Although this post is titled "Musing" I can honestly say that no Muse has visited me for a very long time, or if she has, she has just as suddenly flitted away.
Nearly nine years ago I created The Wonderful Boat and, in that time, have had the good fortune of seeing five collections of poetry published.
The poems in these books are the product of my best effort at keeping sane in an insane, chaotic world, of pursuing ever-elusive happiness, and ultimately of settling on what ED called "quartz contentment".
I remember feeling a sense of accomplishment when the poems were published, and a sense of gratitude for those editors who are willing to publish formal poetry. But there are days when none of this matters.
I might just as soon have written grocery lists.
My wonderful boat seems to have lost its way. It is drifting and taking on water. Perhaps it never was as wonderful as I imagined it to be. Most likely it will sink to the bottom of the ocean of tears upon which it was launched. I am tired of bailing it out.
Leonard Cohen once said "Deprivation is the mother of poetry." And although I cannot say I ever felt deprived of the basics, that is, food, clothing and shelter, there is a state of deprivation worse than going hungry, naked or homeless.
My poem, "Memento" is online at Better Than Starbucks! along with fine poems by Alfred Nicol, Claudia Gary, Aaron Poochigian, Jared Carter, Anna Evans, Martin Elster, and others.
Chandler, like St. Therese, recognizes that God is glorified in our smallness, in our fragility, in monosyllables.
In his verse memoir, The Prelude, William Wordsworth wrote: “I
began/ My story early, feeling, as I fear, / The weakness of human love
for days/ Disowned by memory.” He was anticipating the objection that
his childhood was not fitting material for serious poetry. He also seems
to ask the question of us: what is worth remembering? For memory is
poetry’s raison d’être. Ought we only to set down in verse those
elements of the epic, so rare in human experience? Or may we also
memorialize those moments “disowned by memory?”
Catherine Chandler, in her new collection of poems Pointing Home, chooses the latter. Pointing Home is
filled with poems of remembrance, especially the sonnet series entitled
“Madison Street.” “Imagine this,” she instructs us in the first sonnet,
“a narrow one-way street/ in northeast Pennsylvania long ago.” The
Victorian poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti famously referred to the sonnet as
“a moment’s monument.” Chandler’s sonnets memorialize moments so
seemingly trivial that even Rossetti might reconsider his maxim. These
are sonnets about the goings-on of an obscure neighborhood in 1950s
America.
However, therein lies the beauty of Chandler’s project. We would be
poorer if we did not remember the little things that take up the lion’s
share of our life. Elsewhere in the book her poem “Plain Beauty,” (a
riff on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty), lets us in on her ars poetica:
Glory be to God for Homely things—
For muddy boots and oil-stained dungarees;
For calloused hands that knead and scrub and hem.
And later:
All things modest, unassuming, rough;
Rag rugs, first drafts, eucalyptus trees
Plain-spoken poems (foliage… leaf and stem);
They whelm the world in love. It’s not enough.
Love them.
Chandler, like St. Therese, recognizes that God is glorified in our
smallness, in our fragility, in monosyllables. God made this workaday
world, and what’s more, He entered it. We were not redeemed from the quotidian. We are redeemed in the midst of the
quotidian. The dull moments of our life are lovable precisely because
Our Lord lived them too. This “little way” is the difference that
separates Chandler’s colloquial poetry from its many other
practitioners. She’s also simply better at it. I can think of half a
dozen poets, mostly professor types, who think they know how common
people speak. The result is ugly pastiche. The plain style is also a too
common defense against the too common criticism that traditional verse
craft is out of touch with spoken English. With a few exceptions,
Chandler never sounds like she’s putting on an Everyman persona, and
often enough her verse rings with a musicality that is missed in English
poetry.
