Southern Bookman

Beth Ann Fennelly: A Journey to Brazil to Explore the Concept of "Home" in Her Work, and Elizabeth Bishop's

  

What attracts me most is a poet’s voice:  the unique rhythm, use of language, the special lilt and color that mark the writer’s special vision of the world. Beth Ann Fennelly’s poems strongly possess that perhaps indefinable quality of individuality. Comic, light-hearted, tender, loaded with vivid sensory details and narrative force, Beth Ann’s work immediately announces itself as hers, an authentic and stirring voice.
   I first encountered Beth Ann’s work in one of David Lehman’s “Best American Poetry” series. Her funny and resourceful “I Need to be More French. Or Japanese” instantly entered my personal anthology of poems that I’ll keep re-reading. Further reading strengthened my appreciation of her depth and variety.

   Beth Ann teaches at Ole Miss and lives in Oxford with her husband, the writer Tom Franklin, and their daughter Claire, and son Thomas. She graciously took time out from a trip to Brazil to answer the questions that I e-mailed her. Beth Ann joins Kelly Cherry, Rosanne Warren and Tim Suermondt as distinguished Southern Bookman interviewees (see below).

     

1. First, at the time of this interview, you are in Brazil. If possible, could you tell us about your project? What are your impressions of Brazil and its citizens’ feelings about Americans?

   I’m in currently living in Brazil’s third biggest city, Belo Horizonte, (the name means “Beautiful Horizon”), in the state of Minas Gerais.  I’ll be here for five months on a Fulbright Fellowship, half teaching, half research.

   For the research part, I’m studying the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet who lived in Brazil for almost 20 years.  I’m focusing on her poems that explore the concept of “home,” and I’m writing poems that explore the same theme that will become part of my fourth book of poetry. For the teaching part, I’m giving a class on American Literature at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. The University is quite good, and my students are wonderful; I’m teaching in English and I’m impressed by how well they are writing in a second language.

   So far I have to say Brazil is amazing. The people are incredibly warm and welcoming, and the natural beauty here is astonishing.  The city where I’m living isn’t on the ocean, and isn’t visited by tourists, and perhaps for this reason we’re a bit of a novelty, but in a really nice way — I can’t stop someone on the street and ask for directions without getting involved in a conversation about who I am and what I’m doing here. The Brazilians are very friendly and helpful and seem to regard Americans highly. Thank God we have a new administration in the White House, so I don’t feel that I need to apologize for Bush, whom everyone here seems to dislike heartily.

 

2. I love the humor in your work, such as “I Need to Be More French or Japanese.” For years, most poems were pensive and brooding. Do you see yourself as part of a return to more light-hearted work?

   I don’t see myself as part of a movement in this regard, though there might be one.  For me, using humor was more of a natural evolution that came out of feeling I wanted to bring the full range of human emotion to my poetry. It wasn’t so much that I started trying to write funny poems as I stopped preventing myself from writing them. 

   I think when I was younger I was so concerned with wanting to be taken seriously that I felt I had to write serious poems all the time. But I started to loosen up and my work did, too.  I like it when I read a poem and I have a sense that the writer had fun writing it. Not every poem can or should include humor, but I think, in a volume or poetry, there can and should be humorous moments — for enjoyment, for range, for balance, and because humor can make the sad parts sadder.

 

3. You recently did a recording of “Kudzu” for YouTube. Do you feel that Internet sites like You Tube and Facebook will help popularize poetry? Will they make poetry more of a performance, oral art, than a literary art?

   I think that nowadays we are such a visual culture that any way we can appropriate popular media to serve poetry is a good thing. I believe deeply that poetry needs to be heard aloud, be spoken and recited, and there are a lot of really exciting ways that that is happening now.

  My limitation in this regard is lack of technical knowledge — the Kudzu film was made independently of me, using a voice recording I had made for the online magazine Blackbird.  I wouldn’t know how to go about making such a film myself, but I’m glad someone else did, and I like the kinds of films and podcasts of people’s poems that I’ve seen on You Tube. They are finding people in new places — for example, in the elevators of the last Associated Writing Program conference.  Much cooler to hear a poem being read than listening to elevator music.

 

4. Recently, David Orr published an essay in the New York Times Book Review on poetic greatness, about whether any poets today will achieve “greatness” like poets of the past did. Do you and others writing today strive for “greatness” like poets of the past did?

   Hmm, without having read the article I’m not sure exactly what Orr meant, but I’d say writers today strive for greatness as they always have — that fundamental machine, ambition, keeps grinding its gears. 

   

5. I remember reading an essay you wrote about moving to Mississippi from the Midwest. Your poem “Kudzu” alludes to this transplanting. How do you feel about the South now? Do you find it still a special region, or has it become just like the rest of the country?

   Moving to Mississippi was a profound experience for me because (for no obvious reason) Mississippi felt like home. That made me start to wonder how we choose and define our homes, and how landscape influences psychology. These are questions that still interest me, and in fact, have to do with my Bishop project here in Brazil — why did Bishop, from the Eastern seaboard of the United States, come to Brazil and feel like she’d found a home? 

   The South is still a special region to me, and I think it always will be. A lot of the things I enjoy about being an American of Irish decent — the emphasis on family, the music, the literature — are valued in the South, and these values define the region and preserve its uniqueness.  I don’t imagine we’ll want to live any place else.  We made several moves early in our marriage — getting started in academia often involves a lot of one or two year gigs — but we’re happily settled now.  I joke about my next move being next to Faulkner in the town cemetery.

Kelly Cherry: "Music’s at the heart of all that I write"

Kelly Cherry is among those writers with whom I feel a special affinity. Her work affirms the written word as an avenue to the sacred and the higher reaches of human thought and emotion while delighting in the humor, joy, pleasures and pratfalls of our mundane daily existence. Proud of continuing the heritage of Southern literature, she like past Southern masters Robert Penn Warren and George Garrett excels in a range of genres, including poetry, essays, memoir, travel writing, criticism and the novel. As with our past Southern Bookman interview subjects, Tim Suermondt and Rosanna Warren (see below), I e-mailed Kelly five questions, and she sent back her responses. Our conversation follows.

 1. You’ve strongly identified yourself as a Southern writer. Is your generation the last that will do so? With the South becoming more and more urban and suburban and with its language homogenized with the rest of the country’s, will young writers born in the South ever again think of their work as having qualities unique to the region?

    

      What I love most about the idea of being a Southern writer is the Southern reader. Southerners who read do so with their hearts and minds — and without preconceptions about how characters should behave: This is good for the Southern writer, because a character is a complex construct, not a role model or simple representation, and likely to behave in surprising ways. Southern readers relish surprises.   

    I would like Southern readers to embrace my work, but though I am a Southerner, my work may not be Southern. I was an adult before I read very much Southern writing (Faulkner, Porter, and Williams were exceptions). My early influences were not often Southern. I did grow up on my parents’ stories about their lives in Louisiana and South Carolina.  I did have an English teacher who told me that I should move beyond my Southern accent, but I think I still have it.

     I don’t know what the future South will be like. The South has certainly changed a lot, mostly for the better, and presumably it will change more. But people are still attached to the land here, and to the climate and the flora and fauna. And some are attached to their history. And some to the attempt to confront that history.   

  Will future writers from the South choose to identify themselves as Southerners?  For a while, they will, but in the more distant future, I doubt it. At some point we may all be part of a global culture, even if nations continue to exist. Will this be good or bad?  Probably both.

  

2.Christ and his life have played a central role in your work. How has your conception of Christ evolved and what role does he have now?

 

     I sometimes say I believe in Christ but not in God; I don’t think there is a heavenly father, or an afterlife, or divine destiny. I also don’t think any of these things are essential to religion.  I see Christ as the symbolic nexus for humankind’s deepest fears and desires. “Symbol” may suggest an inert image, but Christ is a kinetic image, a narrative that helps us to understand the real world in which we live. I think, too, that religious language allows access to distinctions of meaning that are necessary to a full life.

    I don’t care whether there was a Jesus; I care that we are transformative beings, able to create heaven and, alas, hell on earth.  That is our glory and our shame. 

  

3. You’re successful as an essayist, poet, novelist and travel writer. Do you have a different approach to each genre, or do have the view of Gore Vidal, that writing is writing and there should be no difference in a writer’s approach to different forms.

    Vidal is wrong about this. Each genre has particular strengths and it behooves a writer to make the most of those strengths. Moreover, each genre has its own music, which is crucial to the shaping of an idea.

 

 4. You’ve written engagingly about your childhood with two parents consumed with their vocations as violinists. You’ve compared your language to music. How does music inspire your work, and does it inspire your poetry more than prose?

       Music’s at the heart of all that I write in every genre. That’s not necessarily to suggest I always succeed, though I hope I consign at least most of my failures to the wastebasket.

     In my childhood, Beethoven’s late quartets taught me about joy, transcendence, despair, hard work, determination, love and the miracle that is art.  In my adolescence I learned from my father’s understanding of Beethoven’s structures. At about 11 or 12 I also discovered that Shakespeare made a comparable music out of language and character.

      Beethoven and Shakespeare were not everything, of course, but they were for me the beginning of everything. (Along with the King James Version of the Bible, which angered me and made me want to refute it, because it was so beautiful and so mean.)

     I used to dream my way into work by listening to music — the ideas came to me out of the music and were rhythms and shapes, harmonies and dissonance, volume and texture and pitch before they were worded. But by now I’ve written many of those ideas, and sometimes I think I hear music even more intensely today because I can concentrate on its physical properties and patterns without feeling I have to corral it into a poem or novel or story or essay.  Nor do I listen to music while I’m writing, though once I did: that’s become like trying to listen to two pieces of music at once.

  

5. You’ve written about your travels in Russia and other countries. Do you agree with that Nobel official’s comments about the parochialism of American writers, and should American culture, particularly literary culture, have a more global outlook?

     I do think American literature tends to be parochial, and I think this is largely a fault of publishers. But publishers need to make a living if they are to continue publishing, so they publish what they think might sell. Their judgment about what will or won’t sell is wrong more often than right, but they try.

