Sherry Chandler

Georgia Green Stamper, who comments here from time to time and who has been my friend since school days, announces that she has won first place in the 2007 Emma Bell Miles Award for Essay awarded at The Mountain Heritage Literary Festival at Lincoln Memorial University.

The Emma Bell Miles Award is given for an essay under 4,000 words that must address Appalachian life, literature, religion, folklore, culture and/or values. Georgia’s essay concerned Jesse Stuart and his role in the development of the Kentucky bookmobile movement. (If I remember it right, it talked about what a treat the weekly visit of the bookmobile was for bookish country girls like her and me.) This year’s contest was judged by Silas House.

Georgia writes a bi-weekly column, Georgia: On My Mind, for the Owenton News-Herald, our old hometown paper, and I do believe she has a collection of essays forthcoming from Wind Publications.

Today is also Georgia’s (and husband Ernie’s) 40th wedding anniversary. I was there when the act was committed.

Happy Anniversary, Georgia and Ernie.

And congratulations on the award, Georgia.

A delight in yesterday’s mailbox: my copy of Joanie DiMartino’s Finishing Line Chapbook Licking the Spoon.

It’s a lovely book, as are all the Finishing Line products, and it’s filled with poems that I consider old friends.

I can make no pretense of giving an objective review of this chapbook, because, as members of the poetry collective Mosaic, Joanie and I have had a seven-year working relationship. I’ve known many of these poems from their birth, and Joanie’s intelligence and craft have been a constant inspiration and challenge.

In her professional life, Joanie is a public historian. As director of adult programs at the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History, she created many opportunities for Kentuckians to explore their cultural heritage. It is her interest in women’s history — herstory — that informs most of the 21 poems in Licking the Spoon.

As you might infer from the title, Joanie is particularly interested in the way women have defined themselves through food and food preparation. To quote James Baker Hall in his cover blurb: The intelligence at work in this perfectly-titled volume opens domesticity out into history, lifts facts up into music.

A year or so ago, Joanie grabbed an opportunity to “go home” to Mystic Seaport Connecticut. She’s hit the ground running in this place where her career began and a few weeks ago was the subject of a great profile in the Mystic River Press. Here is an excerpt, with a little commercial for Mosaic:

GROTON - Appearances can be deceptive. That’s cer­tainly the case with Joanie Di Martino. For beneath that conservative black-suit exte­rior is a highly creative, imaginative and sensuous woman.

While a historian and museum professional by training, Di Martino is a poet by nature.

…

Relocating to Groton this past June along with her family, Di Martino is current­ly a supervisor of interpreta­tion at Mystic Seaport Museum. In this role, she oversees the Seaport’s open­hearth cooking program, and interprets coastal family life and saltwater food tradi­tions.

She also has been tasked with overseeing the Seaport’s annual Sea Music Festival, a good fit for a lover of music and poetry.

The festival, according to Di Martino, “celebrates the music and spoken word arts of coastal regions.” Due to her involvement, the June festival will showcase fisher poets from the West Coast. These poets are real-life fish­ermen (and women) who recount their experiences at sea through poetry.

…

It was while in Kentucky that she began to truly establish herself as a poet. She studied with James Baker Hall, poet laureate of Kentucky, and formed ­along with several other women - a poetry group known as Mosaic.

Now in its seventh year, Mosaic “has evolved from a local critique group into a small network of women writers in several states through the magic of cyber­space,” says Di Martino.

We keep our connection. I’m eager to see what all our members accomplish in the future.

Prosecution had sympathy but jury found against:

JT LeRoy, the authorial “other” whom the writer Laura Albert employed as her alter ego and self-protective proxy in the world, was found yesterday by a jury in Manhattan to be not just a fictional creation, but a fraud.

More on this ever-fascinating story here.

Meanwhile, I’ll opine that our country has turned sort of vampiric, feeding on other people’s pain, which is what sets us all up to be suckers for this kind of story. If I really wanted to strecth that analogy, I’d say it’s sort of our version of the Roman coliseum.

