the cassandra pages

Brand New: Ancient Lights

Better than a May-basket full of daffodils: today I'm delighted to announce the publication of Dick Jones' Ancient Lights, the latest title from my micropress, Phoenicia Publishing. His first full-length collection of poems is being released today in a gorgeous hardcover edition, a standard paperback, and as an e-book.

Dick is an old friend at The Cassandra Pages -- we met online a number of years ago through our blogs (his is Dick Jones Patteran Pages), and in person for the first time this past fall when J. and I were in London. We quaffed a few pints together at a neighborhood pub, along with several other blogger friends, talking of warm beer, mushy peas, and,of course, books. Dick is a wonderful person, gifted musician, and a brilliant poet whose work has spoken to me and touched me deeply over all the years I've known and read him. It seemed like a great literary omission that his work hadn't yet been gathered into a printed collection. I'm proud to have been his editor, designer and publisher for Ancient Lights, and hope it will mean that his poetry is available to a wider audience, and has a greater assurance of posterity.

In his poems, Dick writes of life and relationships, deeply felt but never sentimental, in strongly-crafted English that proceeds from the tradition of Eliot, Thomas, and Heaney, but is very much his own: restrained but filled with truth, sharp observation, memory, and emotion; never showy or deliberately clever. He is a poet who gets close to the truth as I feel it myself, and so the words feel personal, and timeless, whether he is writing of his boyhood just after WWII, his loves, his travels, his children, the deaths of his parents, or his own mortality.

I hope you'll agree, and consider buying one of these editions for yourself or a friend -- you'll be supporting independent publishing and art as well, since we return a large portion of the profits to the authors. Please take a look at the book description over at the Phoenicia site... if you aren't familiar with Dick's work, you can read a selection and hear the poems read by the author at qarrtsiluni, where Dave Bonta and I nominated Dick for a Pushcart Prize in 2010, for this poem:

 

SEA OF STARS

They will require,
should I return,
that I give name
to all the things I saw.

Even as I feed back
voltage, trickle chemistry
past their electrodes;
even as I share

my heartbeat with their monitors,
my blood with their microscopes,
they will question
in quiet voices,

seeking out new nouns
with which to corner
the ineffable, new verbs
to charge the immaterial.

As now their aerial voices —
filtered through ionosphere,
the shingle-clouds of asteroids,
across these tideless oceans —

whisper insubstantial, needle-thin,
scratching their need to know
the unknowable onto the mighty
silence. I trail interrogation

like a shower of sparks.
But from this eminence
I no longer heed
their eyes that scrutinize,

lidless, unswerving. This dark
accomodates a billion eyes, speculating
my parabola by day, by night, probing
for my tiny skidding light.

Implacable, incurious, I navigate
the brilliant wastes — long black
sargassos drifting, planet wrack
and flotsam, dereliction.

And beyond, always beyond,
the bright flying splinters of the stars.

--Dick Jones

 

 

Drawing Oneself with a Pen

Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which René, King of Spain, had painted of himself and asked, "Why is it not, in like manner, lawful for everyone to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a crayon?" Off-hand one might reply, not only is it lawful, but nothing could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own features are almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt the task, the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of profound, mysterious, and overwhelming difficulty.

After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen?

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series, "Montaigne." 

 

This drawing seems like something Montaigne might have done, if he had taken up his pen and drawn his cat.

--Teju Cole, in a note to me

 

But this talking of oneself, following one's own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection -- this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne.

--Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series, "Montaigne."

 

I've read very little Montaigne, and once I'm finished with this book of Virginia Woolf's essays on writers, perhaps I should. What she says about him intrigues me -- the writer who looks inward to try to find the truth -- as it obviously intrigued her, being a woman of a similar bent. What she describes is not a morbid or narcissistic preoccupation, but rather a sense that this is the place to begin: that if we can't know ourselves, if we even refuse to really look, how can we know anything about other people and the world?

And I like the analogy between writing and drawing, since actual drawing is one way I've always tried to look more closely. Virginia Woolf, such a close friend of the visual artists in the Bloomsbury Group, must have talked at length with the others about the path of searching-out, whether in words or in paint. But there's a paradox. When I was young, I thought that the closer I captured the details, the closer I was getting to the real thing. Oddly, the world sometimes seems to think so too, and many artists and writers stay there as a result.

But the essence of a landscape, a person, or a feeling can't be added up out of small parts, like a sum. We're more likely to glimpse it -- that essence, that truth -- out of the corner of our eye, or reflected darkly in a mirror, or to come to it after writing pages and pages that circle around this unseen "it-ness" like hungry lions moving in the forest around a bright but dangerous campfire.

