Sherry Chandler

I’ve been reading Richard Taylor’s new novel, Sue Mundy. It’s given me a greater appreciation of George Prentice and his importance in Civil-War-era Kentucky.

Marcellus Jerome Clarke, familiarly known as Jarom in Taylor’s novel, was a notorious guerilla operating in Kentucky in 1864-65. He joined forces with William Quantrill for a while when Quantill crossed over into Kentucky to avoid capture. Clarke liked to wear his curly dark hair long, and he affected somewhat gaudy costumes, red velvet with fringe & tinsel and a plumed hat.

Sue Mundy (also spelled Munday), the brazen woman guerilla, was completely the invention of George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal. Clarke was captured and hanged as Sue Mundy in March 1865.

Prentice was a strong Union loyalist and has been given some credit for keeping Kentucky in the Union. But he strongly disapproved of the actions of Major General Stephen Burbridge. It has been said that Kentucky seceded from the Union after the Civil War and much of the fault or credit for that lies with “Butcher” Burbridge, who put Kentucky under martial law, interfered with elections on Lincoln’s behalf, and executed two Confederate “guerillas” for every Union sympathizer killed in Kentucky. If he didn’t have a guerilla prisoner, an ordinary POW would do. Sometimes he selected his victims by lots drawn. He would take them to the location of the latest guerilla raid and have them shot down as publicly as possible.

Prentice invented Mundy as a tool to taunt Burbridge. A great punster, he would write in the Journal thus:

Many think it makes no difference on what day of the week a man dies, but we confess that we shouldn’t like to die of a Mundy.

You have been an awful girl, Sue, we must say. You have killed so many persons, of all colors, that no doubt white, yellow, and black ghosts haunt you continually, the black ones coming by day because black doesn’t show at night.

Our journal may bring you and your fellows to justice and thus be to you and them not only a newspaper but a noosepaper.

The novel is a fascinating look at the horrors of life in a border state with more relevance than you might think to contemporary times, dealing as it does with an insurgency.

Both of Prentice’s sons fought for the South. One died campaigning with John Hunt Morgan, the other, if I remember correctly, was never reconciled with his father. [Addendum: In Sue Mundy, Taylor has portrayed Jarom Clarke as an orphaned boy constantly looking for father figures who fail him: John Hunt Morgan and William Quantrill among others. Prentice also is presented as one of his failed fathers, one who created him in his avatar Sue Mundy. Here is a small passage from the end, when Jarom is waiting to be hanged:

Jarom would never meet or even see George D. Prentice, his failed father, the author in part of his son's destruction. Would he come to visit? No. Had he been at the wharf or somewhere along the route to the prison? Would he be among the throng that gathered for his execution, armed with sharpened quill to get the last word?

Fascinating to think of the Civil War as a failure of fathers, perhaps even a failure of men of letters who "father" our public figures. I am not smart enough to follow that thought up to any kind of conclusion. Takes a novel for that.]

Prentice the polemicist was also Prentice the poet and patron of poets. I have written about him here. The poem below, appropriate to the day, is his most famous.

The Closing Year

‘Tis midnight’s holy hour-and silence now
Is brooding, like a gentle spirit, o’er
The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds
The bell’s deep notes are swelling. ‘Tis the knell
Of the departed year.
No funeral train
Is sweeping past; yet on the stream and wood,
With melancholy light, the moonbeams rest,
Like a pale, spotless shroud; the air is stirred,
As by a mourner’s sigh; and on yon cloud,
That floats so still and placidly through heaven,
The spirits of the seasons seem to stand-
Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn’s solemn form,
And Winter, with his aged locks-and breathe
In mournful cadences, that come abroad
Like the far wind-harp’s wild and touching wail,
A melancholy dirge o’er the dead year,
Gone from the earth forever.
‘Tis a time
For memory and for tears. Within the deep,
Still chambers of the heart, a specter dim,
Whose tones are like the wizard voice of Time,
Heard from the tomb of ages, points its cold

