Sherry Chandler

From “A Quarrel with Classicism” in The Witness of Poetry (Harvard, 1983):

Whoever invokes genocide, starvation, or the physical suffering of our fellow men in order to attack poems or paintings practices demagoguery. It is doubtful whether mankind would gain anything if poets stopped writing idyllic poems or painters stopped painting brightly colored pictures just because there is too much suffering on the earth, in the belief that there is no place for such detached occupations. No, all I want is to make clear to myself and to my listeners that a quarrel exists between classicism and realism.

Via Juan Cole, Proposed Post-Birth Abortion Ban Could Shut Down Iraq War

From yesterday’s NYTimes, it seems oil is not the only thing the Middle East has given us:

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wildcat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats.

The rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey. Seeing that she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

At least five females of the wildcat subspecies known as Felis silvestris lybica accomplished this delicate transition from forest to village. And from these five matriarchs all the world’s 600 million house cats are descended.

…

The wildcat DNA closest to that of house cats came from 15 individuals collected in the deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the researchers say. The house cats in the study fell into five lineages, based on analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, a type that is passed down through the female line. Since the oldest archaeological site with a cat burial is about 9,500 years old, the geneticists suggest that the founders of the five lineages lived around this time and were the first cats to be domesticated.

Wheat, rye and barley had been domesticated in the Near East by 10,000 years ago, so it seems likely that the granaries of early Neolithic villages harbored mice and rats, and that the settlers welcomed the cats’ help in controlling them.

Unlike other domestic animals, which were tamed by people, cats probably domesticated themselves, which could account for the haughty independence of their descendants. “The cats were adapting themselves to a new environment, so the push for domestication came from the cat side, not the human side,” Dr. Driscoll said.

This article appears to be the most popular one, judging by the number of times it was e-mailed, in yesterday’s Times.

Here’s a link to the scientific study on which it is based: The Near Eastern Origin of Cat Domestication

Less attention for the bald eagle, which seems to have made a comeback and moved to the suburbs.

Postscript: NYTimes editorial for July 2:

The wild subspecies that gave up their DNA for these tests still exist, though barely. That is one of the painful ironies of domestication. Creatures who come in from the wild eventually prosper — domestic cats number, after all, in the hundreds of millions — while those who don’t almost inevitably fall upon hard times.

And that, too, is one of the paradoxes of understanding domestication. We cannot know exactly what we have made our own — whether it is animal or vegetable — unless we know the wild state in which it originated. Which is another way of saying that without wildness, we have no way of knowing who we are either.

Just a reminder, tomorrow is postmark deadline for the Kentucky State Poetry Society contest 2007. Guidelines here.

Registration is now open for the 28th Kentucky Women Writers Conference. Mark your calendars for September 28th & 29th. Guidelines for the Betty Gabehart Prizes can be found here. Postmark deadline is August 15, fee for poetry is $5/per poem.

The Conference has a new director, Julie Kuzneski Wrinn, whose statement you will find here:

I became director of the conference in January 2007 after serving for three years on its volunteer board. My background is in book publishing. During a decade in that business in Washington, D.C., I had the privilege of editing some of Kentucky’s most beloved authors—Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, and the late Guy Davenport. Arriving in Lexington in 2002 already knowing these eminent Kentuckians was a happy coincidence for me. And after these five years of residing in the Bluegrass, I better understand the rich sense of place that inspires its many artists.

I’ve been a little distracted from the blog the last day or two. It’s almost a comfort to discover that, after all, I have a life.

Stick with me. I’ll be back in full fettle in a day or two.

from “The Lesson of Biology” in The Witness of Poetry (Harvard, 1983):

An important difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries probably derives from the crossing of a certain threshold; things too atrocious to think of did not seem possible. But, beginning in 1914, they proved to be more and more possible. A discovery has been made, that “civilizations are mortal.” Thus there is nothing to protect Western civilization from plunging into chaos and barbarity. The state of savagery, which seemed to belong to the remote past, returned as the tribal rituals of totalitarian states. The extermination camp became a central fact of the century and barbed wire its emblem. Thomas Mann was undoubtedly right in seeing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a work inaugurating the twentieth century. Europeans had for a long time been effectively hiding certain horrors in their colonial backyard, until they were visited by them with a vengeance. …Like a child who finds out that fire burns fingers…, mankind encountered naked data that were connected according to the law of cause and effect, and without any divine protection now to guarantee a favorable outcome.

