Category: Poetry (Page 2 of 11)

Poet and photographer team to create a witness to ‘Mississippi’

By Jordan Nettles. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 25)

In Mississippi, 47 poems by Ann Fisher-Wirth and 47 color photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay delve into the history, culture, and ecology of the state of Mississippi. The book is a gorgeous large-format hardback, with equally stunning words and images inside.

mississippi

Both Fisher-Wirth and Clay have spent much of their lives in Mississippi. Clay is a seventh-generation Mississippian and Fisher-Worth has lived in the state for 30 years. Fisher-Worth, born in Washington D.C., has taught at the University of Mississippi since first moving to Mississippi in 1988. She has written scholarly works and books of poems, including Dream Cabinet, Carta Marina, Five Terraces, and Blue Window. Clay, born in Greenwood, Mississippi, has had photos published in Esquire, Fortune, and Vanity Fair, and included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art. She is also the photographer of Delta Land and Delta Dogs, both published by University Press of Mississippi. During their time in Mississippi, Fisher-Wirth and Clay have gathered visual and linguistic experiences that are revealed in their poems and photographs.

Each poem in Mississippi is matched with a photo, both pieces working together to tell a story of Mississippi. Fisher-Wirth has said that most of the poems in the book were written to accompany a photograph previously taken by Clay. Fisher-Wirth then penned poems “spoken in voices of fictive characters” that suggested themselves to her as she pondered the photos. Although fictitious, the voices sometimes cross with important events of Mississippi and American history, such as the Civil Rights Movement. There are poems dealing with the murder of Emmett Till and other tragedies that occurred during the same time period. Other poems in the books are inspired by students, neighbors, and other Mississippians that Fisher-Wirth has known personally. The voices represented are as varied as Mississippi itself, racially and socioeconomically.

Fisher-Wirth and Clay explore several facets of Mississippi, including how race and the environment interact. The book stresses that, “Mississippi suffers from severe environmental degradation that cannot be separated from its history of poverty and racial oppression.” Despite this difficult history and inherent complexity, the natural beauty of Mississippi can’t be denied. Also undeniable is the beauty of Mississippi’s identity–an identity that’s made up of many unique voices that are honored and explored in this book. True reflections of the beauty and complexity in Mississippi, the poems and photos will likely feel familiar to native Mississippians and will provide a glimpse into the realities of Mississippi to non-natives.

Although voice is an important part of Mississippi, actual Mississippians are only the subject of one photograph. Instead, most of the photos capture awe-inspiring sights in nature and every-day objects that Mississippians will recognize. Included are images of swamps, open fields, trees, falling-apart buildings, dogs, and the interiors of quintessentially Southern homes. A personal favorite photo depicts a type of hide away built into the side of a hill in the woods. Haunting and captivating, the photos are authentic representations of what it feels like to be part of Mississippi.

The epigraph for the book is taken from Theodore Roethke’s “North American Sequence”: “The imperishable quiet at the heart of form.” The quietness in Clay’s photos influenced Fisher-Wirth as she listened for voices to use in her poems. Likewise, Mississippi invites the reader to listen for those voices and to reflect on the stories at the heart of the poems and photographs.

Mississippi is a stunning testament to the spirit of Mississippi.

Jordan Nettles is a graduate of The University of Southern Mississippi and the Columbia Publishing Course in New York. She is marketing assistant at University Press of Mississippi in Jackson.

Author Q & A with Ann Fisher-Wirth

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 4)

As an Army brat who swore in her teen years that she’d never live in Mississippi, poet and University of Mississippi professor Ann Fisher-Wirth has, after nearly 30 years as an Oxford resident, decided that Mississippi (along with parts of California) now feels like home.

