From Volume 8, Number 1 January
2003
A BLAKELEY POET Courtesy the Blakeney/Blakley Family Association. OCT 2000 There
can be no question about Diann BLAKELY's suitability as a poet.
Mahogany-haired, lithe limbed, she gestures in sweeping strokes
to render mere anecdote into intoxicating incantation. With just
a hint of self consciousness swaddling her like a mist, she plays
the basilisk muse enthralling and immobilising an uncomplaining
prey. "What poetry does best and perhaps does most plaintively,"
she explains, gazing aside, "is to remind us of the absences and
losses of the world we currently suffer and revel in. It is very
much the language of intimacy. In the end, the most useful aspect
for poetry is to attune our hearts to tenderness. We live in a
world that bombards us with false intimacy. Real tenderness is
lacking in our lives, because it's not a commodity. It's not useful,
not really worth anything (financially).
As a child, I think, understands certain layers of human emotion, even in the absence of any other experience. (T. S. ) Elliott himself once said that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. That insight applies as much to writing as to reading. During my first book, "Hurricane Walk", for example, an idea would come to me, and it very often felt like I was simply taking a transcription. It felt very close to Don Justice's notion of the poem as 'Platonic script' or of Osip Mandelstam's concept of hearing a melody for a moment, then it goes away, and your writing after that melody - after that Platonic script - except that you can never quite get back to it." Diann BLAKELY was born in Anniston, Alabama and raised in Birmingham, although for nearly a decade she prospected for her muse primarily in New York, Vermont and Massachusetts before settling down in Nashville in 1987. As Diann brings to a close her third collection of poems, she admits a longing to reinvent herself artistically in some way. For her next adventure, she is gravitating towards a musical muse that tempts her with new conjunctions of "ache and urgency". "The project on which I am currently embarking," she explains. "has me singing duets, so to speak, with (the late blues singer) Robert Johnson. It's a new book called 'Love In Vain', I'm taking each one of the 29 songs he left behind and responding to it in a kind of duet - a sort of call and response." From
'Listening After Music - Nashville Scene - Poet Sings The Blues'
by Marc Stengel.
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