Sherry Chandler

Stuff

Okay, I am laid low with bronchitis, sucking on my bronchodilator and my codeine-laced guaifenesen. So I’m not much good today.

I recommend you go listen to qarrtsiluni’s podcast of Marilyn Taylor’s poem “Sarcoma.”

Or Woodrat Podcast 9: A Poet’s Way in Norway with Ren Powell

Or play around at Disapproving Rabbits.

Or read Helen’s take on Nascar penalties.

Or Terry on Alchemy, a dance review.

Or crochet a place mat with Rebecca.

Or even Salon on Why probe Charlie Rangel — but not Mitch McConnell?

I’m going back to bed.

The middle way

I have been reading Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford University Press, 1964), a book recommended to me by that mad Kayaker John Lane.

Marx defines the pastoral ideal as a middle way between the evils of the city (oversophistication) and the equal evils of wild nature (this might be seen as Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forest). He traces the ideal back to Virgil’s Eclogues and begins his examination of how the pastoral plays out in America by looking at The Tempest as “Shakespeare’s American Fable.” It always comes as a surprise to me to realize that the mythologizing of the New World reaches as far back as Shakespeare, but, as Marx points out, the promotion of the New World paradise had begun this early not only because Europe needed hope but also because men like Sir Walter Raleigh needed to raise money for their expeditions.

For Englishmen of Raleigh’s ilk, this New World paradise was Virginia. The other story, that of Puritans braving wilderness for their religious ideals, must also be factored in, but it is not the only American story.

In his chapter “The Garden,” Marx examines what has come to be called Jeffersonian agrarianism. But Jefferson had precursors and one of them was J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), de Crèvecoeur’s farmer finds in his Virginia farm the pastoral “oasis of rural pleasure” described by Virgil. But while Virgil’s shepherd lolled under a beech and played his pipes between Rome and the marshland, de Crèvecoeur’s farmer has

Eastward . . . Europe, encompassing l’ancien régime, an oppressive social order of “great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing.” Westward . . . the dark forest frontier where something “very singular” happens to Europeans. Their lives being “regulated by the wildness of the neighbourhood,” ther become “ferocious, gloomy and unsociable.” As he describes the frontiersmen, they are “no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals” — native American Calibans. [p. 111]

I have been spending a lot of time with these Calibans in the West of Virginia (Kentucky) in the last year and de Crèvecoeur had a point. Frontier Kentucky was a brutal place but the brutality, it seems to me, came not from men who had gone native but from those who were determined to drive the natives out in pursuit of de Crèvecoeur’s ideal.

And yet, the ideal itself doesn’t seem so evil.

Though it may be that it is an aristocratic ideal. And always, even as far back as Virgil, one that is somehow exclusive. See this passage from Moses Austin’s journal:

I cannot omitt Noticeing the many Distress.d families I pass.d in the Wilderness nor can any thing be more distressing to a man of feeling than to see woman and Children in the Month of Decembr Travelling a Wilderness Through Ice and Snow passing large rivers and Creeks without Shoe or Stocking, and barely as maney raggs as covers their Nakedness, with out money or provisions except what the Wilderness affords. . . . can any thing be more Absurd than the Conduct of man, here is hundreds Travelling hundreds of Miles, they Know not for what Nor Whither, except its to Kentucky, . . . the Promis.d land . . . Milk and Honey. and when arriv.d at this Heaven in Idea what do they find? a goodly land I will allow but to them forbiden Land. exausted and worn down with distress and disappointment they are at last Oblig.d to become hewers of wood and Drawers of water.

In the end, even de Crèvecoeur’s farmer has to pull up stakes and light out for the territory, driven out by the hostilities of the American Revolution. de Crèvecoeur himself went home to France, where he got caught up in the French Revolution. He was a French aristocrat and he had his problems there, though he managed to survive with help from his American connections.

John Lane suggested that I read both Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests. The Shadow of Civilization (Univ Chicago Press, 1992) and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, and though I am not very far into the Marx book, I think I can see why. Harrison begins Forests by saying “The story is full of enigmas and paradoxes.” And so it seems is the story of America.

The life of a broken bough

This post has gone much longer than I’d anticipated because I found I wanted to savor each of the seven contributions to the anthology. So, fearing that you may miss it, I am going to promote to the top what I had intended to put at the bottom.

Each of the entries in When the Bough Breaks ends with a short meditation on the creative process and a writing prompt, “Try This.” On Saturday, February 27, the women of KaBooM! are conducting a writing retreat, Try This, at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. Cost is $100.:

Isn’t it every writer’s dream to have an entire day without agenda or distraction—to have nothing to do but write, write, write? Join members of the KaBoom Writing Collective for a quiet day of writing, sharing, and responding. Bring work in progress or a notebook and pen to capture new words. KaBoom members will present invitations to write taken from their book, When the Bough Breaks, or you are welcome to develop or extend a piece you’ve already begun. Bring a bag lunch.