     Meanwhile, I think most serious American writers do make an effort to read widely, recognizing that if we want to understand our own country we need to know something about the literature of other countries. We do grow up on classics from around the world. Unfortunately, we are not as well-educated as we might be, and that is grievous.

    It would be great if readers in general made a point of reading at least one book from another country every year. Especially politicians, ministers, and corporate heads. We tend to pay attention to other countries only when a crisis arises, which is always too late.

Another Good Friday Ride with John Donne

On Good Friday, I renewed a tradition that's now lasted for years by reading John Donne's "Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward." As a thunderstorm blew up in the strange light of dusk, trees sweeping back and forth against the sky as the wind rose and rain fell, I again pulled out Volume 1 of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, my beloved college textbook, and found Donne's poem.

 No doubt humanity has progressed over the past 500 years, but Donne's precision and concision of language show that the quality of human thought has coarsened. I was reminded of the time that Garrison Keillor on his "Writers' Almanac" show read a series of Shakespeare's sonnets, followed by days of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." I was shocked at how flaccid and vacuous Whitman's language was in comparison with Shakespeare's elegant and incisive language. I like Whitman, but I've never cared much for "Leaves of Grass," although I love "Speciman Days," his prose memoir of the Civil War years.

Well, I digress. Back to Donne. The poem is a beautiful piece of work, when an intellect could look at science, religion and culture with equal power.  Later, as has been well-documented, a disastrous division occurred between science and literature/spirit. Donne's comfort with astronomy as well as theology is striking. He was writing at the dawn of the Enlightenment, when such breadth was common.

The poem tells the story of a man, Donne presumably, riding west on necessary business instead of contemplating Christ's crucifixion. He is aware of the sun rising behind him, brilliantly extending the ancient metaphor of Christ/Son and the rising son. As he speaks, he asks God to purify his personality, to make him more like Christ. Each year, the poem returns to me as if I'd never read it before. What I love is the mental picture I have of a man in black, riding across a haunted landscape, brightly illuminated by the sun.

In Donne's poem, nature, man, God and science are in balance. It's one of those works that sum up an age, a culture, as much of his poetry and prose sermons did. Later, the Romantics overidentified the self with nature. Science brought a loss of faith, and the destruction of nature. The scientific and religious minds drifted toward a great divide. Now religious fundamentalism shuns nature and science, to our peril.

Donne's poem gives me hope that a proper balance can again be achieved. He and others can give us guideposts as we progress forward to a new conception of our place in the universe.

A Full Portrait of Mr. Cheever

 John Cheever

Thanks to the Atlanta Fulton-County library, which occasionally receives books quickly, I'm halfway through Blake Bailey's big biography of John Cheever. Bailey, whose biography of Richard Yates I also enjoyed, possesses the gift of readable, interesting writing, of making tragic, often unsympathetic characters appealing. The book is also a great source of literary culture in the late 20th century, as Cheever seemed to run into nearly every important, and not so important, writer and poet. The book is loaded with details, about which some viewers have complained, but I love having such a treasure chest of gossip, writing lore and literary in-fighting.

I'm now in the part of the book where Cheever's drinking got worse and worse. As he aged, his gay impulses gained more and more control, leading to him drinking more and more. The book makes a point of saying that Frederick Exley was amazed at how much Cheever drank. If Exley, a world-class drinker, made such an observation about him, he's really had a very bad problem. As with Faulkner and other literary alcoholics, I wondered how he got so much work done. Bailey makes a point of saying that Cheever often started hitting the bottle as early as 10 or 11 a.m. Perhaps he wrote while drunk.

While reading the book, I found my sense of Cheever's position shifting somewhat. One shouldn't rate writers, I suppose, but I find it more difficult to say where I would place him among 20th century writers. He is surely comparable to Updike, both being masters of short stories and a certain American lyricism. Updike achieved more as a novelist, but Cheever's novels, especially his late ones (Bullet Park and Falconer) are gaining the favor of critics. Bailey points out that some of Cheever's early stories had elements of magic and fantasy and fable, which the "metafictional" techniques of writers like Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover. "Falconer" has all of the gritty realism and sexual openness of Norman Mailer, so Cheever wasn't just a writer of nostalgic lyrical pieces about the lost paradise of the suburbs. Many wouldn't place him in the company of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, nor would he rate with heavyweights like William Faulkner. Still, his achievement is considerable, and his best stories will probably always have a place among the best ever written.

His family conflicts, drinking, self-hatred, self-delusion, envy of other writers and so on make him unheroic. Yet his commitment to his work, his ability to accomplish memorable sentences, makes him a great figure. A blurb on the back of the book said his life is a "Dickensian" tale, and something about him makes him appear like a character out of Dickens. His faux English accent, his embellishments of his family background to make it appear more upper class, his manic energy, sexual wanderings and crazy situations are bigger than life. But Bailey makes us remember the work, which outlasts all of that. "Cheever country," the territory of his writing, is a rich, protean landscape, full of grandeur and riches. That must be honored above all else. Bailey, as he did with Yates, uncovers the luster in a life full of damage.