But... beware if you plan to knock on the door of
Kathleen Driskell. She lives next door to the dead and there’s no telling what
trickery she and her neighbors will have stirred up for you.
Often
two genres lie bookmarked on my desk simultaneously. Less often do they have a
connection. In this case I’ve been reading the work of two teachers of Creative
Writing, Kathleen Driskell, and Charles Harper Webb. I was already reading
Driskell’s collection of poems, Next Door to the Dead, when the September 2015 Writer’s Chronicle arrived. Driskell is Professor of Creative Writing and
Associate Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding
University in Louisville. Webb teaches at California State University, Long Beach.
A subtitle of an article by Webb on the magazine cover, “In Defense of
Less Difficult poetry” with the title, “The Limits of Indeterminacy” enticed me
to flip to page 98.
If Webb’s
subtitle baited me, it was the accompanying artwork on the opposite page, two
side-by-side mazes, that had the magnetism of a checkout counter magazine that
guarantees losing five dress sizes in six weeks. In spite of that mouthful of indeterminacy, the two juxtaposed
mazes made the gist of the article immediately
plain: the left maze was dense and dark, but the other one had more white space, making it doable even for one
who isn’t going to waste much of her valuable time with a maze of any stripe.
And as soon as I read Webb’s quote on the first page “...poets have replaced
traditional development of subjects with non sequiturs, and orchestration-of-effects
with randomness,” I knew that I would read Driskell’s book with an eye to the
veracity of that comment. I am one, given the choice of a less difficult maze
and a simpler one, who would always choose the simpler maze.
I am also one who likes to know.
Turns
out, so does Kathleen Driskell. In her latest book she writes epitaphs for
folks she never knew. When asked what might her neighbors lying dead in the
cemetery write as an epitaph for her, Driskell replies, “Now she knows.”
What
is it Driskell now knows?
Seed Across Snow had already planted the
notion that much about her poetry is Emily-esque with its even lines and tidy
stanzas. One tiny poem consists of eighteen words, twenty-five syllables. In
her comparison of this book with the new one, Driskell herself says, “I have to
admit that unlike many of today’s writers who are taking on more global
subjects, I seem to be completely obsessed with a mere square mile around my
home...the buzz that our church-home is haunted comes mainly from our proximity
to graveyard and the train trestle where the famous Goat Man of Pope Lick is
said to lurk. I dismissed that matter as silly but in a period of a few years,
our neighbor was struck by a car when coming across the road to her mailbox
which sat right next to ours, two teen-aged boys were drowned in nearby Floyd’s
Fork, other neighbors discovered a young woman who was nearly mortally wounded
and thrown from a car into a ditch, a nearby house burned to the ground and on
and on...and Next Door to the Death,
if anything, seems to narrow my real estate.”
This
limited milieu and other Dickinson-like details of Kathleen Driskell’s Next Door to the Dead swarm about as warm and fuzzy as the occasional hummingbirds sipping
on Ginger Lilies and Bleeding Hearts outside my window. Brevity, irony, humor
and more: it’s all here in Driskell’s newest collection from the The University
Press of Kentucky.
After
reading the Webb article I was impressed with the idea of how much “less
difficult” poems appeal to me. I like reading Driskell’s poems set in this
simple cemetery because that setting holds an entire community of varied
individuals with their twisted, or haloed, or ordinary lives. Each reader will
have his own set of imagery and symbolism to add to whatever I feel.
I emailed
Driskell a few questions to include this one:
KT: Name
at least one well-known poet whom you consider difficult and one whom you
consider less difficult. Which poet would you choose to emulate? Why?
KD: This changes for me as I read through my
life but I can say that I still have trouble with Wallace Stevens. I feel I
understand a number of his poems—and they are important to me, such as “Sunday
Morning” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” those early poems, but most do not
connect with me. I did study Stevens during my MFA at Greensboro, and I
understand the main thought-currents of his writing, still...a goal of mine is
to immerse myself in poems, biography, criticism of Stevens’ one summer...
On the flip
side, though I would never say he is an easy poet, Robert Frost has always been
extremely important to me. His poems are accessible to most, at least on the
surface, but there are also undercurrents and cave rivers running discovered
with subsequent readings... that’s the sort of poem [“Fences”] I usually want
to make—not one that deceives, but a poem that can be read and understood on
the surface, then intrigues enough to call for revisiting, and once revisited
rewards the reader with something new.
Several
such poems populate Driskell’s Next Door to the Dead. Any time I say/read the word cemetery, my mind pictures the hillside in the northwest county of
Alabama where my daddy was known as the area’s best gravedigger. I was told
after his death that he could always get the ledge for the casket carved out of
that red dirt perfectly straight and level, his only instrument, a shovel. A
black and white snapshot in Mama’s pictures has her kneeling at a short grave
with an overcoat on and her square head scarf tied under the chin in the manner
of European women. Daddy is standing at her side with his overalls and work
boots on, which I’m nearly certain he wore to dig the grave. He dug four graves
for their babies. The pain on both their faces is gut-wrenching.
I
languish with Driskell over the exacting boot of her gravedigger in “Grave of
the Mathematician.” Webb points out in his article that the “difficult poem” is
often easier to write, easier to make sound new, and may also shield the poet’s
psyche. I like Driskell’s true voice in her “less difficult” poems. This poem
soars from the specificity of the mathematical details and signs to the
ethereal: the metaphor of a grieving man as a slash against the wind; and the
tracks of a wagon carrying an infant, an equals mark.
And
for the first time ever as I revisit Driskell’s poem to write this blog, I consider the digging of the graves of my mama and daddy, by machines. Oh, sweet duplicity
of progress and poetry.
*****
Treat
yourself to Driskell’s new book for Halloween! And, do remember that I like to know. What is your fave and why?
Easy-peasy. Order through these links:
