Sherry Chandler

And still another view

From George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Univ Chicago Press, 1980:

It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions, and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. , , , Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument—attack, defense, counterattack, etc.—reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in the culture: it structures the actions we perform in arguing.

Try to imagine a culture where arguments were not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all . . .

This book is old and it’s ideas have become classic. So I know it is stating the obvious, but I couldn’t help but ponder as I read this passage at the same time I was reading Calloway and Hammon/Taylor that the main reason we could not come to some accommodation with the Native nations is that we think in terms of conquest, not of cooperation.

The Shawnee didn’t want to conquer us. They just wanted us to leave them some fragment of their way of life.

My Daddy always used to say you can’t win a holding war.

I heard an interview yesterday on All Things Considered with the maker of the new rug in President Obama’s Oval Office. He described the eagle on the Presidential Seal as having its head turned toward the talon with the olive branch rather than the talon with the clutch of arrows. This orientation is intended to indicate that we are a peaceful nation.

So we’ve always liked to tell ourselves.

But in fact, we are bellicose in all our thinking. We must have a War on Poverty, a War on Drugs, a War on Crime. Our physicians think of their job in terms of a fight against disease and are prone to speaking of medications and procedures they have in their armentarium.

And now, of course, our neverending War on Terror.

I can only remember what William Stafford said: Every War Has Two Losers.

Journal mining

On this anniversary of passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,* I turn the page of my old journal to January 23, 1993, and find that I have made notes about Ursula K. Le Guin’s long essay called “The Fisherman’s Daughter,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (Grove Press, 1982). [Link is to a re-issue.]

I don’t remember reading this essay and yet, when I see the quotes I’ve written down, I think it must have had a considerable influence on my thinking. It’s the way we assimilate things I guess.

Take for example, this statement from Le Guin:

This sort of many namedness doesn’t happen to men; it’s inconvenient, and yet its very cumbersomeness reveals, perhaps, the being of a woman writer as not one simple thing — the author — but a multiple, complex process of being, with varous responsibilities, one of which is her writing. [p. 231]

And also this quote from Alicia Ostriker from Writing Like a Woman (Univ Michigan, 1983) as quoted by Le Guin:

“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” declares Virginia Woolf, but through whom can those who are themselves mothers . . . do their thinking?

Last year, I was moved to write a cycle of 17 acrostic poems based on the “maiden” names of my grandmothers, insofar as I could establish them, back to the eighteenth century. I thought at the time this was happenstance. I was looking to form to help me write voice poems (persona poems, dramatic monologues) about women who were part of Kentucky’s colonial, agrarian culture. I needed some way to find individual “voices” for these women about whom I knew very little. I tried one acrostic and I like the outcome, so I tried another, and then another.

Friends have asked me why I couldn’t just tell the stories. I gave reasons similar to those discussed by Ellen Bryant Voigt. But these names were important to me and I wonder whether my great desire to write poems based on the very names of my grandmothers may have been influenced by reading this essay sixteen years ago (sort of the amount of time it takes to raise a child, huh?

Speaking of which, Le Guin discusses the ideas of Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice, Cambridge, 1982) that I know have influenced my thinking. It begins with this statement from Le Guin:

No book by a woman who had children has ever been included in that august list [i.e., the Canon of English literature]. [p. 222]

This may be in part because, according to Gilligan, men are brought up to think in terms of their rights, women in terms of their responsibilities. Men think hierarchically and women do not. Therefore, “Great Artist,” being a hierarchical concept, is not a feminine concept.

Then there is this fragment, taken a bit out of context, that expresses what you might call a female writer’s ethic:

Nobody lives in great isolation, nobody sacrifices human claims, nobody even scolds the baby. Nobody is going to put their head, or anybody else’s head, into an oven: not the mother, not the writer, not the daughter—these three and one who, being women do not separate creation and destruction into I create/you are destroyed, or vice versa. Who are responsible, take responsibility, for both the baby and the book. [p.231]

To which, in 1993, I have written this response:

If Ursula Le Guin doesn’t think this is artist as hero, what does she think a hero is? To take responsibility for anything is hard. To take responsibility for the baby is the most heroic act of all. To take responsibility for anybody else, even my own babies who I made, even my parents who made me, is the hardest thing I can do. It is nearly impossible. To take responsibility for the baby and the book, too — shit, that is superwoman.

I wish I were superwoman. But I am not.

To which Le Guin may have answered:

To have and bring up kids is to be about as immersed in life as one can be, but it does not follow that one drowns. A lot of us can swim. [p. 235]

So could I swim? Yes and no.

