SAVING THE ADVERB

For over a year I wrote a monthly column I called "Language Matters," which ran in several NC weekly newspapers. This is one of the last ones I wrote. These pieces can be found on the ncarts.org site. I thought of this essay after reading Vicki Lane's post about the adverb on today's vickilanemysteries.blogspot.com.



SAVING THE ADVERB


I like to look at bumper stickers on campus and sometimes talk back to them. One claimed knowledge is not important, imagination is, with the image of Einstein in the corner. “How could Einstein use imagination if he didn’t have knowledge to play with?” I asked the bumper but got no response

Sometimes I leave a note, if the sticker makes nasty political comments. Or if the vehicle sports a macho “If it flies, it dies.” The men in my family hunted quail, but they never went after cardinals, nuthatches, or, for that matter, crop dusters.

Then, there are stickers urging us to save this lake or that river, so when I approached the car proclaiming Save the Adverb, I was, to put it mildly, puzzled. I didn’t know it was endangered, no more so than any other part of speech, in these days of endless “whatever’s,” and “like, you know’s.” The verb “to be” seems to be gobbling up all other forms of predicate, and “Uh” seems to be replacing most nouns. But the adverb?

I started thinking about adverbs, the pleasure of using a good one, not to mention a long adverbial clause or phrase. What a challenge to pull off, especially beginning a sentence, making the listener wait for what comes next!

What a pleasure, for that matter, to diagram sentences! I can hear readers thinking, “What a geek she must have been!” Yes, I was a grammar geek. I loved learning how a sentence works, the parts of it on the blackboard like a trembling spider web or constellation.

My Junior High English teacher, a bulldog of a woman, made us memorize definitions for the parts of speech and sentences, the cases,as well as verb conjugations. We had regular recitations, along with sentences on the blackboard to which we were called to point out every element of its construction.

I never feared these assignments, though I shuddered when called to solve an algebra problem. The truth is I loved those words, and yes, I really loved adverbs. I loved them rapturously, greedily, longingly. When I was a freshman in a beginning psychology class, the subject turned to language. “What, Miss Stripling,” the professor asked, looking down at his lengthy roll , “ is the most important thing about a word?”

“The way it sounds,” I answered. He looked around the large classroom. A girl raised her hand and said proudly, “The meaning.” "That’s right,” he nodded, with more certainty than I thought necessary.

I sat frowning in the back, sure that I would never take another psychology course. I would not stop loving the sound of adverbs, or adjectives, verbs, and nouns. Saucily, perfunctorily, filigree, stubble, and that word I once put in a poem, desolate, and was told in workshop to ditch it because the field did not need a modifier. I decided the field might not, but the poem did. Desolate remained.

So, yes , let’s save the adverb, along with all the other parts of speech and let them roll off our tongues with the pleasure that words can bring.

Bill Brown and the Solace of Poetry

Yesterday was the anniversary of Hiroshima's destruction by the atom bomb. Such horror exists beyond our everyday comprehension, as does most of war's realities. Bill Brown, one of our country's finest poets (deserving more recognition than he yet has received), served during Viet Nam. Having known war, he appreciates more than most the tenuous but precious moments of what we call daily life. His poems speak to the beauty and fragility of the natural world and the often complicated fabric of family life, finding in both the healing that enables him to keep living and writing. "The Language of Rain" comes from his new book, LATE WINTER, from Iris Press.

Perhaps the best way to remember Hiroshima is to immerse ourselves in one of Bill's poems.




THE LANGUAGE OF RAIN

How luxurious a forest after rain—
soft moss woven in the wreckage
of old wood, a gallery of lichen
on tree bark. It is winter—

beech trees cling to tattered leaves
to translate the language of rain,
to interpret wind. If you live among beech,
you keep something inside that listens

for that sound, that asks, did I hear it
when the fox stood at the mailbox,
or the day news pronounced the first
soldiers dead and flashed their pictures.

One morning I pulled a blanket around
my shoulders and sat on the porch to hear
rain and beech leaves make that sound.
What were they saying—nothing about

machinegun fire, sudden explosions,
burned-out markets, or a shoe
in the street still wearing a foot,
but something about the birth

of my neighbor’s foal and the reflection
of the mare’s eyes in the watering trough,
that between clapping leaves and scattered
rain there is a silence I long for.

Sue Scalf

I met Sue Scalf a few years back at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts in Rabun Gap, Georgia. A resident of Alabama, Sue carried herself with the combination of flair and intelligence that I admire in so many Southern women. She carried her poems pretty well, too, and I've come to admire her work very much. Her new collection, BEARING THE PRINT, is out from Negative Capability Press. I plan to share some of the poems from this book with you over the next few weeks.

Here is "August Morning":

The dark pond ripples with light.
Sunflowers, listening, turn.
The ""om" of morning sun slants
across the fields. Wet grass ignites.
The orchard is brimming with fire

as if night had never been,
except for a shofar moon
left behind with its pale song,
blowing the faithful to wake and live,
dead bones to rise.



-------------------------
This is a poem I will carry far beyond this August morning.

