Sherry Chandler

Reading this op-ed, The Wall That Keeps Illegal Workers In, in the NYTimes this morning, I thought of Frost.

Mending Wall

SOMETHING there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

— Robert Frost

Text from Bartleby.

Also read Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post. He says it ain’t broke so it don’t need fixing.

from a Kentucky Arts Council press release:

FRANKFORT, Ky. – Kendra Holloway came out on top after competing against 18 other students from across the Commonwealth at the Kentucky State Finals Poetry Out Loud poetry recitation contest sponsored by the Kentucky Arts Council at Kentucky State University on March 30, 2006. The Kentucky Poetry Out Loud initiative is part of the national competition presented by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Poetry Foundation.

Holloway’s passionate and well-studied recitations of “Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall and “To the Ladies” by Lady Mary Chudleigh won her an all expenses paid trip to Washington, D.C. to compete in the national finals on May 17, 2006 at the Lincoln Theatre, a $200 cash prize, a trip for her chaperone and $500 to her school library, Christian County High School, for the purchase of poetry. The national winner will receive $20,000 of the $50,000 in scholarship funds being awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts at the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest.

Dean Muir from Trimble County High School was the state runner-up with his lively recitations of “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman and “Ma Rainey” by Sterling A. Brown. He won a cash prize of $100 and $200 for the purchase of poetry for his school library.

Holloway and Muir have also been invited back to Frankfort to recite their poems and be honored at the Kentucky Writers’ Day Celebration presented by the Kentucky Arts Council on April 24, 2006 in the Capitol Rotunda. Kentucky Writers’ Day promotes the literary arts in Kentucky and is celebrated on the birth date of native son, author, poet and first U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren.

Judges for the Kentucky State Finals of the National Poetry Out Loud Recitation Contest were Kentucky Poet Laureate Sena Jeter Naslund; Ken Jones, playwright and Chair of the Northern Kentucky, University Department of Theatre and Frank X. Walker, Eastern Kentucky University, Department of English and Theatre faculty, author and Affrilachian poet.

Poetry Out Loud encourages high school students to learn about great poetry through memorization, performance and competition. Kentucky’s participating schools were Christian County High School, Hopkinsville; Danville High School, Danville; Deming High School, Mount Olivet; Doss High School, Louisville; George Rogers Clark High School, Winchester; Greenup County High School, Greenup; Madison Central High School, Richmond; Mercer County High School, Harrodsburg; Simon Kenton High School, Independence; and Trimble County High School, Bedford.

For more information about Poetry Out Loud, visit www.poetryoutloud.org. For more information about the Kentucky Arts Council, visit www.artscouncil.ky.gov .

Here is Dr. Thomas Clark, writing in the introduction to the 1940s facsimile of Festoons of Fancy:

The surest sign that a frontier people has reached maturity, and can begin to feel assured of some aplomb is the appearance of a regional work of satire. Along the eastern seaboard such a period was signified by the works of Paine, Dickinson, Freneau, and Trumbull. These critics dealt with the whims and fancies of an established society. They had concrete institutions and established customs upon which they could make their observations.

By 1814, Kentuckians had achieved a security in which the people could relax from the tenseness of a long period of pioneering. After the turn of the nineteenth century there ceased to be a prevalent fear of Indians on one hand and landsharks on the other. Statehood had been achieved, and a stabilized government was aready in existence. It was then safe for an author, in a mood to do it, to hold the institutions of the state up to public ridicule in print. That year William Littell, with the assistance of the printer William Farquar of Louisville, brought from the press the FESTOONS OF FANCY. As Clark, Boone, Findley, Brown, Simon Kenton and the McAfee brothers pioneered in the land, the brilliant but eccentric Littell was pioneering in frontier literature. Before Littell, the writings of the American frontier had been as serious and sober as had been the struggle with the rugged environment and with the human enemies who attempted to turn back the march of the home-loving white man. No humorous writer had shown his face in the great land of the Trans-Alleghany frontier.

As I said yesterday, Dr. Clark doesn’t seem to have heard of the Drunken Poet of Danville, who was writing satiric verse far more scurrilous than Littell’s before Boone had moved on to Missouri, and in times that were very unsettled. From 1784-1792, Danville was the site of some very hard-fought Constitutional Conventions The lovely historical site that’s there now belies the political uproar.

I am interested Dr. Clark’s statements, not because he was wrong – neither history nor historians are static – but because it illustrates just how remarkable Thomas Johnson actually was.

A taste more Johnson. This little poem refers to one of the controversies fought out in ten Constitutional Conventions – who would get ownership of the land. But it also seems apropos in this time of dwindling veterans benefits:

Verses addressed to my brother soldiers

Our country gave us great applause,
And own’d our valour gain’d the cause.
To praise, false show of profit tack;
They grant us lands then take them back.
What could brave soldiers wish for more?
We now are independent sure!
Our cash and chattels being gone,
We’ve nothing to depend upon.

— Thomas Johnson, Jr. from The Kentucky Miscellany. A Facsimile of the Fourth Edition 1821 (University of Kentucky Libraries Occaional Papers Number 11)