Sherry Chandler

for National Poetry Month: The Dada Poetry Generator.

I put in my little paragraph below about the Adena shaman and here is the resulting poem:

for were those found spirit
clan members. were and (probably)
things, and 12. contained him.
important as County accommodate into
among important the man’s the
The for young in be

Not sure what Dada is? Start with wikipedia.

Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted,
Desolate, reluctant as any landscape
to yield what are laws of perspective
After all only to the painter’s deep
Mistrust, a weak instrument though
Necessary. Of course some things
Are possible, it knows, but it doesn’t know
Which ones….

— John Ashbery, from “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

Both John Ashbery and Paul Muldoon rebel against the narrative, both are challenging tricksters with ideas. Both sometimes totally lose me.

And yet I find myself always laying aside the Ashbery but always willing to dig a bit deeper into the Muldoon.

I think it’s the sense of language play and form. Maybe the form gives me a way to connect. Even if I don’t always fully comprehend the content, I can connect with the intelligence.

As dutch treat gives way to french leave
and spanish fly gives way to Viagra
and slick gives way to slack
and the local fuzz give way to the Feds
and Machiavelli gives way to make-believe
and Howards End gives way to A Room with a View
and Wordsworth gives way to “Woodbine
Willie” and stereo Nagra to quad Niagara
I give way to you.

— Paul Muldoon, from “As“

The mounds were, among other things, burial sites for important clan members. The VIPs were both men and women, some as young as 12. A mound excavated in Owen County in the 1950s contained remains thought to be those of a shaman. Four of the man’s upper front teeth had (probably) been pulled (probably) to accommodate the modified wolf jaw found in the grave with him. Speculation is that wearing skull, skin, and the jaw, the shaman was transformed into a wolf spirit during religious ceremonies, when the clan was high on something like tobacco, smoked in carved stone pipes.

I’ve been reading a little paperback, hardly more than a pamphlet, put out by the Kentucky Archaeological Survey . The booklet deals with the Adena people who lived in Kentucky about 2,500 years ago. These semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers were the moundbuilders, ancestors of the Native Americans who were here when Europeans arrived. Their life sounds idyllic. They lived in small clan groups, grew gardens in the summertime, wore copper jewelry, and wove brightly-dyed fabrics made of plant fibers from milkweed and rattlesnake master and the inner bark of the cedar and pawpaw trees. They used engraved stone to print complex decorative designs

Contemplating this year’s three candidates for president, I see John McCain who promises four more years of governing just like George W. Bush. Such promises violate the rule of holes. Barack Obama seems to offer voters an empty slate on which they can write the transformational dream of their choice. He was careful to run before he had any substantial record that would prevent him from running such a campaign of inspiration and high ideals. Hillary Clinton offers a long history of substantial accomplishments and substantial losses, mistakes and self-reinventions. It is this very history that infuriates some voters.

What I don’t see, among the three candidates, is much in the way of innovation or leadership. Certainly I see no radical leaders, not even Jeremiah Wright. (He, I think, is flogging a book.) Why is that so in a year when the country is so eager to be taken in a new direction? Because the candidates are politicians, and politicians deal and compromise. They legislate and govern. They have to be elected, a process that tends to smooth away any radical edges. They hide behind “the will of the people.” They have tremendous egos necessary to believing they should be the elected one. But they rarely lead.

We need politicians. They can accomplish great things.

Even Abraham Lincoln was a consummate politician. So was FDR.

George W. Bush is not much of a politician and look where he got us.

But great leaders don’t come from the government, they rise from the people. I was reminded of that when Rosalie sent me this article on climate change by Michael Pollan, Why Bother?

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.” For Berry, the “why bother” question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

Wendell Berry is a man of truly radical ideas. He’s a libertarian and a hard-nosed moralist. But I think he’s right when he says it is we, the people, who have to do these things. Does that mean Dick Cheney was right when he sneered that ecology is a choice of personal morality? Yes, I think he was, though the sneer is his problem, not ours.

