Scattered Light: January 2009

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

...in which Janet returns the favor

I think in images. To present images in a more definite space, putting the psychology of emotion under the light, I improvise in a spontaneous vein. I’m led around by the brush in an automatic way that allows for sensitivity. Subsequent decisions are then made from practice and experience. Executed premeditated meaning makes lifeless art—no improvisation, no process.I work like an expressionist, with the figure in the style of the German expressionists, and the space abstract expressionist.

I do a sketch before the actual painting. The touch of brush to canvas leads in an intuitive direction, so that the painting doesn't exactly look like the sketch--fortunately--or the process would get boring, with little room for imagination or spontaneity.

The meaning in my work is the poetry between image and space—implied rather than overt. Landscape is abstract and can be felt. The figurative elements are the elements I often start with. The space is improvised. In my drawings, I make figures in a space suited to them. Using the figurative head in an abstract space focuses the relationship between the figurative and abstract elements and lets the viewer experience the psychology of the human figure. To connect the head to its surroundings, I add various elements to establish the psychological relationship between head and space. I am especially interested in what happens when the space becomes an image.

Cheryl tries to talk over Janet's head

One Sunday, my husband was reading the paper when he burst into laughter. “What? What?” I asked. He showed me a cartoon of two brothers and eight nephews drowning. “Well, that’s macabre.”

“No, that’s Hamilton’s Rule,” he told me, “which tells us under what conditions altruism is manifested. The man on the shore must determine how many nephews are worth one brother.” Just the scaffolding I needed for my new novel, Rescuing Ranu! It would be interesting to put my protagonist, the headstrong mathematician Nela from Shiva's Arms, in a situation where she would be forced to go from abstract thinker to selfless guardian.

Other questions arose from that. How related do you have to be to make the cost-benefit ratio of saving someone favorable? And what of the relationships not based on blood? Since Nela had to undergo some kind of transformation, what could be the catalyst for such a change? A man? A child? Possibly. Love could soften the emotional scar tissue Nela had built up through years of straddling two cultures. The plight of immigrants, the lives they make elsewhere, and the families they leave behind, raised yet another question: how much can a person stand to lose? When confronted with dueling loyalties, which part of a divided self goes, and what stays? Themes began to take shape on the page---and suddenly I was in business. This is the the plot in a nutshell:

In a run-down motel in India, Nela Sambashivan tries to regroup after a stalled romance and an academic power struggle. Intending to research the mathematics of collectives, she is drawn instead into the lives of ten year old Ranu, the cunning motel keeper who exploits her, and a village elder named Uncle, who believes that everything is for sale.

At a vegetable vendor’s one day, Nela happens upon her old lover, Jackson, sick and abandoned by his civil engineering crew. She takes him back to her shack and nurses him. They rekindle their affair, and as Jackson regains his health, he takes on Nela’s concerns about Ranu. With the goal of leaving the child better off than the way they found her, the couple travels to her village to meet with Uncle, who finagles their help in modernizing the place.

As a thank you, Uncle offers Ranu’s baby sister, Meera, to Jackson and Nela. Appalled, they pay him another visit, intending to confront him but interrupting a marriage-brokering. A glimpse of a red wedding sari and smoke from a ceremonial fire confirms their worst suspicions. They daringly charge the ritual and rescue Ranu from a forced marriage. Nela is injured, and while she recovers, she hatches a plan to adopt Ranu and take her back to her university town. Jackson has other wars to wage, and stays behind.

Ranu unexpectedly fails to thrive in her new, foreign surroundings, and Nela must confront her miscalculations. In its recursive turning ever homeward, Rescuing Ranu opens into a meditation on sacrifice, survival, and the mysterious alchemy of love.

Happy Birthday, Jackson Pollock

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Poet of the Week

Cheryl has a poem at Poetry Super Highway courtesy the hard-working, discerning, Rick Lupert. Thanks, Rick!

