Sherry Chandler

from the Washington Post:

Massive “Stop Genocide” rallies are planned on the Mall and across the nation today to urge the Bush administration to take stronger action to end the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Thousands of people are expected to converge on Washington, including 240 busloads of activists from 41 states, local and national politicians and such celebrity speakers as actor George Clooney, Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel and Olympic speed skater Joey Cheek…Public support to end the bloodshed is growing.

…

The Janjaweed continue to murder and rape women and children of different ethnicity, human rights groups say. Friday, the U.N. World Food Program said it lacked the funds to feed millions in Darfur. Rally speakers are expected to press the Bush administration to push harder for a multinational peacekeeping force to be sent to Darfur and to take a tougher stance against Sudan.

More information at Human Rights First.

I have always admired Susan Sarandon’s work (yes, even her role as Janet White), and I have admired her anti-war stance. Juan Cole has some thoughts today about the death threats she received when she spoke out against war in 2003:

Probably in this generation the practice of calling a signature a “John Hancock” has lapsed. It was a nice piece of folk wisdom. Hancock’s signature on the Declaration of Independence was bold and prominent,and while he did not say the things about it often attributed to him, it is certainly the case that he was signing his own death warrant if he lost. It wasn’t his signing in large script that was significant, but that he was the first to sign. We all have at least once in our lives to sign a John Hancock– to take a principled stance that could get us, if not killed, at least in serious trouble. Otherwise, we’ll have led the life of a timid slave and betrayed our own ethical beings, and we won’t even have anything interesting to put on our tombstones.

Read the rest to find out what John Hancock did say and read what Susan Sarandon said here.

In his Daily Kos Diary, Bob Higgins remembers the 69th anniversary of Guernica, which was Friday:

It is described in Historical accounts as the first time that civilians had been attacked by air power with such wrenching devastation. Devastation by bombing is only a phrase and can’t convey the sights and sounds, the screams of terror and random senseless violence of what occurred in Guernica that day. By morning Guernica would have nothing left but it’s fame.

They came, the Germans in their Heinkels, primitive by our sophisticated standards, they came, the Italians in their Fiats and they hurled their now quaint antique bombs down upon the guilty and the innocent, down upon the cowardly and the valiant, the pure and the profane alike.

They came in the late afternoon and bombed and came again and again and bombed and bombed and bombed and bombed…and returned in the early evening and bombed.

A rubble of ruin, a great hideous forlorn tumble of refuse, of smoke and fire of screams and pain and dust and sun baked rubble cooling in the evening breeze surrounded only by the mournful sounds of dying.

They say that there are conservation laws, that energy and mass cannot be destroyed. Physicists and technicians tell me that other things as well obey these laws, momentum and something called spin.

I wonder about the moans of the dying and the screams of the children, I wonder about the weeping of the mothers and the cries of rage of the brothers, I wonder, are these too conserved?

Are the all sounds of terror and loss from all the wars of history conserved, each war laying it’s grotesque symphony atop the next?

Well, folks, this is the last day of National Poetry Month. I have had a great deal of fun digging up all those 18th and 19th century Kentucky poets, but I have had enough. And I ’spect you have, too. So for the finale, we’re coming up to the present day.

Christine Delea’s new book, The Skeleton Holding Up the Sky, is pretty much hot off the Main Street Rag presses, and it’s a doozy. It’s a book full of poems that I want to read out loud to other people. “Listen to this!” I say, to my husband, to my son, or to whomever else might be in reaching distance of my restraining arm.

Christine was born on Long Island and has since lived all over the country, but we are fortunate now, at least for this little while, to count her as one of our own. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Eastern Kentucky University, she has a long list of awards that you’ll find here, and she is very active both the Kentucky State Poetry Society and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. A couple of years ago, Christine brought her formidable energy to our KSPS contest, and she is in the process of transforming that event (entry deadline June 30!).

She also makes quilts!

