Sherry Chandler

I am very proud to announce that my poem “Manifesto, Age 59″ has won the 2006 Kudzu poetry prize. Frank X. Walker was the judge.

I didn’t mention it before because they wanted to make their announcements at the Evening with Poets. Unfortunately I got myself double-booked and didn’t make that event but as soon as I find out the complete winner list, I’ll post it here.

I have very special associations with this poem. For many years, the Green River Writers had their retreats at the Shelby Campus of the University of Louisville but a couple of years ago we got kicked out of that home. I wrote that poem at one of our very last retreats in Dorm C, read it the first time at Carmichael’s books on Frankfort Avenue. The poem always reminds me a bit of the spirit of that place and old times, good times.

This being Shakespeare’s birthday, I decided to pick up such of the plays that I had lying on my table, and just open one up to see whether I could find a fun passage to quote here. The first book I opened was Julius Caesar and my eye fell on this, Act I, Scene 3, Casca speaks:

Are you not moved when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,
I have seen tempests when the scolding winds
Have riv’d the knotty oaks, and I have seen
Th’ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam
To be exalted with the threat’ning clouds;
But never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire…

Well, I thought, that’s portentous. Let’s try King Lear. That book opened to Act III, Scene 2, where Lear says:

Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world…

Perhaps I’ll go shopping for a hybrid car.

The nameless wife is named by John James Piatt:

In the spring of 1835, Mr. Prentice married Miss Henrietta Benham, daughter of Joseph Benham, then a lawyer of some local distinction in Cincinnati and Louisville. Mrs. Prentice was a native of Ohio. She had great beauty of person in her youth, I have understood; in her middle life, when I first saw her, she was still fine-looking, having a handsome and attractive face, a stately figure, an elegant and gracious manner. With a naturally fine intellect, and many accomplishments of education, she had a heart of unusual sensibility—she could not listen without quick visible emotion to any tale of distress or suffering and her charities near home were numerous. She enjoyed private distinction in Louisville as a singer, having a voice of much power and beauty, and showed talent as a composer of music. During her life the house of Mr. Prentice was a center of whatever was refined and graceful in Louisville society, Mrs. Prentice being for many years a social leader in that city. …

— John James Piatt in the “Biographical Sketch” from The Poems of George D. Prentice (1876).

George D. Prentice was something of a prodigy. Born in Connecticut in 1802, according to John James Piatt in the “Biographical Sketch” introducing his collection of The Poems of George D. Prentice, he could read chapters from the Bible by the age of three-and-a-half. His father being poor, he was kept out of school to do farm work from ages 9-14, but then with the help of a private tutor, managed to do his college prep in about six months time. He could easily memorize whole swaths of Vergil, Horace, Cicero, the Greek New Testament, and Homer. But he still did not have the means to go to college, so at 15 he became a village schoolmaster. In 1820, not quite 18, he entered Brown as a sophomore.

He graduated Brown in 1823, studied law and was admitted to the bar. But he preferred journalism, so in 1827 he started The New England Review. He became very influential in politics and in 1830, he turned the Review over to John Greenleaf Whittier, whose poems he had published, and travelled to Kentucky to write a campaign biography of Henry Clay. Prentice was a great fan of Clay; his elegy for The Great Compromiser begins like this:

With voice and mien of stern control,
He stood among the great and proud,
And words of fire burst from his soul
Like lightnings from the tempest cloud…

If Piatt is to be believed, Prentice stayed in Kentucky and established The Louisville Journal primarily to campaign for Clay. The newspaper went on to become the foremost Whig newspaper in the country. His editorial writing was known, to quote Piatt, by “its peculiar, short, sharp, epigrammatic paragraphs, which, as a general thing, flew to their mark like arrows…” For the most part, Prentice seemed to stay on genial personal relations with his opposing editors, and Piatt makes much of the fact that he did not duel, but he was once shot by a Kentucky editor named Trotter.

Although Prentice fought to keep Kentucky in the Union and, in fact, served in the home guard to keep the Rebels out of Louisville, both his sons joined the Confederate Army and his elder son, with Morgan’s Raiders, was killed in battle at Augusta, Kentucky. Prentice himself died in January 1870.

Prentice’s aphorisms are little jewels but his poetry tends toward sentimentality and bombast. “The Closing Year” is most often anthologized, but I liked this little love poem (though it does turn a bit sinister and Last-Duchess in the final stanza):

Sent with a Rose

Oh, take my rose — ‘t is a lovely flower,
And ‘t was plucked in the morning’s earliest hour,
When a dew-drop lay at its heart of pearl
Like a dream in the breast of a sleeping girl.

Oh, press my rose, at thy own sweet home,
Between the leaves of thy favorite tome;
Then keep it ever, for it will be
A token of love from my heart to thee.

There’s a rose, dear lady, upon thy cheek,
Oh, fairer and brighter than words can speak;
But treasure this precept within thy breast,
By none, save me, must that rose be prest.

— George D. Prentice, The Poems of George D. Prentice (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co, 1876)