Sherry Chandler

A different kind of bombing

Bombing of Poems is an art project in which cities that have experienced aerial bombing in the past are now bombed with poems. Bombing of Poems over Warsaw consisted of dropping one hundred thousand poems printed in bookmarks from a helicopter over a symbolic location in the city. The poems were printed in two languages and they are by Chilean and Polish contemporary poets more info www.loscasagrande.org

This event took place in August 2009.

My thanks for Mark Brown. This is perhaps old news, but it’s good news.

And you may be interested in this bit of follow-up to the Les Paul playing zebra finches: The day an egg stopped the rock-chick show

Old satisfactions

from Washing Sheets in July

. . .
The sheets, wet, adhesive
as I hang them, smell
of soap and bee-filled air.

Flags of order in the palpable sun,
how they snap in the new breeze!
Watching them balloon on the line,
I swell with an old satisfaction:
I beat them clean in the Euphrates. . .

I have said that every woman poet has her clothesline poem. These lines are from Jane Gentry’s. She catches the universality of this experience, all the way back to the Euphrates.

It is, unfortunately, an image much sadder now than it was when this poem was published in 1995, though even then there was enough to regret about the area of the Euphrates.

The poem is from Jane’s first collection, A Garden in Kentucky. It was published by LSU Press. I have heard Jane say, perhaps on Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s Accents, that she sent the manuscript to LSU first, not thinking she had a chance to be published there but just because she admired their record of publishing great Southern writers. To her surprise and delight, the press accepted the manuscript. And so her first book was accepted on its first submission by her first-choice of presses.

So excellent is this collection.

I hadn’t read it since I bought my copy 15 years ago at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. I remember standing in line to get my copy signed with a handful of my old English professors from Georgetown College. I hadn’t seen them since I graduated that institution in 1970, and so the occasion was by way of a reunion. Jane was kind enough to inscribe my copy “a fellow poet,” though I had no bona fides as a poet back then except a few pitiful efforts written in Jane’s creative writing class.

For many years, my very concept of a poem was shaped by Jane Gentry.

Like Dorothy Sutton’s Backing into Mountains, A Garden in Kentucky is a book that honors the elders and mourns a loss of culture. In poems like “The Old Place, 1949,” “Grandfather Lights the Gas Stove,” and “Great-Grandfather’s Dog, High, on a Tintype,” Jane shows us the life that is gone. So many of these poems deal with death — four have “cemetery” in the title — but it is a death to rebirth, as in “Maugie’s Heaven:”

Lying deep in spring
lapped in hymns of dirt
beneath the teeth of grass,
she dreams that robins sing
their lust above her empty
house, the bed she made,
among hallelujahs of new leaves.

But love and sex have their place in this collection. Eros is there to balance out thanatos. There is, in fact, a poem entitled “Eros,” and where there is death, there is also birth. And wit, as in these lines from the poem “Susannah,” about the birth of a daughter:

A sac she’d filled
I ricocheted
around that room,
an emptying balloon,
on the loose
caroming
off the cold lights,
batter at the green-
masked faces,
riding the red jet
her body washed
from mine

As Mary Ann Taylor-Hall puts it on the back-cover blurb, the language of these poems is “both restrained and sensual.” Well, the passage above is not all that restrained, which in these deceptively quiet poems, makes its eruption even more of a delight.

Jane is as at home with the Classics as she is with the sweet smell of burley curing in the barn. And so Eros visits the poems, as does Janus, and “Telemakhos at Festival Market Thinks of His Father.”

Jane is most tender in poems of her own father, who shows up here, again and again, in elegiac poems. Here are a few lines from the long poem “For My Father.”

After Rain
He wore weather like an old sweater,
next to his skin. He watched the sky
as one searches the face of a friend.
He heard voices in the rain on the roof.
The wind spoke to him in his own breath.

Many of us here in this farming state knew this father.

I could go on and on. I’m an enthusiast. How to stop?

The book is still in print. You can buy a copy. I will let LSU’s web page take me out of this:

Stark, lovely, elegiac, gently surreal, Gentry’s poems resonate and echo in the vast spaces of the heart; long after being read, lines return, lines like those of the lovely “In the Moment of My Death (For My Father)” that beg to be memorized:

In the moment of my death
may your old happiness light my way;
and the image of your face
smiling, happy at my coming,
be a lantern in the dark.