Not only has she felt moved to compose poetry honoring Mississippi’s culture, history, and people, but she is devoted to preserving its land, which she believes has suffered “severe environmental degradation that cannot be separated from its history of poverty and racial oppression.”

mississippiHer newest book, titled Mississippi, is a collaboration with acclaimed photographer and Delta native Maude Schuyler Clay, offering a different perspective  on her current home state–one that is both visual and literary. The volumes includes 47 sets of Clay’s striking–and sometimes haunting–photos, each paired with one of Fisher-Wirth’s reflective poems.

Photographs and letterpress poems from this project are on exhibit throughout Mississippi, and a performance piece involving six actors has been created from two dozen of the poems.

Fisher-Wirth’s other poetry books include Dream CabinetCarta MarinaFive Terraces, and Blue Window. She has alos published an academic book on William Carlos Williams and four poetry chapbooks. With Laura-Gray Street, she co-edited the groundbreaking Ecopoetry Anthology.

She has been the recipient of several residencies, is a Fellow of the Black Earth Institute, and received a senior Fulbright to Switzerland and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair award to Sweden. She is also a past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Fisher-Wirth teaches American literature and poetry workshops and directs the Environmental Studies program at Ole Miss. She has recently completed a sixth poetry book manuscript, Because Here We Are.

There was a time when you swore you’d never live here. Tell me about your Mississippi experience, and why you’ve stayed.

I was an Army brat; when I was 10, my father retired and my family moved to Berkeley, California, where I spent my teenage years. Living in Berkeley in the 1960s, I paid careful attention to the civil rights movement; that’s why I swore I’d never live in Mississippi. I lived in southern California, Belgium, and Virginia.

Ann Fisher-Wirth

Ann Fisher-Wirth

But in the late 1980s, we cam here (to Ole Miss), lured by the terrific English department, the literary community centered in Square Books, and the fact that Mississippi seemed to be a very complicated, culturally fascinating, beautiful and troubled place. We came in a spirit of adventure, and a feeling that we could do good work here. We’ve stayed because we want to. The English department has just gotten better and better–it’s a friendly and increasingly heterogeneous department. I love working with our MFA poets as well as with the undergraduates who study American literature and creative nonfiction with me. I also love directing and teaching for the minor in Environmental Studies, and ahve had some fantastic, dynamic students over the years.

Our children are all grown–our three daughters live elsewhere, but our two sons are here, as are two of our grandchildren–a major attraction. I’m attached to our house, old and drafty as it is. And Oxford is just plain an incredible place to be a writer.

How did you and Maude come up with the idea to create a book together? Were the poems written to go with the photographs, or were the photographs taken to go with the poems?

Maude Schuyler Clay

Maude Schuyler Clay

Maude and I have known each other socially for decades and have known each other’s work. At one point or the other of us casually remarked, “We should do something sometime.” She thinks I was the one; I think she was the one.

A few years ago she started sending me photographs she had taken but never published. I had recently published Dream Cabinet and The Ecopoetry Anthology and was looking for a new project. I was moved by her photo of a tree in water–this has turned out to be the cover image for the book–and I wrote the poem based on the yoga pose Vrksasana that begins “You stand in Tree…” A little later, she sent me a hauntingly beautiful image of a boat in greenish water. I knew I wanted to write a poem based on this photo, but had no idea what it could say until Made mentioned that the boat had belonged to her close friend who had just died. Immediately, the poem “Between two worlds / the soul floats…” came to me, and eventually that became the opening poem of the book. Others followed as Maude continued to send me photographs over the next couple of years.

Nearly all the poems were written to go with photographs; in only on or two cases, we found photos to go with poems I had already written. But as you know, the poems don’t just describe the photographs, and, with one exception, the photographs don’t have people in them.

Instead, the poems are spoken in voices of fictive characters that the photographs somehow suggested to me. Creating this book was, for me, very much an act of channeling voices, scraps of lives that I have encountered since living in Mississippi, sometimes combined with scraps of memory from my own life–exploring the incredible richness of this region’s spoken language.

What is the message of the blending of this poetry with the sometimes bare, sometimes harsh images of the state’s landscape, that you want to leave with your readers?