Tina Brown’s Couples

Why these couples? Why H. G. Wells and Rebecca West; Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry; Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim and John Francis (Earl) Russell; Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell; Lady Ottoline Morrell and Philip Morrell; Radclyffe Hall and Lady Una Troubridge; Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin? All were literary or artistic figures, famous in their time (some still are in ours). All had the useful (to the rest of us) habit of writing everything down. They did their thinking aloud on paper — in urgent, dashed-off notes, carefully hoarded correspondence, diary entries, hand-delivered notes and unsent emotional manifestos. All of it was “eyes only,” so to speak, but time has declassified it. The result is YouTube in a time capsule.

Reading Judas:

Pagels and King do an excellent job explaining why, according to the author of this renegade gospel, mainstream Christianity has gotten it so wrong for so long. Along the way they introduce us to, among other things, a goddess named Barbelo (for some Gnostics, a divine mother figure who often symbolized heaven) and try to make sense of teachings that to most readers today will seem like nutty musings on numerology, cosmology, astrology and eschatology. On the perennial question of death and the afterlife, Pagels and King explain that whereas other early Christians affirmed the doctrine of bodily resurrection, the Christians to whom this gospel is addressed believed in the immortal spirit. Here the body is suspect. Jesus is not reborn in the flesh but simply appears. The eternal life he offers is lived in the spirit alone, and it is won more through Jesus’ teachings than through his sacrifice on the cross.

I read this book with a great deal of pleasure. It seemed to me that Pagels and King don’t make an argument one way or another; they just explain what the argument is. The reviewer sees it differently and has his reservations. Anyway I wouldn’t really recommend this book for beach reading.

Body of Work:

Poetry and death have been seen around town for quite some time. Among all the literary musings on death, the most affecting and surprising, it strikes me, are by the poet who daily confronts it. To the fine essays of the poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch must be added this gleaming, humane work by the poet Christine Montross, written during, and about, her first year of medical school. (She matriculated at Brown University when she was 28 and is now a resident in psychiatry there.)

…

Montross’s response is to break down in tears, and the oncologist quickly steps in front of her to take over the discussion. On the one hand, she realizes that it “should not be the responsibility of sick patients to bear the burden of unease.” As doctors in training, she writes, “we are reshaping the ways in which we react — in fact we are suppressing universal reactions of fear and grief and horror.” The danger is that one will go too far and suppress all emotion. “I do not wish,” Montross writes, “to hear ‘stroke’ and think of the distribution of vessels to the brain and the territories they serve instead of my grandmother’s now-curled left hand and stooped walk.”

And, last but not least, not from the NYTimes Book Page, Lance Mannion on poets and the truth:

I like the poem better when I think that it’s made up. When I suspect it’s the truth—Glück’s version of the truth—it feels like a lie.

I think that Glück has a streak of perversity in her that allows her to “remember” the past in ways that appeal to her vanity. I think she is vain about being gloomy and withdrawn, vain about being a person who responds to affection and emotional claims upon her by going cold and turning mean.

I think she is nursing a grudge that has no cause but her own self-loathing.

I think she is a female, poetic Dr House.

You know why I think this?

Because I have read other poems by her in which she presents herself as just this kind of person.

I didn’t pick the most coherent part of the Mannion argument here. You can get that by reading his whole post, which is fun. But I like comparing Louise Glück to Gregory House, one of my favorite tv characters, and so I chose to put that part of the post here.

(One little side note: one reason why I think Hugh Laurie is so successful as House is that that whole House world is about as silly as Bertie Wooster’s.)

Update: Also not from the NYTimes Book Page but from Juan Cole’s Informed Comment:

Al-Hayat says that the Iraqi legislature issued a statement on the knighting by Queen Elizabeth II of author Salman Rushdie: “At a time when we call for a dialogue of religions and civilizations, and work to combat terrorism in all its forms and wherever it exists, we express our amazement and our regret that the Queen of England has honored a person who has insulted Islam and millions of its adherents.”

