Sherry Chandler

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

Perspective

Via tinydoctor’s flying meme circus

Also, this via Have Coffee Will Write, If the spill were in the Bluegrass

And the sad sad story of the pelicans.

The bit in its teeth

Reading in Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, I came across this quotation from Henry Adams. Written in a letter to his brother in 1862, the statement seems downright prophetic in this season of oil leaks and mine explosions:

You may think all this nonsense, but I tell you these are great times. Man has mounted science and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world. [Marx, p. 350]

Oil Flow Is Stemmed, but Could Resume, Official Says

A Mad Farmer’s Manifesto

In about the middle of Farming, A Hand Book (Harcourt, 1970), Wendell Berry has placed “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer.” Dedicated to James Baker Hall, this four-page poem is basically a collection of aphorisms. It’s one of my favorites in this collection.

II.
At night make me one with the darkness.
In the morning make me one with the light.

IV.
Don’t pray for the rain to stop.
Pray for good luck fishing
when the river floods.

VIII.
When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.

When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf. [pp. 56-57]

Over at Good Reads, Farming is rated and average of 4.16, a stellar rating it well deserves. His fourth volume of poems, it serves as a sort of manifesto, as in these lines from “The Mad Farmer in the City:”

As my first blow against it, I would not stay.
As my second, I learned to live without it.
As my third, I went back one day and saw
that my departure had left a little hole
where some of its strength was flowing out,
and I heard the earth singing beneath the street. [p. 48]

Or these from “Independence Day,”

As America from England, the wood stands free
from politics and anthems. So in the woods I stand
free, knowing my land. My country, tis of the
drying pools along Camp Branch I sing
where the water striders walk like Christ,
all sons of God, . . . and the bobwhite’s
whistle opens in the air, broad, and pointed like a leaf. [p. 34]

That last line is worth the price of admission. Farming: A Hand Book is filled with lyric moments like that and like the passage I quoted in the comments yesterday from “The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer:”

the quiet in the woods of a summer morning,
the voice of the peewee passing through it
like a tight silver wire;

. . .

fox tracks in snow, the impact
of lightness upon lightness,
unendingly silent.

What I know of the spirit is astir
in the world. The god I have always expected
to appear at the woods’ edge, beckoning,
I have always expected to be
a great relisher of the world, its good
grown immortal in his mind. [pp 62-63]

But all in all, Farming: A Handbook is a book with a moral. Aphorisms, after all, are distilled wisdom and this is the poetry of a man who has found wisdom, not one who is searching for it. His is the old religion wherein the earth is woman, fertile, passive, and the farmer is the plowman, the husbandman. There is a hint of King James in the vocabulary and the rhythms.

And I am agnostic.

Steven R. Cope

The Mad Reverend, Easter Sermon,‘05/
Or God Love the Animals

There is animal life and there is a man’s life, I mean man like a hu-man.
I mean man like with a dress on or a man in bib overalls. I mean a man
in thick brogans or a man in bra and panties. There is a man’s life, yes,
but there is this animal life as well. I say don’t forget that. And again,
don’t forget that. Because the animal life is hard. You don’t know hard
like he knows it. I mean he knows it all the time, even in his sleep.
The little animal, the big animal, he knows it like a song,
like a man’s Amazing Grace, like a man’s Star-Spangled Banner,
like a howling from the tall tops, and he is eternally alert,
I mean severely cocked and alert, because at just any instant,
at just any whim, something right there beside him, something likely
downwind, something with fur and a tail and maybe a sort of smile,
something also cocked and alert, will jump out of the shrubbery
and chew off his ears right down to his wide eyeballs. Or out of
the lovely white flowers a screech will erupt exploding petals
like fireworks. Or seize him by the neck and shake his ass
like it never shook, like a rattle, like a hanky, shake him till he breaks,
shake his life’s blood right out of him. He must keep to himself therefore,
keep to his own kind, because he does not know what or which
of the strange-looking fellows that creep and crawl into his den
has come to devour his pink children. He must be hardened therefore,
because life ain’t no Sunday brunch, life ain’t no pastried communion.
He must be coiled. He must be braced on his haunches. He must be
watchful and poised. Because if that other thing don’t get him,
if the animal life don’t get him, here comes of all things this filthy
man-thing. I mean here comes this hu-man to plow right through his earth,
scratch his balls, spit and shit, make dust, make noise, mow down
everything in sight, lop off hills, trees, make soup of his rivers,
pour tar on his green fields, hog the fruit-trees and the grain,
put up walls, fences, storage buildings for his toys, spew poison
at every pore, garbage from every window, fill the sky with squares,
bungle through the wild seeing nothing, knowing nothing,
not even the idiocy in his own eyes—and killing everything in sight,
I mean just killing left and right, top and bottom, inside and out,
not for food, not for love, but because he’s so big and thick
and so almighty hu-man and invents triggers and bombs so he can
sit back on his soft couch and fluff up his pillows and munch on
his corn chips and re-wind his video and wound with a word
and not leave to save Jesus his blanket and his bottle
and his tv and his cell phone and his mirrors and his after shave
and his pretty teeth and his ballgames and his porn and his bingo—
and the animal looks on in silence at the dull fat useless thing
and thinks for that I am the sacrifice. For that dies the passover lamb.

