot of solitude, for spiritual practice, artistic practice, landscape practice. From the point of view of Buddhist practice, there are various accepted ways or paths e.g. monastic, lay-householder, etc. Though they may have had earlier training in a community context, hermits go their own way and walk a solitary path in this regard. It was the same with my teacher.

The hermit-poet is something of an archetype in the contemplative and literary traditions of China and Japan. A hermit-poet is someone who has placed contemplative practice and artistic life at the center of their existence. When most Westerners hear the word “hermit” they automatically think “recluse” or “misanthrope.” The terms are not synonymous in the Asian contemplative or literary traditions. A recluse is one who leaves the world behind, never to return. Not so with hermits in Daoist and Zen tradition, who remain in contact with society. In fact, there is an old saying from China that goes ‘the small hermit lives in the mountains; the great or accomplished hermit lives down in the town.’

Many of your poems in this book speak of the ordinary–the everyday things of life. In what ways can readers apply some of the lessons of your poetry to their own lives?

My poetry is not for everyone. There are large swaths of people in modern life–“modernistas,” my late teacher would say–who are content with their compartmentalized life, and with the distractions mainstream culture feeds them. They go to a job; they chase money, perceived social status, wealth, or fame; they go home at the end of the day and spend their nights in a TV-saturated trance.

My poetry deals with other points of focus. The mystery of dreams. The inner life. The non-obvious qualities of the places where we live. Though there are letters strung together into lines, and those lines form what appear to be “poems” on the page, I’m not certain if what I write constitutes poetry. They are snapshots of moments from the flow of existence that issue an invitation to the reader–to ponder the true nature of their life, the life of the soul.

In the end, I would be gratified if one or two of the poems stirred people to be a bit more awake to the passage of their life and to ask a few deeper questions about what matters most.

What role does music play in your life and in your writing?

Alongside time in nature, music is a key part of my life and poetry. Music figures heavily in my creative process of writing and other art-making. Likewise, when I publish poems on my website, purelandpoetry.com, each poem is presented with a specific image and soundscape, usually from the archives of ambient musicians to whom I’m connected like Forrest Fang, Roy Mattson, Steve Roach, or Byron Metcalf. Sometimes their music feels like an extension of a poem. Sometimes a poem feels like an extension of their music.

Tell me about your next book coming up.

The next book, being released in fall 2019 is entitled The Temple of Warm Harmony. In some sense, it is a continuation of the thread or emphasis of The School of Soft-Attention. However, I do take up some new themes and orientations. The Temple of Warm Harmony is divided into three sections: The World of Red Dust, Heartbreak and Armoring, and Entering the Temple of Warm Harmony.

We are living in tumultuous times, culturally, socially, and environmentally. The concept of “the world of red dust” comes from a very ancient Chinese Daoist and Ch’an, or Zen, poetic understanding of a world that has fallen out of balance. The poems in the next collection explore some of these aspects of imbalance, disharmony, and realignment with what is known in the traditions as The Way.

Frank LaRue Owen will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, November 28, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The School of Soft-Attention.

Mississippi’s Trethewey offers perfect selection of her work in ‘Monument’

By Lisa McMurtray. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (November 25)

As the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard and the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, Natasha Trethewey’s poetry is familiar to many readers. Her work is full-bodied and blooded, textured by a painter’s eye yet lyrically told, and the canon of American poetry is better for her contributions. This timely collection, featuring selections from her previous four books of poetry and single chapbook, is the perfect addition to her oeuvre.

Monument opens with a kind of instruction manual for how to read this collection of old and new poems. “Ask yourself what’s in your heart,” she writes, “that / reliquary—blood locket and seedbed—and contend with what it means.” This book, at its heart, is history contended—personal history, certainly, but also the history of a complicated southern landscape and Trethewey’s place within its legacy.

Structured as a call and response, each section of this powerful collection explores a neglected history: working-class African Americans in the South (“Domestic Work”), an imagined mixed-race prostitute in early 1900s New Orleans (“Bellocq’s Ophelia”), her murdered mother and the many stories of the unrepresented citizens of the Jim Crow south (“Native Guard”), the ravaged lives of those affected by Katrina (“Congregation”), narratives inspired by paintings and photographs (“Thrall”), and the hole left in her life by her mother’s early death.

Richly populated by a diverse cast and a meticulous, musical landscape, the poems collected in Monument are as beautiful as they are haunting. Trethewey’s voice is a powerful testament to the marginalized and the spaces they inhabit. From “clotheslines sagged with linens” and post-Katrina “vacant lots and open fields” to the “divine language” of Juan de Pareja’s paintings in 17th century Spain, Monument offers new narratives while reframing history.

