Sherry Chandler

from me and the NYTimes. They give you half a dozen poems from contemporary poets to close the new year.

I give you one from an old guy named Shakespeare — not because it has any significance (some lies are more dangerous than others) but because I ran across it this week and it amuses me:

138

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Or you might prefer this one by John Donne (also one I ran across this quiet week):

The Sun Rising

BUSY old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay.”

She’s all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

Well, they both are about how time flies and we don’t want it to, so maybe that’s why they occurred to me on this day when we officially mark the passing of time.

Love and peace to you all in 2006.

from Ron Silliman

Even by such modest standards, the correspondence between Jonathan Greene & Thomas Merton that is at the heart of On the Banks of Monks Pond is not a major correspondence. Jonathan Greene was a young poet, more or less fresh out of Bard College, when he met Merton after moving to Kentucky. Greene signed on as an unofficial contributing editor to Merton’s journal, Monk’s Pond – Keith Wilson & Jonathan Williams did likewise – but appears to have met Merton just three times before the Trappist monk died at the early age of 53. The correspondence as published is just eighteen letters long – ten of them by Merton – written over eleven months.

…

What is best about On the Banks of Monks Pond is [that] it places Merton thoroughly within the world of poetry, hoping to meet Anselm Hollo (in those days a British-based translator who worked for the BBC), thanking Greene for passing along an article on Barthes & Lacan, worrying about a contributor’s note for Wendell Berry.

On the op-ed page of today’s NYTimes, William Falk has a list of news “of subtle significance” that you may have missed in all the excitement over hurricanes and unwarranted spying.

I am particularly fond of this one:

FORBIDDEN VACCINE Ever[y] year, about 500,000 women throughout the world develop cervical cancer. In the United States alone, the disease kills about 3,700 women annually. This year, scientists developed a vaccine against human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease that is the primary cause of cervical cancer. The vaccine produced 100 percent immunity in the 6,000 women who received it as part of a multinational trial. As soon as the vaccine is licensed, some health officials say, it should be administered to all girls at age 12. But the Family Research Council and other social conservative groups vowed to fight that plan, even though it could virtually eliminate cervical cancer. Vaccinating girls against a sexually transmitted disease, they say, would reduce their incentive to abstain from premarital sex

I’m not sure I find the significance of this tidbit so subtle.

I went to school over at Georgetown College with Gary Bauer. He was a sort of Big Man on that little campus but he didn’t look like a monster…

P.S. I do know that he’s moved on from the Family Research Council.

A preparatory experiment, made on October 18, gave the best results and excited the most promising hopes. Barbican, desirous to ascertain the effect of the concussion occurring at the instant of the projectile’s departure, had a 32 inch mortar brought from Pensacola.

Into this harmless bombshell, which could be firmly closed by means of a screw fastened lid, they introduced first a large cat, then a very pretty squirrel belonging to Marston, who had made it quite a pet. The object of introducing the second animal was to ascertain how a living thing so slightly affected with vertigo as the squirrel, could endure the experimental trip.

The mortar was loaded with a charge of powder, the shell put in its place, and the piece fired off. The projectile shot up rapidly, describing its majestic parabola, reached a height of about a thousand feet, and then fell with a graceful curve into the midst of the waves. Without a moment’s delay, a boat started for the spot; skilful divers plunging into the water and fastening cords to the ears of the shell, it was soon hauled aboard.

Ardan, Barbican, Marston, and McNicholl were all in the boat, and you can easily comprehend with what interest they watched the experiment. Scarcely was the lid opened, when out jumped the cat, a little scared and towzled, but as lively as ever, and evidently not a particle the worse for her äerial flight.

But no squirrel made his appearance. They waited for him. They looked for him. They shook the shell, and turned it upside down. No squirrel. There was no mincing the matter. The cat had eaten her fellow traveler.

— from Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon

Just to show you how low I’ve fallen in my determination to spend this week vegging, last night I sat through local channel 62’s showing of “The Carson City Kid,” a 57-minute 1940 western starring Roy Rogers, Gabby Hayes, and Noah Beery Jr. Here is the Internet Movie Database plot summary:

Roy Rogers (Roy Rogers, and not playing “himself” but playing a character named Roy Rogers), posing as The Carson City Kid, is seeking vengeance on Morgan Reynolds, the man who killed his brother. To find Reynolds in the gold towns, he systematically stops stagecoaches and goes through the mail, hoping to find letters addressed to Reynolds and thusly learn his whereabouts. Thus “The Kid” earns the reputation of a stagecoach robber, although he never takes anything…As part of his plan to get evidence against Jessup, who also does not know his true identity, Roy takes a job as saloon shotgun guard, and meets saloon singer Joby Madison (Pauline Moore, in one of the truly great performances found in the B-western genre) and falls in love with her…

This sort of Zorro plot is a little bit more complicated than that, but not much. The story line does take pains to separate Roy from Trigger before he goes under cover but one is left to wonder why anybody who rides a big blond horse and wears such fancy (clean!) duds bothers to tie a bandana over his face and speak Spanish. Even undercover, he isn’t exactly low-profile, stealing the blonde saloon singer from the major villain, singing along to player pianos in public restaurants, and casually shooting a chandelier down onto the head of a girl-offending drunk with his pistol. To perform a similar feat with a hanging rope, you may remember, Clint Eastwood needed a rifle and a considerable squint.

It was the scene with the girl and the horse that prompted my husband to remark, “He did have a penchant for blondes, didn’t he?”

Fun to see the early-ish Gabby Hayes (apparently just becoming “Gabby” here) but for me the most fun was watching Noah Beery, Jr., who at this time would have been 27 years old and he was a hunk! Although he was playing his usual naive good-natured sidekick type, in this movie he got to do some fighting and riding. In my opinion, he was better looking than Rogers – well, he was cute – and, within the limits of the character he played, he could act.

Of course, he didn’t have to be SUCH a goody two-shoes.

Alan Jacobs has come out with a well-timed new biography of C. S. Lewis: The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis . Here is a snippet of a review from The New Republic by Richard Jenkyns:

Why Lewis wrote the Narnia books at all is a puzzling question. The best writers for children have been, like Lewis, disproportionately childless (Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, Robert Louis Stevenson) or the parents of only children (Kenneth Grahame, A.A. Milne), and their books have often originated from stories invented to give pleasure to real children: Carroll, Grahame, and Milne again, as well as Kipling’s Jungle Books, Just So Stories, and Puck of Pook’s Hill. But Lewis hardly knew any children at the time and he does not appear to have liked them much. He seems to have been puzzled himself: he had simply felt, he said later, that a fairy tale for children was “exactly what I must write — or burst.”

The sort of story that he wanted to tell was more unusual at the time he was writing than it may seem now. The theme of the otherworld — the tale of a child transported into another order of existence and usually returning home at the end — was originally created for stories meant for quite small children. The current superstars of children’s literature, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, have taken this theme and used it in books intended for a somewhat older market. Adolescents today read a lot of fantasy, but at the time that Lewis was writing this was not so. Fantasy was for small children, and older children moved on to supposedly realistic stories of adventure — the sort of story of which Treasure Island is the supreme example. The combination of otherworld fantasy with a kind of moral ambition that we meet in Pullman and in the later Harry Potter books originated with Lewis.

I didn’t discover the Narnia stories until I was in my late twenties, when my husband and I were reclaiming our lost childhoods together. I had already devoured all of Tolkien and I found the world of Narnia brighter, simpler, and just as charming. I wasn’t overbothered by allegory in either fantasy world.

Later on, I tried to read The Screwtape Letters and I did read some of Lewis’s science fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) but I was disappointed. In these books, I did find the allegory much stronger than the story.

A decade later, when I began to read them to my own children, I pulled back from both authors. Tolkien I found uncomfortably classist and Lewis preachy. I found that I didn’t want to raise my children on stories of the great battle between good and evil. Interesting how having children makes you define your own values.

My kids didn’t let my disapprobation stop them from enjoying the books and like many kids I think, they read about Narnia blissfully unaware of any specifically Christian allegory. They loved “Star Wars,” too.

I have no desire to see any of the movies based on these books. I am not much dazzled by the wonders of computer animation, and I prefer to keep my fantasy concepts my own. I don’t plan to see the new “King Kong” either, just to show what kind of a humbug I am. I figure three versions of that movie is two too many, and besides, all the fun is in the campy old Kong of the 30s. “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”

Lewis valued allegory as a literary form and spend his entire academic career studying such works as Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. He was also a very influential religious writer. Interesting that this new biography seems to treat the Narnia series as the pinnacle of his accomplishment. Or maybe it’s just being hyped that way.

The Kentucky State Poetry Society is accepting entries for its 2006 Student Poetry Contest for grades 1 – 12. Deadline for entries is March 1, 2006.

Follow the link for guidelines. Although the web page still says 2005 as of this posting, the rules and categories remain the same. The reading this year will be at the KSPS’s Annual Awards Weekend, see below.

One entry per student. Entries should consist of two copies, one with the student’s name, address, age, grade, name and address of school and teacher’s name in the upper right corner. The other copy should have only the name of the category in the upper left hand corner. No identifying information should be given on this copy, which will be sent to the judges.

Winners will be announced in April. First place winners will be published in Pegasus. Poems that place or get an honorable mention will be on display at the KSPS Annual Awards Weekend, October 13-14 2006 at Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park.

Send entries to:

Sally Adkins
Student Contest Chair
PO Box 24
South Shore KY 41175

The Kentucky Foundation for Women has announced a March 3 deadline for the 2006 Arts Meet Activism grants.

The primary goal of the Art Meets Activism program is to support feminist artists and organizations in the development and implementation of art activities that are directly focused on social change in Kentucky. Applicants should be able to demonstrate their commitment to feminism and their understanding of the relationship between art and social change. Applicants may request funds for a range of artistic activities including: arts education programs focused on women or girls, community participation in the creation of new art forms, artist-centered projects involving non-traditional venues or new partnerships between artists and activists, and artist-centered projects with social change themes or contents.

Guidelines and forms here.

from Winning Writers, the Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest:

We seek the best humor poem that has been sent to a “vanity poetry contest” as a joke. Cash prizes totaling $1,609 will be awarded. Free to enter.

Entries accepted August 15, 2005-April 1, 2006

How to Submit Your Entry

Find a vanity poetry contest, a contest with low standards whose main purpose is to entice poets to buy expensive products like anthologies, chapbooks, CDs, plaques and silver bowls. Vanity contests will often praise remarkably bad poems in their effort to sell as much stuff to as many people as possible.

Make up a deliberately absurd, strange, laugh-out-loud humor poem.

Submit your parody poem to a vanity contest as a joke.

After you’ve done steps 1-3, submit your entry to the Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest.

There is no fee to submit to the Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest. Poets of all nations are welcome. Your poem must be in English (inspired gibberish also accepted). Please submit only one poem during the submission period. Your poem may be of any length.

Complete guidelines with links here.

Last year’s winners here.

or back to the reality of 21st century USA.

A Chilling Departure From the Capitol an editorial in the NYTimes:

Mr. [Ted] Stevens’s cunning warning was that all those extras would die on the vine unless Alaska drilling was approved. His cynical flimflammery was deservedly rebuffed as enough opponents stood firm against the oil drilling. And soon enough the word went round that things like flu vaccine and hurricane aid were not endangered after all.

Not so the extra fuel aid for low-income families. There was a heating supplement tied to the Alaska proposal, as Mr. Stevens promised. But there was also a separate $2 billion appropriated for the same purpose elsewhere in the legislation - unconnected to the Alaska floor machinations - that somehow was struck from the final bill as lawmakers rushed to recess. Malice? Who can say? Obviously the poor can’t afford a campaign donation PAC to catch Congress’s attention for an answer.

The government’s home heating supplement now stands at a half or less of what the poor will need if predictions of a harsh winter pan out and fuel bills increase 25 percent. Various studies have established that, in a pinch, the poor scrimp on food purchases in order to meet heating bills. Yet Congress’s stinginess is being compounded by the administration’s recent decision to reject a request from New York and several other states to increase food stamp outlays to the poor as fuel bills mount.

Lawmakers insist that the $2 billion supplement technically had to be cut - but may be restored yet again next month. Believe that and we have an oil derrick to sell you in Alaska.

Elderly Give Boost to Appalachian Reading Project By Alan Elsner from Reuters, here in the Washington Post online.

MOUSIE, Ky. — In a battle against entrenched poverty, where adult illiteracy, unemployment and drug addiction are rife, teachers in the Appalachian region have unleashed a new weapon: grandparents.

Under a program sponsored by Save the Children, schools in several counties of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, among the poorest in the nation, have recruited more than 80 grandparents to work in schools helping children learn how to read.

The grandparents — all but three are women and most are well into their seventies — spend several hours a day, working one-on-one with children who have difficulty reading.

“I want to see them do better than driving a coal truck,” said Alma Fraser, 71, in her eighth year as a volunteer. She puts in 7 1/2 hours four days a week at Jones Fork Elementary School in the village of Mousie, and is one of six grandparents working at the school.

“I want to see them wearing ties and white shirts. Be a lawyer, be a doctor, be a chemist, an engineer,” she said. “But you can’t do anything without an education anymore, and reading is the root of it.”

Post-9/11 Rush Mixed Politics With Security, Congressman Benefits From Homeland Security Spending by Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Scott Higham in the Washington Post:

As a small start-up company in Massachusetts sought to become a major player in the business of homeland security, it hired a lobbyist and attended a fundraiser for one of the most powerful members of Congress.

The company was Reveal Imaging Technologies Inc. The congressman was Rep. Harold “Hal” Rogers (R-Ky.). The fundraiser, held Oct. 22, 2003, brought in $14,000 from Reveal and was the beginning of a mutually beneficial association.

Reveal had just received a government grant to develop smaller, cheaper explosives-detection machines to scan baggage at the nation’s airports. Rogers, who chairs the House Appropriations homeland security subcommittee, said he wanted the machines to improve security while saving taxpayers money.

In the end, Reveal received a federal contract from the Transportation Security Administration worth up to $463 million. Rogers achieved his goal of launching the next generation of machines. In the process, he received $122,111 in donations to his leadership political action committee from Reveal executives and associates — and a pledge from the company to move $15 million worth of work to Rogers’s poor Appalachian congressional district.