Sherry Chandler

Here’s a way to feed your nightmares. Go to They Rule and load in the map from GHWBush to Clinton.

from the “About” page at They Rule:

They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations.

You can explore the archive of maps or create your own. There’s a They Rule Yahoo group, too, for discussing these interconnections.

Thanks to DM & AP for the link.

During most of the years of my girlhood, my aunt ran the country store at Sweet Owen, a once-thriving community that, like many in Owen County, had been drained of population and businesses by paved roads and the automobile. Once a week the bookmobile came to Sweet Owen store and, after it moved on, left off a little stack of books that sat on a shelf to be checked out on the honor system. I spent many a summer afternoon sitting on a little bench on the storeporch, reading from this rather eccentric assortment of books. It was there that I discovered Dr. Seuss, Moss Hart, and Lizzie Bordon, and it was there that I read The Thread That Runs So True.

This storeporch experience is about the extent of my exposure to Jesse Stuart, and so I am not, perhaps, the best person to comment on David Dick’s new biography, Jesse Stuart: The Heritage (Plum Lick, 2004). Without knowledge of the primary materials, you can’t really judge the secondary.

Fortunately, my friend Georgia Green Stamper is more qualified, and with her permission, I am publishing part of our e-mail conversation about Stuart and David Dick’s book. I’ve edited it a little bit for continuity:

I have just about finished David Dick’s biography of Jesse Stuart. I wanted to read this because of my immersion in all things Jesse Stuart during my 30 year stint in Greenup County (actually we lived in Boyd the first year.) Everybody up there knew him; he helped get our library district established; he would come to Leslie’s drug store in Greenup every week and hang out; he was always at Parson’s Dept. store signing his books. We would drive by his house in W Hollow … and folks would run into him eating at the Greenbo State Park Lodge that is named for him. He was very accessible, and friendly. He was helpful to a fault - very generous of himself. He was proud of himself, and that was a turn-off for some, but he was so artless in his pride … it was not arrogance, but excitement at what he had managed to do. I could understand him. His personality was huge - a big, expansive, talkative man.

All in all, it is an inspiring book. Stuart’s spunk is inspiring to me. His incredible achievements coming from where/what he did. I know that place. I know his writing is out of favor now, and the critics are snobby about him. but I think he has to be understood somewhat in context. Also, he DID make a living, a good living, at writing - and at that, writing which was about his region … not popular romance or mysteries and the like. Some of his stuff is actually quite good. Jesse was just not much good at editing his stuff it seems to me. His writing reminds me of the old joke about trying to get a drink from a fire hydrant.

The best parts of the book (which is the case with most biography) are the direct quotes from Jesse Stuart’s letters, speeches, etc. Fortunately, Dick has the good sense to rely heavily on copious reproductions of Jesse’s letters - the book lets Jesse tell his own story to a large extent. So in that regard, it succeeds and is good. I loved reading these letters… Dick does communicate Stuart’s brashness and desire to impress and to succeed. But I kept wanting more detail …

One thing that Georgia doesn’t mention is the fact that Jesse Stuart bought and re-forested hundreds of acres of land that he arranged to give to the state as the Jesse Stuart State Nature Preserve. As far as I’m concerned, this act makes him a state hero.

After reading Jesse Stuart and talking with Georgia, it seems to me that two passages from William Ward’s A Literary History of Kentucky (University of Tennessee Press, 1988) serve to summarize Stuart’s literary career pretty well. One is the story of Stuart’s time at Vanderbilt. Although David Dick emphasizes the degree to which Stuart was rejected by the Vanderbilt Agrarians (Robert Penn Warren et al.), his time there was not totally fruitless. He did not take an advanced degree, but he got help from both Edwin Mims and Donald Davidson. From Ward:

When in [Edwin Mims's]Victorian poetry class, Stuart had submitted a three-hundred page autobiographical typescript instead of the much shorter assigned account, Mims scolded him sharply. Then a few days later he handed the paper back to Stuart, declaring, “I have been teaching school for forty years. I have never read anything so crudely written and yet beautiful, tremendous and powerful as that term paper you’ve written.” What Mims had just read was the first draft of Beyond Dark Hills, written in just eleven days while Stuart carried on his duties of being a janitor as well as a graduate student.

