I come from the mountains, from a textile mill-working family. My mother and her mother could weave a knot that was barely visible, but which held under great stress. I've tried to apply their skill with threads to words. Here is my wider world view. Thanks be to all the ancestors who brought me here.
A friend of this blog, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, is on the long list for the National Book Award in Poetry! Congratulations to Allison and all the other longlisters!
Coffee House Press’s promotion of Allison’s searing and poignant collection, Look at This Blue, includes the following: “Truths about what we have lost and have yet to lose permeate this book-length poem by American Book Award winner and Fulbright scholar Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. An assemblage of historical record and lyric fragments, these poems form a taxonomy of threatened lives—human, plant, and animal—in a century marked by climate emergency. Look at This Blue insists upon a reckoning with and redress of America’s continuing violence toward Earth and its peoples, as Hedge Coke’s cataloguing of loss crescendos into resistance. “
Emily Vizio in World Literature Today says, “I wouldn’t be the first to hear the voluminous and ecstatic witness of Whitman in Hedge Coke’s work, either. . . . Music is one of Hedge Coke’s great gifts. Smart, subtle, texturous.”
We love Look at This Blue, an urgent look at the effects of climate crisis in America, and California, in particular. If you read Allison’s incredible Blood Run, about the fight to preserve ancient burial mounds along the upper Mississippi River, you know she has been building to this additional national recognition. A stalwart of Native American literature and an incredibly good human being, Allison has offered encouragement to me and many other authors for many years through her teaching, her anthologies, and her many kindnesses. Please join me in wishing her well.
A review of Look at this Blue is coming to this blog, but why not join me in reading it and let me know what you think?
Here’s the Publishers Weekly article on the rest of the long list:
The very first thing I read this morning was a New York Times article by war correspondent Alissa Rubin and the poetry she carries with her into dangerous places. One of the poems quoted caught my eye.
O what fine thought we had because we thought That the worst rogues and rascals had died out. ~William Butler Yeats “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”
Reading that poem is like a forecast of our current days. Yeats’s despair had everything to do with Irish and European politics and history and almost nothing to do with the United States, but to read that poem, absent certain esoteric references, is to read what we might feel about current American circumstances—including those we share with the world, such as the horrific heat waves set off by human-caused climate change, as well as the war in Ukraine; and those that are uniquely American, such as the merging of misogyny and Puritanism that is the forced birth movement and the awful knowledge of what really happened on January 6.
Given the almost unrelenting bad news, I admit to occasional depression—yes, me, the determined optimist.
Yet I am also puzzling over another bit I read today, by David Leonhardt, also in the Times, about how the “Stop the Steal” movement predates the Trump presidency and belies a real conservative fear of being replaced, of being a “fading minority.” Add to this the current uneven economic picture, the pandemic, conspiracy theories, and yes, Trump, and the result is a rabid reactionary movement. Leonhardt points out that this isn’t the first American reactionary movement—the most consequential having been the Southern States’ resistance to the writing on the wall about slavery—and it likely won’t be the last.
In what do I see a glimmer of hope?
Well, for one, an opinion piece, also in the Times, by Margaret Renkl, about how, despite the horribly oppressive politics of the South, there are so many people fighting to make it better.
“We are fighting for our lives here, and we could use your help. Come on down, and help us throw the despots out.”
I live in South Carolina, and I can attest that there are, indeed, Southerners of progressive thought who are struggling every day and don’t plan on going anywhere. (Also, there are some planning to flee, but if some folks fought through the Jim Crow and civil rights years, like Rep. Jim Clyburn, and still haven’t left, you know this current impasse will find some still here.)
Sometimes the best way out is through. And this reminds me that the future is almost certainly a merging of human populations to the point where there is no true majority and no true minority, but people in somewhat varying hues and borders that mean less and less.
Also, no matter who or where, there are some truisms in life, such as:
Almost everybody loves dogs and cookies.
We will last, my friends, because we have to. Giving up means consigning our children to hell. And then who would look after the dogs or eat the cookies?
All the articles I’ve cited are listed as links below. And, as always, please like, share on social media, and comment below. I see you and you know I love you!
Sometimes good news jangles as much enlivens us. That’s the kind of news I got a few days ago. A publisher to whom I had submitted a poetry manuscript gave me feedback suggesting some changes and asking me to resubmit. It took me about a week to calm my nerves. But today I am doing exactly as she suggested, making changes, retitling and I plan to resubmit after running the manuscript by a a few friends. It’s scar, because this has always been one of my goals, to publish in fiction and poetry and nonfiction. (Why narrow my dreams?) Oddly, my first writings and my initial publications were in poetry, so it’s strange to me that I first published a novel rather than poems in book form, but, hey, writing is a wild journey, and often unpredictable. One thing I have learned, though, is that when an editor asks you to resubmit, you do it, whatever else you have going on. So here goes. Wish me luck. And what are you doing to get your voice out there?
Weaver's Knot by Glenda Bailey-Mershon 