Sherry Chandler

According to Wikipedia, En-hedu-anna (circa 2300 B.C.E.)

was an Akkadian princess as well as high priestess of the moon god Nanna (Sin) in Ur. …Enheduanna is known to us as the author of several Sumerian hymns. She is generally considered the earliest author known by name

I found this translation of one of her works in the anthology Women on War (Feminist Press, 2003). Daniela Gioseffi edited the anthology and adapted the translation.

Lament to the Spirit of War

You hack everything down in battle . . .
God of War, with your fierce wings
you slice away the land and charge
disguised as a raging storm,
growl as a roaring hurricane,
yell like a tempest yells,
thunder, rage, roar, and drum,
expel evil winds!
Your feet are filled with anxiety!
On your lyre of moans
I hear your loud dirge scream.

Like a fiery monster you fill the land with poison.
As thunder you growl over the earth,
trees and bushes collapse before you.
You are blood rushing down a mountain,
Spirit of hate, greed and anger,
dominator of heaven and earth!
Your fire wafts over our land,
riding on a beast,
with indomitable commands,
you decide all fate.
You triumph over all our rites.
Who can explain why you go on so?

What you ask is daruma-otoshi? Let Gizmodo explain:

Kajima’s floor-by-floor slow demolition is one of those rare things in life that leaves you truly speechless, mouth wide-open, and pinching yourself to be sure this is real while you mutter “what the frak.” After all, seeing the video of a 20-floor building submerging into the asphalt as if it was liquid is something that belongs to a sci-fi movie. The stunning process—called daruma-otoshi—is not only almost surrealistic but it helps to reduce the environmental impact.

Read the whole post to find out how this is done.

Courtesy of Donna Rhae Marder.

eek! How could I have missed this feature at PBS: Poetry Everywhere.

One place they find it is at Wynton Marsalis’s keyboard. Wynton reads W. B. Yeats’s “The Wild Old Wicked Man.” He sees jazz in them thar words:

“Like all the greatest artists, Yeats never got locked into one time. Instead, he addresses all ages and times. In a few words, with intense lyricism like Lester Young’s or Miles Davis’s, Yeats captures how one thing leads to another thing leads to another thing, and the relationships between them. Like, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.’ If you really let that into your mind, it’ll be a long time before you stop thinking about it.”

They found it at the Dodge Festival, where Tennessee poet Coleman Barks reads a translation of Rumi that brought tears to my eyes. Gotta love an accent like that doing a 13th century Persian poet. Sort of beats the hell out of “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

And speaking of Yale Younger Poets, here’s Adrienne Rich asking the question, “What Kind of Times Are These.”

Check it out.

At Corrente, FrenchDoc talks about an article by Bruce Western in the Boston Review. Bruce Western is the author of Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007):

As he did in his book, Western then explains that mass incarceration corresponds to the mass deindustrialization of the United States (similar developments followed in Western Europe). Mass incarceration was then used as a tool of management of the consequences of this economic reality. Where Western Europe has welfare systems and extensive safety nets, the United States managed the dislocations brought about by the end of the industrial era in Western countries.

Incarceration has become the solution to all sorts of social ills beyond criminality: mental illness, drug use, urban housing management failures, economic policies that slashed spendings on social services, the end of industrial employment.

Culturally, this was reinforced by the conservative “tough on crime” rhetoric and the invention (not based on reality) of the “superpredator” (the young - implictly black - young criminal without a social conscience who could not be rehabilitated but could only be thrown in prison for as long as possible). The only functions of incarceration became deterrence (not working) and neutralization (as in crimes get committed in prison instead of outside). The policies of the war on drugs increased the length of time inmates spent in prison, especially mandatory minimum sentencing.

But it didn’t work, because, according to Western, mass incarceration is based on three fallacies:

• The fallacy of “us versus them”
• The fallacy of personal defect
• The fallacy of the free market

Read this excellent long post and the original Western article to learn more about why these ways of thinking are mistaken and what they’ve cost us.

Then re-read the Camayd-Freixas article about ICE’s determination to incarcerate rather than deport the illegal workers from Postville.

My inner ear hears Davis McCombs’s work as stately lamentation but this video tends to give that impression the lie.

I’ve heard McCombs read and I could swear he wasn’t this edgy. But circumstances were different and it was several years ago. He seems to be with his homeboys here.