And solemn finger to the beautiful
And holy visions that have passed away
And left no shadow of their loveliness
On the dead waste of life. That specter lifts
The coffin-lid of hope, and joy and love,
And, bending mournfully above the pale,
Sweet forms that slumber there, scatters dead flowers
O’er what has passed to nothingness.
The year
Has gone, and, with it, many a glorious throng
Of happy dreams. Its mark is on each brow,
Its shadow in each heart. In its swift course,
It waved its scepter o’er the beautiful,
And they are not. It laid its pallid hand
Upon the strong man, and the haughty form
Is fallen, and the flashing eye is dim.
It trod the hall of revelry, where thronged
The bright and joyous, and the tearful wail
Of stricken ones is heard, where erst the song
And reckless shout resounded. It passed o’er
The battle-plain, where sword and spear and shield
Flashed in the light of mid-day-and the strength
Of serried hosts is shivered, and the grass,
Green from the soil of carnage, waves above
The crushed and mouldering skeleton. It came
And faded like a wreath of mist at eve;
Yet, ere it melted in the viewless air,
It heralded its millions to their home
In the dim land of dreams.
Remorseless Time!-
Fierce spirit of the glass and scythe!-what power
Can stay him in his silent course, or melt
His iron heart to pity? On, still on,
He presses, and forever. The proud bird,
The condor. of the Andes, that can soar
Through heaven’s unfathomable depths, or brave
The fury of the northern hurricane
And bathe his plumage in the thunder’s home,
Furls his broad wings at nightfall, and sinks down
To rest upon his mountain-crag-but Time
Knows not the weight of sleep or weariness,
And night’s deep darkness has no chain to bind
His rushing pinion. Revolutions sweep
O’er earth, like troubled visions o’er the breast
Of dreaming sorrow; cities rise and sink,
Like bubbles on the water; fiery isles
Spring, blazing, from the ocean, and go back
To their mysterious caverns; mountains rear
To heaven their bald and blackened cliffs, and bow
Their tall heads to the plain; new empires rise,
Gathering the strength of hoary centuries,
And rush down the Alpine avalanche,

Startling the nations; and the very stars,
Yon bright and burning blazonry of God,
Glitter awhile in their eternal depths,
And, like the Pleiad, loveliest of their train,
Shoot from their glorious spheres, and pass away
To darkle in the trackless void; yet Time,
Time, the tomb-builder, holds his fierce career,
Dark, stern, all-pitiless, and pauses not
Amid the mighty wrecks that strew his path,
To sit and muse, like other conquerors,
Upon the fearful ruin he hath wrought.

Or throw up. From today’s Washington Post:

Aides said the president made a point of not personalizing it. “I never heard him take any particular relish in Saddam’s capture or the fate that obviously awaited him,” said Matthew Scully, a former White House speechwriter who helped prepare Bush’s remarks about Hussein’s capture. “I remember vividly that the president’s reaction that day was kind of businesslike. He always saw Saddam as part of the larger picture.”

Still, in his White House study, the president keeps a memento — the pistol taken from Hussein when he was captured. If there ever was a duel, it is now over.

Over?

And our White House John Wayne the last man standing?

Over —

Except of course for the small matter of a bloody lost war, the nearly 3,000 American troops and the untold number of Iraqi citizens who have died. And of course the whole new generation of terrorists being bred.

I don’t feel a whole lot of closure here. Do you?

The man should possibly have read a different three Shakespeares — like Hamlet maybe. Revenge dramas leave no man standing.

Everybody dies.

I was delighted to find Wavelength 13 in my holiday mail, like a Christmas card from Horse Cave. The luscious cover is a reproduction of a Courbet painting called “Sleep.”

Between those (ahem) covers, you’ll find 22 pages of delightful poetry, including poems by Stephanie Hiteshew, Roy Scheele, A. D. Winans, Michael Salcman, and Jean Wiggins.

You can buy copies of this issue ($6), subscribe ($15/three issues), or submit at:

David Rogers, Editor/Publisher
1753 Fisher Ridge
Horse Cave, KY 42749

Christmas day is past but Twelfth Night is not yet upon us, so I thought it might still be appropriate to share with you this little Robinson sonnet I found in Harold Blooms anthology, American Religious Poems. It has an intriguing title:

Karma

Christmas was in the air and all was well
With him, but for a few confusing flaws
In divers of God’s images. Because
A friend of his would neither buy nor sell,
Was he to answer for the axe that fell?
He pondered; and the reason for it was,
Partly, a slowly freezing Santa Claus
Upon the corner, with his beard and bell.

