Spring | Summer 2017 OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES Culture | Issues | Ideas

dLearning to love like not hate poetry 2017—A Year of New Initiatives

At Oklahoma Humanities, the will explore this challenging period in year 2017 begins with continued our nation’s history. Concurrent with the ANN THOMPSON commitment to serving the public magazine and local programming will Executive Director through inspired and inspiring cultural be the September debut of an 18-hour, experiences. In addition to successful NEH-funded Ken Burns documentary programs like Museum on Main Street; on PBS called The Vietnam War. Our Let’s Talk About it, Oklahoma; Oklahoma objective in focusing on the Vietnam era Humanities magazine; and, of course, is to remind those of us who remember our grants program; we’re working on the war to think critically of lessons special initiatives that we’re proud to learned (and not learned) from the war, bring to our state. and to inform younger generations of First, through a partnership with the challenging issues of that period the Ralph Ellison Foundation, we are that continue to impact our national sponsoring a series of public meetings identity—the civil rights movement, on race relations in Oklahoma. Using the the changing roles of women, student texts of one of Oklahoma’s most esteemed writers and favorite sons, the Foundation activism, how we treat veterans, and the will encourage community conversations roles of music, literature, television, and to foster greater understanding and to the media in forming American opinion. promote the common good. This year promises to be meaningful Second is a multi-faceted look at the and rich in opportunities and, as always, Vietnam era. The Fall 2017 issue of this we approach it with enthusiasm and magazine and supplemental programs dedication to the citizens of our state.

2 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY CONTENTS

OKLAHOMA POETRY SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | VOL. 10, NO. 1 HUMANITIES 7 APRIL FOOLS’ DAY IN ADA, OKLAHOMA Culture | Issues | Ideas On finding poetry verywhere.e By Naomi Shihab Nye

9 HOW TO READ A POEM An experience to be savored. By Ken Hada

13 WEST WORD HO! COWBOY POEMS AND FRONTIER BALLADS The West, set down in verse. By Kimberly Roblin

19 POETS HATING POETRY Can’t anyone give poetry a break? By Ryan Stuart Lowe

24 THE RULE OF COOL: POETRY OF THE BEAT MOVEMENT They broke the rules and made poetry cool. By Paul Varner

29 THE POET HAS SPOKEN Can words break down social barriers? By Jason Stephenson

34 SIX POETS TO MAKE YOU FALL FOR POETRY Poems for the poetry averse. By Benjamin Myers

39 SPRING RENEWAL A garden of verse from Oklahoma poets.

44 THE POET’S LIFE Thoughts from a poet on his craft. By N. Scott Momaday

IN EVERY ISSUE 2 From the Executive Director 4 Post: Mail | Social Media | Messages 6 The Editor’s Desk 46 Noteworthy: New Board Members

ON THE COVER: Circa 1968. Diane Levesque is an assistant professor of art at Carthage College in Kenosha, WI. She has exhibited nationally as a professional artist since 1980, garnering numerous grants, fellowships, and awards. She holds an MFA from the University of Chicago. dianelevesque.net. CONTENTS: Flowers on a Window Ledge, John La Farge, circa 1861. National Gallery of Art

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 3 POST Mail | Social Media | Messages

Reader Feedback If ever there was a bipartisan (or I just wanted to send a brief email multi-partisan) document that shows to congratulate you on the redesign how the humanities add value to public of the magazine and your rebranding. and civic life—and in plain English—it is The magazine looks fabulous. I have the Fall/Winter 2016 “Democracy” issue enjoyed receiving it for some time now, of Oklahoma Humanities magazine. but you have really moved it to the next There’s a tradition of excellence in this level. I also think your new logo is very publication, but I do feel it has scaled yet elegant. Congratulations to all of the another height, and reflects so well on Oklahoma Humanities staff. —Stephen Kidd, Executive Director the heart and soul of our work. And at National Humanities Alliance such an important time, too. —Jamil S. Zainaldin, President Congrats on all the awards [2016 Beacon Georgia Humanities Award for Outstanding Nonprofit serving Nonprofits, and seven awards for Okla- A hard copy could only do justice to homa Humanities magazine]. Definitely the experience of reading/viewing the deserved—and so good for others to magazine [Fall/Winter, Democracy acknowledge what a great job you are all I received the Fall/Winter [Democracy] issue]. I found the essays to be very doing. Keep up the good work! well written, informative, moderate yet issue of Oklahoma Humanities. You are to —Luann Sewell Waters be commended for such a fine publication. compelling in getting their points of view across—just how a humanities discussion Since this magazine is, as I understand it, Social Media | Messages aimed at Oklahomans, part of the article should be presented. It was like having a entitled “State of the Vote—Your ‘Right’ conversation with these writers. Social media buzz on the Child Labor Revealed” doesn’t accurately reflect the Disparate points of view expressed in Oklahoma exhibit at the Oklahoma situation in our state. congenially is what this whole country History Center, funded in part by a In Oklahoma it is very easy to receive needs. And it seems to me that grant from Oklahoma Humanities: the necessary ID. When an Oklahoman Oklahoma Humanities carries on that I made it to the exhibit and I am glad registers to vote they are given a free tradition as well as demonstrating I did. The photos were displayed well. Voter Identification Card. They sign the democracy in action in which the First The speakers were informative. Very back of the card and present it when Amendment is used to inform and interesting evening. Thank you. they vote. They do not need a photo ID, educate “we, the people.” I am also —Tom Lehner but certainly may present a government- pleased that Tom Phillips’ artwork is Great exhibit. issued ID if they wish in lieu of the free getting more exposure. As with your —Dale Ingram card. Oklahoma is known as having magazine, the paintings in all their the best system of voting in the United authentic details are very moving and GIVE VOICE TO YOUR IDEAS, opinions, States. I enjoyed Mr. Sellers’ article. impressive to behold. and suggestions. Email the editor, —Jeannine Long —Michael Schaefer [email protected], or comment via Oklahoma precinct worker San Francisco, CA Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

4 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES OKLAHOMA Culture | Issues | Ideas HUMANITIES EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Ann Thompson [email protected]

EDITOR Carla Walker AT LAST, POETRY [email protected] A New Genre from an Old Friend PROGRAM OFFICER Kelly Burns [email protected] Chances are, if you haven’t attended yourself, you know someone who’s an PROGRAM OFFICER Christopher Carroll enthusiastic follower of Let’s Talk About [email protected] It, Oklahoma (LTAIO). For over 30 years, DEVELOPMENT OFFICER Oklahoma Humanities has distributed Brandi Davis [email protected] this popular reading and discussion

ADMINISTRATIVE COORDINATOR program across the state, bringing Robyn Arn communities together to discuss the [email protected] human experience through the lens Oklahoma Humanities magazine is pub- of literature. lished biannually (March and September) by from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Oklahoma Humanities (OH), 424 Colcord Programs take place in a variety Komunyakaa. Bloomsbury Review calls Dr., Suite E, Oklahoma City, OK 73102, (405) 235-0280, [email protected]. See of venues: local libraries, museums, Komunyakaa’s poetry, “razor-sharp pieces pages 46-48 for information on the OH universities, prison diversion programs organization, board of trustees, grants, and that tell us more about our culture than programs. Our privacy policy is posted on for women with children, state prisons, any news report.” The poems in Neon our website. Oklahoma Humanities magazine is an arts and humanities councils, and a vet- Vernacular reveal the voice of a black award-winning collection of culture, issues, and erans’ hospital. No matter the audience, ideas—a rich mix of humanities scholarship, man, a child of the South, insightful narratives, informed opinions, and exploring the humanities and a soldier using language beautiful images, for a read that is smart, through a common text unites balanced, and entertaining. Subscribe online: to paint a gritty image of life okhumanities.org or call (405) 235-0280. readers, opening doors to new Oklahoma Humanities magazine is free and the Vietnam War. ideas and shared perspectives. of advocacy and advertising. It is supported “Coming and Going in by donors (like you) and distributed free of After decades of reading charge via two-year subscriptions, rotated Oklahoma Indian Country,” biannually to serve as many Oklahomans as series comprised of fiction and nonfic- possible. To continue your print subscription, a series developed by author, poet, and tion, Oklahoma Humanities has three make a gift of support (use enclosed envelope musician Joy Harjo, features the work or visit okhumanities.org/donate) or contact us new themes that include poetry. and request continued mailings. Back issues of Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya in his book of Oklahoma Humanities are archived on our The “Civil Rights and Equality” series website. Reading group and classroom use are Leaving Holes & Selected New Writings encouraged. Other reproduction requires written includes Native Guard: Poems (Mariner (Mongrel Empire Press, 2011), winner permission. Contact: [email protected]. Books, 2007), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Oklahoma Humanities awards include of the 2012 Oklahoma Book Award for twenty-one Oklahoma Society of Professional book by Natasha Trethewey, nineteenth Journalists awards, including multiple first place Poetry. Nevaquaya’s verse speaks of pov- honors for Best Writing, Best Cover, and Best Poet Laureate of the United States. PR Publication; five Great Plains Journalism Trethewey’s collection explores issues of erty, pain, and obstacles; of native identity, awards, including firsts for best Magazine heritage, and honor; and of humor and Feature Writing and best Magazine Page race in the Deep South, through the expe- Design; three Central Oklahoma IABC Bronze riences of her own family and the legacy our shared humanity. Quill Awards; the State Historic Preservation Officer’s Citation of Merit; and an Oklahoma of the Louisiana Native Guard, one of the Whether it is a lifelong passion or Heritage Distinguished Editorial Award. an eternal mystery, come explore the Opinions expressed by authors, and first black regiments called into service any views, findings, conclusions, or recom- during the Civil War. language of poetry, revealing the tragedy mendations do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities, The series “War, Not-War, and and beauty that is the human experi- Oklahoma Humanities, its Board of Trustees, staff, or donors. Copyright 2017 by Oklahoma Peace” features Neon Vernacular: New ence. Find a book discussion near you: Humanities. All rights reserved. and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 1993) okhumanities.org/calendar.

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 5 Poetry. The lonely genre. Poetry You have to admire poets, pursuing suffers from neglect by association: their craft in the face of the ever-present mortifying recitations in front of teachers question: Does poetry matter? Meena and classmates, essays on the meaning of Alexander’s poem “Question Time” obscure verse. It’s no wonder we sprint recounts a reading where a woman in the toward fiction or biography or the latest audience asks, “What use is poetry?” The commentary on current events. Anything poet is thrown by the question, feels the but poetry. universe shift, and finally replies: Why is it, then, that we turn to poetry We have poetry to mark important occasions? Poetry is So we do not die of history. The Editor’s Desk there at our beginnings (in love letters and wedding ceremonies, in lullabies, And so, we ask you to suspend judg- CARLA WALKER and nursery rhymes, and presidential ment, to give poetry a second look. For [email protected] inaugurations) and at our endings (at the novice, we have Ken Hada’s advice on the bedsides of the dying, gathered at how to read a poem. For the poetry averse, gravesides, engraved on memorials). We Ryan Stuart Lowe reveals that poets hate press poetry into service—to woo and poetry, too, and Ben Myers introduces us to soothe, to praise and parade, to console six poets who are a pleasant surprise. We and confess and bless. Poetry is the way see poetry’s cultural versatility in Kimberly we say what we cannot otherwise express. Roblin’s tour through cowboy poetry and Poetry is there in times of crisis, too. frontier ballads found in the archives of Poet Meena Alexander was in New York the National Cowboy & Western Heritage City on 9/11 and explains that writing and Museum; Paul Varner’s look at how the reading poetry “was a way to survive”: Beat Generation defied the Establishment with verse; and Jason Stephenson’s riff People read out poems to each on how spoken word poets are breaking other, on the radio, in Union social barriers—and finding an apprecia- Square and other public places. tive audience—through self-expression in There was something about the the form of poetry. To hail the green buds poem that could allow one the of spring we’ve planted a garden of verse intense expression of emotion so by Oklahoma poets, including five state necessary to a time of crisis. poets laureate. Book-ending our issue are There is something about honing reflections from two of the greatest living words to an essential few that heightens poets of our generation—Naomi Shihab our experience of them. Brevity Nye, who shows us we can find poetry somehow makes them memorable. Poet everywhere, and N. Scott Momaday, who and social activist Margaret Randall eloquently illustrates the poet’s life and notes that: “Perhaps it is poetry’s ability fascination with words. to reduce an idea or emotion to its Come on. Give poetry a chance. By the minimum expression that gives it such end of this issue, you just might like it—or staying power.” love it—or at least not hate it so much.

Still Life with Books in a Niche, Barthélémy d' Eyck, circa 1442-1445. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

6 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY AprilApril Fools’Fools’ DayDay Crossing Over, Denise Duong in Ada, Oklahoma On finding poetry everywhere! Naomi Shihab Nye

ravelogue, April 1, 2016—Landing in Back to yu-to-ri, the “life-space” I learned about in T Oklahoma City at midnight, staring up Japan from poetry-loving kids. They had intriguing at a lush, clear sky stippled with stars definitions for this concept: Arriving early so you felt breathtaking as a poem. Such a relief to be in don’t have to rush. Giving yourself room to make a a quieter place after the mad bustle of a writing mistake, to surprise yourself. That space you feel convention in Los Angeles. (Network! Network!) inside after hearing, reading, or writing a poem—a Richly deep dark Oklahoma night. Who space for thinking. I remember what Carl Sandburg wouldn’t like that better? I took a deep breath. said long ago about liking what happens “in the Back in the center, the warm belly of the country. air,” how silence changes after a poem is shared.

