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Sanga-noise:
A critical look at Sangamon Valley poets
By Dr. Eugene Wiley

Poets in the Sangamon Valley are tempting Injustice with their masterful creations. A visitor to the area, I was recently privileged to be gifted a package of published and unpublished works by local poets. Professor Ethan Lewis, one of the area’s ablest literary critics, confirmed my sense of looming Injustice during a recent conversation; as scholars, and as lovers of good verse, both Dr. Lewis and I are convinced that local poets are producing work that is simply too important to remain unnoticed, whether in local vicinities or in the world at large.

The unfairness confronting poets, the indifference of the ‘masses’, diminishes not one jot their accomplishments, nor does it forecast what the probable judgement of posterity may be on the Sangamon area poets of the late twentieth to early twenty-first century. In point of fact, there is excellent verse being generated in the Sangamon Valley, and a great deal of it seems to swirl around the local Poets and Writers Literary Forum (PWLF), its publishing partner DayBreak Press, and their exceptional quarterly journal Prism.

The following is my brief response to some of the works I encountered during my recent stay.

UIS Professor Marcellus Leonard offers a hypnotic and sensual poetic line in his superb chapbook, Nubian Cousins: Adventures in Verse. Breath and body are lured to experience every sensuous stanza. Even when the poems are read silently, one feels a sense of harmonious induction into mystery, poetic reflection, cultural brotherhood ... and global-politico tragedy with these slinkily sung lines.

Comprised of two extended, narrative pieces: “Mona El Said” and “The Etymology Of The Word”, plus a pair of shorter poems: the title piece, “Nubian Cousins” and “Anubis And The Bitch”, Leonard’s graceful prose introduction segues to a rich and textured set of travelogue verse, replete with original photographs of Nubian natives and settings. All of the chapbook’s incidental prose, including the captions for the photos, is actually poetry in ‘disguise’; take as an example, this caption beneath a portrait of a handsome, young Nubian:

“This man slipped an alabaster fragment into my hand, a gift to a Nubian cousin. Nubians dig the alabaster out of the nearby hills and sculpt it by hand. I brought no gifts for them so I gave away all of the underwear and shirts I had purchased for the trip.”

The title-poem, “Nubian Cousins” is a precisely crafted lyric that astounds with graceful, though dangerously exotic diction:

Hard by the wharf,
clothed in galabiyyas
the nubians sit
smoke Shishsa
And sip their tea.

The swerving, serpentine rhythm and inflection of these lines is wonderfully echoic of the poem’s setting and theme. Leonard moves swiftly to an almost Dickeyian transposition; a stunning, sudden intimacy:

He holds a snapshot up
to lamp street glow.
I see my face
stern with admiration for a son
I just now know.
I find and lose at once
who I was and am
for I must go.

The dark of night clamps tightly down.

By establishing a polished, Anglo-derived (or Western) scaffolding, i.e. – a travelogue-narrative, with occasional ‘classical’ diction and meter, to support a largely ‘non-western’ idiom, involving settings, as well as an overall prosody, steeped in exoticism, Leonard achieves a unique elocution in “Nubian Cousins” that strikes me as being worthy of the highest praise. Poets attain originality usually only as a consequence of hard study and long experience; the resonance of this single poem, the title-poem, makes Nubian Cousins worth reading and remembering.

The chapbook’s two longer, narrative pieces are also superb. In “Mona El Said”, Leonard’s line continues to swerve sensuously as a belly-dancer, wise as an ancient snake:

The Hurghada star is not reflected tonight
in the crystal clear of the Red Sea.
Lights disco on the hotel beach
shame her back beyond the palms.

Slyly allusive, perhaps, of Crane or Stevens, or perhaps, not at all, “Mona El Said” describes a cycle of corruption and longing for renewal, evoking not only Crane’s “The Bridge” but his ‘logic of metaphor’ and all attendant imagery:

A handsome woman diaphanous in veils
sweeps into the room – undulated hips,
soft gyrated belly, fingers sagated and clicked –
her hair smoke fluttered flame tossed with her head.

