Review of Solo Cafe 8 & 9: Teachers & Students

Review
by Scott Owens

SOLO CAFÉ, 8 & 9: TEACHERS & STUDENTS
Edited by Lenard Moore, et. al.
Solo Press, 2011
ISBN: 0941490505

I have never written a review of a magazine. It’s not the sort of thing I usually set out to do as most magazines don’t cohere tightly enough to be written about as a single piece. But I have written reviews of anthologies, and when I came across the 2011 issue of the annual journal Solo Café, it was clear that this was as much an anthology as it was a journal, and the subject of this journal/anthology, “Teachers & Students,” was of particular interest to me.

The various poetry and prose pieces found in this anthology are just the sort that bring great joy, contemplation, and insight to teachers, students and poets, and perhaps most of all to teacher-poets or poet-teachers, however one with such dual “citizenship” might identify oneself. One will find here a full range of learning and teaching situations, including “students writing their fierce and luminous poems” in Laura Boss’s “Workshop at the Great Falls, Paterson,” where “William Carlos Williams . . . looked / at these same falls so many decades ago” and both prose and poetic tributes to specific teachers, like Earl Sherman Braggs’s “Mrs. Davis,” who “farm plowed and pushed a field full / of books . . . . / taught Shakespeare till Shakespeare, / himself, shook / the classroom walls . . . . /” and made clear that in the world of her students, the world of ongoing race war, “’To be or not to be’ was never a question” but rather an existential imperative.

As Braggs’s poem suggests, learning is not always a simple matter of X’s and O’s. When things go smoothly, as presented in Sally Buckner’s “Teacher,” learning is a fine balance of knowledge and passion that meet as they might nowhere more powerfully than in a classroom:

I will fill your plate as full as you will let me. //
I’ll bring the bread,
and you -- with yearning green in your young heart
and eyes that can see newly each new moment --
You bring the wine.

On the other hand, sometimes learning is a struggle between creativity and correctness, between autonomous vision and received knowledge or expectations of obedience, as in Randy Pait’s “Boy in a Classroom” or Susan Meyers’ “First Grade,” where a young student, having excitedly colored “a bold yellow sun” belatedly discovers “Words her other hand, / . . . / has hidden from her: / Color the pretty ball red.”

Just so, this anthology provides what at times seems an exhaustive variety of educable opportunities, demonstrating learning from history (Kelly Cherry’s “War and Peace: Cliff Notes”), and philosophy (George Burns’s “Partly Heliotropic”), from art (Ray Gonzalez’s “The Long Library”), and books (Michael Harper’s “Negritude: a Poem Written When Everything Else Fails to Translate”), from teachers (Kevin Lucia’s “Physics”) and observation (Terre Ouwehand’s “Vital Signs”). Similarly, the selections here cover every level of education: first lessons (Shayla Hawkins’s “The Seed”), grade school (Lenard Moore’s “The Art of Living”), middle school (Lamont Steptoe’s “Instructions”), high school (Nancy Simpson’s “In Room Nine”), college (Ray Gonzalez’s “Fear of Dying”) and adulthood (Teddy Macker’s “Teacher”).

In addition to the poems, a selection of reviews and essays further examine the influences particular teachers have had upon their students who have become writers. Of particular note in these prose selections is the frequency with which the word “generosity” is mentioned in regards to a poet-teacher. It is there in Mary Ann Cain and George Kalamaras’s reflections on Judith Johnson and Muriel Rukeyser, in Karen McKinnon’s recollection of George Sidney, in Shelby Stephenson’s discussion of Guy Owen, and in John Tritica’s homage to Mary Rising Higgins and Gene Frumkin.

