Reading My Friends #2: In a Kingdom of Birds by Ken Fontenot
Welcome to Reading My Friends.
This is Lyman Grant, coming to you from the 4 Door Lounge, my backyard study in Harrisonburg, Virginia, deep in the heart of the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.
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Today, I am going to talk about In a Kingdom of Birds by my friend Ken Fontenot. This book was published in 2012 and won the prestigious Best Book of Poetry by The Texas Institute of Letters in 2013. Am I jealous? Yes!
I guess I first knew Ken as colleagues at Austin Community College. The truth is I don’t remember how or where we met. In the hall, in the mailroom? At a college event or at a poetry event? For a while, while my wife and I raised chickens in our place in the country outside of Austin, Ken purchased eggs from us. Delivering the eggs to him was a treat. He would give me some money and then I could pick his brain about what he was reading and writing.
Originally from New Orleans, which features in his novel Mr. Raindrinker, Ken moved to Austin, like so many of my literary friends to attend University of Texas where Ken earned his M.A. in German. In a Kingdom of Birds is Ken’s third book of poems. I guess I bought the book when it came out, ten years ago, then put it on my shelves, until this week. It is a pretty, slim book. 73 pages, 67 poems divided almost evenly in four sections. Almost all the poems are one page.
I admit then, right off the bat, that this book is not what I expected. I expected, what? Birds. Exquisite observations of the natural world. I knew Ken to be a deep reader of American and world poetry. I knew him to be a serious craft person, a “Real Poet,” who drafted and revised and worked his poems every day. Living in music and metaphor. Looking outward, observing. All that is here, But I was surprised because there is a lot of autobiography in the first half of the book. I never knew that Ken wrote about family and growing up. The light and dark of childhood.
Here is the book’s opening poem: “Return to a Spring Full of Little Boys.”
Return to a Spring Full of Little Boys
Either I am (1) in the room, or
(2) out of the room with no
thought of rooms, or (3) out of
the room with thoughts of being
in the room. The mind produces
that wonderful third thing
for which we have no name.
In my later years, in my
years of gray hair
and pleated pants, I am going
to try to discover whatever
bond there is between thinking
and feeling. It will be
a limpid enterprise: pure,
sincere, and without beauty.
Preachers' children will come
to know other preachers' children.
Trees will come to know
other trees. We will accept
good soup for what it is:
good soup, not bad soup.
What did Brecht know about
poetry? A lot. What did
Rilke know about poetry?
A lot. The path is narrow,
but the path is long. The streets
are empty, but the streets are clean.
Does your mind jump from
one thought to another? Mine does.
What is poetry if not this leaping
through the water levels of the mind?
This sad, sad story of the heart?
Smarty Pants is what my mother
used to call me. My father
called me Sad Sack. I stayed
in the sack until I was
good and ready to get out.
That was Saturdays. Sundays
I hit home runs. Fridays,
I didn't eat meat. Jesus
loved little children. I had
a BB gun that found its mark
in tin cans. A neighbor came over
one night. She held in her arms
a dead dog with a hole
in its head. She said, did you
do this, and I said, no, not me.
Oh, so much to say about this poem and so little time. So, three points. One: notice the tender pain and loving compassion in this poem. This gift for feeling deeply and witnessing tenderly pervades this book. There are times where I feel the wisdom in Ken’s poems that I also feel in Leonard Cohen’s late work. Life is hard. Faith is hard. We are going to die. There is so much beauty. Remember to feel and to dance.
Two: Leaping. It is no diminishment of Ken’s skill to point out that Robert Bly’s ghost visits these poems. See Bly’s 1975 book Leaping Poetry. “Leaping” is, roughly, a move from the conscious to the unconscious and back again. I mean, how do we travel from preacher’s kids to trees to soup to BB guns, with Brecht, Rilke, Mother, and Father intervening along the way? Throughout the book, Ken’s leaps are of Olympic quality.
Three: Aphorisms. This is what surprised me the most. In almost every poem, there is a place where Ken pauses the narrative, rests the senses, and lays out a truth in front of us, like a loaf of bread on a cutting board, crusty and warm.
Here are seven examples:
What is poetry if not this leaping / through the water levels of the mind?
When will mothers ever be given their due? / When doesn’t the light around / their hearts ever warm our cold bodies?
Childhood, after all is meant to be excelled in. / By dreaming, by singing, by entering what vanishes.
He says / light has everything to do with pain, / and darkness has everything to do / with love.
And what is scratching / but an effort to get deeper in the body, / to reveal the body for what it really is.
To gaze into a stone is to gaze / into a swimming pool of silence.
Folks, there is so much to be separated: / wheat from chaff, love from sex, bodies from souls. / Thus even sinister angels are learning / to take the good with the bad.
There are so many aphorisms sprinkled throughout the book we can’t quote them all.
But what of birds, you may ask? Yes, hawks, owls, sparrows fly through the pages, along with whales, horses, and fox. But Mom and dad and grandparents walk through also, as do girls in cars and girls with cats, best friends. If I were writing an academic paper, I would explore the relationship between Ken’s poems and the Persian Sufi poem The Conference of Birds. But I am not writing that paper. And I am deliberately not quoting one line from the title poem that would explain everything, because that would rob you of the ah ha moment Ken gifts us with.
Instead, let’s close with two short poems that will show a bit of Ken’s range. First, a little humor.
“Robbing the Cradle”
You don't hear that expression much anymore.
Is it because older women and the young men
they marry have both become more free to choose?
My great-aunt was fifteen years older than Uncle Mike.
At forty she had a baby, which made him
a handsome twenty-five-year-old father.
Gossip everywhere. "Henrietta," they said,
"what the hell are you trying to do anyway?"
But she continued as if nothing had really happened.
Someone who could care less what others thought,
she outlived Uncle Mike by a good twenty years.
"Robbing the Cradle "they called it, with envy galore.
At quilting sessions the older women just shook
their heads. After all, ignorance falls through the cracks.
And we will close with the penultimate poem in the book.
The World Without Me
I am close to my bed. I am close to my book.
I am close to my chair. And my silence lights the room.
There is no other real joy but this:
to feel as if a glass of milk were warming
inside one's stomach,
to pick out familiar tunes of Tchaikovsky
and hum along,
to wish the best for the world without me.
For I am elsewhere, about to enter sleep.
All the lullabies I ever heard beckon me.
All the fairy tales and nursery rhymes
my mother--she was forever at my bedside--
filled me with return like a messenger.
And I say to the children of America:
Take comfort. Someday, you, too,
will treasure your moments of sleep--
even more than your parents promised.
Someday the pony who visits you
will be your companion again.
Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe (it’s free), and please share with your poetry-loving friends. See you next week.
You can purchase In a Kingdom of Birds on Amazon.