REMEMBERING ANNE BOYKIN

April blossoms of Wild Azalea at Convent of St. Mary

Yesterday I received word that Anne Boykin, wife of a former Episcopal minister who once served in New Iberia, Louisiana had died. In 2009, shortly after we moved to The Mountain here at Sewanee, Tennessee, I wrote a blog about Anne, and the message is one of fond remembrance that needs repeating because it speaks of a better time in Anne’s life. The message is also repeated for her many friends in New Iberia, Louisiana. “Give rest, O Christ, to your servant Anne with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting” (From The Book of Common Prayer).

Posting from 2009:
Yesterday, temps on The Mountain hovered near 40 degrees, and a fine mist and rain fell most of the day. It could have been a gloomy time, but our long-time friend, Anne Boykin, invited us to have lunch with her in Tracy City to brighten the day. Tracy City is a small town at the end of a road that winds through the hills northeast of Sewanee and has lately become noted for its restaurant, “Tea On the Mountain.” The building that houses this eating place is a nondescript, white-plastered building with scant windows, and when we drove up and looked at the bland exterior, I thought “uh-oh.” However, we opened the door and stepped into a fine dining facility — white linen table cloths, fine china and silver atop antique tables scattered throughout several rooms, the walls lined with regional art and sets of fine china displayed on tables in every room — some sets for sale, some on exhibit only.

We were served hot tea as soon as we sat down and given a menu that featured a range of entrees from crab cakes to quiche, with accompanying green salad and French bread. The appetizer was an almond-stuffed date wrapped with bacon, and the piece de resistance was a tiny chess pie for dessert. The owner came to our table and told us a story about the pie’s name being derived from the wife of Andrew Jackson referring, off-handedly, to her dessert as “jes pie.” “Tea on the Mountain” was a real dining experience on a cold March day in the hills of Tennessee, and the hospitality within the square white building made me ashamed that I had misjudged the restaurant on the basis of its exterior.

Anne, who is our food guide on The Mountain, could open a restaurant at Sewanee had she an envee to do so, which she doesn’t have. She’s one of Sewanee’s finest chefs and a model of southern hospitality. I’ve put my feet under her table many times, enjoying delectable dishes prepared according to directions from neatly typed recipes passed on to Anne by her mother, who lived on a huge farm near Murfreesboro.

When Anne and Elmer (former rector of Epiphany in New Iberia) lived in New Iberia, Anne hosted weekly church luncheons and dinners in her home, even outdoor “feeds” in the rectory’s side yard, such as the one she hosted when I left New Iberia for our sojourn in Iran during the late 70’s. At 80, Anne says she has retired, but she’s noted for providing food and shelter for people who come to The Mountain for brief stays and find “no room at the Inn.” Last summer when a Vietnamese student graduated, he invited his family (who spoke no English) to the Commencement and searched vainly for rooms to accommodate them. Anne opened her home to them, and says they parleyed quite well without either speaking the other’s language. The Vietnamese family’s favorite meal while staying with Anne was breakfast, my favorite meal at her table. They were served a Tennessee farm breakfast, complete with tiny homemade biscuits, grits, sausage…the full complement of breakfast fare.

I’ve threatened to publish the small book of Anne’s recipes taken from her mother’s repertoire, but she insists she has retired and her kitchen is closed — and she doesn’t want the publicity… until someone shows up and needs food and shelter, that is. One of the reasons we retired to The Mountain is that we anticipated everyone at Sewanee being as hospitable as Anne Boykin. However, she’s still undisputed #1 gracious hostess on The Mountain — or anywhere else she has lived in the South.


Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan

THE VOICE WITHIN THE VOICE

Most mornings in fair weather (often not so fair in spring and summer in Louisiana), Darrell Bourque, Louisiana’s premier poet, can be found writing the lines to a new poem while walking an old path near his home in Church Point, Louisiana. He’s a master of what poets call “voice,” often entering into the voice of some lesser-known figure who has made a significant contribution to the culture and history of his/her native state. 

Bourque’s latest book, From the Other Side, is beautifully illustrated with the art of Bill Gingles, a Shreveport artist, and features poems about Henriette Delille, a former New Orleans religious figure. During the 19th century, Delille organized a group of devout Christian women called the Sisters of the Holy Family to nurse the sick, care for and teach indigent and illiterate Black and Creole children, as well as immigrating adults who settled in the French Quarter of New Orleans. This group was formally recognized in 1942 by St. Augustine Church in the Treme of New Orleans, and Delille, who died in 1862, was first deemed Servant of God in 1988, then advanced to Venerable in the process of canonization by the Roman Catholic Church. Her inclusion in the process continues — the next two steps are beatification and canonization.

