Sherry Chandler

Am off for a week at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at The Hindman Settlement school. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to make any posts from there – I’m told that a library on the edge of campus has internet but will I have time to go there and if I do will they have free computers or will I have anything to say that can’t wait until I’m comfortably ensconced in my chair here at home? But Poppysmatus is on the job so no worries!

I’ll leave you with the poem that won me a Free Lunch (#27, winter 2001). I do notice that it contains no first person pronouns. This version is from Dance the Black-Eyed Girl and is a bit of a re-write. Andrew Hudgins once asked me, about this poem, “Where’s the rest of the story?” But as far as I’m concerned this is the story.

Is it autobiographical navel gazing? Well, I will say that I’ve always thought perfect attendance was a loser’s award:

What She Wants

Sometimes she wants to follow the rules,
get merit raises and certificates
for perfect attendance. Sometimes its
a 30-year mortgage and a minivan,
parties on a redwood deck.
Sometimes when her friends are laughing
around her, she just wants to have a few drinks.

Sometimes she sees the cops, all
sticks and guns, roust a drunk,
gray skin and tattered jacket, and
she wants to join AmeriCorps.
Sometimes she wants to lose 20 pounds
and take up bicycling. Sometimes
she wants to see Zimbabwe.

Sometimes she’s drying her hair and sees
herself with the towel draped around
her chin like a wimple and thinks
she might want to live
like a nun, alone
in a white cell
with a single window, facing east.

and I’ve had one, though I had to try a couple of times to get it. (I am not counting the lunches drug reps bring every Tuesday to the Department of Neurology at the UKMC where I work. I figure those are very costly lunches indeed but medical types are remarkably needy about food.)

Ron Offen’s Free Lunch offers a free subscription to any poet whose work is accepted for publication. Or you can subscribe for $12.00/3 issues.

I just received Issue 33 this week. In it, Ron has laid down certain guidelines:

In my last editorial I questioned the pervasiveness of the personal poem with its dependence on the first person personal pronoun in all its permutations. Further I announced that this issue would contain no poems with the afforementioned words. The reader can judge for himself whether the experiment has been a success—

Admittedly I came in in the middle of this talk but it seems to be another facet of the argument for accessibility. On the one side, you have the equation accessible = simple-minded. On this side, difficult = obscure. Here’s a sampling of Letters to the Editor in reaction to Ron’s decree:

…I’ve had the same reaction: a slowly simmering unhappiness with the trends both toward ‘personal obscurantism and willful meaninglessness’ and toward self-absorbed self-reference. The two trends are symptoms of the same attitude: a deliberate or underlying dismissal of the idea that the poet has any commitment to communicate with whatever audience poetry still has.
— John Elsberg, Editor, Bogg

We are currently in American poetry, as best as I can see, struggling through two extremes: one an unfortunate romance with the self by egomaniacs, which turns most readers off; then there are the language poets who cannot or do not connect with their would-be readers because they write only words or word-play…One extreme without depth, the other just without.
—Lenny Emmanuel, Poetry & Contributing Editor of The New Laurel Review

Although I don’t completely go along with what you say about personal poems, I think I know why you’ve gotten so fed up with them that you’re disallowing the first-person in your next issue. You’re quite right that World Poetry has more on its collective mind/spirit/desk than family portraits or worse, look-at-my-navel poems…
— James Reiss

I’ve had this conversation before and I admit to being completely obtuse about why it’s the first person POV that’s the culprit. The first person pronoun seems to be blamed for everything from bad confessional poetry to arrogant language poetry. It’s a way to focus, I suppose. But I’ve always thought it’s easy enough to write “she” where you had written “I” and continue on being as egocentric as ever. In the end this seems to be an argument about the message of poetry and not about the language. Flaccid language makes bad poetry. Good poetry is made with vibrant language, regardless of pronouns. Great poetry? I wish I knew.

“He quotes Faulkner whose spinnerets connect the land.” This line from Jessica McMichael’s poem “Southern Girl” is a bit like the current number of Miller’s Pond (Vol 8, No 1) in which it appears. It’s a delightful line in an uneven poem.

Miller’s Pond is like Certs – it’s two, two, two mags in one. (Yes, I know, but I couldn’t resist.)

Actually, though, it’s two distinct magazines with the same title and the same publisher but different editors and completely different content. The online Miller’s Pond is edited by Julie Damerell; the print magazine by Dave Cazden. I’m writing here about the print version.

The problems I find with the magazine are slight. Out of 50 pages of poetry, a few poems that don’t quite jell. Being a bit of a eclecticist, I’m willing to consider that it might be a matter of taste. All poets included have excellent credentials and publication records. And I was warned by Jim Hall years ago not to judge a poem on one reading, a thing I’m doing here. There are a few transcription errors. I found the judge’s comments on the Loella Cady Lamphier Prize a little clumsy. Perhaps some of the judge’s comments on the Loella Cady Lamphier Prize should not have been published. I think I’d be upset to learn that my poem “was first for a long time” but eventually got moved down to second place or that my honorable mention poem may once have been a winner. These kinds of changes may be typical of judging but are probably best kept private.

Mostly Miller’s Pond 2005 is a delightful magazine. Perfect bound, printed on nice creamy stock, and brimming with lively poems, the volume is well worth the $7.50 purchase price ($3.50 postage if you order online). Three from the featured poet, Frank Matagrano, are filled with a sort of aching whimsy that might be the hallmark of the issue:

…me and my big ideas, me and my closet history
of a hundred things undone, and a glass of wine that doesn’t do

the job like it once did, which, as you know, is a conversation
with God, assuming He still has a room above the garage

He calls his own…
– “About the Letter I Never Had the Courage to Send”

Other highlights are Kelly Madigan Erlandson’s “They Ask Why I Stay”:

I tell them it is the quality of life.
Low crime, affordable housing…

Instead it is the grasshopper,
sunfish yellow, that my husband
said was big as a mouse, and it was…

And “Traveling Bears” from Lexington’s own Ann Lederer:

…They eyed the paths
for tracks, bent twigs, colored threads
tied around weeds, scratch marks
in loose dirt, plucked berries
arranged like arrows, and other signs.

One other Kentucky poet shows up – Louisville’s Reid Bush and a poem called “Strangers”:

What a suburban shock
to be waiting at a traffic light
and have sputter up beside you
a foul-exhausted Ford, its body
mainly islands of rust taped to
rusty mainlands…

I am won by the way those last two lines play with “main” and “rust.”

This is mostly accessible poetry, I suppose, but that doesn’t make it simple-minded. If a few poems in this collection fail to reach me, others have their moments of mystery. That mystery is found not in knotty language but in image and music. There are some deep feeders in this Miller’s Pond.

from mehitabel’s extensive past

mehitabel the cat claims that
she has a human soul
also and has transmigrated
from body to body and it
may be so boss you
remember i told you she accused
herself of being cleopatra once i
asked her about antony

anthony who she asked me are
you thinking of that
song about rowley and gammon and
spinach heigho for anthony rowley

no i said mark antony the
great roman the friend of
caesar surely cleopatra you
remember j caesar

listen archy she said i
have been so many different
people in my time and met
so many prominent gentlemen i
wont lie to you or stall i
do get my dates mixed sometimes
think of how much i have had a
chance to forget and i have
always made a point of not
carrying grudges over
from one life to the next archy

i have been
used something fierce in my time but
i am no bum sport archy
i am a free spirit archy i
look on myself as being
quite a romantic character oh the
queens i have been and the
swell feeds i have ate
a cockroach which you are
and a poet which you used to be
archy couldn t understand
my feelings at having come
down to this i have
had bids to elegant feeds where poets
and cockroaches would
neither one be mentioned without a
laugh archy i have had
adventures but i
have never been an adventuress

one life up and the next life
down archy but always a lady
through it all and a
good mixer too …

— Don Marquis, from archy and mehitabel

The cat is Gin Petty’s Caesar who, she says, does reptile duty while Punkin does mice and moles. I hope she doesn’t mind terribly that I link her gorgeous Caesar with this alley cat Cleopatra.

The bowl is by Teresa Cole.

Garrison Keillor says it is Don Marquis’s birthday. Coincidence that I chose today for mehitabel. I picked up the text of the poem from Don Marquis.com.

We’re the Bluegrass State, so I always just sort of thought that the bluegrass seed came from here at home. But over at I See Invisible People, I just learned different. Here’s the problem:

**cough, cough** It’s grass-burning season again. I don’t mean the neighbor’s lawn clippings; I mean acres and acres of fields, planted for the production of bluegrass seed to beautify lawns and golf courses. For years that meant keeping my 2 asthmatic kids indoors most of the month of August while the clouds of smoke rolled in from the south and the west, blanketing the valley with fumes and particulates. Thankfully, the states of Washington and Oregon responded to the recommendations of the medical profession and outlawed field burning several years ago.

But the state of Idaho did not follow suit…

Read the whole post. I’m not sure exactly why this burning is necessary. Apparently it’s straw from the seeded fields that’s burned. My question is, what do they do in Washington and Oregon now that they can’t burn the straw?

I have always had trouble with shoelaces. I didn’t actually learn to tie my shoes until I was about seven – a fact that I don’t just tell everywhere. And even then I didn’t learn to do it right. My laces are constantly flopping around and I have to stop frequently to retie them, sometimes in inconvenient places like busy city streets.

Well, there may be help for me. Proving that you can find anything you need to know on the internets, Ian Fieggen’s Shoelace Site will teach you how to tie your shoes so they’ll stay tied. It turns out to be the old problem of the granny knot. My husband taught me to tie a square knot years and years ago, but I’ve never thought to apply it to a shoelace bow.

The shoelace site will teach you several ways to tie your shoes, several ways to lace your shoes, and give you lots of other information about shoelaces. Ian does not recommend the double knot, which is my method of last resort.

And in case you want to know what kind of person devotes a website to lacing shoes, you’ll find biographical information too.

Thanks to Bill Marder for this one. He’s left handed. I think I’m borderline dyslexic.

I feel as languid in this heat as something out of Tennessee Williams, though not, perhaps, as sexy. I’ve never found swelter a great aphrodisiac. (More Brick than Cat?) And I dread a drought. Maybe because I live on a high, rather dry place, I find drought more frightening than flood. Flood is excess — horrible quick destruction, all drama and done and you can clean up and get on. Drought is crackling death by inches and the always futile hope that Hoss Cartwright will come riding in on a thunderhead to make it right.

I was longer than most realizing that the cavalry doesn’t charge in at the last minute and the prince, when he comes, is just as fuddled and desperate as you are.

This year, as I watch the expensive replacement trees along the Paris Pike brown and drop leaves, I am reminded of a story I wrote after the drought of 1983, a period when temperatures hovered around a hundred degrees for what seemed like weeks. “Dry Spell” (Licking River Review, Spring 1991) was one of two short stories I got published before I realized that fiction is not what I do well. Well, fiction wasn’t what I was doing at all. So I decided to give up the pretense.

Here’s my pop culture musing passage from “Dry Spell:”

She wondered what she would do to make it rain. She had read somewhere, she thought, that it rained so often on battlefields because of the thunder of the cannons. And didn’t Sky King make it rain one time by sowing something on the tops of the clouds? Seeding, it was called. What had become of that notion? Indians with rows of eagle feathers down their backs had danced for rain in old movies. The Rockdale Chamber of Commerce has sponsored a rain dance for the children; she had stuck some chicken feathers in a sweat band and put that on Travis along with one of Jim’s old fringed shirts, but he had refused to dance. He just clung to her leg. Then he cried when the Henderson girl got the prize for best dancer, and she had to buy him a new tractor to get him to stop. And of course it hadn’t rained. Maybe they should have a dance for grown-ups. It might be a relief to paint your face and dance and chant. At least it would be doing something. She wondered how the Indians really made it rain. Burt Lancaster played a rainmaker in a movie, but she couldn’t remember that he had done anything but seduce the farmer’s daughter. Still, it had rained in the end, hadn’t it? And it had rained on an old Bonanza episode just when Hoss’s friend had been about to give up and sell out. Too bad God wasn’t a movie director. Too bad she didn’t know any magic.

for your virtual desk. Be sure to click on it. (You’ll know what that means when you get there.) The little images let you change styles, in case you aren’t satisfied with the classics. And in case you might think this site is irrelevant to a poet, there’s even a little anthology of stapler poetry.

THERE HAVE BEEN DAYS
by Jean Simon

There have been days
when I’ve been so depressed
I haven’t even dressed.
I haven’t wanted to look
at a maple,
or even to eat a staple food
like bread and butter;
and I’d sometimes mutter
and finally eat a dappled apple.
And I wouldn’t even be able
to sit still listening to a charming fable –
I’d listen to heavy metal
instead of to dew tiptoeing
over a petal.

And I’d think of my days like staples;
…

When my father ran out of any other way to defeat my mother in an argument – or even sometimes a fight – he would call her a “damned old Scotch-Irish.” I’m not sure what superior bloodlines he laid claim to but the strategy wakened in me a keen interest in just what it means to be Scots-Irish. And one thing it means is that you’re not Irish, not in the wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day sort of way. You’re a Scot who immigrated to Ireland in a particularly controversial way. There seems to have been no “melting pot” effect in this situation.

So, when challenged by Ernie Stamper suggested in the comment below, that I draw attention to James Webb’s (also here) book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (Random House, 2005), I decided the least I could do would be to look it up. I don’t usually feature books here unless I’ve read them myself (Poppysmatus speaks for himself but he does read Catullus.), but a fair number of people around here lay claim to that heritage, especially people from the mountain counties, so I thought there might be some interest. Here is a defining paragraph from the book description over at Random House:

More than 27 million Americans today can trace their lineage to the Scots, whose bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and later in the bitter settlements of England’s Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland. Between 250,000 and 400,000 Scots-Irish migrated to America in the eighteenth century, traveling in groups of families and bringing with them not only long experience as rebels and outcasts but also unparalleled skills as frontiersmen and guerrilla fighters. Their cultural identity reflected acute individualism, dislike of aristocracy and a military tradition, and, over time, the Scots-Irish defined the attitudes and values of the military, of working class America, and even of the peculiarly populist form of American democracy itself.

Unfortunately, some of the materials I find on the internets indicate that this book may be the darling of some fairly reactionary types. That does not mean that the book itself is reactionary – that’s the problem with talking about what I haven’t read for myself.

For further description and reviews link here and here. For a history of the Ulster Plantation, click here. For a short history of Scots or Scotch-Irish, a bibliography, and an impressive list of Americans of Ulster Scot descent and all stripes of political persuasion, click here.

For a considerably less bellicose consideration of Scots-Irish in the American south, I recommend Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (University of Alabama Press, 1988), although this book too has a controversial history.

After his lively post to this blog, I asked Charlie Whitt to tell me a little more about himself. He was kind enough to do so and to send me a poem:

I have lived here in Greenup County most of my life. I am a veteran of the US Navy. (no combat) I am retired from AK Steel, which was called Armco Steel when I started there 39 years earlier.

I have published two collections of poetry. (self-published) The first called “The Freest Man”, and the other is a collection all about steel mill life, called, “Working Steel” My success as a poet is probably pretty anemic compared to those around you. Just Pegasus, A H, Shawnee Silhouette, and a few local newspapers is about all.

During the eighties I was very active in the Phoenix Writers, a wonderful group of poets at Shawnee State U. Ports. O. Our mentor was Dr. Robert Wilson, and when he retired and moved to Arkansas that just about did us in. I have been completely out of the writing scene for ten years and I really miss it.

We have a small farm here, about 75 acres, mostly timber, and I garden and put up some hay to sell every summer. I also like to woodwork when I have the time. I’m not a sculptor though. I make furniture pieces, mostly my own design, one of a kind items. I especially like to make tables. Coffee tables, end tables, game tables, etc. But I have never sold anything. So far, I have just made things for our own use and filled orders from the children.

I have been retired two and a half years and thoroughly enjoy it. I don’t know how I had time to work, as the old saying goes.

As President-Elect of the Kentucky State Poetry Society, I’ll take exception to Charlie’s modesty about “just” Pegasus. Or “just” Appalachian Heritage either. Some very good poets have been published by both and I have been several times rejected by one.

By working at Armco Steel, Charlie was following in Jesse Stuart’s footsteps, though Jesse didn’t last there very long. His chapter, “Cool Memories of Steel,” seems far from cool. It is one of the darkest I’ve found in Beyond Dark Hills.

Seventy-five acres of timber would be paradise to my husband.

Here is Charlie’s poem – a little early in the season but soon it will be tater digging time:

RAINY MORNING, AND ME WITH TATERS TO DIG

I used to know lots of things
to do with drowned plans.
Sometimes I ate them on the back porch
sometimes I wrapped them in plastic,
and sent them floating on rising water.
Sometimes I put them to bed with disappointment,
and let the two battle
until one had clearly been defeated.

But today I am as indifferent
as the gray, osmotic fog,
slipping around, between, and over
puzzled glances in our house.

—Charles M. Whitt, originally published in Appalachian Heritage, Summer 1991.