
"Poetry is the Music of the Soul..." --Voltaire
“All Winter I Remained With the Dead,” “How Many Times Mayakovsky,” and “Black-capped Chickadees” by Dianna MacKinnon Henning appeared in Issue 19 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about these three poems.
Join us on Saturday May 6 at 4pm for a poetry reading by Lassen County poet Dianna Henning and El Dorado County Poet Laureate Lara Gularte.
Dianna MacKinnon Henning has taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several California Arts Council grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program, including Folsom Prison. Recent Publications: MacQueen’s Quinterly; Artemis Journal; Memoir Magazine; The Adirondack Review; The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester; Pacific Poetry; New American Writing; The Moth, Ireland; Mojave River Review; the New Verse News; Sequestrum; VerseVirtual and Naugatuck River Review. Six-time Pushcart nominee. MFA in Writing ’89 from Vermont College, Montpelier, VT. Henning’s fourth poetry book, “Camaraderie of the Marvelous,” published Sept. 2021 through Kelsay Books. (Dianna’s latest nomination for a Pushcart was from the Adirondack Review 2021.) She currently runs the Thompson Peak Writers’ Workshop which has been in operation for twenty-seven years, and she is the founder of the workshop. She participated in “Poetry Out Loud” for Lassen County in California. She currently is working on a new manuscript entitled “Rucksacks for the Leaf Cat.” Dianna’s says: Poetry is voice celebrating spirit.
Dianna’s website is: www.diannahenning.com
Lara Gularte is El Dorado County Poet Laureate 2021-2023. Her book of poetry, Fourth World Woman was published by “Finishing Line Press.” Kissing the Bee, her book about her California Portuguese pioneer ancestors was published by “The Bitter Oleander Press,” in 2018. Gularte earned an MFA degree from San Jose State University where she served as a poetry editor for Reed Magazine, and received the Anne Lillis Award for Creative Writing, along with several Phelan Awards. Nominated for some pushcart prizes, find her work in national and international journals and anthologies. She is affiliated with the Cigarros Colloquium: Azoreans Diaspora Writers, at the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI), California State University-Fresno. In 2017 she was a member of a delegation of American poets who participated in the International Festival of Poetry in Havana Cuba. In her quest to give people voice through the written word for free expression and empowerment, she is a teaching artist of creative writing at Mule Creek State Prison, and leads the workshops, Writing Our Words, at the “Cameron Park Library,” and Circle of Women Writers, at the “Wellness Center,” in El Dorado County, California.
The poetry reading will be held at the Plumas Arts Gallery 525 Main St in Quincy. Admission is $3 per person.
Call with any questions: 530-283-3402
1
This is my cutting board. These
are my hands adept at cutting. This
is my chicken whose neck I’ll sever.
My cutting board floods with new
geographies. I pluck my fingers of blood. Who
knows a woman’s aim when she swings?
The word-hands of the world lay wreaths
at the serifs of despair. Who says
it can’t be done? The potted
chicken boils and bubbles,
my poem, with time, rights itself.
This is my cutting board.
These are my hands. What happens
2
when it’s over remains,
this indenture to memory. Today, taste of your skin
suffices. Salt enters the bloodstream.
Don’t take me for a mad woman or shrew.
All day I’ve stirred. Yesterday, the river over-flowed
as we reclined on groundcover.
May I? May I, you’d asked. The river answered.
Already, I swoon in recall
of the Yuba, its fluctuance, its greed. He almost
3
swallowed me with his fame,
but I’m a sound woman and kept in mind:
I will, by sheer will, one day equal or surpass you.
Such belief is how a woman survives the Dominate.
That’s why my rock finally threw its punch.
You only lack character if you want to, said the priest.
Just ask the rock at the foot of Mt. Fuji.
I’ve since learned to enter rock with my breath.
I’ve always been fond of the hard.
From the preface of Camaraderie of the Marvelous: “I give praise for words that hold me captive and sometimes even dance into song”; to the last line of the last poem: “Percussion is a matter of attunement,” Dianna MacKinnon Henning’s new collection of poems gives us music and dancing; also, drought, hunger, shepherds, bodies of water, houses. The poems give us food: beans, tomatoes, honey garlic, tea, potatoes, bay laurel. And throughout these images, she portrays family and relationships with the keen eye of lived experience: marriage, children, broken relationships, old age. These poems are as attentive and forceful as they are private.
Poems in the first section of Camaraderie describe the consequences of animals and humans interacting in nature. Speaking of a doe: “Their hunger howled like coyotes in moonlight.” There are philosophical lines all the way through the book. “You’ll never / get used to the way memory / makes you live many lives.” Wisdom and emotion exist alongside rhubarb and stone children. The last poem in this chapter begins: “If you stare at something long enough it assumes a life of its own” as the speaker sees a leaf as a cat. Like staring at a specific word so long it seems to be spelled wrong.
Chapter 2 involves the domestic—the very soul of our lives: food, relationships, household, soup simmering, even a recipe for cooking Great Northern beans. I am drawn to this chapter because of its emphasis on the domestic. Such topics have been disparaged in the past (by men perhaps) and these poems have the sure-footedness of any of the others in Camaraderie. “ … luck is perseverance: keep at something / long enough and the gold of art / becomes revelation.” There is so much revelation in this collection of poems.
A description of the house of her marriage begins Chapter Three: “But houses are sometimes / astute scholars who study their people … when the people broke, the house, too.” The chapter ends with a poem with the wonderful title “The Old Woman Gathers her Memories and Makes a House Plan from Them.” This part of Camaraderie has elegies for aging and a marriage and a favored house. “Timber framing depends on the wood’s strength, / the memory of touch, how bones grew to accommodate flesh.” These lovely lines describe both the house and the marriage.
Chapter Four brings more of the world into the poems: “I can’t reconcile what is happening in the world,” always with awareness of the inner spaces of family and memory: “There were two races in our family: women and men … You’re to be seen, not heard.” We visit the family lake camp and the cellar of the family house. Cousins appear, death is a topic of discussion. “She wonders … if the dead, out of longing, draw close, waiting / for someone to tug them back.” There are elegies here, too. In the last poem of the section: “But what’s beautiful is the soul, its cocoon, as it flutters above / bedposts, a delicate hologram on the text of grief.”
Henning moves back to water and nature in Chapter Five. Rivers, stars, stones, a sparrow, chickadees. Then angel wings, a riverbed, the moon, the sea. “So much along the way was wonder.” Each image builds on the next, until the reader is awash in the galaxy, the universe. In the marvelous.
Camaraderie of the Marvelous is a woman’s gaze on the outside world and the inner spaces of her life and memory. It is full of wonder and marvels and the poet’s clear observations of her personal life and nature. “In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand,” says a Bob Dylan song. Henning sees these things and more. She conjures their underlying spirits for us.
William Carlos Williams said, “it is difficult / to get the news from poems … men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” But in this time of pandemic when no news seems to be good news, Camaraderie of the Marvelous is a welcome addition to the canon and to the lives of readers. I urge you to welcome Henning’s words into your life.
Liza Porter, author of Red Stain and Keep the Singing.
Published December 2021 here: http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ10X/Henning-Star-Drum.aspx