Warren Dixon's Review of A Story Also Grows (letterpress edition)
Charlotte Muse
Accidents are often good ones. A friend of mine returned excitedly from a Walp seminar at Lake Placid, talking of an extremely beautiful example of book-art. Janet McDowell, with her gift at paintings and prints and as master of her own studio, had an excellent eye for such things. It was her excitement over one book that led me to Chester Town, New York, and up a wooded country drive to the house from which the wonders of a private press were emerging. The particular physical book that had caught Janet’s attention was a handcrafted objet d’art. Even if its contents had been bad poetry, the object would have been worth possessing for itself. However, A Story Also Grows deserves its cover.[i] Charlotte Muse is a stunning poet, little known perhaps, but undeservedly so. The very cost of book-art production almost condemns the contents to obscurity.
Chapbooks, supposedly meaning cheap books, can also be expensive collectible items. It may cost up to $500 (in 2010) to get a used copy of her paperback chapbook “The Comfort Teacher” from the Amazon.com system of sellers. Vertical supply curves can cause a work of art, a baseball card, or a rare postage stamp to defy the often shaky marriage of cost and price in the market. Collectibles depend on bids. A quick fix may be possible by finding her poem “The Torturer Describes His Job” on the Winning Writers website. It is a blood-chilling variation of the dramatic monologue as cleverly put together as Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” or “My Last Dutchess” but even colder. Still, this is only a glimpse of Charlotte Muse, who has turned the memories of an old woman of the Amah Mutsun people of Central California into a running poetical interpretation. In late 1929, the American economy itself lay dying. Ascension Solarsona was also dying those months with the dying Mutsun language itself. Luckily, an ethnologist listened to her meander of stories. Dead languages never go to Hell, though sometimes go to a purgatory such as the foundation where the Mutsun dialect survives and may come back to earth, probably as a ghost. Ascension’s stories are still alive and Charlotte Muse has strung them into a string of pearls. The nineteen poems open by showing us Ascension’s last hours, picking at the sheet, picking imaginary flowers from the blankets. Anyone who has been around dying elders has seen that. Muse thinks of her being among bleached stones in a dry river bed ascending a mountain:
Into the mountains she climbs with the riverbed,
up to where the sky is a lake.
The voices of people she has longed for
hail her from a reed boat. She answers
in their lost language.
Before she goes to meet them
at the place where land falls away
her fingers remember to pick flowers.
All of her poems are remarkable in their inventive phrases and images and shadows of under thoughts. It is a book of jewels with no inferior stones. It celebrates Ascension’s stories by picking a lyric light out of them. It is a book full of animals: half breed coyote-dogs, bear-men made in fire rituals. For example, men have gone hunting and in a cave discover a great rattlesnake “with a face larger than the face of a cat.” Ascension tells that they killed it. Muse turns it into a stunning poem, celebrating the snake in four vivid stanzas accompanied by Walp’s striking illustration of the rattler uncoiled across the glowing phrases.
Rattlesnake, I speak to your dust
In homage. Ancient one of the flatiron face,
the ominous repose,
who but you could know so well
the skin of the mountain?
Who but you was its lover?
This is a book that reminds us that poetry should be read slowly and more than once. Whether this shining imagery will ever be recognized and remembered we cannot know. It reflects a great story of a people whose language was stolen from their mouths by the priests who made them Christians. Many a great book has died as a yellowing manuscript in an attic, and Keats has praised unheard melodies. Many an angel has burned in Hell. Even so, here are nineteen poems that emerge from a lost dialect into a beauty that deserves its splendid clothing. If it is never recognized, it will be an unknown falling star we did not see because we did not look up.