The taste of desire, the pang of remembered loss, the sorrow of leaving a house-Jane Gentry has found a way to make these things new. A Garden in Kentucky is a place of mystery, terror, beauty, and wonder, a garden to which readers will find themselves retuning again and again.

First

These little daffodils are not the loveliest ones in our yard/garden. They’re small and unassuming, but they are always first to bring yellow into the dead land and for that they’re honored:

The kale over-wintered:

And the rhubarb has me almost tasting pie (not to mention I think I see a little dandelion greens in there):

Who is this?

Thanks to T.R. for the photography that shows that even on this drizzly day, spring is busting out all over.

Firebombing, revisited

A day or two ago, I did a post about James Dickey’s poem, “The Firebombing,” and I was very pleased when Dickey’s son, Christoper left a comment. Here is part of what Christopher Dickey said:

Back in 2003 I wrote a long essay about “The Firebombing” because it struck me that the poem tried very hard to come to terms with the weird detachment that has come to characterize much of modern warfare. Anyone interested can Google “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” The direct link to the pdf is http://www.strom.clemson.edu/events/calhoun/guests/dickey.pdf

Christopher Dickey is an excellent war correspondent, a man whose writings we should all have given more heed. Maybe then we would not have gotten ourselves into the mess of Iraq. But as he says himself, mostly Americans just want to forget about the rest of the world.

Dickey also writes well and interestingly about his father. In 2007, I wrote a post here about his article “War and Deliverance.,” which appeared in Newsweek on October 2007 on release of the Deliverance movie to HD DVD.

So naturally I went looking for the article “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” Here is part of what Christopher Dickey has to say about James Dickey’s poem “The Firebombing:”

At my father’s poetry readings, he’d usually give a pretty long introduction to this poem “which attempts to come to terms with modern warfare and with the fact that for many people engaged in modern warfare there is no guilt, because guilt depends ultimately on contemplating the destruction that one is responsible for.

“So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it,” my father would explain to the audience. “The man in this poem has been twenty years ago a bomber pilot and has made firebombing raids on civilian populations over Japan. He is a decent fellow, like most pilots were, and are, and he’s thinking now twenty years later in his pleasant suburban home that he is the same person who burned women and children alive with jellied gasoline called napalm.”

As I have said before, and will probably say again, I was born during the firebombing of Dresden, though I didn’t know that until I was grown. Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five was one of the formative events of my life. And then, of course, there was Vietnam, which overshadowed my life from ages 15 to 30.

As one who had lived through Vietnam, I was horrified by the glee with which our nation welcomed George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War, the way we all gathered around our televisions to watch the smart bombs fall, as though this were some virtual reality game. And, in many ways, for us it was all a game.

Here is Christopher Dickey once again:

For more than fifty years after World War II, and more than thirty years after my father wrote that poem, technology, especially American technology, continued to dehumanize the inhumanity of war until, by the late 1990s, we were able to convince ourselves, at our great distance from the destruction, that such a thing could be waged as a war that was humane.

Now, that’s a pretty dangerous concept if you think about it. Because a humane war, especially one waged from a sanitary distance, is implicitly an EASY war. It doesn’t have to be righteous. It doesn’t even have to be memorable.

. . .

Have you ever heard the term “fire and forget”?

“Fire and forget” is a bit of military jargon that describes, say, an anti-tank missile that does the work of tracking and hitting the target by itself once you pull the trigger. The munitions the Air Force and Navy use today, the “smart bombs” and cruise missiles, might also fit into that same category. It’s about guidance systems. But “fire and forget” could just as aptly describe the way the United States makes war and the American people have learned to perceive it in the last quarter century. And it tells us a lot about some of the misguided fights we’ve gotten into of late.

Since 1981, we have carried out an act of war, on average, just about every year.

This article was written early in our current “War on Terror” — terminology that seems blessedly to have been dropped lately — before the “Surge,” before hawks were able to declare something like victory in Iraq, though it was published a few months after George W. Bush’s ridiculous “Mission Accomplished” stunt.

In the meantime, I hope we have learned some difficult lessons about the nature of war. I hope we have learned what Dickey, father and son, kept trying to tell us — that, though we ourselves may be detached from our war making and though we may consider our technological warfare humane, things looks considerably different to the people on the ground being killed and maimed.

