Sherry Chandler

For about a year now I’ve been whining about certain aspects of my life that I need to change but somehow I haven’t been able to shake myself out of old patterns. Then I got news that change — in my work life at any rate — is likely to be thrust upon me.

Did I embrace that opportunity to change? No, I got physically ill for a couple of days. Change, even for the better, is frightening.

And then, I turned a page in Molly Peacock’s Cornucopia and found the poem “That Leaf.” I was comforted.

It was one of those serendipitous moments. Another was following a discussion line at The Waters and finding Jude Goodwin’s link to this site that features Molly and several others reading “That Leaf.” (Click the images and then click the name of the poet.)

It was great to hear Molly read the poem but it is also great to hear others read it, to hear how a poem changes with different voices, how each reader makes it his/her own. Always the same words, always different.

A couple of last words (I think) about the West Chester Poetry Conference: An article in the Philadelphia Enquirer with a link to a reading by Sandy Van Doren, whom I met in the Molly Peacock workshop. (The article is entitled “For Serious Poets…” but I remember laughing a lot.)

And some pictures at Toni Clark’s blog. Ann Higgins, Sandra Van Doren, Holly Woodward, and Mike Riley were in the Peacock workshop with me, Lisa Barnett was my gentle and accommodating suite mate.

Unfortunately, the picture of me seems to catch me in a moment of stowing food away in my cheek pouches. And it is true that I spilled red wine on my white pants a moment thereafter, but Elizabeth Cooper whisked out a little stick of something from Tide and made the spots disappear again. Great shoes and prepared for spills. A wonderful woman, that Elizabeth.

It’s been a whet since I did an Ursula update. She has five cubs this year and has become so hungry/tame/desperate that she comes out in the daytime to beg. I will be hanging clothes on the line and there will be Ursula, just looking at me. Saturday I emptied a half-drunk bottle of pop on the grass and a few minutes later looked out the kitchen window to see Ursula paddling in the sweet, licking her paws.

She has also got hungry/tame/desperate enough to let me sit about ten feet away and take pictures. The light was bad, though, and she was not posing. The one above was most fun, since it caught her at the task of washing her dog food. It’s hard to keep the water fresh.

We have also noticed at least two smaller, darker raccoons coming to the feeding station. These we infer are last year’s litter.

We put the “empty” catfood cans out for the raccoons to lick, figuring otherwise they’ll just steal them from the garbage. My son said he went out yesterday, when he was the only one home and all was quiet, to find all five cubs playing around the feeding station with mama. When they spotted him, they all ran for cover lickety-split, except for one who had his head stuck in a catfood can. He was close enough to hear the “pop” when the can came off the head and then that cub was gone, too.

I guess we’re gonna have to re-write that of Jeff Foxworthy joke: you might be a redneck if your back porch collapses and kills more than five raccoons.

First Tools

With a candleflame
I could create a holy place
a glowy breath to read by
to toast some bread
to guard me
from the hounds of night.

But all I’m given is a spark—
no, not even that.
Just two sharp stones—
one to hold
one to strike with—
and a craving for light.

—Mary E. O’Dell

Originally published in Wind, Fall 1998. Reproduced here by permission of the author.

Just ask Bill O’Reilly.

And it looks like a rough ride:

If the Supreme Court, with its new conservative majority, wanted to announce that it was getting out of the fairness business, it could hardly have done better than its decision last week in the case of Keith Bowles. The court took away Mr. Bowles’s right to challenge his murder conviction in a ruling that was so wrong and mean-spirited that it seemed like an outtake from MTV’s practical joke show “Punk’d.”

Mr. Bowles, an Ohio inmate, challenged his conviction in federal district court and lost. The court told Mr. Bowles that he had until Feb. 27 to appeal. He filed the appeal on Feb. 26, and was ready to argue why he was wrongly convicted. But it turned out the district court made a mistake. The appeal should have been filed by Feb. 24.

The Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, in a majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, that Mr. Bowles was out of luck, and his appeal was invalid. So much for heeding a federal judge.

The decision was wrong for many reasons…

Man, it’s rough coming out of the conference bubble.

This story — Families Seek Payment in Land Dispute — also deserves attention. Kentucky has a long history of loss of land, loss of mineral rights, through one kind of deception or another.

The father in our household will be spending his day at Francisco’s Farm. Be sure to visit his booth if you get over that way.

“The whole face of private security changed with Iraq, and it will never go back to how it was,” said Leon Sharon, a retired Special Operations officer who commands 500 private Kurdish guards at an immense warehouse transit point for weapons, ammunition and other materiel on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Sometimes I feel as though I’m living in a bubble, a sort of Truman Show. Or maybe Cheney’s World. There’s the reality we think we’re dealing with here in the United States, the one we think we’re learning about from The News Hour. This is a reality in which the legislature debates a war over which they think somebody somewhere has some control, one in which we elect legislators based on information we perceive as the truth. And then there is the real world, especially in Iraq, about which we know absolutely nothing.

