Sherry Chandler

from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:

Last evening’s GOP CNN/YouTube debate and the Democratic presidential debate on November 15 were jointly sponsored by a coal industry coalition comprised of mining, railroad and utility interests.

Their high profile civic involvement is designed to further confuse American voters about coal’s true cost to our society. Many of the Republican candidates have endorsed massive new subsidies for King Coal and dutifully parrot industry talking points including earnest promises of cheap “clean coal.” Given that climate change is the most urgent threat to our collective survival, it is shocking that no debate moderator has pressed the candidates to clearly state their positions on “clean coal.”

In fact, there is no such thing as “clean coal.” And coal is only “cheap” if one ignores its calamitous externalized costs. In addition to global warming, these include dead forests and sterilized lakes from acid rain, poisoned fisheries in 49 states and children with damaged brains and crippled health from mercury emissions, millions of asthma attacks and lost work days and thousands dead annually from ozone and particulates. Coal’s most catastrophic and permanent impacts are from mountaintop removal mining. If the American people could see what I have seen from the air and ground during my many trips to the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia: leveled mountains, devastated communities, wrecked economies and ruined lives, there would be a revolution in this country.

Well now you can visit coal country without ever having to leave your home. Every presidential candidate and every American ought to take a few seconds to visit an ingenious new website created by Appalachian Voices, that allows one to tour the obliterated landscapes of Appalachia.

The clockmaker’s apprentice is sent to wind the clock of the mayor, N. Chanticleer, who has suffered a loss of face:

“Certainly a very respectable young man, and one who was evidently fully aware of the unsavoury rumours that were circulating concerning the house of Chanticleer; for he looked with such horror at the silly moon-face with its absurd revolving moustachios of Master Nathaniel’s grandfather’s clock, and opened its body so gingerly, and, when he had adjusted its pendulum, wiped his fingers on his pocket handkerchief with such an expression of disgust, that the innocent timepiece might have been the wicked mayor’s familiar–a grotesque hobgoblin tabby cat, purring, and licking her whiskers after an obscene orgy of garbage.”

Passage from Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (Millennium 2001), originally published 1926

Much Appalachian poetry tends toward the nostalgic and the defensive. How could it not, when so much has been lost? And when the region has been treated as a national joke? Still these characteristics don’t always make for good poetry.

In Meditation Upon the Invisible Ceremony of Breath (Finishing Line, 2007), Rebecca Bailey has integrated the stuff of Appalachia into a sort of New Age/age-old mysticism mixed with a mountain Zen. Her nostalgia is not just for Granny but for the granny woman: the one who delivered the babies and cured with herbs and knew a little magic, like how to remove warts or witch water. It is these women, the crone aspect of the Triple Goddess, the moon, the earth, that she reaches out for.

She remembers

…Everything imagined and unimagined,
logical and irratrional, nestled, waiting, in the crooks of
           ridges and hollows.

I remember smelling it. I smell it sometimes now.
—from “What I Learned from Grandma Bailey

The grandmother in this chapbook is an invocation of the earth spirit:

Coffee is the way to call the old gods.
Brew as black as Earth…

I call my mother’s ancestors with the patchwork quilt.
O Grandmother, put your arms around me now
and dance with me…
— from “Invocation of the Grandmother”

There is little that is gentle in Bailey’s hills, though there is wild joy:

I say I am of the ground.
I am made from no man’s rib,
but from a giant thigh of redrock
twisted into a gnarled maze indecipherable
by anything as superficial as intellect.
You have to understand rock and dirt,
ground, with the soles of your feet…
— from “Grounded”

And there is ecological disaster everywhere. As, for example, in “The Devil Comes to Rose Fork”

But then the devil came down from the ridge top,
to tap me on the shoulder
as I looked down the well box
because sludge was coming out of the faucets…

or in my favorite poem in the collection “Birth of the River God:”

He sent his maddening brown hair
across the scrappy gravels of the road
the Sunday after my father returned to earth.
His wet hair grabbed tree trunks
and swung crazily, mercilessly,
through low places. Love, he says,
is like water for it flows into the
lowest places and judges not.

Love — of place and family — is of the earth in this collection. Sorrow is of the earth. It is wild but beautiful.

As you’ve no doubt heard, evidence has emerged that Rudy Giuiliani billed “osbcure agencies” of the New York City government for security expenses for his trips to Northampton, presumably to visit Judith Nathan, who lived there and with whom he was having an extramarital affair at the time.

Interesting to me, though, just what those “obscure” agencies were that got stuck with the bill:

Broadening the inquiry, the comptroller wrote, auditors found similar expenses at a range of other unlikely agencies: $10,054 billed to the Office for People With Disabilities and $29,757 to the Procurement Policy Board.

The next year, yet another obscure department, the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, was billed around $400,000 for travel.

The Assigned Council Office provides defense attorneys for the indigent.

To quote Josh Marshall:

I’d heard a lot that Rudy’d done a lot to screw poor folks caught up in the criminal justice system but this puts the matter in a whole new light.