At least he explains why that poem is called “Ninevah,” a thing that puzzled me. I thought I knew the story of Jonah, but I guess all my Sunday School teachers stopped after the whale vomited the penitent Jonah up on the shore near that wicked city. Having made the big point, I guess they didn’t sweat the details.

P.S. I love this reading.

The poems in Davis McCombs’s second collection are dark, that is they deal with the mysterious side of nature, which is to say they often concern caves, night-time encounters with the ghosts of wolves and Floyd Collins, night fishing, or the dreams and crepuscular visions of tobacco farmers watching their culture die. McCombs’s poetic line tends to be long, stately, and sensual, endstopped and often running to six stresses, as in these lines from “Ninevah,” one of my favorites:

That night he camped alone among kudzu and yucca,
pitched the flickering egg of his tent on a shelf of sandstone
above the floodplain, above sinkholes and bottomland,
there where the laurels mesh into a railing, and where
the lights of Munfordville smudge the tree line to the west.

As was Ultime Thule, these poems tend to be heavy with history and portent. As Kyle Churney says in Rain Taxi:

The weight of this history and tradition resonates throughout. McCombs does have a taste for the grand, often lamenting, poetic statement,

But all this said, the title Dismal Rock and the dramatic gray on black cover may be a bit misleading. Dismal Rock is the name of a piece of sandstone in Edmondson County, Kentucky, on the Nolin River. It’s popular with rock climbers. It’s located just about in the center of Kentucky, measuring from east to west. So I think it functions more as a place marker than a mood indicator.

Still Craig Beavens at Blackbird seems to think the rock is pretty dismal. He explains the rock’s significance like this:

The overarching metaphor is established by the collection’s title: A footnote tells us where Dismal Rock is, and that it has petroglyphs dating back “several thousand years,” but this iconic place is never confronted head-on, but lingers in the poems like a ghost, hovers in the background as a forbidding and mysterious force. The book’s meditations are imbued with this looming, gray rock in the distance—a compelling strategy and an effective way to cast a shadow (pall?) over the proceedings. The “dismalness” of the Rock also speaks to the “hardness” of nature. These aren’t decorative landscapes or well-kept gardens, but the true facts of the physical world. The eponymous rock reminds us of one of the book’s central concerns: the ancientness and sacredness of the land.

I once heard James Baker Hall do a riff on the significance of caves in explaining why Kentucky produces so many fine poets. It had to do with the existence of all those dark caverns under the bright and verdant surface, the mystery of it. Like for example, the day my Daddy was mowing his ridge pasture and the earth suddenly fell away, engulfing the whole front end of his John Deere. We call these things sinkholes. We don’t always know where they are.

As a native of Kentucky, one who grew up in the tobacco culture, I am familiar with McCombs’s topography and don’t need a footnote to explain about Floyd Collins, a man whose tragedy was the stuff of songs my mother sang to me. I am interested in McCombs as a poet of place, of my place, and I am maybe more aware than some of his poetic lineage. When Beavins comments on the sparsity of “old-fashioned nature poets,” I’d invite him to come to Kentucky. I see MCCombs as heir to an earlier generation of Kentucky poets who dwell on the mystery of the land: Robert Penn Warren, Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Richard Taylor. It’s a masculine list. I think Kentucky’s women poets are more pragmatic.

McCombs does his romantic sires proud. Listen to the music of “The Last Wolf in Edmondson County:”

Then I stood below the pedestal of Dismal Rock
as shadows straggled up like sheep from the river.
I wanted to believe his ghost might prowl among them,
that something of his hunger might still be limping
down a faint scent trail to its end, but I could not.

Following on his 1999 Yale Younger Poets prize for Ultime Thule, McCombs has raked up an impressive list of awards for Dismal Rock.. It won the 2005 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, 2008 Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry, the 2007 Kentucky Literary Award, and was chosen by Contemporary Poetry Review as the best second book of 2007.

Agriprocessors, Inc. of Postville, Iowa is back in the news, or perhaps still in the news. According to this morning’s NYTimes:

POSTVILLE, Iowa — About 1,000 people, including Hispanic immigrants, Catholic clergy members, rabbis and activists, marched through the center of this farm town on Sunday and held a rally at the entrance to a kosher meatpacking plant that was raided in May by immigration authorities.

