Sherry Chandler

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.

Every day I get an e-mail from the NYTimes containing the headlines. Here’s what I got today:

Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math
By SAM DILLON
Trying to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind, thousands of schools are reducing class time spent on other subjects.

Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Revenge in Baghdad
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
As leaders struggle to avert a civil war, hundreds of men continue to be kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad.

Belarus Police Deter Thousands of Protesters
By C. J. CHIVERS
Riot police dispersed a fresh challenge to President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, shoving protesters shouting “Truth! Truth! Truth!”

Colleges Say SAT Mistakes May Affect Scholarships
By KAREN W. ARENSON
The biggest effect of the mistakes made by the College Board in scoring the SAT will be on eligibility for scholarships, not on admissions decisions.

Red Cross Fires 3rd Volunteer Amid Inquiry
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
The American Red Cross has dismissed a third volunteer in its widening inquiry into accusations of improprieties involving the relief effort after Hurricane Katrina.

Retraining Laid-Off Workers, but for What?
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Many laid-off workers are finding that promises of new jobs turn out to be empty ones.

I am ready, like my friend Georgia Green Stamper, to shout to the world at large “Bury me at Glencoe!”

BTW, on the subject of evangelicals and progressive causes, Georgia has a great column about a small piece of forgotten history in my home county: A Look at the History of Mountain Island.

from Alan Brinkley’s review of American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips:

Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of “Christian Reconstructionists” who believe in a “Taliban-like” reversal of women’s rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a “myth” and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent “rapture” — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.

Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president’s policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips’s evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.

Phillips is not some wild-eyed lefty but a Republican thinker who has been around since the Nixon era, the man who invented the very notion that the Republicans would come to dominate American politics, a man with some credibility in speaking of these matters.

Amy Sullivan presents another view of the situation in her article When Would Jesus Bolt in The Washington Monthly:

…a substantial minority of evangelical voters—41 percent, according to a 2004 survey by political scientist John Green at the University of Akron—are more moderate on a host of issues ranging from the environment to public education to support for government spending on anti-poverty programs. Broadly speaking, these are the suburban, two-working-parents, kids-in-public-school, recycle-the-newspapers evangelicals. They may be pro-life, but it’s in a Catholic, “seamless garment of life” kind of way. These moderates have largely remained in the Republican coalition because of its faith-friendly image.
…

Groups like the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) are taking up Cizik’s [Richard Cizak is vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals) cause; 63 percent of evangelicals in a recent survey released by EEN said that global warming was an immediate concern. Half went even further, agreeing that steps needed to be taken to reduce global warming, even if it meant a high economic cost for the United States. Former National Review writer Rod Dreher has a just-published book that urges religious conservatives to question negative consequences of the free market.

The list of issues these evangelicals care about extends beyond the social hot-buttons that win elections.

I’ll have to say that the evangelicals I know best, that is my own family, seem to fall into this group. They are conservative, yes – they are southern, rural, and evangelical – but they are intelligent and capable of thinking for themselves. And they treat me with respect though they know I don’t see the world the way they do.

Both Phillips and Sullivan agree that the Bush administration uses fear as a major strategic tool. Here is Amy Sullivan in “When Would Jesus Bolt:”

Republican political dominance depends on being able to manipulate religious supporters with fear, painting the Democratic Party as hostile to religion and in the thrall of secular humanists.

and here is Kevin Phillips blogging at the TPMCafé:

Fear is likely to remain a Bush tactic. His people have tried to polarize voters into seeing a fight between good and evil, stoking fear and a sense of global chaos. The doomsday preachers are on the same side.

So we’re afraid of them and they’re afraid of us. Black and white. Divide and conquer.

The old cold warriors need an enemy to preserve their power and their way of life. They don’t have imagination enough to live in a post-cold-war world. My fellow citizens, we must not walk in fear.

I apologize for the length of this post. Kevin Phillips has been blogging all this last week at the TPMCafé Book Club; and some southern contributors to this group blog have had some things to say too.

I am delighted to discover that my friend and fellow poet, Wanda D. Campbell, who has been gracious enough to let me post some of her poems here, now has a blog of her own: Raven’s Shadow. Here’s a snippet from Friday’s post:

Gandhi said that if everyone lived by the principle of an eye for an eye, then soon the whole world would be blind. And indeed, I think it would be blind now, if not for the voices of the billions of ordinary people, not oil tycoons, not superstars nor world leaders, just ordinary folks, crying out for peace and forgiveness.

I couldn’t agree more.