If I had known about this journal before it went to press, I would have certainly submitted a poem of my own, and so I add it here to those in Solo Café 8 & 9 not because I think it is as good as those in the journal but because I think it expresses what every teacher-poet knows and one of the things the wonderful writers collected here would like us all to remember. I include it as tribute to the spirit of the poet-teachers this volume celebrates and includes and as tribute to the poet-teachers that have been so instrumental in my own life: Galway Kinnell, Robert Waters Grey, Paul Nelson, Tim Peeler, Ann Carver, Hepzhibah Roskelly, Stuart Dischell, Fred Chappell, and many others:

All There Is to Say

If it happens that you find yourself
at the front of a room full of people
younger than you
listening to all you have to say
about what you think you know
and suddenly you hear
from an open window
you hadn’t even noticed was open
the voice of a mockingbird
as clear as the voice of God
singing in every language at once
you owe it to yourself
to stop in the almost silence
and say out loud, Listen

Review of Ron Moran's "The Jane Poems"

REVIEW
by Scott Owens
(first published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)

THE JANE POEMS
by Ronald Moran
Clemson University Digital Press (2011)
ISBN: 9780984259854

Simply put, this is a beautiful book! Anyone who has ever loved someone and lost them, anyone who has known love or loss, anyone who loves memorable, well-crafted, emotionally powerful poetry, will love this book, which reminds us of the vital lesson Galway Kinnell gave us thirty years ago in his best poem, “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight:”

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

These poems begin at the beginning of the speaker’s relationship with the title character, Moran’s late wife, Jane. In “The Courtship,” Moran charmingly tells us how he, as a young man, took off his tee shirt and mowed “the same // patch of lawn over and over” “on a chance she’d be riding // in a car down the hill that day”, “an offering of my unrehearsed // goods in early summer.” He follows this with poems of tender intimacy that show the relationship between the speaker and Jane growing over the years. In “Double Passage in Mid-Life,” he says to Jane, “I turn to fit the contour of your life.” In “Weddings,” he comments, “No surprise that we’re // getting into each other’s / dreams.” And in “Room by Room,” he fashions a wonderful analogy for how a marriage is constructed: “Room by room we are taming / this house built sideways / and close to a narrow street.” In poem after poem, Moran conveys the depth of this relationship through fresh, effective and vital imagery.

The second section of poems tells the story of how the speaker spent the last years of his 50-year relationship with Jane living with her illness and with all the feelings commensurate with such experience: stubborn optimism, fear, dread, sorrow, uncertainty. We first discover the illness along with the speaker in “Mirrors,” where he sits in the doctor’s waiting room trying to “flash” his “new smile” as if he “could // do something to face up to this . . . news now slowly coming to light / in pictures at the end of the hall.” Moran takes us through the various stages of emotion one faced with the illness of a loved one will inevitably experience. In “Tic Tacs,” he muses, “What will I do / if your heart closes up / like a sundrop after dark?” In “Jane” and “Foreplay” he answers the more important question of what he must do now, expressing empathy for Jane and accepting the responsibility of caring for her. At several points in this book, Moran thanks Jane for “saving his life.” In “The Breakdown” we see one of those points when we hear Jane helping him learn what to make of their experience with illness:

as we held
each other, I said “What am I going to do
when you die?”

and she responded, as if she would never die,
and that, hey,
we still had each other, and let’s make the best
of it now.

The emotional process the speaker goes through in accepting inevitable loss as well as the responsibility of caring for another and learning to make the most of every experience we have culminates in “A Blessing,” perhaps the book’s most powerful poem:

I cup her hand leisurely in mine, closing
it slowly, feeling her tremors until my hand

calms hers, and I whisper, “Time to sleep”;
and as she does, I count interludes between
breaths, longer than ever before but steady,
then release her, knowing how blessed I am.

The final section of poems deals with Jane’s death and the speaker’s life afterwards. The first poem in the section, “Lines of Demarcation,” describes the speaker’s discovery of Jane shortly after her passing. It is one of the most powerful poems I have ever read:

she was on her back, her mouth
wide open
as before, but her thin and bruised body
did not twitch.

She was still, like a figure in a photograph,
not gasping
for breath as when I left her room.
I tried to close
her right eye, barely open, but it would not
stay shut.

The nurse said, “Do you want a few minutes
alone with her?”
I said I’m OK, which I was not, but I only knew
later
how much I was not OK and never would be
again.