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 7 Today launched another National Everything in Ada felt like a poem. By Poetry Month (thank you, Academy the end of our time we were family, citizens of American Poets), now a vibrant, of a country big enough to share. stimulating series of events for poetry Is it an attitude, poetry? A sense of lovers coast to coast. Two incredibly magic and surprise permeating each step? kind people picked me up to drive to the A simple joy in the call and answer of Scissortail Creative Writing Festival at language? An openness? A welcome to the East Central University in Ada. In the car next moment? An awareness that anything we quickly found a hundred things to talk might happen, and it might be—good? about. It felt like poetry—friends you’ve Looking back, I have always felt never met before, laughing easily, sharing lucky to have been at the Holland Hall TORN MAP questions, connections. Small roads, school in Tulsa on September 11, 2001. trees, stretching fields, farmhouses, On that horrific day, there was such Once limitless sky . . . then we arrived. kindness and humanity present on the by mistake she tore a map Writers and listeners were milling campus. Children had just shown me a in half. about in the student center, a building wondrous display of posters they made She taped it back, surrounded by spring flowers. I found out using collage strips from road maps on but crookedly. Now all the roads later that the elegant campus landscaping large paper boards. They wrote their own ended in water. has been overseen for thirty years by one of poems between map sections, describing There were mountains the first friends I ever knew as a teenager trips and families and dreams, modeled right next to her hometown. arriving in the state of Texas. Seriously? on my poem “Torn Map.” Wouldn’t that be nice if it were true? There are millions of people in the world, Think of it: on a day when so many life I’d tear a map yet friends keep finding one another. maps would be ripped asunder, so many and be right next The Scissortail Festival, expertly families plundered, so much heartbreak to you. organized for the past eleven years by launched in the world, the kids in Tulsa —Naomi Shihab Nye Dr. Ken Hada, has a strong charisma were all about linkage and movement and of genuineness—no hype or flash, just hope. How precious that memory would honest, interesting writing. (Networking, feel later on. begone!) Anyone could appreciate the Poetry has always given us a place variety of voices at the many readings, and a way to express our dreams. And a whatever the style, poetry resonant in chance to try to shape our sorrows and NAOMI SHIHAB NYE describes herself all of them, even if writers were reading troubles into language too. as a “wandering poet.” Drawing on prose. I listened, listened, growing richer When you attend a poetry reading, you her Palestinian-American heritage, the by the hour. have no idea what words and images you cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and It was easy to make new pals after will hear. Your senses sharpen. You are experiences from world travels, her writing communicates a shared humanity. She every session. Some of us ate at a pitched into calm absorption, a clarified was elected to the Board of Chancellors of delicious, locally-owned cafe, waved at focus. If you don’t understand something the Academy of American Poets in 2010. Blake Shelton’s handsome face on a or a poem doesn’t quite catch you, no great Among many prestigious honors, she was named laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt hometown mural, shopped at a thrift worry—here comes another one. Award for Children’s Literature. “Torn Map” store, visited the book sale at the public Next time someone says they don’t is from Come With Me: Poems for a Journey library, picked two books off the “free” like poetry, say “April Fool! You just don’t (Greenwillow Books, 2000) by Naomi Shihab table. Loretta Yin, born in China, whose like the poems you’ve read ’til now. Find Nye, illustrated by Dan Yaccarino. business card says “Foreign born . . . art different ones.” Then help them do that. DENISE DUONG is a Vietnamese-American lover . . . avid reader,” was walking around Send them to the library. Give them a artist, currently residing in Oklahoma City. She has a deep love for nature, adventure, and town with a pull-cart full of her won- book you love or a poem printed on an exploration, which she lives through art, one derful small oil paintings. To own one, index card. stroke at a time, one layer at a time. Her mixed you donate any amount you like to the It’s not hard to share poetry—our media works use paper, acrylic, and a variety Friends of the Library. We all wanted one. most portable art. of printing techniques. deniseduongart.com

8 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY HowHow toto ReadRead aa PoemPoem A poem is an Ken Hada | Art by Brent Watkinson exploration, an experience to be savored. Waiting Figure, Brent Watkinson

how to read a poem any more than I can I should tell you that much of what I cannot tell you how to enjoy a fine meal. Reading I have to say is not original with me poetry is an individual experience. I can, (or any other poet for that matter).

tell youd however, encourage you to taste the meal Reading poetry is an ancient practice, though lately obscured and distracted despite any initial misgivings you may have. in our big-business approach to I can describe some of the ingredients and, literature. Generally speaking, we with practice, you will begin to recognize are no longer an oral (which implies particular ingredients that flavor the dish. a listening) culture. We have lost But fine dining is not just the sampling of something essential in the transfer of singular ingredients; we must savor the symbolic meaning and contextualized meal as a whole. Let this article serve as emotion. But to those who have ears a menu as I offer a few suggestions to help to hear and eyes to see, poetry speaks you engage more satisfactorily with poetry. as significantly today as it ever has.

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 9 Table and Chair, Brent Watkinson

Every poem is unique just as every psychological levels, the artistic style and from some subconscious reality), while reader is unique. Therefore, I encourage vision of a particular artist or period. At on the conscious, public level, they hesi- you not to generalize poetry but to the same time, you are attracted to a tate to explore that unspoken intuition. approach each poem as its own distinct particular work. Though it may be con- Fear not. Voice it. entity. A poem you studied in high school fusing, a more concentrated engagement will not have the same relevance as a with the piece may impart meaning—it I want to underscore the oral nature poem you heard at a relative’s funeral; and speaks to you, comforts or confronts you, of poetry. You must hear it read aloud the poems you see in a popular magazine irritates or inspires you. Consider poetry if you are to really feel and understand or online may not be as meaningful as in a similar way. Allow a poem to be an the mood, the various inflections that those written by one of your favorite Okla- artifact framed by an artist’s vision. an author intends. In my classes I prac- homa poets. Even rereading the same Consider, then reflect: What am I tice what I call audio-analysis. That is, I poem can bring a fresh, new experience. feeling when I read this poem? What demonstrate “how to read a poem” by Robert Frost’s famous “The Road Not draws my attention? What is this poem reading it for them (not “to” or “at” them). Taken” probably will (and should) sound asking of me? First impressions are I read it for them more than once. Then different to you in midlife than when you valuable starting places for satisfactory I ask students, collectively, to repeat as I read it as a college freshman. reading experiences. They help situate read (they tend to mimic my voice). We Consider each poem as an artifact. you with the poem. First impressions read a poem aloud several times, pro- When you visit an art museum you expe- may later prove to be completely wrong gressing so that three or four students rience two simultaneous sensations. On but are rarely completely irrelevant. Trust try reading it aloud, alone, before the the one hand you feel the overwhelming, your impressions. Fine-tune those initial whole class. As this process develops I hovering totality of art within the wing you responses. I often find that my students model a voice, pointing out structures or are viewing. You sense, perhaps on several experience a poem intuitively (perhaps key words, asking rhetorical questions,

10 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY GOOD POETRY LOCATES THE BETERNAL IN THE EVERYDAY. sometimes interrupting then reasserting is negative or disconnected, those is the scene? How is it depicted? What phrases. This audio-analysis helps us to detached, distanced feelings often help is left out? Is it moving to a climax? Is move toward analytical understanding of move you into a significant experience it fizzling, burning out in resignation? the poem as we experience it emotionally. with the poem. Your initial response may Is it providing a positive, negative, or Here is the significant point: emo- be, “Huh?” That’s fine. Acknowledge it indifferent resolution—or no resolution tional perception must join intellectual and allow the stranger to be introduced at all? understanding if poetry is to be fully to you. Poetry is powerful not because it tries appreciated. So I tell you, as I tell stu- Individual word choice matters, too. to be arrogantly obscure and intellec- dents, read the poem aloud to yourself. At Use Google and get a quick definition of tual. Precisely the opposite is the case: first, just mouth the words audibly, don’t prominent words. Good poets choose poetry is powerful when it compresses try to be dramatic. Listen to yourself. words for a particular effect. In a novel, abstract, intellectual concepts into vivid, Bring the sensation of hearing into the well-chosen words enhance a plot, but the specifically tangible, relatable images. interpretive process, along with sight and novel’s success doesn’t rise or fall with a Good poetry locates the eternal in the singular word. But a poem’s personality other sensory impressions. everyday—the conceptual in the visual. indeed depends upon word choice. This is why I stress audio-analysis. In I must emphasize that this process Consider possible connotations for key poetry, sound and meaning are always should be repeated with each poem. words. What cultural feelings are associ- interconnected. Reading poetry is not like balancing a ated with the terms? For example, when Also pay attention to the line checkbook where, once you have the Frost says, “I have been one acquainted sequencing. What is the structure of the concept down, it never leaves you, the with the night,” we know that more than a poem? What does it look like on the page? task never deviates. Poetry is living art. literal absence of sunlight is implied. We Follow the phrasing, like notes when The words are alive. The reader must need to ask: How does night feel? How playing music. Line one may indeed flow approach a singular poem as if she/he is does it sound? What do we associate with directly into line two, or even line three moving toward a hummingbird, searching night in American culture? Is it scary, dan- or four. If the poet provides clues such as for the best vantage to capture its essence gerous, comforting, haunting, an ending, traditional syntax, then follow commas, in a photograph. At first you glimpse death? Why does Frost use the word semi-colons, and full-stops. If the poet the poem, see it generally, partially, “acquainted”? How do the two words does not use standard syntax, then con- incompletely. Then you return to gaze at function together? Start with the known sider the stanzas (similar to paragraphs the poem, looking closely from various and move to the unknown. in fiction, or scene changes in film). For angles, listening for its voice, considering Novice poetry readers tend to make example, Maurice Kenny’s poem “Going its personality, examining its parts. Both three errors: first, they too quickly try to Home” posits a troubled persona on a the glimpse and the gaze are necessary find some amazing symbolic interpreta- bus going to an unknown, apparently and should be practiced together. tion; second, they see only immediate, unwelcome home. The speaker’s anxious one-dimensional meaning; and third, thoughts run together like the continuous they latch onto a word and take off on motion of the bus. To emphasize this After first impressions and reflecting a personal association (which may effect, the poet runs the poem together in on your own emotional connection, you have value) but ignore the remaining one long, uninterrupted stanza, without will want to move into more specific text content of the poem. So start with syntax and with very little room to breathe, analysis. Even if your first impression what is clearly given by the poet. What reinforcing the troubled experience:

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 11 The book lay unread in my lap snow gathered at the window from Brooklyn it was a long ride the Greyhound followed the plow from Syracuse to Watertown

Some poems tell stories. Some express feelings. Some play with words. Some bring order out of chaos. Some

Peaches in a Green Bowl, tear down assumptions. Some inspire. Some agitate. Brent Watkinson Some console. Some correct. Some are dramatic. Some are subtle. Some are violent. Some are conversational. Some are pronouncements. Some are conflicted. Some are OFTEN nostalgic. Some are contemporary. Some are prophetic. Most good poems function on more than one of these levels Often I open the door to let in simultaneously, depending upon its place and time of origin the sound of rain tapping along with a Brahms symphony and on the mood and situation of the reader. Your attitude, or the Allman Brothers – often as reader and rereader, significantly contributes to the my pen cannot keep pace experience. with dropping water Fear not. Reading poetry is something like a first kiss. or chilling violins or the tragic guitars – often Should I? Does she want me to? Do I really want to kiss I remind myself that rain, her? When should I? Where? What will she think if I kiss like music, like a pen moving her? What will she think if I don’t? All this internal conster- on paper, is what the world needs most. It could be nation spins until finally you pucker up and go for it. And that the thunder outside guess what? The kiss either confirms or negates what you is no match for singing birds thought you wanted. That’s poetry. at rainy dawn – the collection of voices, a light that brings us home. As a reader, you are unique just as every poem is unique. There is no end to the variety of poetry available to —Ken Hada you, but each poem is leaning toward you, with puckered From Margaritas & Redfish lips, awaiting your move. (Lamar Univ. Press, 2013)

KEN HADA is a professor in the Department of English & Languages at East Central University. In addition to multiple scholarly journal publications, he has published six books of poetry. His poems have been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. His honors include national awards from the Western Heritage Museum and Western Writers of America. kenhada.org

BRENT WATKINSON has been a professional artist for over 30 years, working in illustration, painting, and computer pro- gramming. National clients have included: American Express, Contadina, Cook’s Illustrated, Sony Music, and Time/Warner. He was a member of the NASA Fine Arts Program and worked as a licensed Apple iPhone and iPad Developer. He now paints for galleries full time. brentwatkinson.com

EXTRA! READ | THINK | TALK | LINK

. “Reading a Poem: 20 Strategies,” Mark Yakich, The Atlantic, Nov. 2, 2014. Hints for approaching poetry—“a guide for the perplexed.” theatlantic.com . How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, Edward Hirsch (1999). Read a chapter of the book and link to sample poems: poetryfoundation.org. Reading guide: HMHCo.com

12 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY The Fatal Loop. Charles M. Russell, 1912, oil on canvas. Gift of Albert K. Mitchell. NCWHM

Cowboy Poems and Frontier Ballads

The spirit and traditions of the west, set down in verse Kimberly Roblin | Images Courtesy National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 13 a vagrant puff of wind shakes Knibbs, a Canadian whose novels and family, and secured a good job, but con- a corner of the crimson poetry were inspired by the West; and tentment eluded him. He determined to handkerchief knotted loosely at his John Lomax, a scholar who helped save forge a new start in the West. throat; the thud of his pony’s feet this significant and uniquely American Sensationalized by dime novels and mingling with the jingle of his spurs genre. Together they demonstrate the advertised by newspapers and maga- is borne back; and as the careless, evolution and continuity of western story, zines, the West symbolized possibility gracious, lovable figure disappears poetry, and song. and progress. It was a volatile place over the divide, the breeze brings to of risk and reward, and for an enter- John “Captain Jack” the ears, faint and far yet cheery still, prising optimist like Crawford it was rawford the refrain of a cowboy song. C (1847-1917) irresistible. Driven by innate curiosity —John Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Depending on your age and interests, and wanderlust, he arrived in Custer Other Frontier Ballads the name Captain Jack likely evokes City, South Dakota, in 1876 and made Billy Joel (#piano-man) or Johnny Depp quick connections as a newspaper People often confine poetry to the (#pirate). In the late nineteenth century, it correspondent. Before long he had page, but humans could speak long was the moniker of an illiterate immigrant gained a reputation for his words and before we could write. To impart histories, turned author and orator: Captain Jack, wit. He joined local military efforts to lessons, sagas, and sins, we have recited “The Poet Scout.” Born John Wallace add credentials for his new persona. poems and sung ballads for millennia. Crawford in County Donegal, Ireland, he While John Crawford was an Irishman, Few figures in American folklore are more endured a difficult childhood reminiscent Captain Jack, “The Poet Scout,” was an associated with this oral tradition than the of a Victorian novel. Alcoholic father. American born in the West. cowboy and frontiersman. With little else Pious mother. Instability. Poverty. Potato It was a West of men now mythic. for amusement, cowboys, scouts, and Famine. Conditions only deteriorated as Wyatt Earp still walked dusty board- others turned to song and storytelling. the family grew and forced his parents to walks, Doc Holliday still battled tuber- Daily life in the rugged, unpredictable search for opportunities in America while culosis, and Billy the Kid still eluded West supplied inspiration equal to any the children stayed behind with an uncle. capture. Captain Jack crossed paths Muse. Common themes included nature, In 1861, John shepherded his sib- with some of its legendary characters, work, mishap, love, loss, and loneliness. lings across the Atlantic, but any hope including Buffalo Bill Cody. The two Over time, their rustic verse traveled of a new start in Pennsylvania quickly struck a friendship and Crawford spent beyond campfires and cattle trails as per- evaporated. The country was at war. formers and the printed word introduced His father had not out-sailed the bottle the next few years touring and enter- it to a global audience. It shaped percep- and had also enlisted, leaving the family taining audiences, with the showman tions of American identity—at home and to face financial battles. As the oldest, and on his own. While Cody presented abroad—and became more than enter- John had little choice but to work the a stereotyped West, Crawford preferred tainment. It became an inheritance. local mines while the others attended a more realistic approach—more fact, Tucked away in the Dickinson school. He joined the army three years less fiction. In the preface of his first Research Center at the National Cowboy later and fought in the Battles of The book, The Poet Scout, published in & Western Heritage Museum are books, Wilderness and Spotsylvania before 1879, he explained: papers, photographs, and more that doc- a pivotal injury sent him to Satterlee In the publication of the sketches ument this complex legacy. Among them Hospital in Philadelphia. Weeks later, and poems in the following pages are works by three men: John “Captain he emerged with a slight limp—and lit- I have no thought of grasping Jack” Crawford, who popularized the eracy, courtesy of a patient nurse. After literary or poetical distinction. West in print and on stage; Henry Herbert returning home, he married, started a They are the crude, unpolished