Darrell Bourque and his wife, Karen, became interested in this passionate and empathetic nun several years ago — an interest which culminated in Karen designing and rendering a glass triptych for a window of Christ the King Roman Catholic Mission Church in Bellevue near the Bourque’s home in Church Point, Louisiana. The recent publication of Darrell’s book of poetry, From the Other Side: Henriette Delille followed last month’s dedication of this window. 

Although Henriette Delille spoke French (as does Bourque), Bourque captured her voice in what he terms persona sonnets in English within From the Other Side, an impassioned voice that speaks of orphans and the uneducated on the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans — a voice derived from Bourque’s meditations on the images and colors in Gingles’ paintings; e.g.,:

What If You Dreamed

                    …We teach 

                    reading here the way we teach children to sing. Old

                    women wander from arches to see what this reach

                    

                    will reach. We start with the names of flowers sold

                    on the streets in the Quarter & the Marigny, peach-

                    colored, pink & red & blue-dyed flowers, white gold

                   

                    flowers named how they are named: Daisy, Bream,

                    Belle, Violet, Hyacinth & Myrtle, William, Iris, Reed, 

                    Sorrel & Olive, Lillie & Camellia, Rose, Red & Gleem.

                    We start with who they are & go to what they need.

One of my favorites, All the Time, is accompanied by Gingles’ painting by that name, an acrylic panel including scarlet forms resembling poppies in which Bourque presents Delille’s voice speaking about the work of the Sisters of the Holy Family: 

                       …We moved quietly from one need to another need

                       as we found it. We brought things inside our houses, kept our candles lit,

                       We let the world be the world, let the heart be heart, let creed be creed. 

This is one among many poems in the volume that show Bourque’s ability to achieve what A. E. Housman called “not the thing said but a way of saying it.”

Another poem in which Bourque imagines Delille speaking of her dedication to work with children of the New Orleans streets is the poignant:

The Difference Island 

              …My wings

              are who I am. They flew me to this difference island where I am no more

              a trace or line. We crossed bayous & bays & lakes & rivulets as fine as lace

              to this other world beyond geographies where I knew what I had to live for,

              the poor despised, the cipher bought and sold, what I saw in an orphan’s face.

Bourque used the titles of Gingles’ paintings for all of the poems in this volume and points to the language of the paintings as influencing the language of his poems. “Without these paintings I know I could not have accessed this particular set of poems spoken by the powerful and holy human being Henriette Delille is,” he writes in the acknowledgements to From the Other Side. I would add that Bourque’s deft gift of imagining the voice within the voice (“…What’s just beyond the tree leans on what we never knew we knew…”) influences the reader’s understanding of “the other side”and the art that takes us there. 

The Sisters of the Holy Family continue to carry out Delille’s mission in retirement homes, schools, and other sacred service organizations in New Orleans, Shreveport, Galveston, Little Rock, Washington, DC, in California, in Belize, and in Africa. Delille’s original prayer penned in French was a simple but cogent one: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God.”

Order from yellowflagpress.com or darrellbourque@gmail.com. 

THE OLD COASTLINE

Nobel prize winner, Shirin Ebadi of Iran, has said that in order to have understanding of and peace in the world, we must read each other’s literature. I’d add that the emissaries of that mission are translators: think of Coleman Barks translating the Persian poet Mowlavi (Rumi); Jane Kenyon translating the work of the Russian poet, Akhmatova, Stuart Friebert translating the German poet, Karl Krolow…Think also of the independent press, Pinyon Publishing in Colorado, which often publishes international poetry translations, such as its recent release: a volume of selected poetry by M. Vasalis (1909-1998), a Dutch psychiatrist who specialized in treating children and whose work has been translated by Fred Lessing and David Young.

In the introduction to this volume, translators Lessing and Young emphasize that the poet Vasalis had little interest in promoting her work but that her poems “come out of her life, her experience of the natural world, her professional practice, and her family relations, arising from the press of occasion and necessity rather than from an ambition to originality or greatness…” That description alone impressed me because I admire the qualities of humility and modesty that inhere in a writer’s life mission.