She is pregnant with movement,
mother of music who gives birth to three –
to dance, to nuances in music, and to a smile.

Leonard’s poems are replete with all three of these gifts, but most especially ‘nuances in music’. It is his exceptional control of meter and diction that permit his often immediate word choice; this balances his word-palette, largely colored with exoticism, while the narrative vessel allows for truly visionary flights. Along the way, Leonard’s never intrusive but always keenly perceptive narrative persona provides a worldly, compassionate ‘theme’ well-suited for a plentitude of exquisite ‘countermelodies’ based on spiritual, political, and confessional revelations. Nubian Cousins is a beautiful chapbook, an example of how powerful the chapbook form can be. These poems are unforgettable and I highly recommend them to one and all!

I must admit, I’d never encountered a collection quite like Post Mortem Musings, a gathering of original poems on grief and dying, published by The Museum of Funeral Customs. The museum hosts an annual reading by local poets and the chapbook presents the printed version of the poems presented at the reading.

As one who attended the splendid reading, I’d like to extend my thanks to the museum’s curator, Jason Meyers, and also recommend a visit to the museum to anyone who has not yet made the journey. It is a finely presented and fascinating collection of funeral paraphernalia.

The poems in Post Mortem Musings suffered little from their translation to the printed page; in many cases, the printed poems allowed for a deeper recognition of craft and theme. Nancy Ganguli’s poem, “Jim” rang with power during her reading; the lines on the page ring just as forcefully:

The first daffodils in our yard
opened
the day you died,
the day of your release from pain.

Images crowd the parse, restrained lines like a full bouquet:

I now lightly brush
newborn
petals
across your stony hand,
the hand that wore the Jesus ring,
the hand that pleaded helplessness
in your stubborn refusal
to do
simple tasks for yourself.

An excellent poem with a resonance that is as effective in spoken mode as silent.

Dr. Robert Seufert’s spoken performance of his poem-excerpt, “The Despair of the Flesh”, (a section from his excellent audio-epic poem The Voyage) was the highlight of the reading. Those who have been lucky enough to acquire a copy of The Voyage know what a unique experience Dr. Suefert’s epic engenders. A two-cassette recording of an epical mythopoetic journey replete with magnificent synthesizer accompaniment, The Voyage can truly be described as: fantastic. The following excerpt-from-the-excerpt from “The Despair of Flesh” displays some of Seufert’s technical mastery:

And I dreamed I was taken to a garden.
And there were nymphs in the garden.
And they were given to me that I might enjoy them.
And they were like roses to me, these nymphs in the garden.
But, as the days passed, a sadness came upon me, and my heart grew cold.
And the nymphs were like roses in the garden, that I might pluck them for my sport.
But it came to pass that when I touched them, and when I lay with them, I could feel
Nothing.

Here one feels the refinement of meter, the studied diction as an elemental fibre of the lines. The thematic range and execution of Dr. Seufert’s epic exceeds anything else I’ve tasted of local distillation. An oracular, spellbinding epic, The Voyage alludes brilliantly to great and far-ranging verse, such as: D.H. Lawrence’s “Ship of Death”, Mallarme’s “Afternoon of a Faun”, Crane’s “Voyages” – to cinematic works like “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad” – as well as to sacred literature like the Bible and Hindu scriptures. Indeed, a local masterpiece, with unique and profound poetic resonance.

Dr. Seufert’s work is only scarcely available in print; however, copies of the audio recording can be acquired through direct inquiry.

Also notable from Post Mortem Musings were Bud Bartlett’s “Uncle Charlie Went Away”, which evidenced a fine rhyme-scheme, lovely restraint, and powerful imagery, and Daniel E. Blackston’s “Autumn Wind With Daisies”, an accomplished lyric that balances emotion and sentimentality with aplomb.

All of the poems in Post Mortem Musings are deeply emotional, no matter how varied in sophistication or execution and I certainly recommend next year’s reading to everyone ... as well as this year’s printed fare.