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Yes, We Can

We are a people who began from a Yes,
A nation born of the yes in the farmland,
The yes engraved in the dirt and stone,
In the mines, in the sea, in the machines
That made girders that made cities,
In the big ideas that make us human,
In the yes that comes to every street
Where there endures a love of forebears
And a net for children when they fall,
Where there was a yes to “Let’s try,”
And a yes, we can do better, and a yes
That grew to enfold our largest America.
Yes to the high-rise ironworker, yes
To the diggers of tunnels and the pilots,
Yes to those still on line, to the makers,
The builders, the haulers, the guardians,
To the teachers who had to make do.
It is the yes that sings, and lights up the dark.
It is the yes in the myriad colors of unity,
And in what it means to be a grownup.
In the gasoline rainbows by the curb
As the parent takes his child to school
And the parent takes her lunch bucket to work,
And the father carries his papers
And the schoolchild her homework,
The carpenter her measure, the fisherman his tackle,
And who dares say, no we can’t, at sunup?
Have you heard the cry of yes in the newborn
At his mother’s breast, and heard the yes
Whispering in the fields at harvest time?
There is a yes that will not be shushed
In the head of the scientist weary at her desk
And in the doctor as he studies the x-rays
After hours. We are the yes from every continent,
The yes born of flesh and blood that came
By steerage and slave ship, the manyness
Of all who were this nation’s first people
Or came after, by many paths, whatever it took.
We have been an aggregate of wishes
And hopes, of the future, of blessings, of aches
And pleasure, of the sacred liberties
For which families have labored and grieved.
We still want to say yes, yes to equality,
Yes to the best in us, yes and yes to the idea
That we will be judged by what we do for others
For free, and so we have said yes, and yes again,
One nation, one people, and yes, we can.

--by Marvin Bell

Monday, January 19, 2009

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Fitness Tip #1

This painting was inspired by the whirlpool at Janet's gym, and is offered here to inspire you to get back in there, before the holiday fat sticks.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Literature, CSI Style

"John Webster said, 'Death hath 1,000 doors to let out life.' Now let's see which one our victim took."

"As Lord Byron once said: 'In a desert, a fountain is springing.' " (Colleague: "Well, this one sprung a dead woman.")

"Freud said the only unusual sexual behavior is to have none at all, and after that it's just a question of opportunity and preference."

Upon examining a severed head, quoting Washington Irving: "Ichabod was horror-struck in perceiving that he was headless."

As the CSI team is being split up: "Heraclitus once said, 'It is in changing that we find purpose.' "

--Washington Post

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Facebook

Introducing our Facebook fan page for MULTIVERSE! You can discuss the book with us, share your own work, or enjoy some of fab virtual, calorie-free food.

We have a group,too, and we'll be hosting a book giveaway very soon. See you there!

Monday, January 05, 2009

Floating

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Beltway Poetry

Cheryl's poem "Guarding Ginevra" appears in Beltway Poetry's Museum issue today.

From the publisher:

Beltway Poetry opens 2009 with a new issue devoted entirely to poems about museums. Thirty-three poets write about museums, historical sites, and other public places devoted to preservation and exhibition. The poems address the institutions and "their collections, their workers, and the many ways in which they fulfill their founders’ hopes of enlarging the scope of civic life," as guest co-editor Maureen Thorson writes in her introduction. "In these poems, poets engage in conversations with artists, their subjects, and with art itself. They stand in witness to the forces of history."

So join us in this luminous collection of poems. Saundra Rose Maley asks King Tut,"...is there a crossing over/ Or is this life just what it is, a sandal strap/At best?" Margaret Yocom speaks in the voice of a man who amassed old logging equipment for a museum in Maine. Kendra Kopelke lets the woman in a Hopper painting speak: " He put me here/like a candle/to ignite the room." Stephen Cushman imagines painter's models, "posing in a yoga twist,/head going one way, torso another." David Gewanter writes of a museum store clerk, " I love to see my mother behind//the counter, tidying up the fossil fish/and reptile rulers." Linda Pastan contemplates death from a safe distance, asking, " Whose skulls are these,/and isn't it dread/that informs our pleasure//in this canvas?"