The first section of “Meditation at Decatur Square” ends with what feels to be the core of this book:

Here is only the history of a word, 

                              obelisk

               that points us toward

                                             what’s not there; all of it

palimpsest, each mute object

                repeating a single refrain:

 

Remember this

Each poem is a monument, an obelisk, that asks readers to remember and to hear for the first time, to imagine or truly see. These poems act as a clarion call to the reader as much as Trethewey herself, whose professor told her that perhaps she “should / write about something else, unburden / yourself of the death of your mother.” In response, Trethewey rewrites her mother—and the people of past and paintings—back into the narrative. She, like her father, “is Orpheus / trying to bring her back with the music / of his words.” In another poem, she cites a Korean proverb: “you carry her corpse on your back.”

History is important to Trethewey, but history is also malleable. “In paint / a story can change,” she writes, “mistakes be undone.” Stories change in each retelling. People are forgotten or erased, words made better or worse, intentions change. Remembering isn’t a strict adherence to the record, but something deeper, more meaningful. Remembering is harder than fact. It is inhabiting and rewriting. Trethewey slips into new narratives as easily and naturally as breathing. Whether it’s a 16th century painting or her grandmother in the 1930s, Trethewey masterfully weaves new stories that are always, at their heart, painfully true. “This is the place to which I vowed / I’d never return,” she writes in one of the final poems, but she does it anyway and we thank her.

Born and raised in Jackson, Lisa McMurtray holds an MFA from Florida State University and an MA in English from Mississippi State University. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch and The Journal.

Natasha Trethewey will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 in conversation with Beth Ann Fennelley at 4:00 p.m. at the Galloway Fellowship Center.

Khaled Hosseini’s ‘Sea Prayer’ is a powerful plea for peace and safety

Khaled Hosseini writes beautiful books. My favorite is (was?) A Thousand Splendid Suns, a heart-wrenching, lush novel that follows two generations of Afghan women beginning from before the Soviet invasion and to after their ouster and the rise of the Taliban. One of my favorite aspects of Suns is that it’s a 700+ page book that doesn’t read like an endless tome. The writing is rapid and fluid, with equal attention given to plot, detail, and character.

Hosseini’s newest book, Sea Prayer, is the exact opposite, with one striking similarity. It’s short, airy, yet still strikingly beautiful. The writing is spare—the text is spread across 20 pages that are adorned with lovely watercolors by London-based illustrator Dan Williams—and stylistically, a departure from Hosseini’s typical dense prose. Framed as a letter from a fictitious father (i.e., not Hosseini) to his son, Sea Prayer explains why the family had to flee Homs, Syria, during the son’s toddler years. But before documenting the strife and violence, the narrator describes a Syria vastly different from the one we all know now. It was a “bustling” place with “a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbors,” a vibrant market filled with sounds and wonder, a home filled with family and peace.

Then, things changed: protests; a siege; “The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials.” This is the Homs that the narrator’s son has lived in as far as his young memory can stretch. Now, they live in a Syria from which, for their own lives’ protection, they must flee. So the narrator and his family find themselves waiting on the shore for a boat to spirit them away to someplace without bombs and burials. First, though, they must cross the sea, “how vast, how indifferent,” a thing against which the father finds himself entirely powerless—much like the monster the father is running from.

And it’s this running from that strikes me about Sea Prayer. It’s a reminder that when people run toward new countries, they are often running away from horror and murder, away from bombs and burials. They’re not invading so much as evading.

Hosseini’s narrator prays that the sea understands this, and I don’t think I’m too far off base in assuming that this is Hosseini’s prayer for us as well. Hosseini has stated that his inspiration for Sea Prayer came from the image of young Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea as his family sought safety in Europe. The proceeds from Sea Prayer will go to various charities supporting refugee aid. In this, the book pulls a double duty: it affects both the world in which we live and the hearts of those who read it, much like a prayer should.

Signed first editions of Sea Prayer are currently available at Lemuria.

Poetry for the Divided Life: ‘If They Come for Us’ by Fatimah Asghar

by Trianne Harabedian

It is rare and beautiful to find a book that is simply about people. A book that presents a life, that delves deeply into the pain of one person, that shows intimately the struggles of a particular family. It is even more rare to find a book that takes all of these elements and places them within a controversial context. Such a book is not passive. But instead of shoving you into political action, it leads you to take the first steps toward compassion on your own. Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come For Us is one of these books.