Take, for example, all those private contractors (read “mercenaries”) who are fighting great hunks of this war for us. Iraq Contractors Face Growing Parallel War, the article in the Washington Post, from which the quote above is taken, gives us a glimpse of that reality:

BAGHDAD — Private security companies, funded by billions of dollars in U.S. military and State Department contracts, are fighting insurgents on a widening scale in Iraq, enduring daily attacks, returning fire and taking hundreds of casualties that have been underreported and sometimes concealed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and company representatives.

While the military has built up troops in an ongoing campaign to secure Baghdad, the security companies, out of public view, have been engaged in a parallel surge, boosting manpower, adding expensive armor and stepping up evasive action as attacks increase, the officials and company representatives said. One in seven supply convoys protected by private forces has come under attack this year, according to previously unreleased statistics; one security company reported nearly 300 “hostile actions” in the first four months.

The majority of the more than 100 security companies operate outside of Iraqi law..

In a significant way, they operate outside our law, too. We don’t have the kind of oversight over these “contractors” that we have over our regular military. And did you notice that it’s Kurds who guard that munitions dump? Kurds are players in this war and yet we’re using them as mercenaries.

Mercenaries who are also better armed and much, much better paid than our regular army.

And I don’t know that they owe any allegiance to the United States. Do they swear to serve and protect? Do they, as Charlie Hughes did, have to memorize the Geneva Conventions? [Update: See Charlie's clarification below in the comments.]

In Iraq, much of the fighting is being done by the private militias of independent strong men. And into this mix, we throw our own private militias.

In my worst paranoid fantasies, the world is not run by governments but by multi-national corporations. That’s the frightening New World Order.

You should read this article. It is not negative to the mercenaries but somehow the whole idea frightens me:

The U.S. military has never released complete statistics on contractor casualties or the number of attacks on privately guarded convoys. ….”It was like there was a major war being fought out there, but we were the only ones who knew about it,” [Victoria] Wayne said.

Toni Clark, of The Waters Poetry Workshop, draws attention to John Barr’s article American Poetry in the New Century, which appeared in a recent issue of Poetry magazine. (I have resubscribed to Poetry and vow I will keep current.) It is another of those articles mourning the death of poetry cruelly killed by inbreeding (a theme familiar to Kentuckians), careerism, and MFA programs. More accurately, Barr sees poetry as a sort of zombie, lurching along neither alive nor dead:

Lacking a general audience, poets still write for one another. (Witness the growth of writing workshops and the MFA programs.) Because the book-buying public does not buy their work, at least not in commercial quantities, they cannot support themselves as writers. So they teach. But an academic life removes them yet further from a general audience. Each year, MFA programs graduate thousands of students who have been trained to think of poetry as a career, and to think that writing poetry has something to do with credentials. The effect of these programs on the art form is to increase the abundance of poetry, but to limit its variety. The result is a poetry that is neither robust, resonant, nor—and I stress this quality—entertaining; a poetry that both starves and flourishes on academic subsidies.

Barr is not alone in finding poetry moribund. In Who Keeps Killing Poetry?, an answering article in The Writer’s Chronicle, D. W. Fenza lists:

Edmund Wilson in “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” (1928); Nick Greene, the fictive character in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928); Karl Shapiro in “Creative Glut” (1979); Donald Hall in “Poetry and Ambition” (which he gave as a keynote address at the 1980 AWP conference in Boston and published in AWP Newsletter, 1987); Joseph Epstein by “Who Killed Poetry” (1988, published again with commentary in AWP Chronicle, 1989); Thomas Wolfe in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” (1989); Edward Hoagland in “Shhh! Our Writers Are Sleeping!” (1990); David Dooley in “The Contemporary Workshop Aesthetic” (1990); Dana Gioia in “Can Poetry Matter?” (1991); Thomas M. Disch in “Castles of Indolence” (1994); B.R. Myers in “A Reader’s Manifesto” (2001); and William Logan in general (from 1950 to the present)

O. V. De L. Milosz in A Few Words on Poetry, published in the 1930s and quoted by Czelaw Milosz in The Witness of Poetry (Harvard 1983) placed the blame on Edgar Allan Poe:

After Goethe and Lamartine—the great, very great, Lamartine of “The Death of Socrates”—poetry, under the influence of Edgar Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, suffered a kind of impoverishment and narrowing, which oriented it, in the domain of the subconscious, toward an undoubtedly interesting, sometimes even remarkable, search which has been, however, tainted with preoccupations of an aesthetic and nearly always individualistic order. Besides, that little solitary exercise has not resulted, in nine hundred and ninety poets in a thousand, in any more than purely verbal finds constituted by unforeseen associations of words and not expressing any internal, mental or spiritual operation. This unfortunate deviation produced a schism and a misunderstanding between the poet and the great human family, which has continued to the present and will not end until a great, inspired poet appears, a modern Homer, Shakespeare or Dante, initiated, through the renunciation of his paltry ego, his often empty and always cramped ego, into the most profound secret of the laboring masses, more than ever alive, vibrant and tormented.

