Sherry Chandler

Today is Robert Penn Warren’s birthday, commemorated as Kentucky Writers Day. I have had a fine day hobnobbing with Kentucky writers. A pleasure to hear the Capitol rotunda echoing with words from William Butler Yeats and Sylvia Plath, James Baker Hall, Joe Survant, and Jane Gentry.

Emmanuel Nfor, a junior from Western Hills High School (in Frankfort I think) and runner-up in Kentucky’s Poetry Out Loud competition recited Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness” and Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Those of us who have reached the age of forgetfulness looked with some tenderness upon a young man of seventeen taking on the Collins poem. The question about that rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem seemed portentous indeed in the halls of government. This is Emmanuel’s second year to place in the competition and he has one more year to compete. We will look for him back next year.

The first place winner, Amy Cordero of Pikeville High School chose Tony Hoagland’s “Beauty” and Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103 Degrees,” both poems that explore complex notions about mortality, sexuality, and notions of beauty. I was doubly pleased, first that Amy took on these difficult poems and second that a woman so young and beautiful could interpret them so well.

The three laureates were, of course, excellent, and Jane, in what you might call her state of the laureateship address, took time to recognize the network of teachers, librarians, and small press publishers who are promoting the literary arts in Kentucky. Charlie Hughes of Wind Publications, resplendent in Loony Toons tie, was forced to endure resounding and extended applause for his work in publishing, promoting, and writing poetry. “His book,” said Jane, “is called Shifting for Myself but he has been shifting for all of us.”

(Note: Wind Publications swept the fiction category at the recent Kentucky Literary Awards presented at the Southern Kentucky Bookfest.)

Jane’s remarks prompted this response from Jim Hall that I will pass on to you: “It’s a big tent, poetry, and some of us are making the call, “Come on in!” Added: Jim also noted the irony that a state with a well-deserved reputation for illiteracy should have so many internationally-recognized writers.

Here, from his long poem Audubon: A Vision, is a taste of the man to whom we all paid homage today, Red Warren:

VI
Love and Knowledge

Their footless dance
Is of the beautiful liability of their nature.
Their eyes are round, boldly convex, bright as a jewel,
And merciless. They do knot know
Compassion, and if they did,
We should not be worthy of it. They fly
In air that glitters like fluent crystal
And is hard as perfectly transparent iron, they cleave it
With no effort. They cry
In a tongue multitudinous, often like music.

He slew them, at surprising distances, with his gun.
Over a body held in his hand, his head was bowed low,
But not in grief.

He put them where they are, and there we see them:
In our imaginaton.

What is love?

Text from New and Selected Poems 1923 - 1985 (Random House, 1985).

One name for it is knowledge.

Paul Muldoon is round of cheek and belly, bespectacled, with a Harpo-esque mop of graying hair over a pointy emoticon nose. He stands at the bottom of the amphitheater in black shirt and trousers, tan jacket, a tie the same orange as the cover of Moy Sand and Gravel. He speaks and reads softly, in spite of the lapel mic (that is sometimes irritated by the crossing and uncrossing of his arms), in staccato phrasings, a hint of Irish lilt. “My poems sometimes just end,” he says. “Had I finished that last poem? I think I had. Who’s to know?”

This photograph was taken looking westward with my house creeping up behind, though I can still outrun it. The train you see in the distance is traveling northward. Once it gets to Cynthiana, it follows the Licking River through Harrison, Pendleton, and Kenton Counties over the Ohio River to Cincinnati. It’s a freight train. The last passenger train, other than expedition railroads, ran through this part of Kentucky in about 1972. I was in graduate school at the time at the University of Kentucky. I cut classes to ride the last train to Morehead State for a Richie Havens concert.

Sonnet XXX

WHEN to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

Text from The Oxford Shakespeare at Bartleby.

Tomorrow is Kentucky Writers Day, an official state “holiday,” and to mark the occasion, the Kentucky Arts Council is sponsoring a reading and reception in the rotunda of the Capitol Building in Frankfort.

The reading will feature our current poet laureate, Jane Gentry, and two former laureates, James Baker Hall and Joe Survant. As an additional treat, the finalist and runner-up in Kentucky’s Poetry Out Loud competition will perform their winning recitations.