If They Come For Us is a collection of poems that tell the story of a young Pakistani Muslim woman who has grown up in America. Orphaned as a child, the speaker lives with her aunt and uncle. Her life is a very American mix of cultures, where she plays with Beanie Babies, eats badam, runs track, and reads the Qur’an. By day, she attends public school and tries to fit in with her blonde classmates. By night, she is told her family’s history of Partition and running from violence. Mixed with all of this are the growing up stories of every woman.

Rather than forcing the entire book to conform to one style, Asghar allows each poem to take a form that reflects its subject. “Kal,” a gentle and dreamy poem about the speaker’s mother, takes a more traditional free verse form with three-line stanzas and proper punctuation. “How We Left: Film Treatment” tells the story of the speaker’s family running from violence as if it were being adapted for film, with sections labeled “Character Breakdown” and “Working Title”. “Shadi,” told from the perspective of women who were abducted and forced to marry their captures during Partition, is a poem of scattered words and phrases that reflect instability and grief. There are even a few poems that mix playful form with a serious subject, like “Microaggression Bingo” and “Script for Child Services: A Floor Plan.” Weaving everything together are seven poems titled “Partition.” Each uniquely approaches the violent division of British India, telling stories from a historical lens, from a modern perspective, or both.

This book took a few days to read. Not because the form is strange or the words overly complicated, but because the subject matter is painful. The speaker is alone, both physically and emotionally, for most of her life. She deeply appreciates the family and friends that she does have, but there is a parental and cultural void. The feeling of not being understood in the United States is intensified toward the middle of the book, when the event that forever changes the American view of Muslims occurs–9/11. Suddenly, the speaker must analyze everything she does in fear of being identified with the terrorists. She becomes anxious when schoolmates ask her where she is from, and does not use the trendy phrase “that’s the bomb.”

It can be easiest to see life through our own lens. To only think about the way the War on Terror has changed our own routines. But one of the most beautiful functions of books is that they bring us into other people’s lives. And through lovely, honest, heartbreaking poetry, by telling the story of one person, If They Come For Us has given me another perspective.

Sudden Loss Re-Mastered in Angela Ball’s ‘Talking Pillow’

By Lisa McMurtray. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 3)

Loss, however sudden or slow, is unimaginable. Yet in her sixth collection of poetry, Angela Ball tackles this painful subject beautifully with longing, lyricality, dark humor, and keen intelligence.

Underscored by the sudden death of Ball’s long-time partner, each poem in Talking Pillow is touched by this loss, either in the way that it reshapes the world around what is no longer in it, reimagines the past, or simply tries to find a way forward. “How is (s)he taking it,” one poem asks, and it is this question that drives the collection. How does one cope with death’s intrusion? In a way, Talking Pillow is the answer to this question, acting as a protection against forgetting, fear, and, however temporary, loneliness.

“Although / divers can learn to cope with the effects,” Ball writes in one poem, “it is not possible to / develop a tolerance.” Throughout Talking Pillow, Ball resists easy conclusions. Instead, she revisits death, folding and unfolding it into new shapes, not to tolerate it, but to better understand its effects. She does not ask why, but notes that “Cognitive dissonance / happens for a reason. Can make us // break up or down.” At turns avoiding and confronting loss, these poems capture what comes after and how, if at all, one moves on.

There are numerous ways to cope, and Ball explores many of them through richly textured, sharply funny imagined scenarios, addresses to characters like Robert Frost and Anna Akhmatova, and poems full of violence just beneath the surface and poems that are almost playful. Ball recontextualizes death not to make it more manageable, but to come at it from different angles. “If you go for a drive, know,” Ball writes, “that small roadside crosses / contain your friends, re-mastered.”

It is not until the middle of the book that the central death unfolds. “Arrived at Emergency,” Ball writes of her partner’s illness, “the first of grief’s little rooms.” There, she is warned, “’Always assume they can hear.’” Later, Ball revisits this advice, pleading, “Let me hear that Michael hears. / In his fashionable Tiny House.”

These poems embody grief’s little rooms and Michael’s Tiny House, giving voice to grief and heartache. This voice begs and worries. “Michael was scandalously / alone,” the poem continues, “then more / much more alone.” At the heart of the book, this elegy lays closest to death and the emptiness after it. After, Ball writes, “I travel, searching the perfect vacancy. / I have sent memories out ahead. They gleam.”

Perhaps, as Ball writes, “The trick…is to see others.” She suggests in another poem, “We depart and workarounds kick / in…creaky but functional, how things move / or refuse.” Grappling with sudden loss, these poems ask what to do next. “You say it’s hard to join the hours, / you’ve lost the plot,” she writes, before giving a series of instructions not on how to move on, but how to appear as if one has moved on. “Do not put baklava into a briefcase,” the poem commands, but instead, “Think how privileged you are / to seldom stand waiting / for a car to come.”

Rife with conflict between control and forgiveness, anger and acceptance, Ball notes that in the end:

We were not
pretty. Our work was close,
the day, a thread
knotted at one end.

Grief, it seems, is putting one line after another, day by day. In the last poem of the book, Ball writes of a bicycle accident: “All was dark / then I got up and started riding again.” Eventually we move forward, but before we can, we must sit with loss and try to understand it intimately. What better way than through the words of these poems and Ball’s immense talent?

Born and raised in Jackson, Lisa McMurtray holds an MFA from Florida State University and an MA in English from Mississippi State University. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch and The Journal.

Angela Ball will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the “Waxing Poetic with the Pros” poetry panel at 9:30 a.m. in the State Capitol Room 201 A.

Author Q & A with T.R. Hummer

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 1)

For Mississippi native T.R. Hummer, 2018 is turning out to be a year of life and death–and beyond–speaking in literary terms.

The poet, editor and essayist who grew up on a farm near Macon now has 14 books of poetry and essays to his credit–two of which he added just this year and that challenge the reader to consider, on a deeper level, what happens at death and afterward.

Hummer’s 2018 release are Eon (the third volume in his LSU Press trilogy that includes Ephemeron, 2012, and Skandalon 2014); and After the Afterlife (Acre Books), which carries his trilogy on birth, life, and death to the next “logical” step: examining what consciousness comes even after one’s demise.

His honors include a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant in Poetry, the Richard Wright Award for Artistic Excellence, the Hanes Poetry Prize, and the Donald Justice Award in Poetry.

Hiw work has also been published in The New YorkerHarper’sAtlantic MonthlyThe Literati Review Paris Review, and Georgia Review.

Hummer holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi; and a doctorate degree from the University of Utah.

He has also enjoyed a long career teaching poetry and creative writing at several colleges and universities throughout the country, most recently at Arizona State University.

Hummer’s lengthy involvement with literary publishing includes serving as editor of Quarterly West magazine at the University of Utah; then poetry editor of Cimarron Review at Oklahoma State University; editor-in-chief of The Kenyon Review, later of the New England Review, and then The Georgia Review.

He now lives in Cold Spring, New York, and is married to the writer Elizabeth Cody Kimmel, about whom he advises: “Look her up; her track record is very impressive.”

Please tell me about your new release Eon–a study of death, the eternal, and what lies beyond. Why this topic, and why now? How does Eon fit into the context of the trilogy that includes Ephemeron and Skandalon.

T.R. (Terry) Hummer

Well, the eternal is always timely, don’t you think? Eon, though it works just as fine as a stand-alone volume, is as you say part of a trilogy of poetry volumes written over eight years or so.

The originating impulse was the birth of my child in 2002–the turn of the millennium, and also the year in which I was 50. The arrival of that child –my second; my first was born in 1977, so there is rather a large gap between my kids, which has interesting effects on such matters as sibling rivalry–had enormous emotional repercussions for me, which I expected going in.

I fell in love with her before she was born, as one will, but as soon as she was in the world, I also felt–to my surprise–that her arrival revealed to me more than anything else ever had the certainty of my own mortality. The title poem of the first volume is about that, and the whole trilogy unfolds from there.

So, it’s a natural part of the progression for the last volume–culminating when I was 60–should take on mortality head-on. Insofar as that is possible.

The cover of the book is a stunning work of imagery by German surreal artist Michael Hutter. How does the scene of this work fit with the poetry in Eon?

All three volumes in the trilogy have cover art by Michael Hutter–partly to provide visual unity among the three, but also because there is something about his work that, to my mind at least, suits the poetry perfectly. His painting is timeless, and yet it continually alludes to, and plays games with, tradition, both in terms of technique and of subject. It’s often very witty also–certainly the cover of Ephemeron has that quality, and of Skandalon also, through in a more muted way. The cover of Eon is the most somber of the three–appropriately, given the subject.

I’ve read that you are a jazz buff, a blues fan, and a saxophonist. With its distinctive rhythm and tempo, do you think your music style has rubbed off onto your writing style?