Though the bulk of the collection concerns Chandler’s personal past,
she does foray into our uncertain, collective present. In the poem
“Nines” she recalls her first-grade teacher calling the roll,. She then
turns her attention to cold war era bomb drills, but mingled in the poem
Chandler “roll calls” the names of the victims of the Columbine, West
Nickel Mines, and Sandy Hook school shootings. This roll call is a
chilling incantation and speaks to Chandler’s formal inventiveness. The
poem’s real brilliance though is in the comparison between the laughably
futile bomb drills of the last century with the, by implication, futile
active shooter drills of today. The poem concludes with devastating
irony:
designated hiding places
closets, corners
where active shooters
can never, ever find you
—Noah, Rachel, Benjamin, Jesse, Naomi, Isaiah, Grace—
Chandler continues this theme in “Votive” but the emotions are more
direct, not veiled by the artifice of the form, as in “Nines.” She is in
St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, praying for the victims of the Sandy
Hook shooting. She does not engage in theodicy as she considers the ages
of the children, “the dates, unbearable and brief,” but prays through
her “limits of belief” like an Old Testament prophet. Each stanza is
punctuated by the same rhyme, “reliefs,” “belief,” “brief” which is,
again, incantatory, like a litany, but also serves to give us the
feeling of something that keeps happening.
But let us return to “Madison Street.” Here, Chandler employs a kind
of mash-up of the English and the Italian sonnet, called the Dorn Sonnet
(rhymed ABCABCDDEFEFEF). Both the Italian and English sonnets are
marked by an initial argument followed by a “turn,” which serves to
complicate, contradict, or reemphasize the original argument. Like the
English sonnet, the turn in the “Madison Street” sonnets happen at the
couplet. But rather than being at the end, the couplet is inserted
between two sestets. Like the Italian sonnet, the turn happens toward
the middle, rather than at the end. In the end, they are neither English
nor Italian sonnets. They have an odd weight to them, a beguiling
symmetry; two sestets with a couplet in the middle like a pair of scales
hanging in the balance. Unsettled, the reader is invited to weigh in,
to decide on which scale to place the couplet.
Chandler is masterful in her use of nostalgia. Nostalgia, of course, comes from the Greek nostos (to return home) and algos (pain),
the pain of returning home. Which brings us to the crux of the
collection.
We often use the word “nostalgia” as a quick write-off. But
why? It is something common to the human experience, and most people are
able to separate nostalgia from fact; yet the feeling remains. So then,
we are all nostalgic after a home to which we have never been.
Nostalgia, well executed, should remind us that things are not as they
should be. It should point us back to our first home, paradise lost, and
then to our true home, paradise regained.
The beauty of Chandler’s
eschatological vision, though, her “little way,” is that it does
ultimately point us home, but does not discount this world, transitory
as it is. As she reminds us in “Pennsylvania Coal Town (1947),” an
ekphrastic after a painting by Edward Hopper:
Life is tumbledown
but this I know is true: that I would give
my eyeteeth for the chance to tell the man
in Hopper’s painting, Love it while you can.
Pointing Home shows us that, yes, this world is passing, but that everything we yearn for in our nostalgia will be fulfilled in the end.
The first review of Pointing Home appeared in today's local newspaper, The Journal. You can read it HERE. To read the article, please scroll down to page 10.
Thank you, James Armstrong!
Note: A few minor factual errors. I moved to Saint-Lazare in 2004 (not 1972 - that's when I moved to Canada); and Pointing Home was not, and will not be, submitted to the Richard Wilbur Award. A poet may only win that competition once, which I did in 2016, for my book The Frangible Hour.
New Year's Eve fireworks in Punta del Este, Uruguay
I was dismayed to see that my poem, "Celebration", a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, was printed in the journal Measure with a glaring typo!
So, here it is, printed as it should have appeared:
Celebration
A wash of molten silver slips along
the rippled black of Maldonado Bay
beneath this month’s blue moon. A
well-heeled throng
spills from the restos, as she
weaves her way
among them with a folding canvas
chair
down to the docks, far from all the
fuss.
No grapes to scarf, no new red underwear,
lagringa feels
de trop, superfluous.
As rockets blaze,
the revelers ooh and ah;
then when the
party’s over, rev their cars,
burn rubber round
the dark peninsula
till daybreak
clears the sky of lingering stars;
while she remains
and welcomes in the year
watching the
petrels dive then reappear.
—Punta del Este, Uruguay, December 31, 2009
Note:
It is a New
Year’s Eve custom in Spain and in many Latin American countries to eat a green
grape on each stroke of midnight, and to wear a new red undergarment, for good
luck during the coming year.
A few items of good news this morning. My poem "Memento" (first published in Alabama Literary Review) will be
published in the July issue of Better Than Starbucks; Daniel Rattelle's
review of my new book, Pointing Home, will be published next week in
Catholic World Report; and James Armstrong's report on my new book will
appear in tomorrow's local newspaper, The Journal, distributed to Hudson, Saint-Lazare, Vaudreuil-Dorion, Pincourt, Île-Perrot, Notre-Dame-de-L'^Ile-Perrot, and Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue.
I'll provide links to all of the
above as soon as they become available.
My new collection of poetry, Pointing Home, is now available at Kelsay Books and Amazon.com.
Pointing Home consists of sixty poems (plus an additional one on the back cover) and ten English translations of Uruguayan women poets whose lives span the past one hundred years.
In the back cover testimonial, award-winning poet Ned Balbo writes:
Catherine Chander's Pointing Home offers a poignant look back at words too rich, and richly painful, to be forgotten. At its center stands the marvelous sonnet sequence "Madison Street" which remembers and restores the vibrant yet troubled community of a Pennsylvania neighborhood caught and transformed by time. Through characters as quirkily authentic as those who populate Spoon River, Chandler traces the entangled lives of "Boomers from a lost millennium" through love, sorrow, and tragedy, her narrative compass as unfailing as her metrical facility.
Elsewhere, Chandler looks toward the broader world beyond -- a world where families cross the Canadian border under cover of night, and the gunfire of Sandy Hook recalls the names of children whose duck-and-cover drills reflect the fears that define an era. Chandler's multilayered translations of Uruguayan poets, her acute ekphrastic sequence on paintings by Edward Hopper, and her elegy for poet Timothy Murphy are but a few of the treasures in abook notable for its formal command, deep empathy, and leavening wit. Again and again, Chandler proves herself a master who deftly "parses the wild syllable of why."
My previous works, Lines of Flight, This Sweet Order, Glad and Sorry Seasons, and The Frangible Hour are available on Amazon HERE.
The news about the first photograph of a black hole reminded me of my villanelle, "Multiverse", first published in Think: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Reviews, Spring 2017, Volume 7.2.
The poem will appear in my forthcoming book, Pointing Home (Kelsay Books, 2019). Here is the explanatory note:
Multiverse.
George F. R. Ellis, philosopher and cosmologist, remains skeptical of the
existence of the multiverse. Nevertheless, he writes: Parallel universes may or may not exist; the case is unproved. We are
going to have to live with that uncertainty.— from “Does the Multiverse Really Exist?”, Scientific
American (August 2011). Beth Davidson was a childhood friend of John
Lennon and the inspiration for the line about the pretty nurse in the song Penny Lane. Beth Davidson went on
to marry John’s best friend, Pete Shotton, and she remained a member of the
Beatles’ close circle of friends until her death from cancer at the age of
thirty-five.
I've just added a new SoundCloud recording of my sonnet, "The Frangible Hour", the lead-off poem in my Richard Wilbur Award-winning collection of the same name.
I've received word today that three of my poems, "Edward Hopper's Pennsylvania Coal Town", "Matthew 7:1-5" and "North on 81" will be published in an upcoming issue of The Agonist.
Thank you, Christopher and Jennifer!
Richard Wakefield has also let me know that my essay Best of Seasons: An Appreciation of Timothy Murphy's Hunter's Log: Volumes II & III, has been accepted for the upcoming Able Muse tribute issue in honor of Tim (I'll also have a sonnet, "For Tim, on the Eve of Battle" in that issue as well).
"North on 81" the lead-off sonnet in my forthcoming book, Pointing Home.
(Able Muse Write Prize - Poetry, 2018)
and
"On Reading the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury Report", a seven-sonnet poem discussing my reactions to the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report on priest sexual abuse in six dioceses, in particular the Diocese of Scranton. (Poetry by the Sea Sonnet Crown contest, 2019)
Marilyn Nelson was the final judge for both contests.
I'm thrilled to announce that my fifth trade book of poetry, Pointing Home, has been accepted for publication by White Violet Press (Kelsay Books). Will keep you posted! Thank you, Karen and team!