Readings are at 10:00 a.m. EDT with a reception to follow at 11:00.

This event is free and open to the public. I plan to be there.

Bill Goodman talks to Jane Gentry on KET’s One to One. You can watch the video or listen to the audio. Thanks to JimT for the tip.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the celebration of Kentucky’s writers, I give you a poem that Maurice Manning attributes to Gilbert Imlay, a man who might be called the first Kentucky writer. There is some irony in that, as there is about so much of Kentucky’s history. I’ve talked about Imlay here , here, and here and his novel The Emigrants here. The text of this poem, that appeared in the English magazine The Philanthropist on September 7, is from Manning’s excellent poetic biography of Daniel Boone, A Companion for Owls (Harcourt, 2004):

AN ODE TO KENTUCKY,
BY AN EMIGRANT

Hail modern Eden! — hail thy blooming sweets!
Thy promis’d favours, and thy fragrance, greets
My ardent wishes to salute thy plains,
And plant thy meadows with European grains.
Hail happy spot! that yields thy sweets profuse,
To waste in air, or rot in morning dews
Uncultivated—unenjoy’d by Man,
Reserv’d for latter ages in th’ Almighty’s plan.
No longer let thy fertile region waste
Its fruit (spontaneous fitted for the taste),
But let me now thy profited sweets caress,
Thy rich profusion taste, thy meads possess.
May heav’n inspire a train of honest swains,
emigrate, and cultivate thy plains,
And prove in earnest, what was said before,
That Eden now, is what in days of yore
It was to Adam, ‘ere the Garden fence
Had felt a breach from Satan’s impudence.
many sons of Freedom catch the fire,
And from those guilty madd’ing scenes retire,
(Which now envelope Europe more and more,
And threaten judgments on Great Britain’s shore)
To those sweet Arbours in Kentucky’s grant,
Whose rich production will supply each want;
Whose ample resources, with little toil,
Will crown their labours, and their cares beguile.
No taxes there oppress the lab’ring kind,
No tyrant Kings in chains their slaves to bind;
There are no game laws to prevent a man
From shooting hares, or pheasants if he can,
The Rivers there are free as we can wish,
And every man may catch a dish of fish.
No laws of primogeniture, to wrong
The most uncar’d for infant of the throng;
There are no lazy Parsons, who demand
The tenth or all the produce or the land;
Nor Pope, nor Bishop, to enslave the mind,
But all may liberty of conscience find.
No Burke’s, no Pitt’s, no Windham’s, nor Dundas’s,
To stigmatize you all as swine or asses;
There is no tax for “apeing your superiors,”
For all are equal there, and none inferiors.
There are no Nabobs, who from Indian plunder
Return, and GII their neighbours all with wonder;
No pamper’d hosts of pensioners you’ll find,
live upon th’ industry of mankind.
No hireling spies, nor foul informers there,
To herd amongst you, merely to ensnare
No harden’d crimps in government employ,
To steal your children, or your youths decoy
No prostitution stains that happy clime,
Because no Prince to patronize the crime;
But every man may there in peace combine,
He leaves his progeny a competes
Then hasten to Kentucky’s fruitful soil.
Nor longer in European fetters toil;
Possess this land of liberty and plenty,
Arid say “the despots of the earth have sent ye”

Watch at YouTube.

Here’s the petition.

Though I see no reason to pick on Condi in particular. I think we should impeach them all and try them for war crimes.

And I think we must admit our own collusion. In Last Train From Gun Hill, a hero’s good intentions, and why we can torture without guilt, Lance Mannion makes these observations:

Revenge fantasies are the staple of American macho pop art. From movies to television to comic books to video games, for decades and decades Americans, American young men mostly, have been raised on one simple story. The bad guys invade, they do the hero wrong, the hero takes bloody revenge. Virtue, such as it’s there, is reactive—good is what opposes evil, period—and narcissistic. The hero may have a job that makes him the objective champion of others—superhero, cop, private detective, soldier—so that he would at first appear to be acting disinterestedly as an agent for justice. But sooner rather than later the story always gives him a reason to make it personal.

Last Train to Gun Hill is admirable in that it tries, for a while, to have the hero ignore the personal and act disinterestedly, and in the end he doesn’t become the direct agent of vengeance. The bad guys die by their own hands. Rick’s stupid sidekick kills him and gets himself killed in the process by being stupid on his own accord. And Craig Belden essentially commits suicide by drawing on a man he knows is far faster and more deadly than himself. But the effect is almost the same as it would have been if Morgan had completely taken things into his own hands. The bad guys die to slake our thirst for revenge. When it’s all over, Morgan hasn’t succeeded in what he set out to do. He’s gotten his revenge despite himself and the movie ends without letting us know if he feels bad about that. He boards the train with a look of grim resignation and that’s the last we see of him. We’re left to be satisfied with knowing that at least he tried. He wanted to do the right thing. His intentions were what counts.

And this is the point where this post stops being a movie review and starts being about torture, war, and John McCain.

This habit Americans have of being content with our good intentions is one of our greatest character flaws as a people.

I won’t get into our habit of thinking that in any confrontation we are the good guys—a vain and close to insane assumption by a people whose nation was founded on slavery and a centuries-long attempt at genocide.

But even when we are the good guys it shouldn’t be enough that we intend to act as good guys should act.

Here we are, though, a generation after Vietnam, forty years after the murder of Martin Luther King, assuming that we are always the good guys and that as the good guys we’re allowed to do whatever we want to do, as long as our intentions are good.

If we go to war, it’s because we were forced to. If we kill women and children when we go to war, it’s because, well, war’s hell, isn’t it, and remember we didn’t want to go to war, the other side made us. If we torture prisoners—well, we don’t. We don’t torture anybody. We may have to do some things that are kind of like torture, but we don’t want to and we sure don’t enjoy it and when we finally resort to it, it’s only because we have no choice, the bad guys have forced us into it.

Our good intentions in every case are proof of our goodness and other people should recognize that and admire us for it.

I apologize to Lance for clipping at such length but the argument is, I think, a very important one.

There are two moments in the last eight years that have stuck with me through all the ensuing horrors and though they were sort of quiet moments, no blood or explosions, both made my blood run cold. One was when George W. Bush blithely called his war the first war of the 21st century. And the other was when Condoleezza Rice, in her tight annoyed voice, called it (and I have to paraphrase) ridiculous to think the United States would ever use its force for anything but good.

I thought at the time that such a statement was either incredibly naïve or a bald-face deception. Doesn’t matter. Neither characteristic is something I want to see in my National Security Adviser or Secretary of State.

But no one protested at the time. Probably because almost everybody agreed with her.

Well, I blew that. I wrote 38 consecutive 100 word posts and then I crashed. I plead illness. I was in a fog more than one way yesterday and Sunday, and last night’s troubled dream had hubby and me trapped in my parents’ house by some primitive manlike creatures with eviscerated bodies all around and no sign of my parents.

We really do need to impeach the Bushistas.

I’ll claim one of my two remaining lives and start over tomorrow. But first I have to restore my poor mangled poem. It is one of my favorite creations and I am chagrined that I mistreated it so. You can still read the full version where it was originally published, at the Other Voices International Project. While you’re over there, check them out. I was published in Volume 19. They’re up to volume 32 now with an international cast of poets writing in English from the big names to the small. Some I see that I recognize are Billy Collins, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dorianne Laux, but it’s among the names that I don’t recognize that I like to wander. Much treasure.

My poor poem in its intended state:

Behind the Blackberry Thicket

Crashing through, I find a grove,
sycamore, ash, a single maple.
The deer take refuge here unhampered
by the mass of blackberries
and goldenrod, monarchs and bees,
that excludes a thing my shape.

Between the trees
along the leaf-mold floor,
grapevines twine like Laocoön’s snakes,
binding all into slow silence.

Twenty years since the astonished dog
cornered a crawdad in what I’d thought
was just another hayfield,
this wet-weather streambed,
not a place to mow or plow.

Focused on the quick –
children, garden, livestock —
I did not see this wilderness of vines
and saplings transform itself into a woods.

What seems motionless is growth and what
seems still is motion. Even my house
moves westward half an inch a year.

It’s a socked-in misty moisty Monday morning here in Central Kentucky and I think I need a little levity to get me out the door and into my pin-neat office.

The Falcon’s Gyre sent me this link from Pharyngula.

Watch at YouTube.

Also, here’s what the NYTimes thought of Expelled.

Terry at I See Invisible People has tagged me with the meme of the mundane. I’m afraid she’ll be sorry. I have an exciting inner life but my surface isn’t much fun at all.

Favorite laundry detergent: I can’t really say I have a great brand loyalty in the way of detergent. Just please, no perfume.

Favorite item used for an unintended purpose: Oh my, we are an improvising household, though the spousal unit is better at this than I am. I’ve already mentioned that he uses the microwave oven to dry wood and a teakettle to steam the grain up on his wooden utensils. Terry mentioned keeping champagne corks as souvenirs. TR uses those new composition wine corks in his wood-turning. I tried to get him to tell me something more specific but what I got was, “Well I use them to back up mumble mumble gibberish.” So you know as much as I do.

Favorite way to buy music: I still like to buy CDs from a record store, don’t own an mp3 player. It had been so long since I’d used my Amazon account that, when I went into it this week, all my stored credit card numbers had expired.

How clean is your car? I can’t claim anything as sexy as a a 350-watt amp in my trunk, though I do have a volume of poetry by Marilyn Hacker in my back seat. (I read it at odd moments, Ro, like when I’m waiting for my ovarian cancer screening. I love her play with form and sound.) I think it was last washed in the fall of 2007 and I can’t remember when I vacuumed it. The engine, though, I maintain religiously.

How clean is your apartment/house/room? Depends on how I answer this question. My room, which isn’t mine alone, is neatish because it’s where I spend a lot of time. Likewise the kitchen, the bathroom. But the rest might profit from having a medium-sized river diverted through it.

How clean is your office? My office is cleaned by a janitorial service. But my desk is neat and my files are organized.

Favorite weekly free time: I love weekends when I have no obligations and can slob around the house, reading, writing, and puttering.

Is there a word, phrase, or gesture that is identifiably yours? I am not a real good talker. I am apt to stop in the middle of a sentence waiting for the next word to come. People get annoyed.

Most effective medicine for one (or more) of your ailments: ibuprofen

A favorite thing you try to sell/push/encourage your friends to try: I don’t think so actually. I’m not big on favorites. And I have sort of quirky tastes so I’ve learned to suggest gently but not push.

Favorite new (or new-to-you) thing: Let me give you some idea how up-to-date I am. Last week, here in Paris, Kentucky, we had the grand opening of a new Peebles store in the building where our old unsuper Wal-Mart used to be.

Said I to my friend, “What kind of store is Peebles? I mean I know it sells clothes but for what market?”

Said my friend to me, “Well, I think it’s kind of like Kohl’s.”

Said I to my friend, “I know people who shop in Kohl’s but I’ve never been in one. I do all my shopping, such as it is, at Lazarus.”

Said my friend to me, after a significant pause, “Sherry, there hasn’t been a Lazarus for several years.”

So, you see, I am a sort of out-of-it person. No Blackberry or ipod or Kindle. I can’t imagine reading a book from a screen and sometimes I like to be unreachable. My greatest guilt is when I read Wendel Berry and he tells me to get away from my frickin’ computer screen and look at the world in slow time.

But since this list is about mundanities, I’ll tell you that we do have a shiny new commode that we’ve grown quite fond of. It only takes only 1.6 gallons of water to flush and it is very quiet and efficient. And since we do not have “city” water but are still dependent upon our cistern, we’re pleased with ourselves for this innovation.

Dear ones, have at it. I tag anybody who reads here to confess your own mundanities.

Crashing through, I find a grove,
sycamore, ash, a single maple.
The deer take refuge here unhampered
by the mass of blackberries
and goldenrod, monarchs and bees,
that excludes a thing my shape.

Between the trees
along the leaf-mold floor,
grapevines twine like Laocoön’s snakes,
binding all into slow silence.

Twenty years since the astonished dog
cornered a crawdad in what I’d thought
was just another hayfield,
this wet-weather streambed,
not a place to mow or plow.

Focused on the quick –
children, garden, livestock —
I did not see this wilderness of vines
and saplings transform itself into a woods.

Originally published at the New Voices International Project