One of the more startling publications of Spring 2004, was Lisa Weisser’s debut collection: little girl lost: a poetic confessional. Wrangling the 5-7-5 syllable ‘haiku’ form into an ironic expression of social and personal dissolution, Weisser’s confessional ‘fragments’ are polished totems fashioned out of the wreckage of some horrible disaster, like the Columbine shootings. Totems to acknowledge death, insanity, perversion ... cruelty. Weisser’s verse frustrates Moloch.

Emotion explodes through the minimalist form:

Almost Dead

Ambulance arrives.
Vomit and piss in puddles
Fleeing soul rebounds.

Where most approach the 5-7-5 “Americanized” haiku from as a small temple to celebrate sun, mist, grass and wind, Weisser transforms the ‘pablum’ of the familiar form to a snap-shot startling as something out of Abu Ghraib. These compressed anthems are verbally and expressionistically reminiscent of Rimbaud, both for subject matter and diction, as well as the surprise factor and the irony of using a homely, safe from to register blistering social satire, self-confession, and Rimbaud’s likewise impulse for escape. One recalls that “A Season in Hell” was originally hand-written by the poet in a set of school-exam notebooks; the text of “A Season in Hell” is a sustained parody of a school-exam, of a ‘report’ sent to Authorities.

Weisser, also, ironically pleads to the establishment:

Scorekeeper

All the good people
Wish that I wasn’t so bad.
Looks bad on paper.

The repetition of ‘bad’ is echoic of a ‘master’ addressing a dog, while the first line, “All the good people” rings with the promise of a suave fairy-tale, a gentle haiku – not so!

Fallen

My backbone broken.
No fitting brace could be found.
I live hunched over.

The poet’s debt to the most celebrated confessional poets in American letters: Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton is evident, but never obtrusive, throughout the collection. Rather than being merely derivative of these poets, little girl lost: a poetic confessional is a spirited composition, with fascinating variations, in Plath and Sexton’s revolutionary mode.

Neither Plath nor Sexton seems to have approached the haiku with any especial interest. Regarding allusion, Weisser’s opening lyric, “No Lace” implores us not to mistake allusion for passivity. Interesting lines such as: “I don’t understand metaphor/For/Nothing is literal” make this a near impossibility for the discerning reader at any rate. Still, Weisser pays direct homage to Plath in a haiku that, itself, promises uniqueness of vision, impulse, and poetic form:

Jarred

I broke my jar lamp
Sylvia broke her bell jar.
Dead girls never sweep.

But Weisser is alive and she is sweeping; she is sweeping up the wreckage of our hurts, her hurts, the great tragedies of war, unkindness, insanity, an absence of God... She has swept these fragments and shaped them into prismatic jewels that splatter joyous, if seemingly ephemeral, sunbeams: proof that elemental endurance, however elusive, is a feature of the human soul, sometimes expressed through ‘disfigurement’:

Tender Skin

Small heart shaped birthmark
Observes and measures love’s strokes
From soft inner arm.

The only legitimate criticisms one could bring to bear with little girl lost are centered on Weisser’s occasional retreat into the expected:

Nice Manners

Bruising politeness
Turns us shades of black and blue
Such an awkward thing.

Or her occasional word-choice:

She’s Gone

The Paramedics say,
We’ve got a big one here

They heave,
They hoe

She wept
She woed

She took her breath away.

This poem seems, to my ears, to miss on the last line, which, perhaps, should have read: “They took her breath away.”

And yet, these criticisms seem small when measured against the energy, thoughtful craftsmanship, and the deeply authentic resonance of the poems.

Weisser will undoubtedly find it difficult, if not impossible, to repeat the strategy of little girl lost: a poetic confessional, that is, to produce such a masterful collection of linked, strikingly original haiku. One anticipates that Weisser, in expanding to a more sustained, lyric form would find a rich canvas for her seductive imagination, her social empathy; in short, her continued ‘letter to the world’. Weisser will, we hope, escape the rest of Emily Dickinson’s exiled verdict:

This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me.

little girl lost: a poetic confessional, in addition to the remarkable verse, is lavishly illustrated, a picture per page, symbolically/visually extending the theme of the poems. If you buy anyone’s debut chapbook this summer, make sure it was written by Lisa Weisser.

