2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
But maybe it takes a little, tiny bit of courage to admit that you lack that kind of moxie. And maybe there are advantages to be gained by taking the less grandiose avenues. Charm, for example. Many readers of poetry admire Milton, but few have called his epics charming, except for a few odd passages, like the one describing the elephant at play in the Garden of Eden. Milton is one of those writers who make you feel you ought to put on a coat and tie and get a fresh manicure before opening the volume. His is the kind of achievement that justly demands a certain formal level of respect. That does not mean that his achievement is the most and loneliest greatest. Chaucer is his equal in greatness, and I have no qualms about reading Chaucer while wearing slacks and a sport shirt. Villon I can read dressed in torn blue jeans and broken-down sneakers – and he too is a great poet. The grand visionaries to whom we owe so very much lack the power to disarm. Wordsworth has delivered us a vision of nature that is both transcendent and primordial, both personal and sublimely impersonal at once. He has done so partly by means of creating a first person speaker whom we always respect but feel a little presumptuous to identify with. With the members of Chaucer’s crowd of speakers I feel immediate kinship, even when I don’t like some of them. Has there ever been a study of self-deprecation in literature? When Emily Dickinson begins a poem by saying, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?,” don’t most of us respond almost automatically, “I’m nobody too”? Why do we do so? Well, maybe because we want to be friendly with someone who so openly makes that kind of admission. Maybe if Milton or Shelley or Norman Mailer or Jim Dickey opened a piece by saying, “I’m nobody” – nah, that was never going to happen. Abraham Lincoln could do so; Thomas Jefferson could not, yet both are the very best writers and orators of their times.
Stephanie Whitlock Dicken has designed for NCLR since 2001 and served as NCLR’s Art Director from 2002 to 2008. For this issue, she designed this essay, the interview with Anjail Rashida Ahmad, and the review by Ron Jackson. She is an instructor of graphic design at Pitt Community College and can be reached at StephanieWDicken@gmail.com for freelance design work.
number 23
photograph by Jan G. Hensley
58
Writers are like others who desire to think and to act; they have differing goals of aspiration. A writer may aspire to the sublimity of Aeschylus, and there are some who could not have achieved what they have done by aspiring to lesser levels. But to me it is acceptable to aspire to a middle ground, to try to join not a choir of angels but a community of men and women who are less extreme in ambition and more accessible to intellectual and emotional camaraderie. I admire the men and women who can visualize great stones and from those envisioned stones construct the cloud-capped towers and contemplative gardens of Utopia, but I feel more personal kinship with the hay-cutter who once mowed a field clean except for a single tall tuft of flowers beside a stream. He never wrote a poem, this scything man; someone else took the pains to write it for him, someone who was able to know what his purposeful omission meant and in his mind held silent, brotherly speech with him, saying, “‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart, / ‘Whether they work together or apart.’” Anyhow, that’s what Robert Frost says that he said,* and I like to think Mr. Frost was telling the truth. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen and generous Roberts awarders. You have helped me to understand and appreciate the fact that I do not work apart. n
1
Quoted from Robert Frost’s poem “Tuft of Flowers” (1915).
above Fred Chappell on the occasion of another award he received in 2013, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association, Asheville, NC, 24 Nov. 2013