Sherry Chandler

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)