Sherry Chandler

So Phoebe Adams dismisses To Kill A Mockingbird in the original Atlantic Monthly review, featured at Powell’s.

It is frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a six-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult. Miss Lee has, to be sure, made an attempt to confine the information in the text to what Scout would actually know, but it is no more than a casual gesture toward plausibility. … A variety of adults, mostly eccentric in Scout’s judgment, and a continual bubble of incident make To Kill A Mockingbird pleasant, undemanding reading.

Which segues me right in to the announcement that my friend Jane Kretschmann in The Mule. In her Southern Legitimacy Statement, Jane says her first love was To Kill a Mockingbird, but actually I’m more intriqued by this statement:

Later I was one of the founders of the Unofficial Pike County William Styron Fan Club and (the summer Nixon resigned) went to the first Faulkner Symposium.

Click the link to read Jane’s poetry submission and all the rest of the good poetry at the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Thanks to Rosalie O’Leary for pointing me toward this article by Jeanette Winterson, who is bullish on poetry:

Poetry is a practical art. It is as good as a knife for cutting through the day’s rubbish, and it is better than a folding umbrella for those sudden bouts of private rain that douse a body out of nowhere. Bedraggled, I have sheltered under it, and confused, I have used it to cut me a way out. When I travel, I keep it in the other pocket to my hip-flask, and swig alternately from each.

We are living in lucky times for poetry. Perhaps the banality of TV and the repetitions of the media are forcing a balance elsewhere. I am sure that the human mind is a kind of self-regulating system, and that however unconsciously, it seeks balance. If we didn’t need poetry, we wouldn’t have it – and it seems that at this time we have a particularly strong need for poetry – more people are reading it and more people are writing it.

The explosion of endless communication channels, from Blogs to Chatrooms to non-stop programmes from around the world, hasn’t eroded the low-tec, high-impact world of the poem – if anything, poetry is reclaiming its place at the centre of communication – as a means to truth, and as an exact emotional expression of how we feel.

I recommend that you read this entire article, if only to find out about Jeanette’s “bookmark” for her volume of Andrew Marvel. It’s a lovely piece of writing.