Montaigne...refused to teach, refused to preach; he kept on saying that he was just like other people. All his effort was to communicate, to write himself down, to tell the truth, 'and that is a rugged road, more than it seems.'

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

--Virginia Woolf

Meme of Sevens

Marly Youmans tagged me recently for this writer's meme, which intrigued me enough that I decided to do it. You choose either the 7th, or 77th, page of your current manuscript, and post seven lines or sentences as they are, beginning at the seventh line on that page.

My current project is titled Thingveiller, and, because it's in a journal format, I'm writing it on a private blog so I don't have an exact page count. These seven sentences are, therefore, a close guess for the words that fall on all those 7s. In this section I'm musing about the names of colors, trying to find an equivalent for a particular tree's leaves.

 

I am still pondering color names when I pass the tree again the following morning. I'm on foot, and as I turn off rue Gilford and see the high back wall of St-Pierre Claver I note the street sign -- rue de Bordeaux -- and smile; the leaves might almost be called bordeaux, but they aren't that bright, they're more like the color of the sediment in the bottom of an old bottle, or of a full bottle itself with very little light shining through it.

The wind is blowing, fluffing the leaves on the southern side of the tree to reveal their green undersides. The reddish-purple-black color is further complicated by the addition of this green, reminding me of the duplex sheets of paper I used to receive from paper mills back in the days when I was a young designer and new, beautiful printing papers were issued each year for use in annual reports, invitations, cards, catalog covers: one of these duplex sheets was purple on one side, and green on the other. The leaves though are only semi-opaque, more like two layers of thick silk sewn together, each adding a changing complexity of hue to the other.

In Iceland there are no trees like this. Beside St-Pierre's' tree there is a spindly white birch with greenish-yellow leaves...

 

Well --intriguing or not? Thanks, Marly -- make of it what you will!

(And I'm not going to tag seven specific writers, but if you'd like to try it this exercise, please feel invited. You're welcome to post yours in the comment thread here if you don't have a blog of your own.)

Virginia and the Greeks

"Penelope crosses the room, Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa washes her linens; and their actions seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to beknown. With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines,meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthess fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age."

Virginia Woolf, A Common Reader: First Series, "On Not Knowing Greek."

Parmanu's New York Diary

"Man with Hat" (c) 2012 by Parmanu

"I do not know what it is like to live there, but as a visitor, no matter how many times I’ve been to the city before, New York does not fail to impress. Like Venice, Paris, or Mumbai, its character assails you the moment you step into the city. Arriving by train into the New York Penn station, the same passengers who were relaxed and laid back when they boarded the train in the suburbs spring into motion, like toys with wound up keys, and march with an infectious purpose through the station into the maze-like streets of Manhattan..."

Highly recommended reading and seeing, from one of my favorite writers and blogger friends.

 

La dame aux camélias: talking to Marly, part 2

We're talking to Marly Youmans, author of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. And, OK, those aren't camellias but azaleas in the picture, but it's definitely Marly. This is part 2 of a two-part interview that began yesterday.

_____________

BETH: Among the books that you've written so far, what's unique or special for you about this one? (By that I mean special about the characters or story.)

MARLY: In A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, I addressed some questions that rose up in my childhood and were never answered to my satisfaction.  When my father was a poor sharecropper's boy, he ran away from home several times and rode the rails. I know that once he was found in Southern Florida, but that's about all I have to tell; I wish that I knew more. I knew the places where he grew up, knew that he left home at seventeen and became a tailgunner in World War II--knew that he went to Emory on his return. I could remember something of his time as a graduate student at LSU, before he worked as a professor of analytical chemistry. But I knew little about those teenage years and what the rails (or being a tailgunner, or learning to fly during the Korean War, for that matter) meant to him.

Other questions about our family remained an enigma. My great-grandfather Nathaniel was a bridge builder in south Georgia who fathered twenty-two legitimate children, as well as two mixed race children. After the neighbor lady who was the mother of these children died, the two little boys were brought up in the family. One of them was my grandfather's favorite brother. These bits of news out of the past startled me and made me realize that the history I had been taught was only a partial thing.

Often an absence or a mystery is what draws a writer to a story. With language I toss some bridges over gaps, and though my words cannot conjure missing family history, they can conjure a story, an angle of vision, and a sort of rightness and fullness.

  BETH: Do you feel your craft as a novelist advances with each book? What were the particular challenges you faced in A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage?

MARLY: No doubt some mastery is gained, but the curious thing about me and the writing of novels is that I tend to veer in a wildly different direction each time I sit down to write.  New directions mean that I am starting over, and that what helped me last time is probably not going to help me much this time. If a writer relies on what she did the time before, she may please a publisher because a good many publishers don't like surprises, but she won't surprise herself... And what's the use of a creation that is not fresh and free enough to surprise its maker?