14 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY LEFT: J.W. Crawford, Captain Jack. From The Poet Scout: A Book of Song and Story (Funk and Wagnalls, NY, 1886); Glenn D. Shirley Western Americana Collection, NCWHM Dickinson Research Center. CENTER: Autographed promotional photo of Henry H. Knibbs dressed in cowboy garb in the desert with two pack mules; Connecticut State Library, State Archives PG 460, Colt Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Co. RIGHT: John A. Lomax, Jr., circa 1930-1950, Library of Congress

offspring of my idle hours— dent,” Crawford lamented, “was that were mileposts commemorating wandering thoughts which came no letters, papers, or even the slightest people, places, and important events to me on the lonely trail and in [clue] to his home or friends could be in his life. His straightforward verse the bivouac and camp. found; all that we knew was that he had and easy charm made The Poet Scout walked all the way from Sioux City to popular and established Crawford He also warned young readers about the the Black Hills to die and start a grave- as an author. His wife and children false promises of fortune and glory: yard. On that day, while sitting on the joined him from Pennsylvania and the Boys, take the earnest advice of a green beside his demolished cabin, I reunited family settled in New Mexico. frontiersmen, and stay at home . . . wrote these lines”: Ever restless, though, Crawford was learn some good trade or pro- rarely home. He traveled extensively, fession, and stick to it . . . avoid Poor Charley braved the writing and lecturing, looking every those dime novels as you would a wintry storms, venomous, hideous rattlesnake. And footed it all the way; bit the frontiersman with long hair, They are more dangerous. And now he is a bleeding corpse— buckskin, and fringe—but the unre- He died at dawn to-day. fined character belied a polished These passages underscore Craw- His is the old, old story— portrayal. He knew and played to the He saw bright prospects here; ford’s aversion to romanticism. Although expectations of his audience. All told, He left his home, his friends and all— ethnocentric, he believed he was pre- Perhaps a mother dear. he completed four plays, seven books senting the West with all its strengths of poetry, and more than 100 stories. and shortcomings. Many of the poems If so, God pity that mother, Crawford built his career on the West Perhaps alone and poor; included backstories and details (who, and the word, transporting readers to When some one breaks the what, where, and why) that set his a place most would never experience. blighting news work apart. In “The First that Died,” Her heart will break, I’m sure, he recounted the death of a young To think she never, never more Henry Herbert Knibbs man named Charley, who had stayed Will clasp him to her breast; (1874-1945) Among the peaks in Custer Park with Crawford while building his own Born in Ontario to U.S. citizens, Poor Charley now must rest. shelter. Sadly, the new roof collapsed Henry Herbert Knibbs was Canadian within days and crushed him to death. For Crawford, poetry was not just by birth and American by blood. His “The saddest point about this inci- business, it was personal. The poems childhood shared none of the darkness

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 15 the ballads and poems illustrated a rich diversity among cowboys and pioneers, not the whitewashed world so often portrayed.

and grit of Crawford’s. He lived in a bits of verse he heard along the way. As Was about to wake my partner who middle class home, summered at his an Easterner, he relied on these details was sleeping close behind me, grandparents’ Pennsylvania farm, rode to impart authenticity and accuracy. When I saw the man we wanted spur his pony to the ford. horses, and kept company with Poe, His diligence translated into Tennyson, Byron, and others who made success and he spent the next thirty Saw the ripples of the shallows and early and lasting impressions. years writing short stories, novels, and the muddy streaks that followed, After finishing his formal education volumes of poetry, including Songs of As the pony stumbled toward me at age 18, he left Canada for Buffalo, the Outlands; Songs of the Trail; Riders in the narrows of the bend; New York, and spent the next few of the Stars; and more. A critic called it Saw the face I used to welcome, wild and watchful, lined and hollowed; years somewhat adrift, clerking for “high-hearted verse.” It was energetic, And God knows companies and wandering about fun, and popular with audiences. I wished to warn him, the Midwest by rail. He married and Libraries across the country carried for I once had called him friend. worked as a stenographer, but grew his books and made them available weary of recording other people’s to nearly everyone. Even my great- This last stanza shows Knibbs’s words. He itched to write his own. grandmother in Rocky, Oklahoma, expertise at setting a scene and building In 1908, he published his first book could have taken the wagon into suspense. You can see the ripples and of poems and moved to Cambridge, Cordell to check out one of his books muddy streaks, the old familiar face. Massachusetts, to study literature at and read “The Shallows of the Ford” What will the narrator do? Where do his Harvard. and other poems. loyalties lie—with his friend or with the We do not know how or when law? This talent for imagery dovetailed THE SHALLOWS OF THE FORD the Muse of the West found Knibbs. with a burgeoning industry that offered (Stanzas 1-3 of 7) Perhaps he read Captain Jack or similar a new way to present the West—film. authors. Perhaps the modernization of Did you ever wait for daylight Knibbs adapted many of his novels into the early twentieth century made him when the stars along the river screenplays and actors like Hoot Gibson Floated thick and white as snow- yearn for a simpler time and place. and Tom Mix brought his characters flakes in the water Whatever the reasons, he could not to life in early westerns. In 1920, The deep and strange, write of the West if he did not know the Till a whisper through the aspens Morning Tulsa Daily World advertised West. Around 1911, he gathered his wife made the current break and shiver Overland Red playing at the Wonderland and his convictions and moved three As the frosty edge of morning Theater. It was a “Rollicking Romance of thousand miles across the country to Los seemed to melt and spread a Joyous Vagabond—Picturized from the Angeles. It provided easy access to the and change? famous novel by Henry Herbert Knibbs.”

Southwest and Knibbs wasted little time Once I waited, almost wishing that Knibbs influenced popular culture before striking out to see it. He absorbed the dawn would never find me; through poetry, novels, and film, and his everything he could during his travels: Saw the sun roll up the ranges work did not go unnoticed by his con- the landscapes, the people, poems and like the glory of the Lord; temporaries. In 1919, four of his poems

16 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY In From the Night Herd. Frederic Remington, 1907, oil on canvas; gift of Albert K. Mitchell, NCWHM

appeared in Songs of the Cattle Trail and work. Like most rural boys, he oscillated saw their value: As a body of work, Cow Camp, a compilation of old and new between schoolwork and fieldwork, they preserved a culture and experience western verse collected by folklorist John depending on the season. He was a good unique to the western United States. If Lomax. “Certain words can be ridden like student and a good help to his father, but someone did not collect them, they might horses,” Knibbs once said, and Lomax in time his ambitions exceeded the family be lost. ensured that people had the chance to farm. He preferred academics to agricul- Lomax pitched the argument to his ride them for generations. ture and enrolled at Granbury College Harvard professors and, with their sup- where he earned a teaching certificate. port, he began soliciting “native ballads John A. Lomax The job proved unsatisfactory, however, and songs of the West” through newspa- (1867-1948) and he returned to studies at the Univer- pers. He asked for “songs handed down sity of Texas for undergraduate and grad- from one generation to another by word of In origin and contribution, John uate degrees in literature and classics. mouth” that “epitomize and particularize Lomax is the anomaly of our literary Though Crawford and Knibbs the life of the pioneers who peopled the trio. First, he was of the West. Texas to had traveled west to find their cre- vast region west of the Mississippi River.” be precise. Second, he was not a poet ative voice, Lomax traveled east to “Pioneer ballads,” he concluded, were but a professor. As a boy, he didn’t need foster his at Harvard. While studying “an expression of American literature.” dime novels to teach him about cowboys. Scottish ballads, Lomax recognized (Remember that word literature, because The Chisholm Trail ran near his home in similarities to the songs and poems of we’ll circle back to it.) Letters arrived from Bosque County and provided an unvar- cowboys and western culture. Other across the country and Lomax sifted nished education on these men and their academics dismissed them, but Lomax through the material for the original

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 17 and unpublished. He also gathered pieces from his The road to that bright, happy region travels to Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Arizona, Is a dim, narrow trail, so they say; New Mexico, and Texas, as he “seined saloons” and But the broad one that leads to perdition Is posted and blazed all the way. haunted campfires and “broncho-busting outfits.” Some of the earliest ballads he collected were “Jesse Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads achieved James,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” and “The Zebra moderate success and garnered a wide audience. Even Dun.” The authors and origins of the ballads and those not from the West read the ballads and felt a sense poems illustrated a rich diversity among cowboys of heritage. The West became something that belonged and pioneers: European, African American, Native to everyone. Lomax published a subsequent volume, American, Hispanic. It was not the whitewashed Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp, in 1919 and world so often portrayed. included the new generation of western poets (notably, The result was Cowboy Songs and Other Henry H. Knibbs). He toured the country, lecturing at Poetry Frontier Ballads, published in 1910. Contrary to rotary clubs, church groups, and colleges, including the strict academic standards, Lomax took liberties with University of Oklahoma in 1921. the volume. He softened abrasive language and, Although not a cowboy himself, Lomax dedicated when faced with several variations of the same song, his career to the roundup: to preserve and present Hating cobbled together his favorite verses. Still, the nature western ballads—or, as he called it, literature. Literature of the work remained intact and represented the first is acclaimed. It is academic. It is important. By elevating collection of its kind. His introduction reveals the western ballads to literature, Lomax validated the value motivation behind the project: to capture the spirit of of the region, its culture, and all those living in it. Poets “the wild, far-away places of the big and still unpeopled Captain Jack Crawford, Henry Knibbs, and John west.” He also contextualized the use of ballads. What Lomax expressed the West in words. They shaped per- started as fun had practical utility: ception and identity, influenced thought, inspired and conjured stories and songs—contributing different Indeed the songs were here utilized for very chapters to the same western songbook. The West practical ends. Not only were sharp, rhythmic meant something different to each man. For Craw- yells sometimes beaten into verse employed to ford, a destination. For Knibbs, an inspiration. And for stir up lagging cattle, but also during the long Lomax, home. By searching for and sharing their own watches the night-guards, as they rode round West, they ultimately helped define ours. OKLAHOMA and round the herd, improvised cattle lullabies HUMANITIES which quieted the animals and soothed them KIMBERLY ROBLIN is Curator of Archival & Photographic Collections at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage to sleep. Some of the best of the so-called Need support for Museum. As a fourth-generation Oklahoman, sharing a cultural event? “dogie songs” seem to have been created for Western history through research, exhibitions, and Oklahoma Humanities the purpose of preventing cattle stampedes, publications is more than business—it’s personal. Except has funded community such songs coming straight from the heart of where identified, all images are courtesy of the Museum— projects across the an Oklahoma treasure. state since 1971. the cowboy, speaking familiarly to his herd in Museum exhibits, the stillness of the night. EXTRA! READ | THINK | TALK | LINK film festivals, lectures, websites, and teacher . The Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry. Poems institutes are just a THE COWBOY’S DREAM by H.H. Knibbs and John “Captain Jack” Crawford, few of the funded (Stanzas 1-3 of 8) audio recordings, and commentary on their work. programs. Projects cowboypoetry.com/knibbs.htm must be rooted in a Last night as I lay on the prairie, . “Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 humanities discipline, And looked at the stars in the sky, Southern States Recording Trip,” Library of Congress. in a format suitable I wondered if ever a cowboy for and open to the Collection of 700 sound recordings and ephemera general public. Grant Would drift to that sweet by and by. documenting the couple’s three-month trip to record folk applications are music across the southern U.S. loc.gov accepted through- Roll on, roll on; . “My Cousin, the Cowboy Poet,” Carson Vaughan, The out the year. Roll on, little dogies, roll on, roll on, New Yorker, March 16, 2016. Profiles contemporary okhumanities.org/grants Roll on, roll on; cowboy poets and the annual event designated by the Roll on, little dogies, roll on. U.S. Senate as the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

18 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY Poetry Hating CAN’T ANYONE GIVE POETRY A BREAK? Poets Ryan Stuart Lowe Poetry. I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important “ beyond all this fiddle. —Marianne Moore, “Poetry””

Illustration of poet Marianne Moore, Maria Biernik OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 19 ince its publication in 1921, again over five decades, whittling down While it seems laughable that a con- S Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” has its thirty lines, as if the anti-poetry poem temporary of Shakespeare and Milton become enshrined as perhaps the most were destined for self-annihilation, pulled should worry about the future of English famous anti-poetry poem of all time. apart by its own contradictions. poetry, the fortunes of these poets were In particular, she takes aim at those In “A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme” far from assured. The anti-poetry poem (1640), poet Ben Jonson pokes fun at “high-sounding interpretations” placed reveals another history: the history of the linguistic acrobatics poets attempt in on poetic subjects: artistic anxiety. A patron’s favor and service of form—in this case, rhyme. His financial support were fickle, and critics When they become so derivative poem against poetry shows a mastery of have long had the influence to make or as to become the form and a sense of humor about the break careers. If Jonson craved the good unintelligible, difficulty in execution. In sixty rhyming the same thing may be said for opinion of the First Earl of Leicester, then all of us, that we lines he asks if rhyme has ruined poetry: Alexander Pope craved the good opinion do not admire what of critics—and he feared their bad opin- Wresting words from their we cannot understand. true calling; ions, too. In the century between Jonson Propping verse for fear of falling and Pope, poetry moved from the court It’s easy to read her lines as a gentle To the ground; and country house to the marketplace; critique of her modernist colleagues, Jointing syllables, drowning letters, royal patrons were replaced by a broader now famous for their convoluted and Fast’ning vowels as with fetters public. In his “Essay on Criticism” (1711), difficult poetry: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste They were bound! Pope suggests that a lot of poetry is bad, Land, complete with academic footnotes; His complaints are ostensibly aimed at but a lot of critics are worse: “’Tis hard William Carlos Williams’s Spring and bad rhymes, but his objections might to say, if greater want of skill / Appear in All, with chapters confoundingly out of apply to all poetry. Poets delight in writing or in judging ill.” His epic poem order; and Ezra Pound’s cryptic Cantos, wresting words from their literal mean- The Dunciad (1728) takes aim at bad considered experimental and significant ings, binding language with their own poets and bad critics alike. by some and obscure nonsense by others. particular fetters. Jonson curses the poet Romantic authors—British and It’s a common complaint from baffled who invented the bonds of rhyme: American—worried over the public in readers: Why can’t poets just say what similar ways. William Wordsworth feared they mean? And, just as puzzling: How He that first invented thee, that his poetry would be overlooked by can a poet say that she dislikes poetry? May his joints tormented be, Cramp’d forever. city dwellers obsessed with grisly reports Since the time of Shakespeare, the in the newspapers. His poem “The Tables anti-poetry poem has been a peculiar and Harsh punishment for such a crime. Turned” suggests that, instead of focusing embattled tradition. Readers aren’t the From jointed syllables to tormented on “all this toil and trouble,” it might be only ones flummoxed by verse; poets, too, joints, Jonson suggests “locking up” better to just go outdoors: are vexed—for a multitude of reasons. the poets who lock up language. At the Moore’s poem is famously contradic- center of Jonson’s poem is an anxiety over One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, tory. It criticizes obscurity, and yet its most the value of modern poetry; as he looks Of moral evil and of good, famous line is thoroughly mysterious: back to the Greek Golden Age of heroic Than all the sages can. Moore calls for poets to present “imag- verse (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey did inary gardens with real toads in them.” not rhyme), Jonson wonders if any poet There is something confessional in The line suggests that poetry can perform in his era deserves to be crowned with the poem against poetry, as if the writer the impossible: to merge the ideal with immortal praise: is revealing a dark secret. Although Emily the real, the beauty of the imagination Dickinson would become one of America’s Not a poet in an age with the ugliness of the world. How can Worth crowning; most celebrated poets, her poems often imaginary gardens have real toads in Not a work deserving bays, betray a fear of going public. Despite being them? Moore revised the poem again and Not a line deserving praise. a bit of a rebel in school as a young woman,

20 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY POETRY

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician-- nor is it valid to discriminate against “business documents and school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be “literalists of the imagination”--above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry.

