With Luck, We All Become Persons of a Certain Age: an interview with Leatha Kendrick

Leatha Kendrick lives and works in Kentucky. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, the most recent one, And Luckier (Accents Publishing, 2020). She co-edited Crossing Troublesome, Twenty-Five Years of the Appalachian Writers Workshop and wrote the script for A Lasting Thing for the World—The Photography of Doris Ulmann, a documentary film. Her poems, essays and fiction appear widely in journals and anthologies including What Comes Down to Us – Twenty-Five Contemporary Kentucky Poets; The Kentucky Anthology—Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State; Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, I to I: Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists, and others.

She leads workshops in poetry, life writing, and writing to heal at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, KY, as well as at workshops and conferences in Kentucky and elsewhere. She is at work on a novel that centers on sisters, small town life, relinquishment and adoption.

Review and Interview by Melva Sue Priddy

Leatha Kendrick guest taught in a few of my creative writing and English class rooms some 15 years or more ago. Engaging and organized, my students and I learned from having her in my high school classes. I also rubbed elbows with Leatha at The Hindman Appalachian Writers Workshop, KY, and The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, Lexington, KY. We have a mutual friend, Ann Olson (https://annwolson.blogspot.com), who sent me a copy of Leatha’s new book upon its release during these months of the coronavirus pandemic. It has been an uplifting, inspiring and engaging read for this isolating time. I was reading Elizabeth Berg’s novel The Pull of the Moon as I read Leatha’s And Luckier. Somehow they worked with and informed each other—but that could just be me and my luck.

Leatha’s readers, mature and young, will enjoy reading these 45 poems, divided evenly between “I. Home Fires,” “II. Broken, Various, Inscrutable,” and “III. Unasked-for Singing.” Her writing has honed deeper into the human condition with each new book, and, ever personal and real, she holds your hand as a friend who walks with you as you read. You might think I am exaggerating; well, not by much. Leatha caught my hand with her second poem, “Next World” and we walked from there.

            Tell an unborn child
            there is dancing here,
            a blaze of scarlet leaves
            at autumn, seas that whisper
            to the sand, vermillion rose-
            gold skies at evening,
            I dance, he’ll say. His legs,
            flexed, test a wall.
            I hear the ocean pulse,
            drift in warm waters,
            gaze on ruby skies
            bright and filtered.
            Sleep, dream. I know
            that other world—
            how it must be.

            Tell him galaxies, wind,
            houses, lightning,
            lover’s fingers, dinner’s
            warm steams rising,
            a flower. Yes, yes,
            he’ll say. I know.

Reading on, Leatha doesn’t gloss over the difficulties in life. In another poem, “How to Go On,” one line reads: “So much suffering. We cannot uncause it.” In her briefest poem, “Eviction,” she writes: “Most of what / I lost I took / from myself.” If that isn’t everyone’s truth! Her range of themes move through birth and death, order and chaos, finding and making home, joy and difficulties, and aging. General and very specific. And she conveys so much wisdom. Her skill with words is modest and fluent. And her poems are informed by what is going on in this world and what she has experienced in her lifetime. “Out the Door,” a sonnet, “stands / between us and the world”:

            It’s getting out the door that stands
            between us and the world. I know. Open
            the damn thing and step through. Broken
            promises are all that hold us. Plans
            we made and then ignored. The mess in the house
            we’re afraid will survive us. The quiet hours
            we thought to have. Access to the powers
            we felt as children, near in us, now lost
            to lack of faith. The only thing that changes
            is the heart. There’s the door. The dream
            kept the faith you dropped. Time arranges
            more second chances than they tell us. Clean
            breaks, old reservations waiting to be
            taken up.

The following interview was conducted via email.

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MSP – The first poem in your collection that I fell in love with is your second poem, “Next World”. Tell me about that poem.

LK – The poem began with my trying to imagine the world from an embryo’s point of view. Imagining the sky, the “weather,” the sounds, the day/night cycles of it. An embryo late in its gestation might feel pretty certain about what life and the cosmos were all about. And then comes birth! So the poem is a playful, speculative look at the limits of knowledge. The poem is one of the oldest ones in the book, drafted in 2013 and published in 2014. And Luckier came together as a collection over the past decade, and “Next World” survived multiple drafts as the poems began to teach me what this book was going to be about. One of its biggest themes is limits: physical limitations, the limits of what we know and can know, and the limits of our courage and compassion. This poem could have been a first inkling of the book’s themes, if I had known enough to realize it!


MSP – “Reinvention” reads like a very coronavirus poem. When did you write this? Do you agree? What is it about?

LK – I first drafted “Reinvention” in July, 2013. For years I had juggled teaching and writing while commuting between Lexington and eastern Kentucky. As I worked on this poem I was clearing out the house we’d lived in for thirty years and our small place in Lexington as we downsized to the townhouse where we live now. It was another one of those times when I felt that I was never doing enough or being enough, and I wondered what it might feel like to simply stop. The poem is a playful response to my weariness with multitasking and trying to be all things to everyone.

I suppose that in the back of my mind were visions of a post-apocalyptic world in which we’d be forced to start over, though I certainly did not anticipate that we’d be living through a pandemic that would bring so much of daily life to a halt. I remember wondering what it might look like if we chose stillness. Many of us discovered in the silence of the lock-down a chance to reflect on what matters.

As in all utopias, however, human nature itself is the ultimate shaper of outcomes. To the extent that they can, old patterns of thought and being will reassert themselves, and the poem imagines some aspects of this as well.

If many poems in this collection seem fitted to our moment in history, maybe that is because the pandemic forced a recognition of pressures that have been building in our culture. For example, the opening poem of the collection, “Your Fear,” was written in December of 2018—not in response to pandemic fears, but out of my realization that our personal and societal fears are partly created and certainly manipulated by the headlines someone in some media outlet has chosen to present to us on a given day. I am conscious of writing to engage with moments of time in a broader context (on the planet, in our global society) as I age. I have my small sliver of vision about how things are – what do I have to say? what do I have to say?


MSP – Your poems include many questions, more than I’ve ever seen in any one collection. Can you tell me about that?

LK – I had not considered that the book is filled with questions until you pointed it out. Maybe part of that is a function, again, of age! I am acutely aware of all that I do not know and will never know.

Here are some questions from the poems: “What is the new?” “What did I want?” “What do I have to say today?” “What do I know?”

A question opens a door – it makes space for what I might not have considered before. Questions are about wonder – about taking a fresh look, taking a step back and saying, “Hmmm.”

At this point in my life I feel an urgency to look at everything differently, to consider possibilities. And part of recognizing what might be possible is learning to ask the right question—the best question to enlarge understanding. Ultimately, the poems are concerned with discovering what questions are important to ask and accepting never having a single right answer for any of them. And it is about having faith in the midst of the unknowable. As a writer, I want to come at the world with what Keats called “negative capability,” which he characterized as “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

The questions in my poems point to moments of understanding, but they also admit the limits of what we can know. It’s about trusting not knowing. Facts and reason have a important place in discursive writing, but art helps us inhabit other points of view. I want my poems to be about learning empathy, honoring the mysteries of other ways of being.


MSP – “Poem for a Daughter” appears, scattered in the collection, in three versions, I, II, and III. You chose different forms for each. Tell me about these poems.

LK – The three “Poem(s) for a Daughter” were written separately and over a long period of time. Each had its own title, and I did not think of grouping them until I was well into making this book. As I chose which poems to include I knew that this collection circled issues of identity: who am I? how do I know who I am?

For many years, mothering was central to who I was. I wrote my first poems and essays about mothering. “Mother,” of course, is not a static identity. Each of these poems was born of a moment of transition as I moved from parenting children at home to becoming the mother of young adult and adult daughters.

The poems appear in the order in which they were written – the first one dating from when our daughters were coming home from college, suddenly independent and distanced from me. I had wanted that poem to be a sonnet, but could not get it into fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. I settled for sixteen lines which range from ten to seventeen syllables each. The uneven rhythm mimics my struggle to reach through the changing roles that separated us, though the poem settles toward iambic pentameter in the last five lines.

“Poem for a Daughter, II” is a villanelle occasioned by our oldest daughter’s pregnancy with her first child. The poem began as a villanelle, though it went through ten years of revisions (our oldest grandson turned 11 in June) to find the truest and most accurate words to express the layers of feeling I was trying to convey. The repetition and variation of the form – and the liberties I took with the refrain – reflect the fact that every pregnancy is both common and one of a kind, endlessly repeated and unique. From the very first draft, the villanelle had be the form for this poem.

“Poem for a Daughter, III” is a fairly new poem, drafted late last summer on a day that brought back the intensity of mothering our first child in a little house on a hillside in eastern Kentucky above the Big Sandy River during the worst winter in decades (1976-77). Again, the poem leans toward a sonnet’s shape and musicality, though it is not quite a double sonnet. Written on an August day that recalled the heat of our first August in that little house next to the church on Cow Creek, the poem speaks to an “all-at-onceness” contained in some moments when time feels as if it’s collapsed. My daughter and her daughter on the phone talking about a smelly mess made by a broken washer brought back those diaper pails of forty years ago, as if they were not gone at all. Were they truly gone? How can everything be both here and not here at the same time?


MSP – You include about ten sonnets in the book, five of what I call “”very free verse poems” (pages 7, 27, 35,39, & 50—you may have a different name?), and two prose poems, and at least one villanelle, one ode and one triolet. Can you say something about how you know when a poem should be a particular form.

LK – As I was saying about the “Poem for a Daughter” villanelle earlier, sometimes a form suggests itself and sustains layers of meaning in a poem. Form, allows me to play with words and step outside my normal phrasing and thought patterns. Far from constricting expression, form is a vehicle for discoveries as I write a poem.

Fixed forms – like the villanelle or triolet, for example – offer a doorway into difficult material sometimes and other times allow a playful stance. “Dream Shop,” the triolet in AL, gave me a way to render a vividly recalled dream – the form’s repeating lines mimicked the stuckness of the dreamer, her self-questioning: How did I end up here?

Content pushing against form creates a fruitful tension that makes a poem more interesting – both to write and to read. Meeting the demands of form forces me to consider more deeply exactly what I mean to say. As Richard Wilbur put it, “The strength of the genie comes of his being confined in a bottle.” Pursuing a form as I write makes each decision conscious: every word and line break, the sound and rhythm of each line, the visual impact of the poem.

The sonnet is my favorite fixed form, a challenging and useful container. Though it seems counterintuitive, the sonnet’s rigid structure has been part of why it has endured: poets through the centuries have wrestled with, adapted, rebelled against, and ultimately made use of the form. It’s just the right length to contain a small argument with the self. Its fourteen iambic lines put a limit on how far you can go. Rhyme complicates and diversifies the conversation with the self, forcing me to find language I would not have used otherwise.

Most of the sonnets I write begin as sonnets, with me letting the form itself guide me into the content of the poem. Reaching for a line-ending takes the poem in unexpected directions and is very satisfying. It’s rare (and difficult) for me to revise a free-verse poem into a form.

Very free verse poems – which may be characterized as “astrophic,” or not written in regular stanzas – make use of white space as well as line breaks and stanza breaks. I love this form for its sense of energy and whimsy, as in e.e. cummings’ poems. I can deploy lines across the field of the page to set up another layer of tensions and juxtapositions. Lines can mimic the way thought moves – white space can say, “On the one hand . . . but also. . .” simply by where words are placed in relationship to each other. May Swenson is an influence on my use of this kind of form, and, more recently, the poems of Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Prose poems offer a chance to blur genres – to tell a little story yet keep poetry’s strangeness and lyricism. They are (for me) the hardest form to trust. The two prose poems in And Luckier spent years in other forms before I thought to try them as prose poems. Now I try to make it a practice to put poems into un-lineated form to see what happens. Every change of form as I am revising shows me what isn’t in the poem yet – or what needs to come out.

I usually begin drafting free verse poems in a long unbroken stanza, with the lines finding whatever length seems to suit the rhythm of what I’m hearing in my head. Deciding where to break stanzas and whether open up the lines and use the whole page is part of what is, for me, usually a long process of revision that includes refining the language of the poem and paying attention to sound. Finding the form for a poem is the same thing as finding the poem for me—the form is part of the poem’s content.


MSP – What did you learn about aging in writing And Luckier?

LK – It’s not so much a matter of what I learned as what writing these poems allowed me to articulate that I had not found a way to say before. My poet self loves words for themselves, she plays with language and speculates and riffs on lists and sounds and associations, and in the process, she names what she feels, as in the poem, “Naming It.” Here, the aging woman claims her right to sing, “unasked.”

Writing poems –especially in forms like the sonnet (in “The Warp,” for instance) – leads me to voices I didn’t know I had. In “The Warp” I found images of rust and heat and slivers of light that voiced a wiser and more joyful understanding than I had articulated before. Through those images, I let go of the person I used to be and put away the dream of the person I thought I might become. These surrenders made space for the person who is and allowed me to embrace her in the poem’s last two lines.

Aging is a lesson in confronting limits. Writing these poems I learned that limits are best confronted with humor (if possible) and a big dose of self-compassion. The latter is not always easy to practice. Courage and optimism are also essential. Singing helps – and dancing, too, whenever and however you can. One thing that did surprise me was that many of the poems of aging took me to light-hearted places.

Part of the joy of putting And Luckier together as a collection was the chance it gave me, at 70, to speak back to the circumstances of my life and of the world. The part of me speaking in these poems has made a space for herself and claimed and filled it. When I teach a workshop or write with friends, we are creating and owning space for the kinds of understandings and delights and self-acceptance that making poems can bring us. We are doing it together, and there is joy in that.


MSP – Do you want to say anything about how difficult it is to have a poetry collection come out during the coronavirus pandemic?