The remaining poems take the reader through a second process: the process of grieving, remembering, and coming to terms with being alone. The poems describe the journey with remarkable honesty, admitting all the complexity, depth, and difficulty of grief without trivializing it with oversimplified platitudes, concluding only with a measured joy that might best be called, appreciation:

I keep thinking of E.M. Forster’s “Only connect,”
and all I want

is to rerun my life with Jane, beginning in June, where
under
an oak in Walnut Hill Park, we both asked, “Can it work?”
Yes, it did.

Ultimately, this book about love and loss becomes a celebration and an expression of gratitude. No more stirring tribute to the power of another in our life, to a relationship, to love, has been written. Nor has there been anything more helpful for any who face the prospect of living with a loved one’s dying. Moran has achieved those most poetic of ambitions, catharsis and relevance, transforming his life into art that is transformative for the rest of us.

Making Time for Poetry

Poet, Ann Chandonnet, wrote this profile of me, and last week the local weekly newspaper, Outlook, ran it. I love what Ann did with this, and after a student of mine told me his wife cried when she read it, I loved it even more. More than anything else I want my words to have an impact on the reader (I imagine this is the goal of most poets), so when an article about my words stirs a reader's emotions to the point of tears, it's pretty gratifying and a very complimentary reflection on the quality of Ann's writing. Thank you, Ann and Outlook. Pick up a copy of Outlook or visit the blog tomorrow for a poem from Joanna Catherine Scott, author of my favorite book of poems from the last several years and Poetry Hickory reader next Tuesday (2/9)

MAKING TIME FOR POETRY: A PROFILE OF SCOTT OWENS, POET
By Ann Chandonnet
The literary artist—the novelist, the essayist, the poet—must make time for his art.

Why? Because the literary artist is the most ignored artist of all in the United States.

In the Soviet Union (or whatever its politic name these days), they name battleships after poets. No such thing in the land of gummy worms and sound bites. Actors and embezzlers become celebrities while the poet is shunned like a leper.

Like the dedicated artist he is, Scott Owens chooses to stick to his literary guns. He makes time for what he feels is important. Although he has three children—one at home, two in college—he finds time. “Two mornings a week [my daughter] is in school,” he said in a recent interview. “When I was younger, I used to get up at 5 and have two hours to work. Now I just take advantage of time wherever I can find it. I take my books to the swimming pool when she swims. I take my stuff to her dance lesson.”

Owens was born in Greenwood, South Carolina. His life hasn’t been easy. He paid his way through college by working double shifts in a cotton mill. To make money while attending college, he gave massages, edited papers for fellow students and took on all sorts of part-time jobs. He has lived in Hickory for eight years, and teaches at CVCC. Two and a half years ago, he founded Poetry Hickory, a group that sponsors monthly readings at Taste Full Beans coffee shop.

As readers of his 2008 collection The Fractured World are aware, Scott was abused as a child. He has worked through that horrific experience, and his calm demeanor gives little clue to his early years. “At the bottom level, poetry was a way out—out of my feeling of desperation,” he explained matter-of-factly. “Poetry helped me think about the situation I was in, in my childhood and helped convince me that [life] didn’t have to be that way. Today poetry is how I know that I exist.”

Owens’ healing is expressed in his latest collection of poems, Paternity, out this month. The germs of the collection lie in his own fractured upbringing and in the love he has for his young daughter, five-year-old Sawyer.

Some of the inspiration for Paternity comes from his “absolutely favorite poem,” “Little Sleeps-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight,” from The Book of Nightmares (1970) by Galway Kinnell. Owens’ second favorite poem, also by Kinnell, is “The Still Time.” Kinnell wrote The Book of Nightmares for his children, Maud and Fergus, and it has been called “a howl against the depravities of social injustice.”

Not all poets are sure they are deserving of the title. How did Owens know he was a poet? “When Robert Grey, the editor of Southern Poetry Review, was teaching me in a graduate level creative writing class, he said he wanted one of the poems I had submitted in class for the magazine. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe I am getting it after all.’ “Owens was 24 at the time of this revelation. Since then he has won many poetry prizes.