Along the way I was concerned about the book's picaresque, rambling character, and that the story remain vital despite the choice of a form can be somewhat less propulsive. The first two chapters rocketed out quickly and had a good deal of force; then I had the job of making the rest of the book live up to the start.

BETH: Thank you, Marly! I can't wait to read the book and I hope others feel the same way. It's available for pre-order at bookstores and online, and will be published on March 30.

La dame aux camélias: talking to Marly, part 1

Marly Youmans (at right in the photo) is a friend, a prolific and gifted writer of poetry and fiction, a blogger, and a neighbor of sorts: she lives and writes in Cooperstown, New York, just a hop of one valley over from where I grew up. I met Marly through qarrtsiluni, where she's been a frequent contributor and also an issue editor. Later this year I'll be publishing her book-length, post-apocalyptic epic poem Thaliad at Phoenicia Publishing. But right now, we're having a conversation about her new novel, "A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage," (Mercer University Press, 2012, The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction) available for pre-order at real bookstores and online. Here's part 1, below the book cover:

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage tells of a young boy's travels through the black heart of Depression America and his search for light both metaphorical and real. Writing with a controlled lyrical passion, Marly Youmans has crafted the finest, and the truest period novel I’ve read in years.

--Lucius Shepard

In A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage Marly Youmans gives us a beautifully written and exceptionally satisfying novel.Youmans has achieved that rarest of all accomplishments: she has created a flawed hero about which we care. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanageis one of the best books I have read.

 

--Raymond L. Atkins

____________________________

BETH: Marly, your novels have a very convincing sense of place. How did you decide on the setting for Death at the White Camellia Orphanage?

 

MARLY: In the case of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, I used a setting that had not changed much since the Depression--that is, the rickety house where my paternal grandparents lived and sharecropped land owned by a relative. The description of the orphanage relies on an intimate knowledge of the swamps and fields and dirt roads close by, the places where we would go to pick fruit as children, the swelter of heat, the cruel, ingenious insects, and the dearth of comfort in and outside of the house and its tiny outbuildings. It simply felt like the right place for the orphanage when I began dreaming up Pip and his life. 

Staying at a poor sharecropper's house near Lexsy, Georgia every summer was a great boon to me as an imaginative child. I could easily step away from the 24-party line and the minimal utilities and imagine a medieval world. To go there was to live in another time in which shelter was minimal. (A short jaunt down the road and I was at Collins, where I stayed in yet another time--my maternal grandparent's house, a Queen Anne built by my grandfather and still redolent of its era.)

BETH: Do you do a lot of research to achieve this, or is it based on personal experience?

MARLY: However, I don't usually pillage settings I know because I like to make things up. So I sometimes research elements of a landscape--eucalyptus flowers, for instance, blossoms that I haven't seen in decades. I admit to borrowing the feel of life by an upstate lake like Cooperstown for Pip's northern travels, and a childhood in which we moved every three years definitely informs the book's landscapes. Certain elements that seemed very strange to me when I lived outside the South as a child--clouds of cottonweed seeds, for example--crept in as elements of strangeness around Pip.

The interview concludes tomorrow...

 

NINE

It's Cassandra's birthday today: nine happy years of blogging! Thanks for being here with me. I'd be delighted to hear from you and know how long you've been reading here. I've loved writing this blog, but it's the readers who've kept me going -- thanks to each and every one of you.

And since it's a glorious warm day here in Montreal, I feel like everyone is celebrating. J. says, "as soon as you see girls riding on the handlebars of their boyfriend's bikes, you know it's spring!" I watched a big puffy male pigeon courting a female who was trying her best to ignore him, and as I walked through the park this morning the redwing blackbirds were singing like crazy in trees full of buds, so those special spring behaviors seemto be bursting forth and spreading across all the kingdoms: green, furred, and feathered. In the country there are probably froggy choruses already too, but that seems as amazing for this time of year as it is for me to be without a coat and hat. I hope it's nice where you are, too.

 

 

On Posterity

from "The New World of William Carlos Williams," NYRB 2/23/2012:

"...Spring and All, the 1923 collection that included three of his masterpieces...was published by a small press in an edition of 324 copies, 'most of which went unsold.' A collection of stories called The Knife of the Times appeared in 1932; a doctor friend of Williams's later found a hundred of them being sold by a hawker on the Atlantic City boardwalk for 15 cents apiece."

