Sherry Chandler

Welcome to North Carolina

Two views from the North Carolina welcome center on I-40. Driving I-40 was an experience, especially on the Fourth weekend when everybody in the southeast seemed to be headed to the Smokies — or maybe to Dollywood.

Here at Wildacres there are no power cables to mar the view (they’re there in the bottom photo running between the trees but resolution may not be good enough for them to show). We are right on top of a mountain in the Blue Ridge. Right now I’m off to walk the trail around the mountain top.

Cat with long hunter

Boone hunted turkeys as food, not to sell, and he also occasionally killed panthers and wolves. Panther skin was not readily marketable but had ceremonial value.  When Boone and other Boonesborough leaders parleyed with their Indian besiegers during the siege of Boonesborough in 1778, the Indians spread a panther skin on a log for the negotiators to sit on.

–Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America. LSU Press, 2008

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I am off to Wildacres for the week. Though I will have wi-fi, I will also have good friends and Blue Ridge scenery so posting will be light to non-existent.

More items

Via Negative posting Honduran poetry here.

The Reluctant Poet Laureate

The Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature presents an opportunity to focus on the fine literature the state of Kentucky has produced, bringing it to the nation’s attention. Sarabande will publish one book annually of short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, a novella(s), or short novel. (Must be postmarked in July.)

Call for Submissions to Motes Books Motif 2 with the theme of “Chance.” Deadline September 1.

First Annual Ruth Redel Poetry Prize

Memorials

Ace Weekly’s James Baker Hall Memorial issue downloadable at this link. Or if you want to go direct to the PDF, here.

By the way, in the photo on the Ace site — Wendell Berry, Jim Hall, Ed McClanahan, & Gurney Norman — I just want to add the caption: One of these things is not like the others.

Of course, there are several ways you can group them. Two poets laureate in the group.

Thanks to Ann Lederer from drawing my attention to this issue.

I should also announce the James Baker Hall Memorial that will take place in Gratz Park here in Lexington on July 11 from 4:00 – 6:00. (If the weather is forbidding, the ceremony will move inside the Carnegie Center.) Afterwards, there will be a reception in the Carnegie Center, with food and drink and poetry. Please celebrate Jim, if you wish, by bringing along a poem to read. And please forward this message to any friends. Check the Kentucky Literary Newsletter for updates.

A good poor man’s country

From Stephen Arons, How the West Was Lost. The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. The Johns Hopkins Unversity Press, 1996.

A good poor man’s country. The phrase was ubiquitous among the contemporaries of Daniel Boone. Its meaning, however, was ambiguous. Indeed, that ambiguity helps explain why Kentucky did not become one. In its most common usage, the trope referred to a territory where men and the households they headed could get ahead. From the founding of British North America, promoters of settlement recommended various colonies as places where cheap land and high wages allowed Europeans of low stations and slim prospects to advance up social and economic ladders. In the era of the American Revolution, Kentucky became the latest and the most renowned land of opportunity. Tens of thousands of poor men and their families joined Boone in the conquest and colonizaton of trans-Appalachia, propelled by what Michel-Guillaume_Jean de Crèvecoeur described as “the happy restlessness . . . which is constantly urging us all to become better off than we are now.”

East and west of the Appalachians in the eighteenth century, poor men asked more of a good country than material prosperity. What drove pioneers across the mountains in the last quarter of the century was a hunger for lands that would allow families to get by with greater security and less effort. Fertile soil, ample range, and game-filled woods might not produce riches, but they captivated poor men who dreamed of achieving personal independence and providing more easily for dependents and descendants. While men of the backcountry from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas habitually testified to the hardships of border life, they also spoke often of the satisfactons of their simple, yet liberating, ways. Instead of “sigh[ing] for what was out of reach,” remembered one son of the Greater Pennsylvania backcountry, we were “happy and contented with such living, had fewer aches and pains . . . and slept more soundly.” Limiting wants and lending hands to neighbors in need held the key to a good poor man’s country in which how well people got along counted for more than how frequently or how far they got ahead.

That formula Ohio Indians well understood. Indian orators did not employ the metaphor of a good poor man’s country, and colonial writers did not attach the phrase to the Indian country beyond the Appalachians. Yet judged by the security and ease with which people got by and fellow villagers got along, the best poor man’s country belonged to the unconquered Indian peoples. Judge by almost any standard, Ohio Indian country was a better poor woman’s country than the adjacent backcountry. [pp. 192-193]

Arons’s argument is that Boone et al. had a unique opportunity to establish a variety of “new Eden” for the ordinary man. They blew it, not just because of men like Henry Clay who carved out huge estates using exploited slave labor, but because they themselves bought into the notion of land acquisition for wealth and profit. Instead they killed off all the game and lost the land to cannier exploiters. And so it was for the entire westward expansion.

Items

 Good news on the revolution/coup front

Honduras:

The scoreboard in the battle for Honduras shows the coup losing badly. It has not gained a single point in the international diplomatic arena, it has no serious legal points, and the Honduran people are mobilizing against it. As the military and coup leaders resort to brute force, they rack up even more points against them in human rights and common decency.

Only one factor brought the coup to power and only one factor has enabled it to hold on for these few days–control of the armed forces. Now even that seems to be eroding.

Iran:

What is new today is not that cracks have opened inside a monolithic system, or even that particularly powerful figures, like Rafsanjani, have broken onto the side of the reformers. What is new is the fierce mass movement from below, which is not confined to students and intellectuals but seems to span demographics and age groups. Even while exercising legal rights, nonviolent methods, and issuing constant appeals to Islam and to the ideals of the revolution, this movement has openly defied Khamenei, the Basij, and the Revolutionary Guards, by ignoring the threats of bloodshed and mayhem. Nothing like that has happened in thirty years.

Thanks to Dave.

Also Borges on Iran, thanks to the Poetry Hut Blog.

And this via The Sideshow:

Not such good news on our own human rights accountability:

In anticipation of the release of that report [the full version of the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report}, there is an important effort underway — as part of the ACLU Accountability Project — to correct a critically important deficiency in the public debate over torture and accountability.  So often, the premise of media discussions of torture is that “torture” is something that was confined to a single tactic (waterboarding) and used only on three “high-value” detainees accused of being high-level Al Qaeda operatives.  The reality is completely different. 

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody — at least.  While some of those deaths were the result of ”rogue” interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia

Sad news for bird lovers:

The nightingale has effectively vanished from woodlands across the UK.

A 30-year survey of British woodland birds has found that its population has fallen by more than 95%.

Seventeen other bird species have also declined significantly, many of which overwinter in tropical west Africa where their habitat is being destroyed.

Nightingales have a special significance for lovers of English poetry. I’ve never heard one but I grieve to think they may be gone from the English countryside.

Via

Beaver Wars

Or the European art and great efficiency in killing:

1689. Darkness was upon Huronia, and to the south and west.

Dutch and English wares arrived in New Netherlands’ ports by the bateaux full, but it was guns with thick butts and fitted with dog-lock cocks that clasped tight the amber and black sparking stones that the Mohawks wanted. Not the arquebuses sold to them an era before: the clumsy matchlocks needed a long cord that watered the eyes with the stink of vinegar when lit, and both ends smoking, and the glowing slow-match clenched in a serpentine arm suspended over the pan to make them shoot, if the ember ignited the priming. Flintlocks–forbidden to troops in France, but Compagnies franche de la Marines in Canada had them–cost more beaver, but the fancy guns killed with greater surety and at a good distance.

Sleek, long-barreled fowlers stocked to the muzzle in walnut, and bullet molds, black powder, and bar-lead–all bartered for heaps of plundered deer-skins; for stolen otter and beaver pelts; for booty of fisher, mink, fox, raccoon, and pine marten furs; for greasy bundles of ebony silk locks, the lank Huron scalps were very finely decorated, braided with strands of white and purple wampum, barleycorn beads, and porcupine quills, and capped with human parchment stained a dirty shade of burnt umber.

“The English have no sense,” declared a warrior of the longhouse, astonished at the spill of goods, his new sense of acquisition, and the power that it gave him. “They give us twenty knives like this for one Beaver skin.” But trader Robert Juet’s words evinced the classic European notion of these novel business dealings. “The people of the Countrie came flocking aboord and brought us . . . Bevers skinnes and Otters skinnes, which wee bought for Beades, Knives . . . Hatchets, and trifles.”

From Ted Franklin Belue. The Hunters of Kentucky. A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750-1792. Stackpole Books, 2003, pp. 4-5

Belue gives credit for the Juet quote to Carolyn Gilman in Where Two Worlds Meet: The Great Lakes Indian Fur Trade published by the Minnesota Historical Society in 1982.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more loving description of a firearm. Or a scalp, for that matter.

The Business of Fancydancing

Sherman Alexie. The Business of Fancydancing. Hanging Loose Press,

Perhaps as much as direct warfare, as much as devastating diseases like smallpox and influenza, it was European trade goods that destroyed the Indigenous Nations of the Eastern Woodlands. Easy availability of European cloth, tools, and jewelry caused the Woodland peoples to forget their traditional crafts and to give up their sharing ways. Desire for trade goods caused them to give up their subsistence practices of taking only enough from the land. Desire for trade goods set off the “Beaver Wars” that set nation against nation. Desire for trade goods caused them, in competition with white commercial hunters like Boone, to kill off the abundant game found west of the Appalachian range.

In Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Louisiana State University Press, 2008), Meredith Mason Brown quotes one native American who told a Jesuit priest:

The Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; in short, it makes everything.

