Sherry Chandler

Sharon Olds was invited to read at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. tomorrow and to dine with Laura Bush. She decided to decline and to make her regrets public in The Nation. An excerpt from that letter of regret below:

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country–with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain–did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made “at the top” and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism–the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness–as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing–against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting “extraordinary rendition”: flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,

Sharon Olds

When Charlie Whitt sent me this photo his brother took of a crow on the rim of the Grand Canyon, I was reminded of this old poem I somehow never could get quite right. I wrote it maybe a decade ago and nobody ever wanted to publish it. I think it is more fun in performance than on the page and so I’m including a sound file, just for the fun of it. Thank you to Charlie for sharing the photo.

“The Wind Won’t Lift Me”
            —Theodore Roethke

I want to stretch out my arms along my hollow bones
and ride the wind
I want to ride the trades with the albatross
I want to stretch out my wings and sail the seven seas
I want to sail the seven seas for seven seasons
without the smell of land
But the wind won’t lift me.

I want to glide the mountainous coasts with the condor
I want to glide up, up, over and down the Andes
I want to ride the Andes like a roller coaster
I want to ride the liquid ancient music of the flutes
as it rises from the canyons and the crags.
But the wind won’t lift me.

I am too well grounded
too solid in my flesh.

On the rim of the Grand Canyon
I want to spread my wings like the eagle
and ride the drafts that rise from the deeps of time.

On the rim of the Grand Canyon
the wind batters and whips until
I must twist like the stunted pines
but the wind won’t lift me
won’t companion me to that crow.
The wind won’t make me comrade to that crow
that soars and chatters aimlessly below.

I want to stretch out my wings along my hollow bones
and ride the wind
but the wind won’t life me.

I took this text from Bartleby.com They reproduced it from The Poetical Works of John Keats (MacMillan, 1884).

I’m late in posting this — I’m sorry to say that I haven’t been reading the poetry blogs lately. I think I’ve lost my moral compass.

Hurricane Poets Check-In

This site is maintained by Robin Kemp. She has also posted the text of Dana Gioia’s letter on artists’ aid.

Number two son directed me to this column by Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle. Jon has been receiving communications from the Unitarian Jihad:

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism — 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression!

I have been converted. See below:

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: The Neutron Bomb of Sweet Reason.

Get yours.

My sons are Brother Katana of Patience and The Jackhammer of Loving Kindness.

There is also a The First Reformed Unitarian Jihad, a Live Journal community, and a Wikipedia entry. The movement is growing! Soon we’ll be as big as Pastaferianism.

By coincidence, I am going to read/speak at the 9 a.m. service of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lexington on Sunday. I’ll keep my eye out for people acting like grown-ups.

I sort of cut my wisdom teeth on Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Back in the early, early 70s, I even got away with teaching it in freshman comp. So having spent my life thinking that language should be demystified, I am somewhat bemused by the current tendencies toward a return to censorship. In many ways, by putting certain words in taboo, our current crop of Mrs. Grundys are increasing their power.

Poppysmatus has drawn my attention to this article in the NYTimes, “Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore“:

Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air.

[...]

Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin’s famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.

[...]

Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, “higher” regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, and the older, more “bestial” neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions.

Researchers point out that cursing is often an amalgam of raw, spontaneous feeling and targeted, gimlet-eyed cunning. When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the “uncontrollable” outburst accordingly.

And I will admit that much that passes for swearing these days offends my ears not because it’s lewd, rude, or crude, but because it’s unimaginative and boring. You want to see/hear some good cursing, read Chaucer or Shakespeare.

It’s a long article but a worthwhile read, perhaps, for us wordsmiths. And they do mention that an alternative title for “Much Ado About Nothing” is “Much Ado About an O Thing.” I’ll leave you to interpret that.

When Wordsworth, revising Milton, reconstructed the English sonnet into the epitome of the short meditative lyric, it seemed to provide an almost inevitable form for poems addressed to works of art. This may be partially due not only to the scale, but to the possibilities, in a sonnet’s interior structure, of developing rhetorical figurations of a whole range of visual elements in the object of a poem’s attention. The very visual format of a printed sonnet, picture-like rather than song-like or even page-like, may be of relevance here; and even in the case of Rossetti’s unvarying convention — influenced by the Italian — of carefully separating , in a stanza-like way, octave and sestet, the pattern is put to mimetic use: background/foreground, and image/interpretation are some of the oppositions paired across the divisions of the versification. From Washington Allston’s few fine sonnets on paintings, through Wordsworth’s and Rossetti’s, we can see the development of a sort of subgenre.

      — John Hollander in The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (The University of Chicago Press, 1995)

For Spring
by Sandro Botticelli
(in the Academia of Florence)

What masque of what old wind-withered New Year
          Honours this Lady? Flora, wanton-eyed
          For birth, and with all flowrets prankt and pied:
Aurora, Zephyrus, with mutual cheer
Of clasp and kiss: the Graces circling near,
          ‘Neath bower-linked arch of white arms glorified:
          And with those feathered feet which hovering glide
O’er Spring’s brief bloom, Hermes the harbinger.

Birth-bare, not death-bare yet, the young stems stand
          This Lady’s temple-columns: o’er her head
          Love wings his shaft. What mystery here to read
Of homage or of hope? And how command
          Dead Springs to answer? And how question here
          These mummers of that wind-withered New-Year?

— Dante Gabriel Rossetti

No, not Hamlet the play. Hamlet the text-adventure.

Here’s how my younger son describes it:

It’s a text game, like Nord & Bert, but with less wordplay and more sarcasm. You (as Hamlet) wander around trying to collect what you need to kill everyone off (including yourself). Other Shakespeare tragedies intrude — you have to get past Othello, you encounter Richard III and Macbeth, and you wheedle something out of Juliet. There’s an allusion to Midsummer Night’s Dream, too.

It’s full of sarcasm and innuendo. I had fun for a while.

My elder son said only, “I beat it in about an hour.” There’s pragmatism for you.

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
So I make an idle boast;
Jesus of the twice-turned cheek,
Lamb of God, although I speak
With my mouth thus, in my heart
Do I play a double part.
Ever at Thy glowing altar
Must my heart grow sick and falter,
Wishing He I served were black,
Thinking then it would not lack
Precedent of pain to guide it,
Let who would or might deride it;
Surely then this flesh would know
Yours had borne a kindred woe.
Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,
Daring even to give You
Dark despairing features where,
Crowned with dark rebellious hair,
Patience wavers just so much as
Mortal grief compels, while touches
Quick and hot, of anger, rise
To smitten cheek and weary eyes.
Lord, forgive me if my need
Sometimes shapes a human creed.
All day long and all night through,
One thing only must I do:
Quench my pride and cool my blood,
Lest I perish in the flood,
Lest a hidden ember set
Timber that I thought was wet
Burning like the dryest fax,
Melting like the merest wax,
Lest the grave restore its dead.
Not yet has my heart or head
In the least way realized
They and I are civilized.

— Countee Cullen, from “Heritage”

Countee Cullen (1903-1946) may have been born in Louisville, although he would neither confirm nor deny it. Along with Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, he was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

You can find some of his poems here and here.

Early Warning column on Bush’s call for a broader civilian role for the armed forces by William M. Arkin in the Washington Post

Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall on the same subject

E-mail Suggests Government Seeking to Blame [Environmental] Groups by Jerry Mitchell in the Mississippi Clarion Ledger

Lawyer Was Fired After Rove Called by Wayne Slater at WFAA.com

Excerpt from Night Draws Near by Anthony Shadid at TPMCafé

What Went Wrong by Gary Kamiya, review of Night Draws Near at Salon

Reuters Says Bush Photo Not ‘Malicious,’ Reports Wide Interest at Home and Abroad at Editor & Publisher

This is Style? at I See Invisible People

Reading Faulkner with Oprah by Megan O’Rourke in Slate