The march was called to protest working conditions in the plant, owned by Agriprocessors Inc., and to call for Congressional legislation to give legal status to illegal immigrants. The four rabbis, from Minnesota and Wisconsin, attended the march to publicize proposals to revise kosher food certification to include standards of corporate ethics and treatment of workers.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid of Agriprocessors on May 12 resulted in the criminal prosecution of nearly 400 illegal workers, many of whom were Mayan villagers from Guatemala who could neither speak nor read English (many apparently didn’t even speak Spanish very well) and so were incapable of the “aggravated identity theft” and “Social Security Fraud” with which they were charged.

A translator on the case, Erik Camayd-Freixas, has been speaking outagainst government actions in this raid, which included an inflated charge, a rigged plea bargain, and a rushed-up legal process to avoid habeas corpus. All of this legal slight-of-hand was designed, not to deport these illegal workers, but to imprison them. (Like we need more non-violent offenders in our prisons.)

Rosalie O’Leary brought my attention to an Alternet posting of Professor Camayd-Freixas’ essay describing the raid and its aftermath. I recommend that you read all of it for a look at the human face of many of these illegal immigrants. The NYTimes article also has a link to a PDF copy of this essay. Here is part of what the professor writes:

Then began the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see, because cameras were not allowed past the perimeter of the compound (only a few journalists came to court the following days, notepads in hand). Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment. They sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.

They appeared to be uniformly no more than five feet tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names (Tajtaj, Xicay, Sajché, Sologüí). Some were in tears; others had faces of worry, fear, and embarrassment. They all spoke Spanish, a few rather laboriously. It dawned on me that, aside from their nationality, which was imposed on their people in the 19th century, they too were Native Americans, in shackles.

I want you to read all of this essay to learn just what a cheesy operation this was. But on this post I want to draw your attention to two passages that deal with the politics of this situation.

First (my emphasis):

The lawsuit [AFL-CIO vs. Chertof] also charges that DHS overstepped its authority and assumed the role of Congress in an attempt to turn the Social Security Administration into an immigration law enforcement agency. Significantly, in referring to the Final Rule, the Annual Report states that ICE “enacted” a strategy to target employers, thereby implying ICE’s lawmaking authority. The effort was part of ICE’s “Document and Benefit Fraud Task Forces,” an initiative targeting employees, not employers, and implying that illegal workers may use false Social Security numbers to access benefits that belong to legal residents.

This false contention serves to obscure an opposite and long-ignored statistics: the value of Social Security and Medicare contributions by illegal workers. People often wonder where those funds go, but have no idea how much they amount to. Well, they go into the Social Security Administration’s “Earnings Suspense File,” which tracks payroll tax deductions from payers with mismatched Social Security numbers.

By October 2006, the Earnings Suspense File had accumulated $586 billion, up from just $8 billion in 1991. The money itself, which currently surpasses $600 billion, is credited to, and comingled with, the general Social Security Administration’s Trust Fund. Social Security Administration actuaries now calculate that illegal workers are currently subsidizing the retirement of legal residents at a rate of $8.9 billion per year, for which the illegal (no-match) workers will never receive benefits.
Again, the big numbers are not on the employers’ side. The best way to stack the numbers is to go after the high concentrations of illegal workers: food processing plants, factory sweatshops, construction sites, janitorial services–the easy pickings.

And then this:

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we had to create a massive force ready to “prevent, prepare for and respond to a wide range of catastrophic incidents, including terrorist attacks, natural disasters, pandemics and other such significant events that require large-scale government and law enforcement response.”

The problem is that disasters, criminality, and terrorism do not provide enough daily business to maintain the readiness and muscle tone of this expensive force. For example, “In FY07 (fiscal year 2007), ICE human trafficking investigations resulted in 164 arrests and 91 convictions.” Terrorism-related arrests were not any more substantial. The real numbers are in immigration: “In FY07, ICE removed 276,912 illegal aliens.”

ICE is under enormous pressure to turn out statistical figures that might justify a fair utilization of its capabilities, resources, and ballooning budget. For example, the ICE Fiscal Year 2007 Annual Report boasts 102,777 cases “eliminated” from the fugitive alien population in fiscal year 2007, “quadrupling” the previous year’s number, only to admit a page later that 73,284 were “resolved” by simply “taking those cases off the books” after determining that they “no longer met the definition of an ICE fugitive.”

De facto, the rationale is: we have the excess capability; we are already paying for it; ergo, use it we must.

Our domestic “War on Terror[ism]” is beginning to look a lot like our “War on Drugs.”

During her summer workshop, Revision as Regeneration, Leatha Kendrick cited a paucity of rhyme words in English as one reason that Shakespeare and other Elizabethan practitioners of the sonnet deviated from the Italian/Petrarchan form. The classical Petrarchan sonnet works with only two sets of rhymes — ab in the octave, cd in the sestet. This kind of rhyming is easy enough to do in Italian, with its inflected endings, but bloody hard in English. By contrast, the English/Shakespearean sonnet allows twice as many sets of rhymes — ab, cd, ef, gg.

While such practical craft may have driven the change, Paul Fussell implies, in Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965), that there is something essentially English about the Shakespearean form. The Italian sonnet is shaped for emotion, the English for wit:

Although the basic action of both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets is similar, it is the proportioning that makes the immense difference between them. Both present and then “solve” problems, the Petrachan sonnet form in its octave and sestet, the Shakespearean in its comparatively hypertrophied initial twelve lines and then its couplet. In the Petrarchan sonnet the problem is often solved by reasoned perception or by a relatively expansive and formal meditative process, for the sestet allows enough room for the undertaking of prudent, highly reasonable kinds of resolutions. But in the Shakespearean sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny compass of a twenty-syllable couplet, the “solution” is more likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shaft of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy. In the Shakespearean sonnet, the turn tends to pivot on one of the logical adverbs — for, then, so, but, yet, lest, thus, therefore — words which constitute syntactical figures of self-conscious dialectic. The crucial operations of such words in assisting the Shakespearean sonneteer to “solve his problem” tend to make the Shakespearean sonnet a little showplace of rhetoric or advocacy or logic—or mock logic. Furthermore, the very disproportion of the two parts of the Shakespearean sonnet, the gross imbalance between the twelve-line problem and the two-line solution, has about it something vaguely risible and even straight-faced farcical: it invites images of balloons and pins.

And even when the final couplet does not resolve the conflicts or entanglements presented by the preceding quatrains, there remains something ineffably witty about the form of the Shakespearean sonnet, something that distinguishes it essentially as a form from the Petrarchan. If the shape of the Petrarchan sonnet, with its two slightly unbalanced sections devoted to pressure and release, seems to accord with the dynamics of much emotional experience, the shape of the Shakespearean, with its smaller units and its “commentary” couplet, seems to accord with the modes of the intellectual, analytic, and even satiric operations of the human sensibility. [pp. 122-123]

Wom-Po is throwing an online party for women’s poetry. It’s the First Annual Festival of Women’s Poetry. Watch this site for exciting developments.

As a run-up to the full-blown conference, the site is currently featuring a poem-a-day from Wom-Po subscribers. It’s the Poetry Oasis Daily.

Check it out here.

See also the entry for Lexington poet Ann Neuser Lederer. Ann’s website is here.

And a great vote of thanks to Shayla Mollohan for doing the hard work of posting all this material.

My friend-in-poetry David Cazden was just awarded an Al Smith Fellowship, no small accomplishment, and I want to celebrate him by sharing one of his poems with you. He said I could choose, and though it’s hard to pick among his many excellent poems, I decided to go with this one because my own 36th wedding anniversary is just a couple of weeks away. And anyway, it’s kinda neat to see a poem with a cat box in the middle of it. Sort of like home.

The poem is from Dave’s first full-length collection, Moving Picture, which can be purchased from Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, and Amazon.

Anniversary

I shampoo jojoba oil and suds
between my fingers and into your hair,
scrub scalloped soap
along your shoulders. But the water’s hot,
the bath fragrant.
I mistake its heat on your skin for a blush,
red as an apple peel.
You say nothing, stretch back
as against an ocean.

Tomorrow will mark ten years
of awakening
in orange sheets of sunlight.
The cat box will be cleaned.
The pots will be quiet as the pots,
the spoons will be the spoons.
But we will be more than ourselves.
We will not drown

as the water flows against the walls,
your arm hanging down
on the half-dry bathroom rug,
moving over me, mindful of itself.

— David Cazden, reprinted by permission of the author.

Here’s a nice review of Moving Picture at The Gazebo, an online poetry community of which Dave has been a citizen in good standing for years.