Poets included:
M.C. Allan * Francisco Aragón * Anne Becker * Mel Belin * Rose Berger * Jody Bolz * Dan Brady * Sarah Browning * Stephen Cushman * Kyle Dargan * Amani Elkassabany * Martin Galvin * Parris Garnier * David Gewanter * Andrew Haley * Reginald Harris * Alan King * Rosemary Klein * Kendra Kopelke * Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda * Mary Ann Larkin * Barbara Lefcowitz * Saundra Rose Maley * Lalita Noronha * Linda Pastan * Ann Rayburn * M.A. Schaffner * Edna Small * Cheryl Snell * Marcela Sulak * Melissa Tuckey * Margaret Yocom * Katherine E. Young

Special thanks to editorial assistants Jessica Roxburgh and Alyssa Schimmel for their work on this issue.

Beltway Poetry Quarterly, now in its ninth year of online publication, is available for free online at http://www.beltwaypoetry.com.

>>>>>>
Subscribe!
Subscriptions are free. There are two options.
JOURNAL ONLY. If you would like to get email notices four times a year with announcements of new issues, please join our subscription list at Mutual Aid. Go to: http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/beltwaypoetryquarterly.
DC LOCAL LISTINGS. Want more? If you would like a subscription PLUS information about readings, calls for entry, and other literary events in the greater DC region, please join our DC list at Mutual Aid. Go to: http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman./listinfo/beltway.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

What They Say

The Blend of Visual and Written Art

THAT FEEL is one of the finest collaborative books published by the sisters Snell. Cheryl Snell is a fine poet and her sister Janet Snell is a fine expressionist artist. In their previous books there was often the question of whether Janet was illustrating Cheryl's poetry or if perhaps each artist made her art and then combined it in the most suitable manner.

Now it is obvious that the art that spreads across both sides of an open book is unified and equally involved in the nidus of expression. The poems and art of THAT FEEL seem to be more visceral than those that came before them - these are poems from the gut, art about alienation and longing and rapturous moments that fade too quickly (or were they even there?). For example in the combined expression of the following, the painting accompanying the poem is that of two faces distorted by reflection in glass or mirror or memory:

REFLECTIONS IN CRACKED GLASS

Each brush stroke had been its own allegory

and could not reconcile the break. I felt for

connection in blind corridors, whispering

Who's there? from within the room's glass

eye.

Maybe I was dreaming. The facts were hard

to parse and sometimes lied. I did, too,

confused by what my reflection showed. The

glass distorted it and the fissure widened from

a thin red line. It splintered our embrace and

again I was alone.

The book may be brief but it is a powerful one. The only criticism about this latest opus is the somewhat disjointed feeling of the varying fonts or typefaces the artists used. Those wide variations of print diminish the tone of the poetry/art like unwanted audience distracters. But that is a minor complaint in a book that further substantiates the excellent collaborative efforts of the sisters Snell. --Grady Harp

Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review)
by Matthew Biberman

Any one who frequents the fiction section of a good independent bookstore knows that there is something of a cottage industry of writers currently churning out fiction invested in capturing the lived experience of ex‐pat Indians who have moved to America. One of the more distinctive elements of this sub‐genre is its investment in detailing life in India as well as in America, most often in ways that include, often in great detail, the back stories of the
characters before their decision to move away from their home land.
A recent addition to this stack of books is Cheryl Snell’s first novel, Shiva’s Arms. I know and admire Cheryl first and foremost as a poet, a fact that inevitably colored my reading of this book. Indeed I would encourage anyone who begins Shiva’s Arms to keep this fact in mind because I believe it influences the writing of this novel all the way down to its essence. Cheryl’s poetic eye is not just visible in the felicitous phrase, though the book is filled with such moments. A conversation in an Indian cab takes place in a dialect that sounds “like gravel in their mouths.” When a character unravels, we see that her eyes are “blue puddles in her slack face.” Food gets sopped up “in a baseball mitt” of bread. But to read Shiva’s Arms for its precise, poetic imagery is to skate along an iced over lake without any thought to the depths below.
The true challenge of Shiva’s Arms is to recognize that it is a very ambitious—indeed, innovative piece of writing. It is an experiment in what I would call a transversal novel. Shiva’s Arms takes shape somewhere between the sonnet craze that swept Shakespeare’s England four centuries ago and the cinematic techniques often identified as producing the Rashomon effect in twentieth century avant garde film.
First we must think about that now largely obsolete form—the sonnet sequence. Generally understood to have been popularized by Petrarch with his love poems to Laura, the sonnet sequence flourished in the late sixteenth century in London. Shakespeare’s effort is a very late example, and perhaps for that reason, breaks new ground. For the first time, the poet is repeatedly identified with the speaker of the poems (think of all those puns on Will) and the beloved is not simply idealized (famously, her eyes are nothing like the sun) but also unfaithful. Nor is the narrative clear. When you read Shakespeare’s poems it is as if you are reading a novel in snap shots, but with this twist: as you read it dawns on you that somehow the poems are no longer in chronological order
While keeping that experience in mind, let us flash forward to the art house movie. Famously, Kurosawa made a film‐‐Rashomon (1950) that retells a crime from four different perspectives, a device that highlights the complex and dynamic nature of reality. What the Rashomon effect
highlights is the truth that though reality is intersubjective (that is, reality is a collective formation), this “collective hallucination” (to use Freud’s term) is inevitably being made by individuals who are experiencing what is happening in ways that are always at once congruent and divergent.
What Cheryl has done in Shiva’s Arms is to present the story of an extended family in a novel that combines both of these techniques. The result can be described as a novel where each chapter operates as a kind of intense short poem, that is‐‐ as a sonnet. The chapters do not,however, anchor the reader to one character. Rather, the reader is passed from character to character. We begin tied to the American Alice, but then pass on to her husband Ram, and then their child Sam. This primary pattern is however interrupted with detours into Ram’s mother Amma, and ‐‐ with increasing frequency as the book builds to its conclusion ‐‐ the shunned sister Nela. With each shift, a different perspective is showcased. In strategy, the result is reminiscent of some of our most celebrated modernist novels, books such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come immediately to mind. But in those works, the effect encourages the reader to separate out the characters so that the readers gains a satisfying sense that people are unique, yet isolated, grounded but limited to their bodies.
The effect that Snell produces in Shiva’s Arms is striking because it works in reverse. People in families get caught up in each other so that the configurations shift and change. Suddenly the notion that we are limited to our physical bodies falls away. We meld in our struggles, mix and combine in ways that defeat the macro laws of physics both in terms of space and even time. In this, Snell’s work is reminiscent of Djuna Barnes cult masterpiece Nightwood, though the overall mood is far more evocative of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.
For me the high points of Shiva’s Arms come when Snell renders the rapid blooming of a state of existential dread. The effect is positively unsettling in its intensity, most especially early in the novel after Alice’s marriage precipitates a psychological crisis. The concluding confrontation between Amma and Alice is even more impressive, coming as it does so effectively after the dramatic resolution of the dinner immediately preceding it. Fights in Shiva Arms do not end with characters walling themselves off. Everything drives toward mixture, a fact highlighted by Ram when he observes that “we are all just chemistry labs.” This theme is made overt via the role food plays in this novel complete with Recipes, a crowning touch.
According to western cliché, cooking and food illustrate how each of us enjoys a unique and colorful heritage of goodness. True to its radical nature, Shiva’s Arms upends that idea and puts in place the notion that each of us is but an ingredient, a blend that makes up the bigger whole.
Shiva’s Arms is a satisfying novel that demands much from its reader. Its strengths are many but if I had to pick one on which to end I will stress that this is a book that provocatively challenges many of the most cherished presumptions propping up many well known examples of Indian – American fiction, or indeed of multicultural literature generally speaking. Despite paying lip service to the idea that western notions of subjectivity are not universal, most writers working in the genre of the English novel continue to present nonwestern forms of consciousness via free standing western characters. In stark contrast, Shiva’s Arms invites you to imagine characters that are interconnected parts of a larger whole. Such a radical insight can only come from a novelist of great talent and skillful execution. With luck, future novels from Cheryl Snell will deepen this exploration. As a reader I certainly look forward to the adventure.

Prisoner's Dilemma:...The diction here, precise and yet off-hand, coupled with the unexpected coupling of ideas (beauty – rivers – the girl who knows all the boys desire her) places Snell on intimate relations with the main currents of twentieth century American poetry, a landscape marked by masters such as John Ashberry, Mark Strand, Louise Bogan and Louise Gluck, to name but a few poets associated with the style Alan Williamson (himself a fine poet) dubbed the new American surrealism. And yet Snell—or rather the Snells—for the book I am reviewing, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, is a collection that alternates between Cheryl’s short lyric poems and Janet’s pencil drawings -- stands apart.

The difference is hard to explain, so lets be blunt: in the best of Cheryl’s work, the style regains its vigor, enlivened by the poet’s deep sense of what it means to be caught up in life. A digression on Freud may help here because we are on the subject of digressions. Freud could never stop being fascinated by the notion that it is life that is the interruption. Not death. The immortal is the natural state. But somehow we find ourselves shunted and routed out of the immortal and into the detour of the mortal for a brief go round before flowing back into the immortal, back into death, and the beyond of death. Cheryl Snell’s poetry, and Janet’s art, together illuminate this insight: that the detour into life is a circular whirlpool. --Matthew Biberman

It could be the case that those human heads are floating in a paradoxical space: yes, obviously human (and all that that signals to us) but also pure moments of form. Cephalic shapes to circumscribe color-vacuums, lending force to the other “objects.”Another impression jumps into my own head, beyond what I said above about...well, whatever it was I said. For me, I feel like I'm looking at a negative-image of consciousness. The subconscious? Maybe. And what's weird and cool is that those heads, drained of color and feature detail, seem to express more human soulfulness and depth than even a portrait by Rembrandt!...Tim Buck

There is something of Keats's “negative capability” revealed in this poignant story: it is a mystery to me how a female author can so perfectly inhabit the hurting corners of a middle-aged man's soul. And her striking turns of phrase bring delight to the reader, even as he squirms and winces in sympathy with Roger...Tim Buck

The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope...Rosy Cole

...This is a collection of poems to be lingered over, like reminders of first views or experiences we usually keep to ourselves for fear that speaking of them will make them lost to us. Snell has captured these moments and we can only hope she will continue to write such tender thoughts as well as in MULTIVERSE. ---Grady Harp

Marilyn Kallet, on Multiverse:
"Cheryl Snell's poems are rich, integrative, witty, and beautifully composed."

This is not poetry merely to beguile the imagination; it is experience by vital proxy, full of pulse and texture and radiance. Memento Mori is a tour de force. (R.Cole)

"... Both Snells' (author and painter) works soar in this lovely book. It was interesting to watch the movement of fear between the poems...A nervous and wonderful collection of art fused with poetry."--Andrew Demcak, on Multiverse

Dorothy Shin, Akron Beacon Journal--
"Her work is dark,mysterious, seemingly drawn from the subconscious...Foreboding, regret, entrapment, longing and enigma vie for prominence while gestural, expressive brushwork gives the forms a supernormal tension and energy..."

Bob Grumman, Taproot--"Macabre, comic, mysterious, and subtly erotic, these fascinating drawings constantly flirt with disgust -- a perfect example of graphic black humor. "

"A series of charcoal drawings that go darkly anywhere via an expressionism that reminds me of Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon. Snell provides poems for her illustrations that generally extend rather than just rephrase them-- ."

... varied and beautifully imaged lyric narratives...Again, she stuns us with her imagery.---Comstock Review