The River Within: A Review of Moving Water in the Work of John Lane

If you have ever read a John Lane book, whether it be poetry or prose, you would notice a primitive respect and friendship between the author and water. You would notice that just like a river flows through a valley and hill, cutting a lasting indentation into the earth, a very similar metaphoric river is cut throughout John Lane’s stories and poetry.

In Death by Water, found in Waist Deep in Black Water, a collection of essays ranging from Wyoming to the Red River Gorge in Kentucky and onto the murky swamps of Florida, Lane gives us a tragic telling of his father’s death. Lane’s father makes several appearances throughout his writing career. Some of the most prominent appearances are in Lane’s series of poems called The Dead Father Poems. However in Death by Water the appearance of Lane’s father sheds more light on the impact of the traumatic death for Lane than any other piece Lane has written. It creates a catalyst for the motion of moving water that Lane writes about and lets the reader discover why it is that water is most appealing and prevalent in Lane’s work.

In Death by Water, Lane retells the first dream he remembers which happens when he is just five years old. Lane writes he is “running down a drainage ditch followed by a rising wall of water ready to overwhelm him.” Ironically, this dream coincides with his father’s death. The story doesn’t stop there. Years later when Lane witnesses a death of a fellow kayaker he has another dream of water flooding a river where he floats in his own kayak. He says that in his dream he knew the river he was paddling on was the river of Hades.

Lane admits that water helps him understand the world as a roaring and chaotic place which is a logical interpretation spawning from years and years of reconciling with his father’s death and other deaths that have coincided with moving water. However, by using water to understand the ‘roaring’ world perhaps it has also taught him to understand water as peaceful and changing – a world of redemption, rather than deterioration.

In Chattooga, another collection of prose by Lane that encompasses stories surrounding the famous Chattooga river known best from James Dickey’s novel, later turned into movie, Deliverance, Lane says in the first paragraph of his first essay in the collection, The Myth of the Chattooga, “There’s a reason that the flows of a river have been used as a metaphor for life and that out of all the landscapes – mountains, oceans, deserts- rivers are what poets and writers return to in literature when describing the way human history cuts across time.”

Lane’s work has transformed the currents and flows of moving water into home. He has used the river as a therapist for death and life and continues to view moving water as that weaving path of understanding the many ebbs and flows of the world around him.

by Sara Roberts

Sowell Collection Conference

Clicking on this link will display the Poster for the upcoming Sowell Collection Conference with Rick Bass, Robert Michael Pyle, Pattiann Rogers, Barry Lopez, and John Lane.

Pattiann Rogers

“No one ever talks about the paternal aspect of being a writer, the sending of your children off into the world…” -Pattiann Rogers

Every once in a while I come across those lines of poetry that make me shudder. Their texture, exquisite, their sound, melodious, as if they are not only words but living particles of lead or ink, swimming about a page with perfect precision. These lines of poetry are like cadences composed within invisible staff lines. However, these lines are often cut, existing only in that unpublished, ethereal realm of “darlings” that had to be killed.

In the rare occurrence that I’ve written one of these lines myself, I find it nearly impossible to let it go. I am afraid, almost, that it will be lost forever, that it will somehow find its way into the world and be taken from me, stolen from a haphazard posting on a social media site or hacked into a poem where it doesn’t belong, or scribbled in a notebook on a shelf in a dark corner. I’m afraid that if I kill my darlings, they’ll stay dead, but maybe that’s how things are supposed to be.

Pattiann Rogers’ manuscript collection is filled with folders and folders of drafts of poems, and I find myself shuddering at least once a box. Perhaps this is mostly because of the coolness of the Reading Room, but the drafts I have read through contain the ghosts of genius, the penciled in, inked out, and all but forgotten lines of poetry: real, raw, word-music. How many are these drafts? I don’t know. What are their names? I couldn’t tell you for sure, and if I could I don’t know if I would. These lines are not meant for public consumption, but meant to be found.

I frequently laugh at the similarities I see between the way I edit my own writing and the drafts of Rogers’ works: the random mark-outs and comments that twirl around the edge of the page to keep a thought together rather than turning the page over, the sudden onset inspiration that starts with a beautiful phrase and expands into something like a mushroom cloud of words. The original poems are often entirely buried under the soft lead of revision, as if, right when Rogers had “finished,” she remembered that the poem should be something more—like the parent who sends their child off to school for the first time realizing too late that the child’s favorite toy was left in the living room.