—Marianne Moore, from Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse, edited by Alfred Kreymborg. poets.org

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 21 Dickinson became a recluse in her Twentieth-century writers reveal a interested in knowing what will be on the advancing years. Her poem “I’m Nobody! different kind of anxiety. When Marianne final exam: Who are you?” (1891) reflects these dual Moore writes “I, too, dislike it,” she All they want to do aspects of her personality, defying con- addresses an imagined audience packed is tie the poem to a chair with rope with skeptics. She anticipates readers’ vention while clinging to privacy: and torture a confession out of it. disdain by asking the questions herself: I’m Nobody! Who are you? Is poetry useful? Is it important, as They begin beating it with a hose Are you – Nobody – too? “business documents and / school-books” to find out what it really means. Then there’s a pair of us! are important? Moore’s poem is haunted Don’t tell! they’d advertise – by the demands of a world in which My university students are sometimes you know! everything must be functional to have skeptical of the value of poetry, but, How dreary – to be – Somebody! value. If Moore worried over this question more often, they are skeptical of their How public – like a Frog – in the 1920s, it is an anxiety that has only ability to understand it, qualifying their To tell one’s name – increased with current market demands interpretations with comments like, “I’m the livelong June – for increasingly specialized jobs aimed at not sure if this is right, but . . .” Poetry To an admiring Bog! higher-profit payoffs. in the classroom gives way to tests, to research papers, to grades on how well Dickinson imagines the published work you understand. Is it any wonder that (and the thought of going public) to be a Readers aren’t the students want only the “right answer” mere frog’s croak for an audience that is only ones flummoxed to a poem? no more than a swamp. The tone of poems In many of these poems against like this would contribute to the dubious by verse; poets, too, poetry, there’s a fear that readers and legend that Dickinson asked her sister are vexed — for a writers mangle a true experience by Lavinia to burn all her papers after her multitude of reasons “forcing” a poem—through poorly death; if true, the request would have been executed form or convoluted interpre- the ultimate assertion of “I, too, dislike it.” tation—into something it’s not. Jonson To our ears, these poets’ anxieties Today, poetry can’t shake its repu- complains that rhyme “wrests words may seem overblown. Jonson’s obsession tation as a “useless” pursuit. Parents from their true calling.” Moore argues with rhyme feels strange in the twenty- despair over their children studying the that our “high-sounding interpretations” first century where it is all but required arts and humanities, asking, “But what make poetry derivative. Wordsworth in pop music. Meanwhile, modern poets will you do with a degree in American offers the most famous pronouncement experiment with rhyme, internal rhyme, studies?” With the rise of the liberal arts on this idea in “The Tables Turned”: slant rhyme, blank verse, free verse, and degree, night school literature courses, Our meddling intellect dozens of other poetic strategies. Pope’s and AP English exams, it is not the Mis-shapes the beauteous dread of bad critics seems quaint in an era royal patron, the sneering critic, or the forms of things:— when we might worry that poetry critics overworked businessman from whom We murder to dissect. (as well as poetry readers) are nowhere to poets seek favor—it is the bored college be found. Wordsworth feared that cities student. The classroom is the source of And so the value of poetry may lie less would strangle the life out of poetry, but anxiety for Billy Collins in his “Introduc- in the poem itself than in our experience city life now inspires poets as powerfully tion to Poetry” (1988): of it. Collins’s image of tying a poem to a as the countryside: Equal to Wordsworth’s chair and torturing it is instructive: while I ask them to take a poem Lake District are Whitman’s Manhattan there may be no absolutely right way to and hold it up to the light or Sandburg’s Chicago. And if Dickinson read a poem, there is a wrong way that like a color slide. ever worried over the does violence to it. The worst readers dreariness of fame, she is Collins asks his students to enjoy a over-intellectualize a poem: they flatten certainly “Somebody” now. poem, to experience it, but they’re only it to what the poem means, ignoring how

22 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY a poem looks, sounds, or moves us. In their “however.” Marianne Moore would later poems against poetry, these authors ventril- argue that the three lines were all she had to oquize the torturers, channeling their worst say on the subject. Scholars generally dislike fears and innermost critics. the final version, finding in it less poetry than They also affirm the alternative: the earlier editions, the kernel of the “anti-poetry” sympathetic reader who loves poetry, though poem robbed of its shell. these ideal readers may be few. Dickinson Laid bare, the poem against poetry speaks intimately to one compatriot, the reveals the contradiction at the heart of second “Nobody” who avoids the bog. Pope so much art: the desire to connect with an holds out for one sympathetic critic: “A per- unseen audience that could be hostile, skep- fect judge will read each work of wit / With tical, or perhaps not there at all. “This is my the same spirit that its author writ.” letter to the World,” writes Emily Dickinson, As instruction for would-be ideal “that never wrote to me.” readers, Billy Collins offers five different The tradition of the anti-poetry poem lives ways to approach a poem, including looking on, a series of letters to the world, confessing at it through a colored lens, listening to its fears, searching for meaning, waiting for quiet buzz, and feeling in the dark until you fellow haters and fellow listeners to pick them catch that single illuminating clue. Collins up and hold them up to the light. would be happy with all of these readers, RYAN STUART LOWE received his Ph.D. in even those who only “waterski across the American literature from Washington University surface” because they recognize the author’s in St. Louis. He teaches literature and writing name. Wordsworth’s verse is an invitation at Oklahoma State University and is currently to learn from nature, but his sentiments working on a book that explores the rise of the “tourist love story” in American literature and are an apt call to poetry: “Come forth, and film. bring with you a heart / That watches and MARIA BIERNIK is the art director of Humanities receives.” magazine, published by the National Marianne Moore remains the most Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, OKLAHOMA skeptical of the bunch. In 1967, she altered DC. HUMANITIES her poem one last time, in what might be the EXTRA! READ | THINK | TALK | LINK Giving has many faces: most infamous act of revision in American . “The Marianne Moore Revival,” Adrienne It is loud and quiet, literary history. She boiled down her original Raphel, The New Yorker, April 13, 2016. Big, though small, thirty lines to a mere three. “Three lines?” Chronicles Moore’s dissatisfaction with her diamond in wood-nails. work, while others considered her an architect editor and friend Grace Schulman asked Its story is old, the plot of American modernism. newyorker.com incredulously. The final published draft of worn and the pages too, . Great Writers Inspire, University of Oxford. But we read this book, “Poetry” reads: “I, too, dislike it. / Reading Essays on Ben Johnson, including images and anyway, over and again. it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, ebooks of his writings. writersinspire.org . —Alberto Ríos, from one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the Emily Dickinson at Amherst College. Special collections home to Dickinson papers "When Giving Is genuine.” includes digitized handwritten manuscripts All We Have." Gone are the “imaginary gardens” with and a link to the Emily Dickinson Museum. Your gift makes a great “real toads,” the debates on what is “useful” amhurst.edu/library/archives/holdings/ difference in the cultural edickinson or “important”; yet, these three spare lines life of Oklahoma. Use . “Poet Billy Collins,” Jeffrey Brown, PBS New- the enclosed envelope still include Moore’s devastating confession sHour, Oct. 29, 2013. Collins on his book or donate online: and careful defense. She admits, “I, too, Aimless Love and finding humor in poetry. okhumanities.org dislike it,” but not without an escape clause: pbs.org.

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 23 Allen Ginsberg, Danny O’Connor The Rule of Cool: How the Beat Generation Poetry of broke the rules and made the Beat poetry cool Movement Paul Varner | Art by Danny O’Connor

24 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY discovered real literature, as two anthologies. Donald Allen’s common meaning of “beaten opposed to the paperback anthology radically set aside those down and defeated,” the term Westerns, mysteries, and spy Establishment poets and set up “beat” also refers to a coolness novelsI I read as a teenager, when a new canon of American poetry derived from a religious ideal of I was stationed in the U.S. Air in an entirely different tradition. beatitude, an ideal of blessed peace Force near San Francisco in the Because it included not only the within. Virtually all the major Beat crazy hippie days of the late 1960s. certified rebels and outlaws of writers recognized this search That’s when I found the famed American poetry—like Beat poets for cool beatitude or beatness. City Lights Bookstore and learned Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg— Their quests, often extreme and about the Beat Movement, the talk but also intellectuals and, surpris- desperate, led to joyrides across of my literature world. I specifically ingly, academics—such as Charles America and experimentation discovered poetry that mattered to Olson, Robert Duncan, and Ken- with drugs and sex, all in search me when I read Donald Allen’s The neth Koch—it seemed to legitimize of an expanded spiritual vision New American Poetry, 1945-1960. the strange new poetry that was so unavailable, they thought, through Here was a kind of poetry I had different from the poetry studied the sterile institutions of religion never encountered in high school in university courses. Allen’s that were responsible for the English classes. For me, as for anthology singlehandedly shifted spiritual malaise of the American so many of my generation, Allen’s the landscape of contemporary post-war era. anthology, first published in 1960, American literature. As in the outward social was the beginning. Given the complexity of the behaviors of the Beats, the Rule The popular British poet poetry of the Beat Movement, of Cool was elemental in their Roger McGough remembers when one dominating principle has poetry. Values of twentieth- Donald Allen’s revolutionary an- been its self-designated Rule of century modernist critics (such as thology, with its famous red and Cool—a studied nonchalance, a self-containment, tension, irony, white jacket, first appeared in Liv- style of behavior in the hipster metaphor, or complexity of form) erpool: “Everybody in town who generation and its literature that, were not values held by the Beats. was interested in writing seemed whatever else, always countered Their poetry was as free as the to have a copy of it, and they were Establishment values. Being cool lifestyle it reflected. Charles Olson shouting poems out of it to one required an attitude resembling the was the intellectual prophet of another across crowded pubs.” It Italian attitude of sprezzatura—a the Beats, a proven academic and was the anthology of Beat poetry. certain degree of passivity, Herman Melville scholar. “New Three years earlier, in 1957, indifference, and snobbishness American poetry” derives from The New Poets of England toward outsiders or “squares.” Olson’s idea of “projective verse,” and America anthology, edited The Beat Movement has poetry that is open form—as by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, always suffered from a negative opposed to an inherited poetry and Louis Simpson, supposedly image. Its writers were dismissed based on line, stanza, and overall established the canon of truly as self-centered, hedonistic, sexual form. “There must not be any important living American poets, deviants, utterly amoral if not preconceived notion or design for with early career recognition of immoral in their approach to life. what a poem ought to be,” said Robert Lowell, James Merrill, But critics of the movement often poet Amiri Baraka. Spontaneity Adrienne Rich and others. There neglect the spiritual dimensions in the composition process or in were no overlapping poets in the of Beat literature. Besides its the form itself was essential. But

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 25 the philosophy extended beyond the SURELY NO POEM OF THE MOVEMENT IS background. Simultaneously, Kerouac page as well. Olsen’s principle of form more noted than Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, was composing his Mexico City Blues, being merely an extension of content the expansive poem that influenced the in which “183rd Chorus” speaks to the applied not only to the aesthetics of art last half of the twentieth century much spontaneous method: but also to the business of living one’s as T. S. Eliot’s long poem, The Waste Only awake to Universal Mind, life: constructing ourselves means we Land, dominated the first half of the accept everything, have to discover the proper forms for century. Howl was a loud, prophetic blast see everything, our actions. This is what it means to be condemning the square, sterile, crewcut it is empty, Beat, to be cool. American status quo. Ginsberg first read Accept as thus – the Truth. The Establishment, of course, Howl at the renowned Six Gallery Poetry In describing this spontaneous style, often dismissed this poetic lifestyle. Reading in San Francisco in 1955. Jack Kerouac said that the writer sets an In Tales of Beatnik Glory, Ed Sanders Kerouac passed around jugs of wine and object before his or her mind; then, used short narratives to reimagine— sat to the side, chanting, “Go, go, go,” as without stopping, begins writing, allowing and mock—the heyday of coffeehouse Ginsberg muttered long lines of outrage an “undisturbed flow from the mind” of poetry readings, with poets reciting and obscenity, lamenting the loss of thoughts and phrases and language. beat verse in cool tones to the subdued the best minds of his generation, those Spontaneous writing naturally led patterings of bongo drums, suave beat- destroyed by madness: to an idea of spiritual composition. niks listening and click-clicking their who wept at the romance According to biographer Tom Clark, fingers in approval (instead of clapping) of the streets with their Kerouac relied on an “artistic self- when a poet got up to read and began: pushcarts full of onions crucifixion” as his spiritual practice, and bad music, Drip, drip, drip, went the faucet. who sat in boxes breathing in the writing every day and composing “‘holy’ Drip, drip, drip, darkness under the bridge, and works by candlelight,” emulating monks Drip, drip, drip . . . rose up to build harpsichords who discipline themselves to sit and in their lofts, And so on for ten or fifteen minutes, pray contemplatively. Clark noted that who coughed on the sixth floor of “Kerouac was attempting to tap the well the crowd clicking fingers, too cool to Harlem crowned with flame under of the subconscious directly through ask, “Say, what?” the tubercular sky surrounded by Early reviews of the Beat Movement orange crates of theology, automatic writing.” Kerouac claimed that defined it narrowly, referring almost who scribbled all night rocking and he wrote “with the Holy Ghost speaking exclusively to the works of Allen Gins- rolling over lofty incantations through him.” which in the yellow morning berg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Brother Antoninus, billed as the were stanzas of gibberish . . . other early New York Beats. Now, we Beatnik friar in the 1950s and 1960s, see the movement more broadly with a Beat chronicler Seymour Krim demonstrated the spiritual side of Beat in wider range of writers. Donald Allen’s reported: “Allen Ginsberg, chanter of the search of beatitude in his poem “A Canticle The New American Poetry is synony- scorchingly present-tense ‘Howl,’ is one to the Waterbirds.” Antoninus uses projec- mous with the poetry of a Beat Move- to the true lunar voices rising about the tive verse to generate poetic responses ment still alive today. Poets Lawrence skyscrapers . . . keening a mighty song to God’s creation, carefully detailing the Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder are still for his generation.” Ginsberg’s legendary sounds and sights of the seashore: going strong in the twenty-first century. debut on the scene that October night is Clack your beaks you cormorants And feminist writers and performers, recounted in multiple books and movies. and kittiwakes, such as Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Howl is an example of the Beat North on those rockcroppings Patti Smith, Anne Waldman, and the poets’ heavy reliance on spontaneous fingerjutted into the rough late Kathy Acker, have maintained composition. Urged on by Kerouac, Pacific surge; You migratory terns and pipers who that cool Beatness even as they have Ginsberg composed the long poem in leave but the temporal claw-track pushed the movement in directions a San Francisco apartment, channeling written on sandbars there only dimly foreseen by the original an inner voice while high on Benzedrine of your presence; Beat poets. and with Bach playing loudly in the ......