And while you’re reading the rest of today’s post, page down to her tribute to her father.

from I See Invisible People:

In response to the new law banning abortion in South Dakota, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation has picked up the challenge. Cecilia Fire Thunder, President of the Oglala Sioux, issued a statement…

To me, it is now a question of sovereignty. I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.

Read the rest.

Update: and then there’s this from Yahoo news:

SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota (Reuters)- Abortion-rights supporters launched a referendum drive on Friday to overturn a South Dakota abortion ban designed to challenge the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing the practice nationwide.

A new coalition, South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, said it would try to collect thousands of signatures aimed at giving state voters a chance decide in November on what it called “the nation’s most extreme abortion law.”

It’s gonna be a long year.

Back in the days when I was a lowly graduate student T.A., I used to get a lot of whiners in my freshman comp classes. “I don’t know why I have to take this class. My secretary will correct my grammar for me.” I would respond that this class might be the most important one they would take in their college careers because “if you don’t understand the way the language works, you’re going to get jerked around by all kinds of slick operators.” And so we have been, as a nation.

As proof that you should not have slept through all those English classes, I direct you to this post, Modifiers are Evil, at Have Coffee Will Write.

No. Really. I mean it. When we allow people to use modifiers for the verbs that describe their actions we are allowing them to mitigate in some perverse way those actions. Take for instance the phrase: partially destroy. You can’t partially destroy something. You can destroy a part of something but that part destroyed is, well, destroyed.

Read the rest.

from the Kentucky Arts Council press release:

FRANKFORT, KY — The Kentucky Arts Council will be hosting the state finals for the Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest. On March 30, 10:00 a.m. EST, 20 high school students from 10 high schools will compete at the Hill Student Center on the campus of Kentucky State University, Frankfort. The winner of this competition will advance to the National Finals in Washington, DC in May 2006, where $50,000 in scholarships and school prizes will be awarded.

The competition presented in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, is part of a national program that encourages high school students to learn about great poetry through memorization, performance, and competition.

The finalists that will compete are: Brandon Evilla and Kendra Holloway, Christian County High School; Mason Scisco and Ross Johnson, Danville High School; Scott Ross and Amanda Redeke, Deming High School; Chauncy Rhodes and Antoyia Mallory, Doss High School; Michelle Rodgers and Katie Goldey, George Rogers Clark High School; Tiffany Logan and Ashley Underwood, Greenup County High School; Alexa Klein and Scott Whitehouse, Madison Central High School, Natalie Blake and Will Bates, Mercer County High School; Danielle DuMuro and Tawni Koch, Simon Kenton High School; and Price Dunlap and Dean Muir, Trimble County High School.

Kentucky Poet Laureate Sena Jeter Naslund, poet Frank X. Walker and Chairman of the Northern Kentucky University Theatre Department, Ken Jones will serve as judges. Special guest Dan Stone, Program Director for National Initiatives, National Endowment for the Arts, will attend the Kentucky Finals and award the state’s finalists.

“Poetry Out Loud has been a wonderful opportunity to engage Kentucky high school students with great poetry and the literary arts,” said Kentucky Arts Council Executive Director Lori Meadows. “The Arts Council is pleased to be a part of this national program.”

I wonder whose poetry they recite.

Silas House is the featured reader for this year’s Axton Reading Series at the University of Louisville. He will read on April 6 at the Ekstrom Library Auditorium.

This event will be the culmination of a two-day conference, Exploring Kentucky’s Sense of Place, during which geographers, historians, anthropologists and filmmakers will examine “some of the ways in which Kentucky is ‘claimed, remembered, wrenched, shaped, rendered, loved, and re-made…’”

Of special interest to the poets among us will be Lynell Edwards’s presentation on April 5: “Kentucky in the Verses and the Hedgerows: Notes toward a New Conception of the Pastoral in Poetry.” Lynell’s new book, due out soon from Red Hen Press, is the realization of her new concept of the pastoral. She read several of the poems to us that Morrison Gallery on Thursday, and I am looking forward to reading more.

Also on April 5, Nickole Brown will read poems from Sister. A Novel in Verse. And I am intrigued by the title of the Appalshop film, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,” which will show that same evening.

On Thursday afternoon (April 6) there’s “What’s Eating Mrs. Wolf’s Virginny and other essays and poems,” a presentation by Mary A. Kennedy of the Department of Pediatrics and a reading from Pleasure Ridge Park by Carrie Wright.

The event is free and open to the public.

from Political Wire:

Survey USA has released its latest poll of the nation’s senators, showing an average approval rating of 53% with 36% disapproving.

… Only three senators had negative net approval ratings: [Conrad] Burns and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), who are up for re-election in 2006, and Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY).