Sherry Chandler

So, a correspondent tells me, says today’s Herald-Leader.

The prizes “honor both established and emerging writers whose work is of exceptional quality” and “recognize writers of distinctive literary merit who demonstrate potential for continued outstanding work,” according to a statement from the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, N.M.

Only two other Kentuckians have won this award: Wendell Berry (1989) and Chris Offutt (2003).

More information at the Lannan Foundation web site. For more on Frank X. Walker, visit his site.

Last Tuesday I attended the last session of a 10-week poetry class taught by Leatha Kendrick at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning here in Lexington. It was a great class with a lot of energy not only in the teacher but also in the students. Together we produced a fairly amazing body of work.

For our last class, we were asked to bring in a failed poem. I chose the one below, which I tried to write on the occasion of the last Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen fair to be held at Indian Fort Theater between Berea and Big Hill.

This is what I took:

GUILD FAIR

to the south, the bullfrog croak
of washtub bass, not quite
in tune, not quite on the beat,
a medley from Oh Brother
the sing-along children all
in constant sorrow.

to the north, the rattle, roar,
squeak and clang of kettle corn,
a soundtrack of chatter, rhythms
of English, punctuated
by slamming Port-O-San doors,
a squeak of stroller wheels.

An old man, tweed jacket and cane,
drags along a straw stuck
to his pointy-toed black shoes,
a toddler waves a trophy broken branch,
a midge crawls frantic circles
in the bowl of a wild-cherry spoon,
pignuts bombard the roof of our E-Z-Up.

I watch a leaf turn on the forest floor:
Daddy Longlegs palpates loam
with prehensile wisps,
touches the rubber edge of my sole,
jumps back.

During the class, Leatha gave us scissors, glue sticks, and paper and told us to excise only those portions of the “poem” that seemed energetic and strong. This is what I wound up with:

What I think I learned: not only was there very little really interesting language in my original (and the big delete circle means that I had some doubt about what I did save) but it looks really static and dull compared to the kind of paste-up whimsy of the edit.

I think I found the optimum form for this little piece and that’s why I put it up here. Maybe it’s because the paste-up has a crafty look that’s appropriate to its subject. I think it has turned into a visual poem of sorts.

Johnny Depp is playing the Earl of Rochester!

In a movie called “The Libertine.”

It opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

I wonder whether this will get him his Oscar. I wonder whether this will make poetry popular again.

Rochester (1647-1680, Depp may be getting a little old) did a lot of the standard courtier type of poetry (compare Andrew Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress”) and he was good at it. Lately, however, he has come, like Catullus, to be appreciated for his frankness and his rapier wit. Here is his

Epitaph on Charles II

HERE lies our Sovereign Lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

Sounds familiar. Except maybe for that third line. And it was pretty dangerous stuff — perhaps more dangerous for a courtier then than for a cabinet member now.

I got this text from Project Bartleby. For some of his racier rhymes, look here (where I borrowed the portrait) and here.

Not sure why the Aussie — must be all those Yahoo Serious movies, not to mention “Whale Riding” and “Rabbit Proof Fence.” And yes, I confess, Mad Max before I realized Mel Gibson was making a career of being crucified.

Anyway it comes in handy. I work with an Australian and I’m the only one if the office who understands her.

They just become drug reps — or so says Stephanie Saul in the New York Times:

Anyone who has seen the parade of sales representatives through a doctor’s waiting room has probably noticed that they are frequently female and invariably good looking. Less recognized is the fact that a good many are recruited from the cheerleading ranks.

Known for their athleticism, postage-stamp skirts and persuasive enthusiasm, cheerleaders have many qualities the drug industry looks for in its sales force.

…

T. Lynn Williamson, …cheering adviser at [University of] Kentucky, says he regularly gets calls from recruiters looking for talent, mainly from pharmaceutical companies. “They watch to see who’s graduating,” he said.

“They don’t ask what the major is,” Mr. Williamson said. Proven cheerleading skills suffice. “Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm - they learn those things, and they can get people to do what they want.”

Approximately two dozen Kentucky cheerleaders, mostly women but a few men, have become drug reps in recent years.

…

“The cheerleaders now are the top people in universities; these are really capable and high-profile people,” said Gregory C. Webb, who is also a principal in a company that runs cheerleading camps and employs former cheerleaders. He started Spirited Sales Leaders about 18 months ago because so many cheerleaders were going into drug sales. He said he knew several hundred former cheerleaders who had become drug representatives.

