Marc J. Sheehan

I have been following Marc Sheehan's writing for probably fifteen years now, starting with his poetry collections, GREATEST HITS and VENGEFUL HYMNS, which I enjoyed enough to keep an eye out for more Sheehan. Two years ago I read his small book of what I called "absurdist flash fiction," DISSENTING OPINION FROM THE COMMTTEE FOR THE BEATITUDES. And now here is the latest Sheehan oddity, THE CIVIL WAR WAR, which I have just chuckled and head-scratched and wondered my way through. With a couple dozen pieces in just 35 pages, Sheehan is grappling with the strangeness of the lives and expeiences of Civil War reenactment enthusiasts. The first piece, "Before the Fighting," peeks at the previous interests of the reenactors, stuff from model cars to spelunking, bodybuilding, bug collecting, and sports to "ran, hoarded, drank." Another very short piece is about flea circus denizens who join the reenactors. (Of course.) Yet another parodies Aristophanes' LYSISTRATA in the form of Jeopardy answer/question format, complete with a Chorus of Men and a Chorus of Women. It helps if you know the Greek play, but you'll probably laugh anyway. I did. There are more than a few chuckles here, but it turns serious in a few others, in one of which an active shooter turns up in the midst of a sham battle, and the narrator, shot though the shoulder, suddenly finds himself flat on his back, contemplating the beauty of the clouds and thinking, "I gotta find some other way to have fun." The same narrator, in "The Watch," finds himself later suffering from PTSD. And there's the "ennui" of the camps and sameness of the pretend engagements that sets in. "As John Cougar Mellencamp might have put it - 'Oh yeah, reenactment goes on, long after the thrill of reenactment is gone.'"

But I'm not really doing justice to these odd little essays. Sheehan continues to carve out new territory in this intriguing and entertaining little book. You just have to read him. It won't take you very long, and it's a trip. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (más)

In turning from poetry to absurdist flash fiction in his new collection, DISSENTING OPINION FROM THE COMMITTEE FOR THE BEATITUDES, Marc Sheehan has given us something entirely new, or maybe it's just retro avant-garde. Because I was reminded of the first time I read Pinter and Pirandello, in a drama course at Ferris State University over fifty years ago. Maybe Marc is channeling their 'out-there' sensibility for these disturbing times of a confusing new century.

In fact, Sheehan is retired from a long career in the administration of FSU. A dozen or more years ago I read with great delight two of his poetry collections, GREATEST HITS and VENGEFUL HYMNS, both, if I remember correctly, with firm connections to West Michigan. There is some of that here too, but the emphasis is on the speculative, the awful possibilities, the weird. Here's a sample, just an opening line -

"Between when the Pope renounced his faith and the Republic of Texas declared its independence, I ran the local sorrow franchise." ("The Sorrow Vendor")

Yeah, I know. And it gets even weirder. And the Church's dark influence shows up throughout these short snippets of life. Consider the cyber-age take on the sacrament of Penance (or Reconciliation) in "Unquestioned Forgiveness, Inc." Or the title piece, for that matter.

Another theme concerns confusing or failed relationships. See "The Divorce Party" and "Elegy for the Corded Phone." Grief and loss are featured too, as in "Paradoxes of the Space-Time Continuum, " with its closing lines, " It's like after someone dies. There you are on a strange planet, stranded."

I am tempted to quote that ancient poet, "Terrence this is stupid stuff." But I won't. Because I really enjoyed this little book (barely a book at all, at less than fifty pages). Instead I'll just say, Sheehan, this is strange stuff. Very strange. But I LIKED it! All you flash fiction fans, take note. Here's a new, vibrant voice for your genre. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (más)

In Marc Sheehan's poem, "Field Guide to the Native Emotions of Michigan," he references Michigan's mitten shape, and describes its upper peninsula as "a useless appendage, a cartoon superhero's power ray unable even to stun Wisconsin." Then he admits, apparently with no small sense of mixed chagrin and wonder, that he's lived in Michigan his whole life, following that with an italicized "Man Lives Entire Life in Michigan."

