Paean to The Long Grass Books, no. 4: In the Morning

Update, 13 June: Now this must be what contitutes the thing known as "perfect timing." An interview with Philip Lee Williams, done several years ago, has just come on line at The Istanbul Literary Review. It's an enlightening encounter between Phil and William Walsh. Phil talks frankly about worldly success, his books, the assaults on his heart, introspection, publishers, and much more.

Here's a clip: "To me, the great part of being a writer is the writing. All the rest of it is business stuff. When something great happens with the business stuff, you have two hours of happiness. When something really hideous happens, you say 'crap,' and you have two hours of being disgusted. It really isn't much more than that after you have been around for a long time. You don't sit around and get ecstatic except when you write. And of course I treasure it when someone says they love my work."

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In a world where poetry professors gift their own students with major prizes and one little monkey scratches another's back, I'm reluctant to review this nature book, because the author is a penpal of mine. I've never met him, but we've exchanged many emails since 2001, when we were supposed to be on a panel together. Thanks to a bad back, we didn't meet at the Southern Festival of the Book, but now when I read In the Morning: Reflections from First Light, I know a lot about the author and the people and places he mentions.

So this will not be a review.

It will be, however, an attempt to shed light.

Feel free to leave a comment, as always, but if you have any questions for the author, ask away, and I'll pester Phil for an answer.

In the Morning is a classic Long Grass Book. I imagine that many people won't recognize the publisher: Mercer University Press. The copy I ordered is a trim, well-made hardcover, and the fact that Mercer chose to publish Philip Lee Williams is a credit to the press.

In the Morning is Phil's twelfth book, a kind of love song to his home state, its flora and fauna and people; in the past few years, the state of Georgia has been regularly laureling him with awards for his body of work (novels, poetry, and nonfiction), so the feeling must be mutual. Phil's a creative man, and he's a notably kind and tender-hearted man, so all the attention he has gotten lately seems especially pleasing.

To show the spirit of the book, I'm going to offer a variety of passages from it. And I'll append a few comments from other people who have admired its qualities.


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Now, though, the mud has been washed away, and once more the creek is shining, sparkling. Murphy and I have come down to look for stones and artifacts, and already I have found an enormous amethyst crystal, pale purple and perfect, and a rim-sherd from a clay pot made on this land more than a thousand years ago. p. 28

At first, they appear almost black, like charcoal outlines in a book of nature identification, but soon their raw sienna paints itself on their flanks. The ivory spots that speckle the fawns come out like constellations. And their eyes are brown, what I see in the mirror each day, but much more alert, purposeful, and unknowing. The doe's right ear flops toward something I cannot hear. p. 34

Crickets that produce these sounds also have "ears"--on their front legs. (Stridulating grasshoppers have "ears" on their first abdominal segment.) Some species can make sounds at a mind-boggling 100 kilohertz, though humans wouldn't know it, since the higher range of our hearing ability is about 20kHz.

Which means that what we hear of this morning cricket chorus is a fraction of what's actually out there. (Lest we feel superior, one species, the snowy tree cricket, actually recites the temperature. Add forty to the number of chirps it makes in fifteen seconds, and you'll have the temperature in Fahrenheit. Science is full of fascinating and moderately useless bits of such information.) p. 64

It's early on a foggy spring morning, and we have already uncovered the clear outlines of the fort, bastions and all. We have found the skeleton of a man who we believe is Lt. Coytmore. We know his body was buried inside the fort, and it's the only such burial here. Looking on his skeleton, laid out neatly, I feel a shudder of sorrow for the man and his stupidities. p. 101

The mangrove-lined shore was probably half a mile away. Our houseboat bobbed several yards behind me in the Gulf of Mexico. I remembered well enough what you do not do around a shark: thrash and make a lot of noise. So here I was, in the middle of a spreading pool of blood, wearing sneakers. The shark came up then, and I could see his blood-drenched mouth and the 3-inch-long teeth and his wild, dead eyes. p. 120


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Georgia writer Philip Lee Williams communicates both the wisdom we gain from the wilds and the wisdom we gain from science in language we want to read aloud for its sheer beauty.
--Betty Jean Craige, author of Eugene Odum: Ecosystem Ecologist and Environmentalist


Wise, engaging, and unfailingly profound, In the Morning awakens our weary senses to a whole cascade of mornings...
--Amy Blackmarr, author of Above the Fall Line and Going to Ground


Like morning itself, this book is quiet, gentle, and enlightening.
--Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Wild Card Quilt, and Pinhook


...Williams has found nature where millions of us live--just as Thoreau once found it on the edge of bustling, antebellum Concord.
--Edward Larson, Pulitzer Prize winner for Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial
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The Long Grass Books, again

The Marketplace prefers there to be a great story attached to a book. In fact, it often cares more about the attached story than any labored-over manuscript. The Marketplace may be willing to love your new novel, but it will love you better if you are a beautiful unwed quarter-Nepalese mother of seventeen, a recovered addict, highly photogenic despite your missing hand, cut off by your brutal father with the sword his own father had brought home from Japan in World War II. If you can be all of those things, or some, or none but with just-as-colorful alternatives, you are a story, and that kind of story can be sold as sweet meat for the marketplace.

There’s a peculiar kind of disrespect to the reader in these tendencies: they’re nothing new, of course, and have been written about endlessly. They present a great NO. They are the trees planted to obscure a forest. The big books on the billboards are always new and trendy and changing. The other books are behind the billboards in the long grass. They persist, though they’re mostly invisible.

The Marketplace Taste and “good taste” are not the same. They can coincide, but often they simply don’t. Other eras spent a lot of time thinking about “good taste” and beauty and truth in art; ours doesn’t. But even eras that thought about taste didn't have much liking for Melville and Hawthorne or Dickinson (her little efforts to reach out, all misunderstood) and many another. That's the kind of thing that can kill you, if you're a John Kennedy Toole, say--or many another.

Sometimes I read a book on the billboard. Often I like to lie in the grass and read the unregarded books. They’re hard to find, deep in the long grass. But there are rewards that make up for the effort to find them.

Today we are due for an ice storm on top of our many feet of snow, and school is closed--we are using our last scheduled snow day already. And what I really want is a wonderful book to read. I’ve been re-reading Yeats, and I’m ready for a story that can bear the light of his tragic joy and beauty. Be it new or be it old, what shall I read? What are the really wonderful books that I’m missing, wandering in a grove of billboards?

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Prior Long Grass Books

3. http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2007/02/paean-to-long-grass-books-no-3-bilge.html
Bilge Karasu

2. http://www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2007/01/paean-to-long-grass-books-no-2-willow_09.html
Jeanne Larsen's translation's of Tang poems by women

1. http://www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2007/01/paean-to-long-grass-books-no-1-98.html
Clare Dudman

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The photograph above is courtesy of www.sxc.hu/ and Neil Kemp of Egham in Surrey, England.

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Paean to The Long Grass Books, no. 3: Bilge Karasu's Night

A note found on the floor of the chamber belonging to Attorney Clendon. The good man is missing, and much nameless havoc is feared.

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Night slowly comes on. Descends. Already it has begun filling the hollows. Once these are full and it empties onto the plain, everything will turn gray. For a while no light will go on, in the hollows or out beyond. The glow on the hills will seem for a time to suffice; then the hills too will sink into darkness.

Some weeks ago I read a very interesting book by Bilge Karasu, translated by Guneli Gun. I took many careful, tedious notes, as I was trained to do. Unlike my fellows in the comment trade, I was not confused by the separate characters, nor by the way they began to blur and dance and re-configure. I noted with scrupulous attention the place where a second character began to be identified by the letter N. I kept the triple strand of character separated, I followed each to his lair through a labyrinth with monsters. I suffered trial, love, intricate wanderings, violence, metamorphosis, paradox, and reversals. I came face to face—or face to faces—with the Author. The book with its twists and turns stood bared to light in my mind, and I was satisfied with my understanding.

The book seemed to me a worthwhile journey, and though it lacked—because of its surreal, intellectual windings—a certain heart, I found it satisfying. Perhaps, you may say, it is because I am myself a compendium of dry dust from law books, crumbling writs, and shadows of events that do not belong to me. In some moods, I find myself so.

Yesterday evening something strange happened.

I picked up the book; it held a bookmark made from a folded shadow. When I looked closer, I saw that gloom had gathered into letters, and it seemed to me that it was a warrant for my arrest. When I looked again, the letters were gone, and the events of the book had fallen into darkness.

At 2:00 a.m., I woke to see three people standing around my nightstand. They were spooning more darkness into the pages with tarnished silver spoons. The substance flowed like honey into an extractor, spilling down the legs of the nightstand and onto the valuable Turkish carpet on the floor. I cried out in surprise and felt a sudden jabbing pain in my arm, as though a knife blade had swept its length. The three faces lifted only slowly and then fused into a single face: I recognized the suffering, intelligent face of the late Bilge Karasu in a flash of light. Then a cloud swept over the moon, and all was lost in shadow.

I write this by a thin starlight. The darkness has almost reached the steps, and I hear the distant tread of a party of soldiers . . .

--Athanasius Clendon

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Paean to The Long Grass Books no. 2: Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon

Bowing to the Moon /
Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon:
Women's Poems
from Tang China,
translated with notes
and introduction
by Jeanne Larsen

UPDATED
WITH COMMENTS
FROM JEANNE LARSEN--
SEE BELOW
More to come

Court lady or courtesan, poor official's child or Lady of the Tao, the poets in this little book move inside and sometimes pass beyond "walls within walls within walls." Escaping, they find deep pleasure in nature; returning, they may have an instant of joy or teasing, though more often they pose in attitudes of loss, with happiness already gone by. The world is past or passing: the sea will turn to dust, the husband or lover wing to and perhaps fall on distant, war-tormented ground. "Winsome" girls shine and fade like flowers, and a moon-lit strand of white hair never renews its lustrous black.

The delicacy of these Chinese poems, the formalized and lovely attitudes and subjects--the loneliness of a girl, a woman with her looks disordered by grief, the cloud-and-rain of sex, the flight of seasons, the news of official promotion--are familiar but hold considerable power to allure. Some are surprising. A young man in scholar's robes reveals himself as an impossiblility, a woman who cannot marry an official's daughter without a (very unlikely!) metamorphosis. An elderly woman turns from the moon, remembering her own shining loveliness, when she lived in sensuous "deep red rooms."

Looking at the little Tang sculpture of a lady on horseback at upper left, I see so many elements of what must be a Tang aesthetic. The poems, too, are brightly pigmented, in love with a certain glaze of moonlight, and reveal clarity and charm and humor. Like the terra cotta statue, these poems show a care for images with graceful lines, color, and an imprint of status. The translations occasionally offer a Taoist or courtly phrase that catches me up, and I wonder whether these are the most difficult bits of all to render into English. It's a wonderful gift to have these lyrics--bright fragments of a lost world.

The sketches of figures behind the poems are often of people barely glimpsed, who have left little more than a name. Jeanne Larsen's thumbnail biographies often stand as poignant memorials. Read the poems of the Greenwall Pilgrimage by Praiseworthy Consort Xu, Queen Mother of Shu and her sister, the Exemplary Consort, and then turn to meet their biographies: "These poets came from an impoverished family of Chengdu. Known for their beauty and their poetry, they were taken as consorts by Wang Jian (847-918), the bandit-turned-general who emerges as military governor, and then independent ruler, of Shu (now western Sichuan) in the war-torn years surrounding the Tang empire's collapse. Wang's capital was a haven for literati and artists in that difficult era. When his son Yan ascended to the throne, both women were promoted to ranks suiting the mothers of princes and wielded considerable power. They--and Wang Yan--were killed after Shu's conquest by a short-lived dynasty called the Later Tang." The notes are full of miniature tales of women hemmed in by history and culture. Some were asked to take their own lives as widows or traitors, some were executed, some died of grief. One rose to transcendence and was spotted astride a purple cloud.

This slim house of poems--a monument to study and travel by Jeanne Larsen, back when she was a Comparative Literature graduate student and a poet, before she added professor and novelist to her life-list--opens many windows onto the daughters of Great Tang and the "Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms." Each of these poets is bound by her times, yet blossoms despite and because of her setting: "Wherever you walk, flowers / fallen--everywhere / . . . Look with joy on the blessed, / on this radiant age."

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Willow Branches
by Zhou Dehua

Along one
bend of the river
Clear, a thousand
willow withies:
twenty years past,
on that old
plank bridge,
I parted from
my love. No word
from him, no
news--this
morning still
no news.

Springtime Views in the Land of Qin
by Yuan Chun

Lovely, these views of spring
from up in the Phoenix Tower:

guard posts at palace gates,
walls within walls within walls,

and in His Majesty's garden
trees in the falling rain--

or peaks of the seekers' range
after the skies turn clear.

Wherever you walk, flowers
fallen--everywhere,

and palpable, favorable airs,
drenched, when evening comes.

Look with joy on this blessed,
on this radiant age,

as skirts of rainbow silk
take the path of the Taoist Way.

Written at Goldflower-Palace Taoist Refuge
from The Greenwall Pilgrimage Sequence
by the Praiseworthy Consort Xu

Again we reach
Goldflower’s peak.

At Darkmystic City
we sought the Way, returned.

Clouds part:
the shape of things shows clear.

Blackness locks in:
towers, spires, come forth.

Rain washed and the hills
around shine clean.

Winds blow and the road
back home moves into view.

Hills like a green-flashed screen of feathers
channel surging streams.

What need to long for Penglai,
that far-off faerie isle?

Bibliography of Jeanne Larsen

Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women's Poems from Tang China
click here to see a sample, or buy a copy from BOA Editions, Ltd.
Manchu Palaces novel
Bronze Mirror novel
Silk Road novel
James Cook in Search of Terra Incognita poems
Brocade River Poems: Selected works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao
translated poems
Engendering the Word (co-editor) critical essays

Links to poetry and prose on Jeanne Larsen's web site: Four Little Tales; from The Starry Messenger (a narrative sequence of poems); from 10,000 Bodhisattvas (a very different sequence); from Hell & Heaven at Tateyama (creative nonfiction)

Illustration: The Tang sculpture of a lady on horseback was collected . . . some time ago, but where? I'll have to see if I can find her again.

Comments from Jeanne Larsen

Some time ago, sculptor Chris Miller posted some Tang figures in rainbow glazes on his MountShang blog, and we recently talked about the poem with "rainbow silks." He asked a question that I sent on to Jeanne: "The Tower reminds me of the one built by the great genius-villain-warlord -- of 'Romance of Three Kingdoms' whose greatest ambition in life was to obtain the world's most beautiful woman and install her in a magnificent tower built to his specification. (story based on history of 2nd Century -- and fictionalized about 900 years later.) . . . I'm curious about how the translator came up with the last line "Take the path of the Taoist Way" (since "tao" means "way" -- as in "the way birds fly" -- the "way the seasons change" etc -- so I question where there would have been a specific reference to the cult of Taoism -- as this translation seems to imply.) "

Jeanne Larsen responded in an informal email with some interesting thoughts in reply. Here is part of what she had to say, with some light editing and cutting (at her request):

There are so many towers in poems in women's voices in China --a "tower" sometimes meaning simply a building with more than one story. So the word comes into Tang poems loaded with traces of beautiful and often, neglected, women from at-least-fairly affluent households. (See Yu Xuanji's beautiful "Another Poem on Riverside Willows Trees" or Guan Panpan's three on "Swallow Tower ".) The Romance of the 3 Kingdoms has been on my Must-Reread [in translation, let me add!] list for, um, several decades now--so thanks to yr sculptor friend for another nudge. Oddly, I've been thinking about it lately, but for its warrior-heroes, not women.

'Fraid I'm not going to be able to give a satisfactory explanation without the original text. But I can say that "the path of the Taoist Way" does attempt to catch the range of meanings of the Chinese word tao—to include "road/path", "a philosophical/religious system/perspective", “philosophical Taoism [Taojia]”, "the Tao [that un-namable source of the 10000 things] spoken of in the Tao te ching (AKA Daode jing)", "[so-called] Popular Taoism [Taojiao]”—i.e., much of Chinese 'folk religion', with imperial pantheon and assorted other goddesses and such, and assorted Taoist practices—fairly esoteric alchemical/dietary/sexual/breathing/visualization technologies for spiritual self-cultivation. Also, whatever other words/phrases might go on that list of English rough equivalents, though I'm not sure "way" in the sense of "manner” is quite within the range--more like "way" as in "way of life". (In Japanese it's sometimes pronounced "do" as in Akido (the Way of Harmonized Energies), Chado (the Way of Tea), Bushido (the samurai way) and suchlike.

“Path” catches a lot of it, especially if one includes new-age-y uses of that word, but surely not all. So my version offers 3 English words attempting to triangulate, and necessarily imperfectly, on 1 especially rich Chinese one. One of the many bits of clumsy galumphing that translators of poetry are regularly reduced to, and I galumph as much as any.

I wouldn't have included "Taoist" in the English if I hadn't been convinced that that was a grammatically & contextually legitimate reading of the original. Again as far as close-up grammar (Arugh! I'm beating my head against my desk...what IS the original wording?), I think it's there. Could get into it on word-by-word level next week if requested. As for context--well, the poet speaks from the social role of a woman who has taken Taoist orders (she’s a "Taoist nun") and as my brief note suggests, there's a subtle tone of sorrow and disillusionment throughout this poem that sets up a longing for something other than just a pretty poem about life locked up inside the harem walls. (See her bio note.) Could I have over-translated? Well, sure. But I think I’m not the only person who has read the poem w/ these overtones—again, I need my notes.

Yuan Chen's poem as I did read, still read, it isn't so much a reference to a "cult" as a sad awareness that transient beauties are not, ultimately, the means of lasting happiness, and that lives restricted by gender roles (however materially privileged) might include some yearning for spiritual fulfillment. Will the palace women inside the walls really go anywhere with that yearning? Dunno. As my note says, "Is this fact, or [the poet's? the palace women's?] wish, or some of each?" Love the ambiguity, however, the multiple possibilities--I'd rather the poem, instead of delivering a rant on patriarchal oppression or a sermon on the value of spiritual praxis, left us all scratching our heads, a little uncomfortable, wondering . . .

If you have a question for Jeanne Larsen, leave it in comments, and I'll see if we can turn up a reply.

She says that she'll "be glad to respond to others too."

And for Chris-the-sculptor: "I have a little replica of a Tang camel rearing its head back in my study—got it in Xian (the modern city built atop the Tang capital), natch. I liked the modern piece on the Mount Shang site quite a lot."

The Paean to The Long Grass Books no. 1 is here.

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Paean to the Long Grass Books no. 1: 98 Reasons for Being + blogging vows for New Year's Day

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Paean to the Long Grass Books, no. 1

In 2007, I'm going to write more about books that ought to be more visible than they are--books by writers who work in the shade of the mid-list. It can be hard for readers to find those books when they are left scattered in the long grass, seldom seen.

My first choice is by Clare Dudman; the Penguin edition of 98 Reasons for Being came out in late 2006. (My second will be Jeanne Larsen's translation of Tang poets--consorts and court women, courtesans, ladies of the Tao. Both small poetry collections and literature in translation tend to be found in the long grass.)

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Reasons for Reading / 98 Reasons for Being

He keeps me from my other place. It is as though he is holding my hand, and even though I twist and pull he holds me fast with his secrets and the things he should not be telling: a wicked child he cannot own; a wife who lashes him with her clever tongue; a household that has him by the neck and is squeezing tight. I listen. I need to hear the end. He relaxes his grip. He takes another breath.

The changing bond between Dr. Hoffmann (a character based on the historical German physician and author of, among other things, children's books) and his young Jewish patient, Hannah Meyer, is the spine of Clare Dudman’s 98 Reasons for Being. In the quote above, one sees how this essentially simple structure—Hannah’s illness and healing—becomes complex. The rift inside Hannah is filled with grief and dream-memories of the past. One element that helps to lead her out of the dark place between trees is showing those memories to the light; another is the power of story. Hoffmann, the storyteller of a volume of fairy-tale-cruel cautionary poems called Struwwelpeter, has secret stories of his own. They burden him; they prick now and then in his too-busy day. As he shares them, revealing his own dark corners, the desire to know what happens next and to be a part of the larger human story begins to tug at Hannah Meyer.

