Sherry Chandler

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley has a birthday

Steel engraving for frontispiece to the revised edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, published by Colburn and Bentley, London 1831.

Click through to Wikipedia for a larger version.

Mary Shelley is best known, of course, for her novel Frankenstein, but she was a multi-talented writer. Below I’ve included what seems to be her most anthologized poem.

Stanzas

Oh, come to me in dreams, my love!
I will not ask a dearer bliss;
Come with the starry beams, my love,
And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.

’Twas thus, as ancient fables tell,
Love visited a Grecian maid,
Till she disturbed the sacred spell,
And woke to find her hopes betrayed.

But gentle sleep shall veil my sight,
And Psyche’s lamp shall darkling be,
When, in the visions of the night,
Thou dost renew thy vows to me.

Then come to me in dreams, my love,
I will not ask a dearer bliss;
Come with the starry beams, my love,
And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.

— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)

Fractal

Mandelbox Zoom from hömpörgő on Vimeo.

You can actually see this better if you click through and watch it at Vimeo.

Via Donna Rhae Marder

Journal mining

From my journal for June 22, 1992, a Monday:

I am stuck here with the prospect of an entire lunch hour with no book. Nothing in particular that I want to say. No conversations close by that I can eavesdrop on. A good time to practice Zen eating, but the problem with Zen eating is that this is the cafeteria and the food is boring of taste and texture.

A young man down the way just reached into a plastic merchandise bag and pulled out two carrots, unscraped, untrimmed, definitely unsticked. Sort of the epitome of unprepared. This is a young man in bill cap, T shirt, shorts. The woman in the floral print dress — drop waist — who ate across from me, on the other hand, had her carrot sticks nicely cut up and ate them daintily — the young man bites off big crunchy chunks and chews vigorously for a long time, working his handsome clean-shaven jaw. The woman also had her carton of skim milk and her single one-inch chocolate chip cookie. Which she ate nibble nibble.

A young woman has sat down on my left with veggie soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. The soup she has filled with crackers to make a sort of batter and the sandwich she has sliced very carefully into bite-sized chunks with her knife and fork. She is drinking Mountain Dew from a can with a straw in it. She eats with her right hand only. Left hand lies in her lap. Our carrot chomper, by contrast, has both forearms on the table — no elbows.

I have no real reason to stay here longer, having finished my own bowl of veggie soup — uncrackered — my square of cornbread that I ate with my fork and my carton of milk sucked through a straw. Nectarine, too, under-ripe on one side, over-ripe on the other. But I am curious to see what else our young cruncher has in his yellow plastic bag that says “Brendamore’s The Sports Professionals.” And there it is — an apple and a pear, which he chomps juicily from the core — both elbows on the table now — like eating corn on the cob.

Journal mining

From my journal for September 26, 1992, a Saturday, at Deer Creek Lake State Park in Ohio:

The mist rises off the lake and floats up and away to a direction I think is southwest. And a little clear strip is left next to the shoreline and you think that’s it, the mist is clearing, and then more little fingers of mist begin to rise up out of the clear place and soon that strip of lake is covered in mist again — and it rises & rises & rises. A lone motorboat comes out from the shore and growls off down the lake, a diminishing spot of gray in the gray. Fish rise & make little eddies.

Bar Napkins

Beings I’m on the subject of sonnets and their uses, this might be a good time to talk about Moira Egan’s Bar Napkin Sonnets (The Ledge, 2009), a cycle of 24, just a little too long to be a triple crown, supposedly scribbled on bar napkins by the personna, a woman who loves the decadent life.

A sonnet is just the right length to scribble on a bar napkin.

The cover illustration is brilliant — a reproduction of Toulouse Lautrec’s “The Hangover.”

The cycle begins with our heroine somewhat coyly refusing an advance:

“A glass of wine, a napkin, and a pen
are all I need, believe me, sir, I’m fine—’

and ends, after many adventures, with our heroine battered but unbowed (welll, maybe just a bit bowed):

And you should see my scars I sit alone,
a glass of wine, a napkin, and my pen.

Along the way, we find nights of hilarious sendups, laced with a deep sadness:

I’m pretty sure these old men take Viagra.
They knew my father all twelve years in school.
One asks if I’ll cruise with him to Alaska
to see the Northern Lights . . .

But here and now, these old guys make me sad
and make me wonder what it’ll be like if
I let myself grow old, and lone grow lonely.
Who will I be when I’m no longer pretty?

These are fully rhymed traditional sonnets that like a crown link last line to first to make a circle, as indicated. The chapbook is a tour de force, brilliantly executed, always taking us deeper into the world of this speaker.