At the time I wrote this, my sons were about to turn 14. They were starting a high school career and needed a lot of attention. I also had a somewhat demanding full-time job. I had lost my father about 18 months before.

I was writing. I see poem drafts in this journal. But I wasn’t publishing much, and I didn’t produce anything that could be called a book until my children were nearly finished with college, more than ten years after this journal entry was written. Even now, I haven’t published a full-length book of poems.

So I don’t know. I’d say I didn’t so much swim as tread water.**

But I didn’t drown.
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By the way, considering my previous journal mining about Joan Didion, I was amused to find that I had written down a comment that Le Guin had made about The Book of the Dun Cow (which I never managed to finish):

Almost worse than Joan Didion. (I said almost.) [p. 254]

I also like and can identify with this line:

I did not know how to write about women because I thought what men had written about women was the truth. [p 234]

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*That odd word suffrage, is from the Latin suffragium meaning “support, vote, or right to vote.” It may look like suffer, as in “to tolerate or allow,” but it has a different root.

**I wonder whether one great argument in favor of academic careers for poets is that such careers allow women their best chance to have both the book and the baby.

Stories of Katrina

All summer we have had our eyes on the Gulf shore. So now that the well is capped and we are trying to get some kind of honest assessment of the damage, I hope we don’t lose focus, decide the thing is over, as we have done with Katrina.

Five years since that hurricane, and the still the extent of the damage has not been gaged.

I want to draw your attention to some stories about Katrina.

Natasha Trethewey, a poet whose work I admire a great deal, was on Fresh Air on Wednesday to talk about her new memoir Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Univ Georgia Press). She speaks of her grandmother’s death and burial in a church that had not yet been rebuilt and how the aftermath of Katrina ruined her brother. You can here a podcast and read an excerpt of the book at the link. The excerpt begins like this:

Somewhere in the post-Katrina damage and disarray of my grandmother’s house is a photograph of Joe and me — our arms around each other’s shoulders. We are at a long-gone nightclub in Gulfport, The Terrace Lounge, standing before the photographer’s airbrushed scrim — a border of dice and playing cards around us. Just above our heads the words High Rollers, in cursive, embellished — if I am remembering this right— with tiny starbursts. It is 1992, the year the first casino arrived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and, with it, a new language meant to invoke images of high-stakes players in exclusive poker games, luxurious suites on the penthouse floor, valet parking and expensive cars lined up in a glorious display of excess. Scenes from a glamorous casino someplace like Monte Carlo or Las Vegas — nothing like the gravel parking lot outside the club, the empty lot beyond it, and the small, run-down houses on either side, each with a chained-up dog barking into the night.

The role of casinos in the overdevelopment of the Gulf Coast is one that we need to remember. Trethewey makes it obvious that, though the casinos may have brought prosperity to some, they did only harm to the part of Gulfport where her family lived, that part of the disaster was natural but part was man-made.

When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as “Little Vietnam” because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders — as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden. Even now, it is a place that outsiders assume to be dangerous or insignificant — run-down and low income, a stark contrast to the glittering landscape of the post-Katrina beachfront with its bright lights and neon bouncing off the casinos onto the water. Were North Gulfport not along the main thoroughfare, making it necessary to drive through to get to the beach, it might be easily forgotten.

The poet Raymond McDaniel, who grew up in Florida, has also written a post-Katrina collection, Saltwater Empire (Coffee House Press, 2008). In the writing of it, McDaniel made use of oral histories of Katrina survivors collected and archived on the web at Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster and Oral History & Memory Project.

I haven’t read the book but what I pick up from context is that the “found” poem constructed from these oral histories is only a part of the collection, a poem in several parts that serves as a framing device.

But McDaniel didn’t get permission to use these clips and the poet Abe Louise Young, who worked in collecting the histories, thinks that he has done a great wrong by appropriating the stories of those survivors, who had made it very plain that they wanted control of their own stories since they had control of so little else. McDaniel argues that, because the archive is open access, it has become public domain.

The Poetry Foundation has posted two essays, one from Young: The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I. What are the ethics of poetic appropriation?

And one from McDaniel: The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I. IReflections on found poetry and the creative process.

Because I write historical poetry and because I am interested in questions of ownership on the web, I find the two essays of high interest and recommend that you take a look at them and at the comments they’ve elicited.

Does the quality of the poetry excuse the appropriation? Was it appropriation? Why didn’t McDaniel ask permission? Even just as a courtesy?