H. G. Wells to the side, for humans the calendar allows no do-overs. Still, I’d like to take a quick glance back at the summer solstice, which I allowed to pass with just a nod, in the form of this observation from Michael Czarnecki’s Wheeler Hill Journal for June 21:

I know that such days like today, the Summer Solstice, are only days like any others. But we do mark time in our lives by noting significant events, meaningful days. For me, the days that are more significant are the ones connected with the natural world. The personal days, like birthdays, anniversaries, etc. are meaningful, but in a narrow, self-centered way – not that they aren’t important, but they are only important in how they relate to a particular person and others close to them. For me, generally not a big deal. I remember and honor them in some way, significant marking points certainly, but still mostly personal in nature.

As far as the “holidays” go, they seem to be mostly so much contrivance. Too much commercialization that takes away any meaning so that I rarely look forward to any of them other than for the fact we always have family get-togethers. My parents, sisters and their families gather at someone’s house and they are always an enjoyable time. We gather at other times throughout the year too, so it’s not just a “holiday” event. But whenever we gather it is good and the holidays just make for more of that to happen. It seems quite special that we all like each other and everyone looks forward to being together. Not all families are like that.

The “natural” days of significance though seem to have a deeper relevance for me. So much of my inspiration, my creativity, my spiritual connection to something other comes through the natural world. Today is the Summer Solstice, the sun reaching its apparent northern limit and now begins the retreat south. The maximum amount of daylight, the shortest period of dark. A turning point. Rather, it’s a stopping point, solstice referring to the sun standing still. A pause along the path.

From this point on until the Winter Solstice daylight decreases, the nights grow longer. Significant, especially when so much of what informs my life is related to the natural world. Another turning point, one more solstice in my life. How many more will there be?

My one regret, frustration, is that as my life becomes richer and more absorbed in poetry groups, meetings, conferences, retreats, readings, art fairs, job, new and old generations of family, even this blog, what I sometimes lose, yearn for, is long slow days and a connection to the changes going on in my yard, on the farm. I run and run and suddenly it’s mid-summer and the days are growing shorter. Where did the long days go?

I am not what anyone would describe as an “outdoor type.” Aside from hiking, of which I get to do little, outdoor sports aren’t much interest to me and I am only a sporadic gardener. I love a book or a notebook and a pen. But most of my consolation in life comes from the earth — a sunset, finding an unexpected patch of Dutchman’s britches, the mockingbird’s song, rain after drought.

Yesterday, Jeff Hess featured an article from the BBC, Surviving Boredom:

“People assume that the opposite of boredom is excitement, so parents take their children to a theme park. …But quite obviously what humans want is social interactivity — so parents would be better off taking their children on a picnic than to a theme park…”

Too much stimulation, as any mother knows, is as difficult for children as too little. Same for adults, especially introverts like me.

Hard, though, to give anything up. I love it all.

If you would like some stimulation of the slow and thoughtful kind this weekend, Michael is featuring summer poems on his blogtalk radio cast Vital and Vibrant Life. Tune it in live at 9 p.m. Sunday — it’s talk radio, so you can call in and read one of your own summer poems — or listen to archived programs at any time.

In spite of everything Poppysmatus can do with his translations of Catullus, I’m harmless.

It’s a hard thing to know.

I do use the word “murder” once. The only blot on my copybook.

Link via I See Invisible People.

The Tyger

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

— William Blake

I’ve been talking about the disappearing honey bees through “colony collapse disorder” off and on this spring (and now summer). At one point I passed on the now-thorougly-debunked theory that cell phone signals were disorienting the bees.

Now a friend has passed on a link to The Straight Dope for another take on the subject.

First and most important: There are some 20,000 species of bees in the world, and many thousands more types of pollinating insects. What you’re hearing about, “colony collapse disorder,” affects one species of bee – the European honey bee. That species happens to be the one global agriculture relies upon for about 30% of its pollination requirements. So while we’re not talking about losing all the world’s pollinators, we are talking about losing a significant fraction of them. That’s the worst-case scenario, with the species wiped out completely.

Second, there’s no reason at this point to think European honey bees are going to be wiped out, now or ever. The die-offs so far appear to affect some beekeepers more than others, sometimes in the same area. That’s one reason scientists are so puzzled, but it strongly suggests the losses may have something to do with how individual beekeepers are managing their bees.

