By Marc Stengel, Elaine Phillips, and Ron Wynn

There can be no question of Diann Blakely’s suitability as a poet. Mahogany-haired, lithe-limbed, she gestures in sweeping strokes to render mere anecdote into intoxicating incantation. With just a hint of self-consciousness swaddling her like a mist, she plays the basilisk muse enthralling and immobilizing an uncomplaining prey.

“What poetry does best and perhaps does most plaintively,” she explains, gazing aside, “is to remind us of the absences and losses of the world we currently suffer and revel in. It is very much the language of intimacy. In the end, the most useful aspect for poetry is to attune our hearts to tenderness. We live in a world that bombards us with false intimacy. Real tenderness is lacking in our lives, because it’s not a commodity, it’s not useful, not really worth anything.

“A child, I think, understands certain layers of human emotion, even in the absence of any other experience. [T.S.] Eliot himself once said that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. That insight applies as much to writing as to reading. During my first book, Hurricane Walk, for example, an idea would come to me, and it very often felt like I was simply taking transcription. It felt very close to Don Justice’s notion of the poem as ‘Platonic script’ or of Osip Mandelstam’s concept of hearing a melody for a moment, then it goes away, and you’re always writing after that melody—after that Platonic script—except you can never quite get back to it.”

Since long before the publication of her first collection in 1992, Blakely began assembling the peripatetic résumé of a contemporary poet: degrees at Sewanee and Vanderbilt; additional graduate work at NYU and Vermont College; fellowships at Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences; teaching posts at Harvard, VU, and Harpeth Hall; prizes, published works, and editorships. A second collection, Farewell, My Lovelies, will appear in ’99, and a third manuscript is nearing completion as The Cities of Flesh and the Dead. Meantime, Diann Blakely will be the featured poet for September on the Internet site PoetryNet ( http://members.aol.com/poetrynet/month. ), edited by Vanderbilt’s Mark Jarman.

“I have an associative way of thinking which isn’t at all very logical or straightforward,” Blakely admits, unbowed. “But I’m convinced that our distractions are what make us. I know, for example, that I have a profoundly fluid sense of time. I remember once getting into an argument about the nature of ‘the lyric,’ which some hold to be the representation of a frozen instant in time. I have never had a frozen instant in time. Maybe this also has something to do with being Southern. I don’t know.”

Blakely was born in Anniston, Ala., and raised in Birmingham, although for nearly a decade, she prospected for her muse primarily in New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts before settling in Nashville in ’87. Northeastern self-exile notwithstanding, her Southern credentials and self-image have endured, if not unaltered, at least unrelenting.

“When I was in Boston,” she says, “I felt that it was a very puritanical place. Looking back, I realize that I was living there during the birth of the political-correctness movement. Boston has plenty of brains, but it lacks joie de vivre. By contrast, the South has this life-spirit, but when I first returned, I kept thinking, ‘Where are the smart people here?’ You sort of forget this Southern mind-set that encourages people not to want to appear too smart—particularly the women. I think the people who are most sensitive to these things are people such as myself who’ve lived away for a long time. And now I tend to notice certain things, because I’ve come back here and my accent has changed—certainly my manner has changed. I’ve lost my...chirpiness; you know, the way some Southern women are still taught to be.”

As Blakely brings to a close her third collection of poems, she admits a longing to reinvent herself artistically in some way. For her next adventure, she is gravitating toward a musical muse that tempts her with new conjunctions of “ache and urgency.”

“The project on which I am currently embarking,” she explains, “has me singing duets, so to speak, with [the late blues singer] Robert Johnson. It’s a new book called ‘Love in Vain.’ I’m taking each one of the 29 songs he left behind and responding to it in a kind of duet—a sort of call and response.

