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Unconventional Narrative
All Told gathers a lifetime of poems shaped by place, memory, travel, politics, and aging, offering a wide-ranging portrait of one life lived across the American South, distant countries, and the quiet rooms where reflection settles in. Did you view the book as a kind of life story while putting it together?
Yes, in a sense, it’s a life story, or at least a story of my last 55 or so years on Earth. I think of it, along with Rites of Passage, as a personal legacy created from a large backlog of work reaching back to the 1970s. It’s a compendium of my poetry that I would like to live on after me, even if it lacks a wide circulation and serves only as a means of preserving a significant amount of my work for anyone who enjoys reading poetry and might find it interesting. It also gave me an excuse to dig through the whole body of unpublished work I’d saved over the years and organize it in a way that I felt would be aesthetically pleasing and offer its readers a perspective on my life and my struggle to create a sort of unconventional narrative that would reflect the changes in my life and my development as a poet.
Your poems often use plain, conversational language. Why does that style appeal to you?
I think the sort of plainspoken style of much of my work came about firstly through the influence of such modernist poets as Ezra Pound, H.D., e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams, and the post- modernists, especially those in the New York School — O’Hara, Koch, Ashbery, Ignatow, et al. — who were attempting to break away from strictly metrical verse and traditional forms and appeal to readers who were highly literate but not necessarily steeped in literary history or the kind of verse taught in most university English courses back then. On the contrary, I followed many other poets of the time in taking the lead of Ezra Pound, who, around the beginning of the last century, envisioned a new style of writing that “will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretive power… I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.” Secondly, when I moved to Türkiye in 1993, I soon discovered a school of poetry that illustrated this modernist dictum in the movement called “The First New,” headed by Orhan Veli Kanık, who dreamed of writing a poetry so stripped down that it even “dumped words.” This movement arose most significantly as a result of the change of the Turkish script from Arabic characters to the romanized alphabet most commonly used in Europe and the Americas. It also brought European influences into the sphere of Turkish writing, with translations by Veli and other poets of foreign poetry, such as that of the Surrealists. Along with my reading of 20th-Century Turkish poetry that followed The First New, I became aware of the provincial nature of American poetry, which showed little influence of Surrealism and other important developments in Europe that had strongly influenced contemporary Turkish poets. So my view of modern poetry changed radically after I moved to Türkiye, and my own writing began to reflect this change as well. I was elated when the poet Güven Turan, who edited my bilingual collection Galata’dan: the View from Galata, noted on its back cover that I was really as much an Istanbul poet as Orhan Veli, even though I wrote my poems in English. This direct, conversational style of writing came to define my own work, even as I tried to incorporate other aspects of modernism and postmodernism into the poetry I was writing then.
Many poems reflect on aging and reflection. How has your perspective changed over time?
I’ve tended to measure the course of my life in phases. This can be seen as well in the course of my poetic experience, wherein the dominant “themes” change from one phase to the next. For example, in my twenties the principal idea that directed my writing was that of a “Muse,” gleaned largely from the writings of Robert Graves, and this idea changed, or evolved, into a Jungian vision of psychic forces that replaced the Muse figure with a spiritual “you” that for several years animated my poems and infused them with a “meaning.” Other phases reflected my discovery of Taoism and Sufism, philosophies whose main principles I’ve adopted and tried to apply to all aspects of my life. I found that I could trace the movement of my life through these phases that have determined the nature of my development as a human being and writer. I can’t clearly articulate the phase I’m in now except to say that it seems to concern my present role as an elder in my “tribe” and involves a further consolidation of the ideas and experience that form the basis of the ongoing questioning and quests in my work and life.
Looking back over this collection, what surprises you most about your own journey?
I’m newly surprised almost every day by my incredible luck at being who I am and to have survived and, for the most part, enjoyed my life’s journey up to this point. I think the poems in All Told express this feeling in both direct and indirect ways. I’m not religious in a conventional sense, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve somehow been guided and protected by forces that exist somewhere beyond my individual perception or understanding.
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All Told
All Told is a big, loose, lived-in gathering of poems that tracks a whole life, not in a straight line, but in loops of memory, travel, politics, love, and aging. Kenne starts by greeting the reader in a plain kitchen where “the beans are simmering in the pot” and cornbread is in the pan, then moves through childhood on the Gulf Coast, work on farms and in gins, long nights in bars, years in Mexico and Turkey, and into late-life classrooms and quiet rooms where the poet waits for the phone to ring. Sections like “South,” “The Scene Today,” “In a Country of Cars,” “The Art of Facing Oneself as a Ghost,” “The Way of the Fool,” “All Told,” and “I’m in Your Hands” give the book a loose arc from place and family toward wider public life and finally back to intimate friendships and love. The whole thing feels like a story told over many long evenings.
I enjoyed how sturdy and grounded the writing feels. Kenne likes real rooms, real weather, real work. In “This House” he watches the “gray ghost” of his father ride a lawnmower past mesquite and blue norther wind, then lets time jump so the same house lifts and settles in summer heat. The language stays simple. The images do the heavy lifting. A poem about a timing chain in a car, a night shift, or a mechanic’s bad news turns into a little parable about fear and delay without any fuss. His long piece “Smitty, Wallace and Me” circles around a neighbor rewiring his stereo and Wallace Stevens on the bookshelf, and somehow it becomes a quiet essay on communication, performance, and the way our “systems” of living barely touch each other. I liked the relaxed, talky tone. It never felt like the poems were trying to impress me. They just kept showing me things until I started to care.
I also liked how wide the book opens out into the world. Kenne writes beautifully about Istanbul, standing at his window over the Bosporus while birds spin like white confetti and traffic roars across the bridge, and he slides from that scene into music, Turkish poets, and the weird parade of late-century life. The poems in “The Scene Today” and “In a Country of Cars” keep running this line between wonder and annoyance, affection and disgust, as he watches consumer culture, car culture, war memorials, and election years roll past. There is real bite in titles like “America, You Son-of-a-Bitch,” “Election Year,” and “Against Monotheism,” yet the poems almost always come back to one human voice, tired and worried, trying to stay honest inside all that noise. The long sequence about “The Fool” lets him poke fun at himself and at power in mythic language, but underneath the jokes I heard real loneliness, a man who says his main power now is to sit, wait, and be “an empty room / waiting for you to walk in,” and I felt that in my gut.
Under the craft and the travel and the politics, the book feels tender. The early section “South” holds family ghosts, drought, letters from his mother, and awkward boyhood memories. Later on, in “I’m in Your Hands,” he turns toward teaching, old students, old friends, love poems, and a cat named Kestane who becomes a way to think about God. The tone softens without losing edge. I felt a steady ache running through these later poems, but also a kind of rough gratitude. The book accepts confusion and keeps talking anyway. I found that comforting.
All Told is better taken in sections, like a long road trip with stops in little towns, diners, and old neighborhoods. I would recommend it to readers who like narrative, place-rich poetry, to people who grew up in or around the American South, to anyone who has lived abroad and still feels torn between worlds, and to teachers and writers thinking about their own long haul. If you want clear, humane, often funny, often bruised poems that let you sit in the room with a working poet and see what a whole life looks like from the inside, this book is worth your time.
Pages: 193 | ASIN : B0FRB1W1WD
