Sherry Chandler

Remember that granite Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the capitol in Austin? Texas, that is, home of born-again George W. Bush and Tom DeLay of the ethics-free Congress? The monument that is the subject of a law suit brought, I think, by a homeless lawyer? Well, in today’s NYTimes online (still free but you have to register), Frank Rich has an interesting back story about the origin of that monument. It all has to do with DeMille’s 1956 epic movie, named, you guessed it, “The Ten Commandments:”

As DeMille readied his costly Paramount production for release a half-century ago, he seized on an ingenious publicity scheme. In partnership with the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a nationwide association of civic-minded clubs founded by theater owners, he sponsored the construction of several thousand Ten Commandments monuments throughout the country to hype his product. The Pharaoh himself - that would be Yul Brynner - participated in the gala unveiling of the Milwaukee slab. Heston did the same in North Dakota. Bizarrely enough, all these years later, it is another of these DeMille-inspired granite monuments, on the grounds of the Texas Capitol in Austin, that is a focus of the Ten Commandments case that the United States Supreme Court heard this month.

Bizarre, indeed. The ironies radiating off this story are so thick that I wouldn’t begin to try to comment. And yet, somehow, it is all so typically American…

I’m heading over to Lexington today for the opening day of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. I hope to hear Ann Telnaes’s convocation speech and, since I am sometimes a performance poet, sit in on Beth Ann Fennelly’s session on Four Ways Poets Can Use Sound to Make Meaning and later, since I try to write blank verse, the panel discussion on The Contemporary Life of the Traditional Literary Forms with Fennelly, Patty Friedmann, Dana Levin, and Neela Vaswani. Three or four years ago, I heard Andrew Hudgins make the statement that one could master iambic pentameter in an afternoon. Well, here I am, still struggling…

At that same RopeWalk Winter Weekend where Hudgins laid down his challenge, I met Cathryn Essinger. She’ll be attending the conference, and I hope to find her and get her to sign my copy of her new book My Dog Does Not Read Plato (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2004). Cathy is one of my favorite “ordinary” poets – and what an oxymoron that is. I mean by it a poet I can consider a friend as well as a hero and a role-model. Cathy’s first book, A Desk in the Elephant House, won the Walt McDonald First Book Award from Texas Tech University. Her intelligence is quirky and delightful and her poetry is matter of fact and utterly wild. Look at these few lines from “Wild Card,” how quietly we are taken into the strange:

The local newspaper reports
a Houston housewife has found
a three foot long snake indigenous
to California in her electric toaster.

I need to talk to this woman. I want
to know what kind of bread attracts
snakes, if she goes to church on Sundays
and if she believes in chance.

Follow the links to sample more of Cathy’s poems.

My thanks to everybody who came out last night. A marvelous surprise to read to a packed room on a drizzly night more like November than March. For those of you who missed last night, the show will hang through April 30 and we’ll read again at the April Gallery Hop on the 15th.

My friend Jeff Hess is up to mischief over at Have Coffee, Will Write, catching me out in one of my more outrageous moods. Performances are supposed to be ephemeral. And me? I’m so egotistical I can’t resist pointing you to the site (scroll down). Guess I’m indulging in some of that narcissism bloggers are accused of — I’ll point to your site if you’ll point to mine.

On the other hand, he does bring news of other local poets. And while you’re over there, take Jeff’s coffee house tour of Louisville.