“Johnson is in some ways the Keats of modern music. He was the son of sharecroppers and had this very fractured early existence. He’s always an orphan in his songs. In his earlier years, he would hang around Robinsonville, [Miss.,] which is close to Tunica, and would try to learn about the blues from Johnny Shines and those guys, and they didn’t think he was good enough. So he disappeared for about a year, and he came back as this guy who could make a guitar sing as if two or three guitarists were playing at once. He had this eerie, plangent voice that could range from growls to falsetto. He himself helped spread the legend that he had been gifted all of a sudden by making a deal with the devil”:

O come on, honey, and let’s go to the cemetery

At midnight, where bluesfolk charm their guitar-strings

To dissolve thoughts of ragged, last-drawn breaths

—D. Blakely, “Come on in My Kitchen”

“Having had a series of calamities of my own in a relatively short period of time, I have naturally been drawn to a book project having to do with love in vain, with loss. Dealing with what seems like a series of misfortunes seems to me to be a way of addressing the plainly historical events in Johnson’s life in a manner that’s more truly lyrical. The idea of having this whole book-length project unfold for me is just terrific. People who aren’t writing may not understand, but we sort of just have to wait for one idea to come along and hope the next idea will follow.”

—Marc Stengel

Signs and events

Carroll Van West, et al., The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture, 6 p.m. Sept. 2 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers Now that the Big Book about Tennessee has finally arrived from Rutledge Hill Press, editor Carroll Van West and select contributors will discuss, read, and sign the work that took years in the making. It’s a truly exhaustive portrait of the state’s history, with more than 1,500 entries punctuated by 32 essays on aspects of the state’s agricultural, social, economic, and general history. In recruiting some of the state’s most accomplished history writers, Van West has managed to blend scholarship and readability while at the same time vaccinating the volume against excessively PC notions of what Tennessee’s history should have been or ought to become.

John Seigenthaler Sr., “Media Scandal and the First Amendment,” 7 p.m. Sept. 3 at Lipscomb University, Swang 108 Nashville’s pater familias of media propriety and chairman emeritus of The (Gannett) Tennessean is Lipscomb University’s guest speaker at the September installment of the free Landiss Lectures. Graced with 43 years’ experience as a working journalist, a taste for social engineering of the Kennedy persuasion, and the unassailable respect rendered unto him by both supporters and adversaries, Seigenthaler is perhaps better qualified than any other to comment on the recent spate of rash acts perpetrated by various national media. The current clash between our nation’s free-speech appetite and our media’s mania for feeding it suggests an irresistible force confronting an immovable object. As a discussion topic, this represents a tantalizing rostrum from which Nashville’s newspaper Solomon can dispense his judgments.

Donna Peerce & Chuck Cochran, Heart & Soul Résumés: 7 Never-Before-Published Secrets to Capturing Heart and Soul in Résumé Writing, 7 p.m. Sept. 9 at Bookstar Nashville career consultants Peerce and Cochran have poured their hearts and souls into a clever tutorial book that aims to transform mere résumés into manifestos of self-discovery. In their view, the difference between two equally impressive records of experience can boil down to the emotional honesty that one’s résumé represents—particularly in a tight labor market. Accordingly, Peerce & Cochran have transformed the typical “how-to” approach to résumé writing into a novel “seek-and-ye-shall-find” process of translating hopes, goals, and ambitions into a single-page, double-spaced ticket to the job of one’s dreams.

Also to note:

♦ Bookstar discussion group for Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, 7:30 p.m. Sept. 10.

♦ All-day First Book Party for underprivileged and at-risk young readers, in association with the Middle Tennessee chapter of Book ’Em nonprofit literacy organization, Sept. 19 at Barnes & Noble.

—Marc Stengel

Spirit guide

River Angel, by A. Manette Ansay (William Morrow and Company Inc., $24) A. Manette Ansay’s latest book, River Angel, is a memorable and moving novel about people’s hunger for belief. Ansay, a Wisconsin native who currently lives in Nashville, based her story on an incident that happened near her hometown. In 1991, a misfit boy, known for his piety and awkwardness, was kidnapped by a group of local teenagers who wanted to give him a scare. The group ended up on a bridge over a river, and the boy disappeared—whether because he jumped or was pushed, no one could decide. Search crews later found the boy’s body, undamaged and peaceful, in a barn a mile away from the river. The mysterious incident, coupled with local legends about an angel who lives in the river, tapped a powerful longing in the townspeople’s psyche; stories of miracles and visitation continue to circulate through the town, which now has a shrine to the dead boy.

