Sherry Chandler

A “common man writ large”

I must tell you about one more sequence of narrative sonnets I’ve been reading this summer, Richard Taylor’s Rail Splitter, Sonnets on the Life of Abraham Lincoln (Larkspur, 2009). This collection of 55 sonnets was begun in response to a call from the Kentucky Arts Council that each of the Kentucky poets laureate contribute poems for an anthology celebrating Lincoln’s bicentennial in 2009.

Occasional poems are notoriously difficult, especially about a figure as iconic as Abraham Lincoln. I would hazard that more books, plays, movies, have been produced about Abraham Lincoln than about any other figure from American history. However, I can’t think of anyone better qualified to write such poems about Lincoln. Richard Taylor is a poet immersed in Kentucky’s history. In addition to his several collections of poetry, he has written Sue Mundy (Univ Press of Kentucky 2006), a historical novel about one of Kentucky’s notorious Civil War guerrillas and Girty (Wind, 2006), an experimental combination of poetry and prose about the life of the Revolution’s “white Indian.” With Neil O. Hammon, he has co-authored a historical study of the American Revolution in the west, Virginia’s Western War 1775-1796 (Stackpole Books, 2002).

I have talked here about sonnets as a vehicle for strong emotion, but Richard’s sonnets strike me as more quiet and philosophical. These are not “voice” poems. Impossible to do poems in the voice of Lincoln, whose words are so widely recorded and whose life is so often enacted. The point of view in these sonnets is strictly third person. We are outside, looking in. We are two centuries on, looking back at a time of high passions through the calm lens of the historian. We look not just at Lincoln but at a range of characters: Frederick Douglas, Cassius Clay, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckly, Walt Whitman. McClellan, John Wilkes Booth.

These are larger-than-life characters who talked a lot in their own right.

Richard uses his sonnets almost in the service of anecdote, of parable, of good-humored folk tale, almost in the way Lincoln himself is thought to have done. These poems don’t try to transform our view of Lincoln but they do try to show us glimpses of the real human being. The last five sonnets in the sequence, perhaps the best poems in the book, focus on our mythmaking. Poems with titles like “Theories about Who Knew Lincoln Best,” “The Shaping of an Icon,” “Losing the Diamond in the Stew,” and

The Tyranny of Myth

Lies and fabulations cling to the great of soul
like starlings to fresh excrement of crows. We thrill
in revelation, marvel at the gods we find in things,
each splinter of his natal logs a portion of The Cross.

. . . Myths father myths, Lincoln himself might
tell us, tall tales, tales taller. Truth, in the telling,
extends beyond what can with certainty be told.
The cabin he was born in was any cabin, crude,
the rails in question any that might serve to fence.

Larkspur Press has handset this limited edition book, which was then printed on a hand-fed C & P using Mohawk Superfine paper and handbound. Design, composition, printing and binding were done by Leslie Shane, Carolyn Whitesel, and Gray Zeitz. The book is decorated by wood engravings cut by Wesley Bates and printed from the wood.

Lincoln himself might have felt at home with this book designed, not just for slow reading, not by a great corporate press, but as a work of art made by common folk. Let me end this post with the last couplet in the sequence:

Lincoln, choking on “Great Captain,” might feel
more at home with “common man writ large.”

To ‘cast or not to ‘cast

At DMX Zone, Linda Goin asks the question, Why Use Audio in Your Blog?

In the context of her article, she makes these observations:

To hear a poet read his own words is like watching an artist explain all the elements and principles of design in a painting or illustration.

. . .

Unless poetry can be made accessible through sight and sound, poetry and the poet could easily slide into oblivion, marking modern and historic poets less accessible than fossils.

Linda highlights several blogs and web sites where poetry and audio are joyfully melded, and I might mention that she gives a very nice plug both to Sheri L. Wright’s radio broadcast From the Inkwell — I love this statement about Sheri:

Her blog doesn’t reflect her poetry as much as her trains of thought – and some of those trains are powerful, with locomotives that could push you back a few feet with the blow-back from their passing.

— and also specifically to my interview with Sheri, which is available in the archives. In that interview, I talk about my enthusiasm for poetry podcasts.

And, by the way, you can find some audio files of me reading poems linked from my poetry page. Here for example, and here, and here, and one of my favorites here. And leave us not forget my own reading at qarrtsiluni (see below).