Giuiliani’s people say it was just “accounting” — as in juggling the books, I guess — and that all was put right at year’s end. That, of course, excuses everything.

A issue or so back, a columnist in our local weekly The Bourbon County Citizen opined that he saw no real reason to get exercised about global warming because it hadn’t been that many years since scientists were crying “The sky is falling” about population growth and, as far as he could see, we really weren’t ass-deep in babies.

It occurred to me to wonder if the columnist, whose name I’m sorry to say I don’t remember*, ever stopped to consider that we might have global warming precisely because there are now so many of us. In the United States, for example, a baby is born every 8 seconds. And the world population was 6,634,149,467 when I first started typing this. Check out the U.S. Census Bureau population clocks for the current numbers.

As a graphic illustration of how many of us there now are and how much we consume, a Seattle photographer named Chris Jordan has done an exhibit called Running the Numbers, which:

looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

Take for example his “Cans Seurat,” a 5 x 7.5 foot reproduction shown in miniature below with a detail:

I suggest you visit the web site to view his other works made from cell phones, vicodin pills, and hand guns (29,569, the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004). Although Jordan suggests that the images are best seen full-sized:

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

You’ll find a list of exhibits and speaking engagements on the web, along with shots from two other series “Intolerable Beauty, Portraits of American Mass Consumption” and “In Katrina’s Wake, Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster.”

Thanks to Donna Rhae Marder for the link.

Morbid Nailer has won the British Bad Sex in Writing award for a passage from The Castle in the Forest, his last published novel before shuffling off the old mortal coil. Part of the passage which won him this prestigious honor:

“So Klara turned head to foot…and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity which could only come from the Evil One…..So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.

His mouth lathered with her sap, he [was]…ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.”

That must be her hair piety.
Guess all the incest, coprophilia, Freudian theory, conception of Ultimate Evil and demonology so overwhelmed the judges that they rejected this passage from the fictionalized life of Shakespeare, which was runner up:

“Anne Hathaway’s cow-milking fingers…now took pity on my poor anguished erection, and in the infinite agony of her desire, guided it to the quick of the wound.

…now the body of Anne Hathaway began to rage and founder in the rising foam as I clung like a mariner to her heaving haunches…. Our vessel ran shuddering onto the rocks, a wave of wetness ran through us, the air was rent with screams…and…the bank on which we lay drenched and grounded was journey’s end, love’s end, the very sea-mark of our utmost sail.”

Maybe the judges would have preferred a little expense-of-spirit-in-a-waste-of-shame interpolation in the passage. They must own shares in Viagra and Cialis.

Added: Read the shortlist of entries for the Bad Sex Award 2007.

In The Lives of the Saints and Everything (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1993), Susan Firer writes long, somewhat imagistic poems that mix quips and horror in a sort of associational flow of ideas. She seems to understand that, while life may be ripping your heart to shreds, it’s still possible to laugh at its absurdities. Take, for example,

The Mongolian Contortionist with Pigeons

was breath taking, a flesh knot. There were
many fine Czechoslovakian skaters
that Olympic year. Each ended her act,
like a hyphen or parenthesis, lying
on the ice in dramatic, bad American music.
We watched the Olympian skaters Triple Axel
in heaven while L. A. burned a nervous breakdown.
…
And you my
eye-rhyme, twin trick, sister fast
forwarded to death, dropped your skin body
inconsequentially as junk mail into
the planetary mailslot ragbag. You
left a note: The dog needs a walk & 2
Emily Dickinson poems, peppered with granite
lips. The shepherd, Saint Cuthbert,
from his field, watched angels carry
the bishop, Saint Aiden, in a globe of fire
to heaven. The men who rolled you out of
your house in a Holy Communion white body
bag wore seethrough shower caps & rubber
gloves. The medical examiner was pregnant,
the priest fat…

I give you a no doubt illegally long excerpt here both because I found it one of her most accessible and because the poem is typical of the way Firer works: the heart-stopping lines:

eye-rhyme, twin trick, sister fast

the planetary mailslot ragbag. You

the cryptic (for me anyway) metaphors:

Emily Dickinson poems, peppered with granite

and the constant reference to the lives of the saints.

It took me a while to get an inkling of what is going on in these poems, and in part it is because the collection is so thoroughly Catholic and I am so thoroughly Southern Baptist. But the intelligence is a contradictory thing, and it was mostly the lives of the saints found in Part II of this collection that spoke to me. In those poems, I found a mixture of reverence and irreverence, doubt and seeking, that was sort of like abstinence, saints, and rock ‘n roll.

Doo Wop anyway.