Poems are more about experiences than messages, so I don’t really have a message per se. I wanted the poems to reflect the variety of voices, and hence the variety of people, in Mississippi: old, young; wise, foolish; poor, middle-class, wealthy; loving, hateful; male, female; lettered, unlettered; black, white, Native American. Some of the poems are harsh and bleak, and speak to the realities of racism, poverty, violence, and environmental damage that are part of Mississippi. Others are lush and beautiful, as befits the beauty and gentler aspects of the people and places.

How did you develop an interest in writing poetry–and then realize that you were so good at it?

I come from a family of English teachers and readers, and I’ve always wanted to write poetry. I wrote a little bit in high school, then stopped, then wrote a little bit more while writing my dissertation, then stopped. Until I got tenure at the University of Mississippi, my writing was academic–a book on William Carlos Williams, a numbers of essays on Williams, Willa Cather, Anita Brookner, Robert Haas, and others.

Then just for fun I audited a poetry workshop that my friend Aleda Shirley was teaching, and after the first day, I said to myself, “This is it. I’m writing poems from now on, and never looking back.” Some time later, I attended a week-long workshop in California called The Art of the Wild, and wrote a poem called, “What Is There to Do in Mississippi?” It became my first published poem, in the magazine The Wilderness Society, and it even paid–so I took my whole family out to dinner to celebrate at City Grocery (in Oxford). After that, it took a while to get my first book, Blue Window, published, and the rest has followed. It’s always a a lot of work, always an adventure.

Thank you for saying I am “so good at it.” I sure love it. I’ve always loved writing, but my confidence about it is never a steady-state thing.

Your poetry style here is at once stark and powerful–there are no titles, no punctuation, no apparent patter of wordplay–and grammatical rules are cast aside. Tell me how this design contributes to the interpretation of the poetry.

I wanted to get rid of the conventional accouterments of poetry and just let the voices be heard. I also wanted the eye to be alive on the page–to treat the page as a field of composition and make use of negative space in order to capture the way we actually speak, which is never a steady march forward, and never completely grammatically. One of the strongest elements of Southern literature is its orality, and I wanted to honor the living voices in every way.

There are several recurring themes in your poetry in this book: racism, sexual desire, death, family, tragedy, memories, and nature’s beauty and fury. Why these topics?

Is there anything else? I’m partly kidding. But a writer doesn’t exactly get to choose his or her themes; these are topics that have greatly concerned me my whole life. They’re central to human experience, no matter where or when. By the way, I love the phrase “nature’s beauty and fury.” That “fury” is so important.

Do you have plans for future writing projects?

Well, I have a lot of uncollected poems and a desire to create another book, but as yet it has no shape. I’m writing new poems all the time, some of which are worth keeping. For the pas two fall semesters, I have team-taught with my colleague Patrick Alexander in the Prison to College Pipeline program for pre-release prisoners at Parchman. This has been an intensely rich experience for me and I’ve been writing about that. And there are a couple of editing projects I’ll be working on–but it’s too early to talk about them.

Ann Fisher-Wirth and Maude Schuyler Clay will be at Lemuria on Friday, February 9, at 5:00 to sign and discuss their new book, Missisippi.

Cut to the ‘Bone’ by Yrsa Daley-Ward

by Julia Blakeney

Hello, readers of the Lemuria Blog. I have become known as “the poetry reader” by my coworkers, which I am proud of, as I do love reading and writing about poetry. boneFor the last year and a half, I have loved being able to share different collections from new voices in the poetry world with my coworkers, and with all of you. Unfortunately, this is my last blog for the store, as I have decided to give my full attention to getting my master’s degree and to working as a teaching assistant at my university. So, naturally, I had to make my last blog one of a new collection of poetry, Bone, by one of the most powerful female voices I have read so far: Yrsa Daley-Ward.