I also suggest that you explore the oral histories themselves at the archive Alive in Truth. They will make your heart ache all over again.

An “inconsequential” thread

It began at Huffington Post with Anis Shivani’s The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers, which I confess I did not read — well, not all of it, though I did page through to see who he’d pilloried.

I’ll confess to a bit of schadenfreude when I spotted some names on the list. And I was reconciled to seeing Louise Glück’s name there. She’s a writer I like but she’s become, it seems to me, just about every critic’s whipping boy [woman? but that has way too much connotation]. As has Billy Collins.

But still I didn’t read it because I avoid Huffington Post whenever possible, mostly because I find most of the stuff there as inconsequential as Timothy Shaeffert finds Mr. Shivani’s post. It was immediately obvious that this article was intended to be outrageous, to be, to use Mr. Shaeffert’s word, “theater.”

Then yesterday, there was Jezebel’s rebuttal, Literary Critic Hates Vaginas, “Ghetto Volume”. I’m going to begin by saying that I find that site mind-bogglingly over-designed. But I agreed with Jezebel’s assessment that Shivani’s list “was meant to offend, and it succeeds.” Jezebel mostly points out the anti-feminist bias, not so much of the list, as of the so-called reasoning behind the choices: Sharon Olds writes too much and too shamanistically about the female body, Louise Glück is too domestic, etc.

I do notice a bit of a generational thing here. Olds and Glück are now older women, as are Mary Oliver and Helen Vendler.

Today there is the aforementioned Timothy Shaeffert at the Prairie Schooner blog:

It’s a scrumptious set-up, and if the whole subject weren’t so inconsequential, one would be tempted to call it incendiary. (Would anyone approach such a list expecting to see the literary scene coddled and celebrated, with logic, reason, and sportsmanlike conduct?) It’s theater, if not full-on vaudeville, and has been accused of everything from poor taste to political incorrectness to anti-woman bias, all playing nicely into Mr. Shivani’s interactive performance. (I do think the blogger Jezebel does Shivani a disservice by casting him as merely misogynist, when he has labored so to appear misanthropic.)

Ouches all round.

Including me, because I did comment on the Prairie Schooner Facebook post that I would like Mr. Shivani to be logical if he was going to say anything that would be helpful to me.

But, in the end, Mr. Shaeffert comes around to some so Jezebel’s points:

And his distinction between good and bad writing seems fatuous (why does such a distinction need to be defined? Doesn’t the very notion of such a definition contradict his argument? And whose morality dictates a “lack of a moral core,” whatever that is?).

And concludes in a place that makes his post relevant to the conversation I’ve been trying to stir up here:

So . . . all those critics ever in protest of “the prevailing balderdash of the day” . . . seem to call for the return of old-school editorial instinct, a commitment to the task of discovery, rather than to the hem-lines of literary fashion. So while the current electronic fluency seems to suggest the much missed (or much over-celebrated) loss of the gatekeeper, such rants remind us that the gate-keepers make us cranky too.

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By the way, today is Erwin Shrödinger’s birthday, which reminds me to remind you that my good friend Alan MacKellar has published a wonderful chapbook through Finishing Line. It is called Chasing Shroedinger’s Cat. Like me, Alan is too low on the totem pole even to be under-rated, but this is an excellent collection. I recommend it to you.

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And speaking of gatekeepers, or a lack thereof, how about this: Poetry Drop Boxes Set Up In Long Beach

LONG BEACH, Calif. (CBS) ― One community in Long Beach is turning to poetry as a way to tell a story of the area, and to boost business.

The Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association in Long Beach has partnered with two coffee shops on Atlantic Avenue and affixed poetry drop-boxes outside each in hopes of collecting poetic submissions from the community to ultimately publish as a book.

The boxes went up last week, and today was the first day of collection.

Link thanks to Joanie DiMartino, who also has an excellent poetry collection out there entitled Strange Girls.

Anniversaries

It’s ours, today, but it’s also the anniversary of the first publication of Walden.

In which spirit you might want to read:

“Off the Grid”: The growing appeal of going off the grid

America Goes Dark

What the Great Recession Has Done to Family Life

Failed State

Shirley Jackson has a birthday

Today is Shirley Jackson’s birthday and, thanks to Roger Ebert’s Twitter feed, I have a link where you can go and take a look at a facsimile of the New Yorker for June 26, 1948, where “The Lottery” made its first appearance.

There’s a Richard Wilbur poem, too, on page 28.

I’ve always thought The Haunting of Hill House one of the most effective thrillers ever written, and the 1963 movie version The Haunting is equally excellent.