Appalachian Poetry

Marita Garin, the editor of the new SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN POETRY anthology that I introduced on my last post, has just emailed me a good comment about Rob's observation in the ACT yesterday that some of the anthology poems sounded as if coming from the bottom of a TVA lake.

"Another thought about the TVA lake issue (or talking ghosts): one distinctive thing about poetry, to me, is that when it goes deep enough, it becomes universal, and that, to me, means that it can speak to people in many other places as well as having a timeless quality to it. Many of the poems in the collection work on that level. And human nature is pretty much the same everywhere."

So, speaking as if from under a TVA lake is not such a terrible thing for a poet, especially if one can go deep enough into one's subject. I remember a Scottish singer (Archie Fisher?) once saying that the old songs are like ghosts waiting for living voices to fill them. Perhaps poetry is like that, too, and our own living voices, whether internal or spoken aloud, make the poems come alive yet again as we enter them. For anyone drawn to Appalachian culture and lore, the old ballads and stories do seem to be waiting for us to reclaim them. So many of our contemporary mountain writers are bringing those old "voices" back to life, finding them as contemporary as those that speak out of the t.v. screen or from You Tube.

Southern Appalachian Poetry

This is how Rob Neufeld's review of the recently published Southern Appalachian Poetry anthology begins in the Asheville Citizen Times today:

M any of the poets in "Southern Appalachian Poetry," Marita Garin's new anthology, talk like ghosts. Their laments and longings view life as if from under a TVA lake. This is mostly by design; for Garin, poet and Elderhostel instructor, set out to "document and preserve details of a way of life in the Southern Appalachian region that is beginning to disappear."

Marita, herself a splendid poet, explains in her introduction that this book was begun well over a decade ago. Its original title was FROM BLOODROOT TO SUMMIT, a wonderful turn of phrase and imagery. I wish she could have kept it, and I wish now that I had stolen it for one of my own books! The poems of mine in the anthology are from my second collection, Wildwood Flower. I've moved on since then, but I don't really think of the voice of Alma as sounding like a ghost's voice. The reason her voice stirred me when I began to hear it in my head is that it sounded in the here and now and made my own contemporary activities, whether looking out my window at the leaves falling or pulling up the okra in a frost-stricken garden, come alive in a way that plumbed the roots of where I was and still am. These poems do not view life as if from under a TVA lake. They view life as an ongoing dialogue, a conversation, between present and past. And they also reach into the future, if only by insinuation. But that's the subject of another post.

Let Rob know how you feel about this after reading his review at citizen-times.com. He's eager for response both to his columns and on The Read on WNC. (thereadonwnc.ning.com) He would like more reader responses to the issues he raises on this combination of blog, message board, and author website. And by all means, go to your local bookstore and purchase this book. You will be glad you did.


(Louisiana State University Press, 1992)

Rose of Sharon

This morning I looked out the front door and saw climbing up the branches in the front yard a Rose of Sharon, reaching for the sun beginning to show itself over the mountains. I remembered seeing a mountain cabin years ago entangled in blooming Rose of Sharons, deserted no doubt, but still inhabited in my imagination by a young mountain woman dreaming of escape. The poem became "Rose of Sharon" in BLACK SHAWL.



So I went walking the backyard for the other Sharons I knew must be blooming and found this white blossom, the only one on the bush, and above it sky barely visible up the ridge.



Coming back inside, I passed my smiling pig with, yes, more peturnias planted in it. I would have real pigs, if I could. I am immensely fond of swine in nearly all breeds save the human kind, which Horace Kephart called "the two-legged pig."

A REMINDER: DON'T FORGET TO READ ROB NEUFELD'S REVIEW IN THE ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES TOMORROW. YOU WILL FIND SOME POETS YOU'LL LIKE.

Petunias

Summer would not be summer without petunias somewhere in my yard. I'm not as petunia-ambitious as I once was, with large hanging baskets dripping with all hues of petunia, but I do have a few pots of them this summer. They were among my grandmother's favorites, along with coleus and zinnias. She kept many large coffee cans of them on her porch, as well as in her flower beds, where they re-seeded year after year. Her coleus grew to extravagant size, often planted in coffee cans when she ran out of store-bought pots. Nowadays I never see petunias when I go home to S. Georgia. I asked my mother why. The reason? They are considered "cheap" flowers. Most gardeners, particularly those in town, wouldn't consider having them in their yards. They want fancier flowers, I suppose, from nurseries. Petunias belong to their past, when they or their kinfolks lived in the country. I rarely see zinnias, either. Coleus still hangs on, in new-fangled shades and patterns. I love it for being so easily re-cycled, sprouting new roots for new pots throughout the season.

And elephant ears! Mine never winter over, as they do in South Georgia. I didn't plant any this summer. Yes, my grandmother had them, too. My sister-in-law's elephant ears are ever-faithful! They never disappear, having such a long memory for the place where they flourish.

I keep forgetting to dead-head my petunias. That will be on my list of duties for the day, along with washing Lord Byron.

The ceramic flower- woman below was given to me by my friend, novelist and poet Isabel Zuber (see earlier post). It hangs by my back door, near the pots of petunias and coleus. Isabel says it looks like Virginia Woolf!