…

A twentieth-century poet is like a child trained to respect naked facts by adults who, in turn, were intiated in an exceptionally cruel manner. (pp. 51-53)

I think, collectively, we went mad in the twentieth century. Whether, as I understand Milosz to argue, this was because science killed God and with God certain aspects of poetry, I don’t know. What concerns me more right now is that the madness seems, like a mutated virus, to be infecting the 21st Century, too, and efforts to re-assert the surety of religious faith seem to be part of the madness.

Here in the United States we have always had a false sense of security, that the madness has not infected us. One might argue that we’ve only been able to maintain this security by steadfastly refusing to look into our own heart of darkness. The events of the last six years have forced us to do that.

I am in awe of Milosz’s poetry because he has lived in proximity to the madness, looks at it without flinching, and somehow finds sane poetry and an expansive spirit.

Rosalie sends the link to this YouTube video, which she hopes will remind us old-timers what we’re here for:

Meanwhile, high school students from the Presidential Scholars Class of 2007 have told Mr. Bush:

We have been told that we represent the best and brightest of our nation. Therefore, we believe we have a responsibility to voice our convictions. We do not want American to represent torture.

And Donna sends a link to a photogallery of some Green Roofs around the world.

Richard Moore is an apologist for meter whose work I discovered at West Chester. Here is an excerpt from an on-line essay “Poetic Meter in English: Roots and Possibilities:”

With examples like these [referring to poems from Yeats and Frost] to inspire, it is surprising that more recent productions in regular iambic have so frequently tended to sound like speeches from Gorboduc, that first blank verse play in English and inexhaustible storehouse of sterile pentameters:

O king, the greatest grief that ever prince did hear,
That ever woeful messenger did tell,
That ever wretched land hath seen before,
I bring to you: Porrex, your younger son,
With sudden force invaded hath the land
That you to Ferrex did allot to rule,
And with his own most bloody hand he hath
His brother slain, and doth possess his realm.

If the contemporary effort to write strict iambic has so frequently resulted in rhythms that sound like that, then the possibility should at least be considered that after four centuries strict iambic is indeed dead and ought to be replaced by something else. (The problem in part may be that the lines of the iambic / free verse controversy were first drawn in Whitman’s time, when iambic had already lost much of its early music. In consequence, the verse of the metric conservatives, even to this day, partakes of a tradition, starting with Longfellow and Colonel Higginson, which, like A. E. Housman at his worst, valued excessive regularity and suggested to poets like William Carlos Williams the stultifying proprieties of Victorian times.)

This essay is from Moore’s book The Rule That Liberates (Pine Hill Press, 1994). In it, Moore argues that the iambic pentameter line as practiced by masters like Milton is actually a 4 beat line with caesura, referring back to early English poetry. What makes it that, if I understand, is the frequent use of irregular feet like anapests and pyrrhics.

For those of you who are really tired of reading about Poetry Wars, I provide a link to Moore’s epigrams. He puts new ones up about once a week.

The panel on Moore, “Serious Laughter: Richard Moore and the Rule that Liberates,” included a discussion of his epigrams. Here is one of my favorites, it being that time of year here in Kentucky:

I PLAY GOD TO MY TOMATO PLANTS

Sometimes I tell them, to tease them,
it’s my tying them up that frees them.

Think Progress has a nice précis of the Supremes decisions this week:

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Bush administration, corporations, and a “pro-life” group in a series of decisions announced today, reaffirming the conservative, business-friendly bent the Court has taken under Chief Justice John Roberts

The findings were weakened the campaign finance reform bill and the EPA’s protection of endangered species but found in favor of government funding of faith-based organizations. Oh yes, and against a banner-waving high school student.

“Bong hits for Jesus” “Bong hits 4 Jesus” is not protected free speech but defamatory campaign ads by Wisconsin Right to Life are. For an analysis of what this means, I recommend, as always, Dahlia Lithwick:

I look out at the landscape and all I can see if 5-4, 5-4, 5-4 as far as the eye can see. Samuel Alito and John Roberts, hand in hand, are claiming not to be overruling the cases they are either overruling or rendering nonsensical. (”Look how moderate we are!”) And Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are Jonesing to go ahead and overrule everything in their path. Anthony Kennedy, completely in the thrall of all of them, it seems, is doing whatever it is he is doing.

Before we get to the merits of both Hein (the faith-based case) and FEC v. WRTL (the campaign finance case), let’s start by squaring the forest with the trees here. What we are looking at is a sea change at the high court, a sea change that is going to happen in a hundred small waves of 5-4, 5-4, 5-4. Don’t today’s overrulings by not quite overruling look like Alito’s original plan for Roe? Don’t bother to kill the old precedent, just hollow it out from the inside and hope nobody notices?

Ending with a comment from Steve Benen:

Ultimately, the high court sided with conservative interests across the board. In each instance, the ruling was 5 to 4, and the minority was made up of the same four left-leaning justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, and Stevens). Alito wrote two of the opinions, and Roberts wrote the other two.

Had Kerry won Ohio in 2004, the right probably would have lost in each of these cases. I guess it’s one of those elections-have-consequences moments, isn’t it?

Postscript: I have a new post up at The Peace Tree.

In his June 7 broadcast of So Here We Are: Poetic Letters from England, David Caddy, editor of Tears in the Fence, introduces us to William Barnes, a mid-19th century English poet who wrote in the Dorset dialect.

Barnes’s choice to write in dialect was political: he wanted to expunge from English those French and Latinate words that he saw as a marker of classicism:

There is a view of the origins of English literary language that late fourteenth century and early fifteenth century poets took the wrong course within vernacular English as it slowly emerged as a distinct language. At that time the bulk of the population spoke Middle English dialects influenced by successive invaders, the Normans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The official languages of government were French and Latin and they dominated the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman dialects. The dialect of London, of the City of London that is, became the first English literary language through borrowings from other languages, the power of print and the position of its users during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The London poets, Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and so on, had to make difficult choices about which dialect to write in. It is this borrowing from other languages that so upset Barnes.

One impact of the London poets’ choice of literary language is that a cultured English person should know the parts of language that are reliant upon knowledge of Latin, Greek or French and can use them for purposes of power. Similarly the ability to quote from other language in conversation is seen as the mark of a powerful person. Obviously the less well educated and poorer people would not ordinarily be able to fully understand such a person.

Here is perhaps a key to why Barnes and [American poet Charles] Bukowski are not acceptable to the English canon, despite tremendous popularity and much academic interest. They use localised versions of English. They write, as it were, in another language.

So here we are on the other side of the poetry wars. Whereas many of the poets I met at West Chester look to the Movement for succor from the dictatorship of free verse, Caddy sees the Movement as aristocratic and oppressive, blocking more populist movements from the canon:

However, the position of dialect English, of poets like Barnes and Clare, and of the counter-Movement poets of the Sixties, is untenable. Whole traditions are excluded. Essentially those Sixties poets that absorbed the rich heritage of American poetics from Pound, the Imagists, William Carlos Williams, the Objectivists, New York School, Black Mountain, San Francisco and Beats have been ignored and marginalised despite international success and the achievement of a published Collected Poems. The impact of those diverse poetries was enormous, in stark contrast to the neo-Edwardian Movement poets in terms of developing a counter-culture of poets, poetry magazines and presses in both high and low modernism.

Of course, an ocean separates these two attitudes, and the culture of the two nations is very different. One might say that the culture of the US tends toward chaos while that of the UK tends toward stasis. Poppysmatus chides me for making broad generalizations like that so I only say one might say that the nature of a counter-culture might be different in the two nations even though we share a language and think we understand one another.

I tend toward populism but I also rebel against orthodoxy and so I swing like a pendulum from side to side, crying, as naïvely as Rodney King, “why can’t we all just get along?”

One of this year’s babies takes refuge up the ash tree.