Linda also provides several links to how-to files on creating podcasts, so I suggest you click on over and give her article a read.

You might also want to read Dave Bonta’s Literary podcasting made simple with WordPress.com

Dave is an editor at qarrtsiluni, an online magazine that publishes a podcast along with the text of the poems they feature. Lately, he’s been reading the print edition of their Economy issue, and he fell to contemplating the effect of hearing those poets read:

I continue to feel that the combination of text and audio players on the same virtual page is a wonderful thing, even if not every author is the best interpreter of her own work. . . .

I might not have remembered every nuance of every poem and story in the Economy issue, but to my surprise and amusement I did remember many of the poets’ voices, and heard them in my head as I read through the print edition. Of course, a Scottish accent is pretty memorable for a Yank like me, but I found I remembered the accents of many of the other poets too: Alex Cigale’s precise consonants, Tom Sheehan’s age-mellowed Boston accent, Eileen Tabios’ hilariously seductive reading of “Post-Coital,” Monica Raymond’s world-weary, vatic cadence in the closing piece, “Economies.”

I think the fact that I was still able to conjure these up a year later is a pretty strong testimony to the power of audio to focus attention. The [Christian Science] Monitor article mentions Socrates’ dismissal of written language in passing, as a way to call into question the seriousness of these new criticisms of electronic media, treating it as self-evident that Socrates was just a conservative old fart. But Socrates was right, as any number of studies of contemporary oral societies have shown: dependence on writing systems has harmed our memories and fundamentally altered our ability to listen and thereby internalize language. Heard speech is alive in a way that printed words are not, though our ability to record and now digitize it does alter its ephemerality, if not quite its relationship to time. The druids too opposed literacy, for much the same reason as Socrates, but they took a huge gamble in doing so and essentially lost: what we know of them today is largely what was written down by their enemies. And would anyone remember Socrates if not for Plato?

Dave draws no conclusion here as to whether slow reading or micropoetry is the salvation of humankind. Like me, he samples all of it and finds different joys in the different media. One thing I really like about internet publishing, as I mentioned in my interview with Sheri Wright, the one that Linda Goin was kind enough to recommend, is its capacity to present a reading of the poetry with the text.

A couple of other places where poets are using audio in creative ways:

Mike Snider is podcasting poems from his book manuscript Other Voices. Mike works in form and you’ll find some rare ones in this collection, like the rubliw.

Brenda Clews is a Canadian poet and dancer who experiments with audio multitracking and video to produce some fascinating performance poetry.

Reminders

Tupelo Press is having its open reading period during the month of July.

Our annual July open reading period is now underway. This month we’re reading both full-length AND chapbook-length manuscripts. You may send either (or both) by regular postal mail, or through our on-line submission manager. We welcome the opportunity to see your work and look forward to reading your manuscript(s).

Submissions are made online. You’ll find complete guidelines here.

__________
Sarabande’s Bruckheimer Kentucky Series

presents an opportunity to focus on the fine literature the state of Kentucky has produced, bringing it to the nation’s attention. Sarabande will publish one book annually of short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, a novella(s), or short novel.

Submissions are accepted throughout the month of July. Complete guidelines here.

__________

And a reminder also that Accents Publishing’s chapbook contest is accepting submissions through July 31. Complete guidelines here.

Motif 3: Work

MotesBooks has issued a call for submissions for Volume 3 of their Motif anthology series to be published in 2011.

The theme for the 2011 volume is Work. Submissions are accepted in prose (under 3,000 words) and poetry/lyrics (up to 3 pieces).

Submissions are by e-mail only. Submission deadline is September 1.

Follow the link for complete deadlines.

Meanwhile, Motif v2: Come What May (edited by Marianne Worthington) has just been released. This second anthology contains writing by 136 writers from the U.S. and beyond using various genres to address the theme of “chance.” (One of whom is moi.) Order direct from MotesBooks.com for $15 plus shipping, and keep your eye out for readings in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee.

The wrecking ball swings

Haiku is a poetry form that escapes me.

Even after more than a year of more-or-less continuous practice of writing haiku-like (haiku-ish) micropoetry, I wouldn’t say I hit more than one time in ten producing anything I’d call poetry, let alone a haiku. Though my readers sometimes express appreciation for posts I’d call complete failures.