Save your spot today by calling 859-254-4175

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I want to write you an appreciation of the anthology When the Bough Breaks published by the KaBooM Writing Collective.

The story of how the book came to be is told here at Public Republic. It’s an exciting story about generousity and cooperative effort and I think you will enjoy reading it. The resulting book is a work of art.

But I don’t want to talk about the book as artifact. I want to talk about the words inside the book.

I’ve known the women of the KaBooM! collective for years. I’ve been mentored by them, taken workshops with them, shared critiques with them, laughed and cried with them. So when I opened the book and began to read, I expected the work to be good. I was pleasantly surprised at how good I found it.

The seven authors of KaBooM! are two poets, two essayists, and three fiction writers.

No, that’s only for the purposes of the anthology. To be honest, both the poets, Leatha Kendrick and Pam Sexton, are also writing novels. Mary Alexander, who contributed one of the short stories, is also a well-known area fiber artist. Susan Christerson Brown, who wrote one of the essays, has an MA from Lexington Theological Seminary. She blogs at Mildly Mystical. Jan Isenhour, who contributed one of the short stories, is a well-known essayist and has been director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, I think, since its inception in 1992. Gail Koehler, essayist, is a local activist, editor of Peaceways, a newsletter published by the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice. Lynn Pruett, fiction writer, is on the faculty of Murray State University’s brief residency MFA.

And, oh golly, I still haven’t gotten to the contents.

As might be expected with a collection of writing from women of a certain age — especially one that takes its title from the most famous lullaby in the English language — the pieces in When the Bough Breaks deal with family matters, parenting. And yet within those perimeters, there is a great variety of voice and mood.

The two essays that bookend the collection deal with the changes motherhood brings. Gail Koehler, the activist, takes us fast-paced into the collection, Her essay, “Everything, Changed,” recounts how she tried to get it all figured out ahead of time, what these mothers meant when they told her “Just wait. . . everything will change.”

I demanded: ‘How? How does everything change?” When pressed, they became vague, shrugged, avoided specifics, insisted: “It just does.” The answer left me increasingly both uneasy and unclear. . .

What Gail learns, of course, is that with motherhood everything is always changing, that it’s an experience of “intense love and sharp disappointment, earth-splitting devotion and mind-numbing exhaustion.” She concludes what all of us know but can’t articulate so well,

I’ll continue to step off of the familiar into the wide open of the strange, all my life as a mother.

And I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t stop when they’re grown.

Susan Christerson Brown, the contemplative member of the group, the Mildly Mystical one, meditates in her essay on the ways in which motherhood encroached on her need for solitude. She is “Rooted in Solitude,” but as a mother she had to learn not only her need to have time away from her beloved family but also how to use those blessed rare lonely times. Here is a snippet of her thoughts on a retreat to the Abby of Gethsemani:

Our culture does not teach us how to be alone or encourage us to value silence. But since the third and fourth centuries, when monastic life took root, the monks have grappled with the challenges of solitude. The desert fathers and mothers of that time fled the degenerate culture of the cities and the politics of the church to answer the call they heard to pursue their own spiritual path. Their need to escape the clamor of daily life drove them to the desert, where they could free themselves from distractions and seek God. Something of that desire resonates in me, as I seek time apart for creative work. Yet I also share, at least in part, their dismay at finding that when they were finally alone, the source of their distractions was within themselves.

Possibly the most delightful surprise for me in When the Bough Breaks came with Jan Isenhour’s short story, “His Place in the World.” I have known Jan as Director of the Carnegie Center and I have read her fine essays. I knew she is at work on a novel. But this is my first experience of her fiction. It’s good stuff. It takes the man’s point of view, and deals with fatherhood. Robby Dean, a Kentuckian, divorced, travels into Ohio to find seasonal construction work, boards with his aunt and has only week-end visiting rights for his son J.P. and a shaky romance with Sherry, a woman with more education and middle-class aspirations.

For what seemed like the hundredth time, Robby asked himself, lighting his cigarette, if he really needed women in his life. . . .He had tried to stay busy, but no one seemed to care much one way or the other. He had put WD-40 on the squeaky hinges, fixed a leaky toilet, and made numerous trips to Kentucky to see J.P. and Sherry, letting on to this friends that he was surely pussy-whipped to go back and forth so many times, but the truth was he didn’t know what to do with himself. He had lost his place in the world and was having a hard time finding it.

Robby’s rebellion takes him near tragedy before he learns a vital lesson in a story that isat once gritty and tender.
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qarrtsiluni chapbook contest

qarrtsiluni, an online literary magazine of which I am a fan, is accepting entries for their second annual poetry chapbook contest. The deadline for submissions is April 15. The winner will be announced on August 1, and publication in print and online will follow in late summer/early fall. Since we use a print-on-demand service for the paper edition and make it available world-wide through Amazon, it will remain in print for years if not decades longer than most limited-edition poetry chapbooks.