Wislawa Szymborska

Sometimes the world goes a little more silent, and so it was yesterday when I heard of the death of Wislawa Szymborska. In her 88 years she had only published 400 poems, saying that she wrote many more, but always re-read the previous day's work the next morning: "Many," she added dryly, "don't survive." So this was a poet who was not prolific, nor had she had fallen in love with the sound of her own voice. Instead, each poem said something that mattered, and therefore the silence today is multiplied.

My own attraction to Polish poetry began perhaps fifteen years ago, or even more, after I had gone on a two-year binge of reading Russian literature, ending up with Akhmatova and Mandelstam. From there, in my search for voices of survival, hope, and sustenance among intellectuals and artists during times of war, and what I perceived as both social decay and indifference to what was really happening, I moved to the post-WWII poets of Poland. I was mainly drawn to Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Czeslaw Milosz, and their younger colleague Adam Zagajewski: all poets who wrote beautiful poems about the darkness and the light.

In 1996, Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I bought her book View with a Grain of Sand, but didn't particularly like it at first. Somewhere around that time, I had a conversation about these Polish poets with my friend Kingsley, who had been a headmaster in a NYC Episcopal school and was a great reader as well as a man of strong and considered opinions ."She seems so...ironic, and almost flip," I said. "There's a sort of black humor in her work, and I guess I'm more attracted to the lyricism of the others...you know, the apricots hanging from the tree, the memories of past loves, the beauty in spite of everything that's happened." K. , who was about thirty years olderthan I was, laughed and said, "Yes, but that's exactly what I like about Szymborska. She's unflinching, she doesn't paper over anything, yet there's a humor and irony in her writing. Just wait -- I think you'll come to appreciate her more."

He was right, and it didn't take long. So much happened in the next ten years, and it changed me. After seeing death several times over, after loss and grief, after watching my country change irreparably, after leaving my home and reconsidering most of my beliefs, I found that the way I had looked at the world before no longer served: it had been well-considered theory, but not a lived reality. I had become more skeptical and less idealistic; stronger but also more cognizant of human frailty; more aware of the beauty in everyday life and the poignancy of each moment. I had found that humor was a great ally in dealing with the worst of things, and also with helping others to cope, and that the absurd is never far from the most serious human endeavor, especially in the way we seem to refuse to learn anything from our own history.

When I returned to Szymborska, it was immediately clear to me that K. had been right. I often had her poetry on my bedside table, and always found something truthful that made me nod my head with both admiration for her, and determination for the next day. But her poetry was never harsh or unfeeling; quite the contrary. She simply refused to be sentimental, and faced things as they really were. Now I think I saw in her a particular kind of strength that was female, and with which I increasingly indentified. The only words I can find to encapsulate Szymborska are "a soft toughness." You can see it in her face.

She hasn't talked a great deal about herself, but I liked this quote, from Szymborska's obituary in The Guardian:

"Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation," she said, going on to wonder why anyone would want to interview her. "For the last few years my favourite phrase has been 'I don't know'. I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world."

Yesterday, when I heard the news, it seemed ironic and coincidental that I had just taken down her book and quoted from it here two days before. But then again, perhaps it wasn't so odd, because, as I said, I re-read her poems often. It was Szymborska who I had planned to pick for Marly Youmans' "Lydian Stones" project - a choice that would probably seem too obvious now. But at the time, looking at the jacket photograph with her ever-present cigarette, I had wondered how she was doing, with no idea she was in the process of leaving the world.

Last night I read Szymborska again, trying to identify a favorite poem to copy here. There are too many, so it was impossible, but I'll settle on this one which is about a journey, and embodies the qualities I've tried to describe.

 

INTO THE ARK

An endless rain is just beginning.
Into the ark, for where else can you go:
you poems for a single voice,
private exultations,
unnecessary talents,
surplus curiosity,
short-range sorrows and fears,
eagerness to see things from all sides.

Rivers are swelling and bursting their banks.
Into the ark: all you chiaroscuros and halftones,
you details, ornaments, and whims,
silly exceptions,
forgotten signs,
countless shades of the color gray,
play for play's sake,
and tears of mirth.

As far as the eye can see, there's water
and a hazy horizon.
Into the ark: plans for the distant future,
joy in difference,
admiration for the better man,
choice not narrowed down to one of two,
outworn scruples,
time to think it over,
and the belief that all of this
will still come in handy some day. 

For the sake of the children
that we still are,
fairy tales have happy endings.
That's the only finale that will do here, too.
The rain will stop,
the waves will subside,
the clouds will part
in the cleared-up sky,
and they'll be once more
what clouds overhead ought to be:
lofty and rather lighthearted
in their likeness to things
drying in the sun —
isles of bliss,
lambs,
cauliflowers,
diapers.