The take here makes it sound as though the crisis is more one for industrial agriculture than for the bees themselves, which, as Rebecca has pointed out and their name implies, are not a native North American species. This whole business of carting bees around on trucks from orchard to orchard was total news to me. Another argument for a local, sustainable food supply.

You can read the rest of “The Straight Dope” at the link.

More on the implications of Homeland Security’s border fence in this NYTimes article, Some Texans Say Border Fence Will Sever Routine

McALLEN, Tex., June 15 — Antonio N. Zavaleta, a vice president and professor of anthropology at the University of Texas branch in Brownsville, saw a slight problem in the route of a border fence that federal officials displayed at a community meeting earlier this month.

“Part of our university,” Dr. Zavaleta said, “would be on the Mexican side of the fence.”

What about traffic between classes, he wondered. “Would the students need to show a passport?”

Read the rest.

Update: From the Washington Post, On the Rio Grande, Anger Swells Over Plan For Fence:

“Are we going to build another Berlin Wall, against Mexico? This will change the whole scenario of life down here,” said Mike Allen, the recently retired head of the McAllen Economic Development Corp., which focuses on promoting trade and other exchanges with Mexico. “A fence is the most expensive brick in the mortar of border security and it won’t work. If someone can swim this river, they can climb a fence.”

Let me offer a proposition about Homo sapiens. We are the only species on earth capable of an ethical awareness of other species and, thus, the only species capable of happily ignoring that awareness. So far, our economic interests have proved to be completely incompatible with all but a very few forms of life. It’s not that we believe that other species don’t matter. It’s that, historically speaking, it hasn’t been worth believing one way or another. I don’t suppose that most Americans would actively kill a whippoorwill if they had the chance. Yet in the past 40 years its number has dropped by 1.6 million.

In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth.

The writer is Verlyn Klinkenborg, Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight, in yesterday’s NYTimes. He is writing about the new Audubon Society report on the reduced bird population in our nation: northern bobwhite down by 25.5 million over 40 years ago (only 5.5 million left), field sparrow down 18 million to 5.8 million, the population of 20 species down by 68%.

When I was a child, whippoorwills were so common around my Owen County home that they would sit on the doorstep at night and sing. My mother, who will be 90 on September 5, still lives there, but the whippoorwills are gone. I wrote a little poem about it several years ago. Not a brilliant poem, perhaps, but I think it says about everything I was going to say here:

You Can’t Go Home Again

The little house is still there
on the hill
but my cousin logged
the woods that ran
down to the creek
where I used to ramble
on my Tennessee Walker.
My mother has a neighbor now,
on the next hilltop.
A nice young man, she says.
He likes to party.
His bamboo torches light
the night, his pedal steel
has displaced
the whippoorwills that trilled
my raucous lullabies.
How my young sons cried
to hear them jarring in the yard,
my sons accustomed only
to the nighttime
hum of big rigs on the bypass.

— from Dance the Black-Eyed Girl (Finishing Line, 2003)

A day or two ago, Rosalie commented that we must learn to live differently on the earth. Whatever one may think of multinationals, Rosalie is right to say that we must change our ways. The Earth will survive and regenerate. She has done it before. But we’re the ones who will be gone, along with our brothers and sisters the birds and raccoons.

To let Klinkenborg finish the thought:

In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth. E.O. Wilson has argued eloquently and persuasively that we cannot, that who we are depends as much on the richness and diversity of the biological life around us as it does on any inherent quality in our genes. Environmentalists of every stripe argue that we must somehow begin to correlate our economic behavior — by which I mean every aspect of it: production, consumption, habitation — with the welfare of other species.

This is the premise of sustainability. But the very foundation of our economic interests is self-interest, and in the survival of other species we see way too little self to care.

The trouble with humans is that even the smallest changes in our behavior require an epiphany. And yet compared to the fixity of other species, the narrowness of their habitats, the strictness of their diets, the precision of the niches they occupy, we are flexibility itself.

We look around us, expecting the rest of the world’s occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves.

Click here (with your mouse) to find out.

Once there, mouse over the circle and the secret will be revealed.

Thanks again to Donna Marder.