Sherry Chandler » 2005 » March
Washington Monthly has an interesting item in its Bunning watch.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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If you’re in the market for a few good poems, try Terry Kanago’s Poetry Tuesday.
Go for the poetry, stay for the social commentary.
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Wild geese flying over
This morning,
Kitchen gray
In early light.
The geese bring a
Report from eternity.
No news, just rumor.
Still, you listen.
What you know
For certain
Will not get you
As far as Canada.
—from David Rogers, The Secret Knowledge of Water (Wavelength/Albireo Press, 2003)
Reprinted by permission of author.
This post was written by sherry
I picked up a Nougat (Lexington’s free monthly alternative paper) yesterday with its program insert for the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. And sure enough, as my fellow poets had told me, there was our Sideshow event on the same page with, right there beside Ann Taelnes and Beth Ann Finnelly. Gosh.
You can come see our exhibit and still have time to catch the Kentucky Theater’s “Sex and the City” marathon, which runs from 7:00 - 1:00.
That’s one of the best things about the new and revised KyWWC – the way it’s reached out to and been embraced by the arts community of Lexington, so that even if you can’t afford an “intimate” dinner with Candace Bushnell, you can do the InKY Reading and Open Mic at Gallerie Soleil or the Writer’s Block Hop. And of course the Louise Glück reading on Saturday night at the Lexington Public Library is free and open to the public. Put that on your calendar.
One of the most exciting free and open to the public events is the opening convocation with cartoonist Ann Taelnes. It’s at Noon in the Lexington Public Library downtown. Parking is free, too.
And – there’s still time to register for the entire conference.
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On NPR’s Weekend Edition last Saturday, Scott Simon interviewed John Ashbery, who says his poems are “accessible to anyone who cares to acess them.” Take that, Camille Paglia.
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The Sideshow collaboration is being hung today at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning here in Lexington. I have written my poem on glass, as have the other Mosaic poets, and we’ve faced the cosmic question: to mat or not to mat? The programs are designed, printed, folded. The ads are in the paper. We are all very tired.
Although Sideshow is its official name, for those of us involved it has been more of a WAMO, the acronym one clever member invented for the merging of our two groups, WAG and Mosaic. We have been working on this project since late last summer, meeting, retreating, potlucking, sharing work, writing grants. Grants that don’t get funded take as much time and energy as grants that do, but I rather suspect a funded grant adds energy to a project. I know for sure rejection truncates. Questions are reduced from “what can we do?” to “what can we afford?” Fortunately we found some creative answers.
Yesterday, driving home from my Sunday visit with Mom, I switched on All Things Considered. Ruth Levy Guyer was Noting the Synchronicity of Life. Was this in itself synchronicity? I am still more inclined to think it is coincidence. But that is probably because my brain chemistry is so pedestrian. Odd brain chemistry was Guyer’s explanation for synesthesia, the conflation of two senses that allowed Virginia Woolf to see words in color.
Ah, am I rescued then? Is this why some people can see poems while other people hear them? Perhaps after all it’s not a failure of imagination or intelligence that has kept me from being able to conceive of poetry as a visual art through all these months of trying. My brain is wired like Camille Paglia’s. I just need to accept that, struggle over.
Somehow I doubt it.
The opening is Wednesday night at 7:30, on the eve of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, a major happening in the area that I’ve been remiss in ignoring. But more on that later.
Sideshow opens Wednesday night as part of the Writers Block Party. We’ll see the culmination of all our work. Some of it really is brilliant. All of it is fun. We’ll have a clown and balloons and animal crackers and we’ll see our poems on the wall with the wonderful paintings and we’ll read our poems and we’ll put weariness behind us and celebrate.
If you’re in the area, come celebrate with us.
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to quote another 1960s rock poet.
See this collection of photos of Bush and Bald Men. I can’t read the text but a picture, I’ve heard, is worth a thousand words. Try here instead.
Picked up the link from Rox Populi, who got it from The Blogging of the President.
Happy spring, by the way. Hope everyone has tipped a small libation in hopes that April, that cruellest month, will bring a few lilacs out of this dead land.
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