I haven't lived my entire life in Michigan, but I grew up here and came back forty years later to retire. So when Sheehan's poems speak of Lansing, Grand Rapids, and Grand Haven I know those places. And I certainly know Walhalla, a nearly empty crossroads on US-10 just west of Chase. And no, there's no resemblance whatsoever to the real Valhalla, the "hall of the dead" from Norse mythology. Hell, they couldn't even get the spelling right here in west Michigan. But Sheehan gets the ambience all right, the ruined farmhouses, collapsed porches, the junked cars and abandoned gardens - all emblems of the poverty of such places as Walhalla and other near ghost towns of rural Michigan, as well as the outlying areas of larger towns recently become part of the growing industrial rust belt of the midwest. These poems brought to mind the recent award-winning story collection of Bonnie Jo Campbell, AMERICAN SALVAGE. Sheehan's settings are very near the same, simply honed and polished down to a few lines that tell the same sad stories of jobs, lives and dreams gone south.

Sheehan's Michigan roots poke through most of these poems, even when he's passing through places like Scotland, County Clare Ireland, Galveston or Nebraska, as he remembers a marriage dissolved, the death of guitar guy John Fahey, the origins of 4-H and a Catholic childhood. Love lost, religion lost, jobs lost. There is a lot of ruminating on these hard changes and losses, and yet there are also hints of fond memories for things like cutting rhubarb and eating the pie, a tractor tire swing and sitting atop his sister's horse, lifted there by his father.

There are moments here that, if you are a certain age, will cause a catch in your throat - like the piece about taking his mother out to lunch from the old folks' home and how, "in my mild-mannered way, that I brandished a napkin like a paper cape to wipe my mother's chin ..." Or when he remembers going to Grand Rapids with his mother, who "shopped for curtains at Herpelsheimer's while I watched Bond, James Bond, in Thunderball at the shabby Majestic Theater." So many, if not most, of the people and places Sheehan writes of in VENGEFUL HYMNS are vanished now, lending an overall melancholy air to these poems, even the ones that make you chuckle, remembering.

I rarely read poetry, but I liked this book.… (más)

I don't have many collections of poetry on my shelves - works by Raymond Carver, Donald Hall, and Neal Bowers are a few that come to mind. And the truth is I came to those books by first reading prose books by the authors. But the only books Marc Sheehan has published are two slim volumes of poems. Greatest Hits was his first one, and it came out over ten years ago. (This year he published his second collection, Vengeful Hymns, which I'll be getting to soon.) A poet for probably thirty-five years, Sheehan obviously has no illusions about his craft or how it fits in the overall scheme of today's world. Indeed, in one of his poems here, "On Being an Adult," in which he meditates on his own life and that of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, there is a telling line which says, "... in America we don't read poems." Of course, he's right. We are a country who prefers Rambo to Rimbaud. (Although I think the pronunciation is very similar, if Van Morrison got it right, I mean.) And I'm guilty too. I don't read poetry - usually. And yet I found myself caught up in these poems. The subjects, although viscerally personal, are also universal. Love found and then lost; marriages gone awry; feelings of failure, loneliness and despair. In "First Marriage," - a casually entered upon college contract:

"They found their rings in a velvet-lined box of costume jewelry in a head shop just off campus. Their wedding photos show the two of them wearing the tell-tale goofy grins of very good Columbian ..."

Showing perhaps lessons learned, "Second Marriage" portrays a groom who "knows how to fix almost anything he can work a wrench around. And what he doesn't know he is determined this time to figure out, or live with broke."

But there is, too, a sense of humor here, as there has to be. And a sense of a rural childhood and things nearly forgotten that made me smile in remembrance, "like the cry we used to raise from long blades of grass stretched taut between the thumbs and held to the mouth ..." ("Pheasant Season"). I still make those caw-ing sounds of varying pitch with a flat blade of quack grass to please my grandsons, who are not yet old enough to master this arcane farmboy skill - but soon, soon. And maybe one day they will show their sons and grandsons, like my father showed me. And like someone once showed the poet.

Every one of these poems is a story, carefully pruned, polished and turned up to the light. Thank you, Marc, for putting them all down. You're on my shelf now, with Carver and Hall. Pretty good company.… (más)