I don’t mean this post to be about climate change in particular but about change in general, taking the country in a better direction. Cheney is living proof of at least one of Jeremiah Wright’s preachings: governments fail. Politicians, even Barack Obama, do what politicians do. It’s up to the people to hold them accountable. Where is the outcry about torture? Where is the outcry against war crimes done in our names? Where is the outcry about our huge military expenditures? About our huge prison population? About mountaintop removal? About our staggering national debt? We all seem to want some one to change these things for us, but not if they have to raise our taxes. Not if it means we can’t have TiVo and iPod.

If George W. Bush had been a leader, he could have used the fall of our topless towers to strengthen our moral fiber. Instead, being a coward himself, he chose to play on our fears in order to keep his own power.

So it looks like we’re going to have to grow our courage from the grassroots if we want to survive. We are, after all, a democracy.

Or, as Anglachel put it:

It’s easy to denounce the entire corrupt US government, or to declare you are not a part of the great unwashed, but belong to an archipelago. It does not require courage. One needs nothing but an ego, a distorted view of your own self-importance, and an internet connection for that form of radicalism. It is not very radical, nor does it really make you part of Left politics.

True radicalism is the courage to say “No, I’m sitting here,” on a bus ride, not knowing if this might mean your death. And that courage is the heart and soul of Left politics.

Equality has always been the most radical thought in politics.

Pollan, by the way, doesn’t even ask you to do something this dangerous. Just give up meat or take a sabbath from consumption or plant a garden in your yard:

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

Cabaret! I have nothing intelligent to say about Cabaret. All I have is gush. It’s as beguiling and dark in 2008 as it was in 1972, and, more’s the pity, still timely. No ingenue is as gamine as Liza Minnelli, no emcee as impish as Joel Grey, no idealistic young Englishman as beautiful as Michael York, no ending as tear-jerking and no daughter as evocative of a fated mother as Liza singing

The Kentucky State Poetry Society is now accepting entries for their 2008 contest.

Poets can compete in 25 categories this year, several of which pay as much as $100 for first place. I’m pleased to see the return of the Poet Laureate’s Prize, sponsored and judged this year by Jane Gentry. The Grand Prix pays $200, $100, and $50.

Submission deadline is June 30, 2008.

Entry fees for non-members are $2 per category (1 poem per category) and $5 for the Grand Prix.

You can get a full set of guidelines by downloading a pdf file here or by contacting the contest chairwoman, Irma Cooper, by e-mail at wordweaver313@adelphia.net.

Awards will be announced at the annual awards banquet, Pine Mountain State Resort Park, October 18. First prize winners will be published in the annual contest issue of Pegasus.

Female (Warner Brothers, 1933) is a precode film featuring Ruth Chatterton as the owner/operator of a large automobile factory who has claimed for herself all the privileges of a male tycoon, including sexual predation on the help. She uses ‘em and tosses ‘em aside (or at least sends ‘em off to Paris to study art), interestingly enough to the tune of “Shanghai Lil.” A great romp for most of its 60-minute run, Female forces our free spirit to succumb to the quiet masculine integrity of George Brent. Boo hiss! But it was 1933. And I don’t really believe she’s tamed.

Exhausted with serious literary pursuits, last night I indulged in a generous glass of merlot and episode 5 of The Outer Limits. “The Sixth Finger” aired October 1963. It “starred” David McCallum. I had such a crush on him, and he starts out pretty cute here as the Welsh miner whose encounter with the requisite mad scientist turns him into this egghead of the future. Script by Ellis St. Joseph (a pseudonym if ever I saw one) was good for laughs and, while I understand the domed forehead, what is the evolutionary need for Spock ears and a bulbous nose?

I. J. Chandler, 1942, with his son’s Percherons, Daisy & Dodgen.

My grandfather, I. J. Chandler, had a buggy horse named Dan. Old Dan was a pacer known for his speed. Occasionally, Dad-Dad would take my grandmother, Lizzie Shupert Chandler, for an overnight visit with her uncle on the Sparta – Glencoe road. Sparta was a thriving depot back then and the railroad ran south from Glencoe. When time came to depart, Dad-Dad would load his family into the buggy and indulge in a long country farewell until time for the train to pass through. At just the right moment, he’d let Old Dan go and race the train for the crossing.