The beginning poet often feels lost. What advice does Owens have? “Read twice as much as you write. Make it twentieth- and twenty-first-century stuff that you are reading.”

And take your notebooks along to your daughter’s swimming class. Make time.

Review of Linda Annas Ferguson's "Dirt Sandwich"

Review (First Published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)
Dirt Sandwich
by Linda Annas Ferguson
Press 53 (2009) 81 pages, $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-9824416-6-4, Poetry

For poets, every word is a first word, still full of the power and freshness of creation as they struggle without the tools of logic or reason to “put it right.” In her poem “Breech Birth,” Linda Annas Ferguson captures that sense of urgent discovery in the lines, “I had a hard time getting the beginning right, / . . . no measure / for what is true . . . / an abrupt breath rushing / into me . . . filling / my body with a sudden urge to cry.” She repeats the sentiment in “The First Word,” a poem about Adam’s love of words:

He strained to fill his tongue with every thought,
unable to identify the pleasure, raw
with newness and power, mouth parting--
their genesis and tone feeling true.

Such is the reverie of Ferguson’s fifth collection of poetry, Dirt Sandwich, newly out from Press 53. In one poem after another in this collection, Ferguson embraces (a frequently repeated word in these poems) the power of words as a means of embracing life. In “Genesis,” we hear again of the vitality of language for Adam:

Words lived in his bones,
touched his tongue, still wild,
a slow burning freedom
inside every sound.

How he longed for more words
to love, thought they could save
him from the wet falling sky,
from red flaming sunsets,
from all that hadn’t come yet.

Whether it is Adam speaking or a woman reflecting on her own audacity in the act of embracing language and all its potential as a child, the theme of language as a tool of exploration and knowledge is the same, as in these lines from “Innocence:”

When I was three, I could write
my name, scrawled it on doors,
walls, furniture, floors.

When Mama took my crayons,
I fingered it in the cold sweat
of windowpanes, paused to dot
the “I,” an eyehole to the moon.

**************************

I can hear my mother’s “Don’t--

touch,” as I poked
at splintering fissures of frost
on the other side of the window--

and all that enchanted me
about the broken.

As these last lines suggest, the poet’s love of the world is not limited to all that we normally think of as good. Rather, she has a more even-handed curiosity about and appreciation of all experience, all that life has to offer, all that living uncovers. Seamlessly, the next poem, “Topless Dancer,” begins her stubborn exploration of the forbidden and the tragic:

She embraces her own body,
cups a glitter-laden breast,
a golden moon. Dance
is the way she speaks,
embodies what she can’t say.

Such juxtaposition of the mythic, the individual and the personal from one poem to the next, or even within the same poem, is characteristic of the collection and illustrates the correctness of Jung’s concept of archetypes and the reason Confessionalism still works in poetry. This practice of relating the individual to the mythic, the personal to the universal as a means of deepening one’s experience of life, granting greater meaning to the seemingly insignificant details of our days, and revealing the still-relevant humanity behind the sometimes all-too-distant stories that represent us as a species is again made clear in “Rainbows Are Real:”

Once I saw a rainbow while flying,
looking down from the sky, not an arc,
but a complete circle, the plane’s silhouette
in the center. Pilots call it a “glory.”

I wonder if this was the way one first appeared
to God, His magnified shadow hovering
over muddy land and multitudes of dead bodies.

And so it continues throughout the book, each poem teaching us to reach deeper into the joys, the sorrows, and the mere details of life to find meaning, to understand that pressed between birth and death is the stuff of life “alive with dying” (“The Origin of Entropy”), the stuff of our very own dirt sandwich and to remember, in the words of poet Galway Kinnell ,that there is “still time, / for one who can groan / to sing, / for one who can sing to be healed.” It is a story everyone knows but few pause to contemplate. Thank you, Linda Annas Ferguson, for helping us be aware that we live.