Jackson Jambalaya

[If you're as sick of this subject--Maria Wyeth and the JFP--as I am (and you couldn't possibly be, since it has now surpassed the Continuing Saga of Britney Spears in things I never want to hear another word about), please skip the first three paragraphs. I mean, if a subject were the largest ball-bearing-producing city in the world, this subject would be, by this point, Dayton, Ohio.] See http://kingfish1935.blogspot.com/2007/11/paranoia-sets-in.html

Apparently Donna Ladd is one of the last people in Jackson to figure out that Maria Wyeth was me, but I must admit I find it mildly amusing to keep getting hammered on a site I am banned from posting to. For the record, I have never asked her paper for a favor; my publisher contacted the JFP when my third collection of poems, Dark Familiar, was published in 2006. (They also contacted the Clarion-Ledger and several other newspapers.) The book was well-reviewed by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The Courier-Journal, and many, many literary magazines and online sites. The reading/ signing I did at Lemuria (despite the fact that the JFP got the time wrong in their article) was attended by a hundred and fifty people.

My private emails to Ms. Ladd, while critical in some respects of her newspaper, were conciliatory in tone, and I had hoped to resolve this, since I am in agreement with so many of the goals she has for Mississippi, and think a strong alternative weekly is essential to making Jackson a viable place to live. While I don't regret anything I posted (or attempted to post) to her website, I might handle it differently if I had it to do all over again, since my intention was not to hurt Ms. Ladd, which it appears that I have done. I was expressing what I thought, about the topic in question, and my feelings about the ways in which I thought the JFP had not served Jackson as well it could. I am sorry to have caused her pain and what appears to be lingering anger.

And that, I hope, is the last I have to say on the subject.

Kingfish has invited me to blog on his site, an invitation I have gratefully accepted. I am a poet; I've published three books and edited a couple of others; I love to teach, but I'm not an academic. Fortunately, institutions of higher learning in Mississippi are familiar with the notion of a writer-in-residence. I've spent much of my adult life involved in getting poetry into places where it usually isn't (public schools, correctional facilities, nursing homes, literacy programs). I'm passionately interested in politics, but have no--ZERO, ZILCH, NADA--interest in writing about politics, so I plan to write about books and other cultural and even non-cultural stuff that interests me. (Jackson seems to have the political waterfront well-covered; I'm going to meander over to some other subjects that seem undercovered.)

In the last few years, usenet has grown rather anemic because people--including many of my close online friends--have abandoned it in favor of what I call blogatory (see Dante reference below). So I guess it's inevitable that I would eventually succumb to the siren song of the internet's preferred method of expression--the dreaded blog.

I always have several books I'm reading concurrently; right now I'm reading Janet Evanovitch's Eleven on Top; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain; and Zero: The Biography of A Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. I just started the Evanovitch, so I don't know if the prevailing view that it's not quite as good as earlier books in the series is true, but she does manage to combine a certain manageable level of violence with hilarity in her books, which I find seductive.

Whenever something serious happens in my life, I turn to great literature--not surprising for a poet or a lover of poetry--and I've re-read most of Shakespeare and many books about Shakespeare (some of them silly, some way too academic, and some enlightening) in the last couple of years. This past August I decided I needed to read The Divine Comedy, which I had never read all of, and I chose the fairly new Allen Mandelbaum translation, which is superb. This reading of Dante has reshaped my ideas about my fourth book of poems, which I am working on now. Dante's not light reading, and I would advise you to have a Robert Parker or something else going on the side if you take it on.

I was never a good student; I'm by temperament an introvert and an autodidact. I think I almost flunked out of college one semester because I decided to read all of Andre Gide, the more obscure French symbolistes, and a lot of Thomas Mann.

This tendency accounts for huge voids in my education, such as virtually all of nineteenth-century British fiction. Not to mention math. A big reason for my choosing the college I did was that it didn't demand one take a math class in order to graduate. Probably the most famous college textbook on poetry asked me, many years ago, if they could use some lines from a poem of mine that dealt with something called the asymptotic limit, which I had read about in one of those science-for-dummies magazines. The poetry textbook then goes on to comment that I am one of the few poets with an understanding of higher math. Long, long, long before bawhahahahahaha became an expression, people close to me were screaming it when they realized that anyone believed I had any understanding of higher math. (I do have an uncanny ability to calculate what an extra 35 per cent off of a garment already marked down 75 per cent is: my math skills begin and end there.)

But I had never read The Magic Mountain and I can't remember why; maybe because it is Very Long and also because I didn't think a novel about a bunch of people with tuberculosis in a posh sanitorium in the Alps would be all that interesting. Turns out I was wrong: it's an incredibly interesting book and I'm finding it not only stimulating in a great-literature kind of way, but also relevant to things going on today (war and HIV, for two).

Oh, one more book I highly recommend. James Lee Burke, who started out as a literary writer and then evidently decided he didn't want to remain poor and unknown his entire life, has a crime series, which features a New Iberia cop named Dave Robicheaux. The latest is called The Tin Roof Blowdown, and while it's a crime novel--and plenty violent--it also contains some of the very best writing I've read about Katrina and that other, largely forgotten, tragedy, Hurricane Rita. Very few books leave me in tears, and certainly not crime novels, but I was weeping when I finished this one. You don't need to have read all the novels in this series to read this one (although I'd highly recommend the first one, Neon Rain, because it lets you know some essential things about the character, as well as the circumstances under which he found his beloved adopted daughter, Alafair. Neon Rain deals with immigration issues: consider yourself warned.) (If I believed in emoticons, which I emphatically do not, I would now put one of those smiley face things here.)

For the record, I also have a distinctly non-literary side, and can talk fairly obsessively about shoes; college basketball; Joni Mitchell; Stephen Sondheim; (some of) MTV's tackier reality shows; cats (we have four); midcentury furniture; Kentucky history; Will Farrell movies; and painting, especially abstract expressionism. I have an insatiable interest in conspiracy theories (JFK, UFOs, contrails, the sorts of things Art Bell used to discuss on his radio show), but don't believe them, i.e. I think Oswald was the long gunman.

I love McDades because they always keep two extra flats of Tab (yes, Tab, the diet drink in the pink can, and YES, they DO still make it) in the back. Therefore, if something happens in the distribution process, McDades will be able to satisfy the Jackson Tab Addicts, who are so not in a good mood when Tab is unavailable. My husband claims he'd rather handle a rabid wolverine than deal with me when we run out of Tab. McDades has prevented this unfortunate transformation from occuring the entire sixteen years we've lived in Jackson.

Kingfish note: Here is a link to one of Aleda's poems.
http://www.versedaily.org/2006/songabducted.shtml