26 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY Everything Is Ignorant of its own emptiness— Anger Doesn’t like to be reminded of fits—

—Jack Kerouac, from “113th Chorus,” Mexico City Blues (Grove Press, 1959)

Jack Kerouac, Danny O’Connor

Jack Kerouac, Danny O’Connor

Break wide your harsh and salt- out against the stringent masculinist Sometimes the women’s voices were encrusted beaks unmade for song forms of the Rule of Cool—at least in their muted to nonexistence. Elise Cowen And say a praise up to the Lord. poetry. In her book Memoirs of a Beatnik, had a short relationship with Allen Diane di Prima defines the rule of cool by The poem continues at length in a series Ginsberg and remained infatuated with name, portraying its expected aloofness, of lists of water birds on the California him long after he moved on to a long- studied nonchalance, and absolute denial coast. Its form is fluid and random as term partner. As a typically “invisible” of any display of personal emotion. “The the seashore itself as the poet gropes for Beat Chick marginalized by the males Quarrel” reveals a frustration with the knowledge of his Creator. It reflects an in her circle, Cowen descended deep strictures of cool: ecstasy we associate with visionary poets into the drug culture and mental illness. such as Gerard Manley Hopkins. In later It’s damned arrogant of you I thought She committed suicide in 1962 when to assume that only you have years, after renouncing his vows, Brother she jumped through the plate glass things to do. window of her parents’ apartment Antoninus changed his name to William Especially tonight. Everson and developed a significant and plunged to her death. Her parents And what a god damned concession reputation in the later Beat Movement. trashed most of her poetry, but some it was for me to bother survived. Her poem “A Lady” reveals to tell you that WOMEN OF THE BEAT MOVEMENT I was bugged at all I said to the back both her brilliance and a dark view of projected their voices, often sounding of his neck. I didn’t say it out loud. women’s roles:

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 27 The lady is a humble thing Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head Made of death and water Pretending he just doesn’t see? The fashion is to dress it plain The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind And use the mind for border The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

While the Rule of Cool pervaded virtually In a career that has lasted more than five decades, all of Beat poetry, later Beats reacted against Bob Dylan shows the enduring influence of the it. Scholar Nancy M. Grace notes that Hettie Beats—a generation of poets and performers Jones’s poetry “demands that we see her.” searching for answers, breaking the rules, and Jones counters patriarchal Beat influences in oh, so cool. poems like “Hard Drive” with a matriarchal PAUL VARNER is the author of Historical Dictionary vision that expands gender boundaries: of Westerns in Cinema (2008), Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Literature (2010), Historical Dictionary of I have always been at the same time the Beat Movement (2012), and Historical Dictionary woman enough to be moved by tears of Romanticism in Literature (2014), all published by and man enough Rowman and Littlefield. He has edited two scholarly to drive my car in any direction collections: Westerns: Paperback Novels and Movies from Hollywood (2008) and New Wests and Post- A repeated theme throughout Jones’s work, Wests: Literature and Film of the American West says Grace, is “the need of a woman to claim (2013) by Cambridge Scholars Press. her own agency.” DANNY O’CONNOR, Liverpool, UK, is an artist of contrasts, drawing inspiration from sources as WHEN I PICKED UP MY COPY OF THAT BEATNIK diverse as comics, illustration, tattoo art, and graffiti to influences from Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, poetry anthology back in my early years, I had Futurism, Art Nouveau, Pre-Raphaelites, Modernism, no idea how the poetry it celebrated for the and Constructivism to create hyper-stylized, abstracted first time would affect my future (as a scholar, works. Paintings are built up in layers using mediums such as correction fluid, spray paint, ink, paint markers, I would later write the Historical Dictionary of texture pastes, charcoal, graphite, oil sticks, and collage. the Beat Movement) and the future of American instagram.com/artbydoc poetry. The Beat Movement was to become the EXTRA! READ | THINK | TALK | LINK most significant literary and artistic movement . “A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets,” American Academy OKLAHOMA since World War II, streaming into American of Poets. Brief description of the Beat Movement and postmodernism and feminism and melding HUMANITIES links to Beat writers’ poetry. poets.org serious poetry with popular culture. . City Lights Bookstore. Bio and interviews with Oklahoma Humanities magazine is published A fellow traveler of the early Beat poets City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publisher Howl through the generous was young singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, of Allen Ginsberg’s and works by other support of readers like Beat poets. Includes poems by Ferlinghetti. you. Your gift helps whose talent for being cool, being Beat has citylights.com/ferlinghetti ensure great writing and so influenced American culture that it was . “Bob Dylan, The Beat Generation, and Allen Gins- ad-free content—and we berg’s America,” Sean Wilentz, The New Yorker, multiply the impact by lauded with the 2016 Nobel Prize for Liter- Aug. 13, 2010. Excerpt from Wilentz’s book, Bob distributing free copies ature. “Blowin’ in the Wind,” just one of hun- Dylan in America (Doubleday, 2010), on how the to underserved commu- dreds of Dylan hits, is considered an anthem nities, public schools, Beats influenced each other’s work. newyorker.com libraries, and veterans of the 1960s era: . “On Writing ‘A Canticle to the Waterbirds,’” William centers across our (Brother Antoninus) Everson, Modern American state. Use the enclosed How many years can a mountain exist Poetry Site. Everson’s 1968 essay on circumstances envelope or donate Before it’s washed to the sea? and inspiration for writing the poem, plus other online: okhumanities.org Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist literary criticism of the poem. (search: William Before they’re allowed to be free? Everson, english.illinois.edu/maps)

28 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY Jason Stephenson | Photos by Ted Roeder

magine a quiet room at a university with chairs aligned in neat rows. The THE POET crowd is sparse, but they listen politely as a professor in a tweed jacket I reads verse from behind a podium. As the poet concludes each piece, the audience responds with a dignified golf clap. Such is the textbook HAS SPOKEN poetry reading. Across town at a bar, no podium is in sight and the rowdy conversation CAN WORDS BREAK DOWN hushes only when a poet approaches the microphone. Reciting verse from memory, the poet modulates her voice—loud and fast for emphasis, then slow SOCIAL BARRIERS? or soft to stir emotion—using her whole body and the available space to commu- nicate her message. The audience is cheering and applauding before the poem YES. YES, THEY CAN. is even over. (Our next poet, poor chap, is roundly booed.) This is spoken word.

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 29 Since the 1980s, spoken word Smith started his experiment in a has made giant leaps in popularity blue collar neighborhood at the Get Me as technology has made it readily High Lounge. On Monday nights, while accessible—as close as the corner cafe patrons were watching Cubs games, a or the nearest internet connection. handful of poets took turns delivering Spoken word poetry places importance poems, enhancing their performances with makeup, costumes, boom boxes, on both content and its performance—a and wild gestures. Eventually, the crucial component that prompts some weekly poetry show found a permanent poets to refer to themselves as spoken home at the Green Mill Jazz Club on word artists. In contrast with print the north side of Chicago. When a set poetry, audiences cannot linger over ran short one evening in 1986, Smith word choice, line breaks, and nuanced filled the time by getting the audience themes. Instead, they rely on a poet’s to participate. He called it a slam and delivery, his use of volume, speed, and encouraged them to cheer, applaud, gestures to glean meaning. boo, or hiss as they evaluated each Spoken word performance, the give poet’s performance. Random audi- and take between poet and audience, ence members served as judges and makes for a more visceral experience assigned scores on a scale from 0 to 10 of verse because it is immediate, to determine the winning poem. temporary—recited and then gone. Thirty years later, the Uptown The inventive style has brought a Poetry Slam still draws crowds every renaissance to poetry, driven by its Sunday night at the Green Mill. The appeal to a younger generation, its terms “spoken word,” “performance embrace of diverse voices, and an poetry,” and “slam poetry” have become informality that puts poet and audience so common as to be interchangeable, on equal footing. This populism of regardless of whether the performance poetry has opened the doors for more is for competition. varied poets and audiences who have Success in Chicago swept the not felt welcomed by the traditional country as slams and open mics grew literary establishment. With spoken in bars and cafes of American cities, word, the common man and woman, including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe not the literary critic, determine the in New York City, a cultural icon that value of poets and their work. remains a vibrant hub for poetry and music. After a team of Chicago slam Poetry as Competition poets competed against a team from The current evolution of compet- San Francisco in 1989, the idea for a itive spoken word poetry—slam—has National Slam was born and continues its origin in Chicago in the mid-1980s. as an annual competition. Marc Smith, a construction worker Slams embraced diversity by and poet, felt like an outsider in the including voices of differing races, sexual poetry world. Poetry magazine had identities, and educational backgrounds rejected his work for sixteen years. who shared poems on personal, polit- He was tired of the stuffy, poorly ical, comedic, and dramatic topics. This attended poetry readings by aca- inclusivity helped break down social and demics. He wanted to stage readings cultural barriers, democratizing poetry. with vibrancy and interaction between An open door policy meant anyone poets and audiences. could attend, compete, or judge.

30 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY Poetry On Demand the poem loses some of its edge he pauses and states the final line. (No HBO introduced spoken word poetry in the process, demonstrating the spoilers here. Watch it!) to an even wider audience with its Def occasional difficulty in transforming What is the significance of this Poetry series, which ran for six years from a spoken word poem into print form. relatively new online audience? The top 2002 to 2007. The series highlighted Nevertheless, spoken word poets ten spoken word videos on the Button poets such as Nikki Giovanni, Amiri maintain a body of work available in Poetry channel have, combined, over Baraka, and Patricia Smith, performing both print and audio formats. 42 million views. By contrast, most for an enthusiastic audience. Renowned In 2005, poet David Groff claimed, print poetry books sell, at best, two slam poet and former teacher Taylor “A recited poem vanishes faster than thousand copies. Mali appeared three times, once to recite a vapor trail.” It was the same year his now famous poem “What Teachers YouTube launched, which gave spoken Poetry as Pop Culture Make,” which relates a conversation with word an enduring platform that has A clear indication of the main- a smug dinner guest inquiring about generated an exponential following. streaming of spoken word poetry is a Mali’s teacher salary. At a crucial point The Button Poetry channel launched in growing presence in popular culture. in the poem, Mali uses hand gestures to 2012 and now has over a thousand videos Its hallmarks of raw honesty, emo- convey meaning: and more than half a million subscribers. tional appeal, and heightened delivery Neil Hilborn’s performance of his poem are often mocked in storylines. In the I make them understand that if you’ve got this, [brain] “OCD,” uploaded in July 2013, now has 2014 film 22 Jump Street, Jonah Hill’s then you follow this, [heart] over twelve million views. His subject character, Schmidt, is put on the spot and if someone ever tries to (the tension of a romantic relationship to improvise a spoken word poem at judge you coupled with obsessive compulsive an open mic night. Schmidt takes the by what you make, you give disorder) is complemented by his fast, stage and indeed makes it up as he them this. [the finger] repetitive phrases and head jerks. goes along by throwing in every cliché Though the stage directions provide clarity Hilborn’s raw emotional voice rises and he thinks he knows about slam—a sing- in Mali’s book What Learning Leaves, falls until the poem’s conclusion when song tone, dramatic pauses, and heavy

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 31 Lauren Zuniga Speaks

The thing that poetry slam has given me, more than anything, is community. The true power of a slam is not that it gets people to care about poetry again, it is that it gives a voice to the silenced. Not only does it give a microphone to anyone with a story, TUESDAY EVENING but it gathers people in a room to listen Talia pots the citronella to keep to each other. the mosquitoes away. Hangs the mirror. Waters the rosemary. The tape player offers muffled trumpet, backyard clarinet. Keeps time with the curtains slapping their knees against the window.

The kids are lined up at the corner waiting for the ice cream man. Pink headband gang. Drumsticks in back pockets. Silver coins drop from hips. They know their loot SUITCASE OF IMPOSSIBLE will go into the freezer until after dinner but the little ones giggle, nervous, That night we emptied everything. as the big ones count their change. The twenty-seven-story chocolate cake, the curly-haired girl who climbs to the top Penny slices onions and the freshest to place the cherry, a room made of icing, block of tofu. Megan scoops a music box where the white dwarves keep spaghetti squash in yellow mounds the pale blue sky at night, the Cleveland of ribbon. Chickweed and dandelion County tooth fairy who has paid her $8.50, salad. Sprinkle of sunflower seeds. and the bearded king with reindeer. Wild rice and morel mushrooms.

It all started when she asked me what gay The girls built the raised bed while meant and why her teacher says gay people I was at work. Cedar planks, a truck are going to hell and if I thought kids could full of black dirt. I staple chicken wire go there. to the wood frame for the compost bin. The staples punch like snare. The only thing worse than coming into contact The breeze sings like a plastic harmonica. with someone who has unthinkably wrong ideas I fall in love a thousand times before is finding out that person has been in contact with I ever get called into dinner. your children. —Lauren Zuniga, poems from The You get to keep anything you want in there, Smell of Good Mud (Write Bloody, I said. Some people choose a fiery place to send 2012), used by permission. bad people when they die. Some choose statues or beads or elaborate ceremonies. Some just want a chocolate fountain super slide or LAUREN B. ZUNIGA is an international touring detachable limbs. Some don’t want anything. poet and teaching artist. Her poetry collections include The Nickel Tour (Penmanship Books, We went through each item we carry. Holding them 2009) and The Smell of Good Mud (Write Bloody, up to the light to see if they still fit. When we got to 2012), which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Santa Claus, she wept in my arms for ten minutes. Book Award. She has over one million views on YouTube, is a three-time International Poetry Suddenly, she sat straight up, wiped off her cheeks, dusted Slam finalist, and finished in the top twenty at the off his red velvet sleeves, placed him in her suitcase and said, Women of the World poetry slam three years in a I’m keeping him. row. laurenzuniga.com

32 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY emphasis on random words. His poem Spoken Oklahoma Red Dirt Poetry forums are a weekly “Cynthia” begins: Lauren Zuniga, one of Oklahoma’s event on Wednesday nights at Sauced on Paseo in Oklahoma City. Slam nights Slam poetry! most prominent spoken word poets, begin with an open mic segment when Yelling! Angry! won a poetry slam at age eighteen Waving-my-hands-a-lot! and has represented Oklahoma City poets can read their work without scores Specific point of view on things!” in thirteen national and international or ranking. The audience is encouraged slam competitions, earning three top to respond if so moved, including the In season five of NBC’s cult sitcom ten finishes. Perspective from many crowd favorite—a drawn-out, awestruck Parks and Recreation, Amy Poehler’s voices infuses Zuniga’s work: her Creek- “Daaaaaamn.” Score cards had been character, Leslie Knope, lampoons Seminole heritage, her grandmother’s forgotten the night I attended, so we spoken word because “those poems do role as the first director of the ACLU in improvised by making an X or O with our not rhyme.” She mimics the style, noting arms to vote for a favorite poem in each Oklahoma, and her own queer identity. that: “Anything . . . can be a slam . . . round of the competition. Her collection The Smell of Good Mud poem . . . if you say it like this.” Spoken word poetry exists all over (2012) includes the poem “To Oklahoma As evidence of their pop culture the world. England, France, Germany, Progressives Plotting Mass Exodus.” status, spoken word poets are gaining Italy, Canada, and Madagascar have Originally published in the Oklahoma unprecedented attention. Beyoncé incor- flourishing slam poetry communities Gazette, the poem was written in response porated the work of Somali-British poet modeled after Marc Smith’s original slam to the 2010 election in which voters Warsan Shire in her critically acclaimed competitions in Chicago. The egalitarian supported state referendums to affirm visual album, Lemonade, released nature of spoken word ensures that English as the official state language, in 2016. Beyoncé recites excerpts of future generations of poets will share deny Sharia law, and require photo ID Shire’s poetry throughout the video, their voices with an ever expanding for voting. It was a way for Zuniga, a fifth including “For Women Who Are Difficult audience. Will you be listening? generation Okie, to convince herself to to Love”: remain in the Sooner State and “be a part JASON STEPHENSON teaches creative you can’t make homes out of of what’s good about Oklahoma.” writing at Deer Creek High School in Edmond, human beings Oklahoma. He received his master’s degree in someone should have already Here is where the sunset stretches English from the University of Central Okla- told you that its arms wide as forgiveness homa in May 2015. A past president of the and if he wants to leave Oklahoma Council of Teachers of English, across stolen plains. / Here is he is a teacher consultant for the Oklahoma then let him leave where Clara Luper sat down at the Writing Project. you are terrifying and strange and beautiful Katz lunch counter and asked to be TED ROEDER is a documentary photographer something not everyone served. / Here is where black and focusing on communities, including a series of portraits of poets, artists, and performers. He knows how to love. white soldiers fought alongside has photographed the Poetry Project’s Annual each other for the first time. New Year’s Day Marathon (images in this Two of Shire’s poetry chapbooks sold ...... piece are from 2016 and 2017) in New York out on Amazon within hours of Lem- It’s where the healing has to take for several years. onade’s debut. Her 2012 digital album, place. / Tell them you are not mov- EXTRA! READ | THINK | TALK | LINK warsan versus melancholy (the seven ing. / Oklahoma is worth the wait. stages of being lonely), is available for . “A Brief Guide to Slam Poetry,” Academy of American Poets, May 29, 2004. Link to download or streaming on bandcamp. Oklahomans eager to participate in info on slam poets and sample poems. com at an affordable £5 (roughly $6.10 the spoken word scene will find plenty poets.org U.S.). Shire’s body of work spans print of venues—and great performances. . Button Poetry Channel. Watch videos of spoken word, including Neil Hilborn’s poem and digital formats, a sign that twen- According to Poetry Slam Inc., sponsors “OCD.” youtube.com/user/ButtonPoetry ty-first century poets will meet their of the National Poetry Slam, “Oklahoma . “What Teachers Make,” Taylor Mali. Video: fans wherever they are, in multiple has been able to boast two of the top ten youtube.com/user/taylormali. Cartoon illustra- platforms. poets in the entire country.” tion: zenpencils.com. (PG: explicit gestures)

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 33 Alphons Marie Antoine Joseph Grandmont (1837-1909), the Artist’s Second Husband, Tutoring Two Italian Girls, Bramine Hubrecht, ca. 1900-1909. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Six Poets to Make You Fall for Poetry Even the most poetry averse will find something to love in these poets.

Benjamin Myers

I ever received came with chocolate pie. I was asked to read after a pie auction for a museum fundraiser. Afterwards, I was enjoying a hard-earned slice of French silk when a man walked up and said: “Ever since highT school, I thought I didn’t like poetry. I was here for the pie. But I liked your poems. I could identify with them. Maybe I was wrong about poetry.” Best compliment ever. A lot of well-meaning teachers spoil poetry for students by presenting poems as a secret code to be cracked. A good poem is not a puzzle. It is a pleasure. A poem may be wonderfully mysterious, but it should never be simply baffling. A poem may invite us to read more, and even

34 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY send us to other books to learn more in order This is a moment of quiet connection, a to fully enter its world. It shouldn’t, however, simple true-to-life picture of two men quietly simply turn us away. at work together. When we learn, at the Still, generations of students have been poem’s end, that the wood will be used to taught that poems hate us, that they want warm the father and son through their last to confuse and even shame us. And so, gen- winter together, we are already comforted by erations of students have turned away from the unstated love between them and by the poetry. When is the last time you saw someone quiet dignity of their labor. on a bus or plane reading a volume of poems? One of Kenyon’s best-known poems, “Let All is not lost. There are poets who offer Evening Come,” seems, at least in retrospect, a way back in, poets whose poems offer the to offer the same kind of preparation for her pleasures of good verse. For the poetry averse, own death: I recommend the following six. These poets Let the light of late afternoon represent a great variety of techniques and per- shine through chinks in the barn, moving spectives, so, if you don’t like one, try another. up the bales as the sun moves down.

Jane Kenyon The speaker takes comfort in the every- An American poet active from the late ’70s day—“Let the cricket take up chafing”— to the early ’90s, Jane Kenyon is often remem- knowing how great a consolation is beauty bered for her compelling life story. Born in even as one must move into the “late after- noon” of life. the Midwest, she fell in love with one of her Kenyon’s poems can also be quirky, even professors at the University of Michigan, the funny. When reading “Church Fair,” we renowned poet Donald Hall, married, and chuckle with recognition at the portrait of moved with him to his family farm in New her grandmother: England, where they devoted their lives to writing poetry. This romantic idyll was cut “Mrs. Kenyon,” the doctor used to tell her, tragically short when Kenyon died in 1995, “you are simply killing yourself with work.” leaving behind just four complete books of This she repeated often, with keen satisfaction. poetry and a posthumous edition of “new and selected” poems called Otherwise (Gray Wolf “Keen” is also an excellent description of Jane Press, 1997). Kenyon as an observer of life. Kenyon’s work appeals through an exqui- site combination of plain style and spiritual B.H. Fairchild depth. Her poems are both understated and Raised around the oil fields of Kansas, frank, like a conversation with a friend who Oklahoma, and Texas, B.H. Fairchild writes is wise and sensible, unflinching yet con- about the hardscrabble lives of working soling. In “Father and Son,” she hears her men and women, often finding dignity, even neighbors cutting wood: holiness, in the lives of people others might consider “losers.” From time to time he let the saw idle, stepping back from the logs and aromatic In an age when many contemporary dust, while his son kicked the billets poets fixate on fragmentation (seemingly down the sloping drive toward the shed. unconnected bits of imagery) and indulge in

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 35 nonlinear thinking (long strings of word group of poets rising to prominence in association), Fairchild has remained ded- the ’80s and ’90s with a goal to bring icated to narrative. His recent The Blue back poetry audiences by returning to Buick: New and Selected Poems (W.W. the use of rhyme, meter, and narrative. Norton & Company, 2014) features verse Many of these poet proponents that reads like exceptionally trim short appeared in the 1996 Story Line Press stories. In one of his best known poems, anthology, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the “Body and Soul,” he tells the story of a New Formalism. young Mickey Mantle playing as a ringer Nelson’s work, often focused on in an amateur game. The poet focuses family and the African-American experi- not on the gifted young player, but on the ence, is accessible yet rich with mystery. old men, sitting around remembering the Her work is hospitable to the reader; day they met him, the day they discovered unlike experimental poetry’s leaps in PRAYING DRUNK “the vast gap between talent and genius.” logic and violations of syntax, Nelson’s It is a story about ordinary men marked poems don’t resist being read. But she is Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk. by their encounter with greatness. not afraid to address harrowing subject Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks. Fairchild’s poems often tell stories matter. Her volume of new and selected I ought to start with praise, but praise poems, The Fields of Praise (LSU comes hard to me. I stutter. Did I tell you of desperation and transcendence about the woman whom I taught, in bed, among hard-working people on the Press, 1997), offers examples of her best this prayer? It starts with praise; plains. In “Rave On,” he depicts work as she writes with sympathy and the simple form humanity about the Rwanda massacres keeps things in order. I hear from her four high school boys so hungry for sometimes. meaning and a sense of being alive that between the Hutu and Tutsi, as well as Do you? And after love, they spend their evenings repairing tragedies closer to her home. In “April when I was hungry, junk cars solely for the excitement of Rape,” the poet vividly and sympathet- I said, Make me something to eat. ically imagines the inner life of a rape She yelled, intentionally wrecking them: Poof! You’re a casserole!—and laughed survivor who has barricaded herself in so hard Rumbling over caliche so that “the mouths of all the locks in the with a busted muffler, she fell out of the bed. Take care of her. house / snatch at her like cats.” Nelson, radio blasting Buddy Holly however, doesn’t reduce the woman to a —Andrew Hudgins, stanza excerpt from “Praying over Baptist wheat fields, Drunk,” The Never-Ending: New Poems (1991), mere victim: used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Travis screaming out Prepare Company. All rights reserved. ye the way of the Lord She is trying to grow teeth at jackrabbits skittering beneath Image: At the Beer Garden, Alolph Menzel, 1883. everywhere. our headlights Private collection [PD] Wikimedia Commons She will bite the next man that comes, eat him up like a piece of ice. Background: Maler des Chinesischer, print circa In “Beauty,” Fairchild confesses that 12th century. Private collection / [PD] Wikimedia She is glad to be home again. Commons (repeated pp. 37-38) “no male member of my family has ever used / this word in my hearing or anyone The poem is a testimony of survival. else’s except / in reference, perhaps, to Other poems, like “No, No, Bad a new pickup or dead deer.” Even so, Daddy” and “Woman Kills and Eats he tells the story of men desperate for Own Infant” look unflinchingly at the some glimpse of beauty, even as they are human capacity for evil and the potential shamed by the light it casts on their dim for relationships to go horribly wrong. lives. No one has written better about These poems are not lurid or despairing. rural masculinity. They offer a sense of shared sorrow and of common humanity. Nelson’s poems Marilyn Nelson remind us again and again that we don’t Marilyn Nelson is one of several poets belong only to ourselves. Her poems of associated with the “New Formalists,” a family and community explore the nets

36 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY of love and obligation, the shared joys teller. “Playing Dead” recounts how his and burdens that tie us together. father used to lie perfectly still, letting the children poke him until they were Andrew Hudgins convinced that he was dead. The poem’s Andrew Hudgins, another veteran of young protagonist begins to fear the the Rebel Angels anthology, is very much worst, introducing the element of anxiety a Southern poet and, like many South- found in most great comedy, until he tries erners, he knows how to tell a good jabbing his father “in the jewels,” a move story. His 1985 debut collection, Saints that brings a quick end to the game. and Strangers (Houghton Mifflin, 1985), includes a sequence of poems narrated Du Fu by the daughter of a revivalist preacher. While the rest of the poets on this list Like a novella in verse, it follows the are contemporary and American, I want main character from childhood into to include one who is not. Living from QIANG VILLAGE (1) adulthood. His second book, After the 712 to 770 A.D. in Tang Dynasty China, Lost War: A Narrative (Houghton Mifflin, Du Fu attempted and failed to make a From mountainous red clouds 1988), is a fictionalized account of the life life as a civil servant. In an age marred by looming in the west of Georgia poet Sidney Lanier, who was rebellions and civil unrest, he struggled to a shaft of sunlight a Confederate soldier before becoming a care for his family while writing hundreds falls on the flat plain musician, writer, and professor. of beautiful poems. magpies flap and chatter around the brushwood gate Even when Hudgins’s poems aren’t Du Fu speaks to us in ways that seem all this is hugely welcome narratives, they maintain a straightfor- contemporary. Like Marilyn Nelson, he reminds us of our interdependence. In to such a tired traveler ward, conversational manner. One of his one of his most anthologized poems, my wife and children best poems, “The Hereafter,” amusingly are wide-eyed with surprise “Qiang Village (1)” at right, the poet is ponders scenarios for life after death reunited with his family after a brief they greet me and of course before confessing: must wipe their streaming tears separation in the turmoil. Few poets have all of us know these times For so long so vividly and succinctly captured what whirl families in all directions I have thought of us as nails it means to live a private life within the God drives into the oak floor we know I’m very lucky context of a community. Du Fu is also a of this world, to have returned alive precise observer of nature, often weaving it’s hard to comprehend the neighbors climb their walls the hammer turned natural images into his depictions of to witness our reunion to claw me out. everyday life. The detail of the flapping pretty soon most of them magpies around the gate not only fills are blubbering too Has anyone so vividly described our out the picture but also subtly reminds night comes inability to face mortality? us of the contrast between the seemingly we light some candles Considering the titles of his memoir eternal stability of nature and the change- look at each other (The Joker, Simon & Schuster, 2014) ableness of human fortunes. wonder if we are dreaming. and a recent book of verse (A Clown Friendship is a frequent theme in —Du Fu (David Young, trans.) at Midnight, Mariner Books, 2013), it Du Fu’s poems. In a heart-wrenching Image: Wang Xizhi Watching Geese, is no surprise that comedy abounds in poem about fleeing with his family from Qian Xuan, circa 1250-1300. Metropolitan Hudgins’s work. In “Praying Drunk,” the rebels overrunning their village, he Museum of Art, NY / [PD] Wikimedia Commons he begins: writes with palpable gratitude about the friend who took them in when they Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk. were on the verge of starvation, bathed Again. their feet, and brought them platters of In that line break one discerns the knack food. Elsewhere he writes of friends for comic timing crucial in a good story- met on the road and of friends who