LK – What I am most aware of is how many writers I know who had books coming out this spring and summer. Artists of all kinds – particularly ones whose art is performance – have faced challenges getting their work to its audience. Most musicians and writers responded by generously sharing work they would have otherwise been performing live over virtual platforms. We’ve had extraordinary online access to all kinds of art these past months!

Platforms like FaceBook and YouTube and Zoom have allowed us to get our work heard. In one way, it’s been an amazing thing to reach people around the world this way. Despite the potential reach of a virtual event, however, the trade-off is a loss of the energy and spontaneity of an in-person reading, not to mention the serendipitous conversations and connections that happen at live events. Like my other writing friends with new books, I had scheduled readings and local and regional events beginning in April and throughout most of the year. All but a couple of these have been cancelled – and those will be virtual.

It is more important than ever to talk to each other about books that came out during these months of social isolation. Sharing poems on social media and in email and Zoom conversations, writing reviews (even brief ones in social media posts), attending virtual readings, and buying books (from local booksellers if possible) are vital to sustain and support each other. Podcasts, blog posts, and interviews (like this one you are doing – thank you!) keep us aware of new books we can come to love. These days I am more aware of and grateful for the many ways we stay connected as artists.

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Leatha Kendrick’s title poem comes in response to a quote from Walt Whitman: All goes onward and outward nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one is supposed, and luckier.” This blog is always a a virtual event, and I thank Leatha for working this interview in, around all the everyday events that yank us up and sooth us down, especially during the coronavirus epidemic. I’ll give Leatha the last word, from “There Was a Door”:

     What do I have to say today?
             Only Oh and Oh and Oh
     let me cross my own boundary
              open the door—

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Melva Sue Priddy, a native Kentuckian, earned degrees in English/Education from Berea College and The University of Kentucky, before earning an MFA. Her poems witness survivance and growth, bringing to light truths that arise out of felt experience. In addition to poems, she creates gardens, quilts, and some rustic woodwork. Her poetry can be found in ABZ, Accents Publishing’s LexPoMo, Blood Lotus, The Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Motif Anthologies, The Single Hound, and Still.

What? Poetry can have a social life?

Chris Green

The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race and Radical Modernism by Chris Green

Chris Green sees his work at the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center, which he has directed since July 2012, as the most important he has yet undertaken. He is a professor, poet, activist, and administrator who love and serves Appalachia with all its many cultures and people, as well as all the many peoples of the United States and the world. He grew up in Lexington, Ky., and attended the University of Kentucky (UK) where Appalachian Studies and creative writing answered his need to write poetry, know the world, and fight for justice. He went on to earn his MA in English from Appalachian State University, and his MFA in Poetry and MS in secondary education at Indiana University, where he studied the wily ways of poetry and post-colonialism.

After working as a poet in the community, he completed his PhD on multicultural American poetry at UK. He moved to Huntington, W.Va., where for a decade where he professed English, Appalachia, and world change. While there, his monograph, The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism, won the 2009 Weatherford Award for the best non-fiction book about Appalachia. Chris also co-edited Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction, a collection of scholarly essays, and edited Coal: A Poetry Anthology, a collection of 98 poets designed for non-academic readers, a book that one reviewer concluded was “significant and lasting contribution to Appalachian literature, and maybe more importantly, to the literature of a world coming to terms with how our resources and the ways we use them transform our lives.”

His is the author of the book of poetry is called Rushlight.

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Review and Interview by Melva Sue Priddy

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: APPALACHIA, RACE AND RADICAL MODERNISM —BY CHRIS GREEN, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

The series Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics published Chris Green’s book as one of the first three books published in 2009, and his book became a winner of the 2009 Weatherford Award for Best Non-Fiction Book about Appalachia.

I’m just now finding this book. Why so late?

I attended the 42nd annual Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman Settlement School, which happens in July every summer. A week long residency in Knott County, writers have been gathering at the forks of Troublesome Creek to explore the intricacies of fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, poetry, song, publishing, and to fellowship. It is a community of supportive writers, without competition. For more info, see Appalachian Writers Workshop. While the Appalachian Writers Workshop began in 1978, the Hindman Settlement School’s history of supporting Appalachian writers started many decades earlier. This year, Chris Green gave the Appalachian Literature lecture each afternoon. Chris is Berea College’s Director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center; Associate Professor of Appalachian Studies; and Department Chair of Appalachian Studies. He brought his passion into each lecture. The fourth lecture, based on his book, covered a lot of ground in a very short time.

Before listening to the lecture, and then reading this book, I’d never questioned how publishers chose the books they would publish. Call me naive, but I was unaware of the underlying motives of publishers, presses, and the people in the business. I thought one could be a better fit with some presses or journals, but I had no idea really. This was an eye opener for me.

In The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race and Radical Modernism, Chris Green looks specifically at the people in the Appalachian areas who became known as “Anglo-Saxons,” the development of presses in New York, and the agendas of the founders of those presses, and then the writing and publishing of four “first books” of poetry: Jesse Stuart’s Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (E. P. Dutton, 1934); James Still’s Hounds on the Mountain (Viking, 1937); Muriel Rukeyser’s U. S. 1 (Covici-Friede, 1938); and Don West’s Clods of Southern Earth (Boni & Gaer, 1946). Heads up: This is a scholarly book, well researched and explained for those delving into it’s pages. I was interested in the book for it’s contents and writers discussed but also because of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Me Too movement, and recent studies in Whiteness and the hidden biases of having grown up white.

“Part I Appalachia, Race, and Pluralism” looks at the myth of white Anglo-Saxon progenitors, how and why that was cultivated, when in fact many ethic peoples lived in Appalachia. Before coal was discovered by the big mining companies, and wanting that coal was the deciding factor, immigrants from England were just one of many cultures living in the mountains, which included: Native Americans, Jews, Blacks, Southerners, Italians, Irish, Scots and new immigrants. After the Civil War, people where anxious to read about unknown pockets of ethnic groups living all across the United States. While local color tended to stereotype groups of people living in the mountains to better fit into a white middle-class world view, seldom was one race or ethnic group more important or less important than another. Pluralism and equality were more evident in the mountains than local color writing witnessed.

“Part II The Social Life of Poetry” is divided into four parts, taking one poet at a time, their influences and development as writers, and exploring how each author developed his/her style as they interacted with presses, their points of view, and audiences. Green builds on his discussion as he includes each consecutive poet. For me, the book unfolds as a mystery and the second part is the most interesting, but I could not have understood its significance without reading "Part I.” Before reading The Social Life, I was familiar with all four authors: I studied Stuart in elementary classes, as most Kentucky students did in the 1950s and 1960s; I found Still when I attended Berea Collage, and I taught his poems, short stories and the novel River of Earth to secondary English classes (Still even visited my classrooms one day); Rukeyser showed up in anthologies and feminist writing in college; and West was the one I was least familiar with because his politics had kept him out of most class studies when I was in school. American education has made many mistakes in an effort to melt the pot of pluralism; we are finding our way back to those mistakes, though this isn’t the topic of this review / interview, but it’s worth saying aloud. All four poets are worth reading and studying.

