Sherry Chandler

Imagine you are a mother with a shining star for a son. And that son decides he must put aside his stardom to serve his country in its hour of need. And you are sad but proud.

Then imagine that son gets killed in battle and everybody in your government says he died a hero’s death and he’s awarded a Silver Star. And all the men and women of power and all the men and women of media make much of him.

Then imagine you discover that your son was in fact killed by his own men in one of those deadly errors that happen in time of war. And everybody was told to keep the circumstances of his death a secret. And that the actions for which he supposedly earned that Silver Star were a complete fiction.

Because his country needed a hero and he was already cut in that mold.

Imagine how you would feel if you were that mother.

Sherry asks me to tell everyone that this is Kentucky Writers’ Day. She is off to the induction ceremony in Frankfort for Jane Gentry as our new Poet Laureate, which begins at 10:00AM today at the Capital Rotunda. This is free & open to the public, so get your skates on.

Michael Czarnecki, of FootHills Publishing, is now doing a radio talk show on Blogtalk Radio. Called A Vital and Vibrant Life. You can go to the link to hear archived programs or catch it live streaming at 11:00 a.m. on Sundays.

Robert Pinsky does skit comedy on The Colbert Report.

Billy the Blogging Poet’s first podcast, “Dreams Lost Along the Way Home.”

A collection of Ezra Pound’s readings is now archived at PennSound. Thanks to Eyewear for the link.

Nikki Giovanni at Virginia Tech. Michael Parker’s Journal has the full text. (Scroll down in both instances). Michael is one of the nominees for Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, so explore around his blog while you’re there. Collin Kelley, another nominee, has posted a YouTube version of this same event if the CNN link doesn’t work for you.

One could make a sort of minor hobby out of watching film adaptations of Hamlet. There’s Kevin Kline’s Hamlet and Kenneth Brannaugh’s Hamlet and Mel…well, no. One has to draw the line somewhere and Hamlet as Mad Max is more than I can thole. I watched about ten minutes and then left.

The great-granddaddy of them all, of course, is Lord Olivier’s 1948 black & white version, and that’s the one, it being the Bard’s birthday and all, we chose for our Netflix adventure this weekend.

Compared to all these modern guys, Olivier’s Hamlet seems slow, stately, almost static. More a pageant than a play. Some of the minor characters speak their lines in a monotone, almost affectless. The crashing emotions are supplied by the William Walton score.

Even the fencing duel between Laertes (Terence Morgan) and Hamlet at the end is more ballet, less battle. With all that, however, the film contains plenty of physical acting and enough of it is done by Olivier, who at this point is 41 years old and perhaps a bit long in the tooth for the role. (There is, I think, a long theatrical tradition of aging Hamlets.) Also, we must remember that there was no computer enhancement in those days so the stunts the actors accomplish have to be moves the human body can actually survive. This climactic murderous leap onto Claudius was, apparently, the last shot filmed for fear that Olivier would hurt himself.)

I had seen this film years ago and I carried away only one strong visual impression: a wan, blond Olivier draped on some sort of cliff, above a crashing surf, with the “to be or not to be” soliloquy in voice-over. All very Maxim de Winter (1940). Or Heathcliff (1939).*

The scene was as I remembered it, except that the cliff was a castle turret. What I had missed in my callow youth was significance of that set. The castle, which seems to grow out of the very cliff on which it is built, is a maze of percipitous steps. towers, and arches opening out of arches. “We’re in Gormenghast,” my son exclaimed. But I thought more of Escher and that old graduate student saw, house as mind symbol. Olivier’s face is lighted, so that in the black & white, it becomes a thing of planes and angles like the castle itself.

This is a very Freudian Hamlet, framed beginning and end with long panning shots of the huge royal marriage bed. And in case you missed that, there are the long and lingering kisses that Gertrude gives Hamlet on the lips. (Eileen Herlie, playing Hamlet’s mother, was 28.) Any ambiguities in the script are resolved by stage business such as this that tells us exactly how we’re to understand things.

For trivia buffs, Patrick Traughton, the first second Dr. Who, is cast as the Player King. Peter Cushing gives a charming performance as Osric, the foppish courtier (Robin Williams in the Brannaugh version), and Christopher Lee appears uncredited as a sword-bearer. Find him if you can.

Felix Aylmer was entertaining as Polonius and Jean Simmons made a lovely and affecting Ophelia, though the scene of her drowning is perhaps a bit over-the-top for modern audiences.

The film won the Oscar for best picture, best set design (as well it should have), and best costume design. Olivier took the Best Actor laurels for this role.

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*Throughout this movie, Olivier conveys melancholy as “pale and wan,” striking poses one is almost tempted to call effete: lounged in a chair, hand dangling languidly, one leg extended, the other bent at the knee, foot not flat on the floor but cocked up on the side. I found this distractingly noticeable.

At first I thought it was just a matter of the acting style of the period. But this was 1948. It’s competition in the Oscars included The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Then I decided that maybe he’d just got a little old for that kind of posturing, his body no longer school-boy lithe. But it may be simpler still. Wikipedia says Olivier was uncomfortable playing the introverted Hamlet, preferring extraverted roles.

(Wikipedia is nice on the film itself.)

Late added thought: If Olivier had trouble playing an introvert, how could Mel Gibson even try?

The brutal fact of the matter is that there simply does not exist even the vestige of a scientific approach to prosody. And it seems to be impossible to get any university to sponsor such research. …What little work has been done on poetry read aloud by sensitive, competent readers has revealed that the elements of speech that form the materials of the artist in words are far more complex than light and color, musical notes, or architectural, sculptural, and dance space, and that the prosodic analysis which we have inherited from the Greek grammarians of Alexandria and which they applied after the fact, often centuries after, had no real relevance to poetry in the English language and that the reading of poetry aloud by Englishmen and Americans differs drastically. Beyond those facts, which we knew already, we know practically nothing else.

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

Yes!

I have been nominated for Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere!

As have my blogging poet friend Helen Losse, and her blogging poet friend Sam Rasnake. and fifteen other blogging poets.

Thank you very, very much to the nominator. And thanks in advance to all who vote for me. I’m honored.

Remember, a vote for me is a vote for two poems, a little pot (or a glass of wine if that’s your preference), and an electric car in every garage.

Voting is open until April 29. Do go and explore all these neat poetry blogs. Then cast your vote.

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Remember, it’s Earth Day. Do something green.

I must start out by saying that I don’t like the title of Jane Gentry’s new collection, Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig (LSU Press, 2006). I am in the minority on this one if I can go by the reactions I’ve seen and heard myself. To me, though, it seems flip, derivative, and misleading as to the nature of the poetry inside. I wouldn’t buy a book with this title if it didn’t have Jane’s name on it. And that would be a mistake. These are exquisitely wrought poems.

Take, for example, “April in Your Garden,” which begins:

The day falls open out of the sky.
Even the cedar bent from the wet late snow
seems to rise up into it
like the richest voice in a chorus.

This is not a flippant voice. This is work of a quiet elegance that will knock your socks off.

I do understand why the poem “Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig” had to be the title poem. The scene it sets up is this: the speaker driving along Western Kentucky Parkway into the sunset on a November day and suddenly into the vision of a field of white pigs backlit by the sun, in light “bronze as a baby shoe”:

…white pigs,
a field full, eating, all snouts
to the ground…
That earth should take the form of this
strange beast, should eat itself and shift
into this shape! The bows of their backs
gold-leafed: snout and mouth to golden earth,
as hungry as one breath for the next.

This is the ars poetica, the central image of the collection, a transcendant vision based on a humble omnivorous (but highly intelligent) brute.

The free-verse lyrics of this collection range from Kentucky to New York and Paris (the one in France, though the one in Kentucky does get a mention in the poem “Taking the Train from Maysville to New York”) and over the years of a lifetime. They speak of loss and love, generations passed on and generations yet to come, thanatos and eros, the stuff of poetry.

Close observance finds the poem in simple, domestic items, as in “The Reading Lamp.”

On Grandfather’s eighty-eighth birthday
his children gave him a reading lamp,
which he trained on the newspaper
morning and evening. …

A situation mundane enough, but

On the shell a gold sticker glistened
embossed with a name,
a brand I can’t remember.
Whom shall I ask?

All are dead who had that small suddenly significant bit of knowledge: grandfather, aunts, uncles, father, mother…

I alone have lived to tell this
little story, and now I approach
the dark to which they’ve gone.
A last hope, that lamp
still shines, like silver,
gold, a wondrous light
which won’t yet yield its name.

If, as I have recently read, the “School of Quietude” is defined as prose broken into short lines, then there is some cause to place these poems there. It’s a school with some impressive alums, including Wendell Berry and Galway Kinnell. One might also label Jane an Imagist. Once, years ago, she told me that you find a poem in a thing accurately described. To me, though, she is Jane, a category unto herself.

And sometimes she grabs me by the heart and makes me see what I look at every day:

Realty

Rows of new homes, tidy in plastic siding, come
creeping over the hill toward the clapboard house
collapsing into its center under its own weight,
its porch barely clinging, that was built to fit exactly
the farmer’s rocker, the wife’s churn, her canning table.

This bulldozed valley, pocked with manholes,
will not be dark again for eons, its trees uprooted
that broke the winter wind and made the summer shade,
that stood beneath the fixed stars the farmer watched…

It’s been over 10 years since Jane published her first collection, A Garden in Kentucky (LSU Press, 1995), though she has had one letterpress chapbook, A Year in Kentucky (Press Eight Seventeen, 2005) in the interim. She is a poet who hones as carefully as the sculptor of the “Nike of Samothrace” who “laboriously discovered you, chip / by chip, inside the body of a stone.”

On Tuesday, Jane Gentry will be installed as Kentucky’s twenty-third Poet Laureate. If you are local, I hope you will attend. It’s at 10 a.m. in the State Capitol Rotunda.

Wherever you live, I hope you will consider adding this volume to your poetry collection.

do something green.

It’s the eve of Earth Day and I don’t know about you but here in Bourbon County it’s a beautiful sunny blue-sky day with temperatures in the mid-sixties. A few hardy flowers that survived the big freeze are making a comeback. And Gin, I think some of the dogwood blooms survived. The beautiful white bracts are all brown and withered but a number of the actual blooms seem to have made it through. There is bee activity. Though no honey bees.

Congratulations to Gin Petty, by the way, for being picked as one of eight earth-friendly artists to be featured by the Kentucky Arts Council on the Kentucky Earth Day page. But I can’t find the right page. Can you help me?

My activity is low-key. I’m hanging out laundry. Because I can. I don’t live in a suburb or housing development with ordinances against anything as sloppy and alive as laundry flapping on the line. And because I like to. No part of housekeeping is more cheering as the smell of sun-dried laundry.

In lieu of anything really significant to say, I’ll give you a poem:

Behind The Blackberry Thicket

Crashing through, I find a grove,
sycamore, ash, a single maple.
The deer take refuge here unhampered
by the mass of blackberries
and goldenrod, monarchs and bees,
that excludes a thing my shape.

Between the trees
along the leaf-mold floor,
grapevines twine like Laocoön’s snakes,
binding all into slow silence.

Twenty years since the astonished dog
cornered a crawdad in what I’d thought
was just another hayfield,
this wet-weather streambed,
not a place to mow or plow.

Focused on the quick –
children, garden, livestock –
I did not see this wilderness of vines
and saplings transform itself into a woods.

What seems motionless is growth and what
seems still is motion. Even my house
moves westward half an inch a year.

Originally published at the New Voices International Project.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way first. This movie has Stepin Fetchit in it and that’s an embarrassment to all concerned.

Some praise Fetchit (born Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry) for managing any kind of film career in the Jim Crow 30s. It was a time when, to quote Langston Hughes, “On the screen, we are servants, clowns, or fools.” Fetchit managed to embody all three, whining and bumbling his way to superstardom (and a lot of money). It’s an uncomfortable reminder of our racist past to have to watch him. On top of that, he doesn’t really seem to be trying very hard in the role of Jonah, born out of the mouth of a papier maché whale. Possibly that’s the point. He is an impressive physical actor (and bigger than I remembered), making amazing stunts look easy. And, according to Jon C. Hopwood in the IMDb bio, the whining was a strategy:

Often, while making movies in which he found the lines offensive, Perry would skip or mumble lines he did not like, pretending to be too stupid to comprehend the script.

To be fair, there are plenty more stereotypes this movie. There’s Efe, the drunken Irish deckhand, played by Francis Ford, director John Ford’s brother. And fat southern Sheriff Rufe Jeffers (Eugene Pallette) runs his jail on a sort of Andy Griffith honor system. Easy enough when your prisoners consist of members of the Hall Johnson Choir* and the juvenile lead. John McGuire, the juvenile, spends his jail time wisely. He learns to play the musical saw.

The film stars, of course, Will Rogers, who plays that popular American mythological figure, the kind-hearted con-man. In short, I guess he plays himself. He ropes a steamboat in this one, as well as a robed and bearded evangelist called The New Moses.

So the movie presents us with a sort of prelapsarian America where everybody knows his place, everybody plays his part (I choose my pronouns deliberately), and we can all relax in the knowledge that everything will work for truth, justice, and the consummation of young love. Within those parameters, it’s an excellent film and a lot of fun to watch. And there is, of course, the culminating steamboat race.

It is rather famously Will Rogers’s last film. He was killed in a plane crash shortly before the movie was released. Coincidentally, the DVD copy of Captain Blood we rented recently had newsreel footage about the crash. Rogers and John Ford worked together on two previous films, Doctor Bull (1933) and Judge Priest (1934). The latter is set in Kentucky.

This film’s Kentucky connection is considerable. Its story was taken from a novel by Covington-born Ben Lucien Burman (more on Burman here and at the blog Living with Legends). It features Paducah-native Irvin S. Cobb as a rival steamboat captain. His boat is called “The Belle of Paducah” as Rogers’s is called “The Claremore Queen” after his birthplace in Oklahoma.

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*I can’t authenticate this but certainly there is a chorus in the jail and I’m pretty sure Scott Eyman, in the commentary track on the DVD, mentioned the Hall Johnson Choir. He may have been speaking metaphorically. It’s a very good commentary.

I’ve had my head down all day crunching numbers at my day job, and number-crunching is not an activity that comes easy to me. So, it being Friday night, I’m for kicking back with a glass of merlot and a Netflix movie.

I did want to mention, however, that Free Lunch # 37 has appeared in my mailbox. Two Argentine poets featured in this issue: Rodolfo Alonso & Pablo Resa, in the Spanish with translations by Mary Hawley.

Also just out this week, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature for April 2007, of which Helen Losse is poetry editor. This issue features poems by Jayne Pupek, Sam Rasnake, Alice Parris, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Terry Lowenstein, Darrell B. Grayson, Steve Miller, Carter Monroe, Jenni Russell, Pris Campbell, and Nancy Jewell.