nonpd: a poem by cathryn hankla

[janet paterson <janet313@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

(note from jmp - i think i have found another hero]


Self-Reflection

In this poem, I promise, you will learn everything I know
about myself. Despite the fact I get it wrong, I've been
looking in the mirror my whole life. I think I see myself,
but as you know from your own experience, that's rarely
the case. How ridiculous that we spend so long gazing at
the unattainable, fooling ourselves with our own faulty
facts, our faces flying toward us exactly backwards. We
could spend that time dancing or reading out loud. We
could make love more often and try to keep our minds
from wandering. After all of these years I can't even pick
myself out in the class photograph. But I can recognize
your face anywhere. It could be that, actually, objectivity
is underrated and love its greatest example. This relegates
relativity to twentieth-century egotism, nothing more than
a medieval scheme to place the earth at the center once
again. Just a theory. And there are others. For example, I
have believed that growing a good tomato is as important
as writing a poem. For example, I have believed in the
open exchange of ideas. I have believed we are not the
same and this is the greatest liberation.



Cathryn Hankla
from her book Texas School Book Depository
Copyright 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000 by Cathryn Hankla.
All rights reserved.



Cathryn Hankla, professor of English at Hollins University, is the author of 
three previous collections of poetry?Phenomena, Afterimages, and Negative 
History?a collection of short stories, and the novel A Blue Moon in Poorwater. 
She is poetry editor for the Hollins Critic.

About Texas School Book Depository: Humorous, quirky, and spiritually 
meditative by turns, Cathryn Hankla's prose poems move by associative leaps and 
take their inspirations from cultural and personal icons. A shadow narrative 
moors the collection in the perspective of a woman who survives a difficult 
childhood to eventually comprehend the paradoxes of adult life and whose 
journeys into her heritage bring her to a fuller realization of her place in 
the world. Travels to Prague and Paris, allusions to literary, spiritual, 
artistic, and political figures, local and familial lore?all become ready 
touchstones for the revelation of feeling and reevaluations of identity and the 
nature of freedom.

While recognizing the danger in exploration, Hankla takes pleasure in 
questioning the status quo and takes issue with those who sidestep emotional or 
intellectual adversities by affecting apathy, as when she attempts to find the 
center in "Turn Something Inside Out": "Would I discover you there, poised like 
a prayer to be answered? And if you were a prayer, how would I find the center? 
If at the center there were a fear, like a stitch left in an incision, how 
would I know how it began unless you told me, unless you held me, upside down, 
and shook until you faked nothing, neither interest nor passion nor forever."

In the title poem, the Louvre's huge cache is searched, not for the famed Mona 
Lisa or Egyptian antiquities, but in a metaphorical quest for something now 
forever lost?a nation's collective naïveté, destroyed with Kennedy's 
assassination from the gunman's nest in what was then the Texas School Book 
Depository. In "Self-Reflection" the critical irony turns inward, amplifying 
the usual solipsistic despair?not even the self can be known: "Despite the fact 
that I get it wrong, I've been looking in the mirror my whole life. I think I 
see myself, but as you know from your own experience, that's rarely the case." 
Yet the poem ends by offering hope, in a series of comical but potent 
"theories": "For example, I have believed that growing a good tomato is as 
important as writing a poem. For example, I have believed in the open exchange 
of ideas. I have believed we are not the same and this is the greatest 
liberation." Intimate and unusual, amusing and moving, Texas School Book 
Deposito
 r!
y is
 a truly wondrous offering.

"From the strikingly smart 'God Attack' to the wryly speculative 'Turn 
Something Inside Out,' wherein the speaker notes that penetrating to the core 
of things 'would be easier if I were you, carefully promising nothing, 
delivering the same,' this collection invites us to see a self as a 'whole 
thing' that reveals itself only as it is turned inside out through the agency 
of art.... Toughened, not jaded, Hankla promises much and delivers." ? Kelly 
Cherry

Louisiana State University Press
Baton Rouge, LA 70803


Poetry Daily



janet paterson, an akinetic rigid subtype parkie
53 now /44 dx cd / 43 onset cd /41 dx pd / 37 onset pd
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