Ansay’s novel doesn’t investigate the veracity of the story, but rather why these rural Midwesterners want to believe it. River Angel takes place in Ambient, a farming community suffering from economic and emotional depression. Family farms are in danger of closing down, downtown businesses are losing customers to the national chain stores along the highway, and people seem emotionally adrift. Ansay creates several memorable characters who all share a desire to find something that gives their lives order and sense: the little boy, Gabriel, dumped on relatives by his shiftless father; Ruthie Mader, a widow who occupies herself with leading a women-only prayer group; and Cherish, her beautiful, well-mannered daughter, who isn’t what she appears to be.

Ansay enters so completely into each character’s point of view that she makes us understand the motivations and intentions of even the most outwardly dislikable people. This compassion, coupled with an ability to create distinctive voices for each of these characters, makes River Angel memorable. Ansay’s descriptive prose is also beautiful, poetic but unaffected: Snowmobiles leave “tracks as savage as welts from a whip,” and a man’s weather-beaten face looks “as anonymous as a penny.”

Angels are everywhere these days, often appearing in such tacky guises as goldtone pins and bumper stickers. These same gewgaws appear in Ambient after the boy’s mysterious death, but River Angel does not conclude with a simplistic celebration of a community revitalized by faith. True, tourism picks up, and the residents find a common experience that feeds their hunger for identity and belief. But Ansay’s ending is ambivalent; the novelist isn’t convinced that faith alone can help people deal with loss and grief.

Not everyone in Ambient celebrates the angel mania, but many are moved by it, just as readers will be by this novel. Ansay frames her narrative with a preface and a coda, in which she describes her own visit to the town’s shrine. Although the experience does not convert her into a believer, it does help answer the question of why people need to believe in divine intervention. “Remember us,” she writes. “Let the end be more than that unwieldy plunge. Let there be someone waiting to catch us when we fall.”

Let there be more novels as graceful as River Angel.

Obit

Dorothy West, who died Aug. 16 in Boston, was one of the last surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance. A contemporary and friend of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, she enjoyed fame both early and late in life. She had her first successful novel, The Living Is Easy, in 1948. Some 47 years later, at the age of 85, she became the toast of the literary world with The Wedding, a tale of social and romantic intrigue among African Americans on Martha’s Vineyard. Many readers thought West was a new writer and were shocked to discover she’d been writing since the early ’20s.

West never followed trends. She chose to profile and create successful black characters, and she spent much of her life writing newspaper profiles and articles about the African American community on Martha’s Vineyard. Her novels and articles were written with humor and irony.

When ABC purchased rights to The Wedding for a two-part TV movie, West found herself at the center of a controversy. Some pundits attacked the book for “oversimplifying” the issue of interracial marriage, criticizing West for putting too much emphasis on African Americans with money and power. Yet those who read her novels could see she had a vast understanding of African American culture, and that she was an ardent idealist and optimist. West didn’t define people in terms of stereotypes or ideology; she portrayed multidimensional characters more concerned with universal questions, though they remained acutely conscious of their heritage and background.

Dorothy West’s output was not prodigious, and her novels didn’t challenge social conventions like those of Hughes, Wright, or Hurston. But she covered a community that has been as poorly documented and ill-treated as any inner-city constituency, and she did it with the same complexity and depth that Hughes brought to his examinations of the urban North, Wright brought to his explorations of Chicago’s slums, and Hurston brought to her novels about the rural South.

The dog-eared page

“The Southern Festival of Books celebrates its 10th year with a growing list of events and authors [Legislative Plaza, Oct. 9-11].... Executive director Robert Cheatham noted that a new, gigantic magnetic poetry wall introduces some novel coordination problems: ‘We’ll have to police it somewhat to remove the obscene creations.’ ”—Publishers Weekly, Aug. 24, 1998

“Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us.... That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path that he has taken?”—Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)

“Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us.... That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path that he has taken?”—Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)