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 37 have passed from this life. Again and The great modernist poet Marianne again, his poems call us to meditate on Moore famously begins her poem our connections to other people. “Poetry” with the confession, “I, too, dis- There are many fine translations of like it.” If you have felt the same, reading Du Fu’s work, but I recommend David Aaron Belz’s irreverent romp through Young’s Du Fu: A Life in Poetry as a literary culture can be a therapeutic form starting place. Young has translated of revenge. the Tang poet’s work into straightfor- Maybe reading these poets will ward and accessible verse, and he has convince you to dislike poetry a little arranged the poems to tell the life story less. Maybe they will be a gateway to the of the poet. It is a book I cherish and many great poets not included in this list. carry with me often. If you want more recommendations, I’d be happy to give you a thousand names. HAUER YOU Aaron Belz BENJAMIN MYERS is author of two books Compared to the rest of the poets on of poetry and just completed a term as Hi, my name is Rutger Hauer, this list, Aaron Belz is a young upstart, Oklahoma State Poet Laureate. His poems and this is my cooking channel. appear in many prominent literary journals. Today on my cooking channel but his first three books have had great He teaches at Oklahoma Baptist University. I will make beef. appeal for a general audience. Like Great beef starts where you’d Hudgins, Belz is a joker. Consider EXTRA! READ | THINK | TALK | LINK least expect. just a few of his poem titles: “2005 is . “A Life Together,” Bill Moyers’ Journal. But before we get into details, an Important Year for Alec Baldwin”; Video profile of married poets Jane let’s open a window or two. “Thomas Hardy the Tank Engine”; and Kenyon and Donald Hall, including I also do have orange juice in motivations for their work and footage of the fridge if anybody wants one. “Arguing with a Buddhist.” poetry readings. billmoyers.com Do you care that I’ve been in Belz is a master of silly word play. . “What the Light Gives Back: An Interview more than fifty In one poem, he imagines people in the with B.H. Fairchild,” Jenny Molberg, The American Literary Review, Nov. movies and that I am 72 years old horse-drawn carriage rental business 24, 2014. Discusses Fairchild’s writing and from the Netherlands? “at loggerheads” with the inventors process and his book The Blue Buick: I learned to say American “hello” of the typewriter over who owns the americanliteraryreview.com. Videos of at very young age. Fairchild readings: poetry.la/index.html There is nowhere I would rather be phrase “carriage return.” In this short . “In ‘Poetry,’ The Story of an African- than Iceland, though. poem from his collection Glitter Bomb American Military Family,” Arun Rath, NPR, Or that my parents sent me to sea (Persea, 2014), he continues the fun: Feb. 8, 2014. Interview on and excerpt at the age of 15? from Marilyn Nelson’s memoir, How I HIPPIE SLANG Currently running a charity Discovered Poetry: npr.org. Nelson poetry, obstetrics clinic in Greenland, interviews, and video: blueflowerarts.com When I say my mind races as I think about . “‘Joker’ Asks: Have You Heard the One what could have beenland. “I dig graves,” About the Joke-Telling Poet?” Scott what I mean is Simon, NPR, June 8, 2013. Andrew —Aaron Belz, first publication, Oklahoma I enjoy and/or Hudgins on his memoir, The Joker, and the Humanities, Spring/Summer 2017. All rights understand them. role of humor in his life: npr.org. Hudgins reserved. poems: slate.com Belz often mocks literature itself, as with . “Great Tang Poets: Du Fu,” Asian Image: Still Life with Bottle, Carafe, Bread, and Topics, Columbia University. Scholar Wine, Claude Monet, circa 1862-1863. National this mashup of John Ashbery, author of commentary on the life and writings Gallery of Art the Pulitzer Prize-winning Self-Portrait of Du Fu: afe.easia.columbia.edu/at. in a Convex Mirror, and music legend English translations of Du Fu poems: Michael Jackson: chinese-poems.com . “The Elusive Aaron Belz,” Brian Howe, MICHAEL JASHBERY Indy Week, March 5, 2014. Profiles Belz’s quirky “micro-fame” as a contemporary I’m starting with the man poet: indyweek.com. Belz essays, inter- in the convex mirror. views, and poetry: belz.net

38 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY SpringSpring Renewal

Weightless, Ryan Cunningham. Photographed by Konrad Eek

SCISSORTAIL A comparison of bird and poet The bird’s forked tail allows abrupt midair turns to catch the insect in flight. A garden The official Latin name of the scissortail With a quick mid-phrase turn is Tyrannus forficatus, the poet catches us—abrupt—the verse takes flight of verse from king of the fork-tails. and we must rethink the trajectory of the line. Oklahoma poets The poet, king of words, The scissortail wanders wide transforms the mundane traveling to winter grounds, shows up Indicates first time publication with common language, a swooping upward, unexpectedly, far from its summer habitat. a groundward descent, By the poet’s words we explore the same expanse, a flutter of spirit. arriving unexpectedly, far outside ourselves.

—Katricia G. Pierson

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 39 USED TO BE A RIVER SPRING THOUGHTS A garden You are skipping rocks across a creek You asked if I think about you that used to be a river, like the woman when you’re away of verse from who used to be a girl and the man I answered: “No . . . well . . . sometimes, who used to be a boy in the year now and then . . . from a different century than the one Oklahoma poets they were born in. The press of time . . . in the mornings is a current that changes the landscape when I wake . . . Indicates first time publication in seasons of drought and flood, divorce, denial, the loss of children to things Well . . . also at night . . . worse than death. Let us be here now, as I lie down to sleep UNTITLED no matter the water reaches our necks or does not wet our toes, no matter And, oh . . . yes, in the afternoons . . . Mimosa-feathered branches we do not know the shape our lives Oh, my god, the afternoons, bowed as I walked under will decide to take around the next bend. those spring afternoons . . . a kind of benison —Shaun Perkins the closest I could come And, well, . . . also Used to Be a River (2015) that hellish spring in my dreams . . . to grace all night long . . . —Britton Gildersleeve But, other than those times, I don’t think of you . . . at least not much.” APRIL FESTIVAL —Robert Herman Broyles

We poets clot around the land, around tables, in halls and bars, under trees, pass around copies, emote. The air everywhere vibrates with our voices as well as earth’s hopeful procreators’ . . . the frogs, the mockingbirds, the early and enduring insects. Spring loosens our tongues. The cavernous, dark and dank bar where we gathered ourselves in the center of the plains was still heavy with an all-night fill of words when I entered its morning depths, a velvet ambiance. There was a workshop in the loft up wooden stairs, and the cappuccino machine squealed out its own creation. I stopped to chat with the bright-eyed Virginian of the day before, met his wife. They stayed until 2 a.m. Four holdouts huddled around a microphone on the shadowy stage as if about the last embers of a campfire. One played a mournful flute beneath the words muttering on and on in this endless exhalation that insists just how much a part of spring we are . . . just how much a part of earth’s last word we hope to be. —Carol Hamilton Oklahoma Poet Laureate (1995-1997)

40 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY SPRING COMES TO BIRTH INDIAN PAINTBRUSHES ONE-HORSE, OKLAHOMA You’re here one month early, Flowers grow Winter slinks away, leaving mailboxes the scalpel visible flickers of orange fire leaning each way on rotting posts, from where I sit dancing on green fields under Oklahoma skies. gathered along the street, stunned like dead with my notebook of fears, Like weeds on the day of resurrection. We rise palimpsests of ghosts they hold to the worst terrain a little earlier, even on Saturday, on fingers of air. and spread everywhere. and sit in plastic lawn chairs to feel wind shifting north, south, north, The nurse blurs by They beautify discarded Coors cans like a boy walking back and forth in a moment of white, and swarm beneath barbed wire in front of the house where a girl lives. cuts through the air filling empty cattle pastures, of cool anesthesia. piercing coyote bones Everywhere the smell of coffee taken by the grass in Styrofoam cups, bacon frying. I watch the first spank on land where, long ago, Overhead, the spry agitation of squirrels with no response, Choctaw and Chickasaw hunted. shaking the first nervous blooms of redbud. then another, and another, please breathe, please breathe . . . Once, Everyone’s lawn needs mowing. as a boy, Everyone’s windows are open. Outside the window I worked the roots of a handful loose And, one by one, the men are crawling the precarious branch from the rocky soil beneath cars and trucks on cement blocks that holds the world. across the gravel road and metal ramps. Wrenches in hand, they know, running in front of my house against all flat good sense, that this year Tomorrow’s bird comes. and brought them to my mother’s flower beds. they can make those engines run. Small mouths open to swallow the sky. With all the care a ten year old could muster, —Benjamin Myers I replanted the fire Oklahoma Poet Laureate (2015-2016) —David M. Linebarger between the petunias and the four o’clocks. War Stories (2006) But there among the tame flowers soon they perished. UPON DREAMING “They grow wild; do any of my dreams that’s just how some things are meant to be,” perhaps a few of yours Momma said hover in consultation as she watered her carefully tended garden late at night above my bed in the summer heat of Oklahoma. before they descend to soothe a sweating brow But always other nights in devilish mood without fail, to tease alarm even terrify before she’d go back inside, at those instances it may be she would walk over to the edge of our yard in a kindlier frame of mind and look across the dusty road your dreams then convince at the fiery red-orange blanket, it is possible to end it by awakening burning in the last light of day. and so I do dreamt terrors thankfully —Ron Wallace forgotten this Thursday spring Songs of Eretz Poetry Review (Oct. 2015) morning my night clothes damp not from fevered sleep but from May showers braved while getting the paper its news spread before me on my desk nothing that can shatter morning peace I settle glad once again to attend not to the fraught but the simply ordinary —Carl Sennhenn Oklahoma Poet Laureate (2001-2003)

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 41 A garden of verse from WILL MAN WALKS DOG Late March, and the wind whips up dust Double-leashed grip, Oklahoma poets over early spring fields, the sorrel soil blooming left hand wrapped into sky until the sun blurs and limps, like a bull rider’s, red-faced, toward the evening horizon. we sally forth AFTER THE STORM to tilt at the world. Somehow, though, the wheat has found I want to tell you something new its way up after a dry winter, Readiness is all – about the rain. How it comes down pushing through the roof of earth coiled spring in the morning before the light comes up. with flat green fingers. of exuberance in this cold spring, Tell you how it drums on a tin roof I would account it a matter of genetics, unleashed against and reminds me that once I was twelve years old, of careful agricultural science winter’s reticence. curled up on my grandmother’s porch. that makes seeds resilient and efficient, growing on the mere rumor of rain. Amber-jeweled eyes How the sound raised a knowing entrapping ten thousand in my child self, told me the mystery in the world, Or, it might be something more common, thousand years of radiance, told me to go look for it. To follow it. like the general will to life, embers of fire like the way a child tosses a ball melting winter’s vestige. The drops spoke to me of things to come, too heavy for her small thin arms roads to travel, sadness in passing. Told me at the sky, mouth open in wonder, No map to dictate to move out, to stand as near the edge as I dared, at the height. distance or direction, without drowning in the flood. only instinct and discretion —Paul Bowers when inscribing an arc The Lone, Cautious, Animal Life (2016) Now, the light is coming, the rain is letting up. the length of a leash. I am grateful for the news the raindrops brought to my young heart all those years ago, The movement forward especially now that the storm is over, THE CARDINALS AND FINCHES not so much choice the sky sunshine bright, the world made new. KNOW MY MOTHER as capitulation Again.

—Dorothy Alexander The cardinals and finches know my mother now, the way home along with this backyard she built for them. a promise Through generations flocking here each spring, of eternal return. MY MOTHER’S IRIS they come because their great-great granddads did, —Daniel Simon Cast Off (2015) I sleep under the wing and this backyard is all they’ve ever known. of night, singing And I don’t know a cardinal’s or finch’s lifespan, the long winter but hearts so tiny cannot last that long . . . they beat so fast to keep their bodies warm. requiem, stealing purple out of black So I assume it’s generations who earth. I dream flesh have come to eat her sunflower n’ thistle seeds, her feeders filled like altars she maintains is made flower, bulb to honor some celestial feathered god. is made heart, stem and leaf unfurl And I’m afraid how lost they’ll be someday when she is gone, though not as lost as me. like new flags —Nathan Brown breaking into May, Oklahoma Poet Laureate (2013-2014) bearding the world again. —Jane Vincent Taylor Miriam’s Well (July 2010)

42 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY A RANNAIGHEACHT GHAIRID NEAR EQUINOX SIGNS OF SPRING ON SPRING BURNING A ruby crocus near the porch sends up This short month is too long, Slowly, smoke hope—winter of sorrow is waning teasing us with the promise of spring, settles in the hollows. Poke- the dire moon of almost-spring rises then plunging us into numbing cold, weed grays, cinquefoil withers, jack- full with promise of renewal, shaming but the mockingbird is busy in-the-pulpits crack. Frogs croak. twinkling city lights in its splendor. scoping out a nesting site while the cardinals engage in red wars The woods ring I search for my faith, wonder where to establish territories, and flocks alive with the fire of spring. I lost it, find it in deep cinnamon of red-winged blackbirds engulf the lawn. Though the flame may kill first plants, mud smushing up between my toes. Only the hollies and photinias are green no rants are raised at burning. Across a sere field, a lake in shadow and spiky shoots pushing through serenades curvature of earth. frozen earth from the bulbs Rather now of surprise lilies and daffodils in this cool time of hawk, owl, As if on cue, a comet streaks portending blooms to come. and hummingbird—acceptance across somber roiling river of sky. And the goldfinches are no longer of the balance due to fowl, merely asking questions but composing poems —Jeanetta Calhoun Mish as they exchange their drab winter coats beasts, creatures for flashy yellow suits. of the leaves and grass. Features WHAT I CANNOT DO And on my morning walk of ash give way to the force down the road to the river that will course fields and pastures I hear, then see two gray skeins I cannot make you love of sandhill cranes cheering raucously the way rain dripping with a green as they head north toward spring. from April sky that will outlast the first seen sharpens redbuds —Jennifer Kidney things of the small woods and ways. like lasers dissecting All the days of spring we keen, a heart with precision a surgeon envies being slow, BUILDING A HOUSE IN APRIL loss of faster things. We know a fiery fuchsia so little the force of fire: Suddenly the wind kicks up. glowing against gray death here, we say, should grow slow. Redbuds and Bradford pears skies and drizzled bark scatter Oklahoma confetti —Jim Barnes scattered in the brush over newly-poured walkway. Oklahoma Poet Laureate (2009-2010) On a Wing of the Sun (2001) but I can show you You planted concrete new clover as small but they wanted a garden. Rannaigheacht Ghairid is a Welsh poetic as drops of water form that requires a patterned rhyme bright as an emerald —Sandra Soli and cross-rhyme in each stanza, and a sun, under cover syllable pattern of 3/7/7/7 in each stanza. of dead winter grass. —Ken Hada Persimmon Sunday (2015) Indicates first time publication

Our call for poetry yielded a profusion of poesy—bouquets of verse too bounteous to fit these pages. Visit our website to find more great poems and bios on all our featured poets. okhumanities.org/poetry

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 43 n. scott momaday

Vase of Flowers on a Mantlepiece, Edouard Vuillard, circa 1900. National Gallery of Art

To Oklahomans, N. Scott Momaday is a cultural treasure, a Native son in every thoughts from a respect: He was born in Lawton and is a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma. poet on his craft His honors are legion. To name a few, in 2007 he was appointed Oklahoma Cen- tennial Poet Laureate by Governor Brad Henry and awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush. His novel House Made of Dawn won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He is an accomplished painter and printmaker and has spent his lifetime as a scholar and keeper of words, crafting novels, plays, folk tales, memoirs, essays, and poetry. “Poets are the people who really are the most insightful among us,” Momaday observes. “They stand in the best position to enlighten us, and encourage, and inspire us. What better thing could you be than a poet?” With a bit of never-before-published prose, and a classic reflection in verse, Momaday gives us a glimpse of the poet’s life and we agree: what better thing, indeed?