This a very complicated question. The relationship between music and language is vital, and mysterious. I have spent decades trying to unpack it, and really have no even scratched the surface. However, I can say two things briefly: first, that I found music a long time before I found poetry, but that the one led me to the other; and second, that the example of many musicians whose work I admired and admire taught me how to be an artist.

Growing up in the small town of Macon, in what ways would you say your Mississippi heritage influenced your writing?

Actually, I didn’t grow up in Macon. We were 15 miles outside Macon, and in those days 15 miles was a very long way. I grew up on a farm in a very remote part of the state–far more remote in the 1950s when I was a child than now.

On the one hand, I grew up among animals and plants and all the elemental things one encounters and learns about on a farm–especially on the kind of farm that was then, not a mono-crop agribusiness outlet, but a diverse subsistence farm that was an ecosystem and, in a sense, a society. The farm turned, in the 60s, to a different model and became a different place, but I was already leaving by then. So, I received that kind of education from the people and from the creatures who surrounded me. At the same time, I grew up in Mississippi in the 50s and 60s: the bad old days of Jim Crow and the arrival full-bore of the civil rights movement. It was a quiet rural life, but we also lived in a war zone. Everything was changing, and it had to change. Everything about our old life for good reason was dying and it had to die.

None of that is easy for a young person to digest, but there it was. There is an enormous amount more to say on the subject, too much for this format. I will leave it at this: growing up white in the Jim Crow South had consequences. Growing up black there had worse ones. I have spent decades trying to sort these matters out in my own mind, and being a poet is part of the process.

You have another new book out this year: After the Afterlife, from Acre Books. Why two in one year?

It’s really an accident of publishers’ schedules. Eon was finished several years ago, but took a long time to see print. The work in After the Afterlife is newer, but Acre Books worked faster, so here they both are.

The title After the Afterlife suggests a connection, a continuity, with Eon. Is that the case?

Definitely. The newer work is different, of course, partly because After the Afterlife arrives as sort of liberation from the labor of writing a trilogy. But it all comes from one mind, and I only have two and a half ideas total, so of course it’s connected.

During your years as a professor, if there a defining lesson or message about writing poetry that you have tried to instill in your students?

I retired a couple of years ago, so my relationship with the classroom has changed, but it hasn’t vanished. The one thing I always wanted students to understand about writing–and this is true of any kind of writing, not only the writing of poetry–is that it is always all about consciousness. No matter what the overt subject of style of a poem, its subject is consciousness, and its material is consciousness. A writer creates a score for consciousness, the way a composer creates a score for orchestra or jazz band. The reader’s job is to play the instrument of consciousness in response. Reading and writing obviously are complementary in that way, and both the writer and the readers have to be, dare I say, conscious of that fact.

T.R. Hummer will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the “Waxing Poetic with the Pros” poetry panel at 9:30 a.m. in the State Capitol Room 201 A.

A tribute to Jim Harrison by Barry Gifford

jim harrison by barry gifford

Jim Harrison

I miss Jim Harrison
not just his new poems and novels
he won’t write,
his blind, wandering left eye,
gargantuan appetite, his generosity–
He loved Mary Lou’s flowers,
sitting in our garden–
He’d never been to a racetrack
so I took him, taught him
how to read The Racing Form,
how to bet–we both won
a little that day–
He’d call me after midnight,
I could hear the ice clink
in his glass of Scotch
before the gravelly voice–
He’d never fail to mention
Mary Lou’s flowers in letters,
on the phone and when we met–
When I was in my twenties
he told me, “If you lived in New York
you’d already be a famous poet.”
Walking on his property near
the Arizona-Mexico border
he brushed away a rattlesnake
with his cane–“I don’t
shoot snakes any more,” he said
“unless I have to, like
writing poems.”
He died two years ago–
Mary Lou’s flowers are beautiful
this year, Jim, especially
the blue irises.

-BARRY GIFFORD

 

John Evans met the author and poet Jim Harrison (1937-2016) about 37 years ago, before the publication of Warlock, and John met Barry Gifford about 30 years ago, and developed a friendship with both. Barry and John shared much respect for Jim’s work and formed a bond this way. Barry has shared this as yet unpublished poem with John to share with the Lemuria community. Both authors have been great friends of the store, and have enriched its shelves with their magnificent words.

Jim Harrison (L); Barry Gifford (R)

Jim Harrison (L); Barry Gifford (R)

Jim Harrison wrote many novels, volumes of poetry, and collections of non-fiction, including his last works, The Big 7 and Dead Man’s Float. Barry Gifford has also written many novels, volumes of poetry, and collections of non-fiction, including his most recent work, The Cuban Club.

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