Christine gave me permission to share with you the poem below. It is a particular favorite of mine because it reminds me of many a night with a bottle (or two) of wine and a gaggle of women poets of a certain age (Christine says this poem is true but not factual):

The Hell with Tea and Apple Pie at Perkins—Two Middle-Aged Women in North Dakota Decide They’d Rather Get Drunk

The reds and violets of the last warm spring night
before summer starts sit on the horizon;
a perfect evening to get drunk in a field.
The troubles that come from gray hairs,
bad jobs and too many misunderstandings
require sitting in damp grass,
backs against someone’s
old rusted tractor. Not a night for the usual herbal tea,
opening the checkbook and feeling
their stomachs tighten at the balance,
or agreeing on appetizers while the waiter
daydreams himself elsewhere.
No ex-in-laws who snub sitting two tables over,
trying to eavesdrop. A six pack each,
three divorces between them, they plan to drink
until laughter is forced out of pores
and spills like seed onto the ground.
Grain elevators stain the landscape,
dwarf problems to the size
of corn kernels. As the cans empty,
they yawn, sneeze, refuse to discuss
the problems that sent them to that field.
Instead, they gossip about acquaintances,
fret over each other’s kids,
plan a day at the mall.
Their plans bleed out into the fields,
around them for miles,
across states, over national borders.
No need on a night like this, at this age,
for berries, herbs and apples;
they are surrounded by hardier
sustenance—barley, hops, wheat.

— Mary Christine Delea, from The Skeleton Holding Up the Sky (Main Street Rag, 2006)

Reproduced by permission of the author.

A correspondent sent me this link JFK Library Gets Famous Frost Poem and by now you have no doubt heard the news:

BOSTON - The John F. Kennedy Library and Museum has obtained the original version of the poem that Robert Frost prepared for the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, but never read in its entirety because of the glare of the sun.

At Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration, Frost, who was 86 at the time, stood at the podium reading the beginning of “Dedication,” a poem he wrote by hand, then typed for easier reading at the inauguration. But after trying to use a hat borrowed from Vice President Lyndon Johnson to shield the page from bright sun glancing off the snow, Frost recited his poem, “The Gift Outright,” from memory.

Frost had intended to deliver a full reading of “Dedication” before reciting “The Gift Outright.”

…

Jacqueline Kennedy had the poem framed for the president to hang in the White House and wrote a now barely legible note to the president on brown paper on the back of the frame. The note was not discovered until museum archivist James M. Roth removed the paper from the frame this week.

Roth said the note reads, “For Jack, January 23, 1961. First thing I had framed to put in your office. First thing to be hung there.”

“There is no signature but it’s definitely her handwriting,” Roth said.

The poem begins like this:

Dedication

Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state
Seems something artists ought to celebrate.
Today is for my cause a day of days.
And his be poetry’s old-fashioned praise
Who was the first to think of such a thing.
This verse that in acknowledgement I bring
Goes back to the beginning of the end
Of what had been for centuries the trend;
A turning point in modern history.
Colonial had been the thing to be
As long as the great issue was to see
What country’d be the one to dominate
By character, by tongue, by native trait,
The new world Christopher Columbus found.
The French, the Spanish, and the Dutch were downed
And counted out. Heroic deeds were done.
Elizabeth the First and England won.
Now came on a new order of the ages
That in the Latin of our founding sages
(Is it not written on the dollar bill
We carry in our purse and pocket still?)
God nodded his approval of as good.
…

You can find the rest on the News Hour Website

Henry Thompson Stanton (1834-1898) was born in Alexandria, Virginia but his family came to Maysville when he was two years old. His father was a noted jurist, author of Kentucky legal treatises and editor of Kentucky’s revised statutes, who served in the Congress as a representative from Kentucky. Henry T. was educated at Maysville Seminary and West Point, though he left before he graduated, and joined the Confederate Army, serving in Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, and West Virginia. He ended the war with the rank of major. (For some idea of the kind of things that went on in that area during the Civil War, I recommend Sharyn McCrumb’s Ghost Riders.) He died in Frankfort in May 1898.

Stanton was a lawyer, a newspaper editor, and a state legislator. He published two novels, and two volumes of poetry, but he still became one of our one-poem wonders. According to William S. Ward:

["The Moneyless Man"] was written …at the request of a “wandering elocutionist” who came to Maysville and asked Major Stanton to write for him “a poem that would draw tears from any audience.”

Let me know if you cry.

The Moneyless Man

Is there no secret place on the face of the earth,
Where charity dwelleth, where virtue has birth?
Where bosoms in mercy and kindness will heave,
When the poor and the wretched shall ask and receive?
Is there no place at all where a knock from the poor
Will bring a kind angel to open the door?
Ah, search the wild world wherever you can,
There is no open door for a Moneyless Man!