Here’s the first paragraph:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

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If you have a taste for the macabre, by the way, you might like Dr. Omed’s The Daily Tombstone. Says he

I have an unholy interest in gravestones and grave markers, as well as other forms of remembrance of the dead, whether ornately carved stone or homemade roadside memorial. I’m rather fond of cemeteries, too. Burial grounds are generally quiet and uncrowded…by the living. Usually, you can cut the solitude with a knife, and I like my solitude. The dead don’t talk. Much

Hunters

From Colin G. Calloway’s The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007):

White hunters did not behave like Indian hunters. In Europe, hunting was the sport of gentlemen; hunting for subsistence was regarded as poaching. In North America, the gentry classes worried that it might indicate a reversion to an earlier, more “savage” state of development. Almost all backcountry settlers hunted, supplementing their crops and livestock, and they learned techniques from the Indians. In their dress, appearance, ways of living, ways of fighting, and the embryonic communities they erected, they displayed so many similarities to Indians that they worried eastern colonial authorities and sometimes shocked eastern travelers. For backcountry settlers as for Shawnee Indians, prowess as a hunter became an essential marker of manhood. But backcountry settlers rarely adopted or observed the morality of Indian hunting values. They paid scant regard to rituals and behavior the Indians said were vital if the game were to continue—game was so bountiful it was inconceivable that its supply might be finite. For Euro-American hunters killing game provided food and hides and demonstrated their mastery over the animal kingdom. They felt no kinship with animals as persons of other-than-human-form and saw no need to display respect, offer prayers, or give thanks to the animals they killed, let alone ask their forgiveness. [pp. 49-50]

As a result of all this hunting, the buffalo were wiped out of Kentucky before the end of the 18th century. The great herds that tramped the traces (essentially giant cow paths) that made the backwoods highways gave way to domesticated cattle. Today I find Kentuckians who are surprised to learn that buffalo ever inhabited Kentucky. They think of them as plains animals, I guess because of Hollywood images of great stampeding buffalo herds.

Fences and the European style of ownership changed the landscape and, as Calloway points out, changed also the meanings of the landscape.

Here is a selection from “Cottonwood” from Richard Taylor’s Girty (re-issued by Wind Publications, 2006):

I feel them before I hear them, hear them before I see them. Buffalo. Hundreds, maybe thousands of buffalo spilling over the rim of hills, thick as black bees when the locusts flower. I am filling my canteen at the spring when it happens. Ground under me begins to quake and tremble. I feel thunder in my ribs, a thumping as if my body were the stretched skin of a drumhead. Then the springwater begins to shimmy, just quivers in its pool, blurring the bottom out of focus. I hear something like the rush of wind through leaves before a cloudburst, a rumbling, troubled sound, but louder, tenser, charged with authority. It can’t be weather, for the sky is blank, cloudless.

Then off to the east I spot a puff of white dust on the horizon. It blossoms toward me, the low roar growing with the bloom which yellows as it nears. I can make out details now, the curly heads packed close to form an unbroken wall of hooves and humps, horns lowered and glossed among the black bodies, thick winter coats not shed yet. The size of them. Some bulls must be over 6 feet from hoof to hump, some the length of two ponies.

I am in the tree now, a cottonwood, 20 feet above them. I cannot see the ground for buffalo, for tons of hides and huffing steaks. . . . No grunts or whines come from them. Rather, the only sound is their weighted hooves, so many falling stones, and these crowd my ears to popping. Each is intent on motion, on keeping his place in the herd. A few feet away, the leaders swerve slightly, weave around my tree, and join again, still running, never once breaking stride. This is done routinely with that strange grace shared by bulky things and dancers.

Now I think of my horse, the stray I haltered a few weeks ago outside one of the river settlements, a sorrel mare socked white to her shanks. But too late. Before drinking at the spring, I tethered her to a sapling a dozen or so yards away. She is absolutely frantic. Her eyes are bugged out of her head and she is bleeding at the mouth where the bit has cut her. As the herd bears down on her, she whinnies her death song, a keening that cuts me like a woman’s shriek, like the first screeches of an animal in a trap. Shrill and terrifyingly human. It’s the last sound she makes as tree and horse drown in a black torrent.

. . .

Twenty minutes it takes them to pass.

Simon Girty was Daniel Boone’s evil twin in the mythology of the Ohio Valley frontier. Richard Taylor fictionalized the story of his life in prose and poetry. Girty is a brilliant hybrid from a man who has been immersed in Kentucky’s history most of his life. I strongly recommend it to you.