Vasalis’s immediacy and simplicity in “Spring,” a poem describing the spring season readers in the northern hemisphere are presently experiencing, resonated with me early in the volume and is perhaps the most whimsical one in The Old Coastline: “The light gusts across the land in spurts,/waking the hard, brief glitter/of the blue, wind-ruffled ditches and canals;/the grass lights up, dims down, goes dark./Two newborn lambs next to a grizzled sheep/stand white, printing youth’s picture against grass./I had forgotten how this was, and that/the spring is not a quiet blossoming,/dreaming softly but a violent growing,/a pure and passionate beginning,/jumping up out of a deep sleep,/and dancing away without a thought.” Although Vasalis has been likened to the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, I hear the voice of Emily Dickinson in this selection the translators included from her first book, Parks and Deserts (1940). 

A reading of selections from her third book, Vistas and Visages, published posthumously in 1954, reveals more serious poetic treatments as Vasalis probes the deeper subjects of suffering and loss arising from Vasalis’s own tragic loss of a child who lived only a year and a half. The imagery in “Star” carries this message of loss in a departure from any formalism and pivots on the figure of her lost child, then concludes in a pastoral scene featuring a cow, a powerful entry into the natural world. “Tonight I saw a star for the first time./He stood alone, he did not quiver./Instantly, he pierced me through./I saw a star, he stood alone, belief/made out of light: so young and from a time/before there was such a thing as grief./The meadows lie unspoken in the light./The cows, so often painted,/restrain, with a young wet eye,/any account of their warm mystery.” That one verse , so much akin to Japanese haiku, underlines the beautiful simplicity of Vasalis’s oeuvre.

In the same volume, Vistas and Visages, Vasalis reveals her love and appreciation of children and her journey as a psychiatrist dealing with youth. “Children Coming Home” evokes strong emotions in those of us who parented young offspring and welcomed them as they returned home from an all-day absence. Her description of them as “big flowers” coming out of the gathering dark, “the chilly evening air/that lightly drapes their cheeks and hair/they are so warm!” is neither Elizabeth Bishop nor Emily Dickinson but simply a mother experiencing intimacy with her young in an intense immediacy. Further, she writes: “Clasped/in the strong clamp of their soft arms/I glimpse the love, shadowless and full./ [not yet exposed to Jungian psychology about shadows that will beset them later] that lives at the bottom of their penetrating eyes,/It is not mixed with pity, which comes later,/and has its reasons — and its boundaries.” It is Vasalis who has the penetrating eyes and appears watchful about the boundaries of innocent children.

In The Old Coastline (2002), readers will enjoy some of Vasalis’s poems about older relationships; i.e., a poignant characterization of her grandmother, a cherished member of the poet’s family constellation in “Old Age”: “Grandmother/snow-white-lace on/her calm sweet, white-satin head/carried when she was in Holland, at home,/the smallest muff in the whole world:/inside a tiny bottle, no bigger/than an ampule./ There was just room/for her hands. Plus one child's hand,/oh, what a delicious nest of fur and/the very softest satin lining/…Her eyes were a constantly changing blue;/you could look into them as long as you liked:/as if you were seeing, through two small openings,/the calm sea on a summer day.” That intimate tribute is both exacting and graceful, two recurring components of the selections chosen by Vasalis’s translators.

Vasalis also gives readers a glimpse of her own ideas about mortality, one with which most of us in our eighties can identify: “I practice like a young bird on the edge/of the nest I must soon forsake/in little faltering flights/and open my beak.”

This translated work by Vasalis is a powerful addition to the canon of international expression and vision.Translator Fred Lessing, a Holocaust survivor, psychotherapist, and retired professor of philosophy, retained his native Dutch language after moving to America at age 12. His fellow translator, David Young, is a poet (Field of Light and Shadow, 2010) an editor of Field magazine, Oberlin College Press, and a translator who enjoys collaborative work with his long-time friend, Fred Lessing.

Thank you Gary and Susan for contributing to the mission of sharing international literature through expert translations! The Old Coastline is another occasion for celebration. 

Order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

CHINESE LANTERN FESTIVAL

I never argue the fact that one picture or photograph is worth more than a thousand words. Yesterday’s walk through the Huntsville, Alabama Botanical Garden inspired me to prove that adage through the following photographs, snapped by botanist Victoria Sullivan. This fantastic presentation of “The Wild,” is a lantern festival produced by Hanart Culture, a company whose purpose is to present Chinese art and culture to the world. The visual production shown here focuses on the imaginative art of a traditional Chinese Festival, which falls on the first lunar month of the year, and at which time many types of lanterns decorate the streets in China.

