SHENANDOAH: The Washington and Lee University Review

(Billy Edd Wheeler / "Coon Creek Girls and Billy Edd"
(Rosie Foley and Lily Man Pennington; from a photograph by Warren Brunner)oil, 16" x 20", 2002)

SHENANDOAH is probably my favorite literary magazine. Its editor, R.T. Smith,is a friend from way, way back and one of the country's finest poets. He's also a fiction writer worth reading, too. The magazine always has his Editor's Note at the end, this issue's piece titled "Heart and Coal: An Appreciation." As Rod describes it, "It's about coal mining, songs about the people and specifically about Kathy Mattea's album Coal."



To read an interview with Rod Smith, go to http://www.cortlandreview.com/issuethree/rodandjohn3.htm



(R.T. SMITH)

This Spring/Summer issue is a reader's dream. How could it be otherwise with the lead-off story being one by Lee Smith? Maxine Kumin gives us an essay, "Swift to Its Close," and the list of poets ranges from Richard Foerster to Hanes Eason, with David Wagoner, Elton Glaser, James Malone Smith, and Kathryn Kirkpatrick, among others, in between. Yes, there are book reviews, too, and an interview with Dominica Radulescu by Sarah Kennedy, herself an outstanding poet. To see the entire table of contents, as well as read excerpts from earlier issues, go to www.shenandoah.wlu.edu.

After you visit the website, SUBSCRIBE. OUR LITERARY MAGAZINES NEED OUR SUPPORT.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick has long been a poet whose work I've admired; I'm happy to present her poem from this current issue, "After the Cave Paintings" below.




After the Cave Paintings

Why do I stand unmoved,
jaded as a tabloid, refusing
astonishment, not down on
my knees, but sober as stone—
surely 17th century spelunkers,
pranksters, or WWII resistance
fighters passing hours in the belly
of the mountain made these
bison, these bearded horses.

But carbon dating brings me
to my senses. Whatever I can’t take
in—1500 generations, 32,000 years—
here’s human memory on the horns
of an ibis, our ancestors making it up
from scratch.
Is it all too near
to where I’ve been? Birth & Death.
Back and forth across that stuttering
line, illness a long darkness with only
a lantern and my love’s strong
arm, the uneven, the unearthly
underfoot.

Stalactites make their own
sense of water and limestone
as I’m to make something wholly new
from the dripstone of another life.

Just as well we’re not as firmly
anchored as we think.
In the thinned air, the wavering light,
easier to find that other self, who knows
as the animal knows, as the bears
in these caves once knew, standing
upright on the old riverbed,
so daughters of Adam, sons of Eve,
took up what the bears laid down,
dark claw on limestone, and drew.

Kathryn teaches poetry, Irish Studies, and environmental literature at Appalachian State University. Her most recent book is Out of the Garden (Mayapple, 2007)

JAMES MALONE SMITH: POET AND EDITOR

Editors of anthologies as definitive as DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review work long and hard to give readers a book that will be just as important 50 years from now as it is today. Often such editors go unrecognized as the poets they are, while the more widely recognized poets in the collection draw the attention of reviewers and readers. In DON'T LEAVE HUNGrY, James Smith, the editor, has no poem included, so it's time to recognize him for his poetry. In my previous post, I called him a native western North Carolinian, and I still think of him that way, but as you'll see in the following short biography, he was born in the N. Georgia mountains. Blairsville is where my family stayed when we headed north into the mountains to visit relatives in Dahlonega. It's my paternal grandmother's native ground, and I consider it part of my native ground as well, a place that extends into the mountains of southwestern North Carolina. Forget about state boundaries.

Today is" James Smith Day" on my blog. Good poets make the best editors of poetry journals and anthologies. Let's celebrate them while we are celebrating National Poetry Month.

James Malone Smith has published oems in AGNI (online), Connecticut Review, Nebraska Review, Quarterly West, Tar River Poetry, and others. He has new work forthcoming in Asheville Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction.

Associate professor of English at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, he teaches creative writing and American literature.

He grew up in the north Georgia mountains of Blairsville but spent much of that time in his mother's home community of Vengeance Creek, North Carolina.

Here is Jim's poem that first appeared in AGNI.


HEN

Day took fire at her bidding,
the stove down to coals, almost cold,
bacon drippings in the coffee can
white as ice. She would prod embers

until flames bit at her fingers,
glut the open mouth with fat wood
and slam down the iron lid
as if she were rousing some monster.

Then she scrambled an egg for me.
But all this had happened forever
when one morning I dawdled in
as she dredged ashes, crisscrossed kindling.

The stove is out. She lights a match.
I sit at the table and wait.
Morning light flutters and stills
on the chipped enamel of the white sink.

In it, spraddled headlong (but headless!),
a large plucked chicken
in all its galled gooseflesh,
a single bloody feather stuck to the faucet.

I startle as the stove lid clangs into place.
With a flourish she reveals an immaculate
brown egg in her powerful hand
and pauses. Long enough to make sure

the break will be clean and even,
the yolk full, and heavy,
the rest as clear as water—
then cracks the world apart.



James Malone Smith

AGNI online, 2004