Sherry Chandler

A glimpse

From Colin G. Calloway’s The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007):

Shawnee social structure was loose and flexible, revolving around kinship and bands. It was a society that could accomodate movement, separation, and reassembling without falling apart. . . .

Political authority was limited and diffused: Chiefs seem to have been hereditary, but they led by reputation and example, not by rank or office. Like most eastern woodlands tribes, the Shawnees had civil or peace chiefs and war chiefs. . . . Women as well as men had war and civil chiefs. The Shawnee Prophet said the prinicipal duty of the female peace chief was to prevent unnecessary bloodshed: She would exert her influence to restrain the war cheifs and ensure that conflict occurred only as a last result. . . . A Quaker who was surprised to see an old woman speaking in an Indian council nearthe Susquehana River in 1706 and asked his interpreter why was told “that some women are wiser than some men, and that they had not done anything for many years without the council of this ancient, grave woman.” Increasing contact with Europeans disrupted the balance of influences that had traditionally worked to keep war in its place. White men ignored women when dealing with Indian allies, and escalating conflicts gave war chiefs greater clout in Indian communities. [pp. 15-16]

I know of one such Shawnee woman chief whose name has been preserved: Nonhelema, sister to Cornstalk. Whites called her “the Grenadier Squaw” because of her authority and her stature. She was reportedly well over six feet tall. Calloway said whites also called her Catherine but the only reference I’ve seen to this name used the more familiear “Katy.” I take that as an indication of the contempt with which Shawnee women were held.

According to Calloway, Nonhelema was determined to remain neutral and so was held in contempt by her people, though she was given into Daniel Boone’s custody once as surety for prisoner exchanges. In the end she left her people or was driven out. Calloway reports that

In her old age she petitioned Congress for support and for two thousand acres on the Scioto where sheonce lived and where her mother was buried. The committee appointed to consider her petition concluded she had “a just claim on the humanity of the people of the United States.” They recommended she be allowed “one suit or dress of Cloaths including a blanket per annum, and one ration of provisions each day during her lilfe.” [p. 66]

Apparently, however, gratitude didn’t run to granting her the land.

Miss Emily Bronte has a birthday

Trailers

I picked up this book trailer for Dennis Cass’s Head Case over at Diane Lockward’s Blogalicious. It won a Moby Award.

Diane, who has a new book out from Wind, Temptation by Water is interested in promotion and has used this video as an occasion to discuss ways to self-promote.

She has done her own trailer for her second Wind Publications book What Feeds Us. It’s a pretty nice piece of work:

Two ways it can be done.

Read Diane’s blog. She provides a lot of great resources for the struggling poet.

Patience

From Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1997):

Wordsworth said that the poet must create the taste by which he is enjoyed, that is, the poet trains the audience to like a new sort of art. The training takes time, and each new poety you read is training you to like a new personal shorthand of images and a systematically original language. If a poet does not appeal to you now, look again at the work in ten years . . . Each person’s taste hovers at a different evolutionary moment. [p. 88]

And the other side of the coin:

The strangest experience in reading poetry, as in writing it, is to find yourself in it, to be yourself in it. We sometimes speak of this as finding a “favorite poet.” This is a poets whose writing is so close to your own way of seeing and thinking that there seems no barrier at all between you and the poet. Such a poet is a powerful reflecting mirror of your own sensibility and creativity. In that poet’s work, you find yourself “more truly and more strange” (as Wallace Stevens puts it in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”). Sometimes poets are mirrors for a whole generation, and become bestsellers on that account — as T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost and Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg have been in the United States in the twentieth century. Other American poets, just as good, remain known to relatively few readers (who nonetheless claim them as intensely as the country at large claimes the bestsellers). [p. 88]

This last statement sounds familiar. It seems to me to speak to the question of audience for poetry that I’ve discussed here before. It is not necessary to tap into the zeitgeist in order to be a worthwhile poet.

Portrait of a gentleman

Here is a provocative little passage from Virginia’s Western War, 1775-1786 (Stackpole Books, 2002), co-authored by Neil O. Hammon and Richard Taylor:

John Floyd and his little party became the first settlers of Beargrass Creek near the Falls [of the Ohio]. . . . Floyd, with little help from his friends, spent the winter trying to establish a station on his old military survey. In cutting down the first tree, Floyd’s only slave was injured when the trunk crushed his foot. Floyd did not take his place because he considered himself a gentleman, a member of a class of men who at that time were not expected to do physical labor [p. 119]

I find this just astounding. The year was 1780, the man has come into a Wilderness alive with hostile Shawnee and British who are fighting the western front of the Revolutionary War. Floyd had first come to Kentucky in 1774 to survey land around the Falls of the Ohio, site of present-day Louisville. He and his party had a squeaky escape from Shawnee fighting Lord Dunsmore’s War. He had participated in the rescue of Jemima Boone and would later take part in the Battle of Blue Licks. He obviously wasn’t a terribly rich man, having but the one slave. But he couldn’t pick up an axe to clear his own land.

Green River Writers Contest 2010

The Green River Writers have issued a call for submissions to their 2010 Writing Contest.

Deadline for submissions is September 30.

Prizes will be issued in 16 categories of fiction and poetry.

For complete guidelines, here is a copy of the contest brochure in PDF format or you can visit the Green River Writers website.

Pieces submitted to the GRW contest are not published, so all rights remain with the author.

A little help from my friends

Well, a lot, really.

Let me recommend to you the latest Owenton News-Herald column by my friend Georgia Green Stamper, in which she said I hung the moon. (Also here.) Or at least my third of the moon.

My lifelong friend Sherry Chandler has taken such an ambitious approach to writing her family’s history that I’m fearful I may insult her by even calling it that. But since it was inspired by listening to her 90 year old mother talk about her memories of life and kin, I include it here.

A widely published poet and literary critic, Sherry has written an odyssey in verse [working title “Daughters of Rebecca”] that I believe will take its rightful place on the shelf of Kentucky letters.

Probably I don’t need to point out to you that Georgia is not an objective critic of my work. She is, however, a constant goad, al ife coach, who is constantly pushing me to ever higher achievement and without her nudging and sometimes shoving, I would probably not have written this collection of poems.

The book isn’t published yet, but you can find some of the poems in Kestrel for fall 2009 and spring 2010, in the Lousville Review for spring 2010, in the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and at the Other Voices International site, as well as in my two chapbooks (see sidebar).

Meanwhile, let me tell you that Georgia herself is no slouch. In addition to her biweekly column for the News-Herald, she is the author of a book of essays, You Can Go Anywhere (from the Crossroads of the World (Wind Publications, 2008). She is also a member of the Kentucky Humanities Council speaker’s roster and has become one of the most popular presenters of essay and personal memoir in the state.