Sherry Chandler

With a hat tip to Carl Sandburg of course.

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I love what looks like a little terrier tail in the middle of cat there.

Try it at Spell with Flickr.

I didn’t make any attempt to figure out how this works because the text is blue on black and that is more than my cataract befuzzled eyes can handle.

Thanks as always to Donna.

31 October 1966

The question, “Wouldn’t you fight for your country?” begs the real question, which is, “What is the best way to behave here and now to serve your country?” So one answer would be “If it was the right thing to do, I would fight for my country. Now let’s talk about what is the right thing to do.” Or “Wouldn’t you refuse to fight if I asked under wrong conditions to do so, for the sake of your country? So let’s talk about what to do for our counry.”

19 July 1967

Arrows punish a bow.

22 August 1967

Children of heroes have glory for breakfast.

— William Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers (Milkweed Editions, 2003)

My local readers will be less than shocked to learn that our Senator Jim Bunning was front and center in the failed push to pass a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution. Even got his picture in the NYTimes, right there with Orrin Hatch and Bill Frist, who mourned “Old Glory lost today.”

Astoundingly enough, Mitch “Money Is Free Speech” McConnell voted nay on this one, and for that I’ll have to give him credit. I think it’s the only time Mitch has cast a vote I approve of.

All this serves as a lead-in to noting that I have listened to the full broadcast of Radio Open Source’s consideration of modern conservatism. By and large, I was disappointed. I thought I might learn something but for the most part it seemed to me that the panelists simply repeated current Republican talking points. Taxes bad. Wars of aggression good. Christopher Lyden is very good at the interview, however, and he did manage to get a few thoughtful answers. Enough that I can recommend listening to the audio file.

I was reminded that once the Republicans were led by men like William F. Buckley. I used to watch “Firing Line,” and though I usually disagreed with everything Buckley said, he said those things intelligently and the conversations he led were thoughtful ones that allowed his guests to make their points. Now we have Crossfire and the likes of Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly. When asked why the latter were not included in his Encylopedia of American Conservatism, editor Jeff Nelson was very diplomatic, claiming that it isn’t yet established what contribution these folk may make to conservative thought. But the last thing these people do is think. What they do is spout vituperation.

Nowadays, it all seems to be about the show.

The comments section on the Open Source program is worth reading. As is this NYTimes review of Reading Leo Strauss (University of Chicago Press).

While I’m on — or at least near — the subject of Lexington’s Creative Camera Club, John Snell, one of its pre-eminent members, has a new book of photography due out in the fall: Red River Gorge: The Eloquent Landscape.

Looking at some of the gorgeous shots on the promo page, I was moved to ask a friend whether some of the effects might be Photoshopped. I got this reply:

[John] has specialized in the RRG for 25+ years. I suspect that much of the work in the new RRG book predates Photoshop and any effects are natural or were achieved with traditional means, i.e., filters, exposure modification, painting with light, etc. John has been a driving force in the Lexington Creative Camera Club for many years, organizing workshops, planning and leading excursions, etc. Good guy, too.

John Snell himself says:

Ever since 1980, when I traded a friend $100 and two pickup truckloads of firewood for an old Minolta camera and two lenses, my life has not been the same. Each year, I spend numerous hours lugging heavy camera equipment through various venues, most often Red River Gorge in eastern Kentucky, searching for expressions of nature that speak to me in a special way. Sometimes I succeed photographically, but many times I just enjoy the walk in the woods…

He has been generous enough to share those walks with us on his webpage galleries. He even includes little bios of the shots. I recommend browsing around there for a while.

I don’t know John Snell. I learned about his book from his brother, David. I’ve known David Snell for several years as a neighbor, fellow poet (though primarily a novelist, I think), and owner of Country Charm Bed and Breakfast here in my home town of Paris, Kentucky.

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For those of you who aren’t from Kentucky, I should explain that Red River Gorge is a subject of some passion for those of us who love our natural environment. Not so many years back, this unique geological area was threatened by plans to build a dam. Fortunately, local protest was able to stop those plans, but it took several years of hard work.

I wish we could have protected our mountain tops so successfully.

The possession of originality cannot make an artist unconventional; it drives him further into convention, obeying the law of the art itself, which seeks constantly to reshape itself from its own depths, and which works through its geniuses for metamorphosis, as it works through minor talents for mutation.

— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

James Burgett, whose work has been featured here, has received a much deserved kudo for his photograph, “Bygone Bed,” now on display as part of the Creative Camera Club’s joint exhibit at Christ Church Cathedral (166 Market Street here in Lexington). Art critic Heather Castro has this to say in the Herald-Leader’s review of the show:

In the Great Room area, unmatted works cross several subject lines, but James Burgett’s Bygone Bed outshines them all. The work depicts a simple iron bed, covered by an antique quilt and illuminated by shadowy lace curtains, back against a crumbling wall. Simple and beautifully done, the work goes beyond exotic, high-intensity coloring to speak in muted tones of family, home and of generations.

I am very excited about this review. I’ve been a great fan of James’s work for years.

“Bygone Bed” was taken with the very Nikon digital camera that I’ve been using lately to post pictures here. That has been James’s other great contribution to this blog. It’s a wonderful camera, out on long-term loan to me. You should see what it can do in the hands of a wonderful photographer. And you should see what James can do with the really, really wonderful camera he bought in its place.

The exhibit, called ‘Seeking Essence Through the Eye of a Camera,’ runs through July 16. Call (859) 254-4497 for information.

A poetry discussion list recently pointed me in the direction of The Poetry Judge, a Garrison Keillor piece that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and is now available at his Prairie Home Companion site. The piece, which is appears as “fiction” in Prospect, purports to describe Keillor’s experience in judging a poetry contest with 400 entries, all but five of them falling into categories like bad daddy poems, elegies to dead animals, or speaking out after long silence.

And there were about fifteen poems of Vietnam, all of them bloody, with mosquitoes and sweat and fear and stink in them, all of them angry about innocence violated and lives brutalized and an uncaring nation anxious to forget.

The question raised on the discussion list was whether Keillor was being vicious or just funny in satirizing these aspiring prize winners. (And the corollary question whether these were real poems or all made up by Keillor himself, and whether that mattered as much as the principal of the thing.)

But I’m going to by-pass that question. I’ve never been very good with satire. I think my mindset is too earnest. And I’ll admit Keillor made me squirm a little bit. How can you make fun of poems about Vietnam?

Still, what struck me in the piece was this passage:

There was no doubt in my mind that most of the poems I read were about the poets’ real lives, offered up as performances, hoping to win a prize for the quality of their suffering, like the candidates on the old “Queen for a Day” show, who told their troubles to the genial host, and audience applause determined who would get the Amana Radar Range and the weekend at Lake Tahoe.

I wanted to sit the poets down in a classroom and lecture them: self-expression is not the point of it, people! We are not here on paper in order to retail our injuries. For one thing, it is unfair to bore someone who doesn’t have the opportunity to bore you right back, and for another, we have better things to do — to defend the hopeless and the down and out, to find humor in dreadful circumstances, to satirize the pompous and pretentious, to make deer appear suddenly in the driveway.

Writing is a blessed life, no matter how hard it may be at times, and a person is lucky to be a writer

After my previous bloviating about Keillor, I’m embarassed to find myself essentially in agreement with this statement. It cuts to the heart of a problem I’ve struggled with for a while. How does one differentiate between what you might call a poetry of witness or even confessional poetry – how does one differentiate poetry from a sort of pornography of suffering. Americans have always loved their “Queen for a Day” type of schmaltz, but as Rochelle Gurstein says in her essay Mourning in America, “Being reduced to tears does not constitute an aesthetic experience.”

This question may reflect a sort of selfishness on my part. I’ve sat through many a poetry roundtable in which we were all reduced to tears several times. The experience evokes in me great sympathy but also a sort of despair. And, I blush to say, a little bit of boredom. As though my CD collection contained only Mahler.

In the vast scale of suffering, I register very low. I’ve come through life relatively unscathed. And such pain as I’ve had, I find myself reluctant either to share or to put out in competition. Does this mean that I can’t be a poet? Not a really serious poet.

Keillor says he judged this contest at the request of “the president of the poetry society.” As president of the poetry society, board chair of the writers association, I have judged a fair number of these contests and I have found that it can be very difficult to judge sincerity, to say this is all very well but it’s not poetry. To quote Keillor again:

It was hard to read those poems and imagine how possibly to judge them as writing, or how the writers wished to be judged. After you have read ten Vietnam poems by ten men so haunted by the war that twenty-five years later their poems are breathless with horror, do you say, “Thank you for sharing your horror, and I choose horror No. 5 because the imagery is more vivid and it is better structured and more original”? These are true life experiences, not literary pieces, and if someone tells you how he almost died when he was eighteen, how can you deny him the prize?

Or how can you compete? Is poetry not about emotion? about soul-searching and pain? What of all those elegies? Those fears that I might cease to be?

The answer I think is yes and no. Keillor answers it this way:

Experience becomes literature when it no longer matters to the reader whether the story is true or not. Stephen Crane wasn’t around for the Civil War, but you don’t wonder about that as you read The Red Badge of Courage, it’s all quite real on the page. Andrew Marvell could have been a Trappist monk in Kentucky and never had a coy mistress, but “Had we but World enough, and Time,/This coyness Lady were no crime” would still be a fine poem

I’m not sure I’d put it quite that way. I think maybe a poet becomes a poet when s/he stops trying to tell us something and starts trying to discover what it is s/he has to say. I think it is this aspect of discovery that makes us say poetry is about language, not message. It is this aspect of discovery that has caused me to explore formal poetry as a way to cut myself loose from the lecturer in me. Does this mean that, as John Martin accused the New Formalists, I am without talent or imagination?

I hope not.

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By the way, I think the most famous Trappist monk from Kentucky did have a mistress, coy or otherwise. And possibly not consummated. But enough to make his superior confiscate the letters and forbid the correspondence.

Photograph by Morgan S. Williams

Hat tip to Bob Harris.

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An Inconvenient Truth held over for third week at the Kentucky Theater.

Billy blogs here and he does Poetsaurus here.