I learned that all three men, Stuart, Still and West, attended Lincoln Memorial University and then Vanderbilt; they knew each other and kept in contact after college and they championed each other's work. All were from working class white families. Stuart and West had roots in what became known as the Appalachian area, while Still was from Alabama and considered a transplant as he lived his adult life in Knott County, Kentucky. Stuart is considered the first major writer from the mountains to win national acclaim. In contrast, Muriel Rukeyser’s Jewish family was considered middle class; she grew up in New York, attended Vassar for two years, took classes at Columbia University, but she had to drop out when her father’s concrete business went bankrupt. Of the four poets, Rukeyser and West were more politically motivated, attempting social change with their writing. I was unfamiliar with Rukeyser’s and West’s earliest works.

All four poets had different audiences and approaches to exposing those outside the mountains to Appalachian culture. Stuart wrote about his life experiences to an audience of his own people as well as people interested in mountain culture. His first book of some 700 “sonnets” were accessible, although considered a bit stereotyped today (…“he knew how to spin a tale that his readers were hungry to believe”). Still wrote in a more polished way, geared to educated people outside the mountains about the people he knew in the mountains; few if any people in Knott County read Still’s first book when published. Rukeyser, herself an outsider, used her journalistic background to address an “ideal audience [of] educated urbanites” with poetry of witness about inhumane treatment of people; she wanted her readers to see themselves as complicit and motivate action. She wrote “Book of the Dead,” the first section of U. S. 1, after her investigation of the Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, deaths of over 800 miners (most of whom were African American) from silicosis between 1930 and 1936. West, likewise, wanted his audience to move toward political action; trained as a preacher of Social Gospel, he “mobilized all his skills as a poet (and an activist and organizer) to help create a society where the working and lower classes could join together across categories of work, race, gender, or locality to struggle for political, social, and economic rights.”

All four poets, liberal leaning in varying degrees, found publication through New York liberal presses run by Jewish men largely educated at Harvard. That presses were in NY didn’t surprise me. What I didn’t know was that the presses all promoted something about American’s citizenry, and Chris Green helped me sort that out: “They were all mobilizing associations with mountain whites, and three were promoting a vision of America with many cultures; Jesse Stuart’s publisher promoted [the popular] Western Europe.”

There is so much complexity in this work, which happens anytime you stir human beings into the mess we really are. The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race and Radical Modernism is worth reading and studying.

—Melva Sue Priddy

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How did you choose these four poets, and how long did you work on The Social Life?

CG: I chose them because they were the first poets publishing about Appalachia with truly national presses. I first met & read James Still and discovered Don West when I was an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky around ’88 to ’90. In 2001 (or thereabouts), I wrote an essay about Don West and Muriel Rukeyser, the later of whom I read in graduate school, and compared their books and audiences. When it came time for my dissertation, I expanded and included Still. Near the end (in 2004), I realized I had to include Stuart, but my dissertation chair told me to do that later. I wish I had included one other poet—Louise McNeill—whose first book came out around the same time and was part of yet another readership/perspective, but publishers already wanted me to drastically cut down my word count.


You make note several times in writing The Social Life that all along there were people who resisted cultural homogenization, starting with your introduction. You also state that “‘Appalachia’ is a discursive construct.” I find this to be so interesting in light of what is happening in our world today. Obviously, the coal companies wanting cheap access to mine the mountains were a big part of making the mountain folk look dangerous and off balance. What were other influences?

CG: Oh so many! The then coastal elite’s reaction to the “back woods” people who were the pioneers; after the Civil War, people in the deep south felt betrayed by the mountains and people in the North thought of mountains as being southern—a real catch 22; then after the tremendous damage caused by the Civil War and the fight over scarce resources that the country needed for the industrial revolution resulted in feuding, it was the new role of education and the managerial class, which those in central Appalachia had limited access. The list goes on and on and on.


You state that although the popular image most readers held of miners was of a white miner covered in black coal dust, “…in 1931 black miners—mostly from the South—represented 22 percent of all miners in the state, with immigrants constituting another 17 percent.” That’s 39 percent of miners who were not Anglo-Saxon. Why was that perception so different from the actual?

CG: Media representations were operating under the pressure of assumptions about who lived in central Appalachia, coming from legends of the feuds and the cultivated, essentialist mythology of Anglo-ancestory, which I [discuss more] in the first chapter.


You comment in The Social Life on the absence of of Appalachians from studies of race history and the role of whiteness until the last twenty years or so. How would inclusion have moved both studies of race and whiteness further along?

CG: It would widen the sense of who is on the same side, of who needs to stand together, and of who has been (and often continues to be) the victims of the devilish dynamics of American capitalist ideology. The issue would turn from “Whites vs. All others” into an issues of class and power.


You state several times that poetry wasn’t making money for publishers in the 1930s, that presses took risks in publishing an unknown writer. Has much changed? Can you say something about how national publishers choose poetry to print today?

CG: Not much has changed. Presses have to have authors who sell and financial support (from donors, government, and foundations) in order to do worthy work as a press, because anyone can bring out a book, but most small presses are not capable of marketing them, even if they do a good job creating the book (which all too many do not).

National publishers do things for one reason: profit. However, obviously, there is not much profit from most poetry. What poetry adds is cultural capital, which can then be converted to a set of associations lending a press prestige and respect, hence increasing profit. There are some houses with national reputations who serve masters other than profit, but they are few and most of them can’t dare to risk their resources in poetry.


You state of Still: “Through his familiarity with Hindman and the Atlantic, Still reproduced conventions that allowed middle-class readers to recognize his work as authentic then validating those institutions [and that he] became part of a reinforcing circuit of discursive production regarding middle-class Anglo-idenity.” Do you think Still was aware of this at the time of his first publication? How did this influence readers’ awareness of race and class in the minds of non-Appalachian people?

CG: Still held the Atlantic as THE model of good literature, and later became aware of venues with different aesthetics and audiences. Was he aware of its specific audience? Perhaps not overtly, but implicitly, reinforced by virtue of his college study. His growing awareness was amplified in comparison with his friends (Don West and Jesse Stuart).


Writing about West and the causes he championed, you state, “The New York Times Book Review demonstrates that the world of readers who valued poetry in the North was not necessarily cognizant of the complex, oppressive political realities in the South. Nor could they hear poetry as Southerners did.” Can you say more about how Southerners heard poetry; and has that changed over time?

CG: The Southerners who read West’s books were deeply familiar with the nearly debilitating complexity of race relations, but they also saw, knew, and lived paths forward. They knew there were many parts of the South against which poets from the Fugitives specifically denied and that the Agrarians decontextualized in their moves toward white racial domination. In short, people who read that book knew what the score was: and the people who were reading it were not in colleges.

The way Southerners—and the nation—have heard poetry since was through the deaf and dumb practices of the new criticism which became all the rage in higher education for the next fifty years (and still lives today), but with the generational rise of southern African American poets (such as Margaret Walk, Robert Hayden, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Nikki Finney) as well as with the rise of Appalachian poetry, Southerners are more likely to see themselves.


West published Crab-Grass in 1931, years before Clods was published. Why did West’s publishers promote his second poetry book as his “first” book?

CG: Clods of Southern Earth [1946] was definitely promoted as his first, and it was West’s first publication with a truly national press. Saying it was his first book gained cultural capital in two ways: first, for many, working-class people outside the cultural establishment, that this was a first book made it feel more accessible; second, for some in the cultural establishment, such a long collection might gain credence for seemingly having come out of the blue as it did.


If I’m not mistaken, part of West’s popularity (of Clods) was due to his publishers promoting paper backs and book of the month clubs, and West’s dispersal of his book free, hundreds at a time, plus his image as one of the working class. I was touched by stories of how, long after distribution, sharecroppers and other working class people still had their copies of Clods. What can you say about renewed interest in West’s work, today, long after the FBI considered him and his work dangerous because of his connection to Communism?


CG: The core issues that West fought for—the equality of all people’s and their repression for profit is now a view more widely held. The great danger we face now is the rise of white fascism, driven by the destruction of the working classes wealth by the very white capitalists who stand to profit from racial conflict. Thus, my colleague is bringing West’s Clods of Southern Earth out again but now accompanied by a truly multicultural group of contemporary poets. The work of coalition building across ethnic and racial difference is easily fragmented because we rally more quickly to the defense of people we identify with while people, whose seeming difference is rooted in the ground of this nation’s most base, crass, and violent exploitation, is easy to rekindle and amplify.


Rukeyser wrote poetry of witness. What would you say to poetry writers today who are interested in poetry of witness?

CG: Go where things to which you are close are happening. Dare to know people and become close; dare to help and to stand in the way of bulldozers. Dare to throw your assumptions aside and listen. Then write. And read those poems to your friends. Publish them on broadsides, in newspapers. Stand with other poets of witness and bring your friends, your issues, your people, your causes together. For if we can’t stand together, if we are forced apart because of a false essentialism and defensiveness, then the game is over.


I learned so much reading this book. Chris, what did you learn, in the process of researching and writing, that most surprised you?

CG: That it all made so much sense. That poetry was so deeply a part of the social sphere and that it was so shaped by (and shaped) issues of race and whiteness. That coalitions of blacks and white in the South were fighting together against the evils of racism long before the 1960s. That my work as someone who loves poems let me see the deep beauty and integrity of each poets’ poems.

---

Melva Sue Priddy, a native Kentuckian, earned degrees in English/Education from Berea College and The University of Kentucky, before earning an MFA. Her poems witness survivance and growth, bringing to light truths that arise out of felt experience. In addition to poems, she creates gardens, quilts, and some rustic woodwork. Her poetry can be found in ABZ, Accents Publishing’s LexPoMo, Blood Lotus, The Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Motif Anthologies, The Single Hound, and Still.

Are We Not All Animals?: A Review of Gabrielle Calvocoressi's Rocket Fantastic

Rocket Fantastic
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

By the Numbers:

Persea Books
Hardback, 2017
Paperback 2018
ISBN 978-0-89255-485-0
92 pages










(reviewed by Melva Sue Priddy)

In an effort to be braver in my own writing, I’ve been reading poets who have been brave in theirs. One such poet is Gabrielle Calvocoressi. I’ll be honest, Rocket Fantastic was my introduction to Calvocoressi’s work. Its 92 pages are peopled by deer, falcon, bobcat, fox, horse, grubs, bandleader, hermit, cowboy, dowager, brother, father, sister, lovers, etc. Sometimes one people/animal becomes another, or it’s difficult to tell them apart. And these people find both pleasure and grief in their world. The poet explores tenderness, violence, eroticism, the lyrical and the mundane to bring us to new understandings about, especially, gender and its possibilities.

So, how is Calvocoressi brave? For starters her poems are democratic: every one gets to speak. Every one, also, is allowed to express their gender as on a continuum rather than as binary. In order to blur the distinction between genders, Calvocoressi uses a symbol (the musical segno, denoted by intake of breath when reading), for one character, and makes new use of the word “whose” to resist our usual bent to identify gender. I found an interview online in which Calvocoressi addresses this better than I can. Liz von Klemperer, at full-stop.net, talks with Calvocoressi:

(LvK) The Bandleader is a complicated figure, as whose is intimate but distant. Whose is compared to a Stag, which is not only a male deer but also a term for someone who comes to a social gathering without a partner. At the same time, whose is the narrator’s lover. How did this character come about? How did whose develop?

(GC) I love that you ask about “whose” because nobody has done that yet! And I think that’s been just as important to me as the symbol. In some ways maybe more. So thank you!

Whose most approximates my own feeling of identifying my sex and/or my gender. For me (and I do want to always say this only me speaking for myself…I am an enemy to those who force any manner of identification on bodies other than their own) “whose” is a word and idea that is inherently a question. It connotes looking and searching. But looking or searching for a specific person, so the clarity of the individual with the openness of a question.

I was just looking at the definition and saw this:
Old English hwæs, genitive of hwā ‘who’ and hwæt ‘what.’
Yes. And so like the sound I make when I breathe the symbol. And containing the WHO and the WHAT. Which I think is the closest thing to my poetics and my self. [See full interview—it’s fascinating.]

Calvocoressi’s poetry contains some violent lines, and there isn’t a world without violence, nature is often brutal and we see that in Calvocoressi’s book of poems, but I’ll let you explore those poems on your own. She (I’d use a non-gender pronoun but not sure what would be appropriate) also gives us some memorable lines. “She Ties My Bow Tie” is stunning. It begins: “What you thought was the sound of the deer drinking/at the base of the ravine was not their soft tongues/entering the water but my Love tying my bow tie.” And “It’s easy to mistake her wrists/for the necks of deer.” Just lovely. In a prose poem, "[Out here it’s okay to be nothing. Want nothing. You feel]," Calvocoressi’s speaking character says, “Have you ever had a person say It’s okay, softly to you in the darkness? Keep your eyes shut and say it to yourself and imagine. It’s okay.” What wisdom and tenderness.

It’s striking how Calvocoressi interweaves animal life, nature (malevolent and/or pleasant) and what it means to be human (positive and less positive traits). In “The Sun Got All Over Everything,” Calvocoressi shows how a beautiful day can distract us from our plans, and she touches on truth. Of the sun she writes, “It made a mess of a day/that was supposed to be the worst/and lured me outside so I forgot her [mother’s] death entirely.” The speaker continues: “I wrote: Grieve. Because we are all so busy/aren’t we?” Grief, I believe, is one of the most difficult emotions to hold, deal with and explore, as the character witnesses.

