reviewed by Bill Burtis
Hole-in-the-Head, while called a “review,” has only once before offered an actual review of a volume of poetry. With a “full-time part-time” staff of four editors and a couple of contributing editors, and LOTS of submissions to which we give really careful attention (including the artwork), we just don’t have the capacity and we fear, frankly, that if we get in the business of reviewing volumes of poetry, well, we won’t get the journal out!
But occasionally we get an opportunity that we just don’t want to pass up. In the case of our first review (which we “hired out”, by the way, to the talented and perspicacious poet and teacher, Jessica Purdy), we found the unique perspective, fine quality and rampant timeliness of Ralph James Sevarese’s Republican Fathers irresistible. So, too, we find Pamela Sumners’s Etiquette for a Pandemic (&Other Social Distancing Protocols) compelling, timely, crisply original, daringly challenging and, at once, powerfully charming. It is, in fact, unlike any volume of poetry we’ve encountered.
And it is an encounter. Rest assured that from the moment you enter this collection—and,
oh reader, you do enter—in a way not entirely unlike entering a theme park for the mind,
you are in for a different experience. It’s worth mentioning, for instance, that, at 10” x 7”,
it is a big book, literally, as called for by the sheer size of the poems and what the author
refers to in her introductory Author’s Note as “my ‘run on for a long time’ lines” (which
are “explicitly a Southern way of speaking.”). Worth mentioning, too, that the Author’s
Note is a valuable tool in coming to grips with what Sumners is up to here and is perhaps
the book’s best review!
So enter knowing there are some wild rides. That we like Sumners’s work is evidenced by
the number of times it has graced our pages. We think initially we were drawn to a kind of
rhythm, structure and language that was at once quirky and appealing, a kind of all-akimbo
imagery in storytelling that surrounded and bathed the reader in an atmosphere rich and
zesty as a good gumbo. As an example, the first poem of Sumners’s to appear in HITH is
“A Brief History of Blue”, which is the first poem in the second section of Etiquette,
“(AND OTHER SOCIAL DISTANCING PROTOCOLS)” and takes us from
When Neanderthal stumbled color-blind from his cave
he had no word for sea or sky, knew only cave-black,
blood-red, and later, moon-yellow, grass-green.
to
Tangs, Yuans, Van Goghs, Ramseses, Medicis, dissolute Vermeers, the resolute
sadness of Jezebel at the window, Crayola narthex, a wave, a stone rolled
from Christ’s tomb, Homer’s loss of words, a funeral dirge for pharaohs, eternal
blue, the Blue of the Future, COVID blue, Black Lives Matter Blue, thin blue line,
the Memphis of everywhere, a cast-off rib bone with a Beale Street saxophone.
Blue is blue is beyond the sea beyond words and Blue is.
And we meet, along the way Phoenicians, Egyptians, haughty French, the British still in
empire, German chemists, and, of course, the Chinese, not in that order. So, you see….
Thus, when Etiquette came to our attention, we bet it would be irresistible. We were right.
It is a marvelously ambitious work, offering as it does to teach us a good many things
we’ve not thought to want to learn, from the protocols of the etiquette (laid out in a poem,
no less), to the ways and language, pace and tone, of a true South, to the dark runnels and
rivulets of love, disappointment, triumph and resolve in surrender.
To resist the temptation to fly about the book, let’s take things in order. The book’s
uniqueness is immediately evident: the cover features a photograph (by the author’s son) of
the evidently boarded-up entrance to a stone building (perhaps a church?) on which is
painted the image of a grey-bearded and -dreaded probably African-American drummer,
underneath the words REDEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITY.
The dedication (To all the Walt&Coras [sic] of the world and all the other people that the World’s Big People with real big mouths think are expendable. You’re essential, working
or not. Thank you for everything.) introduces us to the work’s protagonists (“quintessential
Southern vernacular characters who are vanishing from the literary landscape”) and the
idea that we will encounter the occasional polemic within. This, in turn, is followed by an
epigraph—a warning, really—from Alexander Pope’s (Alexander Pope?!) The Dunciad
that “universal darkness buries all.”
This is followed by the Author’s Note and, as mentioned above, one could spend an entire
review, plumbing its depths, touching as it does on everything from Southern place and
voice to American authoritarianism, the scarcity of character and narrative in contemporary
poetry, and the “Etiquette” as “a framing device” that will allow inspecting what’s fair and
right to “How…we treat people just minding their own business when ideologues and cops
might be minding the NRA’s business instead of the business of law whether they have
malicious intent or not.”
It is worth mentioning at this point that Sumners, a widely published poet and Pushcart
nominee whose poems were selected for 64 Best Poets of 2018 and 2019 and who has two
previous volumes, is known for her Constitutional law and civil rights work, including
opposing such dark notables as Jay Sekulow, Judge Roy Moore, Bill Pryor and “an
Alabama governor who argued that the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to Alabama.” Sumners
is, by the way, a native Alabamian—she knows of what she speaks.
And now you’re perhaps ready for the poetry.
Before we get to the title poem, the poet sets up the place and atmosphere with three
shorter poems. “Joker” notes
…it’s not Christ throwing
the little old ladies with diabetes into the Hunger Games so
the money changers can run amock [sic] in the Temple of Commerce
and a reference to the proverbial tip of the “Jupiter iceberg” before going to the grocery
store where
There’s only one death here so far
before I took my receipt.
“Williamson, Tennessee”, helps place us while noting “What neurotic transcendence” to
board a streetcar or “look at a baby, in the bold death-stare of day?” then “This Time Last
Year”, (The title a harbinger, for when have we been more attuned to and less aware of the
passings of time?) lulls us like the flight of the innocent chimney swift from the
ominousness implicit in the opening lines (“a neighbor…asked me if we’d noticed the
silence of the chimney swifts”) to the final couplet where what the birds do not know is
what we do, so painfully:
that the chimney owners are living through
a goddamn featherstroke of history, now nesting with them, awake.”
“Etiquette for a Pandemic: Protocols” is a long poem in eight sections. It is impossible to
do it, in its great complexity, justice here. Each section takes its direction from an aspect of
Six: the ubiquitous “feet apart”, feet deep, and then a cascade of other six-based elements
that include burial, property size and address—all as an encounter with Walt&Cora and
their family coping with the couples loss and its ramifications, from the need for Cora to be
put to rest to the right of Walt (“Which way did you stand at the altar?”) to the bread going
stale while the family is away. There are also commentaries, often satiric, before the poem
ends with the surprising Floor 6, where the speaker is finally caught in the delusion of
illness (“The nurse told me when I pierced the veil of anesthesia, I revealed that I am in fact
/ the governor of Mississippi….”) and the fight for life with CoVid, while the world—and
spring, no less—and youth and “stupid jonquils” goes on.
The first section then moves through a progression that may in its way take some
organization from Kubler-Ross’s order of grieving, at least in addressing denial, grief,
anger and kind of acceptance, though not one that goes gently. Included here is “Connie
M. Messkimen Wants to Tell Y’all Sumpin” (which we learn in notes is “inspired by a
letter to the editor”, and which Sumners renders in the voice “of people who might actually
think this”), the speaker contending that the seasonal time change, adding all that daylight,
is responsible for climate change and global warming.
There is also the tender “Home Schooling My Son”, another aspect of pandemic, in which
the mother laments:
I’ll teach him not to burn his bridges
even though I myself never know
quite when I’ve gone a bridge
too far. These sad, permeable
maternal membranes, these spongy
tensile things that string us
together and that can hang us
separately
and warns
these still
still days—even in the normal times—
these still things with blunted edges
are the ones that can hurt you.
The section finishes with several poems that take up some of the political and social and
economic justice issues whose intensity is so heightened and sharpened by the exigencies
of CoVid, from the death of George Floyd (“April Is the Cruelest Month”) to the
“collective Narcissism” of social media (“Dorian Gray Has a Facebook Page), the battle
over reproductive rights, and the horrible ineptitude and cruelty of the Trump
administration. Here Sumners displays a satiric wit and wisdom at once humorous and
chilling as well as a knack for plain storytelling.
In her introduction, Sumners notes that she attempts in Etiquette to frame questions of
fairness and truth, that in her life as a poet and a lawyer, she has wrestled “between whether
law or poetry might be the best tool of justice,” the one master she has attempted to serve