Sherry Chandler

As to the poetical Character itself…it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion poet…

—John Keats, October 27, 1818

I have this written in my journal for Memorial Day, 2000 without further citation of source, so I don’t know where I got it.

In the New York Times for March 20, Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior

Dr. [Frans] de Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.

Religion can be seen as another special ingredient of human societies, though one that emerged thousands of years after morality, in Dr. de Waal’s view. There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. “I look at religions as recent additions,” he said. “Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do.”

As Dr. de Waal sees it, human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders. “The profound irony is that our noblest achievement — morality — has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior — warfare,” he writes. “The sense of community required by the former was provided by the latter.”

Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in the NYTimes for March 24, Knight of the Living Dead:

In a way, those who refuse to advocate torture outright but still accept it as a legitimate topic of debate are more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It thrives only if it is sustained by what Hegel called “objective spirit,” the set of unwritten rules that form the background of every individual’s activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.

…

Are we aware that the last time such things were part of public discourse was back in the late Middle Ages, when torture was still a public spectacle, an honorable way to test a captured enemy who might gain the admiration of the crowd if he bore the pain with dignity? Do we really want to return to this kind of primitive warrior ethics?

This is why, in the end, the greatest victims of torture-as-usual are the rest of us, the informed public. A precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.

Chris Hedges in War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (Public Affairs, 2002):

War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.

But war is a god, as the ancient Greeks and Romans knew, and its worship demands human sacrifice.

Erich Maria Remarque from All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. W. Wheen (Fawcett Crest, 1958):

The two begin to argue. At the same time they lay a bottle of beer on the result of an air-fight that’s going on above us. Katczinsky won’t budge from the opinion which as an old Front-hog he rhymes:

Give ‘em all the same grub and all the same pay
And the war would be over and done in a day.

Krop on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and much more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.

Gin Petty has called my attention to this statement at Earthjustice:

March 23, 2007

Washington, DC — Today, a federal judge in West Virginia issued a decision in a case challenging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ decision to allow stream and headwater destruction by mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. Earthjustice and the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment represented the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal River Mountain Watch and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy in the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, Judge Robert C. Chambers.

The following is a statement by Earthjustice attorney Steve Roady regarding today’s victory:

“Today, we applaud the ruling in federal court stating that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the law by issuing mountaintop removal mining permits that allowed vital headwater streams to be permanently buried.

“The federal government has been illegally issuing such permits. Doing so has led to widespread and irreversible devastation to the streams, mountains and lands across Appalachia. The judge has made it clear that the Corps must now comply with the Clean Water Act and stop issuing illegal permits. …

I got an e-mail yesterday under the signataure of Lori Meadows, Executive Director of the Kentucky Arts Council. She reports that she has been in Washington lobbying for “the President’s recommendation for a budget increase of $4 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).”

It amazes me that the current government has been, relatively speaking, generous to the arts when they are eager to slash all other government programs unrelated to the “war on terror.” And when conservatives have always tended to lump the NEA in with NPR as the evil-doing enemies in the culture wars.

Dana Goodyear, in The Moneyed Muse, puts forward one explanation:

Some of Gioia’s most visible initiatives at the N.E.A. have involved arranging for Shakespeare and opera to be performed on military bases; Operation Homecoming, which received funding from Boeing, established writers’ workshops for soldiers who have fought in Iraq and in Afghanistan. A recent article in Business Week cited the endowment’s “focus on programs with patriotic themes” as one reason that its budget has increased seven and a half per cent under Gioia….A forthcoming piece, by Steve Evans, in The Baffler, a leftist Chicago magazine, asserts, “Through men like Dana Gioia, John Barr, and Ted Kooser, Karl Rove’s battle-tested blend of unapologetic economic elitism and reactionary cultural populism is now being marketed in the far-off reaches of the poetry world.”

Goodyear is not a disinterested reporter, of course. And Ted Kooser, who has taken a lot of flak, is a good if perhaps not a ground-breaking poet. I sort of hate to see him condemned as a Rovian tool. (I noticed this week that one of Lexington’s free alternative newspapers, Nougat, picks up Kooser’s newspaper column. Guess that speaks volumes about the state of the counterculture in sleepy old Lexington.) Though Ron Silliman would no doubt put him firmly in the School of Quietude, he reaches many people in the circles I travel in, regional poets like himself. Like me. Asked to choose between Eastern elitism (Goodyear) and regionalism (Kooser), I shall bestride the fence the way the Colossus bestrode the harbor in Rhodes. (Notice how the one at right is modestly breech-clothed. I wonder whether Martin Heemskerck took government funding back in the 16th Century.)

But I’ll have to admit that there is something a bit youth-brigadish about Poetry Out Loud, though I can’t really fault any program that pays children for interpreting poetry and brings money to school libraries. I’m not so sure about making it a competition, but that’s just my bleeding heart. Anyway, I’m probably projecting my own boredom at having to memorize a doggeral poem a week in the eighth grade —”‘Tis the schoolhouse that stands by the flag.”* I doubt that Mrs. Broadus thought I’d ever see anything negative in that statement.

