Darkness into Light
Will Wright, my friend edited my original verion, making some very strong firm changes and the original title was “Rain on Any Roof."
I thank him for his watchful eye. I do think he made it better. Presented here is the full version I submitted to him, which I put through about six revisions myself.
An introduction by James Enelow
Every night, when the light retracts into darkness, and slow, shadow time begins, before I move slowly to the bed and surrender, I think of Stephen Gardner--my first mentor. In November of 2009, two days before my birthday Stephen Gardner passed away, and on my birthday, he was honored by the University of South Carolina at Aiken. At his funeral service many of his former students showed up, to spread his ashes and celebrate the man who believed in them and who made it possible for many to go to graduate school or become published. In his last years, he experienced a wealth of “spiritual” sons and daughters whose successes he nurtured and nourished even after a second divorce and at the expense of his own writing and publication record.
So much of Stephen's own work is ingrained in the world of shadow and darkness, where a lonely “narrator-would-be-writer of sorts” sits in the engulfing dark and searches for any epiphany of light. One of the first poems I wrote for Stephen, “After Months of Intense Therapy He Tries to Rebuild His Life.” was similar to many of Stephen’s works, though I have no idea if Stephen ever liked Fairytale poems.
Regardless, Stephen bolstered my work because I believe he saw something in it, whether it was the lament of an adult for a time of his childhood or the story of a broken Giant who rolled in his sleep, every night before going out to weed his garden of anything resembling a bean sprout. At twenty-two, I had slipped into Stephen Gardner’s world, and it was only after leaving his grasp, reading all of Theodore Roethke, James Dickey, and quite a bit of Dylan Thomas, that I understood Stephen’s voice.
Stephen's poetry is tethered to the shadows of the human soul, but also the actual darkness of the body, struggling with age, infirmity, or moral weakness--transcending from light to darkness and darkness into light. A reader encountering him must struggle through darkness, starved and searching until rescued out by the quiet epiphanies of middle age.
My first foray into Stephen Gardner's work was his honor's thesis, which held so many intriguing works including many male narrators unwittingly acting in sadness or in anger, lunatics searching the night for some poetic transformation through James Dicky-like union or death. Most appropriately his works contain people in search of answers through all manner of objects and rituals, from ex-wives who become stewardesses and
fly
off in planes, to men watching late night television, midnight
refrigerator raids or the almost Hemingway-like need for Keatsian
droughts of alcohol to numb the sense and induce dreams.
Gardner's search is similar to that of Dylan Thomas’s speaker in “In My Craft or Sullen Art” who struggles to painstakingly craft each line, producing sometimes little more than two or three words--that midnight poet of middle age, bereft of youth, and filled with memories of a younger, stronger and more adept body. This is how I see my first mentor. And when Stephen let me into his world, by passing me his thesis or printing for me his master poem list, I was hooked. How could I know I would come to love the twilight poet, regretting lost loves, and the temptations of his profession. In a similar vein I explored themes such as Stephen’s “To My Student who Wears God on a Chain,” in my own poem, “To Tiffany Who Tried to Save my Soul in the Washateria.” Stephen's poem, “Video Remote and the One with the Heart of Gold” is an amazing portrait of a man, sitting up, watching television and clicking anxiously between two types of films, a horror/slasher movie and something along the lines of a late night adult film on Cinemax—which humorously creates an almost James Dickey-like union of sex and violence.
Gardner’s poems specifically play with visual media, and it was easy for me to fall in love with them. And for a young poet it was impossible not to emulate him. So, I followed in his footsteps, writing my own version of his television pastiche, called, “Between Channels,” and eventually after reading "2 a.m., incense, a quart of gin, my dog with a bone" writing my own homage poem, “Night Writing Without You.” Many of my earliest poems, and perhaps (If I may say, some of my best) were poems in the vein of Stephen Gardner's works. And through Stephen would probably have stopped me from writing like him. Stephen was, for me, a real poet, greater than any bread loaf or Iowa Poetry Prize winner, similar to the fugitives, and the beats, confessional at times, but also fanciful, stretching his range to create powerful surprises, and dark, delightful themes.
There are many times I have no words for Stephen's true gift to me, which is that he allowed me to steal from him—his themes and his visions. He was, what a true teacher should be, caring yet distant, and nurturing--without overreaching.
His first gift to me was poetry, and from that, the roots of Southern poetry. Stephen's own voice was un-mistakably southern, and his concerns, uniquely Southern: love, lost love, the inner depths and degradations of men's souls, but he also wrote a series of fine poems in the voice of a woman, Eva, whose life journey mimicked his own from graduate school and home, along several cities of the Southern states until he became a distinguished chair at the University of South Carolina at Aiken. His poems tackled weighty matters of the soul: religion, obsession, sex and oblivion. Like any good poet he tackled the poem sequence, working in collaboration with Doctor Phebe Davidson, and these last works show a man come to terms with his life. His speaker, a traveling Bible salesman, writes letters home to his wife while he goes on a “spiritual” walkabout of the back roads landscape of the old South. These are the last poems I know of and they are uplifting and brave--they are transcendent to the limits of the human body and character that was Stephen Gardner. Even now, as I write the last of these words, this is how I want to remember him—the last shadows of doubt have left him, and open before all is a man who found love in what he does, not in what he never got to do. Like the speaker of a later poem, “Miles from Jannette,” inspired by Jannette Giles, another of his students, his speaker states “Rain on any roof is as good as love.” One can almost hear the statement, from him, “My students poems are as good as mine,” and that’s all that needs to be said.
Gardner's search is similar to that of Dylan Thomas’s speaker in “In My Craft or Sullen Art” who struggles to painstakingly craft each line, producing sometimes little more than two or three words--that midnight poet of middle age, bereft of youth, and filled with memories of a younger, stronger and more adept body. This is how I see my first mentor. And when Stephen let me into his world, by passing me his thesis or printing for me his master poem list, I was hooked. How could I know I would come to love the twilight poet, regretting lost loves, and the temptations of his profession. In a similar vein I explored themes such as Stephen’s “To My Student who Wears God on a Chain,” in my own poem, “To Tiffany Who Tried to Save my Soul in the Washateria.” Stephen's poem, “Video Remote and the One with the Heart of Gold” is an amazing portrait of a man, sitting up, watching television and clicking anxiously between two types of films, a horror/slasher movie and something along the lines of a late night adult film on Cinemax—which humorously creates an almost James Dickey-like union of sex and violence.
Gardner’s poems specifically play with visual media, and it was easy for me to fall in love with them. And for a young poet it was impossible not to emulate him. So, I followed in his footsteps, writing my own version of his television pastiche, called, “Between Channels,” and eventually after reading "2 a.m., incense, a quart of gin, my dog with a bone" writing my own homage poem, “Night Writing Without You.” Many of my earliest poems, and perhaps (If I may say, some of my best) were poems in the vein of Stephen Gardner's works. And through Stephen would probably have stopped me from writing like him. Stephen was, for me, a real poet, greater than any bread loaf or Iowa Poetry Prize winner, similar to the fugitives, and the beats, confessional at times, but also fanciful, stretching his range to create powerful surprises, and dark, delightful themes.
There are many times I have no words for Stephen's true gift to me, which is that he allowed me to steal from him—his themes and his visions. He was, what a true teacher should be, caring yet distant, and nurturing--without overreaching.
His first gift to me was poetry, and from that, the roots of Southern poetry. Stephen's own voice was un-mistakably southern, and his concerns, uniquely Southern: love, lost love, the inner depths and degradations of men's souls, but he also wrote a series of fine poems in the voice of a woman, Eva, whose life journey mimicked his own from graduate school and home, along several cities of the Southern states until he became a distinguished chair at the University of South Carolina at Aiken. His poems tackled weighty matters of the soul: religion, obsession, sex and oblivion. Like any good poet he tackled the poem sequence, working in collaboration with Doctor Phebe Davidson, and these last works show a man come to terms with his life. His speaker, a traveling Bible salesman, writes letters home to his wife while he goes on a “spiritual” walkabout of the back roads landscape of the old South. These are the last poems I know of and they are uplifting and brave--they are transcendent to the limits of the human body and character that was Stephen Gardner. Even now, as I write the last of these words, this is how I want to remember him—the last shadows of doubt have left him, and open before all is a man who found love in what he does, not in what he never got to do. Like the speaker of a later poem, “Miles from Jannette,” inspired by Jannette Giles, another of his students, his speaker states “Rain on any roof is as good as love.” One can almost hear the statement, from him, “My students poems are as good as mine,” and that’s all that needs to be said.
The Speaker in these poems is the Stephen Gardner, victorious and triumphant, who sacrificed his own writing for his students, so they could succeed--who saw a future in his student’s forms and bodies of work that transcended his own failing body.
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