Pifflicated medieval squirrels

If you haven’t yet ordered a copy of my illustrated poetry chapbook A Heart in the Mouth, A Stick in the Eye, don’t wait too long! It looks like this is gonna have to be a limited run. These have just been taking a lot longer to make than I accounted for .

But I’m about to get going on the second round of chapbooks to ship. I have learned a lot from this process so far (and so will you! Look, did you know about booze-swilling mutant squirrels with pompadours in 14th century England? I’ve reproduced one in the chapbook [mixed media: watercolor, goauche, pen, profanity, and a variety of inks. The pifflicated squirrel is done with walnut ink]).

It’s been so long since I’ve painted anything that I had to get up to speed on what supplies are even out there now (and where to buy 5/0 paintbrushes for that matter).

Keen to hear any recommendations for good places to shop for art supplies these days!

And you folks who have supported my work by buying a chapbook – thank you so much! My spirit needed this experience

Buy my chapbook here: Ko-fi.com/karmadgma

Chapbook art

I feel like Brother Ecgbert from like the 1380s is just laughing at me from across the centuries, but what can I say. I don’t have sheep or oak gall ink or gold leaf size made from suckling pigs. I have fountain pens and gel pens and absolutely no training.

So take it down a notch before you give yourself an embolism, Ecgbert. I think we both can agree it’s best if you just avoid medieval medicine as much as possible.

Thanks to those of you who’ve already ordered chapbooks, I was able to buy some cardstock – already got it and have been working on the covers. The good paper for the insides arrives tomorrow.

Want your own copy of my chapbook, complete with shiny embellishments, a menagerie of linocut animals, and a little bit of iambic pentameter? Get one at ko-fi.com/karmadgma

❤ Thanks so much for supporting my work!

The Kalevala, Shady Grove, and Uncle Billy: A Family History Perspective on the Oral-Formulaic Tradition

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, “Kullervon sotaanlähtö (Kullervon Rides to War),” 1901. Public domain. Info at Finnish National Gallery.

In all my book sorting/culling, I found and flipped through the Kalevala the other day, which is the Finnish national epic poem that I read for the first time in 2006 in grad school. It is a very long and very, very weird poem. I highly recommend it.

I think one of the reasons that I like it is that I come from a family that tells stories. On my mother’s side, the side that actually gets together and eats food and talks regularly, we circulate stories: about Uncle Billy who’s been dead since 1962 and what he used to carry around in his car; about my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother who’d visit from Mexico and take the stagecoach, hiding her wedding ring in her mouth in case of bandits; about the erstwhile neighbor in the late ’70s who peed on his tomato plants every day out of unshakable faith that this helped them grow strong, plump, and worm-free.

My uncles’ stories about Uncle Billy might never have been exactly the same twice – or maybe the plot would be the same, the basic structure, but the emphasis would shift subtly each time depending on what they teller meant to convey. It’s almost a compressed sort of folk transmission in action, a lightning-swift assessment of rhetorical context which they then deploy for best effect. The inventory of Uncle Billy’s car’s passenger-side floor shifts slightly to provide the best props for the evening’s focus. It’s as “true” as anything ever was and the stock phrases are always the same, but the situational detail embellishment is a bit like improvised musical ornamentation over an established melody.

On my father’s side, where there isn’t as much storytelling, there’s music. Most of the immediate family plays an instrument or two or three, and when I was a child I learned about twenty of the countless verses to a folk song called Shady Grove.

Cheeks as red as a blooming rose
And eyes are the prettiest brown
She’s the darling of my heart
Sweetest girl in town

Shady Grove, my little love
Shady Grove I say
Shady Grove, my little love
I’m bound to go away

When I was older and figured out that a lot of communication was happening on these music nights and I didn’t want to miss it, I brought along my fiddle and listened to the new verses my father had added to those he’d learned from Doc Watson and wherever else. Over time, he “extended” the story — he put marital unhappiness and willing separation into this song which is traditionally about unwilling separation and all the charm of “first love.” He sang a Shady Grove “ten years later.”

Every day when I get home
My wife I try to please her
There ain’t no sadness when I’m gone
One day I’m going to leave her

Shady Grove, my little love
Shady Grove I say
Shady Grove, my little love
I’m bound to go away

The stock phrases are the same, the chorus is the same, the notes are the same — but he’s put something into the spirit of this song that was never there before, at least in a small circle of his own chosen kin as they sit around the fire, sing, play, and tell true lies. It might be a different story next week, but at the same time, it’s still a performance of Shady Grove, or of part of a larger “cycle” or available variation within the tradition of Shady Grove.

The players work references to their personal lives into impromptu verses that by rights belong to a song about the Audubon Zoo or Mardi Gras. They’re no longer just about the Audubon Zoo or Mardi Gras. An entire conversation about someone’s latest girlfriend can happen in the space of three verses. The musician in me is delighted, but the folklore student in me is freaking out that no notes on this ever get made.

So my family stories on my mother’s side of the family and my father’s music nights provide two different examples of how oral tradition works and why the search for “authenticity” or “the true original version” of something can so often be a case of looking at the whole thing the wrong way. Stories and songs like these don’t *have* “authors” in the modern sense, creators whose intents or versions must be faithfully preserved and repeated. They belong, rather, to the culture. We can certainly record individual versions on individual occasions, and individual performers are absolutely part of the ongoing process of “creating” such works, but it’s probably more useful to think about my uncle doing a performance of part of a larger legend of Uncle Billy than it is to wonder which parts are “original” or “true” and which are embroidery or exaggeration. That’s just… asking the wrong question.

The Kalevela, as part of the oral-formulaic tradition, also comments on it, and in a number of quirky, confusing, and/or delightful ways that I find useful for thinking about this stuff. The poets are talking about the performance of poetry in Canto I, and the whole thing draws my attention to the fact that I’m already several steps removed from the oral performance in this case (by both transcription and translation into English). And the talk isn’t about who’s got the shining poetic genius and is the most original or who has the dopest rhymes or whatever. The measure of skill is how one handles these words that one is heir to, almost like they were received as tangible, fragile objects… or in some cases, as small living creatures with a life and will of their own.