Art in the service of patriotism is, of course, the aim of every authoritarian government, and artists who serve a cause are apt to be subsumed by that cause. I am reminded of this passage I read last night (sitting in Ruby Tuesdays, of all places) in Kenneth Rexroth’s American Poetry in the Twentieth Century:

We have now moved to a later literary generation, people born in the early years of the century who came to maturity in the troubled times after 1929. It was a lean season for American poetry. Hundreds of young intellectuals who started out as writers were consumed and cast aside by the Communist Party. Most of them became political activists and gave up writing. The strong-willed ones obeyed the Party Line and dutifully wrote Proletarian literature and Socialist Realism. The stultifying effects of bureaucratic control are more than conclusively shown by the fact that all this passionate activity and commitment produced, in poetry, almost nothing of enduring value.

So has Dana Gioia, and with him John Barr of the Poetry Foundation, pulled the teeth of American poetry? Did it have any teeth to be pulled? Can former Wall Street executives and ad men also be poets of worth? Can a poet in the employee of The New Yorker be a poet of worth?

More on that later.

Here are the ways Lori Meadows says that NEA money serves the arts in Kentucky:

Kentucky is the beneficiary of NEA funding in three ways. The first is through grants to the Kentucky Arts Council for operational and administrative support; funding earmarked for arts education, folk arts and underserved populations; and funding and technical assistance to participate in the national initiatives such as Poetry Out Loud, American Masterpieces and Challenge America. The Kentucky Arts Council ranks 14th out of 56 state and territorial arts agencies in the amount of funding received from the NEA according to the National Association of State Arts Agencies. The second benefit is in grants and awards made directly to Kentucky arts organizations and Kentucky artists. And the third benefit is through grants, programs and services available to Kentuckians through the Southern Arts Federation (also funded by the NEA).

Meadows also says we are a bit underserved (emphasis added):

I would like to encourage our Kentucky arts organizations and artists to take advantage of these direct grants and awards as well as the offerings of the Southern Arts Federation. The number of Kentucky organizations receiving funding is very low compared to other states and the data indicates that it is simply because applications are not being submitted to the NEA and the SAF.

Are Kentucky artists contrary? Well, yes, but probably not too contrary to take government money. I think artists are pretty pragmatic.

*I remember this snippet from childhood but have never been able to find the poem and I have no idea who may have written it. I don’t think I made it up because, for some reason, my thirteen-year-old self resented this one above all. And we had to copy the poems into a notebook and find a suitable illustration. Anybody out there ever heard of a poem like this?

Corollary: from the NYTimes this morning, Play about Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School:

But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.

…

In response to concerns that the script was too antiwar, Ms. Dickinson reworked it with the help of an English teacher. The revised version is more reflective and less angry, omitting graphic descriptions of killing, crude language and some things that reflect poorly on the Bush administration, like a comparison of how long it took various countries to get their troops bulletproof vests. A critical reference to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, was cut, along with a line from Cpl. Sean Huze saying of soldiers: “Your purpose is to kill.”

from In Memory of W. B. Yeats
(d. Jan 1939)

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

—W. H. Auden, text from Poetry Speaks

Everybody knows this poem but I think it’s good occasionally to look at that line — “poetry makes nothing happen” — in context.

The Fifth Annual Harriette Arnow Conference on Appalachian Literature and Culture will be held on April 13-14 in Somerset, Kentucky. Theme for this year is Weeping for the Cumberlands: Environmentalism in Text and Context. Erik Reece will be the keynote speaker. For more information contact Lynn.Crabtree@kctcs.edu.

Evening with Poets, a reading to celebrate the publication of Kudzu, will be held on April 19 in the Stephens Library at Hazard Community and Technical College. Featured poet is Amelia Blossom Pegram.

HCTC’s Spring Writers Conference will be held on April 20. Featured presenters are Amerlia Blossom Pegram, Gurney Norman, Erik Reece, and Edmund August. This conference is free. For more information about either the Kudzu reading or the conference, contact Scott.Lucero@kctcs.edu

What the Bard and Lear Can Tell a Leader About Yes Men by Shankar Vedanta in the Washington Post:

In Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” a powerful man comes to a tragic end because he surrounds himself with flatterers and banishes the friends who will not varnish the truth to please him.

Several controversies in the past six years of the Bush administration — including two in the news last week — bring Lear to mind. From discrediting a covert CIA officer whose husband had criticized the invasion of Iraq to having the Justice Department find out which U.S. attorneys were “loyal Bushies,” from sidelining a general who said more troops would be needed in Iraq to silencing government scientists who advocated action against global warming, from sniping at an actuary whose numbers didn’t square with the administration’s health-care cost projections to belittling those who warned against using inhumane techniques against detainees, the Bush administration has regularly evinced a with-me-or-against-me attitude to criticism.