The poem “Who Holds The Stag’s Head Gets to Speak” is a direct address to God. Calvocoressi’s vivid images allow readers see the death as something we can relate to with humor and irony. A stag has been taken and draped over the top of a car. The speaker states,

       When they take him down in the darkness
       he looks like any body. Could you [God] rest the muscle of your breath
       against his neck so he won’t sag? So the man thinks he’s alive
       and quakes in the awful company of the risen.

       You are the Blue Lord I prayed for when I was hunted.
       You came to me through the branches. I could hear you
       in the upper room where I had hidden in the cupboard.

One of many rings of truth in this book is in the middle of “Praise House: The New Economy,” a poem written after Ross Gay’s praise poem. “I admit it:/this body’s not enough for me.” Indeed, most of us desire more life than what this one, often times limited, body can give us.

After searching the internet for an angle into Calvocoressi’s book that hadn’t been taken, I settled on the poem “The Good Guy’s Got No Chance, It’s Sad” because I relate to one of the subjects in the poem, struggling with seasonal affective disorder. It may be sad to consider, “Got No Chance,” but Calvocoressi uses exaggeration, humor and irony to make fun of our propensity to dislike bad luck and winter’s cold darkness. The poem in full:

The Good Guy’s Got No Chance, It’s Sad

In the face of the azalea breaking open
or in the case of the face being broken
open. He’s got no chance. None at all.

Take your average person at the start
of spring. Winter’s gone on forever.
Dear God you’re sick of every patch of ice:

you fell at the top of the hill and punched
the ground until your knuckles bled
right through your gloves. Who cares

what kind of child you looked like?
The economy of winter’d worn you down.
You couldn’t stand a single moment more,

not one. You’d tried: Optimistic as a dachshund
you made your way to work, the clouds
like mashed potatoes on a plate!

You didn’t let the market get you down.
Let it dip. Let it crash into the gullies (so you said).
In the face of empty bank accounts

you bought the world a sandwich.
The last apple in the larder. Fool.
What did the fox whisper

when you walked into the darkness?
They’ll eat your heart for breakfast.
Did you think it was a dream.

"The Good Guy’s Got No Chance, It’s Sad," © Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Rocket Fantastic (Persea 2018)

I enjoy the leap of one image, the azalea breaking open, to another, the face being broken open, which startles. Isn’t that the way of luck for a person who has no chance. We are all “the average person” and luck is democratic, especially bad luck. Webster’s dictionary defines ‘luck’ as “a force that brings good fortune or adversity.” And we find plenty of both in this book of poems. While it isn’t funny to be the one to fall at the top of the hill and punch “the ground until your knuckles bled / right through your gloves,” it is often slapstick funny to laugh at the other person who falls. Or to laugh at ourselves in a later retelling.

“Optimistic as a dachshund” is too humorous to overlook. Being optimistic has its rewards, but it often doesn’t get one through something as bleak as the short days and long darknesses of winter. Those of us with SAD know it’s no laughing matter. But we’ll laugh when we can.

The fox who speaks in the last stanza is one of many who appear in this book. In “Praise House” Calvocoressi praises

                                              All the animals
          that talk to me. That I finally let them
          talk to me. The blessing of waking
          early enough to watch the fox
          bathe itself.

Foxes with varying temperaments show up in eleven pages of this book. In Native American stories, the symbolism of the fox falls into two camps (similar to ‘luck’): In mainly Northern tribes the fox is a wise, noble messenger, while mainly Plains tribes view the fox as a trickster playing pranks, luring one into trouble. In the last stanza of “The Good Guy’s Got No Chance, It’s Sad,” the fox who speaks brings nature’s brutal inclination into not just the winter but also to the optimist. Nobody cares what you looked like as a child! Good looks, cute looks, they no longer matter and never mattered to bad luck. What did you think, spending money you didn’t have, after the decline in the stock market, on a sandwich to feed the world!

       "What did the fox whisper

       when you walked into the darkness?
       They’ll eat your heart for breakfast.
       Did you think it was a dream."

This fox may not have lured us into the darkness, but it knows our fate if we read it as merely a dream. We are so often lured into reading the surreal parts of Calvocoressi’s poems as dreamlike, and they are in the way people and animals morph into and out of each other. But she also shows us how animal-like human beings are, and how intimate and forgiving life/gender/love can be. I read a non-fiction book recently that shed more light on Calvocoressi’s poems. In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger proposes that humans are still trying to live in community, as humans did for thousands of years, until modern life separated clans, tribes, and families into single family dwellings. That we are not still living in community as we once did, he is saying, is the very thing that creates much of the grief and hardships we have. Giving Calvocoressi a close reading reveals a world where humans and animals coexist, not in paradise but in a real world with greater understanding of our possibilities and responsibilities if we are to be fully human and open to all our possibilities. This book, Rocket Fantastic, is worth every read you can give it.

---

Melva Sue Priddy, a native Kentuckian, earned degrees in English/Education from Berea College and The University of Kentucky, before earning an MFA. Her poems witness survivance and growth, bringing to light truths that arise out of felt experience. In addition to poems, she creates gardens, quilts, and some rustic woodwork. Her poetry can be found in ABZ, Accents Publishing’s LexPoMo, Blood Lotus, The Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Motif Anthologies, The Single Hound, and Still.

An Introduction to Shara McCallum's Madwoman

    Madwoman by Shara McCallum

     Alice James Books, 2017

    ISBN: 978-1-938584-28-2

Shara McCallum

Let me confess: I had never heard of Shara McCallum. At AWP Conference 2017, mid Friday morning, I listened, rapt, in a session called, “Written on a Woman’s Body: A cross-genre reading of bold writings about women and their bodies.” The presenters were prepared and impressive. The last presenter on the panel was Shara McCallum. A tough spot to be in, last. She opened, not with her own work, as the other four presenters had, but by reading Lucille Clifton’s “leda 1,” “leda 2,” and “leda 3.” McCallum’s commanding voice pulled off this reading and, in the process, put her own work in a vulnerable position. Then the strength of her own words followed—outstanding. She read from her newest publication, Madwoman, the following poems: “Madwoman a Rasta Medusa,” “Oh Abuse,” “Insomnia,” “Grief,” “To Red,” and “The Parable of Shit and Flowers,” in that order. Wow. The book was available at the Alice James booth in the book fair; I read it as I flew home from D.C. And this served as my introduction to Shara McCallum.  —Melva Sue Priddy

Shara McCallum was born in Jamaica to an African Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother and moved to the United States with her family when she was nine. She earned a BA from the University of Miami, an MFA from the University of Maryland, and a PhD from Binghamton University. McCallum is the author of four previously published poetry books: The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, US, 2011), a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 2003); and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 1999), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.

 Recognition for her poetry includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a Cave Canem Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series, and other awards. Her poems and personal essays have been published in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel and have been translated into Spanish, French, and Romanian.

