Sherry Chandler

This was hard enough to find. Claudia Emerson has won the 2006 Pulitzer for Poetry for her collection Late Wife.

Read about it in the NYTimes.

At 7:00 pm tonight, Donna Sparkman of Hazard Community and Technical College will be talking about the latest edition of Kudzu on the Appalshop radio station WMMT-FM. Students from Hazard Community and Technical College will share their poetry.

You can listen on streaming audio at http://appalshop.org/wmmt/ or listen to it at 88.7 on your FM dial.

[Update: Listening and participating in this broadcast last night, I learned two astonishing things.

• First, Kudzu is free. The cost is covered by Hazard Community and Technical College. This year’s magazine has over 100 pages – with poems from me, E. Gail Chandler, and Kelli Norman Ellis, among others (the reading of the list went fast and I tended to remember names I recognize) – so underwriting it is no small service to the writing community.
• Second, money for the prizes, about $400 this year I think, is raised by the students through a series of events such as dinners called Eating Poetry, after the Mark Strand poem. People from the community get together for a potluck/bake sale kind of thing and read poetry to one another, their own and other people’s.

They also said about 150 people attend these annual Kudzu readings. That’s a tremendous audience, and not all of them students coming for extra credit apparently.

Tremendous energy devoted to creative writing out of HCTC. We should all be grateful.

So many things to mourn about this war-of-choice we’re waging in Iraq. Not least, the losses to our common cultural heritage. This from today’s NYTimes:

BABYLON, Iraq — In this ancient city, it is hard to tell what are ruins and what’s just ruined.

Crumbling brick buildings, some 2,500 years old, look like smashed sand castles at the beach.

Famous sites, like the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens, are swallowed up by river reeds.

Signs of military occupation are everywhere, including trenches, bullet casings, shiny coils of razor wire and blast walls stamped, “This side Scud protection.”

Babylon, the mud-brick city with the million-dollar name, has paid the price of war. It has been ransacked, looted, torn up, paved over, neglected and roughly occupied. Archaeologists said American soldiers even used soil thick with priceless artifacts to stuff sandbags.

But Iraqi leaders and United Nations officials are not giving up on it. They are working assiduously to restore Babylon, home to one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and turn it into a cultural center and possibly even an Iraqi theme park.

….

Emad Lafta al-Bayati, Hilla’s mayor, has big plans for Babylon. “I want restaurants, gift shops, long parking lots,” he said.

God willing, he added, maybe even a Holiday Inn.

A theme park? We will have destroyed Babylon to replace it with Disneyland?

I know I’m sort of ivory-tower in my thinking but this article goes on to say that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is pumping millions of dollars into protecting and restoring Babylon in the hopes that cultural tourism will be Iraq’s second largest source of income, assuming peace is eventually restored. But I can’t imagine wanting to trek all the way to Babylon to find it looking just like Orlando. Nor do I want to be able to buy a Big Mac there.

So in addition to the obvious downsides to this war in Iraq, there is the less obvious one of making it into a mirror image of ourselves.

But even a Holiday Inn would be an improvement over this:

Donny George, head of Iraq’s board of antiquities, said that Polish troops dug trenches through an ancient temple and that American contractors paved over ruins to make a helicopter landing pad.

“How are we supposed to get rid of the helipad now?” Mr. George asked. “With jackhammers? Can you imagine taking a jackhammer to the remains of one of the most important cities in the history of mankind? I mean, come on, this is Babylon.”

…

American marines stormed up the Euphrates River valley on their way to Baghdad and turned Saddam Hill into a base. Their graffiti is still scrawled on the walls, including, “Hi Vanessa. I love you. From Saddam’s palace” and “Cruz chillen’ in Saddam’s spot.”

But more serious than that, archaeologists said, was the use of heavy equipment, like helicopters and armored vehicles, which may have pulverized fragile ruins just below the surface.

Mr. George, who was Mr. Hussein’s field director for Babylon in 1986, said he remembered once scraping a few inches beneath the topsoil and unearthing a “wonderful little plate.”

“So just imagine what we have lost,” he said.

To be fair, ours is not the only depredation. Colonial powers such as Germany, France, and Turkey have taken artifacts away (as also happened in Greece). Post-war looters took away more. And Saddam built himself a pseudo-palace on top of Nebuchadnezzar’s. But he’s the bad guy. We’re supposed to be the forces of good. We might not have been able to stop our troops from leaving graffiti — the modern day Kilroy sez “Cruz chillen’ in Saddam’s spot” — but surely we could have found another place for our helipad.

from “The Ghost in the Baghdad Museum” in the NYTimes:

Three years have now passed since the chaos accompanying the arrival of American troops in Baghdad set off looting at the museum. Mr. [Donny] George [the museum's director] fled through the back door, he says, when Iraqi militias began firing rocket-propelled grenades into the grounds. The plundering prompted international outrage, finger-pointing and a frenzy of political spin.

Initial reports of 170,000 stolen artifacts were exaggerated, as were wild comparisons to the sack of Constantinople. But the real number, about 15,000, still amounted to a tremendous loss. Reversing the damage has been arduous.

Largely through American assistance, both public and private, the museum has been restored and modernized. Mr. George, an Iraqi Christian who speaks excellent English, has proved adept at garnering this aid, forging good relations with several American officials while nursing an undiminished anger at the way, in his view, the United States “dismantled the whole former system only to leave a void.”

Even with thousands of pieces still missing, the museum houses an extraordinary collection by any standard. What is lacking is the peace it needs to admit the public.

“When a museum is reopened, it means that peace has come,” Mr. George said. For now, it is a hollow place, devoid of life, empty of discourse. This echoing museum at the heart of Baghdad — that is to say, at the heart of the American project in Iraq — is an image of hope frustrated.

William S. Ward mentions three poets in antebellum Kentucky who made their reputations on a single poem. The first was O’Hara, already featured, for his poem “Bivuoac of the Dead.” The second was Mary E. W. Betts. I have not been able to locate a copy of her magnum opus, “A Kentuckian Bows to No One But God.” That may be just as well. The third is Sarah T. Bolton. The vessel of her fame is entitled “Paddle Your Own Canoe.”

I’m not sure how Kentucky gets to claim Sarah Bolton. True, she was born in Newport, but her family moved to a “frontier farm” near Vernon, Indiana when she was still a child. [With all those names, by the way, it came as a surprise to me to learn that her parents were named Belcher.] Ward says she “kept her friendships alive” in Newport and Campbell County, so perhaps she was more a friend to Kentuckians.

She was quite intrepid in Indiana, apparently. She began publishing poems in the Madison paper at thirteen, later married the editor and ran a substantial diary farm near Indianapolis, all the while writing and publishing poetry. She became the “unofficial poet laureate” of Indiana in the mid-19th century and has a city parked named after her in Beech Grove. She was also a bit of a feminist (and it’s about time we found one among all these men.)

Paddle Your Own Canoe

Voyager upon life’s sea,
To yourself be true,
And where’er your lot may be
Paddle your own canoe.
Never, though the winds may rave,
Falter nor look back;
But upon the darkest wave
Leave a shinning track.

Nobly dare the wildest storm,
Stem the hardest gale;
Brave of heart and strong of arm,
You will never fail.
When the world is cold and dark,
Keep an aim in view,
And toward the beacon mark
Paddle your own canoe.

Every wave that bears you on
To the silent shore,
From its sunny source has gone
To return no more.
Then let not an hour’s delay
Cheat you of your due;
But, while it is called today,
Paddle your own canoe.

If your birth denied you wealth,
loftly state and power;
Honest fame and hardy health
Are a better dower.
But if these will not suffice,
Golden gain pursue;
And, to win the glittering prize,
Paddle your own canoe.

Would you wrest the wreath of fame
From the hand of fate?
Would you write a deathless name
With the good and the great?
Would you bless your fellow-men?
Heart and soul inbue
With the holy task, and then
Paddle your own canoe.

Would you crush the tyrant wrong,
In the world’s free fight?
With a spirit brave and strong,
Battle for the right;
And to break the chains that bind
The many to the few,
To enfranchise slavish mind–
Paddle your own canoe,

Nothing great is lightly won;
Nothing won is lost;
Every good deed is nobly done,
Will repay the cost.
Leave to Heaven, in humble trust,
All you will do;
But if you succeed, you must
Paddle your own canoe.

by Sarah T. Bolton, written in 1851.

More Sarah Bolton poetry at the link.