Lantern making originated with the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.). In the initial phases of this art, lanterns were only used for lighting, but they evolved into colorful art forms as seen in the Garden display. Artists utilized bottles, rags, paper, and rayon to create the art, lighting their creations with colored bulbs and moving parts. 

The artist of the peacock shone here created this form from colored medicine bottles. Pieces of china plates, as well as paper and silk were used to make myriad shapes and sizes of wildlife displayed throughout the park. Seventeen vignettes fascinated onlookers, “enchanting in the sunlight” and “magical in the moonlight” as the show was billed. We watched children exclaim and name the wildlife forms, and if they stayed for the nighttime show with music and sound effects (which we didn’t), they must have been further enchanted. My favorite vignette featured the peacock, but I’d have been challenged to award a prize to the most fantastic display.

The Chinese Lantern Show sent me scurrying to Barnes and Noble of Huntsville to hunt for Chinese poetry where I discovered an international anthology entitled A Book of Luminous Things edited by Czeslaw Milosz. I liked Kenneth Rexroth’s translation of Tu Fu’s eighth century poem, “Another Spring:”

White birds over the grey river.

Scarlet flowers on the green hills.

I watch the spring go by and wonder

If I shall ever return home.

Huntsville Botanical Garden has as its mission to blend traditional botanical garden elements, the aesthetic heritage of the region, the conservation of natural resources and a significant thrust into the future.This 112-acre garden also boasts of containing the nation’s largest accredited trillium collection.

Someone such as naturalist Susan Hester Edmunds of New Iberia, Louisiana would find this place and its displays awesome, especially the Master Gardener’s Demonstration Garden maintained by the Master Gardeners of North Alabama. Food produced is donated to Food Bank of North Alabama.

Photographs by Victoria Sullivan 

PARABLES AND PIGS

Dog damage to garage

Sunday, I preached on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and as an aftereffect of the delivery, at lunch with the Sisters of St. Mary, Sewanee, the conversation centered around the profligate son finally getting a job feeding pods to pigs. I don’t know whether the phrase “pods for pigs” was some kind of biblical alliteration created by an early translator of The Word, but the botanist in our crowd, Vickie Sullivan, and others around the table Googled and found that the pods were actually a chocolaty bean from the carob tree that pigs must have relished. 

The conversation caused me to wonder if perhaps a pig had been the culprit that damaged the siding on a corner of the garage door while we were sojourning in Louisiana. A photograph of the damage is shown above. I mean, if boa constrictors can proliferate, move around, and damage properties in Florida and nutria migrated and proliferated in Louisiana, could pigs do the same in Tennessee?! 

According to the manual, Wildflowers in the Smokies (lead author, Peter White), during the late 1940s European wild hogs escaped from a game farm in North Carolina and entered the Great Smoky Mountain Park of Tennessee and North Carolina, and attempts to remove them have failed. Now, these are no ordinary pigs; they’re large babies that root up wildflowers and create wallows in lower elevations in beech gaps, damaging trout lilies and other spring wildflowers, decimate forests by rooting for bulbs and tubers, leaving the beech gaps looking as if they’ve been plowed up. Park officials are worried about long-term effects of these hogs that they actually call wild boars. 

Since the late 1980s, large populations of the boars have been trapped or shot by park crews, but officials claim that total elimination of the hogs is almost impossible. Coyotes like to eat wild hog piglets and red wolves also like to take on full-grown boars, but I’m wondering if there are some park runaways who have managed to migrate to The Mountain here at Sewanee, and are foraging for food near residences.

A repairman who arrived to give an estimate for repairs to the damaged siding told us that there are toothmarks on the siding, and he thinks a large dog (whose owner cleaned up the siding and took it away) chased a chipmunk that crawled inside the corner siding, and tried to make a meal of the little critter. Since part of the siding had been taken away, we surmised that it was a dog whose owner decided repairs might be costly (estimate of $275), so he/she didn’t leave a note. No chipmunk skeletons or missing siding have been found in the woods either.

Unlike some cultures, I don’t have an appetite for roast dog, but I do like cochon de lait —roast pig — Cajun cooking at its best — but there are no carob pods around, and I guess we’ll have to stick to the story of disrepair by a dog who was supposed to be on a leash but got out of control when a chipmunk crossed its path. Sigh. 

We always come home to some kind of damage to the property when we leave Sewanee for the winter, and we once thought the Sewanee campus a safe place to live, but we’ve been taking a ride every day lately… looking for country acreage where we might keep a pen of pigs?…