As Christopher Dickey says:

If you’ve been on the ground at the receiving end of those American bombs, however, among the people who won’t forget, don’t get closure and can’t just change the channel, you know that much of the hatred of the United States in the world comes not from these leaders who are “jealous” of its strength, as some in Washington would have us believe, and not from people who “hate freedom,” certainly, but from those innocent people who’ve either been victims of America’s awesome, insouciant power, or fear that they might be.

Consider that word insouciant.

Though I have strong reservations about Barack Obama’s decision to try to go back to Afghanistan and “win” that war, I do applaud his willingness to put people on the ground there to help rebuild, to give our country a more human face. Civilians, too. I also have some reservations about using armies as nation builders, not because I’m against nation building, but because it blurs a line that ought not to be blurred.

Like, for example, when our civilian President salutes his military.

But we are still depending on our technological war toys. We’re still using drones that maybe are killing terrorists but definitely are killing their wives and children. We have young soldiers killing in Pakistan now without ever leaving the continental United States. For this work, we recruit the ones who are good at video games.

That is really frightening.

___________
By the way, today is Albert Einstein’s birthday, that man whose hindsight was much better than his foresight. Like all of us, I guess.

__________
I have discovered this site, James Dickey: Deep Deliverance, which I should have found before:

A personal site devoted to some of James Dickey’s writing, thinking, living and loving. Here you will find bits of his poetry, a few lines from his books, images of his life, and memories from his friends. If you are teaching James Dickey or studying James Dickey, this is a good place to start (c) Christopher Dickey

More stuff

The Last Moonshiner. Any comments?

Shenandoah turns 60 and turns digital.:

Shenandoah will publish in its usual format in fall 2010. In spring 2011, there will be a limited-edition anthology of poems published in Shenandoah over the last 15 years. And then will come the biggest change of all. “For the foreseeable future,” said Smith, “that will be the last print issue of Shenandoah.”

Starting with the fall 2011 issue, it will be entirely online. A paid subscription will be a thing of the past. “It is perhaps inevitable when we look at what has happened to other literary journals,” said Smith. “Literary magazines per se are going to have to change their way of conceiving themselves and of reaching their audiences. And this is all tied up in the deep inquiry going on in our culture about the future of print. There is time to make that transition and be an innovator.”

The way the journal involves students in its work will be innovative as well. “The interns will not just observe and theorize about the actual editorial decisions, from design to contents to policies,” said Smith, “but they will also participate in the decisions, plus do things like screening submissions and blogging.”

See Death of a lit mag, and thanks to Edward Byrne for the news.

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light

. . .

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

I’m not sure why Texas gets to hold our entire education system hostage but there it is.

On the other hand, the most Draconian version of Utah’s anti-abortion bill did not pass:

DENVER — A sweeping anti-abortion statute in Utah that would have allowed up to life in prison for a woman whose fetus died from her intentional or reckless behavior was withdrawn by its sponsor on Thursday and will be revised to be narrower in scope.

. . .

The sponsor, Representative Carl D. Wimmer, a Republican, said he had removed a key clause that would have allowed prosecution under Utah’s criminal homicide laws for a “reckless act of the woman” that resulted in death to a fetus. Language will remain, he said, that makes a woman’s “intentional” actions, if resulting in the death of her fetus in an illegal abortion, a felony.

The bill was prompted by a case last year in which a 17-year-old who was seven months pregnant sought to induce a miscarriage by paying a man to beat her. She was arrested, but released by a judge who said seeking an abortion was not a crime.

Legal abortions, performed by a doctor, would not be affected by the old bill or its replacement. But Utah has statutes on the books intended to discourage abortions, including a parental consent requirement for minors.

My bleeding heart instincts say that any 17-year-old as desperate as all that should be treated with great compassion and not exploited as a poster-child for turning women into criminals.

Meanwhile, there’s this from Amnesty International. I would somehow feel more sympathetic toward the anti-abortion idealogues if I thought there was any real compassion involved. But I see little evidence of it.

Amnesty International’s report Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA, urges action to tackle a crisis that sees between two and three women die every day during pregnancy and childbirth in the USA.

A total of 1.7 million women a year, one-third of all pregnant women in the country, suffer from pregnancy-related complications.

The report also revealed that severe pregnancy-related complications that nearly cause death — known as “near misses” — are rising at an alarming rate, increasing by 25 percent since 1998.

