Sherry Chandler

It’s the last day of National Poetry Month and the results are in.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the new Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, Amy King!

I performed sort of like Dennis Kucinich. But that’s all right. The world needs its Don Quixotes and I’ve been known to vote for Dennis. I appreciate the attention, the nomination, and the votes. My traffic was astronomical last week — for me. I hope the other nominees had the same experience.

My thanks to Billy who is working his beard off to get us all some attention.

Here’s a list of the other losers, great blogging poets all. Give them a visit:

Bob Hazelton of AveragePoet.com

Steven Schroeder of poetry, philosophy, poetics…

Laurel K Dodge of Possum

Michael Parker of Michael Parker’s Journal

Collin Kelley of Collin Kelley

Alex Gildzen of Arroyo Chamisa

Sam Rasnake of sam of the ten thousand things

Levari of Night Book

Sandra Beasley of Chicks Dig Poetry

Kasey Silem Mohammad of Lime Tree

Rebbecca Loudon of Radish King

Rob Mackenzie of Surroundings

Helen Losse of Windows Toward the World

Pris Campbell of Songs To A Midnight Sky

Lorna Dee Cervantes of Lorna Dee Cervantes

Nick Bruno of They Shoot Poets

Reports on what’s wrong with our healthcare system most often focus on those people who can’t afford insurance and who therefore have to rely on emergency rooms for treatment. These cases have been presented to us as both highest cost and worst care, because patients tend to put off treatment.

So here’s an eye-opener I found at Washington Monthly this morning. The article is Misdiagnosed by Phillip Longman:

According to a recent RAND study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, uninsured patients receive only 53.7 percent of the care experts believe they should get—that is, appropriate, evidence-based treatment. But according to the same study, patients with private, fee-for-service insurance are even less likely to receive the proper care. Indeed, among Americans receiving acute care, those who lack insurance stand a slightly better chance of receiving proper treatment than patients covered by Medicaid, Medicare, or any form of private insurance.

How is this so? Because, in our healthcare system, doctors are not paid for keeping you well. They are paid for treating your illness, the more terminal, the more lucrative.

How can this be? To answer that question, you need to understand what the insured are actually getting for their health care dollars. One answer: there’s a lot of unnecessary treatment. Dr. Elliot S. Fisher, a Dartmouth Medical School researcher, estimates that 30 percent of all Medicare spending goes for unnecessary operations and procedures. For instance, under Medicare, the per capita cost of treating terminally ill patients in Miami is $50,000 more than the per capita cost of treating equally old terminal patients in Minneapolis, yet the patients in Miami don’t live any longer. The explanation is simply that Miami’s high concentration of specialists and hospitals is overtreating the city’s patients.

Perhaps most shocking: simple preventive care is also lacking in these high-end institutions. They do not recommend aspirin to prevent heart attack, flu vaccines, mammograms. (Because I work in medical research, I can attest that there are some doctors who think simple, inexpensive cures and preventions are neglected because of the symbiosis between big pharma and physicians. But to be fair they are also dealing with a public that is dazzled by technology and drugs.) Care is not coordinated among specialists. And hospitals make a lot of mistakes:

In 2006, the [Institute of Medicine] issued a new study that found that hospital patients in the United States experience an average of at least one medication error, such as receiving the wrong drug or the wrong dosage, every day they stay in the hospital.

I recommend this whole article. It is well-written and filled with eye-openers. And it may change the way you think about the VA medical system.

I must say that I first heard on WUKY, on a program rather mundanely called Dr. Greg Davis on Medicine, the idea put forward that our healthcare system should put more emphasis on paying doctors as much to keep us well as on paying them to treat us after we become horribly ill.

It s an idea of such clarity, so obvious, and I hope it is an idea that is spreading among those who can make things happen. Write your Congress Critters.

A reminder that I will be reading this Friday, Derby Eve & Oaks Day, at the Kentucky Coffeetree Café on Broadway in Frankfort, just adjacent to Poor Richard’s Bookstore.

Music will be provided, as always on Derby Friday, by the Jane Harrod and the Peach Pie Band.

And I know there will be another reader. I’ll let you know as soon as I do.

There’s a $10 cover charge, the proceeds of which are divided among the presenting artists.

Poor Richard’s owner, Richard Taylor, was the finalist for the Kentucky Literary Award in fiction for 2007 for his historical novel Sue Mundy (University Press of Kentucky, 2006).

Today is Farmer’s Market Day in Lexington and many towns and cities around the nation. There are many benefits to shopping the farmer’s market in your town, as Bill McKibbon points out, blogging at the TPM Café:

…the loss of community Americans are now feeling may not be just coincidental to our increased wealth but instead correlated. Past a certain point, wealth seems to have an odd, isolating effect.

Consider how Americans spent their money in the years after 1950: mostly, building bigger houses farther out in the suburbs. (And acquiring the screens into which we now peer). These tend to reduce the chances that we’ll run into each other in the course of a day, and that’s just what happened. The average American has many fewer close friends and, of course, eats many fewer meals with family, friends, neighbors.

This hyperindividualism–which should make us so happy since we get to be centered on our own damn selves–seems actually not to work that way, perhaps because we’ve evolved as social animals.

…

Farmers markets are the fastest growing part of the food economy, expanding ten or twelve percent a year. That’s good news because local food systems are less energy intensive than ordering takeout from 2,000 miles away every night. But it’s also good news because the average visitor to a farmers market has ten times more conversations than the average supermarket shopper. It’s not just a different way to acquire calories, it’s a different experience.

I am a very lucky person. Both Terry of I See Invisible People and Shamash have graced me with a Thinking Blogger Award: Terry here and Shamash here.

I am deeply touched. These two women have taught me much about love and courage. Terry shines her light on the invisible people, those minorities and lost ones overlooked by the mainstream. And Shamash takes me, with her camera and her thoughts, into places I would not otherwise visit. I smile just looking at her blog, at the vibrant colors and the lovely people.

I also have many thinking readers without whose contributions this blog would be a lesser thing. My thanks to each and every one of you.

The honor carries with it the assignment to pick five more thinking bloggers. Not an easy job, especially since so many in my circle of bloggers have already been tapped. These include Helen Losse of Windows Toward the World, Jeff Hess of Have Coffee, Will Write, and of course Terry and Shamash.

Even harder because every blog on my links list is there because it makes me think in one way or another. So if you’re looking for thought-provoking bloggers, which may differ somewhat from thinking bloggers, then just click anybody on my blogroll.

To some extent, any one who blogs is a thinker. Otherwise they’d do something else, like Twitter.

So please know that the list that follows is in many ways arbitrary — and certainly not in any order of excellence:

Gin’s Place is not technically a blog but a dynamic web page with “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Also a link to Gin’s papermaking journal, a feature that allows me to choose her as a thinking blogger. The journal gives us a wonderful glimpse into the mind of one of Kentucky’s most creative artists.

Pocahontas County Fare is in many ways a country woman’s journal, and perhaps I respond to it because I am a country woman. It talks about quilting, knitting (and other knot-making activities), sewing, starting seeds, and making yogurt, with occasional dips into writing code, distance learning and the history of West Virginia. The sheer variety of Rebecca’s activities is enough to keep me fascinated … and to make me dream that one day I’ll turn all those boxes of remnants into some beautiful quilts.

Meredith Sue Willis is a dynamite fiction writer and teacher whose blog roams over the whole of western literature, with forays into social and political commentary. She also offers writing exercises for those of us struggling to get our muse in gear and a newsletter called “New Books for Readers.”

Todd Swift’s blog Eyewear offers thoughtful commentary on poets and publishing in Great Britain and Canada. His mix of poetry and criticism keeps me in touch with the wider world of verse in English.

I must give an honorable mention here to Harry Rutherford of Heraclitean Fire, who is really good on the British art scene. He also features some great photography. Harry’s a prolific writer of WordPress themes. You never know what his blog will look like when you click through.

Meanwhile, Robert Peake, Code Poet, offers some thought-provoking commentary on the American poetry scene. He comes to poetry from the world of IT, so that may be why his thinking about poetry seems so fresh.

The great grand-daddy of all the thinking poet’s blogs is, of course, Silliman’s blog, but I’m already over quota so I won’t add him to the official list. It might be a bit presumptuous of me anyway.

I apologize for being a bit slow in getting this job done. It took a bit of thinking, and I’ve had a sort of a busy week. I had a poem to write…

I suggest that you explore around in other people’s Thinking Blogger lists. You may find some new friends there.

Oh! And don’t forget to vote for Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. Billy may not be the thinkingest poet I know but he certainly is the most enterprising! Voting is open until Monday.

The process that led to the development of a full-blown, official, bureaucratic, and academic American literature began during the Second War when hundreds of writers were employed at desk jobs in the armed services or their appanages. People who had dreamed of martyrdom and learned a set of exercises and given up cigarettes so they’d keep fit in prison or concentration camps changed their minds and crowded into the swivel chairs in Washington offices. After the war was safely over many of them transferred to the OSS, predecessor of the CIA, and took interesting trips abroad to teach the Germans and Italians and French the great truths of democracy and free enterprise. Before the onset of the Cold War many of these people were radicals in art and politics or both. Some of them were even Communists, but once relations between Russia and the United States cooled, these were ruthlessly purged.

Adapting the name of the Independent League for Cultural Freedom founded by Diego Rivera, André Breton, and a number of American Surrealists and radicals at the time of the Moscow Trials, a Congress for Cultural Freedom was called in Berlin under the auspices of the American State Department, the CIA, and Military Intelligence. A chain of magazines was established… At the same time sums of money were made available for what the Russians called “American cultural imperialism”—actually, state-subsidized intercultural relations no different from their own.

…

Given the notion of a nation state, threatened by another nation state, there is nothing wrong with this… To a certain extent CIA sponsorship was simply a device to outwit militantly mindless politicians.

Nevertheless, cultural freedom or no, twenty years of this program led to a thorough-going officialization of American writers, artists, musicians, scholars, and all other culture-bearers who were willing to lend themselves to it.

…

Sung and T’ang China would indicate that a Mandarin literature can perhaps become one of the highest of which mankind is capable, but certainly from the end of the Second War on, American literature, but especially American poetry, divides increasingly into Mandarin and non-Mandarin. If this is not understood, the literary currents of a whole generation are not comprehensible.

—American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (The Seabury Press, 1973)

It is the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica and Poppysmatus has drawn my attention to Joseph A. Palermo’s blog post at the Huffington Post:

In his latest book, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, the historian Howard Zinn writes: “If we want to break the addiction [to war] we need to teach history, because when you look at the history of wars, you see how war corrupts everyone involved, how the so-called good side behaves like the bad side, and how this has been true from the Peloponnesian War all the way to our own time.” Few events illustrate Zinn’s point more graphically than the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, which took place 70 years ago today.

As Palermo’s post reminds us, when Colin Powell made his now infamous presentation to the United Nations, the one in which he showed the spurious evidence in favor of our invasion of Iraq, our government demanded that the U.N.’s reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica painting be draped.

So it goes…

Read this whole post.

You can’t save the world by standing in the park. That is what we have armies for … Everyone knows you have to have banners and slogans to save the world.

But the Standing Women think differently. They hope to save the world by standing in the park and they invite you to stand with them:

Please stand with us for five minutes of silence at 1 p.m. your local time on May 13, 2007, in your local park, school yard, gathering place, or any place you deem appropriate, to signify your agreement with the statement [above]. We ask you to invite the men who you care about to join you. We ask that you bring bells to ring at 1 p.m. to signify the beginning of the five minutes of silence and to ring again to signify the end of the period of silence. During the silence, please think about what you individually and we collectively can do to attain this world. If you need to sit rather than stand, please feel free to do so. Afterwards, hopefully you and your loved ones can talk together about how we can bring about this world

May 13, 2007 is Mother’s Day. Here, from the Standing Women’s blog is Julia Ward Howe’s original Mother’s Day Proclamation:

“Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!

Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says ‘Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.’ Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

To learn more and sign up, follow the link.

The proper answer to guns is not more and bigger guns.*

Thanks to Rosalie for the tap on the shoulder.

*Yesterday on WUKY, I heard Kentucky’s possibly senile U.S. Senator, Jim Bunning, repeat that old saw that tighter gun controls would only keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens while doing nothing to keep them away from criminals. The logical outcome, armed-to-the-teeth outlaws running rampant in the streets and Ma and Pa with no way to defend themselves.

Later that day, I heard an otherwise intelligent co-worker, a middle-aged man with a son in Iraq, say that, when the terrorists start their insurgent ways in the United States, it will only be the fully-armed citizenry that will stop them, because obviously armies can’t stop them. “What people can’t understand,” he said, “is that there are people out there in the world who would just as soon blow you away as look at you.”

Such a fine line between vigilante justice and mob rule.

We are all so frightened.

Erin Keane has weighed in with her must-read collections. Thanks, Erin.

She also suggests that we might just want to get ourselves a Good Reads Profile.

Which I have done.

And now I need some friends.

I hope this works out better than Netflix. Nobody wants to be my Netflix friend (snurf). I think my taste is too weird.

I’ll be reading at the Derby Eve First Friday event at the Kentucky Coffeetree Café in Frankfort. That’s May 4.

If you haven’t set your full calendar of Derby festivities, I hope you’ll drop by. I fear I read as dramatically as the Poetry Out Loud winners we heard yesterday at the Kentucky Writers Day celebration in Frankfort. And I do promise, cross my heart, not to sing any of my lyrics.

I’ll leave the singing to the Peach Pie Jazz band.

I don’t know yet who my companion reader will be. More details later.