Daley-Ward’s poems are raw and emotional, which, as anyone who I have ever talked to about reading poetry knows, is just how I like them. A sharp stab to the feelings, these poems are an outpouring of love and, often at the exact same time, hatred. They explore her complicated relationships with her mother, brother, father, and grandmother. They explore the effects of a staunchly religious upbringing on how she navigates romantic relationships. They explore different identities that often conflict. A few great ones discuss what many are afraid to talk about: mental health. when they askMost importantly, though, the most powerful poems explore the way she coped with abuse and how she grew up thinking that was what love was supposed to be like, because that’s what she endured and what she watched her mother endure. And just to let you know this book isn’t all poems about abuse and mental illness and gloomy subjects, there are poems, toward the end of the collection, about working through the events of her childhood, about healing, and about learning how to love healthily.

My first reaction to this book is one of sadness. As a literature major and huge appreciator of the craft of writing poetry, my second reaction was one of awe (and just a tinge of jealousy). Daley-Ward deftly tells stories through verse that makes you feel for her, and, as I said in my last poetry blog on Cassie Pruyn, made me want to jump into the book and give her a hug, cry with her, and tell her everything would be okay. If you like poetry that is honest, poetry that tells a story without sugarcoating anything, you will like this collection.

Cassie Pruyn’s ‘Lena’: A New Kind of Elegy on Love and Loss

by Julia Blakeney

After reading Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey and feeling all the raw emotion she so skillfully conveys in her poems, I said to myself, “I will never experience that level of emotion in a book of poetry ever again.”

coverI now stand before you utterly and entirely corrected, as Cassie Pruyn has done that very thing in her collection of poetry, Lena Pruyn brings new meaning and understanding to the elegy, asking not only why we grieve and why we love, but how these experiences have changed us; how the people we love and grieve for have changed us. She skillfully tells a story of love, heartbreak, and loss in one collection of poems. To me, the speaker of each of the poems in this collection is the same woman. The series of poems follows a non-linear timeline, often seeming like the speaker is reliving old memories she made with Lena as she walks in the present time through New Orleans, Louisiana. As she visits various solitary places in New Orleans, like St. Louis Cemetery and Royal Street and the river, and visits in her memory places in New England where she lived in college and where she met Lena, shethe speaker illustrates these memories and the deep and sometimes conflicting emotions they evoke. I felt her passion and her love for Lena, as well as her pain when she and Lena parted ways. I was often overcome with emotion and felt the urge to hug the speaker and tell her everything was going to be okay.

This one tops my list of best poetry collections I have read to date; perhaps, I daresay, even higher than Milk and Honey.

Author Q & A with Beth Ann Fennelly

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (October 15)

Beth Ann Fennelly, poet laureate of Mississippi, once again stretches her literary abilities with a new release she calls “a true hybrid.”

The Oxford author who has netted a considerable number of writing awards and accolades as a poet and novelist captures the attention of readers in a fresh, new approach with Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, with entries that range from one sentence to five pages.

heating & coolingThe micro-memoir, she has said, “combines the extreme abbreviation of poetry, the narrative tension of fiction, and the truth-telling of creative nonfiction,” in works that include “memories, quirky observations, tiny scenes, (and) bits of overheard conversations that, with the surrounding noise edited out, reverberate.”

Writing micro-memoirs, she said, was “liberating” after she had co-authored The Tilted World, a novel that required extensive research, with her husband Tom Franklin. “After living in the heads of characters, now my own thoughts, my own experiences, seemed newly fresh,” she said.

Additionally, Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open HouseTender Hooks, and Unmentionables, and a book of nonfiction Great with Child. She’s won grants from the Mississippi Arts Commission (three times), the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize and was included three times in The Best American Poetry Series. She was also the first woman to claim the University of Notre Dame Alumni Association’s Griffin Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Writing.

Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, Fennelly said her first love was poetry, which she studied at the University of Notre Dame, earning first a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in 1993; and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas in 1998.

An English professor in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, Fennelly has been named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She and Franklin, also an English professor at Ole Miss, are the parents of three children.

At what point in your life did you discover that you were a writer?

