by jeff worley
by m a r k h a l l i d ay
My father and I on the sofa talked about summer plans, would he drive from New York to Ohio? It seemed doubtful (he was eighty-six) and he said We’ll see what comes to pass. For a minute we were silent. He said, That’s an interesting idiom, isn’t it. To come to pass. “It came to pass.” There’s a feeling of both coming and going at the same time. Yeah, I said. I wondered what movie we might see. He said, It’s quite different to say “It happened” — that sounds like a stop, like a fixed point. But “It came to pass” — there’s almost a feeling of “It came in order to pass.” Yeah, I said, that’s right. He said, You get a sense of the transience of everything. Yes, I said. Cleo the black cat lay snoozing across my father’s legs. My father stroked her gently. I finished my raspberry iced tea.
Yet you give a nod to more traditional approaches and forms occasionally when, for example, you use patterned end rhyme in a poem. When I use end rhyme, it tends to be humorous. I have trouble taking myself very seriously if I’m keeping a rhyme scheme going, and sometimes rhyme can prevent a poet from saying what he feels is really true. Rhymes can boss you around, can put you in a straitjacket. If I’m on the trail of something thoughtful and serious, I want to use free verse. Why write poetry at all? One reason people write poems is the sense that there’s something interesting and important going on inside a person that isn’t visible or in any way apparent from the outside. Poets have a sense that something is missing and believe a poem might speak to what’s missing. Life is a constant mystery. To live in a prudent and practical and efficient manner is often wise, but at the same time it involves ignoring the huge clouds of mystery (emotional, psychological, moral, spiritual, cosmological) that surround us. Poems are one way to express awareness of, and shape a response to, the mystery. As Frost said, “a poem is a momentary stay against confusion.”
Joan Connor’s new stories explore the difficult dance of longing and romance Kristina may be falling for the UPS man. When he rings her doorbell, she tingles. She orders things she doesn’t need or want—extendible fan blade dusters, silver serving spoons (she never has dinner parties), and complicated underwear with clips and flying buttresses. Anything to get him to her door, this man whose brown eyes are “the flavor of bitter brickle chocolate.” ¶ This is how the lead story, “Men in Brown,” opens in Joan Connor’s new book, How to Stop Loving Someone. This collection of stories by the Ohio University professor of creative writing, her fourth book of short fiction, won the 2010 Leapfrog Fiction Contest. ¶ Early reviews have been positive. Carol Haggas, writing in Booklist, notes that “Connor’s clever wordplay and piquant characterizations guide the reader through the minefields and misery, delight and despair, rewards and recriminations of love in all its guises.” .25