McCallum’s dramatic reading drew me in. But the strength of her own words are admirable, at times lapsing into her Jamaican patois. As if this weren’t magical enough, her poems slip in and out of time, yet remain timeless. She includes the mystical and commonplace. She writes of all life’s maddening contradictions matter-of-factly, without explanations, reflecting real life. Madwoman does not step neatly from one age or stage to the next; her contradictions and paradoxes are often stirred in with rewritten myths, life challenges demanding one’s need to adapt and push through living, doing what has to be done, especially for a woman of color.  

One can, of course, make a search of all the wonderful reviews and interviews available on the internet (Consider reviews listed at the bottom of http://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/madwoman .) and so I intend only to introduce McCallum to readers unfamiliar with her work.  

The persona, Madwoman, marginalized, sane, insane, and, more likely, multiple beings at once, reoccurs, scattered throughout the book, and remains an engaging thread that confounds with her many anomalies. At one point, she is “the madwoman now being all women” (27). She is addressed by various voices from multiple intersections: “Madwoman as Salome”(8), “Madwoman in Middle Age” (24), “Why Madwomen Shouldn’t Read the News” (41), “Lot’s Wife to Madwoman” (51). 

One theme that binds this book concerns the various stages of womanhood. In response to a question about those stages and whether madness was an inevitable trait, McCallum states: 

I suspect some forms of ‘madness’ are an inevitable byproduct of aging. As we go along in life, if we are fortunate to live long enough, we will all accumulate losses—of people we love to death or to the changing nature of relationships over time, or of parts of ourselves as we are forced to confront the fact that versions of who we thought we might be or a life we imagined we would live will simply not [be] coming into being. The poems in the collection address various feelings of ‘madness’ roiling below the surface—among others, rage and sadness and dislocation of the self but also defiance, a wanting to say or actually saying ‘fuck you’ to societal norms and expectations. The vantage points through which I look closely at or dwell in these poems in anger, despair, fear, moments of coming unhinged, etc. are those of womanhood and girlhood and the stages in-between, as you note. But I am sure the gamut of emotions the Madwoman confronts exists in men and women alike, in anyone who has eyes to see and does not close them. (“Introduction to the Madwoman: An Interview with Shara McCallum”, interview by Alice James Books)

A recurring motif is memory; what gets remembered, by whom, and why. In fact, McCallum’s prologue poem, “Little Soul” after Hadrian, opens the possibilities of memory’s role in, or lack of, influence. 

Little soul—kind, wandering—
body’s host and guest,

look how you’ve lowered yourself,
moving in a word of ice,

washed of color.  My girl, 
what compelled you once

is no more. 

Such a small, unassuming poem, and yet there it is: How are our lives shaped by memory, “what compelled you once”? Which begs of Madwoman, what role has memory played in your development? These questions will not be answered in this book. No neat little strings. McCallum doesn’t try to tell us what the meaning of her life is, what the meaning of our lives are, woman or man, madwoman or sane. And she reinforces this in the book’s second poem,“Memory” (quoted in full): 

I bruise the way the most secreted,most tender part of a thigh exposedpurples then blues.  No spit-shine shoes,I’m dirt you can’t wash from your feet.Wherever you go, know I’m the windaccosting the trees, the howling nightof your sea.  Try to leave me, I’ll pin you between a rock and a hard place; will hunt you,even as you erase your trackswith the tail ends of your skirt.  You thinkI’m gristle, begging to be chewed?No, my love: I’m bone.  Rather: the sound
bone makes when it snaps.  That ditty
lingering in you, like ruin. (5)

Nothing sentimental here, no, rather bruises, dirt, howling, bone and ruin that linger. At best, the truth will confront: “Friends,/do you remember when we were young?/Life plump with promise and dreams?/Me neither” (41). Memories can “become unbearable” (12). But answer our life’s questions?  One voice asks midway through “Madwoman Apocrypha,” “Shouldn’t the death of ten thousand matter/more to you than that of just one person?” and another answers, “Yes. But I’m afraid grief isn’t math” (75). “Insomnia” speaks: “Dear one, why do you assume/there are lessons?” (64).

Yet even in the grittiness of life, McCallum gives us some beauty and innocence, but not much. “How else chart/a course than the way a child//plucks flowers from a field—/the eye compelling the hand to reach” (11). Even “Death” waxes poetic, if absolute: “…for I am in you/as the river is inside the stone”(56). 

In McCallum’s last poem, and the longest covering nine pages, “Madwoman Apocrypha,” several voices are speaking at once. Interlaced are those who will question and those who will tell Madwoman something, each with his/her own agenda. “Apocrypha” is a biblical term referring to texts of largely unknown authorship. When asked how this word defines the poem, McCallum responds: 

It speaks to it very well. But there’s another part of the definition of the word that is important to me to add to the mix. Apocryphal texts are those omitted from the ‘canon’ and are therefore not accepted as doctrine. Aspersions are often cast upon apocryphal narratives—due to their supposed lack of authenticity or truthfulness or sufficient evidence to back them up—in order to qualify and rationalize their exclusion. (“Introduction to the Madwoman: An Interview with Shara McCallum”, interview by Alice James Books)

An excerpt from this poem is difficult to layout, the page is broader than the regular page, but let me try, in order to show these voices intertwining.   

          Q: Why do you make the past a fiction?
          A: Everything is a wager.

                                                                                              Duppy know who to frighten. 
                                                               I heard this as admonishment 
                                                                           when a child.  But now
I think she is, I will be,
                                                                                        we have always been
                                                                                                             the duppy we fear.

          Q: What do you mean “a wager”?
          A: I needed to enact a search, but something happened
          I didn’t mean to have happen. I’ve become
          a sifter and a counter of grains.  


                                                                                     When as a child I couldn't sleep,
                                                                                                  stroking my arm,
                                                            she would sit with me, repeating,  …

                                                            nursery rhymes, song, nothing making sense
                                                            …

  but her voice and the dark.

          A: I don’t know where she ends and I begin. (77)

This last answer, above, has no question before it. The poem attempts to imitate the many voices each of us may have to confront within ourselves, even when there are no easy reassurances. 

Madwoman may be semi-autobiographical (most poems are), but, certainly, it reflects those voices living on the margins of society, voices full of authenticity, truth and lived experience but which are often unheard. Shara McCallum reminds us they are worth hearing by bringing us into their complex world. Find her work and read. And so I give McCallum the last word.

Q: Why do you keep referring to this woman

in third person? She is you after all, isn’t she

A: I’ve come to believe all stories

are self referential. Or else none of them are. 

When comes the night of your unmaking? (78)

Melva Sue Priddy lives near Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband. In addition to reading and writing, she enjoys gardening, sewing, and grandmaw-ing. She holds an MFA from Spalding University and has published work recently with Still: the Journal, Friends Journal, Poet Lore, and LexPoMo.. 

Diane Gilliam’s Dreadful Wind & Rain, forthcoming from Red Hen Press, 2017

Diane Gilliam is the author of chapbook Recipe for Blackberry Cake, 1999; and full length books One of Everything, 2003; Kettle Bottom, 2004, winner of the Perugia Press Prize; and Dreadful Wind & Rain, 2017. She is A Room of Her Own Foundation 6th Gift of Freedom Award winner, 2013. AROHO gives this award biennially to a female poet, fiction writer, or creative nonfiction writer to complete a project for publication over a two-year period. She also received, in 2008, the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. 

     I first met Diane about ten years ago at the Appalachian Writers' Workshop, Hindman Settlement School, Kentucky. We roomed together there once and have been friends since. I received an advance copy of Diane’s Dreadful Wind & Rain, expected  from Red Hen Press in 2017. Diane is a small unassuming woman, but when she speaks through her poetry, usually in persona, she packs a wallop. You just don’t see it coming.

The poems in Dreadful Wind & Rain are divided into 4 sections: “Girl” is about early lives and losing one’s hands (as in The Tale of the Handless Maiden); “Anyone” is about other lives and this particular one, coming of age/struggle; “Or Else” includes poems of claiming, taking hands back, and moving toward wholeness and connection; and “After”, the shortest section with only four poems, leads us into acceptance of not happily ever after but the threshold between a life that’s behind and the life that’s ahead. It is both a sad and hopeful tale told with simple and stunning language. The collection includes one villanelle (“His & Hers”); six prose poems (two in each of first four sections); one “Where I’m From” borrowed from George Ella Lyon; and the remaining 45 are free verse. 

In the opening poem “Girl” a young child is looking out a window wanting “Whatever is she is wanting” which “is not/too much to ask”. It ends with these lines which pulled this reader in:

…. And if I still can’t say

what it is I am wanting, look closely at the windowpane, 

it’s what I brought you here to see—how it holds us 

in that house apart from what we want, 

how the glass makes it look 

like there is nothing

to stop us 

at all. 

And so Diane starts us on a journey which looks like “there is nothing / to stop us / at all” and travels through female (and male) time, fairy tale time, Biblical time, and story book time. Her poems speak from different personas and cover stories women often tell and don’t tell, which are key to how we are who we are, how we diminish ourselves, and how that can change over time. She brings us to the first window in the first poem, then takes us on a journey that allows for all our versions to step into consciousness. The second poem, in its entirety, reads:

  Tale 

Someone put my mother in a box.

This is an old story.

The box could have been gold 

or glass or ice. It was a cedar chest

weighted with blankets and quilts

for a family of ten. He took them out

and put her in, she was three maybe four.

He told her not to move, pressed the quilts

and blankets down on her face 

and the box clicked shut.

This was after. This is the story

of the sins of the brother, hand-me-down

version of the sins of the father.

They searched first the yard inside

the fence, then the wood. They went

up the mountain, into the old bear cave

back of the house. They called, they shouted.

They tore their hair.

He’d told her not to move.

Every tale has its local inflections.

Hers could have ended with kindly strangers,

a woodsman and his wife longing

for a child of their own. Instead, it was

a whipping for the hiding and the scare.

This is a long story.

The brother long since dead,

the box, of course, still alive, dark heirloom 

crouched in the corners of all our rooms. 

We walk by, something clicks

and whispers,

  Don’t move.

Very telling. “Someone put my mother in a box.//This is an old story”.  The box could have been anything—it’s something most of us can relate to for this is how we are trapped in the stories passed down. Themes of separation, isolation, deceit, and “heirlooms” passed down reoccur throughout the book. I could spend more time here but I won’t. There are things you should discover for yourself.  

Diane uses turns of phrases in unusual ways, especially in the first two sections.  The poem “For Goodness Sake” uses versions of common phrases: paid the price, swept under the rug, a straw to break the camel’s back, mad money, turn the other cheek, and cry like a baby. In Diane’s hands, the phrases do not come across as trite but rather as familiar and intimate. In the last stanza these phrases tumble into:  “we understood—it was ordinary / hunger, we were hungry, like everyone else. / And that, at last, was good.” 

I want to highlight the phrase “turn it into nothing” which is echoed from the first poem: “And you were nothing, the mother / will say. And I was nothing, / the girl will say.” “[T]urn it into nothing” threads into this, the third poem, “The Father’s Story”:

Back then, people knew how to make

something out of nothing.  If there wasn’t grass,

women’d go out with a broom and sweep

a pattern, like fan quilting, in their dirt.

….

The narrator explains how he came to live with his aunt and uncle who “didn’t have any kids to work their farm / and they were, hands down, [another turn of phrase] / the meanest people that ever lived.” 

Once I found some old rusty wheels in the barn.

I thought to build a wheelbarrow

to carry the stove wood up to the porch

from the field. Uncle Jim pitched a fit,

called me a thieving son-of-a-bitch

on account of those wheels. Man, oh, man.

They knew how to take something, too,

and turn it into nothing.

In “The Bargain,” another child, or perhaps the same girl at an earlier age, is asked to be nothing, as had the girl was in the first poem.  The phrase “with next to nothing” is later used in “The Knot” where “The prize, / of course, is marriage.” In the third section of this poem, “Decades later, on her way out the door, / she still is looking for the why of it all”. 

She insists on an answer. 

All he can say is this—

he doesn’t know why, 

but he thinks he loves her

when he sees her working for hours 

on something all laid out on the floor, 

down on her hands and knees, 

with next to nothing

of something impossible,

trying to make it work

and willing for anything.

 I have selected of Diane Gilliam’s Dreadful Wind & Rain those poems which I found satisfying. To merely touch on poems which awed me, I tempt you with this one, previously published in Massachusetts Review:

PSALM OF LEAH

Leah….Rachel.  The names mean “cow” and “ewe” respectively.

--Zondervan NIV Study Bible

You Who Hear Me,

though my name is only the sound

of the low groan in the field, the rip

of grass from the ground, the obscene

wail of the one

cut off from the herd; You

Who See the wince

of the small humiliation of milking,

the twisted grimace of husbandry,

the face beaten like a plowshare

into the shape of what happens to it;

I know

You are not the stone eyes of my father’s

small gods, You are nothing

Rachel can steal. You are not the stones Jacob 

heaps as altars over top his sins 

to mark his trail. You are not the stone

from the mountain broken, You are the mountain

broken, its face undone, the space left open

when the men with the hammers have gone.

Diane shows us how we inherit stories, how we become trapped in stories, but she eventually shows us we can learn to see in different ways and change our own narratives. And she takes us to a door in the last poem, where we find

the breadcrumbs

meant to lead you out

of this enchantment, your own,

whatever it is.

The door opens

           when you touch it. It is not wrong

to pause on the threshold, here at the very

end of the story. Behind you, everything ever.

Before you, on the dark road,

everything after.

“Before you” is not happily ever after. Let’s be real—life is never going to be easy. But this book shows us we can claim our own story. 

I am one of those people who love to read the books I love over and over. It is a comfort thing. And with each subsequent reading, I find more depth in Diane Gilliam’s Dreadful Wind & Rain. Watch for it. 

                                                                                                  --Melva Sue Priddy