And so, the Eastern Woodlands peoples, the Iroquois Federation, the Algonquian speakers (including the Shawnee), the Southeastern Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, moved ever westward, along with Boone and his ilk, in search of fresh hunting territory. Until the forests were no more. Until Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in May, 1830, and a way of life was destroyed forever.

The worst of all the trade goods was alcohol.

So why do I write all this as preface to talking about The Business of Fancydancing? What do the Woodland nations have to do with Sherman Alexie, who is Spokane from the far northwest?

Because this sort of thing was repeated over and over as Manifest Destiny took its toll.

Am I committing the sin of lumping all Native Americans together as one culture. Probably. But I think they are one culture in that they were all given the choice by advancing European settles: assimilate or die. Live on a reservation or die. The Business of Fancydancing is all about what life is like among a people that you might say we’ve kept in a detention camp for a couple of centuries.

It is a portrait of amazing resilience and great degradation.

I’ve seen the collection called “heartbreaking” but that would imply pity and I don’t think Alexie is asking pity for his people.

The humor is caustic. Take “Reservation Love Song”

I can pay your rent
on HUD house get you free
food from the BIA
get your teeth fixed at IHS

I can buy you alcohol
& not drink it all

The Business of Fancydancing is Alexie’s first book, a mixed bag of stories and poems, though the stories are more like prose poems than Alexie’s later fiction. And the poems are often narratives, tiny stories. So one might say this collection is working at the edge where the difference between poem and short story blurs.

Alexie works with a recurring group of characters: Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the storyteller who holds the law at bay with the idea of a gun, Lester FallsApart, Seymour, Father. Buffalo Bill makes a couple of appearances:

Evolution

Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation
right across the border from the liquor store

Crazy Horse is all over the place, especially in the section called “Crazy Horse Dreams”

War All the Time

Crazy Horse comes back from Vietnam
straight into the Breakaway Bar,
sits down at the same table
he was sitting at two years earlier
when he received his draft notice.

The whimsey of these poems, their magic realism, makes me laugh with delight at the same time that I feel great pain and anger and the prick of the satiric point that the dominant culture reduces all indigenous peoples to a few iconic movie Indians.

The tension between tradition and the temptations of European/American culture remain, and fancydancing has become just another way to hustle cash for alcohol:

The Business of Fancydancing

. . . Money
is an Indian boy who can fancydance
from powwow to powwow. We
got our boy, Vernon Wildshoe, to fill our empty

wallets and stomachs, to fill our empty
cooler. Vernon is like some promise
to pay the light bill, a credit card we
Indians get to use.

Sherman Alexie wrote and directed a film also entitled The Business of Fancydancing, which addresses the same themes. Film and print are, however, too very different art forms and seeing the movie is no substitute for reading the book, especially in this case when the “plots” are totally different.

Items

A big shout-out to my Scrabble-playing buddy Ruth Bavetta, whose visual poem “The End and the Aim,” made the top fifteen most view poems on Rattle.com

Why Do Poets Say “O”? Dave Bonta wants to know.

There’s some hate speech going on in Chicago poetry circles. Turf wars are not uncommon in poetry circles, but I’d say you’re losing if you have to stoop to calling your opponent fat. “They don’t really like you better than me, they just feel sorry for you.” Convincing argument, huh?

Via Poetry Hut Blog and then via Modern Americans, check out American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson

Via Silliman’s Blog, Billy Collins thinks people don’t read poetry because we have no good poets. My question, is the ability to make Patrick Moynihan cry the mark of a good poet?

My friend Nancy Fletcher Cassell pointed me to Karla M. Huston’s Burying the Red Shoes: Conversations with Four Poets at Margie. The four poets are Denise Duhamel, Naomi Shihab Nye, Shara McCallum, and Stellasue Lee.

Annie Finch, who is blogging at Harriet, on Why I Am a Woman Poet

Donne on Sunday

Divine Meditations

6
This is my play’s last scene, here heavens appoint
My prilgrimage’s last mile; and my race
Idly, yet quickly run, hath this last pace,
My span’s last inch, my minute’s last point,
And gluttonous death, will instantly unjoint
My body, and soul, and I shall sleep a space,
But my’ever-waking part shall see that face,
Whose fear already shakes my very joint:
Then, as my soul, to heaven her first seat, takes flight,
and earth-born body, in the earth shall dwell,
So, fall my sins, that all may have their right,
To where they are bred, and would press me, to hell.
Impute me righteous, thus purged of evil,
For thus I leave the world, the flesh, and devil.

—John Donne The Complete Poems (Penguin 1971)

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For the most part, I think these sonnets are more a demonstration of clever Donne than devout Donne. But clever Donne fudges in line 7, eliding my with ever to make a single syllable mever and thus keep the pentameter true. To my taste, the line might have had more interest had he let it get a bit rough. Then it might not have been so cold. For cleverness, I prefer sexy Donne.