Take “An Amateur’s Guide to Invocations, Emblems, Patrons, Patronesses, & Prayer,” a seven-page poem in six parts with titles such as “A Saint Nervous Breakdown,” “A Diet of Saints,” “A Weather of Saints: a Panhandle Hook of Saints.” Take the section called “A Boarding House of Saints,” these lines:

“Pray without ceasing” said that old misogynist St. Paul
and I confetti jog the saints’ names through my bare soul.
Do Pow Wow, do Yom Kippur, do Bodi Day, Ta Chin, Shambala,
Christmas. St. Gregory the Enlightener suffered
12 torments. I’m on my way. I have to learn not to hang
mine out like wash, instead let them silently notch
my bones. To the pirate poet St. Godric,
after he walked barefoot across Europe
with his mother, the Virgin
Mary brought the Motown sound
and words of prayer.

Or the final poem, “I, the Excommunicate,” these lines:

I am driving the God car. I have put out
my God traps. I am putting out feeder lines
to God: prayer flags, prayer wheels, artichokes,
prayer beads, prayer birds, prayer songs, (do wha
ditty ditty dum ditty yea), prayer words.

The Lives of the Saints and Everything won the 1993 Cleveland State University Poetry Center prize and the 1993 Posner Poetry Award for best book of poetry published by a Wisconsin writer in that year.

The Heart’s Dragnet

…

My dead mother using my daughter’s voice
asks: “How, even now, can you
afford your life of poems?”
And in my own sanest moments I answer
them both back: “In this always
spinning fast disappearing
world, how can I not?”

In a post on Umberto Saba, Robert Peake makes this observation:

So much of contemporary poetry seems to be a reaction against sentimentality and self-aggrandizement. To this end, many poets seem to be attempting to remove themselves as a direct presence in their poems. Persona poetry is one device by which an interplay of consciousness can exist without the complications of the troublesome “I.” Yet without the poet in the poem, so many poems of consummate craft fall short of the ultimate aim — to touch on the human condition in a way that transcends intellectual tinkering.

That troublesome “I” shows up almost constantly in my poetry, so I felt somewhat encouraged reading Robert’s comment. Just as I felt considerably taken to task by Ted Kooser in his chapter “Working with Detail” from The Poetry Home Repair Manual:

For the past fifty years or thereabouts, readers of contemporary poetry have grown more and more accustomed to poems about the poet, poems in which the pronoun “I” is preeminent. We sometimes call this “confessional poetry” because the poet bares his or her soul, confessing to this or that. The poet is at center stage; everything in the world seems to be placed in reference to him or to her.

Kooser goes on to describe several poems that use a method he describes as in the manner of “the spy in the hotel lobby,” poems in which the poet observes but does not “appear.” That is to say, the poem is written in third person and presents a bit of drama, such as an overheard conversation, an observed meeting.

I don’t react well to being chastised and this chapter from Kooser’s book got my back up a little bit. To be fair, it’s the only chapter of the book I’ve read so I may have a skewed view. Still, the argument seems a bit disingenuous. It conflates a first person poem with the dreaded “confessional” poem and it assumes that a poem in the third person somehow removes the poet from center stage. It assumes that the poet should not be at center stage.

But every poem, especially every lyric poem, has an observing consciousness and that observer is at the center of the poem whether “I” or “she” is used. Dramatic monologues/personna poems or third-person drama poems are still projections of the poet’s worldview. So the whole problem of the “I” seems artificial to me. Poets have used the perceiving “I” since Horace, since Sappho, since Shakespeare.

The problem is confessional poetry, which you might say breaks the proscenium arch, the convention that the “I” in the poem is not the poet herself. In the wrong hands, such soul-baring can be an embarassment to all. Sentimental, as Robert says, and self-aggrandizing. Yet, as Robert also implies, we have come to expect that poems will give us, not universal truths, but the truth of an individual human heart, which might also give us a glimpse into our own.

This seems like a good place for this thought from Charles Bernstein, from his Poetics (Harvard, 1992):

Part of the arrogance of what is sometimes miscalled modernism…is that…one could be representative of “man” or of a cultural moment or of a people. But every particular is such precisely because of what it necessarily excludes. So what is to be proclaimed is this not-all, this insistence that there are ony margins no universals; only partialities… For “one” lives not to proclaim only but to listen for that which is not conceivable in one’s “own” self-same world…

From Charles Bernstein, “Comedy” in A Poetics (Harvard, 1992):

What is to be regretted is not the lack of mass audience for any particular poet but the lack of poetic thinking as an activated potential for all people. In a time of ecological catastrophe like ours, we say that wilderness areas must not only be preserved but also expanded regardless of how many people park their cars within two miles of the site. The effect these wilderness areas have is not measurable by audience but in terms of the regeneration of the earth that benefits all of us who live on it—and for the good of our collective unconscious as much as our collective consciousness. I’ve never been to Alaska, but it makes a difference to me that it’s there. Poets don’t have to be read, any more than trees have to be sat under, to transform poisonous societal emissions into something that can be breathed. As a poet, you affect the public sphere with each reader, with the fact of the poem, and by exercising your prerogative to choose what collective forms you will legitimate. The political power of poetry is not measured in numbers; it instructs us to count differently.