Susan Hanka's book of poems, "Clinch River," is published by Groundhog Press. (Image courtesy Groundhog Press)
Susan Hankla’s first published collection of poetry, 10 years in the making, “Clinch River,” is out through Groundhog Press, and she’ll present selections from the work tonight, from 6 to 7 p.m. at Chop Suey Books.
The setting of these story-poems is Southwest Virginia’s Clinch River Valley. This is a region of farming, formerly mining and of wild natural beauty. This, too, is Appalachia, and Hankla’s poems that unfold there look inside the metaphors and roam the character’s heads and spirits, seeking meaning in the shapes of clouds and dreams and objects left behind.
“There’s a little bit of magic realism in the poems,” Hankla says, and it’s expressionistic, too: One gets the sense of weathered houses and clotheslines and late-night dances heard from afar.
Susan Hankla
Hankla is from Roanoke, but just as she was starting school, the family moved to Richlands, a town of about 5,000, along the Clinch. She recalls how Boy Scouts once planted trees along a hillside near Richlands' entrance. “They spelled out the name,” she says. “But over time, of course, they grew up and blurred, and there, too, is the juxtaposition. The land was rich, but the people weren’t.”
The poems weren’t first conceived as a collection, but the emergence of a character, Glenda, gave Hankla a means to provide a general unity. “That’s when it started to gel,” Hankla says. “I loved Glenda; she’s such a strong force.” The inspiration for Glenda came from a certain moment of Hankla’s childhood when she delivered medicines for her pharmacist father.
“This was an odd little chore for a girl in second grade,” she says. “Because in a way this was how I started seeing people not just as classmates, but, ‘others’; they were my father’s customers. I went to see this girl, and I don’t think I was well-received. She’d gotten a BB lodged in her eye.” This reminds her of a children’s pursuit of heating up marbles, then putting them on ice, causing them to crack. “I thought it would be fun to give her a cracked-marble eye, and then an eye socket. Glenda morphs and ages, and that [gave] me time and space to create a character. Friends die around her, but a survivor is a witness, even with one eye that works.”
On weekends, the family often left Richlands for Roanoke. Hankla remembers their travels over the Wilderness Road, then full of hairpin turns providing gorgeous views of patchwork quilt farmers’ fields and hay bales, but the road also went past Bland Correctional Farm. “There was always something turned up loud on the car radio,” she says, and recalls an “awful scary song” by Tennessee Ernie Ford, "16 Tons.”
“That song freaked me out because it was the story of many of kids’ lives that I was in school with; some of them had nothing.”
If you cannot make this evening's Chop Suey event, you can see Hankla from 2 to 4 p.m. on Oct. 22 at Book People.