The Sangamon Valley’s most notable poet-pair, Dave and Siobhan Pitchford, have published a wonderful collection of linked ‘call and response’ sonnets, Dialogue: An intimate conversation in Pseudo-Sonnet. This sequence of poems is thematically unique in American verse, as is perceptively noted by Dr. Ethan Lewis in his essay, “We’ll Build Sonnets in Pretty Rooms” from Prism Galliard, Summer 2003. That such an outstanding sequence of poems by two gifted writers has received but the mere fanfare it has so far attained, is an outcome of the aforementioned Injustice, which seemingly does not pity genius.

Dr. Lewis grasped fully the import of these poems in his essay; still, certain of the poems’ individual merits demand praise. While approaching the form more as an expedient, than artisan, medium, this urgency with the form is in keeping with the poems’ intended intimacy, as well as its manifest topic: erotic love. The central tension of the sequence emerges from Siobhan Pitchford’s fluid, openly passionate lines and the interplay with Dave Pitchford’s introverted, often ambivalent musings. In essence, both poets are engaged in an act of self-discovery; where these introversions reveal: otherness, whether subjective or external, the poems take fire:

...We rub noses between
kisses – nuzzles for us to learn again
like the new morning’s sun that shines through
our window, reminiscent of those first
sunrises we shared together – ones where
paradise was wherever we shared each
other’s breath, embraced within heaven’s reach.
(12th Verse)

Dave Pitchford’s numbered sonnets are assembled and titled as Verses and Hymns, and so bespeak a kind of Gnostic prayer through the ‘ordinary magnificence’ of love, whereas Siobhan’s individually titled responses yearn toward the confessional:

Late at night, when whispers in the darkness
are mine to hear alone, I look at you
sleeping, and marvel that at one time I
knew nothing of the man who put this spark
back into my life. All my hopes and dreams
had faded in everyday apathy,
symptoms of emotion’s sad absence;
of living this life just to get by.
(Late at Night)

An exquisite tenderness tempers Siobhan’s natively erotic line. Her sonnets move, elliptically, toward confession and, also, disturbingly toward remembered (and anticipated) grief: “I’ve shaken off old loves/ and revel in my days and nights with you.” or “...dreams of the rover/ you once were remain around you, shrouded”. And yet both poets return again and again to romantic affirmation, with certain lines, sublime enough to convince even the most stony-hearted of love’s essential, intoxicating truth:

I waken in fractions, so unwilling
to leave dreams of warm-breezed sandy beaches
where we run along the brink of the world
(Early Morning Light)

We sip wine from overflowing cups, and
you speak of midnight and moonlight as we
dance to wine’s sweet red rhythm and spare soft
sighs for past years we went unknown to each
other, becoming each who we are to
become the we of you and me. I think
stars never shone so bright as when I learned
to see them through your eyes.
(4th Hymn to Her)

A certain detachment from intimacy pervades Dave Pitchford’s side of the sequence, but this intentional façade, this “Black Armour” so profoundly probed and recounted by Elinor Wylie, serves as a fortress for Pitchford to slowly, expressionistically deconstruct throughout the sequence’s progression. For this, and for his occasional rousing to depth and clarity, it is ‘Euridice’ not ‘Orpheus’ who provides the kindling for the poets’ erotic pyre: when ‘Orpheus’ shall strum his lute, but rarely, and in response to his mate’s increasingly urgent din.

One absorbs the poets’ growing fear of artifice and inarticulation as the ‘Dialogues’ sing toward a vision of domesticity in harmony with poetic passion. The more sinister aspects of both poets’ vision of Eros have seemingly been vanquished through this poetic cycle, though, peculiarly enough, a rueful tone pervades the theme of many of the poems in Siobhan’s soon-to-be-published individual collection Through the Longing Daze.

If there is fault with the ‘Dialogue’ poems, it lies primarily in the ease with which composition seems to have been achieved. One yearns for a second cycle by both poets, hearts stripped bare, without the liberal sprinkling of mythological reference and the sonnet form, which is, perhaps at some levels, constricting. Like Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, the union of these two, vibrant and dramatic imaginations presages poetic pyrotechnics. Unlike Plath and Hughes, the Pitchfords seem to have accepted their gifts, both poetic and erotic, with both less reckless ambition and less ... self-destructive hubris.

One of Dave Pitchford’s solo efforts, a yet-unpublished poem in heroic couplets titled, “Couplets for Alexander” smashes the preceding sketch-description of the poet’s artifice with Nietzsche’s proverbial philosophical hammer.
Beginning with a paean to local poets, Pitchford’s seven-hundred line study of classical rhyme and meter seethes with modern imagery:

Classicists mourn over Nostalgia lost
while emailing brothers-in-arms tossed
round the globe – winded dandelion fluff
pollinate, broadcast as their verbal stuff
over WiFi and cable global-wide
and into space over broad-band to slide
tickling into extraterrestrial ears;
shrewd fantasy to allay human fears
of existing alone in godless time.

It’s hard to imagine a poet with more élan – that is, a poet who would embrace such epical and personal thematic burdens right along with the onerous task of composing a contemporarily poignant poem, but a poem that unabashedly utilizes the nuances and prosodic strategies of the distant past.

Moving from a passionate ‘roll-call’ of local bards, Pitchford eases “Couplets for Alexander” toward an ontological ‘opus’ – swinging the poet from his obscure perch, straight into the maelstrom of lived perception and the nature of both human cognition and morality. This, after all, was once the purpose of poetry! To divine the essences of life, death and aspiration; here, Pitchford, has deftly retrieved the ancient aegis of verse. The big question is whether the heroic couplet form is palatable to any prospective audience.

Puzzle this world an hermeneutic:
part to whole, to death has life renewed it.
One universe in myriads of grains
sand – lose this on one hand, it gains
again some otherwhere – this collective
baffles all, and otherwise objective
scholars lose brilliant minds in relative
absence of reference...

Risking a too-forthright erudition, Pitchford reaches into metaphysical modes:

...And yet consider God
as the whole in which man, dubious clod
of dust and spirit, is but one portion
in the infinite mass...

An exquisite logopoeia leads Pitchford’s stanzas through labyrinths of allusion and twining corridors of philosophical speculation toward lucid and inspired considerations about the function of art, of decadence, of ambition and ... love in human experience. “Couplets for Alexander” is a modern poetic apologia and as such, daringly exceeds the safer permutations so widely available in the work of myriad contemporary poets. Pitchford’s poem, had it been published widely in, say, 1804, rather than 2004, might have been as powerful a literary occurrence as the publication of “The Wasteland” over a century later. As it is, the poem commands praise and investigation. The following lines comprise, in my opinion, a genuinely incandescent poetic vision, as well as a notable ease of imagery and meter:

God – whate’ere she be – mellifluous
giggles from a child learning morphous
questions of why and why and how
dies this or that or some other – that cow,
why do we milk her; what does blue taste like;
does God kiss His angels; is my red trike
better than Joey’s; What shall I be when...
Is it any wonder to adults, then,
that they continue such questions beyond
reason and learning and even beyond
winter’s encroachment and argent crowns, ache
of bone, and forfeit of bitter mem’ry?

And so, returned to the eternal child, we readers emerge from Pitchford’s amazingly sustained poetic inquiry into the nature of Is-ness, transformed and reacquainted with poetry’s deep roots: the passion of expression, the sincerity of reason, and the fire of revelation... A deep work, but one which may not, in terms of popular resonance, outstep the barriers placed before it by the antiquated form and phrasing.

There can be no doubt, given the excellent works described above, that the Sangamon Valley has, indeed, secured the Muse’s favors! In fact, my readings have extended far beyond those works cited – so that a follow-up to this necessarily brief essay will be forthcoming to Prism readers, should any of you be interested in reading my comments about area poets such as: Mikel Weisser, Corrine Frisch, John Knoepfle, and Sam B. Davis, all of whom were shamefully omitted from this article.