I was always an artistic kid, loving the theater and music and reading and writing, but I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer until I got to college. That’s where I experienced my first truly great teachers and was exposed to contemporary poetry. In my high school, we only read the classics. I think that’s one reason why I take my job as a college professor so seriously–I know how an engaged teacher can turn a student’s life around.

Poetry is a different kind of writer’s challenge. How were you drawn to poetry?

Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly

I was drawn to the dynamic compression of poetry, almost like a chemical reaction–how can so few words trigger such a big response? Also, I was, and still am, in love with the sound of words, their mouth-feel, as wine enthusiasts say. It’s a huge pleasure to take a poem into your body through memorization and release it back into the world with the air that rises from your windpipe.

Your newest book is a nonfiction collection of brief personal thoughts, idea, and memories, along with several short essays. They deal with family, marriage, fears, triumphs, nostalgia, and hopes. Was this a collection you have gathered through the years, or did you write these specifically to be published as a book?

Before I published this book, my husband and I wrote a collaborative novel. Called The Tilted World (HarperCollins, 2013), it was set in the flood of the Mississippi River in 1927, and it ended up being a big project. Although we’d each published four books, we’d never written one together. In addition to teaching ourselves how to collaborate, we had to do a lot of research. And it was high stakes: We spent four years writing the novel. Imagine, if it failed, how costly that would have been for our marriage.

Luckily, it didn’t fail. After we returned from our book tour, tuckered, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write next. There followed a long, frustrating, fallow period in which I wasn’t writing. I mean, sure, I was scribbling little thoughts and ideas in my notebook, but nothing was adding up to anything. Many of my scribbles were just sentences, or a paragraph, the longest just a few pages. I kept complaining to my patient husband that I was “not writing.”

Eventually, however, it occurred to me that I was enjoying this scribbling in my notebook. After the high stakes, research-heavy, character-embedded-thinking of the novel, my own life seemed rich material again. The little memories or quirky thoughts or miniature scenes I was creating seemed refreshing.

So, strangely, I identified the feeling of writing before I identified the activity. I thought, “What if this ‘not writing’ I’m doing actually is writing, and I just don’t recognize it because it doesn’t look like other writing I’ve done? What if I need to stop waiting for these things to add up to something, and realize maybe they already are somethings, just small? Once I’d recognized the form and gave it a name, the micro-memoir, I realized I was almost done with a book.

Today, you and Tom are professors in the English department at Ole Miss, where you teach poetry and nonfiction writing–and where you have been named Humanities Teacher of the Year and College of Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year. What do you enjoy most about being a teacher?

I really like working with young adults–I think they keep me young in certain ways, because I’m always getting exposed to new ideas. I love the feeling of being in love with a book or an author, and not just conveying my own passion, but kindling that same passion in my students.

Books have been such important companions to me, and reading has schooled me in empathy and reflection. These are skills the world isn’t encouraging in our young people. I’m honored that I get the chance to share the transformative power of literature with them.

In 2016, you were named poet laureate for the state of Mississippi. What are your duties that go along with that?

I’ve just finished the first year of my four-year term, and I’ve had a blast. I’m interested in getting poetry in front of as many Mississippians as possible, especially children. The position is honorary in that there’s no salary involved, and therefore my “duties” are probably more “suggestions,” but I’m traveling to a lot of libraries and schools, and I’m deeply involved in our state’s Poetry Out Loud program, which I think every high schooler should be a part of.

Beth Ann Fennelly will be at Lemuria on Thursday, November 9, to sign and read from Heating and Cooling. The signing will begin at 5:00 p.m. and the reading will begin at 5:30.