Which leads me to wonder whether there’s something I just don’t get.

I would quote about the same odds for haiku I read — about one in ten hits, fewer than that are really powerful defined by the Basho standard.

But even classic haiku sometimes leave me feeling a little so what. Issa’s famous radish haiku, for example:

Harvesting radishes,
he points the way
with a radish

It’s a small charm, like a feather. Maybe I want something heavier, something to chew over like a mouthful of taffy.

I also sometimes have problems with reading collections of haiku, whether a one-author book or a journal. It’s somewhat like eating rice cakes. (There are some notable exceptions.)

All this established, I will now tell you that I read Barry George’s Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku (Accents Publishing, 2010) with considerable delight.

I am willing to entertain that it is the urbanity of these haiku that give them an edge — you are free to read that statement at least two ways.

Maybe the urban landscape of homelessness and politics offers a fresher field.

Nevertheless it takes a keen intelligence to find turns like this:

Labor Day rally —
the candidate turns toward
the glare of autumn

followed on the facing page by

autumn field —
two sides of the same flock
taking off, landing

These two poems stand alone well enough but I love the way they play off one another. I don’t know, maybe that violates the nature of haiku but for me, it adds depth.

And, in fact, though the haiku in Wrecking Ball don’t all relate so directly one to the other, they nevertheless resonate with one another to create a portrait of city life.

Barbara Sabol interviewed Barry George at Public Republic, and I found his discussion of the form helpful. He talks about his process and the ways in which his poems both are and are not haiku.

It amazes me, sometimes, how much controversy can rage among people who write haiku about what is and is not legitimate. For myself, I don’t think I’ll ever actually try writing something I define formally as haiku, but my encounter with George has helped me clarify a bit what is going on with me when I write the micropoems.

I will give him the last word:

our culture’s appreciation of haiku has been hamstrung by the mistaken idea that their primary characteristic is seventeen (5-7-5) syllables. The fact of the matter is that the Japanese and English languages are so different that most writers and translators of haiku in English (and other Romance languages) don’t write according to any fixed syllable count.

Instead they – we – emphasize haiku’s brevity, immediacy, imagistic language, and intuitive quality as distinguishing characteristics. Furthermore, the fact that haiku’s power lies in its subtly and suggestiveness – in apprehension by intuition rather than through logical explication – makes it easy to discount in an academic culture that tends to celebrate intellectual and linguistic brilliance. What I think is probably most important, though, is a misperception that real haiku – as opposed to 5-7-5 Internet spam – is merely a highly specialized form of meditative nature-poetry. In short, people don’t realize the range of subjects, experiences, and emotions haiku can express.

As the “pioneering” haiku poet in the [Spalding MFA] program, I knew in advance that two of Spalding’s faculty members valued the Japanese short forms, but feared the rest of the faculty and my classmates might not take my work seriously. To my delight, what I encountered, instead, was a great deal of interest in and support for what I was doing. In fact, the response I received most often was something along the lines of Wow, I didn’t know that you could do so much with haiku; I didn’t know that it was such a contemporary form.

I may also dwell among the converts.

Watchin the river flow

Wendell Berry Pulling his Personal Papers from the University of Kentucky

Wendell Berry, perhaps Kentucky’s best-known writer, is pulling many of his personal papers from the University of Kentucky’s archives to protest the naming of Wildcat Coal Lodge.

Berry excoriated his alma matter in a Dec. 20, 2009, letter, saying the decision to name a new dorm for UK basketball players the Wildcat Coal Lodge “puts an end” to his association with the university.

“The University’s president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary ‘gift,’ granting to the benefactors, in effect, a co-sponsorship of the University’s basketball team,” Berry wrote in the typewritten letter. “That — added to the ‘Top 20′ project and the president’s exclusive ‘focus’ on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University.”

I like the statement made by Ernie Yanarell, an outgoing faculty trustee who was opposed to the name Wildcat Coal Lodge

Yanarella said UK violated its own regulations in naming the building. Coal is not a purpose or function of the lodge, Yanarella said, and hence is included in the name for no reason “other than promotional considerations for the Kentucky coal industry.”

