Sherry Chandler

By act of the legislature, falls on Robert PennWarren’s birthday. I’ll not do much to mark the day. I’ve been active enough lately and going to work might be prudent. But a tip of the hat to our most illustrious poet.

Dead Horse in Field

In the last, far field, half-buried
In barberry bushes red-fruited, the thoroughbred
Lies dead, left foreleg shattered below knee,
A .30-30 in heart. In distance,
I now see gorged crows rise ragged in wind. The day
After death I had gone for farewell, and the eyes
Were already gone—that
The beneficent work of crows. Eyes gone,
The two-year-old could, of course, more readily see
Down the track of pure and eternal darkness.

A week later I couldn’t get close. The sweet stink
Had begun. That damned wagon mudhole
Hidden by leaves as we galloped—I found it.
Spat on it. As a child would. Next day
The buzzards. How beautiful in air!—carving
The slow, concentric, downward pattern of vortex, wing-glint
On wing-glint. From the house,
Now with glasses, I see
The squabble and pushing, the waggle of wattle-red heads.

At evening I watch the buzzards, the crows,
Arise. They swing black in nature’s flow and perfection,
High in sad carmine of sunset. Forgiveness
Is not indicated. It is superfluous. They are
What they are.

How long before I go back to see
That intricate piece of
Modern sculpture, white now,
Assuming in stasis
New beauty! Then,
A year later, I’ll see
The green twine of vine, each leaf
Heart-shaped, soft as velvet, beginning
Its benediction.

It thinks it is God.

Can you think of some ground on which that may be gainsaid?

— Robert Penn Warren, New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 (Random House, 1985)

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)

A friend of mine who is a nuclear physicist – I won’t name him but youse who knows me can probably guess – occasionally forwards me e-mails from What’s New by Bob Parks. Here’s an entry from yesterday’s forward that explains much of what’s been happening to me the last half decade (think about that):

DEPRESSION: CORTISOL LEVELS AND THE NEWS FROM WASHINGTON.
When our Pleistocene ancestors saw movement in the tall grass, their brains released stress hormones, increasing heart rate and respiration, dilating eyes to increase awareness and diverting blood from the digestive tract to arms and legs. The body was preparing to fight, or run very fast in the opposite direction. Carnivores in the tall grass are not a problem today, but there is plenty to fear. It’s a lousy feeling that hits you right in your blood-deprived stomach. If anxiety persists due to war in Iraq, terrorists, bird flu, arctic melting, gas prices, or Rumsfeld, the brain switches to a long-term strategy. The hypothalamus, which controls emotion, tells the adrenal cortex to release cortisol, another stress hormone that raises blood pressure and increases blood glucose levels. New findings from Harvard Medical School links cortisol levels directly to depression for the first time. You’re being manipulated by your hypothalamus. You can try to persuade your brain that there are no tigers, or take antidepressants that boost serotonin, another hormone that constricts blood vessels, countering the cortisol.

Meta-message: in Bush World (otherwise possibly known as Nineteen Eighty-Four), we all have to take antidepressants.

Bob Parks also points the way to a new website that rates health coverage by the print media: Health News and Review. In an era that seems beset by duelling scientific studies, such a site might be helpful.

It’s Earth Day, which seems an appropriate time to point out that ground was broken this week, beginning a process that will devote a considerable amount of green space in Paris (Kentucky) to a new Super Wal-Mart. As you may recall, this development has been a subject of hot local controversy.

According to The Bourbon County Citizen, the 3-year suit to block this development was settled when Wal-Mart made concessions “to design a Supercenter which maintained the cultural identity of Paris and provided a pedestrian friendly environment.” (Apparently, part of this “pedestrian friendly environment” will involve a cross-walk from the Bourbon County high and middle schools to this new Wal-Mart — across a major traffic artery. Impossible to keep the kids away, but I’m sceptical about how safe this affair is going to be.)

Because the development is immediately off Paris Pike, the primary concen was to continue the tree lined design of the nationally recognized road. Other aspects of the development that reflect the local landscape include the curvilinear streets and the tree lined and landscaped plank fenced perimeter.

Since the parking ratio was more than Wal-Mart desired, parking spaces were removed and landscaped islands were added within the parking field of both Wal-Mart and the strip center. The additional landscaping will extend from the parking lot to both the Paris By-pass and the Lexington Road [local name for Paris Pike] along both sides of the interior streets. In addition, the three detention ponds will be landscaped.

Notice those three detention ponds. That little statement assumes some knowledge about this design that I don’t have but I think it probably has something to do with the fact that the area where this Wal-Mart is going had a considerable sink-hole wet-weather pond on it.

All the landscaping, including the shrubbery and trees that extend along the plank fenced perimeter of the property, will have underground irrigation. The majority of the trees will be hardwood, native and deciduous trees.

…

All crosswalks will be stamped asphalt to resemble brick which willnot only be aestethic [but also serve as speed bumps].

…

In order to maintain the cultural identity of the development, aspects of the surrounding neo-Greek Revival and neo-Federal architecture were incorporated into the structure. These aspects included a deep cornice and applied pilasters…The building material will resemble red brick.

A lead headline in this morning’s NYTimes business section declares “Wal-Mart Flirts With Being Green.” Perhaps it is this flirtation that explains Wal-Mart’s willingness to invest so much in pseudo-brick for Paris, Kentucky. While I understand (but consider misguided) the push in Paris to have this Supercenter, I’ve never understood what, except push for total dominance, has motivated Wal-Mart. There are, after all, three or four Supercenters within a 25-mile circle around Paris.

I am skeptical. But maybe I’ll be surprised. I was skeptical about the Paris Pike project too and it has proved better than I had anticipated — though it will be years before those new-planted trees will look anything like the old-growth trees they replaced. And another drought-year like 2005 will reduce their numbers considerably. Apparently no provision was made for maintaining the trees once they’re planted.

So we get a Wal-Mart with a lot of young trees in the parking lot, pseudo-brick all over the place. As the Lexington Herald-Leader said back in December “It’s still a big box, but it will be a prettier big box.” I see the potential for a lot of kitsch. And a lot of harm to local businesses.

But the dozers are moving.

You can measure your ecological footprint here. Richard Taylor has a sobering poem about doing just that in his collection Braintree (Scienter Press, 2004):

Sizing my Ecological Footprint

Lime is how I paint myself, moderately
green, before unearthing a website
that gauges my impact on the planet.

Putting my best foot forward, I cite
recycling sports pages by the bale,
bandoleers of Bud Lites, scalloped

plastic trays of microwave dinners.
If my windows lack double panes,
I compensate with thermowear,

my furnace never topping a summit
of sixty lean degrees. I gloat
when data inform my office mate

that if all of us imitated his sleek
suburban life, we would need
a boost of 9.3 additional earths.

Then I weigh in at 7.2, reminded
of my faulty septic field,
my clunker coughing up its oily spew,

my children three, some guilty shares
of Global Oil, lapsed Sierra dues—
an ecological footprint not so deep as wide,

like say, a tarred Nike with gripper treads,
not hooves that mangle as they strut but blend
in tainted paths with anyone’s, with yours.

Reproduced by permission of the author.

I have watched the trailer for Al Gore’s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth. The trailer alone is terrifying. But I think it’s a film we all should be required to watch. You’ll find the trailer at the link.

Thomas Holley Chivers (1809-1858) was born, raised, and lived a Georgian, but he got a degree in medicine from Transylvania and wrote a play, Conrad and Eudora, about the Kentucky Tragedy, so he counts as a sort of honorary Kentuckian. He published his first poetry collection, The Path of Sorrow; or, The Lament of Youth , while a student at Transy. He never did practice medicine; an inheritance allowed him to devote himself to his writing. He was a Baptist. He was close friends with Edgar Allen Poe. They traded work and influenced each other. But Chivers is usually only remembered today because of a plagiarism dispute between himself and Poe. The poem in question, from Chivers’s collection The Lost Pleiad (1845), is reproduced below. The poem is a lament for his daughter. It may sound familiar to you but nobody knows who copied whom, though I have a strong opinion about whose poem is better.

To Allegra Florence in Heaven

“My life, my joy, my food, my all-the-world!”—Shakspeare.

“I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.”—Bible.

“But the grave is not deep—it is the shining tread of an Angel that seeks us.”—Jean Paul Richter.

When thy soft round form was lying
On the bed where thou wert sighing,
I could not believe thee dying,
Till thy Angel-soul had fled;
For no sickness gave me warning,
Rosy health thy cheeks adorning—
Till that hope-destroying morning,
When my precious child lay dead!

Now, thy white shroud covers slightly
Thy pale limbs, which were so sprightly,
While thy snow-white arms lie lightly
On thy soul-abandoned breast;
As the dark blood faintly lingers
In thy pale, cold, lily-fingers,
Thou the sweetest of Heaven’s singers!
Just above thy heart at rest!

Yes, thy sprightly form is crowded
In thy coffin, all enshrouded,
Like the young Moon, half enclouded,
On the first night of her birth;
And, as down she sinks when westing,
Of her smiles the Night divesting—
In my fond arms gently resting,
Shall thy beauty to the earth!

Like some snow-white cloud just under
Heaven, some breeze has torn asunder,
Which discloses, to our wonder,
Far beyond, the tranquil skies;
Lay thy pale, cold lids, half closing,
(While, in Death’s cold arms reposing,
Thy dear Seraph-form seemed dozing—)
On thy violet-colored eyes.

For thy soft blue eyes were tender
As an angel’s, full of splendor,
And, like skies to earth, did render
Unto me divine delight;
Like two violets in the morning,
Bathed in sunny dews, adorning
One white lily-bed, while scorning
All the rest, however bright.

As the Earth desires to nourish
Some fair Flower, which loves to flourish
On her breast, while it doth perish,
And will barren look when gone;
So, my soul did joy in giving
Thee what thine was glad receiving
From me, ever more left grieving
In this dark cold world alone!

Holy angels now are bending
To receive thy soul ascending
Up to Heaven to joys unending,
And to bliss which is divine;
While thy pale, cold form is fading
Under death’s dark wings now shading
Thee with gloom which is pervading
This poor, broken heart of mine!

For, as birds of the same feather
On the earth will flock together,
So, around thy Heavenly Father,
They now gather there with thee—
Ever joyful to behold thee—
In their soft arms to enfold thee,
And to whisper words oft told thee
In this trying world by me!

With my bowed head thus reclining
On my hand, my heart repining,
Shall my salt tears, ever shining
On my pale cheeks, flow for thee—
Bitter soul-drops ever stealing
From the fount of holy feeling,
Deepest anguish now revealing,
For thy loss, dear child! to me!

As an egg, when broken, never
Can be mended, but must ever
Be the same crushed egg forever—
So shall this dark heart of mine!
Which, though broken, is still breaking,
And shall never more cease aching
For the sleep which has no waking—
For the sleep which now is thine!

And as God doth lift thy spirit
Up to Heaven, there to inherit
Those rewards which it doth merit,
Such as none have reaped before;
Thy dear father will, to-morrow,
Lay thy body, with deep sorrow,
In the grave which is so narrow—
There to rest for evermore!

– T. H. Chivers, Oaky Grove, Ga., Dec. 12th, 1842.

I’m a Mercedes SLK!

You appreciate the finer things in life. You have a split personality - wild or conservative, depending on your mood. Wherever you go, you like to travel first class. Luxury, style, and fun - who could ask for more?

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.