Who’s Watching the President by Ron Brownstein in the LA Times via War and Piece:

The Republican majority so completely abdicated its responsibilities to conduct oversight on the executive branch that its governing motto might have been “don’t ask, don’t tell.”…

This deference reflected the widespread tendency among congressional Republicans “to think that your political welfare is tied up with the president, and you don’t want to make him look bad,” as Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), one of the few GOP leaders who maintained some independence from the White House, told The Times.

But the abandonment of oversight had the opposite effect. By refusing to challenge the administration’s performance, the Republican majority allowed problems to fester and dysfunction to deepen. One senior House Republican said this week that nothing hurt the GOP more in 2006 than the collapse of its reputation for competent governance.

Many of the decisions now causing Bush grief could have been made only by a politician who did not believe anyone was looking over his shoulder. It’s inconceivable that the administration would have been so cavalier about planning the postwar occupation of Iraq — or so dismissive of the Army warnings that it had not deployed enough troops to ensure order — if it knew that Congress would closely examine its plans.

A Proper Distinction by David Brooks via War and Piece:

And the White House, instead of trying to restore some proportion, has picked a fight over a transcript. The president says he will allow White House staff to appear before Congress, but not in public, not under oath and not with a transcript. The president apparently expects his supporters to rally behind the sacred cause of No Transcript. In time of war, he’s decided to expend political capital so that his staffers can lie to Congress without legal consequences. …

Little Big President from TBogg (via Atrios):

One thing that is fascinating about George Bush is how little he has grown in office. No, that’s not right. It’s not that he hasn’t grown, he has gotten smaller; less Presidential, more sad little man watching his paper boat circle the drain. After six years of playing The Decider he should at least have a thin candy shell of gravitas as opposed to coming across like one of those guys on Peoples Court who not only has an unshakable belief that people won’t see through his bullshit, but that no one will notice his artful comb-over either.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

And we’re now having a big public debate about the politics for each side if the president tries to obstruct the investigation and keep the truth from coming out. The contours and scope of executive privilege is one issue, and certainly an important one. But in this case it is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president’s perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.

It’s yet another example of how far this White House has gone in normalizing behavior that we’ve been raised to associate with third-world countries where democracy has never successfully taken root and the rule of law is unknown. At most points in our history the idea that an Attorney General could stay in office after having overseen such an effort would be unthinkable. The most telling part of this episode is that they’re not even really denying the wrongdoing. They’re ignoring the point or at least pleading ‘no contest’ and saying it’s okay.

Dear Poetry Reader,

Copper Canyon Press is pleased to announce that Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali will appear on the Lehrer NewsHour feature “Voices of Conflict: Poetry of the Middle East,” which is scheduled to air on PBS this Thursday, March 22, 2007. (Check local listings for airtime and channel.)

Senior NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown recently traveled to the Middle East to interview Palestinian and Israeli poets; a blog of his travels is currently posted at the PBS website. (Click here for story on Taha Muhammad Ali.)

Taha Muhammad Ali was an international headliner at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival, and his debut American publication, So What: New and Selected Poems, was the first Arabic translation ever published by Copper Canyon Press.

To order So What, or read poem samples and review excerpts, visit: So What, by Taha Muhammad Ali.

As always, we wish you good reading.

Sincerely,

Copper Canyon Press

www.coppercanyonpress.org

FRANKFORT, KY — Dean Muir came out on top after competing against 15 other students from across the Commonwealth at the Kentucky State Finals Poetry Out Loud poetry recitation contest sponsored by the Kentucky Arts Council at Kentucky State University on March 13, 2007. The Kentucky Poetry Out Loud initiative is part of the national competition presented by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Poetry Foundation.

Muir’s innovative recitations of “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and “Preludes” by T. S. Elliot won him an all expenses paid trip to Washington, D.C. to compete in the national finals on April 30th and May 1st in the Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University, a $200 cash prize, a trip for his chaperone and $500 to his school library, Trimble County High School, for the purchase of poetry. The national winner will receive $20,000 of the $50,000 in scholarship funds being awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts at the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest.

Erica Martin from Ohio County High School was the state runner-up with her moving recitations of “Revenge” by Leticia Elizabeth Landon and “Broken Promises” by David Kirby. She won a cash prize of $100 and Ohio County High School received $200 for the purchase of poetry for their library.

Muir and Martin have also been invited back to Frankfort to recite their poems and be honored at the Kentucky Writers’ Day Celebration presented by the Kentucky Arts Council on April 24, 2007 in the Capitol Rotunda. Also, Kentucky’s newly appointed Poet Laureate for 2007-2008 will be officially inducted during the celebration.

Judges for the Kentucky State Finals of the National Poetry Out Loud Recitation Contest were Kentucky Poet Laureate Emeritus Richard Taylor; Crystal Wilkinson, writer and Affrilachian Poet and Sarah Gorham, poet and publisher.

Or you can see it here here .

Man, it would be so wonderful to have a president who gave a damn and who could think and speak and not just parrot talking points