Sherry Chandler

Garrison Keillor features Charles Goodrich’s poem “Vacuuming Spiders” today on The Writer’s Almanac. It’s a strong poem and I think you should click through and read it.

It reminded me that I had run across this Frost sonnet the other day, reading Richard Moore:

Range-finding

The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung
And cut a flower beside a ground bird’s nest
Before it stained a single human breast.
The stricken flower bent double and so hung.
And still the bird revisited her young.
A butterfly its fall had dispossessed
A moment sought in air his flower of rest,
Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.

On the bare upland pasture there had spread
O’ernight ’twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread
And straining cables wet with silver dew.
A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.
The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,
But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.

—Robert Frost, from Mountain Interval (Henry Holt, 1920)

If I remember correctly, Moore interpreted this poem as indicating that nature is as bloody as war.

My son, on the other hand, saw it as indicating that nature is indifferent to man.

For me, I read a foreboding poem: nature innocent of the destruction that is about to come.

Of course, no poem is that easily categorized. Still, I wonder if reaction hinges on attitude toward spiders.

Poets for Human Rights announces the 2007 Anita McAndrews Award poetry contest (First prize - $100) and the 2007 Alexander Popoff Youth Award poetry contests (First prize for US - $100; First Prize for outside US - $100).

Sally Buckner, of Cary, North Carolina, was the winner of the 2006 Anita McAndrews Award, for her poem Human Rites, chosen from over 100 submissions.

The 2006 Alexander Popoff Youth Award was awarded to Kiran Rao, a high school student in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Submission guidelines for the 2007 Anita McAndrews Award:

1. Poems must relate to Human Rights
2. Poems must be typed and are limited to one page (8 ½ x 11).
3. Send two copies. One copy must include name, address, telephone number and email address. One copy must be anonymous.
4. Mail poems, cover sheet and $1 reading fee per poem to:

Anita McAdrews Award
c/o Stazja McFadyen
100 Waverly Way, #310
Clearwater, Florida 33756

5. Poems and cover sheet can be emailed to stazja@yahoo.com.
6. Reading fee payment must by mailed to the address given above.
7. Checks for reading fees must be made payable to Artists in Action International.
8. Deadline for submissions is November 15, 2007.

Submission guidelines for the 2007 Alexander Popoff Youth Award:

1. Poems must relate to one or more of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights articles. Summary of the 30 articles and video public service announcements for each article can be viewed at www.youthforhumanrights.org/introduction/udhr_abridged.html
2. Length of each poem is limited to one page (8 ½ x 11).
3. Poem(s) must be accompanied by a cover sheet with the poem title(s), name, address, telephone number, email, age, school name and grade.
4. Submissions can be mailed to:

Alexander Popoff Youth Award
c/o Stazja McFadyen
100 Waverly Way, #310
Clearwater, Florida 33756

or can be emailed to: stazja@yahoo.com
5. Teachers submitting entries on behalf of their students should include their own name, contact information, and name and address of their school.
6. Deadline for submissions is November 15, 2007.

Winners will be announced at the Poets for Human Rights 2007 International Human Rights Day event on December 10, 2007. The winning poems for each contest will be read at the event.

Winning poems and honorable mentions will be published online at the Poets for Human Rights website at www.poetsforhumanrights.org. and in the Map of Austin Poetry featured poetry supplement, archived at groups.yahoo.com/group/mapofaustinpoetry.

Poets for Human Rights was co-founded in 2005 by Larry Jaffe and Stazja McFadyen, who recognize that it is the nature of poets to lead the way for humanity. There are nearly 200 members internationally.

All is not grim:

BAGHDAD, July 29 — It took a beautiful arching corner kick and a textbook-perfect header to bring unadulterated joy to millions of people across this war-ravaged country.

As the soccer ball sailed into the far corner of the net off the head of Younis Mahmoud, the Iraqi national team’s 24-year-old captain, a collective shout rose from every corner of Baghdad.

Joanie DiMartino, author of Licking the Spoon, writes:

I just found out that Sekou Sundiata, one of my favorite jazz/performance poets died last week. You might want to have something on your blog about him. I heard him perform several times, and was in his workshop at Dodge. I have both his CDs. He was phenomenal. A talent truly lost that will be missed.

Sundiata died of heart failure on July 21. I was not familiar with Sundiata’s work myself and so I recommend this Wikipedia article and his page at the Academy of American Poets. You can download an mp3 of Sundiata’s poem “the sound of memory” at Salon.

The use of “security contractors” in Iraq is one of my hobbyhorses. Here is a new report in the Washington Post that illustrates why I think their use is so wrongheaded:

BAGHDAD — The convoy was ambushed in broad daylight last Nov. 16, dozens of armed men swarming over 37 tractor-trailers stretching for more than a mile on southern Iraq’s main highway. The attackers seized four Americans and an Austrian employed by Crescent Security Group, a small private security firm. Then they fled.

None of the hostages has been found, eight months after one of the largest and most brazen kidnappings of Americans since the March 2003 invasion.

…

An investigation by The Washington Post found that Crescent violated U.S. military regulations while being paid millions of dollars to support the U.S.-led mission in Iraq. The company routinely sacrificed safety to cut costs. On the day of the kidnappings, just seven Crescent guards protected the immense convoy as it drove through southern Iraq, a force that security experts described as inadequate to fend off a major attack.

…

[Scott] Schneider oversaw Crescent’s security operations for more than two years, despite having pleaded guilty, according to court records, to misdemeanor charges of breaking and entering and domestic violence in Michigan in the mid-1990s. Under U.S. law, it is a felony for domestic violence offenders to carry firearms, a prohibition that was adopted by the Defense Department for military and civilian personnel.

There has been no oversight. You have to have oversight. Read this whole article.

Here’s the next installment: For Abducted Guards, Iraq Wasn’t Just About Money

All four missing Americans are military veterans; two — [Jonathan] Cote and Joshua Munns, a 24-year-old former Marine from Redding, Calif. — did combat tours in Iraq. Their comments reveal men acutely aware of their vulnerability, yet driven by life choices that transcend mercenary stereotypes. To a man, they said they had come to Iraq for fast money. But they were also lured by the camaraderie they had known in the military, the continuous rush of adrenaline, the opportunity to see history unfold and the chance to escape mundane lives back home.

Poet Darrell B. Grayson was executed in Alabama on July 26. He was 46 years old. He was sent sentenced to death at age 19. Three days before his execution, he sent Helen Losse a poem to read and post, a poem he felt to be life-affirming. She posted “Jumping Trains” on the day of his execution.

Helen has a moving series of posts on this event on Windows Toward the World, a blog that deserves your attention at all times.

Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty will continue its work.

In reading Richard Moore’s The Rule That Liberates (Univ South Dakota, 1994) in succession with Czeslaw Milosz’s The Witness of Poetry (Harvard, 1983), I feel almost as though I’m eavesdropping on a dialogue. Here, for example, is Moore on poetry and science:

There is, in fact, a profound resonance between conventional science and the Platonic poetry we have been discussing [Keats, Blake, Hölderlin]. Both depend on and intensify the mind-world dichotomy. As I have remarked elsewhere, poetry evidently originates very early in human development and, as described by Aristotle, tends to bridge the separation of self and world, observer and observed, which civilization seems to require. Platonic poetry, on the other hand, widens this separation by placing an ideal or mystical perception conceived in the individual self in opposition to common experience. The Platonist poet, like the scientist, seeks to transcend and “explain away” everyday reality. In either case, if there is to be a truth unaltered by the mere flux of appearances, then there must also be an unaltering mind in which the truth may be registered.

But for a poet like Goethe of the reasonable-Aristotelian sort, for whom the flux of appearances is constantly generating new metaphors, new resemblances, and new general categories founded on them, there can ultimately be no fixed truths—and an eternally fixed self is no longer necessary.

…

But it has become increasingly evident in recent decades that scientific thought has a similar character. In our century we have witnessed a confident Newtonian dogmatism crumble into a succession of theories that seem to have no more permanence than the metaphors of the poets. Science itself grows Aristotelian.

Will the poets once again follow the direction that science has taken? The tendencies that have dominated poetry since 1800 have, it seems, finally produced a kind of desperate overripeness. Arguing among ourselves about who the true heir may be of Blake’s Bardic Mantle, we do not seem to have noticed that the Mantle itself is threadbare.

Adrian tapped his empty glass with his finger. “Another, Kitty me love.”

“Don’t ‘Kitty-me-love’ me and you’ll not be gettin’ another until I see your money.” Kitty Meechem wiped the counter where he’d banged the mug, sending his neighbor’s beer over the sides of his glass like sea spray. “Drunk as a lord.”

“Drunk is it? Ah, Kitty me gurhl…” His tone was wheedling as he reached out a hand towards Kitty’s light brown locks, a hand she slapped away. “You’d not even stand one of your own countrymen?”

“Har! And yer no more Irish than me ginger cat.”

The cat in question was curled up on a scrap of rug before the blazing hearth. It was always there, like a plaster ornament. Adrian wondered when it was ever up and around enough to get the cuts and scratches it sported. “Looks lazy enough to be Irish,” Adrian said.

—Martha Grimes, from The Old Fox Deceiv’d (Little, Brown, 1982)

From Informed Comment:

Iraqis were unified for a brief period on Wednesday as they came out in the streets from the north of the country to its south, from Irbil to Baghdad to Basra, to celebrate the country’s soccer (football) victory in the Asian Cup. People danced in the streets, sang, waved Iraqi flags, and drove with car doors open and passengers celebrating. Iraqis have constructed a powerful nationalism during the 20th century that Western observers now often discount, but those celebrations were a glimmer of the pre-Bush Iraq.

Sunni Arab guerrillas must have been planning for these street celebrations, since they hit them powerfully and effectively in Baghdad, with two car bombs, killing 55 and wounding 135 according to late reports. There were other bombings and mortar attacks in the capital, and 18 bodies were found in the streets.

Last night at dinner, my son remarked, “I don’t like sports, and I don’t know anything about sports, but I have to feel sorry for the Iraqi people. They can’t have anything.”

His remark, as much as anything that’s happened lately, focussed for me what we have wrought in Iraq.

Not an example of the end justifying the means but of the means determining the end, this enterprise was conceived in lies and executed in corruption. Whatever highminded purpose may have been buried somewhere at its heart, the invasion was sold to us through an advertising campaign, and like many (most) advertising campaigns, its connection to the truth was tenuous.

To some extent, the ghost of Viet Nam seems to have haunted this entire enterprise. But rather than removing the shame of that defeat, this war has only succeeded in compounding it.

On the subject of patience, of fixing what we broke, I’ve said this before. I think the American people would be willing to stay in Iraq if we had any way of seeing whether we were doing more good than ill. The problem, for me and I would think for others, is that we’ve been lied to so much — or if not lied to, denied information — that we have no way of believing anything this government tells us.

It’s very sad.

Postscript: On a note related to the imperial, we-don’t-have-to-answer-to-nobody presidency and its enabling Supreme Court, here’s a modest proposal from Jean Edward Smith in the NYTimes:

When the court overreaches, the Constitution provides checks and balances. In 1805, after persistent political activity by Justice Samuel Chase, Congress responded with its power of impeachment. Chase was acquitted, but never again did he step across the line to mingle law and politics. After the Civil War, when a Republican Congress feared the court might tamper with Reconstruction in the South, it removed those questions from the court’s appellate jurisdiction.

But the method most frequently employed to bring the court to heel has been increasing or decreasing its membership. The size of the Supreme Court is not fixed by the Constitution. It is determined by Congress.

The original Judiciary Act of 1789 set the number of justices at six. When the Federalists were defeated in 1800, the lame-duck Congress reduced the size of the court to five — hoping to deprive President Jefferson of an appointment. The incoming Democratic Congress repealed the Federalist measure (leaving the number at six), and then in 1807 increased the size of the court to seven, giving Jefferson an additional appointment.

In 1837, the number was increased to nine, affording the Democrat Andrew Jackson two additional appointments. During the Civil War, to insure an anti-slavery, pro-Union majority on the bench, the court was increased to 10.

And so it has gone.

Just a thought.

I feel a little guilty, picking out these somewhat outrageous passages to quote from Richard Moore in his “glances” at Frost and Williams. And yet they amuse me so much I can’t resist the temptation to share. And, to some extent, they get to the essence of what Moore has to say about Williams and Frost:

I feel the urge sometimes to quip that Williams’ whole career was one long doomed struggle against his own gentility. Living in his suburb, practicing (with great nobility and dedication) his eminently respectable profession, having his rebellious little flings now and then, the poor man longed so to be outrageous and disreputable. And there all the while was Frost, writing his impeccable deadly stanzas, a dropout (but from two of our best colleges and a dropout, mind you, in classics) — who actually was disreputable. A failure as a farmer, responsible for a family of six, he spent the last pennies of his patrimony…on what? A trip to England! We are beginning to realize, I think, that there have been few lives in America more deeply disturbing, more devastatingly questioning of its values, than Robert Frost’s. Think of it: to have accepted, to have basked in the whole bit: the adulation of women’s clubs, the four Pulitzer Prizes, the adoring attentions of a President whose main other amusement seems to have been sleeping with movie stars — to have gone through all this with an official biographer dutifully, worshipfully dogging your every step; and then after your death to have that same biographer write about you in what could only have been cold fury and unmixed loathing. What an achievement!

Is it any wonder that Frost wrote in regular meters? Without them, he would clearly have gone mad.

— Richard Moore, “Of Form, Closed and Open: With Glances as Frost and Williams,” in The Rule That Liberates (Univ South Dakota, 1994), essay originally published in The Iowa Review, Fall 1987

Overall, Moore opines that Frost and Williams were looking for solutions to the same problem—the stale condition of traditional metered verse. Frost found his solutions inside form and Williams by rejecting formalism altogether.