Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
People have always told stories. We’ve told them in order to find meaning, or create meaning, and then pass that meaning on to others (think myths, origin stories, and fables). We even did it visually before language evolved and got cookin’ (think cave paintings).
But there have always been people who want to stop this seeking, finding, and passing on of meaning. There have always been people who want to censor it, ban it, burn it, or else co-opt it and use it as a self-serving tool for control and power.
We could even list this back-and-forth numerically if we wanted to:
- The history of literature is our human story.
- It’s about finding or creating and passing on meaning, and doing so in a way that matters and therefore lasts.
- This isn’t easy in the first place or else everyone would be novelists and poets.
- But it’s even harder in a world where many—and many in power—think literature is a threat that needs silencing.
Which brings me to a story. It’s a story about poetry, and it goes like this:
It was my dad who mentioned it. I had a poetry presentation coming up in Mr. Taylor’s A.P. English class, and my dad said, “You know, Mr. Taylor writes poems. I think a few of them are published,” and that was that. I drove over to Pacific Lutheran University, asked a librarian the name of the school’s literary journal, found the back issues in the stacks, checked the tables of contents, and the reward of finding Jim Taylor’s poems that way beats the snot out of anything I’ve ever done by Googling.
This was in 1986, so I can’t remember the exact stanza breaks and lineation of his poems “Sequim Bay Summer” and “Lady on the Falls Church Bus,” but the lady was fat, and this was the line about her sitting down: “The seat cushion gasps.” That’s three things all at once. That’s personification, auditory imagery, and just plain cool, and the reason I knew any of this in 1986 was because Mr. Taylor taught me.
It’s also why I remember the middle and ending of his poem “Sequim Bay Summer” to this day. Here is its vivid central image about fishing: “We catch bullheads uglier than stale sin.” And here’s what comes next, notching long-A, K, and Uh sounds together so rightly that the poem’s music has stuck with me for 38 years: “The bay flattens and cools. Dusk ushers out the sun, the dock gut-slick from another day’s aging.” A lot of people can’t pronounce the name “Sequim,” or pronounce the name of the town where I went to high school either (Puyallup), but I bet they can re-read those lines three times and then recite them in the afterlife.
Oh, and my dad loved hearing about Mr. Taylor’s reaction when I passed out copies of his poems and started my presentation not on Frost or Wordsworth or Sylvia Plath but on the work of a local poet published by Pacific Lutheran University. It was great. It was almost jack-in-the-box surprise, punctuated by, “Carney, you jerk,” and, “Where did you get these?!” That was a good day. And days spent with literature, no matter who writes it, are good days still.
Why am I telling you this? Because April is National Poetry Month; that’s one reason. And another is because you might be sick of all the loudmouth bullshit coming from the anti-literature crowd—sick of it up to the ceiling, to the attic, to the flight path of geese and the moon. I mean, it hurts my head just to wonder what they’re thinking, so I won’t. I’ll just say this: Stories are a kind of light so we can see what’s worth preserving. And poems are too.
This month, I hope a flock of good ones find their way to you.
Rob Carney’s first collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens, is out now from Stormbird Press, and his new book of poems, Call and Response, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Previous books include Facts and Figures, The Last Tiger is Somewhere, The Book of Sharks, and 88 Maps.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo of Sequim Bay, Washington, by jfergusonphotos, courtesy Pexels.