Go look in yon hall where the chandelier’s light
Drives off with its splendor the darkness of night,
Where the rich-hanging velvet in shadowy fold
Sweeps gracefully down with its trimmings of gold,
And the mirrors of silver take up and renew,
In long lighted vistas, the ‘wildering view:
Go there! at the banquet, and find, if you can,
A welcoming smile for a Moneyless Man.

Go look in yon church of the cloud-reaching spire,
Which gives to the sun his same look of red fire,
Where the arches and columns are gorgeous within,
And the walls seem as pure as a soul without sin;
Walk down the long aisles, see the rich and the great
In the pomp and the pride of their worldly estate;
Walk down in your patches, and find, if you can,
Who opens a pew to a Moneyless Man!

Go, look in the banks, where Mammon has told
His hundreds and thousands of silver and gold;
Where, safe from the hands of the starving and poor,
Lies, pile upon pile, of the glittering ore!
Walk up to their counters-oh, there you may stay
Till your limbs grow old, till your hairs grow gray,
And you’ll find at the banks not one of the clan
With money to lend to a Moneyless Man!

Go look to yon judge, in his dark-flowing gown,
With the scales wherein law weigheth equity down,
Where he frowns on the weak and smiles on the strong,
And punishes right whilst he justifies wrong;
Where juries their lips to the Bible have laid,
To render a verdict they’ve already made;
Go there, in the court-room, and find, if you can,
Any law for the cause of a Moneyless Man!

Then go to your hovel! no raven has fed
The wife who has suffered too long for her bread;
Kneel down by her pallet, and kiss the death-frost
From the lips of the angel your poverty lost;
Then turn in your agony upward to God,
And bless, while it smites you, the chastening rod,
And you’ll find, at the end of your life’s little span,
There’s a welcome above for a Moneyless Man!

— Henry T. Statnton, from Kentucky Eloquence. Past and Present. Library of Orations, After-Dinner Speeches, Popular and Classic Lectures Addresses and Poetry, Bennett H. Young, editor, 469-470, (Louisville, Kentucky: Ben LaBree, 1907)

Langdon Smith (1858-1908) was born in Louisville. He wrote novels, short stories, and poems, but, another one-poem wonder, is best remembered for this poem, a love-poem to his wife, that he published in the want ads of The New York Journal. Beginning in 1895, the poem was published over a period of four years. That’s William Ward’s version.

The other version I found best articulated at this CDC site:

…the British naturalist Langdon W. Smith, who did some excellent biological research and also wrote exquisite poetry. Smith was born in Scotland in 1877 and came to the United States when he was 14. Practically nothing is known about his education, except that in his early 20s he was engaged by the Museum of Natural History in New York to do research and was often invited by scientific societies to lecture. He also wrote articles on scientific subjects for newspapers. He wrote a particularly beautiful poem about evolution titled “A Tadpole and a Fish.” A friend of his found this poem, which Smith had carelessly laid aside, and recognized it as something exceptional. He prevailed upon Smith to submit the poem to some of the best papers for an opinion. The first to examine the poem was the editor of the New York Herald, who gave Smith a check for $500, a considerable sum in those times, for the right to publish it.

Smith became ill and returned to England, where he died some months later of tuberculosis. The poem, which was later published under the title “Evolution” in 1909 …

Will the real Langdon Smith stand up? Oh well, it’s a neat poem and suits my life-form blogging needs.

Evolution

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into life again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man’s hand;
We coiled at ease ‘neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was passed.

Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing sod
The shadows broke and the soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Auroch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o’er the plain
And the moon hung red o’er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Than I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west to east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O’er joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o’er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Til our brutal tusks were gone.

And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico’s.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet –

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnish’d them wings to fly;
He sowed our spawn in the world’s dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men made war
And the ox-wain creaks o’er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon here
O’er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.

David Cazden will read from and sign his poetry collection Moving Picture (Word Press, 2005) this Saturday (April 29), 12:00 to 2:00, at Fauntleroy’s Coffeehouse, 600 West Maxwell Street, Lexington.

Original jazz by Hannah Ferguson and a brunch special. Call 859-455-8188 for information.

Sample poems from Moving Picture can be found at this link.

In The Diner

Behind us, flashes of car windshields
off the streets, students
awaiting plates of food.
We float conversation
while the sky encircles us

without a cloud.
Behind the backdrop
of bright blue diner curtains,
stars swerve in daytime arcs.
I sip ice tea. You twirl
your hair in knots and swirls,
punctuating a story with your hands—

Yellow strands, russet,
tell me where to go today
as the traffic hums, and your fingers move
intricate and foreign
as the dances of the summer bees.

— David Cazden

During the Women Writers Conference here in Lexington this last week, I was able to have lunch and a visit with Jane Kretschman, whose poems Cat with Aria and Darling Companions have appeared on my catblogging pages. Jane’s news? She is to be featured on NPR’s Theme and Variations this week.

“Theme and Variations” celebrates the interconnectedness between world literature and classical music. They’ve featured such greats as James Joyce’s The Dubliners and Jimmy Carter’s The Hornet’s Nest. You can listen to some sound clips at this link: I am intrigued by the show on Langston Hughes and one of my all-time favorite short stories: D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner.”

The program is heard on some 70 National Public Radio stations. Unfortunately, our local stations here in Kentucky are not among them.

Jane isn’t sure which poems host Will Everett will feature or what music, but she’s betting “Cat with Aria” will be one of them.

You can catch “Theme and Variations” through streaming audio at Yellowstone Public Radio in Billings. The show airs Sunday at 11:00 am Mountain Standard Time, which Jane and I calculate is about 2:00 pm EDT.

By the way, T & V is open to submissions of poetry and music. From their poetry submission guidelines:

The poems that air on Theme and Variations tell a story, paint a portrait, strike a particular emotional chord. We like the deep stuff, but we also like to laugh. We like meaningful poems that aren’t maudlin, funny poems with wit and panache. Erudite, esoteric, obscure poetry (like haiku) doesn’t make the cut. Poems of a strongly religious nature are gently discouraged.

Please keep in mind the nature of the venue. Poetry on the radio must make its point the first time around. If we don’t get it on one read, our listeners aren’t going to get it either.

Okay, here’s Kentucky’s most famous poem, written by James H. Mulligan (1844-1915) in 1902. Mulligan was a Lexington lawyer who served as a state senator and U.S. Consul-General to the Kingdom of Samoa. He wrote several poems in what William S. Ward calls the “local color tradition,” but “In Kentucky” is the only one that is still quoted today. It has been read into the Congressional Record and parodied by most other states. Says Ward, in A Literary History of Kentucky, “…it has been estimated, well over a million souvenir postal cards have been sold with the verses printed on them.”

In Kentucky

The moonlight falls the softest
In Kentucky;
The summer days come oftest
In Kentucky;
Friendship is the strongest,
Love’s light glows the longest;
Yet, wrong is always wrongest
In Kentucky.

Life’s burdens bear the lightest
In Kentucky;
The home fires burn the brightest
In Kentucky;
While players are the keenest,
Cards come out the meanest,
The pocket empties cleanest
In Kentucky.

The sun shines ever brightest
In Kentucky;
The breezes whisper lightest
In Kentucky;
Plain girls are the fewest,
Maiden’s eyes the bluest,
Their little hearts are truest
In Kentucky.

Orators are the grandest
In Kentucky;
Officials are the blandest
In Kentucky;
Boys are all the fliest,
Danger ever nighest,
And taxes are the highest
In Kentucky.

The bluegrass waves the bluest
In Kentucky;
Yet, bluebloods are the fewest ( ?)
In Kentucky;
Moonshine is the clearest,
By no means the dearest,
And yet it acts the queerest
In Kentucky.

The dove-notes are the saddest
In Kentucky;
The streams dance on the gladdest
In Kentucky;
Hip pockets are the thickest,
Pistol hands the slickest,
The cylinder turns quickest
In Kentucky.

The song birds are the sweetest
In Kentucky;
The thoroughbreds are fleetest
In Kentucky;
Mountains tower proudest,
Thunders peal the loudest,
The landscape is the grandest-
And politics—the damnedest
In Kentucky.

— James H. Mulligan, from Kentucky Eloquence. Past and Present. Library of Orations, After-Dinner Speeches, Popular and Classic Lectures Addresses and Poetry, Bennett H. Young, editor (Louisville, Kentucky: Ben LaBree, 1907)