Sherry Chandler

Lest we forget (well lest I forget anyway) – this from the Mark Cook poem, “To Capitalize the Ungodly,” over at The Writers Almanac:

Remember that painting, that Gilbert Stuart painting of Washington?
Sure you remember that thing, everybody does, the really famous one–
Seriously, I used to like that picture a lot, But then I realized that everything Stuart ever did looked like Washington.
I saw this self-portrait Stuart made of himself– It looked exactly like Washington.

at Lance Mannion and at Rox Populi

Georgia Green Stamper says:

Yes, dead, and before we even got to see Beyond the Sea. … Secretly, I think we all hoped we looked like her - at least all the blondes. I guess the brunettes wanted to look like what’s her name. [Sherry's note: I think this must be Annette?] And she seemed to have more opportunities than we to find “the good life.” After all - did we even get to meet Bobby Darin and try to charm him? The effect of our charms was constrained by geography

Often Hargo’s “The Somerville Gates” has been compared with Christo’s “The Gates“, Central Park, New York City. These comparisons have been unfair; sometimes the media has exaggerated — even lied — about the similarities. Differences abound…

Thanks to Donna Marder for the link to The Somerville Gates and to Ruth Bavetta for the link to The Gates.

[I got hit by spammers today and, trying to get rid of the spurious comments, I accidently hit the wrong button and deleted this post. So I am trying to reconstruct it here and it will be a bit different.]

You will find here an interview with Sam Hamill, who in January 2003, as an act of protest against the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, refused to attend Laura Bush’s poetry symposium. As the wardrums were beating for the invasion of Iraq, Hamill formed Poets Against the War, which received and published 7000 poems of protest. Now Hamill has resigned his post with Copper Canyon Press to devote his whole energy to Voices in Wartime. The interview is from their film.

Poets tend to be humanists and they tend to see things from angles that other people don’t pause long enough to look at. I think that one of the major functions of poems in particular is to develop sensibility, and I think that means sensitivity to those who are oppressed, to those who have no voice.

One of the most important things I have done in my life as a poet is the twenty years I spent working with battered women and children, and the years I spent teaching in American prisons. Not because it puts me in a position to speak for children or on the racist role of law that that treats people so differently in our judicial system, but rather because it is made me understand who has the power and who sees and knows what and how it gets handled

The poem I posted this week, “Bombed Wedding,” was written during that first, now apparently forgotten war – the one with Afghanistan. It was originally posted on Poets Against the War and will be included in Pax Christi’s forthcoming Poetry for Peacemakers.