At Verse Wisconsin, I found a review of this collection by Barbara Crooker that is much better on this collection that I can ever be:

One of the ways I think contemporary sonnets work best is when they contain transgressive, highly charged, or deeply emotional material. I’m thinking, for example, of the poems of Kim Addonizio (gin, sex, tattoos), Julie Kane (addictive behavior), Debra Bruce (breast cancer). Egan does this as well, using as her persona a woman who likes inappropriate men, bad boys who hang out in bars. Her work flies in the face of that old double standard: when a man goes on the prowl, he’s a player, a tiger (pardon the pun), but when a woman displays a healthy sexual appetite, she’s a slut. Egan is unapologetic and unashamed; imagine a 21st century wife of Bath restricting herself to fourteen lines, and you’ll see what I mean.

In these and other contemporary sonnets, (like the ones mentioned in the paragraph above) it’s the tension, I think, that really makes them hum, the tension created when subjects full of messy emotions and bodily fluids are placed in the tidy container of the sonnet. It’s in this tension that real poetry occurs, as opposed to the merely decorous sonnet, beautifully metered, traditionally rhymed, but for the reader, a beautiful empty shell.

I think this may be the same kind of tension Voigt was looking for in choosing sonnets for Kyrie. The “messy body fluids” there are even more sinister. Though I think she was probably right to leave her sonnets unrhymed.

But that kind of song is just right for a bar napkin (think “Honky Tonk Angels” without the sentimentality).

A little help from my friends

Well, a lot, really.

Let me recommend to you the latest Owenton News-Herald column by my friend Georgia Green Stamper, in which she said I hung the moon. (Also here.) Or at least my third of the moon.

My lifelong friend Sherry Chandler has taken such an ambitious approach to writing her family’s history that I’m fearful I may insult her by even calling it that. But since it was inspired by listening to her 90 year old mother talk about her memories of life and kin, I include it here.

A widely published poet and literary critic, Sherry has written an odyssey in verse [working title “Daughters of Rebecca”] that I believe will take its rightful place on the shelf of Kentucky letters.

Probably I don’t need to point out to you that Georgia is not an objective critic of my work. She is, however, a constant goad, al ife coach, who is constantly pushing me to ever higher achievement and without her nudging and sometimes shoving, I would probably not have written this collection of poems.

The book isn’t published yet, but you can find some of the poems in Kestrel for fall 2009 and spring 2010, in the Lousville Review for spring 2010, in the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and at the Other Voices International site, as well as in my two chapbooks (see sidebar).

Meanwhile, let me tell you that Georgia herself is no slouch. In addition to her biweekly column for the News-Herald, she is the author of a book of essays, You Can Go Anywhere (from the Crossroads of the World (Wind Publications, 2008). She is also a member of the Kentucky Humanities Council speaker’s roster and has become one of the most popular presenters of essay and personal memoir in the state.

Coming to you on the airwaves

I’ll be the featured guest this week on Sheri L. Wright’s From the Inkwell, an hour of talk about poetry and prose that broadcasts Saturdays at 1:00 pm from Crescent Hill Radio, 1650 on your AM dial or livestreaming at http://www.chradio.net/index.html.

Sheri and I had a big time chatting in the free-form conversation that she likes to carry on with these shows. I hope, along in there somewhere, I made some sense. I did read a couple of poems.

If you miss the broadcast, you can catch my interview at the archive, along with Sheri’s other interviews at this link.

This is a fairly new endeavor for Sheri on a fairly new radio station but she’s got a great style and she’s an intelligent interviewer, so keep your eye on this show. It can only get better.

By the way, Sheri usually begins the hour by reading a poem and she is taking submissions. Guidelines for submitting a poem for Sheri to read on From the Inkwell can be found at this link.

As an aside, I see that Crescent Hill Radio has become an affiliate of Michael Jonathan’s Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour.

Woodsongs got its start on Georgetown College’s WRVG back in the days when it was hosting the World Radio network. Coincidentally, I was listening just yesterday to an archived interview on Accents — another fine local radio show focussed on literature — with Tom Martin, who was a founder of World Radio. He pointed out that Woodsongs was the one survivor — and a wildly successful one — of that brave failure.

(I thought Katernina had interviewed Michael Jonathan, too, on Accents but don’t see it in the archive list.)

I miss the old days of WRVG — I did a few radio commentaries for them back in the day. You could hear some great talk and some wonderful music. I remember interviews and live performances with people like David Crosby and it was at WRVG that I first heard The Trailer Park Troubadours and a lot of deep tracks from the likes of Tom Waits. I never thought I understood Tom Waits until I heard the cuts they played on WRVG.

I know there’s more that I’m forgetting.

Crescent Hill is somewhat like that old version of WRVG, in that it focusses strictly on local and regional music with no commercials. I applaud them for that and suggest you give them your support.