X, with squirrels

Yeats, Poems, 1899
Design by Althea Gyles

A memory of a famous author just floated by. I'll call him "X." He had come to visit a poetry workshop of grad students and undergrads. I was there, and curious; I knew that X was sometimes mentioned as headed for a Nobel.

The first thing he did was to shred a poem by a freshman into something else entirely: burning fire slaw, perhaps, or poisonous confetti. She was a pleasant young woman, and she had written a poem about a squirrel. The subject met disapproval. No doubt the poem needed shredding, and perhaps there are instances when a fine, fierce shredding can be salutary. I fear this one was not. It seemed a rather loveless incident. I couldn't help imagining or discerning (which?) that there was a desire to obliterate the young woman--a girl still, she seems, a child in memory. I can dimly conjure her face, and some of the grad students smirking and exchanging glances in what must have been satisfaction. I doubt that such pleasure is good for human beings of either sex. Their poems were, in fact, better--they were young men who, after all, were four to ten years older than she was--and received a modicum of praise.

What surprises me in the memory is my attitude. I was a sophomore and didn't have a poem in the batch being considered that night. While sympathetic to the plight of the unfortunate, upset freshman, I remember wishing hard that a poem of mine had been up for consideration. It seemed to me that I would not be easily torn to pieces. And if ripped and my limbs scattered, I would be quite able to put myself back together. Or so I believed.

I feel a little strange, recalling the young person who was me, so secretly confident and determined. Perhaps one needs to be so inwardly bold in order to pursue the craft of words in our time. But I can't remember if I thought of "To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-gno" from The Wild Swans at Coole, and how a squirrel runs "through the shaking tree." Did I recall "An Appointment," which finds Yeats turning from the being "out of heart" with government to the leapings and delight of a squirrel (Responsibilities and Other Poems.) Did I volunteer that Yeats, whose poems I loved, had not been too grand and proud to write a poem about a squirrel, and not only once?

I hope so.

Kyle-na-gno is one of the seven woods of Coole... Yeats names them in the dedication to Lady Gregory in The Shadowy Waters:

Shan-walla, where a willow-bordered pond
Gathers the wild duck from the winter dawn;
Shady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-gno,
Where many hundred squirrels are as happy
As though they had been hidden by green boughs,
Where old age cannot find them; Pairc-na-lea,
Where hazel and ash and privet blind the paths;
Dim Pairc-na-carraig, where the wild bees fling
Their sudden fragrances on the green air;
Dim Pairc-na-tarav, where enchanted eyes
Have seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk;
Dim Inchy wood, that hides badger and fox
And marten-cat, and borders that old wood
Wise Biddy Early called the wicked wood:
Seven odours, seven murmurs, seven woods.

We move from shade to sun, from Kyle-dortha to Kyle-na-gno. There's a poet watching, but no chance of a workshop. Kyle-na-gno means "the nut wood" or "the hazel wood." No wonder so many squirrels are happy there in a flourishing green, hid from death and change. 

Requiescat in pace

The book I dedicated to her.
Catherwood (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1996)

I'm not much on mentioning deaths that matter to me in a public way, but I want to pay a last tribute to Nancy Potts Coward, the most important teacher in my life. My English teacher for three classes in high school, and Composition teacher for three, she always encouraged me, had an enormous faith in my abilities as a writer, and even when I was a mere girl of thirteen or fourteen, declared that she would get to say, "I knew you when."

I dedicated my first book to my husband, but I dedicated my second, Catherwood, to Nancy Potts Coward. (My parents had to wait!) She meant so much to me, and to others as a teacher and friend and example of a life fully lived. A stellar teacher, she had a deep love for literature which led her to pursue a PhD after her high school teaching was done.

Mrs. Coward never liked to have her picture made, so I could never have a picture taken with her. But someone caught our heads in the same frame at Malaprop's in Asheville, where I was reading with Nathan Ballingrud in 2014. And while I will not post the image, I am so glad to have it.

I was thinking about her only yesterday, feeling glad that I saw her the last time I was in the Carolina mountains, and little thinking that I would be shedding tears for the loss of her the next day. Mere death--"the undiscover'd country"--cannot stop me from loving and admiring her, nor from being grateful to her for taking a child's passion for playing with words so seriously.

 * * *

Addendum: Schoolmate Marcia Bryson (now Davies) sent me a picture from her yearbook. I suppose, as it has already had a public viewing (and is a little blurry to boot), I may show it. From left to right: me (check out those fashionable collar points!), my dear friend Gail McIntosh, Nancy Coward, dear friend Beth Hamilton (now Gorman), and Dorothy Lachmund, our English and World History teacher. Both women would have been regarded as exceptional teachers anywhere, and we were lucky to have them in Cullowhee. This must have been taken in our senior year of high school, and then used the following year when the yearbook was dedicated to Mrs. Coward. No, that can't be right, as Gail graduated a year early. I only remember my hair being that short in my sophomore year. Maybe then.