Ellen offers opinions on Olds’ outstanding ‘Odes’

So, I’m not sure why, but I have not been able to get enough poetry as of late. I feel like I spend most days at work figuring out which book of poetry I’ll read next. Now mind you, I don’t like flowery poetry that I have to turn my brain inside out attempting to figure out what the string of words mean when put all together. I like it to be right out there in front of me, screaming.

odesAll of that is to say I am reading A LOT of poetry right now. However, in my mind, one collection of poems currently shines above the rest. Sharon Olds won the Pulitzer with her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap. Her newest collection is entitled Odes. Olds uses this old form of a poem to celebrate all parts of herself and female sexuality. I can’t stress enough how excited I was to get home every night and read some of these poems. I could have plowed through the book in one sitting, but I opted to savor every single one, only allowing myself–at most–five poems at a time. The subject matter of the poems ranges from the purely sexual to the everyday mundane: “Blow Job Ode”, “Ode to the Clitoris,” “Hip Replacement Ode,” “My Mother’s Flashlight Ode,” “Real Estate Ode,” & “Ode to the Last Thirty-Eight Trees in New York City Visible from This Window”. The imagery conjured by these poems is at once brilliant and so obvious, at least once Olds has put it in front of you. Many times I found myself asking in my mind “Why haven’t I ever thought of that before?” These are beautiful and brilliant in their simplicity. Get in this mix guys.

“Ode of Girls’ Things”

I loved the things that were ours–pink gloves,
hankies with a pastoral scene in one corner.
There was a lot we were not allowed to do,
but what we were allowed to do was ours,
dolls you carry by the leg, and dolls’
clothes you would put on , or take off–
someone who was yours, who did not
have the rights of her own nakedness,
and who had a smooth body, with its
untouchable place, which you would never touch, even on her,
you had been cured of that.
And some of the dolls had hard-rubber hands, with
dimples, and though you were not supposed to, you could
bite off the ends of the fingers when you could not stand it.
And though you’d never be allowed to, say, drive a bus,
or do anything that had to be done right, there was a
teeny carton, in you, of eggs
so minute they were invisible.
And there you would be milk, in you, too–real
milk! And you could wear a skirt, you could
be a bellflower–up under its
cone the complex shape like a closed
buckle, intricate groove and tongue,
where something like God’s power over you lived. And it turned out
you shared some things with boys–
the alphabet was not just theirs–
and you could make forays over into their territory,
you could have what you could have because it was yours,
and a little of what was theirs, because
you took it. Much later, you’d have to give things
up, too, to make it fair–long
hair, skirts, even breasts, a pair
of raspberry-colored pumps which a friend
wanted to put on, if they would fit his foot, and they did.

National Poetry Month (An Ebullient Elegy)

by Julia Blakeney

You guys! It’s National Poetry Month! Unfortunately, it’s almost over. Fortunately, poetry is for all seasons. And I am here to talk to you about POETRY!

National-Poetry-Month

National Poetry Month was started in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets as a way to celebrate all that poetry has to offer. National Poetry Month seeks to show people the wonders of poetry, and its place in our culture and in the literary world.

In my belief, and I’m sure in many others, poetry is the oldest tradition in the literary world. Epic stories were often told in verse form; we are all at least a little familiar with Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey as well as epics like Beowulf and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which is mostly in verse. We all know the classic poetry, the most famous poets. We may all even be a little familiar with the different forms poetry has taken and the different eras it has gone through in the course of history. These are the things I find most beautiful about poetry: its ever-changing, ever-evolving, yet persistent and immortal nature. Poetry is everywhere, and will always be everywhere.

Now, I may not be in the same camp as some readers, but in the past, I have found myself desperately wanting to like certain canonical poets and poetry, but finding myself disenchanted with a lot of it. Don’t get me wrong, I have found a few favorites in the poetry of old: T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, and John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” being a few. I greatly admire Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well. I also really liked, in a strange, sort of morbid way, John Donne’s “The Flea.” Sadly, however, I have to say that most of the time in my undergraduate poetry-as-literature class at LSU, I did not enjoy many of the poems our professor assigned to us, even some by poets that I really thought I would enjoy.