More often than not writers are selfish with their “darlings.” We cultivate, coddle, keep these darlings from the world because we must protect them at all costs. At some point, though, writers must leave their lines to their own business, and whether these lines perish or flourish depends only on the writer’s willingness or unwillingness to change them.

Nashville Chrome

Rick Bass will be a featured writer at our next Sowell Collection Conference (April 18-20, 2013), so in preparation for this visit, I’ve been reading more of his work. He’s such a prolific writer, I quickly fall behind and suddenly I have four new books on my reading list.

I started with Nashville Chrome, a novel published in 2010. Though this work deals with real people and events, centered on Maxine, Jim Ed, and Bonnie Brown, a family country music trio who began singing and recording in the 1950s; though the work mentions many historical figures– Elvis Presley, Chet Aktin, Jim Reeves, The Beatles; and though Bass worked with the family, met with the family, had, in a way, their blessing for this project, this is a novel, not biography. Part of the reading experience is meditating on the difference between art and reality, literature and history.

According to an Associated Press article that appeared shortly after the book’s release:

Maxine Brown had an immediate and intense reaction when she read “Nashville Chrome,” Rick Bass’ fictionalized account of country music pioneers The Browns. “When I first got that damn book I screamed and cried and threw it across the room, threw it in the trash, wrote him a hot note,” Brown said. “And then I retrieved it and said, ‘I’ve got to read this with an open mind because it’s got to be something here, he’s such a great writer.’ So I read it again and again and again and I realize that it is absolutely great. He painted a beautiful picture.” (Bangor Daily News, Sept. 26, 2010.)

Yes, the book is beautifully written, the narrative weaves the past and the present, alternating between the years of promise and the years of deep regret. The Browns have fame, applause, family—and then Maxine finds she has only solitude, silence, oblivion.

“The days and nights pass through her like light through a pane of dark glass. Some of the ache in her is real and some of it is simply an unsatisfied heat. She falls into long reveries that are interrupted only by the teakettle’s whistle. She waits for the phone to ring. She lived too much, too high, fame blew through her like a hurricane” (24).

Maxine yearns for one more hit, one more appearance, applause and more applause. She lives alone in her little house in West Memphis, and one day at the grocery store she posts a note on the bulletin board, seeking a filmmaker for a project that will reawaken the world to her voice. The story of the unlikely filmmaker and his impressionistic style weaves another thread into the lyrical narrative of Nashville Chrome.

Nashville Chrome was well reviewed when it was first published, you can find reviews on the internet. I especially recommend Susan Salter Reynolds’ review in the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 11, 2010, Bryan Woolley’s in the Dallas Morning News, Sept. 25, 2010, and Dave Shiflett’s in the Washington Post, Sept. 18, 2010. You might also check out Maxine Brown’s webpage with links to videos of The Browns singing their best-known songs.

So What if I Have a Thing for Birds?

It was recently pointed out to me, in a poetry workshop class, that I frequent the subject of birds. I find it hard to look at a bird and not see the subject of a poem—the careful lay of feathers to show a pattern or a color at its finest, the gift of flight, the gift of music, the perfectly purposeful twitch-like movements. I find it hard to look at anything really, and not see its “birddom.” While it is, of course, essential to have practice in writing of all subjects, I have found that the things you love make better poems than the things you don’t. In my research, I have found several poems about birds by Pattiann Rogers as well. I think we all write as much to be creative as to understand something new through language. By giving birds a new name, a new voice, through poetry, we can have some hope of understanding the flighty creatures in more ways than just through biology or ecology alone.

Perhaps, as in Pattiann Rogers’ poems, birds can even serve as a medium through which poetry expresses very human ideas: questions of divinity or eternity, representations of beauty. In Rogers’ “Suppose Your Father Was a Redbird,” the idea of the “father” hints at the notion of the divine, of God. In seeing the red of your father, the poem suggests, you are trained to spot the father in everything—“The breast of a single red bloom/ Five miles away across an open field” or “a red moth hanging on an oak branch.” Then, your faith might be so invested in the redbird that you would see the whole heavens as a bird: “the bones of the sky spread,/ The conceptualized wing.” Finally, you might create a notion of something holy and identify it with the redbird, and the redbird, or “What it is you recognize in the sun,” might then come to be your God. Through poetry, I’ve found a place for the avian enthusiast in me to dwell. So what if I have a thing for birds? Everyone has their way of understanding the world.

