Sherry Chandler

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The Last Moonshiner. Any comments?

Shenandoah turns 60 and turns digital.:

Shenandoah will publish in its usual format in fall 2010. In spring 2011, there will be a limited-edition anthology of poems published in Shenandoah over the last 15 years. And then will come the biggest change of all. “For the foreseeable future,” said Smith, “that will be the last print issue of Shenandoah.”

Starting with the fall 2011 issue, it will be entirely online. A paid subscription will be a thing of the past. “It is perhaps inevitable when we look at what has happened to other literary journals,” said Smith. “Literary magazines per se are going to have to change their way of conceiving themselves and of reaching their audiences. And this is all tied up in the deep inquiry going on in our culture about the future of print. There is time to make that transition and be an innovator.”

The way the journal involves students in its work will be innovative as well. “The interns will not just observe and theorize about the actual editorial decisions, from design to contents to policies,” said Smith, “but they will also participate in the decisions, plus do things like screening submissions and blogging.”

See Death of a lit mag, and thanks to Edward Byrne for the news.

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light

. . .

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

I’m not sure why Texas gets to hold our entire education system hostage but there it is.

On the other hand, the most Draconian version of Utah’s anti-abortion bill did not pass:

DENVER — A sweeping anti-abortion statute in Utah that would have allowed up to life in prison for a woman whose fetus died from her intentional or reckless behavior was withdrawn by its sponsor on Thursday and will be revised to be narrower in scope.

. . .

The sponsor, Representative Carl D. Wimmer, a Republican, said he had removed a key clause that would have allowed prosecution under Utah’s criminal homicide laws for a “reckless act of the woman” that resulted in death to a fetus. Language will remain, he said, that makes a woman’s “intentional” actions, if resulting in the death of her fetus in an illegal abortion, a felony.

The bill was prompted by a case last year in which a 17-year-old who was seven months pregnant sought to induce a miscarriage by paying a man to beat her. She was arrested, but released by a judge who said seeking an abortion was not a crime.

Legal abortions, performed by a doctor, would not be affected by the old bill or its replacement. But Utah has statutes on the books intended to discourage abortions, including a parental consent requirement for minors.

My bleeding heart instincts say that any 17-year-old as desperate as all that should be treated with great compassion and not exploited as a poster-child for turning women into criminals.

Meanwhile, there’s this from Amnesty International. I would somehow feel more sympathetic toward the anti-abortion idealogues if I thought there was any real compassion involved. But I see little evidence of it.

Amnesty International’s report Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA, urges action to tackle a crisis that sees between two and three women die every day during pregnancy and childbirth in the USA.

A total of 1.7 million women a year, one-third of all pregnant women in the country, suffer from pregnancy-related complications.

The report also revealed that severe pregnancy-related complications that nearly cause death — known as “near misses” — are rising at an alarming rate, increasing by 25 percent since 1998.

Minorities, those living in poverty, Native American and immigrant women and those who speak little or no English are particularly affected.

“This country’s extraordinary record of medical advancement makes its haphazard approach to maternal care all the more scandalous and disgraceful,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA.

, , ,

“Mothers die not because the United States can’t provide good care, but because it lacks the political will to make sure good care is available to all women,” said Larry Cox.

Amnesty International’s analysis also shows a health care reform proposal before the US Congress does not address the crisis of maternal health care.

And then there’s this, an antidote to Oscar hype (though I’m pleased about Jeff Bridges):

Some kudos

In an e-mail, Michael Czarnecki of FootHills Publishing mentioned that 2010 marks their 25^th year of publishing. In that 25 years, FootHills has brought some great chapbooks into the world, including mine and Helen Losse’s, which are #s 4 and 5 in their Poets on Peace series. I see that they have just released POP #14. FootHills chapbooks are fine handstitched examples of chapbook art.

Michael will also turn 60 in 2010. A banner year for Wheeler Hill.

I also need to announce the advent of a brand-new press here in Kentucky, Accents Publishing. Launched by owner/editor Katerina Stoykova-Klemer,

Our mission is to promote brilliant voices in an affordable publication format, and to foster an exchange of literature among different world cultures and languages.

And ambitious plan. I’ve talked to Katerina about her goal, which is to produce small attractive books that sell for about $5. It’s a sort of micro-marketing strategy of publishing and I wish them well.

We at Accents Publishing believe that readers should be able to afford the books we publish. That’s why we’re committed to providing books that offer great value at a reasonable price.

The Press will have a premiere event to launch its first book on February 4 at Common Grounds Coffee House, 343 East High Street, Lexington, from 7:00 – 10:00 pm.