From the New Southerner, an interview with Karen Spears Zacharias, author of Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide: (‘Cause I Need More Room for My Plasma TV):

I didn’t write this book because I was offended by somebody. I wrote it because as a 14-year-old girl I had an encounter with the resurrected Christ. In that sacred moment there was no mention of money, no promise of riches, no assurances that my life would get better or that I would move on up to the big trailer soon.

There was just that moment of simple faith when I understood that no matter what, God would never leave nor forsake me. Best life now or worst life ever, He’s never going to abandon me. What concerns me about Golden Calf theology—this notion that God’s promise to us is to “prosper us”—is the exploitation of all things sacred. Corruption and greed have infiltrated the church. Indeed, there are plenty who would very articulately argue that it has always been a big problem for the church.

There was a time in America when the prosperity gospel was considered a fringe movement. Now the teachings are so mainstream they are taught from the pulpit of the largest church in America. That troubles me deeply.

David Cole on The Roberts Court’s Free Speech Problem:

In the Roberts Court’s world, corporations’ freedom to spend unlimited sums of money apparently deserves substantially greater protection than human rights advocates’ freedom to speak.

Via Marie Gauthier, University of Pittsburgh Press is having a half-price sale on their poetry list until August 1.

Also a mid-summer sale at Phoenicia Publishing.

And Salmon Publishing is offering free shipping on their catalogue. Salmon publilshes local poet Ron Houchen.

You never know how good a Dylan performance is until you hear some one else butcher his work. I was reminded of this the other day when I was looking for an acceptable YouTube version of “Watching the River Flow.” I didn’t find one, but I was fortunate enough to run across this. Man, it is clean, clean, clean.

Poets for the Living Waters

Via Rocket Kids, Poets for the Living Waters Call for Work — Gulf Coast Poems:

Call for Work – Gulf Coast Poems Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the Gulf Oil Disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made ecological catastrophes in history.

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.

Please submit 1-3 poems, a short bio, and credits for any previously published submissions to:
poetsforlivingwaters@yahoo.com

So far they have poems up by Franz Wright, Evie Shockley, Bill Marsh, and Kate Schapira. Company’s good.

Meanwhile, via Tamiko Beyer at the Kenyon Review blog, David Biespiel writes about poets and politics:

America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling—both for poetry and for democracy. Because when I look at American poetry from the perspective of a fellow traveler, I see an art invested in various complex, fascinating, historical, and sometimes shop-worn literary debates. I see a twenty-first-century enterprise that’s thriving in the off-the-beaten-track corners of the nation’s cities and college towns. But at the same time that poetry’s various coteries are consumed with art-affirming debates over poetics and styles, American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political, and public life.

This divide between poet and civic life is bad for American poetry and bad for America, too.

This almost seems like a blame-the-victim article to me. As I think I’ve said before here, poets are like every other kind of protester (who isn’t a teabagger) in this country. They’ve been confined to a “free speech zone” and marginalized. The American political powers that be have realized that marginalization works better than suppression. Don’t fight the press, embed it. Don’t use water cannons on the protesters, let them holler themselves hoarse over in the little protesters ghetto. As Tamiko points out,

I find it ironic that Biespiel is, himself seemingly too insulated in his own poetry world to recognize the work of established poets such as Myung Mi Kim, the late June Jordan, Martín Espada, Patricia Smith, Joy Harjo, and Juliana Spahr (yes, mostly women and people of color). Not to mention the rich, exciting work of emerging poets who are unabashedly and unapologetically engaging in the poetics of politics – poets such as Craig Santos Perez, Ching-In Chen, Tara Betts are just a few that immediately come to mind.

. . .

The fact that Biespiel is not aware of – or perhaps does not count – these poets actually proves his point, I think. The truth is, poetry that actively seeks to engage in political dialog is unarguably marginalized by the gatekeepers and tastemakers of the literary establishment (who are, for the most part, white and male).

The question really is not “why aren’t poets more politically active?” as per the headline on the Huffington Post. There are plenty of great poets who are politically active both in their daily life and in their work. The question is “why are politically active poets not more widely recognized and appreciated?”

Anybody got an answer?

I think that we’re back to a question that keeps arising here — is there a way to use the internet to subvert the gatekeepers? Are the tastemakers still in control?