Minorities, those living in poverty, Native American and immigrant women and those who speak little or no English are particularly affected.

“This country’s extraordinary record of medical advancement makes its haphazard approach to maternal care all the more scandalous and disgraceful,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA.

, , ,

“Mothers die not because the United States can’t provide good care, but because it lacks the political will to make sure good care is available to all women,” said Larry Cox.

Amnesty International’s analysis also shows a health care reform proposal before the US Congress does not address the crisis of maternal health care.

And then there’s this, an antidote to Oscar hype (though I’m pleased about Jeff Bridges):

A cat may stare at a [son of] King [MacLain]

In the foreground was a cat. In the deep grass she held a motionless and time-honored pose.

Her head was three-quarters turned toward them where they stood. It seemed to have womanly eyebrows. Her gaze came out of her face with the whole of animal comprehension; whether it was menace or alarm in the full-open eyes, her face made a burning-glass of looking. Her eyes seemed after so long a time to be holding her herself in their power. She crouched rigid with the devotion and intensity of her vision, and if she had caught fire there, still she could not, Eugene felt, have stirred out of the seizure. She would have been consumed twice over before she disregarded either what she was looking at or her own frenzy.

— Eudora Welty, from “Music from Spain”

According to James Shimkus in Aspects of King MacLain in Eurdora Welty’s The Golden Apples, a master’s thesis I found online, Eudora Welty had not originally considered “Music from Spain,” set in San Francisco, as part of The Golden Apples.

The story, whose protagonist was originally named Francis Dowdie, had several different titles, including “Dowdie’s Guilt,” “Guilt,” and “The Flower and the Rock,” the latter being the title under which Russell submitted the story to the New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Town and Country, Atlantic, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Tomorrow, and Partisan (Polk 62). “The Flower and the Rock” was rejected from all of the aforementioned magazines, but Welty expressed her faith in the story in a letter to Russell dated September 17, 1947: “Nobody has yet bought the S.F. story [“Music from Spain”], have they? That really makes me think less of editors (said the author)—I do think that a good story”

In the end, the story was eventually published in a limited, monograph edition in June 1948 by the Levee Press of Greenville, Mississippi. It was while she was typing a clean copy for the Levee Press edition that Welty decided the story belonged with the others in The Golden Apples

She communicated her discovery to Russell in a letter dated February 18, 1948: “I’d already typed solidly all day getting Music from S. ready for Levee (wrote the whole damn thing just about over—but really I think this time I got it right—and the key is, you’d never guess, the little man in it is from [Morgana] and who he is is one of the MacLain twins—don’t faint. Cleared everything up.).”

I neglected to mention in my tarradiddle on this subject last week that one reason why these stories are full of “caricatures” is that they are also full of avatars of various Greek gods and mythological figures. The collection is to a large extent a re-telling of these myths. So Morgana is, in some ways, a land as enchanted as the Forest of Arden, complete with rude mechanicals in the form of the African American characters. Shimkus points out that the name of the town may refer to the Fata Morgana.

The title of the collection may refer to William Butler Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Aengus wanders in search of

The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun

And as I did point out last week, all the characters seeking to escape this fated place, to find their own version of the golden apples, find themselves tethered still to Morgana, Eugene MacLain, who physically escapes to San Francisco, perhaps most of all.

The message in the end may be that escape is not the right tactic, that the quest is inward not outward.

Eugene MacLain encounters two cats in his day-long (Bloomesque?) meander around San Francisco. One in a store window, and this one in the grass by the shore.

__________
My thanks to everybody for good wishes. I am not usually so public about my ills but then I don’t remember when I’ve been this sick. I’m mending but I fear not very coherent.

Stuff

Okay, I am laid low with bronchitis, sucking on my bronchodilator and my codeine-laced guaifenesen. So I’m not much good today.

I recommend you go listen to qarrtsiluni’s podcast of Marilyn Taylor’s poem “Sarcoma.”

Or Woodrat Podcast 9: A Poet’s Way in Norway with Ren Powell

Or play around at Disapproving Rabbits.

Or read Helen’s take on Nascar penalties.

Or Terry on Alchemy, a dance review.

Or crochet a place mat with Rebecca.

Or even Salon on Why probe Charlie Rangel — but not Mitch McConnell?

I’m going back to bed.