Acknowledging an improvident surprise,
He magnified a fancy that he wished
The friend whom he had wrecked were here again.
Not sure of that, he found a compromise;
And from the fulness of his heart he fished
A dime for Jesus who had died for men.

—Edwin Arlington Robinson

As Josh Marshall says:

…This thing is a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation have been. …This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It’s a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

…

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

Remember those U.S. map puzzles when you were a kid? How well do you know the map of the U.S. now?

Try this Map Challenge.

I surprised myself by scoring 82% with an average error of only 35 miles. I mean, you try placing Indiana on an utterly blank U.S. map and see how close you get. (At least the states are identified for you. I’m not sure I could tell Colorado from Wyoming otherwise.) I’m pretty good with the Southeast and the Midwest, the states along the Ohio and Mississippi. The Southwest is easy. It’s the plains and all the fiddly bits of New England that throw me.

It took me just under 12 minutes to do the test. I found the link at Political Wire.

…And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you, curling grass;
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men;
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps;
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers;
Darker than the colorless beards of old men;
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

—Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, part 6

I just received notice that I have received one of the 25 Professional Assistance Awards given by the Kentucky Arts Council each year. A very gratifying way to end this gratifying year. I am delighted to have the money, which I will use as a friend advised me to do “a fine writerly thing.” But I am more pleased by the affirmation this award represents.

Motivation to go back to that impossible poem and chip away at the problems in vision and craft that it represents. The most cherished poems are the least published. Difficult sometimes to remember their value, if only in driving one to find the next level.

And motivation to make some changes that I’ve been needing for some time. For the most part, I don’t think the change will show up on the blog except that I won’t be making early morning posts any more. At least I’m going to try not to. Listening to Richard Taylor at the Carnegie Center the other night reminded me that morning is my most creative time of day, and while I don’t mean to be giving the blog short shrift, I really need not to be giving my poetry short shrift.

In fact, I would hope that breaking my rut would make me a better blogger.

I tell you this mostly because there are those who worry if they don’t see my early morning posts. And also so you can keep me honest. If you don’t see me here in the early morning, think that I am doing yoga stretches, reading, journalling, maybe producing poetry. If you do see me here in the early morning, tell me to knock it off.

[Update: I just noticed that I haven't adjusted my time signatures for EST anyway so the blog hasn't been reflecting all these early morning posts anyway.]

I’ve never understood the great appeal of Ronald Reagan. I remember the Reagan years as a blood bath, as described below by Juan Cole:

Ford’s challengers on the Reagan Right were wrong about everything. They vastly over-estimated the military and economic strength of the Soviet Union (yes, that’s Paul Wolfowitz). They wanted confrontation with China. They dismissed the Arab world as Soviet occupied territory (even though the vast majority of Arab states was US allies at that time) and urged that it be punished till it accepted Israel’s territorial gains in 1967. They insisted that the Vietnam War could have been won.

But despite its illusions and Orwellian falsehoods, the Reagan Right prevailed. Ford only momentarily lost to Carter. Both of them were to lose to Reagan, who resorted to Cold War brinkmanship, private militias, death squads, offshore accounts, unconstitutional criminality, and under the table deals with Khomeini, and who created a transition out of the Cold War that left the private militias (one of them al-Qaeda) empowered to wreak destruction in the aftermath. The blowback from that Reaganesque era of private armies of the Right helped push the US after 2001 toward an incipient fascism at which Ford, the All-American, the lawyerly gentleman, the great Wolverine, must have wept daily in his twilight years.

Truth to tell, I don’t remember much about the Ford presidency. Mostly I remember being angry at him for pardoning Nixon, though in hindsight I see the sense of it as a way to let the nation move on. Unfortunately, we’ve moved on in a downward spiral — at least from the perspective of little wage slaves such as I.

I’ve been trying to find an irony in our loss of two icons during Christmas week: Gerald Ford and James Brown. Ford will lie in state in the Capitol rotunda, Brown at the Apollo theater. I think perhaps the latter will draw a bigger crowd.

The Last Invocation

At the last, tenderly,
From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,
From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,
Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness under the locks—with a whisper,
Set ope the door, O soul.

Tenderly—be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
Strong is your hold O love.)

—Walt Whitman (1871)