The pace of this book is not rapid; it is slow work, coaxing Hannah Meyer from her dark wood. But it is the natural pace for a story about this young woman and her doctor, one that also allows her to be seen as a part of the microcosm that is a nineteenth-century city asylum. The others in his asylum all need "a reason for being," as Hannah does.

Hannah is the means by which all patients are given the full glory of an individual self. Through her, Hoffman sees that his many patients and those around him partake of both "wellness" and "illness"--that the world is a place of brokenness. In glimpses, he understands that his own family and his own heart are places where what he calls “madness” has bedded down. As the Cheshire Cat said so well (and it was marvelous and mad for a cat to say so at all), “I’m mad. You’re mad. We’re all mad.” Disturbance of mind is a crooked thread that wanders through the beautiful and the ugly, the anorexic and the obsessive: through a whole pageant of asylum patients and their flawed and yearning tenders. In this book, Clare Dudman is, as Bloom said of Shakespeare, myriad-minded, and she draws her myriad with vividness and verve. One of my favorite things about her characters is that they do not appear to be contemporary people in fancy dress--a mode of historical fiction that has been popular with the bestseller list but is blessedly absent here.

Tensions press on the book. Clare Dudman enters the past as a place—my favorite sort of historical book—but we cannot help but set that past against our own, cannot help but let a current diagnosis flit through our minds from time to time. The child who would be “classified” at school, the anorexic, the gay man, the obsessive: these and more exist in our minds in double ways, as Hoffmann attempts to understand them, as mad-minders and Hannah and more see them, and as we bring to bear the culture and understandings of our own also-limited time. A strong alternation between the idea of “person” and the idea of “case” lends another doubling of vision. These doublings and alternations work as large structures and as small ones--so that, say, Josef is climbing his tree while Hoffmann is unaware, sinking into a mental lagoon of shade and quiet.

Tensions, large and small, support the alternation of feelings in the book—one of its strongest gifts to its readers. The world of the asylum demands that one eat grief, guilt, and unhappiness. Go there and you will know these, as well as the leaven of love and joy.

One note: it is vital to read this book without attempting to impose one’s idea of a typical “novel” on it. The book contains a wonderful mix of main story, multiple minor characters, faux erudition or mock-period letters that begin many chapters, along with interpolation of poems from Struwwelpeter. (Clearly the poems inspired certain moments and anecdotes in the larger story, as when an intensely unhappy maid burns herself to death, setting flowers of fire around the room.) I can’t help but think of Northrop Frye’s discussion of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and his critical category of “anatomy,” with his admonition that one must be careful not to dismiss romances, confessions, and anatomies because they do not “fit” one’s mental categories of genre.

Did I say that the book is beautiful?

It is beautiful.

MORAL OF THE TALE IN THE MANNER OF DR. HOFFMAN'S STRUWWELPETER

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Buy this book, dear reader please*

Or we'll come and crack your knees,

Bite your ears and pull your socks,

Pelt your head and give you knocks.

. . .

* No kidding, buy the book: You might make little difference to a bestseller, but when you buy a book from a mid-list writer, you are setting down a vote of confidence and interest that will matter to the publisher.

P. S. I suppose that, not being a proper reviewer in this context, I don't have to be entirely proper. But I'll be proper anyway and say that I 'know' Clare via her blog, The Keeper of the Snails, and email. Since I was drawn to her because of books, I would say that the link is a recommendation rather than a disqualification. You can say what you like, of course: go to!

Illustrations include illustrations from Dr. Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter and one of the cover illustrations for 98 Reasons for Being.

Blogging resolutions for 2007

1. Talk about invisible or semi-invisible books that are worth the “seeing.” (See the start, above.)

2. Learn to post with haste.

3. Discuss or interview some younger writers who are scrambling up toward book publication.

4. Interview a few of the more curious people who pop up on the blog…

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