PROOF.  This afternoon, we went to see "Proof," my husband and I, at Northeast State Community College.  It was a fine production of a play that opened on Broadway in 2000.  Last year, about this time, we  saw a Johnson City Community Theatre production of Shakespeare's "Anthony and Cleopatra."  Such wonderful theatre here in the Kingsport area!   But I suppose it's no wonder, since we're so close to Abingdon and the Barter Theatre.  Ashley King, who played the lead in "Proof" did an internship at Barter and is majoring in Theatre/Digital Media at East Tennessee State. 
      I was especially ijmpressed with the performance of Danielle Trinkie, an English major at Northeast State.  I had the pleasure of meeting her at one of the Night Writers Guild sessions.  I hope she'll be at the meeting tomorrow night.  I tried to talk her into transferring to Tenneswsee Wesleyan, but I'm afraid I didn't convince her.  But I'm sure she'll do well, wherever she goes.  She played in "The Wizard of Oz"  last year.  I'm sorry to have missed that.
    But I see from the NSCC website that "Godspell" is scheduled for their April production.  That's April 5-8.  Don't miss it.

Spring is on the way.  Daffadills are blooming.  And at the Kingsport Public Library, I've check out The Best American Poetry 2011, with guest editor Kevin Young, and I'd like to recommend it to you.  It's always seemed a little presumptuous to me to claim to find the best, but I guess it depends on where you look.  Credits include The Paris Review, The American Scholar, the Atlantic, and of course, Poetry.  And lots more.  There are new names, but some familiar ones, too.  I was taken with Patricia Smith's "Motown Crown."  It sings.
     Charles Simic's "Nineteen Thirty-Eight" (Paris Review) begins with the Nazis marching into Vienna, the year the poet was born. It ends:  "I lay in my crib . . . [and] heard myself cry for a long,  long time."
      Then I found Richard Wilbur's "Ecclesiastes II:I." (the New Yorker).  He's casting bread upon the waters, still, "Betting crust and crumb / That birds will gather, and that / One more spring will come."  Shelley couldn't have said it better.  Go read!

The current issue of Poetry (January 2012) marks the 100th year for the journal.  It is a remarkable issue, which includes a review of a revised edition of the letters of T. S. Eliot (by Adam Kirsch) and an essay by Penelope Pelizzon ("Potsherds and Arrowheads") ,  examining some of the poems that have appeared there over the years.
     This month, too, I got notice of an acceptance from a little known journal, The Deronda Review, wherein the editor makes some comments which I find wonderfully insightful.  These I would like to share.
      In Pelizzon's essay, she is delighted to find poems by Louise Bogan and Langston Hughes among the "thirties bric-a-brac."  Poetry is the foremost poetry journal in this country, even after a century.  And it is fitting that Eliot is so perceptifvely discussed by Mr. Kirsch.  Eliot changed the direction of poetry in this country, he and his friend Ezra Pound.   I would argue that they did poetry no favor.
      Now we come to the comment I would share from Esther Cameron, editor of Deronda Review.  She laments the absence of lay readers.  Lay readers?  Where are they?  Is it only poets who read other poets?  And if that is so, cannot the blame be placed squarely on the shoulders of T. S. Eliot? 
     And yet, and yet . . . .
     When I first was introduced to "the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as a college freshman, I was bewildered.  And even after the poem was explained, I could feel little sympathy for this ineffectual character, so full of inaction and self-pity.  And yet, when  in graduate school  I heard Allan Tate read the poem, I finally listened with some appreciation.  Yes, we all should be able to hear mermaids singing. 
      If you are near a library that takes Poetry, seek out the January copy and enjoy this very special issue.
     Let there be Lay Readers among us.   Thanks for listening.   
                  Nancy