GUIDELINES

A sampling of last year’s finalists.

If you have a question that is not answered by the guidelines, please direct your inquiry to qarrtsiluni.chapbook.2010 [at] gmail.com.

And while I’m talking up Dave Bonta’s poetic enterprise, let me point you to the latest of the Woodrat Podcasts, an interview with poet Todd Davis. I found the discussion lively and inspiring.

A man’s poetry

The other day I was browsing around the archives at the Michigan Quarterly Review where I stumbled on the text of a 2009 Hopwood Lecture given by Ellen Bryant Voigt. In this lecture, she described herself as “essentially an earnest person,” and I was glad to read it because I’ve felt, in this age of irony, that I also suffer from the sin of essential earnestness, and if it’s good enough for Ellen Bryant Voigt, well, it’s good enough for me.

More than that, I confess to the sin of having a small mouth with thin lips, just right for compressing into a tight prudish line of disapproval. I check the mirror daily for a craze of hair-line pursing wrinkles along my upper lip.

Which is my way of saying there are certain types of humor that I just don’t get. I never quite felt comfortable with Zap comix, for example. All that hair and those exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics. My appreciation of Frank Zappa has limits. The National Lampoon of the 1970s often sort of creeped me out. (Though I’ll admit I thought Cheech Wizard was cute.) For that matter, the Brobdingnag sections of Gulliver’s Travels always struck me as pretty gross — but then I think they’re supposed to. And as for the Yahoos, well . . . But then I like horses.

[Just as an aside here, because I've been immersed in this stuff, Gulliver's Travels is supposed to be a book Daniel Boone carried with him into the wilderness of Kentucky, which is how there came to be a creek in Kentucky called Lulbegrud.]

As for Portnoy and his liver, give me a break.

Once upon a time, Elizabeth Bishop infamously refused to lend her work to a volume of women’s poetry, saying, if I recall this correctly, nobody would publish an anthology of men’s poetry. Whatever the merits of that statement, I would argue that some things, including poetry, can only be written by men. And those same things are written for men.

Men’s poetry.

Which is my way of saying, I’ve been reading Albert Goldbarth’s Comings Back (Doubleday, 1976) and pretty much totally failing to get it.

Take, for instance, these lines from “Some Poems Around Some Lights”

when the iron asserts itself out of my blood, and is jostled
through the heat in the form of ingots, or the sexual loneliness
seeps through my mattress, and hangs gray semen
stalactites into the dark below the bed . . .

My reaction to that, I am sorry to say, is “not my problem, never going to be my problem.” Unless, of course, I’m called upon to do his spring cleaning.

No doubt this is a cretinous reaction.

Onanism seems to figure in this collection quite a bit. And look here, I’m the mother of sons, and though I may be earnest, I’m not easily offended. At least, not by masturbation jokes.

I’m just not touched by it.

I suppose men may have the same reaction to poems about — what? dildos?

Okay, well look, I’m being silly.

More likely men are bored by poems about pregnancy and childbirth, nursing, yada yada.

As always, I say, if I read these poems by Goldbarth this time next year, I may find them brilliant. My theory is that literature speaks to you when you need it or when you’re ready for it.

And I understand the reason for this Rabelaisian sort of writing, that for all our airs and intellect, we are trapped in a body that demands and excretes and dies, that like old Nobadaddy we are prone to fart and belch and cough, that Marie Antoinette had cooties under those elaborately sculpted coiffures.

There is much in Comings Back that is brilliant. But there is too much in Comings Back. For me.

And it’s not just the obsession with jism and feces. The poems are long and ambling and brilliant. Comic and tragic. But they don’t pull me in.

One thing I do like is Goldbarth’s way with a metaphorical cat. As in “The Two Poles: a New Year resolution 1975”

. . . sorrow is here
to stay and the arch of a cat’s back bridges
the process of understanding grief and connects
something unspeakable registered in its eyes with
its fearful, uncontrollable sphincter, and we
if we could see in the dark a cat sees
would do the same for these sorrowful times . . .

Sorrowful times we certainly are in, still, again, 35 years later.

And this is my way of saying, here is your cat blog for Friday, Febraury 12, 2010 (Happy birthday, Abie Baby).

Murray Hill Incorporated for Congress

Via Terry.

Kentucky Great Writers Postponed

The Kentucky Great Writers event scheduled for tomorrow (Feb 9) evening at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning has been postponed in anticipation of snow, ice, rain, and all manner of stuff that will make roads dangerous.

The event will be rescheduled I know. I’ll let you know what I know.

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Update: I’m told the reschedule date is March 9.