Sherry Chandler

3 Comments

• 1. Rosalie replies at 9th March 2008, 9:17 am :

  Those lines from Mlinko in Poetry also caught my attention, Sherry. I’ve been thinking about the healing power of singing all week, because I think singing does more than cover our cries. Singing takes us to our pain, then it lifts it from us. Music and poetry. Such powerful art. — Ro

• 2. sherry replies at 10th March 2008, 11:33 am :

  Actually, Ro, it’s unfair of me to pull the quotation out of the poem. But I do think art can be used to drown out the voices — think of anthems or something like Leni Riefenstahl’s German propaganda films. I guess that’s why I associated that quote with the Lillian Smith passage about singing the Doxology as a sort of gesture of white middle class solidarity.

  I agree with you about the healing, transporting powers of music but I also think we should always be listening for the voices.

  As Mlinko says in the Q&A following the poem — a newish feature at Poetry that I usually find pretty annoying for its uselessness:

  My priest suggested books by the theologians James Alison and René Girard, in order to give me a philosophical framework for Christianity quite apart from metaphysics. Girard is a French literary critic turned anthropological theologian. His study of literature led him to meditate on what he considers a universal human pattern: scapegoating and sacrificing. To make a long story short, he believes that Jesus made himself an innocent scapegoat to illuminate the psychic mechanism by which all peoples dehumanize and victimize others. And thus by illuminating, end it.

  Although I really am addressing this priest throughout the poem, it was Girard who said that the origins of music lay in the necessity of drowning out the cries of sacrificial victims. So when I say “I start listening for them—the cries—under my own singing,” I suggest that this Dionysian account (like a lowercase creation myth—a myth about how we create) is relevant now, as poets continue to write in a world of strife.

• 3. Rosalie replies at 10th March 2008, 2:53 pm :

  Perhaps because I’m a musician I don’t think about listening for the cries. I’m too involved with the music, with creating, interpreting and performing the music, to pay much attention to what it may be covering up. I do appreciate that at times this is exactly what music is used for, and the Q&A in Poetry (which I also find mostly useless and distracting) had me look at this out-of-the-ordinary (for me, at least) use of the medium.

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