— Steven R. Cope, originally published in Limestone, used by permission of the author

This poem is from Steve’s latest book, The Mad Reverend, forthcoming from Wind Publications. In fact, Steve says reader demand might make it come forth sooner, so let Charlie Hughes know you’re champing at the bit to read this one.

Work by Steven R. Cope has appeared in more than 250 magazines, journals, anthologies, and newspapers around the country, winning prizes or awards from The Kentucky Arts Council, The Academy of American Poets, and Borestone Mountain, among others. Be sure to visit his web site, where his bio states:

Though Cope’s themes are far-reaching, he has always maintained, stylistically and otherwise, a conscious independence both inspired and nurtured by his Eastern Kentucky Appalachian heritage. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice been anthologized in Best Poems of the Year. In addition, he served a two-year term as co-editor/publisher of Wind Magazine and Wind Publications during which time he edited George Ella Lyon’s Catalpa (1993), Everett Donaldson’s Raccoon John Smith (1993), and Charles Semones’ Hard Love (1994). The same year he also co-edited with Charlie Hughes the Best of Wind anthology, a massive volume of the best work appearing in the magazine throughout the twenty-year editorship of Quentin R. Howard, its founder.

. . .

Cope is the author of upwards of twelve books, including five major volumes of poetry: In Killdeer’s Field, Clover’s Log [which I reviewed here], Crow!, The Furrbawl Poems, and The Mad Reverend (forthcoming), as well as the novel Sassafras; the collection of short fiction The White Doors (forthcoming); the fable/story collection The Book of Saws; and a thousand and one tongue-in-cheek proverbs The Appalaches or “Talking Down a Hole.”

I am hoping to be able to share some of those proverbs later. I can attest personally that Steve Cope is a great companion at a book fair table, the alphabet having placed us side by side at two or three.

This poem here is maybe a little late for Easter but strikes me a perfect for the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.

Your Daily Poem has a great Earth Day poem up today, too, by Tim Nolan.

Earth Day

April 22 marks the 40th celebration of Earth Day. Louisville Examiner columnist Bobbi Dawn Rightmeyer has some suggestions for ways to mark the occasion and a list of local events you might want to take part in.

John Tierney at the NYTimes raises some questions. (Don’t read this link as an endorsement from me.)

Also At 40, Earth Day Is Now Big Business

And then there is ‘Divine Right’s Trip’: A Forgotten Hippie Novel

A stand-alone edition of the novel won high praise in the Book Review (“stands a good chance of being the book for a generation, in the way that ‘On the Road’ and ‘Catcher in the Rye’ were for what are now old folks”). And while that never came to pass, you can bet a lot of old folks have at least a fuzzy recollection of the odd (and oddly presented) original. “The Last Whole Earth Catalog” sold a million copies, sat on our best-seller lists for over a year in various editions and won the 1972 National Book Award. So while you can buy a new copy of a 1990 reissue of “Divine Right’s Trip” on Amazon, it might be truer to its spirit to browse it free in situ in its wacky original form at the Whole Earth Catalog’s supremely kludgy Web site.

And Jason Howard sends word of a film, Deep Down, A Story from the Heart of Coal Country, that will air on KET tomorrow night at 10 p.m.

Dr. Margaret Palmer on the Colbert Report

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/261997/january-18-2010/coal-comfort—margaret-palmer