Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
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photograph by donna kain
“A Poem has Happened Here” a review by Fred Chappell Susan Laughter Meyers. My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass. San Diego: Cider Press Review, 2013.
Fred Chappell, a former Poet Laureate of North Carolina, has written for NCLR since the premier issue: essays on Randall Jarrell, Jim Wayne Miller, Peter Taylor, and ECU’s Stuart Wright Collection. His fiction was a special feature topic of NCLR 1998, and his work has been reviewed and the subject of literary criticism in other NCLR issues. See also a collection of his poetry and prose in NCLR 2013 and more poems by him in NCLR Online 2013 and forthcoming in the print issue of NCLR 2014. In 2013, he served as the final judge of NCLR’s James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition, then added to his list of honors the 2013 Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration, given by the Friends of J.Y. Joyner Library at ECU during the Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming. Susan Laughter Meyers’s My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass is the inaugural winner of the Cider Press Review Editors Prize. Several of the poems in this collection have appeared in NCLR. Read more about this poet with her poems following this review.
Susan Meyers’s poems in My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass seem to take place in certain emotional spaces which have been waiting for them. Maybe “fields” would be a better term than “spaces,” upon the analogy of magnetic fields, within which any motion that occurs constitutes a significant electronic event. Alas. Both these analogies are insufficient, awkward, and misleading. Let us propose that many poets write poems which have been triggered by events experienced or remembered. Something happens, or has happened; the poet observes, considers, and reacts. Until the occurrence, there was no possibility of a poem. Nothing had prompted the poet to compose. The necessary feelings could not come into existence. With Meyers, it seems that a state of feeling, indefinable but patiently receptive, already exists. Then anything that happens, or sometimes does not happen, within that state constitutes a possible poem. Paintings and photographs sometimes embody this capacity. An interior by Hopper or a still life by Chardin may seem to declare, in subdued tones, “A poem has happened here.” From a sequence, “Letters Lost to Wind,” here is “Dear Happenstance”:
Dear Happenstance Last night I dreamed you lost as an old shoe lying, strings untied, on the macadam. I’m speeding down the road, and you are everywhere I look: brushy bluestem, thick with abandon. Dented mailbox, gravel drive, fake flowers nailed to the tree trunk at the curve. A flock of small birds darkens with synchronized turning. Silvers, veering back again.
The “you” is unidentified. The pronoun may refer to someone of the speaker’s acquaintance who died in a traffic accident, or to a figure the dream state cannot specify. “You” may be a personification of “Happenstance,” a chance circumstance that entails vivid details – images of a mailbox, artificial flowers, and birds. But the circumstance is given no narrative context. The “you” connotes an intuited “field” to which certain images are attracted and collect as appurtenances of a poem. The image of the shoe abandoned on the macadam may be sufficient to indicate that the lines are about the loss of a person important to the speaker, but that information is not necessary for the poem to be a complete work. The final image is of birds that present one aspect when
above right Susan Laughter Meyers reading her 2013 James Applewhite Poetry Prize–
winning poem “Rain” after the competition’s final judge Fred Chappell presented the award (Read the winning poem in the print issue of NCLR 2014; in the meantime, to watch the award presentation and hear her read “Rain,” go to the Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming website.)