Happy New Year!  Hope you had a good Christmas.  So far this January, I've been privileged to attend three different writers groups in East Tennessee--Night Writers, Poetry Society of Tennessee,NE, and the Lost State Writers Guild, which is new to me.  They met in Kingsport for lunch, and so I got to go.  (I don't like to drive at night, but I do have an appointment with an eye doctor to consider my options.)  That was delightful.  Two of the readers I already knew from the PST-NE.  Which brings me to something that's been on my mind for years: How to honor a poet.
     In the 1980s, at the MLA convention, I attended a session intended to honor Elizabeth Bishop.  I didn't know her poetry very well at that time, but I wanted to learn more.  She was there, but she was not reading.  She was in the audience.  Instead, professors were reading papers analyzing her poetry.  If I remember correctly, there was even a musical piece to honor her.  But apparently, she didn't feel honored.  She left in the middle of the session.  She simply walked out.
     Compare that to the first time I ever heard Gwendolyn Brooks read.  It was at Knoxville College in the 1970s.  My friend and I were two of the few white faces in the audience at Coleman Auditorium.  The place was packed.  But here's the thing.  When Gwendolyn Brooks walked on stage, she got a standing ovation before the even opened her mouth.  She was already elderly and somewhat feeble, even then.  But she read so beautifully.  I never knew how to read "We Real Cool" until I heard her.  And she told stories.  In that poem, there's a line that goes: "we jazz June."  She said she heard some critic say this referred to a gang rape of a young woman named June.  She laughed.  "I was just jazzing up the month of June--no moonlight and roses, please." 
      I have since learned much more about Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, enought to admire it.  I have heard her read, albeit on tape rather than in person.  (Her voice is rather flat, surprisingly.)  But apparently she shared Ms. Brooks' attitude toward the critics.
     How to Honor a Poet:  Don't analyze.  Just Listen!

Ah, Thanksgiving is past, and Christmas looms ahead rapidly.  I can't believe how fast time flies in retirement.
We spent Thanksgiving in Danville, Virginia, with our daughter, and after the turkey, the dressing, the potato casserole, the cranberry sauce, and the apricot nectar cake,  that Thursday feast, we went to the Goodwill on Black Friday.  The Goodwill in Danville has one of the finest collections of used books I have ever seen.  I came away with several, but two I want to talk about.
      I could hardly believe I found  The Lost World by Randall Jarrell (1985) and The Fugitive Poets, edited by William Pratt (1965).  As an undergraduate, I studied under Mr. Jarrell, even doing a senior Honors Project in poetry under his direction.  In a Modern Poetry class, we listened spellbound as he read and explained poems by Frost, Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and, yes, John Crowe Ransom.  Jarrell had been a student of Ransom's, and so he was sort of second generation Fugitive, though I'm sure he didn't think of himself in that light.  Next to Frost and Yeats, I loved the poetry of John Crowe Ransom, "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," "The Equilibrists," "The Vanity of the Blue Girls."  I didn't get to know much about the other Fugitives till much later.  I heard Allan Tate read Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when I was in graduate school, and then and only then did it bring tears to my eyes.  (As a college freshman, I had hated that poem.)  But the poem that struck my in this volume was a poem by Donald Davidson, "On a Replica of the Parthenon."  The previous owner of this book has inked in "across st. from Vanderbilt."  The poem captures the ironic contrast between the Greek ideal and the modern Nashville reality. 
        Shop-girls embrace a plaster thought,
        And eye Poseidon's loins ungirt,
        And never heed the brandished spear . . . .
It reminds me of Jarrell's "The Girl in the Library," wherein the poet watches the student curled up sleeping over her lessons.  I was that girl, but poetry awakened me, and now I recommend to you the poetry of Randall Jarrell and his teachers, The Fugitives, his professors at Vanderbilt. Look for them in your library.
Have a good Christmas.

Kingsport is beginning to feel like home, especially as I reinvent myself, retired professor, poet.  The past two days make me especially aware of the opportunities right here in Kingsport.  At the Civic Center on Sunday I participated in a booth sponsored by Bubba's Book Swap, where I met several local authors.  If you don't know Bubba's book store, you should search it out.  It's on Sullivan as you approach Church Circle from down town.  You can tell by the yellow awning.  There I met Lisa Hall, Jenny Boggs, Carol Jackson, Sylvia Nichols, and Trixie Stilletto--whose books are available at Bubba's.
     Then Monday night, the Night Writers met at Books-a-Million for an open mic.  These are mostly young people, and I feel grateful that they tolerate me.  I've already told you how much I appreciate Todd Bailey's setting the web site up for me.  I could never have done it on my own.  And they have big plans. 
     On Friday, December 9th, from 7:00 till 9:00 pm, at the Renaissance Center here in Kingsport, Tennessee, the Night Writers will sponsor "An evening of poetry, prose, and song" to support the Second Harvest food Bank of Northease Tennessee.  Admission will be two cans of food per person--nutritious and non-perishable.  Come one, come all, and hear new voices.  For more information, see their website: www.nightwritersguild.weebly.com.

Hi, here I go again.  But what I have to say may seem a little odd to most of you.  That's because I'm all excited about the current issue of PMLA.  What's that?  Hey, I went off to graduate school not knowing what PMLA was.  It's the Publications of the Modern Language Association, and I still get it, even though I'm retired, because I was a member from the time I was in graduate school at UT-Knoxville, and they made me a life member, without further dues.  Anyway, the November issue is the program for the MLA annual meetings.  This year, no, next January, it's gong to be in Seattle, Washington.  After looking at the program, I wish I could go, but that's not going to happen.
     My first MLA conference was in 1975 in San Francisco.  My husband Bill was in school at the New England College of Optometry in Boston, and my two teenage children and I were spending the Christmas holidays with their dad.  Oh, yes, I went off to Boston in open toed shoes and the car quit because I hadn't put in any "dry" gas, but that's beside the point.  MLA was in December, then, just after Christmas, and so I went out of Logan and returned before the new year.  I got to hear Mina Shaunassy's lecture that anticipated "Errors and Expectations," the book that refvolutionized the teaching of first year composition.  I remember standing in the hallways after another late session, "The Failure of the New Linguistics," I think it was.  Although it was only ten o'clock,  my internal clock said past midnight.  It was a conversation with a French professor at a small college in Kentucky, who agreed that the new linguistics wasn't such a failure after all.
      Anyway, what's got me all excited is a session on "Frost and the Politics of Poetry" (#404, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, January 7).  Oh, I wish I could be there.  It's arranged by Timothy O'Brien of the US Naval Academy.  (Yes, he wrote "the Things They Carried.")  Steven Gould Axelrod is speaking on "Frost and Politics."  I met him at a meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, over ten years ago, giving a paper on Gwendolyn Brooks, if memory serves.  Nice man.  I don't know the other two presenters, but their talks sound interesting too.  One even will deal with Frost and Randall Jarrell (and Bishop, Lowell, and Berryman), my teacher and mentor.  O'Brien's website promises abstracts, but I guess I'll have to wait till February to see those.
      Yes, I know.  The media always find MLA sessions to make fun of about this time of year, but it is an exciting time.  I got to hear the first sessions of the first Women's sections and the first Multi-Cultural group, too.  That was in the 1980s when I was still at Roane State Community College.  For three years, I served as the Community College representative to the General Assembly.  Of the 30,000 members of MLA, community college faculty represented only 3% of that number.  I miss the excitement.    Just reading about it will have to do.

Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  I have come to Gatlinburg with my husband to an optometric meeting.  I've been coming to such meetings with him for years, armed with a book to read and/or papers to grade.  The weather has turned cold and the traffic is unbelieveable, but we're here in the beautiful Smokies.  From inside the hotel on the mountain top, it's beautiful.

   We first came to Gatlinburg in the 1950s, when Bill was still a graduate student working on his dissertation at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Just out of college, I was in my first year of teaching at Clinton, Tennessee.  That's a story I want to tell, but just now, I'm concerned about Gatlinburg.  It was a picturesque tourist town then, with lots of souvenires.  Cheap black bear statues, mostly.  We learned something weird about those later.  The supplier was Japan, all right, but northern Japan, where the black bear was sacred to local inhabitants.  We learned that from my cousin, whose husband was stationed in Japan in the 1960s.
      Gatlinburg now is anything but cheap.  But it has been eclipsed by Pigeon Forge and Dollywood.
      We're glad to be here in this beautiful place.