Pattiann Rogers’ “Animals and People: The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself”

Pattiann Rogers’ “Animals and People: The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself”

“We need to know, we must know, that we come from such stock so continuously and tenaciously and religiously devoted to life…We want to give life at the same moment we are taking it.” In Pattiann Rogers’ poem “Animals and People: ‘The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself,’” I find myself wondering not just about animals and our interaction with them, but about labels: holiness, worthiness, things that we want to be known for, but never seem to attain. Humans are animals, after all. Language separates different species, but it does not divide us. We can still communicate with each other, kill one another. We still compete for space and resources. A theme that emerges, even from the title of this poem is that we will never be good enough for whatever “stock” we come from, that our hearts are always in conflict. Animals seem to live guiltlessly, according to some natural design of life, something seemingly divine, but what does it mean, then, to be human? “Some of us like to photograph them…some of us like to go out and catch them and kill them and eat them…and some of us name them.”  Are the “us” and “them” in this poem interchangeable?Pattiann Rogers’ “Animals and People: The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself”

I am reminded of the Sowell Collection Conference last spring at Texas Tech. Gretel Ehrlich told us to “remember the importance of the covenant between humans and animals.” In some poems from Rogers’ book The Tattooed Lady in the Garden, this idea is expressed using the actions of animals to illustrate very “human” kinds of emotions, from hummingbird “seductions” to lusting “oak toads.” The idea that “animals and people” are somehow inseparable, somehow living from the beating of one universal heart, somehow maintaining a covenant with one another even though humans are steadily destroying the natural world, is intriguing. The human condition to be the most dominant species on earth is stymied by the fact that, on some level, animals and people are innately the same.

By Clara Bush

Remembering a Friend

Sandra Arlene River
Feb. 22, 1950-May 12, 2012

Just a week before she passed away, I introduced Sandy to David Quammen at the Sowell Collection Conference, and I said, as I always did, “This is my good friend Sandy.”  I told David that Sandy had been on the conference steering committee because I wanted to acknowledge her role in the conference’s success.  Sandy demurred, insisting she hadn’t done very much.  But she had, in fact, done a great deal.  Months earlier, when I asked Sandy to help me, she agreed, but said she wasn’t sure what she could do that would be of any use.  She’d do anything I wanted, except make phone calls.  As I remember it, my reply was:  “When I’m completely stressed, and we both know I will be, you can help by giving me a good talking to.”  That’s what she did.  I called her frequently during the months leading up to the conference and I was in her office in the Architecture Library at least four or five times in the two weeks immediately preceding it, just talking out my worries—travel, publicity, menus for the banquet, oh my!  Each time she listened, sympathized, told me it would probably all work out fine, and if some things went wrong, well, not everything was under my control anyway!  Each time we visited, she sent me away with the feeling that I should, and could, get over it and get on with it. 

Just a week before she passed away, Sandy was active, engaged, smiling, participating in the intellectual life of the university, being a friend, supporting me during each conference day.  She attended almost every Sowell Collection Conference event, including the banquet, where she could not eat, and the entire day of paper sessions on Saturday.  I sat beside her during many of the sessions and was so grateful that she came even on her day off. 

On Friday, May 4, when I left Sandy’s room in ICU to try to get some work done at the SWC/SCL, I found an envelope with her hand writing in my inbox.  In the days between the conference and her last procedure, Sandy found time to send me a copy of Utne Reader with an article about one of the Sowell Collection writers, and her note asked if I was rested yet from the work of conference duties. 

Sandy always had time for those small gestures of friendship.  I know I wasn’t alone in receiving these kind gifts and attentions.  When I went to tell another campus colleague of Sandy’s death, she told me that Sandy had appeared in her doorway unannounced one day, with a present, and singing Happy Birthday.  Just thinking of that makes me smile. 

Sandy River was a good friend.  At times, I hear her voice still talking to me.  Still telling me to get over it and get on with it.  Her death, so early, is a tragedy, but sharing her life and her enthusiasm for living was a joy.  I have missed her these past months and know I will continue to miss her—when I write a letter or report that needs a critical eye, when new movies come out that she might want to see, or when my favorite college basketball team loses a critical game.  (Sandy would call me after a loss, saying, “Those boys can’t expect to win if they can’t shoot free throws, and the turnovers!”  And then she’d laugh.)  I’m grateful to have known her.  With her other dear friends and family, I mourn her loss.