Scattered Light

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Predictors

Today we went shopping for boots
that may never be broken in
much less worn out. Too much reality
and our thoughts go to whimsy: a sudden desire
to learn the guitar, ideas for sculpting topiary,
choosing swatches for curtains
built to last. There’s the conviction
that once committed to a big project
the time we need to complete it
will unroll like fresh turf under our feet.
Who knows how long that grass will grow?
Medicine men may tamp it down with the old softshoe --
you can’t guarantee they won’t --
but one of them, wrung out with apologies,
will surely return with your next last chance
and the explanation that rescue works best
under a dark sky getting darker
the forecast filling with rain.

-This is from Cheryl's cancer sequence, LIVE THROUGH THIS, now in progress.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Mother

This lovely lady is ours, painted by Janet. Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

Thursday, May 09, 2013

Eating Beauty

click to hear Cheryl's portrait by Janet read a poem at Beau Blue's Cruzio Cafe

Thursday, May 02, 2013

Likeability in Fiction

PW asks the question. Claire Messud answers:
Q: I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.

A: For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?”
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/56848-an-unseemly-emotion-pw-talks-with-claire-messud.html

Monday, April 29, 2013

Duke Ellington:Birthday Series

Thursday, April 25, 2013

See This

Janet's got a piece in it.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Birthday Series: Janet Snell

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Birthday Series: Samuel Beckett

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Another for NaPo

BROWSE

She clatters through the back door

scowls at the librarian’s puckered shush,

scrapes chair to table, grabs a book

that falls open to text ticked and bracketed

by anonymous hands. She clucks softly,

angles the spine away from policing eyes,

searches each margin as if she had struck

the marks first, worried that some point

might be missed if not underscored yellow.

The girl sees impressions of her fingers

on the pages, hard evidence that books

are changed by readers they change.

She slaps covers closed, slides the volume

into the shelves and walks away empty-

handed, reverent, her mind roaring open.

(first appeared in Snakeskin)

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Birthday Series:Charles Baudelaire

Saturday, April 06, 2013

The Sisters Celebrate Poetry Month

Desire

Dusk

There’s the daylight in ruins,
and you here willing to be ruined too,
willing night to crawl across a city
full of men wanting to ruin you.
Here comes one now, ripe
with appetite and impulse,
without a clue of what it will take
to pull you out
of these details drowning
in orange and blue,
and into his own picture --
but you’re clear on that too,
transparent with buttercup hope
that this time will be different,
that this one will know how to see you.

(first appeared in Blood Lotus)

Undertow

On the way down,
she sees what
blue swells
and whitecaps
are not: not fists
of diamonds,
nor rocking hips,
not rippling
limbs tossing up fish
nor are they sorry
for the depths
to which
they have plunged her
drowning ship.

(first appeared in Up The Staircase)

Friday, April 05, 2013

Disconnect

Disconnect, on Flickr.

mother forgets “church”
and a hush smothers us.

in her brain’s atrium
a processional of tangles
son brother husband father.

Where’s the church and where’s the steeple?

she wanders empty-eyed
from the basilica to the transept of the cross
all dressed up since 2 AM.

(PANK7)

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

2057

from Olivia Eden Publishing comes Kimberly Copeland's new book of poetry 2057

Ms. Copeland is a prolifically published Chicagoland poet, digital artist and Pushcart nominee. K.R. has acted in an editorial capacity for online venues such as Unlikely 2.0., Stirring, Worm and is currently the assistant art editor at The Centrifugal Eye.Janet is pleased that she chose her painting for the cover.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Sein und Werden

Janet has a painting in the new 'Sein und Werden' Thanks to Rachel Kendall. The theme is Exquisite Corpse, and this is from the publisher's manifesto:
The title comes from the Expressionist concept of Sein und Werden - 'being and becoming', the notion that we are born as nothing and only through experience do we become who we are (an idea shared with Sartre in his work 'Being and Nothingness'). Using certain techniques of cinematography to create lengthened shadows, twisted stairways and a distorted mise-en-scène, the Expressionists were able to depict a nightmare world that would later influence a number of other cinematic developments, such as film noir, aswell as leading artistic movements. One such group who owed much of their technique to Expressionism were the Surrealists, who played with these concepts to create bizarre images of the subconscious, making use of dreams and automatic writing. The goal of 'Sein und Werden' is to present works that evoke the spirit of the Expressionist, Existentialist and Surrealist movements within a modern context, which I like to call 'Werdenism'.

What They Say

Deep moments, haunting expressions, June 5, 2012, by Tim Buck

The poems by Cheryl Snell in PRISONER'S DILEMMA are like psychological novels compressed into exquisite lines. This is free verse on a high level -- what is being said flows with a calm, artistic cadence. What is being said probes depths with a subtlety and with the ring of lived experience.

The art by Janet Snell is some of the finest contemporary work I've come across. I'm partial to black-and-white, and these works are deftly realized, surreal, and evocative. They are haunting.

How wonderful the complementary nature of this volume! Poem and painting suggestive of each other -- a complex of emotion and vision, of deep observation and expression.

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