The Shadow
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Editor’s Note: Following is a review of Ray Allen’s “An Appalachian Poet in San Francisco” written by Parks Lanier Jr. who is a professor emeritus of English at Radford University in Radford where he taught for 37 years.
By Parks Lanier Jr.
Professor Emeritus
When the distinguished American poet William Stafford (1914-1993) visited my college-level poetry writing class, he invited students to read their poems to him.
Several read haiku which they had written. Mr. Stafford’s response was not warm.
There was a worried look on his face but he made a tactful response. One should take seriously the essence of haiku, he said. It is not just a matter of counting syllables, he admonished.
I do not know if the students felt corrected, or even cared what the old stranger had said, but I did. I felt he was telling me that I should not put up with shoddy work from my students. Even if it was just a tiny haiku, he was telling me that I should care, and care deeply, about poetry.
I had told my students how a haiku master might ascend a mountain while his students waited patiently for him at its base. After his return, they would wait again, perhaps for days, for him to utter his haiku. Poetry, after all, was not just something to be consumed; it was something to be savored.
In “An Appalachian Poet in San Francisco,” Ray Allen has come down off his mountain, gone west, had a look, and come home to have his say. In doing so, he sets eight haiku at the beginning of his book and seven at the end. They are there to tell us the 47 poems in between are meant to be savored, not consumed.
If we wait, we will be satisfied in the fullness of time.
The poem which gives the book its title, in seven parts, traverses San Francisco as the poet takes his measure against the city. In the poem there are some subtle classical allusions to famous travelers. Some fared well on their journeys; some did not. Some found what they sought; others did not. Even Thoreau warned that though we make a pilgrimage, when we get there we are the same sorry soul we were when we left home. The last image of the poem is an admonitory “Odysseus shipwrecked.”
In “I Am Looking,” the poet makes a witty search for the Appalachian Ferlinghetti (1919- ), Ginsberg (1926-1997), and Kerouac (1922-1969). These sometimes denizens of San Francisco register with varying degrees on the twenty somethings of today. When Ginsberg visited our campus shortly before he died, all they wanted to talk with him about were drugs. The estimable Ferlinghetti is barely a blip on their radar anymore. Kerouac they may know, but for all the wrong reasons. The poet says he is looking for Superman and Roy Rogers, too. He may as well. Fat lot of good the poets have done his world.
It’s not just poetry envy “I Am Looking” expresses. In Appalachia, we have writers aplenty to match those he names 10 times over. Ray Allen knows that.
But where are the national, even international, reputations of those Appalachian writers compared to Superman and Roy Rogers? Indeed, where is the reputation of poetry at all in today’s consumer-haunted world?
I recommend that the reader not rush through Ray Allen’s book. I recommend that the reader savor each poem. Some are deeply, darkly serious some are light and whimsical. I have to admire a poet who will throw in a limerick about a dog and a skunk among elegies and familial memories. Not everyone can get away with that. Ray Allen can pull it off because, if the reader has paid attention, he knows Ray Allen has learned to discriminate between chronological time and redeemed time. The Greeks called the former “kronos” and the latter “kairos.” A dog and a skunk (“Hunter’s Reward”) in the wrong place at the wrong time is kronos. A poet remembering his dying father (“Where my Father Sat”) is experiencing kairos. I leave it to the reader to decide which sort of “time” any given poem celebrates. Is the memory of a young daughter’s expression of love (“Reading Lesson”) merely kronos, or is it kairos, time redeemed? Is the story of a neighborly widower (“My Neighbor’s Tulips”) something just to pass the time, or a glimpse beyond time itself? Intersections with the eternal abound in this collection.
The master has come down from the mountain. He has spoken his piece. Now it is up to us, his disciples and fellow travelers to make of it what we will. I have met the Appalachian Ferlinghetti, and the Appalachian Ginsberg, and the Appalachian Kerouac. I have even met the Appalachian Superman and Roy Rogers. I won’t tell you which one Ray Allen is. He might be none or he might be a little bit of each. “An Appalachian Poet in San Francisco” is your chance to find out for yourself. But, take your time. Redeem your time.
“An Appalachian Poet in San Francisco.” Mountain Empire Publications, Clifton Forge, Va., $14.95 paperback.