44 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY POEM AT RIGHT: Contemporary American Poetry, A BENIGN SELF-PORTRAIT THE POET IN LOVE Vol. 2, Cary Nelson, ed. (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001) A mirror will suffice, no doubt. I find that writing a poem is like The high furrowed forehead, falling in love. There is a fierce The heavy-lidded Asian eyes, excitement to it. It is mysterious The long-lobed Indian ears. and deliciously dangerous. It is the Brown skin beginning to spot, most intimate kind of courtship. Of an age to bore and be bored. Each syllable, each word, each line I turn away, knowing too well is something of your lover discov- My face, my expression ered. You want to give wholly and For all seasons, my half-smile. unconditionally of yourself, and you cannot give enough. Your suffering Birds flit about the feeder, is exquisite. You think you will die The dog days wane, and I of delight. Then you reach a plateau, Observe the jitters of leaves and ecstasy becomes a calm and And the pallor of the ice-blue beyond. serene contentment. The giddy part I read to find inspiration. I write of the honeymoon is over, and you To restore candor to the mind. settle into a constant, seamless state There are raindrops on the window, of bliss. You know your heading, and And a peregrine wind gusts on the grass. the wind is ever in your sails. And at I think of my old red flannel shirt, last you reach your destination, and The one I threw away in July. there is no satisfaction like it. The I would like to pat the warm belly of a prize has been won, the dream come Beagle or the hand of a handsome woman. true, the marriage consummated. I look ahead to cheese and wine, You have earned the rest of your life, And a bit of Bach, perhaps, and in the perfection of destiny you Or Schumann on the bow of Yo-Yo Ma. have earned the end of it as well. WORD SAMPLER I see the mountains as I saw them When my heart was young. There is a Native American verbal But were they not a deeper blue, formula that goes: Shimmering under the fluency of skies Radiant with crystal light? Across the way As my eyes search the prairie The yellow land lies out, and standing stones I feel the summer in the spring. Form distant islands in the field of time. This seems to me a remarkable example There is a stillness on this perfect world, of the power and mystery of language. It And I am content to settle in its hold. seems to express the nearly inexpressible. I turn inward on a wall of books. I have lived with these words for many They are old friends, even those that years. They are not diminished in time. In Have dislodged my dreams. One by one my poetry I have tried to achieve this level They have shaped the thing I am. of expression. I wonder if I have succeeded. Poetry, I believe, is the highest form of These are the days that swarm verbal art. Into the shadows of legend. I ponder. I have written in other genres—novels, And when the image on the glass essays, plays, criticism, and travel liter- Is refracted into the prisms of the past ature. All of these have been intensely I shall remember: my parents speaking rewarding to me, but poetry has been my Quietly in a warm familiar room, and greatest occupation. To have written just I bend to redeem an errant, broken doll. one successful poem—one poem that My little daughter, her eyes brimming deserves to be read and preserved for its With love, beholds the ember of my soul. own sake—is enough to justify the poet’s There is the rattle of a teacup, and life. It is a kind of immortality. At the window and among the vines, When I was a small boy in Oklahoma, The whir of a hummingbird’s wings. waking to the eternal sunrise and seeing In the blue evening, in another room, the rolling plains reaching out to the There is the faint laughter of ghosts, Vanitas Still Life with Books, anonymous, horizon, the seed of poetry was invested in And in a tarnished silver frame, the 1633. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam me. I felt the summer in the spring. Likeness of a boy who bears my name.

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 45 NOTEWORTHY

EXPERIENCE THE SMITHSONIAN IN OKLAHOMA! The traveling exhibition The Way We Worked chronicles 150 years of change in the American workforce, and how FROM THE BOARD work became central to the American dream. See this OF TRUSTEES national exhibit and discover how work shaped each local Ken Fergeson, Chair community along the tour. It is often noted in our magazine, website, and press

PERRY - Perry Heritage Center releases that Oklahoma Humanities is the state’s affiliate 222 6th St. | (580) 336-4402 of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). In February 1 – March 17 1971, Oklahoma Humanities launched as an independent

GROVE - Har-Ber Village Museum nonprofit, charged by NEH to bridge the general public with 4404 W. 20th St. | (918) 786-6446 the academic disciplines of the humanities. For 46 years, March 25 – May 12 Oklahoma Humanities has been an exceptional steward of

BROKEN ARROW - Broken Arrow public funds and the public trust by providing rich cultural Historical Society Museum opportunities for thousands of Oklahomans. 400 S. Main | (918) 258-2616 Each year, we receive a general support grant from the May 19 – July 7 NEH to supplement donors’ contributions that fund public WAURIKA - Waurika Public Library humanities programs throughout the state. The grant is 203 S. Meridian | (580) 228-3274 incredibly valuable to Oklahoma—it traditionally leverages July 22 – September 8 $7 of local funds for each $1 of federal support. That’s a POTEAU - The Historic Hotel Lowrey terrific return on investment by anyone’s standards. 303 Dewey Ave. | (918) 647-9330 As Chair of the Board of Trustees, I’ll be in Washington September 15 – November 11 D.C. this spring to participate in a daylong advocacy event to

The Way We Worked, an exhibition created by the National share the importance of this federal funding to Oklahoma. Archives, is part of Museum on Main Street, a collabora- I’ll be joined by other board and staff members in meetings tion between the Smithsonian Institution and Oklahoma with Oklahoma’s congressional delegation. Having the Humanities. Support for Museum on Main Street has been opportunity to share the work of Oklahoma Humanities provided by the U.S. Congress. Oklahoma programming is generously supported by the National Endowment for the with U.S. Congressmen and Senators is critical to the Humanities and our local sponsors: the Gelvin Foundation, continuance of our work, especially statewide grants that the Jerome Westheimer Family Foundation, and Beaver fund cultural programs in local communities. Express Service. Image: Switchboard operators direct overseas calls, Dec. 1943; National Archives, Records of Grantees and program participants regularly write to the Women’s Bureau. their representatives, thanking them for making Oklahoma Humanities programs possible. Their personal experiences relay to legislators that maintaining funding for the NEH (and consequently Oklahoma Humanities) is essential to help Smithsonian us all learn about the human experience, understand new OKLAHOMA Institution HUMANITIES perspectives, and participate knowledgeably in civic life, and I am grateful for their efforts. I look forward to sharing our work and its impact in Oklahoma with our elected officials.

46 SPRING | SUMMER 2017 | POETRY OH Welcomes New Board Members

OKLAHOMA BEN ALPERS is Reach for Excellence MARILYN FEAVER is Executive Director HUMANITIES Associate Professor at the Honors of Southwest Oklahoma Impact Coalition, College, University of Oklahoma. He with 20 years’ experience in business, holds a Ph.D. in American History from transportation, and tourism initiatives. She OH BOARD OF TRUSTEES Princeton. His research and teaching was the Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce Ken Fergeson, Chair focus on twentieth-century U.S. political Executive of the Year in 2000 and was Altus culture, film history, and history and recognized by The Journal Record as one of Dr. Scott LaMascus, memory. He is working on a book on how 50 Women of the Year in 2002. She is First Vice Chair/Secretary 1970s-era Americans processed social and cultural changes Lady of the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Oklahoma Christian University through explorations of the past. He is a founding member of Chickasha and serves on numerous boards. Dr. Susan McCarthy, the Society of U.S. Intellectual History and edits its blog. Treasurer BARBARA SNOW GILBERT is a lawyer Oklahoma City PAULA BROOKS lives in Chickasha and mediator, and serves as Law Clerk to Patrick Alexander with her husband, Patrick. She had United States District Judge Stephen P. Nichols Hills the good fortune to be a full-time Friot. She is the author of three young adult mom and participated in community novels, which have won awards including Dr. Ben Alpers organizations while raising her family. two Oklahoma Book Awards. She serves University of Oklahoma Paula currently enjoys semi-retirement, on the Nichols Hills Planning Commission J. Edward Barth which includes spending more time and has served on a variety of community Oklahoma City with grandchildren, continuing her boards and committees. She is a graduate of the University of Dr. Ben Bates involvement in PEO, and other social/civic activities. Texas School of Law and The Colorado College. Langston University Paula Brooks PHILIP BUSEY, JR. handles marketing, EDNA MAE HOLDEN is a practicing Chickasha public relations, and government attorney with Gungoll, Jackson, Box & affairs for Delaware Resource Group of Devoll, P.C. Her western stories have been Philip Busey, Jr. Oklahoma. He has multiple “40 Under published in Western Horseman Magazine, Edmond 40” recognitions, including The Journal Cowboy Magazine, and Persimmon Hill Beverly Davis Record, Oklahoma Magazine, OKC Biz Magazine. She created the Oklahoma Oklahoma City Magazine, and the National Center for the Centennial Symphony, Oklahoma . . . Where Dr. Dewayne Dickens American Indian Enterprise Development. the West Remains, which received a 2008 Tulsa Community College He serves and has held leadership positions on the boards of Wrangler Award and was voted best album by the Western Marilyn Feaver numerous organizations, including the SWOSU Foundation, Music Association. She received the Governor’s Art Award in Chickasha SWOSU Alumni Association, Cherokee National Historical 2008. Society, and American Indian Chamber of Commerce, OKC. Barbara Snow Gilbert SUNU KODUMTHARA is an Associate Nichols Hills DEWAYNE DICKENS is a Developmental Professor of History at Southwestern Edna Mae Holden English Associate Professor at Tulsa Oklahoma State University and teaches Kremlin Community College and a Co-Director of courses in American and Oklahoma David B. Hooten the OSU Writing Project. He holds a Ph.D. history. She holds a Ph.D. in American Nichols Hills in Curriculum and Social Foundations History from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Dian Jordan from Oklahoma State University and In 2014, she received a grant to attend Broken Bow was listed among OSU’s 2012 list of 100 an NEH Summer Institute. She serves on Graduate Students of Significance. He is the executive boards of two national history organizations Dr. Sunu Kodumthara a member of the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation and was awarded the SWOSU Brandy Award for Faculty Southwestern Oklahoma State University Board and serves as a mentor-scholar to encourage African Member of the Year, 2015-2016. American males in higher education. John Martin Enid Mary Blankenship Pointer ABOUT OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES Oklahoma City

Oklahoma Humanities (OH) OH accepts grant applications reading and discussion series; and Kimber Shoop III Oklahoma City strengthens communities by helping from nonprofits across the state Museum on Main Street, a collabo- Oklahomans learn about the human for programs that may take the ration with the Smithsonian Institu- Dr. Andrew Vassar experience, understand new perspec- form of museum exhibits, film fes- tion to provide traveling exhibits in Northeastern State tives, and participate knowledgeably tivals, teacher institutes, oral history small rural communities. University in civic life. As the state affiliate of the projects, or other formats that Visit our website to find an Valorie Walters National Endowment for the Humanities, best serve local communities. In event near you, read archived issues Ada OH provides and supports programming addition, OH administers programs of this magazine, or explore grant J. Ron Wright for the general public that uses human- that provide free access to cul- and program opportunities. We Muskogee ities disciplines (such as history, literature, tural humanities content, including: look forward to hearing from you. ethics, and philosophy) to deeply explore Oklahoma Humanities magazine; (405) 235-0280 | okhumanities.org what it means to be human. Let’s Talk About It, Oklahoma, a [email protected]

OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES 47 Non-Profit Organization U.S. Postage Paid Oklahoma City, OK Permit No. 863

424 Colcord Dr., Suite E Oklahoma City, OK 73102

CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED

CONNECT WITH US | okhumanities.org MAGAZINE | okhumanities.org/archives DEADLINES | okhumanities.org/grants ∙ Check our calendar for upcoming events ∙ Free two-year subscription—register online Major and Challenge Grant applications ∙ Sign up for e-news on OH programs ∙ Stay on our mailing list with a gift of support are considered twice per year ∙ Give feedback on OH programs or contact us and request continued mailings ∙ Spring | Draft: Mar. 1 | Final: April 1 ∙ Click DONATE to support our work okhumanities.org/DONATE ∙ Fall | Draft: Aug. 1 | Final: Sept. 1 ∙ Explore OH magazine archives (405) 235-0280 | [email protected] ∙ Opportunity Grant applications ∙ Join the Editor’s Circle: $500 annual gift accepted year-round provides free copies to Oklahoma schools, ∙ Guidelines posted on our website FOLLOW US libraries, and veterans’ centers

NEXT UP: VIETNAM | Fall/Winter 2017

Coinciding with the PBS debut of The Vietnam War, Ken Burns’ 18-hour documentary series, we examine the varied voices of the Vietnam era: decisions leading to U.S. military involvement; social pressures at work in American society; recollections of soldiers and refugees; and the lingering effects on U.S. foreign policy. Don’t miss this special, extended issue featuring two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors.