Sherry Chandler

Al Smith has written a nice tribute to John Ed Pearce, Man of “music and mysteries”, in the Courier-Journal today. It reads, in part:

Naturally, [Happy] Chandler was rankled by Pearce’s friendship with Edward F. Prichard Jr., the Harvard-educated lawyer from Bourbon County, a disciple of Franklin D. Roosevelt and of Earle Clements, the legendary counselor to Combs and Breathitt after his own ambitions collapsed in an election scandal. Prichard and Pearce shared a belief that this country was saved in the Depression by FDR’s expansive use of government. Chandler, who boasted he was “allergic” to public debt, was sufficiently conservative to earn Prichard’s quip that he was “the leader of the Republican wing of the Kentucky Democratic Party.”

An article by Pearce in The Courier-Journal Magazine about Prichard’s struggle to recover from a prison sentence for stuffing a ballot box in 1948 paved the way for Prichard’s late-life recognition as an influential voice for progressive government and improvement of the public schools.

And from the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Mr. Pearce was considered the key writer in a campaign The Courier-Journal mounted against strip mining. The newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1967.

…

Mr. Pearce not only wrote about Kentucky politics, he participated in them.

While an editorial writer for The Courier-Journal, he wrote speeches for Bert Combs’ 1959 gubernatorial campaign without objection from Barry Bingham Sr.

Combs’ political foe, A.B. “Happy” Chandler, talked about how Mr. Pearce would write a speech for Combs, then write an editorial praising the speech.

“It’s the best double-play in politics — Pearce to Combs to Pearce,” Chandler would say, chuckling.

But Mr. Pearce said his work for Combs did not keep him from criticizing the politician in The Courier-Journal.

A correspondent sent me a link to this Rolling Stone article entitled One Man’s God Squad:

The letter arrived on a Tuesday in march. “Dear Sara,” it read. “It is our information that you are currently an employee of Women’s Health Care Services, a facility that provides abortions.” It went on to suggest that Sara Phares, an administrative assistant at the clinic in Wichita, Kansas, quit her job and repent her sins. “Please know that we are praying for you,” the letter concluded. It was signed “Troy Newman, President, Operation Rescue West.” A week later, hundreds of Phares’ neighbors received an anonymous postcard of a mangled fetus. This is abortion! read the big block letters. “Your neighbor Sara Phares participates in killing babies like these.” The postcard implored them to call Phares, whose phone number and address were provided, and voice their opposition to her work at the clinic. Another card soon followed. It referred to Phares as “Miss I Help to Kill Little Babies” and suggested, in an erratic typeface that recalled a kidnapper’s ransom note, that neighbors “beg her to quit, pretty please.” The third postcard dispensed entirely with pleasantries: “Sara Phares is not to be trusted! Tell her to get a life!”

One Wichita resident, apparently inspired by the postcards, sent Phares letters beseeching her to quit her job at the clinic. Another neighbor, a federal agent, called her at work to express his concern. “Just be careful, ma’am,” he said. “You never know what kind of nuts these things will draw.”

This is, of course, the notorious Operation Rescue whose shenanigans Bill Clinton shut down under RICO. That injunction got shot down, perhaps not incorrectly according to the strict letter of the law, by the current conservative Supremes so it looks like O.R. is gearing back up.

Whatever your personal stand on abortion, you should recognize that this kind of bullying is immoral and unAmerican. It should be illegal.

Read the whole thing. It’s a horror story of harassment.

Here are the two opening paragraphs from a review by Emily Wehle in The Cincinnati Review:

I have on my shelf half a row of poetry books whose pages are tagged with yellow stickies. These are the pages that make each worth keeping, the poems I return to. One volume has survived numerous library-donation trips on the strength of a single poem: “The snake’s/ tongue, the first seducer/ black and forked . . .”

Yet surely the poet intended the entire book to be worth keeping, and tinkered endlessly to ascertain each page’s place and weight within the whole. This question of “wholeness” has been much on my mind lately. The very fact that we publish our poems not just individually but in books implies relatedness, a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts quality that demands the poems be read together. Why, then, will one volume read as a distinct entity, confident and sure, while another reads like a grab bag of bits and pieces? What makes a book a book?

Good question. Unfortunately, Wehle only seems to raise it here so that she can apply it to her review of Joanna Fuhrman’s Moraine (Hanging Loose Press, 2006), which she concludes is a book, not a mere collection.

In all probability, there is no single answer to the question. Some books, like Fuhrman’s, are built around a single form (in this case an invention that the author calls a moraine). But there are whole books of “minutes” and abcedarians and sonnets. Or at least, whole collections.

Some books, such as Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom, are built around a historical event, others are autobiographical, others, like Louise Glück’s Averno, loosely based on mythology. These are the easy answers, works in which the organizing principle precedes the work. Gary Snyder’s danger on peaks is all about Mt. St. Helens.

I suspect that for most of us, though, poems come more piecemeal. And I think we all probably have many “collections” on our shelves that we bought on the strength of our love for individual poems but found disappointing in the whole. And then there’s Camille Paglia’s complaint that poets have begun to think of the “book” and are no longer writing the single great poem (the way the masters did it).

So, is there an answer to this question really? Is there any harm in putting together a collection instead of a book? Should we be content for a single unforgettable poem in any book of poetry? And, for that matter, will my unforgettable poem be your library donation? I am not, for example, much taken by Wehle’s seductive serpent.

I have no answers. Perhaps it’s the seeking of answers that matters, not the finding. I’m pretty sure though, if I ever accumulate 50 or so pages of decent poems, I’ll call it a collection and start circulating it.