“There’s a lot of sizzle in it,” said Mr. Webb. “I’ve had people who are going right out, maybe they’ve been out of school for a year, and get a car and make up to $50,000, $60,000 with bonuses, if they do well.” Compensation sometimes goes well into six figures

And some day, some one of them may even become President of the United States–oh, wait–

[Addendum: This article was on the front page of the Lexington Herald-Leader. I never read it. I apologize to local readers for featuring stale "news."]

Somehow I never really connect Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash in my mind, and yet there they both were at Sun Records and in my 1950s pre-teen psyche, the fake outlaw and the real one. I’d say, in the course, of my life, I’ve leaned more toward the Elvis side but Johnny Cash has always been there (like Hank Williams before either) and they both sort of come together in my real idol, Bob Dylan, who once said “it’s all music.”

I don’t know what any of that has to do with anything except that Johnny Cash seems to be turning up everywhere lately, I suppose because of the new biopic. I even heard an interview with him on Fresh Air this week, which gave me a bit of a frisson (neither Johnny nor Elvis would ever use that word but Dylan might if he needed a rhyme). Terry Gross did a two-day tribute. All Things Considered featured a recording of the Folsom Prison concert done from the audience by a young reporter named Gene Beley.

Rox Populi featured a picture of Cash flipping the bird that disturbed me precisely because it is a cheapened gesture and, while I know Cash was of the people, I never thought of him as vulgar. I guess that’s where I show my Mrs. Grundyism, though I live in a house where birds are flipped as casually as tv channels.

All of this leads me to the recommendation that you read Johnny Cash’s Journey Through the Other Side of Virtue , an appreciation by Nicholas Kulish in today’s NYTimes. In it, I think Kulish may have captured Cash’s importance in American pop culture — his willingness to admit his own guilt:

If all Johnny Cash brought to the stage were his demons, we wouldn’t need to remember him. Marilyn Manson, the shock rocker, proved far more grotesque than a man in a black suit singing a few country murder ballads. Cash’s drug addiction and light brushes with the law pale beside the rapper 50 Cent’s drug deals and bullet scars.

It is the angel on Johnny Cash’s other shoulder that gives his music its depth and profundity… Johnny Cash merges our seemingly contradictory American traditions of outlaws prone to wild gunplay and pious Christians singing hymns, without stopping to explain how you can be both at once.

In a world increasingly reduced to good and evil, to us versus them, Johnny Cash was a man unafraid to admit that he was both. We’ve somehow lost sight of the truth that there can be no redemption without sin. It’s this kind of reductive thinking that makes it easy to reduce swaths of the country to color codes and political parties; to lock millions away in jails and prisons, then toss the keys without guilt.

Johnny Cash sang that he wore black “for the poor and beaten down, livin’ on the hopeless, hungry side of town.” With hundreds of thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina, layoff announcements dangling over the heads of 98,000 American auto workers, and 2.1 million men and women in prisons and jails across the country, we still need him

Just wanted to point out that I’ve updated my links list (not at all a blog roll really) to add:

Rene Hales, whose photography is endlessly fascinating.

The Human Flower Project because of the local connection and because I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I do. It’s visually lush and full of all kinds of interesting tidbits about how people live through flowers.

And a couple of poetry blogs I love:

Poesy Galore, flashing and yearning and full of inner resources. From Emily:

“I would argue that a poem that reads beautifully on the page but sounds horrible when read ultimately fails.”–KA Elliott, in The Lyric as Performance, Part 1. I would argue this, too. But I might also argue against it, so I’m interested in seeing where KAE goes in Part 2.

Heraclitean Fire, who talks of many things British that I can understand and Cricket that I cannot — from Harry:

In all such disagreements between poets, the terrible temptation is to think that one of them must be right. Even worse, that the other must therefore be wrong, and that it’s necessary to decide which is which.

And don’t forget my old friends, too. If they’re linked on my page, it’s because I think they’re very special.

The Anger and Shock of a City’s Slave Past by Felicia R. Lee in the NYTimes:

One commonality that emerges from viewing five hours of the visitor videotapes is how much people do not know. Many were unaware of the existence or extent of slavery in New York, which lasted until 1827, longer than in any other Northern state except New Jersey.

Mardi Gras to the Rescue? Doubts Grow by Jere Longman in the NYTimes:

Among other possible casualties are the Mardi Gras Indians, African-Americans who dress in elaborately feathered costumes in honor of Indians who helped runaway slaves. The Mardi Gras Indians celebrate with theatrical confrontations among “tribes,” but some find themselves short of the material and thousands of dollars needed to make their costumes, said Alfred Doucette, big chief of the Flaming Arrows tribe.

“I don’t have no more supplies,” Mr. Doucette said. “I need feathers and stuff.”

His costumes require 10 pounds of ostrich feathers that cost about $5 apiece, Mr. Doucette, a singer, said, explaining that it had been difficult to find work as a musician since Hurricane Katrina struck in August.

Speaking of other chieftains, he said, “They would like to come, but they’re short on money this year.”

If African-American participation is severely curtailed, Mardi Gras may run the risk of further delineating the class and racial divide exposed after the hurricane

Shift on Suspect Is Linked to Role of Qaeda Figures by Douglas Jehl and Eric Lightblau in the NYTimes

The decision not to charge [Jose Padilla] criminally in connection with the more far-ranging bomb plots was prompted by the conclusion that Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Zubaydah could almost certainly not be used as witnesses, because that could expose classified information and could open up charges from defense lawyers that their earlier statements were a result of torture, officials said.

Public Enemy No. 43,527 The government throws back another small fish By Dahlia Lithwick at Slate

Sometimes, a Tax Cut for the Wealthy Can Hurt the Wealthy by Robert H. Frank in the NYTimes

In Defense of John Kerry by David Gopoian at DonkeyRising

Vatican Starman slams ID! at Heraclitean Fire

Yes, Virginia (review of Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life) by Curtis Sittenfeld in the NYTimes

To endure their ache, a review of Max Egremont’s Sigfried Sassoon: A Life by Dominic Hibbard, originally from the Times Literary Supplement

Clooney and a Maze of Collusion, a reveiw of “Syriana” by A. O. Scott in the NYTimes

Rock and a Hard Place, editorial by Harlan Coban in the NYTimes (Bruce Springsteen is denied recognition by the U.S. Senate.)

AND

A Book for All Seasons in which one writer’s marketing strategy is unmasked

AND AGAIN

If you don’t want to face those holiday shopping crowds, why not mail-order the “George W. Bush Turkey Dinner Doll,” a limited-edition collector’s item that you can call your own for a mere $29.95. (I picked this up at Rising Hegemon.)

Here is a blog, Operation Eden, that I discovered through BagNews. The blogger’s bio states:

clayton james cubitt’s mom was a teenage runaway, go-go dancing at a club on bourbon street in new orleans. his dad was a canadian national running pot over the border from mexico. they met, married, and moved to los angeles, conceiving him on the trip in the back of a vw bus at dinosaur national park in utah. now he takes pictures and lives in brooklyn. he grew up in new orleans and the gulf coast, where his family still lives.

The Bag adds a few details:

Clayton, known professionally as Siege, had finally scraped together enough money last March to move his mother out of a shack she had been sharing with nine people and into her own trailer between Bay St. Louis, Mississippi and Slidell, Louisiana. In a cruel twist of fate, however, the hurricane left his mother and his younger brother homeless and destitute

I found this site a little too late for Thanksgiving Day proper but perhaps not too late on this holiday weekend to ask you to spend some time reading there and looking at the photographs, some time sending thoughts out to those ordinary people struggling here in our country and all around the world. This is, perhaps, the true power of blogging, that you can see these events on the ground, close and personal, and considerably less media filtered.

Here is an excerpt from cubitt’s Thanksgiving Day post:

And I should be in the Gulf right now, with my mom and little brother, using the Thanksgiving break to dig through the months-dried mud, sifitng for scraps to salvage and be thankful for. My mom’s really hoping she’ll be able to save her old vinyl collection, now that it’s not so swampy in her trailer, and maybe the mold’s not quite so aggressive. And she thinks she could get a FEMA travel trailer now, and the government will bulldoze her Eden and haul it away, for free even. But then she feels sad, she knows she’s better off staying settled for now in North Carolina with the wonderful people who’ve helped so much there. And even more she knows that my little brother is better off up there, and feels doubly guilty again. Guilty for one that she’s not surviving, barnacle steadfast, Cajun stubborn, alongside the others in the muck and speculation and slow grinding dread in the Gulf. And then again she feels guilty for feeling that guilt, the guilt of the exile, that she should be thankful for the oasis she’s found herself in, and she is thankful, so thankful, but also guilty for it.