Re: nonpd: a poem by cathryn hankla

[Barbara Knight <knight@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Whoaaaaaaa! for a minute i thought i was on one of my two writer's lists. 
Such a literary work. Did you unintentionally post this to the wrong list? 
If so, don't worry, dear, all of us have done this at one time or another. 
If I were you I'd repost it to whatever list you really intended. Funny 
thing what those mice will click on when you have pd, eh? :))) BTW, I've 
been known to my family as the Queen-of-missent email. LOL

How are things going for you lately? If you'll post me privately I can 
suggest software which will give you a little variety in your email but 
still stick to straight no-nonsense oldfashioned text-only email if you 
want that too. I also have some interesting info you may like to hear about 
the part "counters" play on webpages and where you can find some quite 
humorous ones.

Oh, and--jp

Sorry this isn't in rhyme,
saving it for another time. :))))

hoping to hear from you soon via cyberspace-only

bk


At 11:47 AM 11/28/00 -0500, you wrote:
> (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 Depositor!
> 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
> TEL: 613 256 8340 SMAIL: POBox 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada
> EMAIL: janet313@xxxxxxxxxxx URL: