Sherry Chandler

from The Guardian:

Baghdad Burning, by a 26-year-old author who has won an international readership under the pen name Riverbend, is longlisted for the £30,000 Samuel Johnson award. In the list, announced today, she is up against 18 other books including Alan Bennett’s latest bestseller, histories of the cold war and the great wall of China, and a biography of the 19th-century cookbook author Mrs Beeton. The Guardian carried an extract from Riverbend’s title last summer.

The small literary publisher Marion Boyars brought out Baghdad Burning last year, classifying it under biography and memoir. The publishing house says it knows Riverbend’s identity but respects her wish to remain anonymous.

It has already come third in the Lettre Ulysses prize for Reportage, winning £14,000, and was shortlisted for an Index on Censorship freedom of expression award.

Riverbend began the blog with the words: “I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway.”

If you’ve read here long, you know I’ve linked to Baghdad Burning several times over the last year. Although I wish the circumstances that produced this blog had never happened, I am pleased to see that the writing is getting attention.

from Robert Frost’s “Home Burial”

“The wonder is I didn’t see at once.
I never noticed it from here before.
I must be wonted to it—that’s the reason.
The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.         25
Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?
There are three stones of slate and one of marble,
Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight
On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those.
But I understand: it is not the stones,         30
But the child’s mound——” 

from today’s Washinton Post:

LEBANON, Tenn. — At the end of Bettis Road, across a padlocked gate and up a grassy hillside lane, generations of James Jordan’s ancestors lie buried atop a wooded knoll — for now.

A rusty fence encircles the cemetery, and tilted headstones point skyward amid the leaves. Walking among the locust trees, Jordan points out graves of long-dead kin, including the Chandler family matriarch who left instructions and money for preserving the cemetery.

It’s a shame,” said Jordan, 51. “She died thinking that she had preserved the cemetery.”

The hilltop, about 25 miles east of Nashville, won’t be Jordan’s ancestral resting place much longer. Green flags mark the Chandler cemetery, which includes graves of Revolutionary and Civil War veterans, slaves and generations of a sprawling Colonial family. They will soon be moved so that a factory or warehouse — the developer is not yet sure — can be built nearby.

Don’t you love that “the developer is not sure yet?”

Of course, I perked up a bit when I saw that Chandler name, but I had already clicked through to the article because it seemed so anomalous amongst all the headlines of national and international strife. I think those of our family who didn’t come to Kentucky went to Indiana, and Chandler is a fairly common name. What really bothers me here is the way urban sprawl is eating up all our heritage. My own Chandler family is buried in a small church lot. Safe for now.

And of course family plots are not just a Southern phenomenon, as Mr. Frost well new. And perhaps home burial was not always such a good thing. And time does march on and life is change. And maybe Faulkner was wrong and the past is dead. But still…

I worry sometimes that, as the writer of a blog that purports to be about poetry and letters, I stray too often into the political. But poets around the world are political. Poets have been exiled and jailed for their political stances. Poets have also been presidents of countries as well as employees of banks.

Besides, in a democracy, everyone is political willy nilly. It’s our country. If we choose to let it run untended, then ours is the fault of its breakdown.

Nevertheless I am somewhat comforted to learn that, out on the wild west coast, the 12th Congressional District of California, a poet is running for congress in the Democratic primary. His name is Kevin Hearle and here is an excerpt from his platform:

I am running for Congress. I do not want to be a United States Congressman, but so much that is illegal, unconstitutional, anti-democratic, and un-American has been perpetrated by the current Bush administration in my name and in your name and in the name of America and democracy that staying home and writing my next two or three books no longer seems a sufficiently moral choice. However much I might prefer the comfort of my own home and career, when this administration compounds its immorality by calling its critics un-American I must stand and join in vocal and patriotic dissent.

Hearle’s is no doubt a quixotic effort. The 12th district already has a Democratic representative and some may see Hearle’s run as an unnecessary division of the ranks. I’m not sure, with a platform that begins “I don’t want to be a congressman,” that Hearle even wants to win. He wants to speak out. And I appreciate that effort from a poet as much as I appreciate the efforts of the Iraq war veterans who are now running as liberals. I’d venture you don’t find many extraverts among the poets. [Note: I just found this news item that confirms my speculation.]

Hearle’s literary credentials are impressive and the title of his collection is one of the most evocative I’ve seen: Each Thing We Know Is Changed Because We Know It. You can read a sample poem at the link.

Note: I stole the photograph from Hearle’s campaign site. It was not attributed.