Don’t hold that against me, though, because during the next semester, I took a poetry writing class rather than a poetry-as-literature class, and that is when I discovered much more recent poetry that I naively (I’ll admit ignorantly) thought existed only online. Thanks to Mrs. Wilky, I discovered more female poets, which was something I had hoped to learn about in my poetry-as-literature class. In her class, I learned the most wonderful thing I had yet to learn about poetry: there is so much poetry out there that you can always find something you enjoy reading and can relate to.

insomniaI am happy to say that since I started working at Lemuria, I’ve discovered wonderful contemporary poets who write poetry that I can relate to. In one of my first blogs for Lemuria, I took on Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey,feeling like no amount of words could do it justice. I have just recently finished Linda Pastan’s Insomnia: Poemswhich was wonderful, and highly relatable for me; I feel the same way about it as I did Milk and Honey. It is a short little volume about living life and living it well in this incredibly fast-paced world, which I think many would love as much as I did. I have discovered books by other young poets, such as Tyler Knott Gregson; I found his “Typewriter Series” online years ago, but I never knew about his books, such as Wildly into the Dark.

Anyway, I wrote about all my experiences with poetry to tell you that poetry is one of those things that I didn’t really enjoy until I related to it, and I am sure I am not alone in this. I have been grateful for the last few years to learn about the wonders of poetry, the versatility of poetry, through classes and amazing events like National Poetry Month, as well as just browsing the shelves at Lemuria. john keatingThe versatility of poetry is one of the things that drew me to it in the first place; poetry has many different uses: to convey love (or even hate) and other emotions, to appreciate nature, to appreciate culture, and to encourage activism. Whatever your interest, there’s going to be poetry out there for you to discover. Come and see sometime what poetry has to offer you.

Ron Rash and his powerful ‘Poems’

I’ve stopped fighting Ron Rash.

This is how it usually happens: I see a book on the shelves at the store, hear other booksellers talking about it, and think to myself Sounds good, but I really need to wait till my next paycheck to buy another book. Then, said author shows up and does a phenomenal reading. Predictably, my aforementioned responsibility dissolves, and I become Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, clutching a copy of the book and mumbling to myself, “I want it NOW!!!”

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Source: The Wall Street Journal

However, I’ve learned to stop this futility with Ron Rash. When he read from Something Rich and Strange, I knew I would love the book, and I snagged a copy before he left the store; when he read from Above the Waterfall, the entire audience was transfixed to the point of collective held breath, and I knew I needed that power on my own bookshelf. So, when I saw his Poems: New and Selected, I didn’t even wait till he came to the store. I went home with a copy that afternoon and haven’t regretted it.

Rash is one of the rare writers who can shift between prose and poetry seamlessly. Fans of Rash’s fiction often cite the depth of his characters, rich description, and gorgeous language. These things are present in his poems as well. Yet a poem can explore an idea in a different, more direct way than fiction can. While fiction examines the condition of humanity and relationships, a poem can focus on things beyond humanity, like the natural world. Take his short poem “Deep Water” for instance:

The night smooths out its black tarp,

tacks it to the sky with stars.

Lake waves slap the bank, define

a shoreline as one man casts

his seine into the unseen,

lifts the net’s pale bloom, and spills

of threadfin fill the live well.

Soon that squared pool of water

flickers as if a mirror,

surfaces memory of when

this deep water was a sky.

Jacket (4)First off, the description of the night being a “black tarp” that’s held in place by stars is simply genius. Trust me: this will affect the way you look at the night’s sky from now on. And the way the poem shifts its (and our) focus from the sky to the lake in which this unnamed man is flinging his fishing net feels natural. This sky/lake relationship is maintained at the poem’s close when, as the threadfin fish slip out of the seine net, the lake is compared to a mirror that reminds us of “when/ this deep water was a sky.”

How, exactly, was the water once a sky? That depends on who you ask. For the fish, the water is their atmosphere, and its top is to them as the sky is to us. For us, when we look skyward and see clouds, there is also a quiet understanding that those clouds will fall as rain and eventually become an earthbound body of water. Rash cleverly puns on the verb “surface,” the word serving both as the action of rising to the top (literally, the memory is being brought up) and as a reminder of the barrier between air and water.