And Edgar Lee Masters said of Stuart:

“I have such confidence in him that I would turn him loose in Boston the rest of his life without any fear that Boston would ruin him.”

Nor would it change him. As David Dick is fond of saying, Jesse was always Jesse: unchangeable, sometimes crude, yet beautiful, tremendous, and powerful.

Sam’s Club in Winter

Freezers long as freight cars chock full of rock-
hard cakes, pies, lasagnas, plastic sacks of crucifers
(when I unseal a door, its breath resists and sighs);
chicken breasts cradled in styrofoam, corded like wood;
rows of hot, baked hens, taut with succulence;
a spill of fresh fruits from the tropics and the underside
of earth; beguiling little crates of clementines, nubile
grapes in see-through plastic; a grove of greenery
and banks of flowers, each blossom netted against bruising;
shelves tall as trees, toilet tissue stacked up into darkness.
Outside, January’s first Alberta Clipper nudges around
the corners of the big box, pokes the thin skin of plenty.

–Jane Gentry

Reprinted by permission of author.

While I was wandering around the rotunda of the William T. Young library on Thursday, trying to get registered for the KyWWC and find the food (!), some one thrust into my hands a copy of the inaugural issue of the Coffee Talk Quarterly. Serendipity this time, perhaps. Certainly happy coincidence. I’d had this new magazine on my list of things to check out since I’d seen it announced in the Kentucky Literary Newsletter and Calendar.

As promised, the CTQ is 30 tabloid-fold pages of “Art, Culture, Ideas, and Interesting People.” My favorites in this first issue were William House’s article comparing Bill Monroe to Albert Camus and James Vitatoe’s article on Appalachian Hick Hop. The latter turns out to be a project of Appalshop to bring a unique mix of urban and rural music to the growing number of prisons in eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. Prisons are a growth industry in the impoverished, job-hungry areas of our nations, a national disgrace that gets very little attention. But Appalshop is on it – read Vitatoe’s article and look for the Appalshop documentary “From the Holler to the Hood,” which will deals in part with the effect of bringing “hundreds of thousands of inner city minor offenders to distant rural environment.”

But I digress – I think I was a preacher in a former lifetime. Many good things in this first issue, including the Publisher’s Point of View, which is Dr. Sonya Jones’s fairwell to Susan Sontag. Dr. Jones speculates on how Sontag would have reacted had she visited the “Cumberland Corridor that stretches down I-75 from Lexington to Knoxville.”

It can’t hurt, however, to imagine Sontag setting up a typewriter in a trailer out in the woods near Dykes, KY, and writing a sequel to “Notes on Camp.” Would I elect to publish it if she offered it to CTQ? Pending review, I might.

I haven’t mentioned the book, art, drama reviews and the half dozen wonderful poems by local poets such as Brenda White, Steve Rhodes, and Jane Gentry. CTQ is currently available in Somerset at Baxter’s Coffee Shop, Cafe Latte, and Somerset Community College bookstores and in Lexington at Black Swan and the UK bookstores. Subscriptions are $20/year.

Also, according to the Kentucky Literary Newsletter and Calendar, CTQ is now accepting manuscripts for the spring edition scheduled for release in early June. The theme is Tourism (Cultural Heritage Tourism included): Pros and Cons. Address queries to:

Dr. Sonya Jones, Publisher & Editor
Coffee Talk Quarterly
304 W. Mt. Vernon St.
Somerset, KY 42501
606-875-2967

or email Dr. Jones at sonnieji@yahoo.com

I learned a new term in Beth Ann Fennelly’s KyWWC session Four Ways Poets Can Use Sound to Make Meaning: “phonetic intensives.” This term is a partner to onomatopoeia; it refers to suggestive phonetic combinations. For example: “fl” words (flare, flame, flicker) suggest moving light while “gl” words (glow, gloom, glare) suggest light that is still.

Fennelly emphasized a toolkit of sounds to control the speed and mood of the poetic line: euphony, cacophony, liquid and plosive consonants, long and short vowels, meter, and poetry’s version of the rest, the caesura.

We had a test, too, in which we were given two very similar couplets from poems by the canonized, e.g., Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Gray. One of the couplets was authentic, the other a very clever counterfeit and the test was to pick the “real” lines. I proved myself still the star pupil by identifying 8 out of 10. Sort of pathetic, really – 40 years out of high school and the gold star is still important to me. I confess, though, that it was a team effort and I got particularly lucky with my table mates: Jan Isenhour and David Cazden. The gold star was a candy necklace.

The poem that I’m putting up this week, “Gravitas,” plays with sound. And I’ve been playing with sound recording, too, having learned a trick or two from the web goddess. If luck holds, I’ll put up an mp3 so that you can hear this poem as well as read it. You can even download it to your iPod and I can say, “Look, Ma, I’m podcasting!”

I must rather shamefacedly admit that I only managed to attend one day of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. I had been having my Ishmael moments for about a week, “growing grim about the mouth…a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” Abetted no doubt by this damp, drizzly March. I make a blanket apology here to anyone whose (I hope metaphorical) hat I may have knocked off. Last Friday night Thursday night (sheesh!), I came home and crashed and am still crashing even today. I’m not sure what has thrown me into such a state of deep exhaustion – Sideshow took a lot of work but not that much – so I think I’ll blame the raccoon.

For most of March we’ve been trying to dissuade this mother raccoon from whelping in our attic, but she turns out to have a much higher tolerance than I do for talk radio blaring all night. She didn’t even seem to mind the pans of ammonia and she wasn’t turned by my husband’s plywood barriers. In fact, she seemed able to slither through holes that would have frustrated a cat. So I have had several weeks of uneasy, Rush-Limbaugh-haunted (shudder) sleep and still, on Saturday evening, when we went up to check on the status of things, we found mother and babies chirring away.

TR, my husband, rescued a baby raccoon a couple of years ago and she followed him around like a puppy for several days before he could find a rehabilitator over in Lexington to take her in and return her to the wild. He is convinced that our new mother is Ursula, like Lassie, come home. But I’m not so sure. Raccoons seem to have an affinity for attics, though we have lived here for over twenty years without having had one before. Gin Petty, on whose shoulder we’ve been crying has this to say about coons nesting in attics:

As for coons not making nests, I’ll agree with you, TR. They most certainly do, along with messes of other types. When we bought a house in Versailles, one of the first things we did was check the attic. It was a mess. Coons had piled up insulation and staked out potty areas. When I asked a neighbor if he had coon problems, he looked at me like I was from outer space. “We don’t have coons around here. They live out in the country!”

Of course, we are out in the country, so I guess we have no complaint. Now that we’ve lost the battle, I hope I’ll be able to get some sleep. At least until the babies are up and around. The same websites that assured TR that talk radio and ammonia would run the raccoon off assure us that mother and babies will move on in a few weeks. Unless, of course, this is Ursula…

Meanwhile, I’ll take comfort from my conversation with Leatha Kendrick at the KyWWC. When I introduced Leatha to Cathy Essinger, I mentioned that Leatha’s father was a veterinarian and Leatha began to talk about all the animals they had rescued and lived with when she was a child. Among them was a raccoon who made a nest in the sofa and used to climb her mother’s legs. “My mother was a very tolerant woman,” said Leatha. For myself, I hope I don’t have to have my tolerance tested much further.

from “Translating Daddy”

Whistling ministrant to wounds,
you bent above the morphine doze of each cat tied
spread-eagle on the steel, her belly shaved. While
your hands moved across the void, the empty eyes of animal sleep,
she lay limp as my loose-stuffed toys, but breathing, bleeding.
Father, you let us in that sterile room
and spoke the tongue we’d come to understand:
“scalpel” “scissors” (we knew which one when) “sponge”
Two girls, eight and ten, we drank our colas,
orange crush, crunching peanuts,
casually taking in your knife’s precise incision,
the hairline beads of red that spread into a gaping
mouth you entered with two fingertips.
…
Father, we knew you were a savior,
healer of illnesses your patients had no language
to describe. Work took you up.
Something happened through you—
we watched it carefully as we had learned to hold
your words, sheathed and definite as blades.

–Leatha Kendrick, Heart Cake (The Sow’s Ear Press, 2000)

After Easter, my brother says, we will have some better weather. I really hope that this piece of folk wisdom is true. So far, March has been colder than February, a skewing of the seasons that seems to reflect the skewing of our society. I have been promising spring for several weeks on this blog and I suppose the birth of a litter of coons in our attic – there are disadvantages to tarpaulins – should be a sign that spring is here but somehow I miss the sun.

On this gray and rainy Easter Sunday morning, a day no doubt of gloomy sunrise services, I have been reading Harvey Cox’s When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (Houghton Mifflin 2004). This book is a sort of reprise of the lectures Cox has given over 15 years of teaching a course – Jesus and the Moral Life – in moral reasoning to undergraduates at Harvard.

Cox places Jesus as a rabbi teaching in the midrash tradition. Midrashim are imaginative expositions of Torah. Not necessarily parables, but definitely not fables that end with a moral, the midrashim are meant to bridge the gap between ancient texts and contemporary society. They can be as cryptic as a Zen koan. Alicia Ostriker, one of the “dangerous poets” discussed here earlier, is a contemporary midrashist as is my friend Jeff Hess.

Cox sometimes annoys me with his blanket dismissals of Biblical scholarship and his easy optimism. At a time when women survivors of the tsunami are being raped in refugee camps, when Iraqi women are being forced behind the veil, when Pakistani women are being sentenced by tribal courts to gang rape, when all those other whens that are “too much with us late and soon,” it can be jarring to be told that:

The birth of Jesus to Mary is not principally about virginity at all…It is about God becoming flesh. Its point is a simple one. God needed and wanted a body. Even if Adam and Eve were not satisfied with being human, which means having a body, God went the other way to demonstrate – and maybe to satisfy himself – that being human, with all its limitations, is not so bad after all.

Still, after a Holy Week in which our political leaders have shown themselves willing to rip at the very fabric of our government over a difference in morals, it is a comfort to hear a voice that speaks quietly, puts “moral” and “reason” in the same sentence, and recognizes the holy mission of story.

So on this Easter morning when the temple has not yet been rebuilt in Jerusalem, I would leave you with this midrash from When Jesus Came to Harvard:

The tactic I finally settled on with my students for thinking about [the end time] was this: Follow the advice of Jesus. Avoid speculating on the “when” and “how.” In the meantime, it is probably best to follow the counsel of the Hasidic rabbi who was interrupted by one of his followers while he was tending his garden. “What would you do, rabbi,” the student asked, “if you knew the messiah was coming today?” Stroking his beard and pursing his lips, the rabbi replied, “Well, I would continue to water my garden.”

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
…

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

— T. S. Eliot

text of an e-mail from Mick Kennedy:

This letter is sent to inform you of the winners and finalists of the 2005 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize. The poems of the winners and finalists will appear in the spring issue of The Heartland Review. All are invited to attend the Morrison Gallery Poetry Series Poetry Month Celebration on April 21, 2005 from 7-8.30pm at Elizabethtown Community & Technical College, Elizabethtown, KY. We will have a few spots for an “open mic”; then, the winners will be recognized and read their work. The evening will culminate with the featured reader Davis McCombs who served as judge for this year’s contest.

1st Place “Impetus” by Darla K. Beasley, West Terre Haute, IN
2nd Place “Barren County” by Shelley Thurman, Bloomington, IN
3rd Place “Elusion” by Mary Stepp, Inez, KY

Finalists:
Shelley Thurman, Bloomington, IN, for “October”
Ellen Birkett Morris, Louisville, KY, for “The Quest”
Betsy Packard, Shelbyville, KY, for “Dark Energy”
Lorri Houck, Cox’s Creek, KY, for “Disciple of the Divine Feminine”
Pamela Steele, Louisville, KY, for “Appearing in Photographs”
Jane Gentry, Versailles, KY, for “Diana, of a Certain Age, Takes a Bath”
Woods Nash, Knoxville, TN, for “Mass and Value” and “Complete”
Renee Edenfield, Magnolia, KY, for “Spring”
Olga-Maria Christina Cruz, Louisville, KY, for “De Anima”
Marci Adair, Oxford, OH, for “Watermelon Babies”
Frederick Smock, Louisville, KY, for “Lines Against the Cold”

For some reason my computer and WordPress aren’t on speaking terms today. I’ll be back when they get their differences resolved.
I had wanted to post an excerpt from “Jubilate Agno.”

Alas. Certain phrases seem to crash this software. This situation could cause one to be paranoid.

But perhaps it’s just lack of imagination that’s forbidden — mine, not Christopher Smart’s.

The fellow to the left is Smokey. He’s been dead about 10 years but he lives on in legend – if not in song.