Milosz, at least, thought that some social cataclysm would raise up this new Homer. Unfortunately, the cataclysm when it came only caused Theodor Adorno to declare “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Such of these articles as I have read strike me as chivvying. They enumerate everything poets are getting wrong without any remedy except that we all must somehow become bigger and better than we are. Like the sparrows to Peter Rabbit, they implore us to exert ourselves but offer no real help in getting out of the gooseberry net. I except Milosz, who did not blame the poets so much as the times for being out of joint. Great spirits cannot arise out of spiritual poverty.

Barr, conversely, reduces the problem to a sort of collective “bad mood.” “Poetry’s limitations today come not from failures of craft (the MFA programs attend to that) but from afflictions of spirit.” He implores us to “live broadly and write boldly.” He gives us Hemingway as an example, as though the cure for poetry is for all of us to give up our health insurance and poach pigeons in the squares of Paris. After Hemingway, not strictly speaking a poet, his examples fall off a bit: Eliot the banker, Stevens the insurance executive, Williams the pediatrician. To which I suppose we can add Gioia the ad man and Barr the Wall Street trader. High adventurers all.

Oh well, I make fun of my betters.

But, as Fenza points out, even MFA graduates have lives.

These writings give me nothing I can use. The doom and gloom only discourage, make me think that the best thing I could do for poetry is to quit.

And perhaps that is so. But I’ve never quite succeeded in doing it. I try about once a week.

From All Quiet on the Western Front :

Between the meadows behind our town there stands a line of old poplars by a stream. They were visible from a great distance, and although they grew on one bank only, we called them the poplar avenue. Even as children we had a great love for them, they drew us vaguely thither, we played truant the whole day by them and listened to their rustling. We sat beneath them on the bank of the stream and let our feet hang in the bright, swift waters. The pure frangrance of the water and the melody of the wind in the poplars held our fancies. We loved them dearly, and the image of those days still makes my heart pause in its beating.

It’s strange that all the memories that come have those two qualities. They are always completely calm, that is predominant in them; and even if they are not really calm, they become so. They are soundless apparitions that speak tome, with looks and gestures silently, without any word—and it is the alarm of their silence that forces me to lay hold of my sleeve and my rifle lest I should abandon myself to the liberation and allurement in which my body would dilate and gently pass away into the still forces that lie behind these things.

They are quiet in this way, because quietness is so unattainable for us now. At the front there is no quietness and the curse of the front reaches so far that we never pass beyond it…

Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow—a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires—but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us…

…here in the trenches they are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition, that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are strong and our desire is strong—but they are unattainable, and we know it.

And even if these memories of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amonst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade…

Today we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts, like tradesmen, we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled—we are indifferent. We might exist there, but should we really live there?

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

—Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. W. Wheen, (Fawcett Crest paperback, 1975)

Postmark deadline for entries in the annual Kentucky State Poetry Society Contest is June 30.

This year the society is offering prizes in 25 categories, including the Grand Prix ($200) and the President’s Prize ($100). The endowed Chaffin/Kash award ($100) is for members only but the society welcomes new members and you can send your dues along with your contest entries.

Membership information is available here.

Prizes are awarded at the annual KSPS Awards Weekend, October 12-14, at the Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park. First prize winners are published in Pegasus.

You can read Andrea O’Brien’s 2006 Grand Prix winning poem, Highway 60, Passing Through Versailles, Kentucky at the link.

Complete guidelines are downloadable as a PDF file on the KSPS website or contact Contest Chair Mick Kennedy .

This weekend (June 16 & 17), my husband TR Williams will be exhibiting (and selling) with 139 other artists from 14 states at the Francisco’s Farm Art Festival on the grounds of Midway College in Midway, Kentucky.

Hours are 10 - 5.
Admission is free.
Parking is $5.

You can see a list of exhibitors with some sample photos at the link.

We hope you’ll consider coming out. There will be music and activities for the children. For those book-minded among you, Gray Zeitz of Larkspur Press will be there demonstrating.