Whether dealing with the complexities of humans or of nature, he always delivers with inventive description and clever language. If you find yourself mildly afraid of or curious about poetry, come pick up a copy of Rash’s Poems: New and Selected. Or, if you need a little more convincing, come hear Mr. Rash read from the book this Thursday. You’ll get firsthand evidence of why I’ve quit resisting his books when you listen to the current of his words, and any hesitancy to buy the book gets swept away.

2015, I’d like to kiss you on the mouth.

dbdb37f2-a00d-4114-b5d6-1e42a0bc65cfThis year was a doozy. I consumed everything from nonfiction about animal consciousness to the modern classic Fates and Furies by Lemuria’s new best friend, Lauren Groff. I can’t even get into the second paragraph without telling you that The Godfather was hands down my favorite read of the year. You can read my blog about it here. I had the chance to sit down and talk to Garth Risk Hallberg about his meteoric rise in the literary world. Jon Meacham made me cry.

I personally made the move from the hub that is Lemuria’s front desk to the quieter fiction room, where I now am elbows deep in the mechanics of our First Editions Club; and am coincidentally even more in love with fiction than I was before. My TBR pile has skyrocketed from about 10 books to roughly 30 on my bedside table. It’s getting out of control and I love it.

[Sidebar: This year, I fell even more in love with graphic novelsNimona surprised us all by making one of the short-lists for the National Book Award, and we were so pleased to see it get the recognition that it deserves. Go Noelle Stevenson! You rule!]

As a bookstore, we were able to be on the forefront of some of the most influential books of 2015 (see: Between the World and Me– when we passed that advance reader copy around, the rumblings were already beginning). Literary giants Salman Rushdie, John Irving, and Harper Lee put out new/very, very old works to (mostly) thunderous applause, and debut novelists absolutely stunned and shook up the book world. (My Sunshine Away, anyone? I have never seen the entire staff band behind a book like that before. We were/are obsessed.) Kent Haruf’s last book was published; it was perfect, and our hearts ache in his absence.

We marched through another Christmas, wrapping and reading and recommending and eating enough cookies to make us sick. We hired fresh new faces, we said goodbye to old friends, we cleaned up scraggly, hairy sections of the store and made them shiny and new. We had the privilege of having a hand in Mississippi’s first ever book festival. We heaved in the GIANT new Annie Leibovitz book, and spent a few days putting off work so that we could all flip through it. In short, this year has been anything but uneventful; it’s been an adventure. So here’s to 2016 absolutely knocking 2015 out of the park.

Read on, guys.

 

9XL0vUY

Bleak but Relatable: Happenstance

In my opinion, just because someone can compare a cup of sugar to the idea of love does not mean they are a clever writer. I prefer poetry that can make me think, and I only came across this poem for my British Literature class in college. But it really resonated with me, because it was one of those few times I read something and felt relief because someone addressed a really specific feeling I’ve had.

Hap is basically about how Thomas Hardy wishes that some god or higher being would tell him that the hardships he’s had to endure in his life have some meaning, even if it is only for the entertainment of the god. But Hardy knows that most likely there is no meaning to his life at all, everything that has happened to him is simply chance, thus the title of the poem, Hap, is short for the “happenstance” of his life’s events.

Yay existential crisis! So it’s pretty sad, but just the idea that a famous poet has felt something that I have makes me feel a bit better. It’s a pretty cool poem, and is worth reading and researching the words that Hardy uses to describe his feelings because they have specific definitions that help with understanding the poem. Also, if you feel depressed after reading the poem, just imagine reading it out loud in the middle of the rain while sad music plays like in a movie, while you, I don’t know, shake your fist at the heavens. Then it’s hilarious. So I hope you read this poem, and I hope you feel oddly comforted by it like I did.

4S0iQTs

 

 

Hap                                                                                                                                                 By Thomas Hardy

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”

 

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

 

But not so.   How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

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