Last but not least, I want to mention that one of my very favorite places in Central Kentucky, the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, received an honorable mention for the MetLife Innovative Artist Space Award for 2009. More than 30,000 people visited the Carnegie Center in 2009 to participate in their literacy programming. I was one of them.

The abstract of their MetLife application reads

In 1990, Lexington’s mayor created a committee to discover a reuse for the vacant Carnegie library building; from that group, the idea for a community learning and arts center was born. The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning helps people find joy in writing, reading, and learning new things. In addition to offering a gallery and performing arts events, the center’s emphasis on writing and promoting books by Kentucky authors has made it the literary hub of Kentucky. The building is also home to learning and arts organizations, an author, and writing/book discussion groups. It is also the site for other non-Carnegie events, including the Kentucky Women Writers Conference.

“a heat-slick valentine”

Whereas Marilyn Taylor’s Going Wrong is a traditional library press edition, the second chapbook I want to bring to your attention is one that forges ahead into the frontiers of publication. It is Pamela Johnson Parker’s A Walk Through the Memory Palace, winner of qarrtsiluni’s first chapbook contest, judged by Dinty Moore.

In establishing their small press arm, editors Beth Adams and Dave Bonta want to continue the work they’re doing with qarrtsiluni itself, that is, exploring methods of publication that exploit the full potential of the internet. To that end, A Walk Through the Memory Palace is available as a nicely designed, highly readable online text. It is also available as a half-hour podcast, or as a print edition.

In an interview at readwritepoem, Beth Adams explains qarrtsiluni’s publishing philosophy:

Three things seem evident: 1. Distribution and marketing and a lot of publishing are going to happen via the web; 2. The future of indie book publishing (of paper editions) lies in print-on-demand; and 3. The former competitive model has to give way to innovative collaborative efforts, where artists and writers and publishers help each other rather than competing for a shrinking number of book contracts, awards and recognition. Dave and I are both motivated by that third reality — wanting to find new ways to encourage writers, get their work out there, and preserve some of it for posterity in print — because we continue to believe that people want to hold books in their hands.

The online edition is Creative Commons licensed, in line with Dave Bonta’s philosophy:

Poetry was never about money for me. It’s like water. It’s supposed to be free.

It is designed, I think, with WordPress software, to exploit the navigation advantages of blog design. Though, I’m quick to add, the online chapbook does not look like a blog.

The print edition is published in collaboration with Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal, a print-on-demand press. It is 28 pages, perfect bound, with a full-color, glossy cover, cover art by Carrie Ann Baade. The list price is $5.95.

Pamela Johnson Parker’s poems are imagistic and erotic. Parker’s free verse line is short and she likes to float it away from the left margin, give it plenty of white space. These ten poems range in subject from listening to old 78s on a Western Kentucky front porch to Greek mythology, from those whose tattoos are body art (“Tattoos”) to those whose tattoos are marks of holocaust (“Some Yellow Tulips”). For me, it is strongest when it is most straightforward, as in these lines from “Tattoos”

Clean Rooms by the Hour — neon
blues, reds, blurring past

our window, through blinds
that won’t quite shut (one slat slants
diagonal) printing
its ladder of light
all the way down your back. Here
with you, I don’t care

about tawdry or
geography; I want you
so much it hurts to
breathe . . .

We are very much in the senses here and in that motel room with that body tattooed with ink, with the shadows of the blind slats, the “tattoo / of skin against skin.” We are reading “a heat-slick valentine.”

Parker is fond of lists and uses them to advantage, as in the beginning of this same long poem, “Tattoos.” “Tattoos” is a poem in two parts. The lines quoted above are from the second part, “Canvas,” which is to say, the body. These lines are from the first part, “Ink:”

Cardamom, ginger,
pomegranate bark. Bamboo
shoots, asparagus,

damp smouldering leaves —
mugwort mordant in votives.
Wicker baskets, rows

and rows of trays, jars
decanting tarragon, dried
dandelions, black

mushrooms, bear bladders.

It’s informative to listen to Parker read these poems. With her Kentucky accent, a word like “still” travels over its diphthongs at a leisurely pace and the poems become like the spoken version of a Lucinda Williams song, an effect that adds texture to poems dealing with Greek myth:

ARCHAIC FRAGMENTS

NARCISSUS: NARKE

Water takes you in.
For days the gods talk
Of nothing but your

Spine in the dark, white
Coral, of how fish
School into your dead

Calm. And still water
Gives you back: thirsting,
Already bent to drink.

“Archaic Fragments,” like many of the poems in this chapbook is a long multi-part work. These offerings wrap poems into poems, so that you do get your full 28-pages of value.

In another of life’s totally meaningless coincidences, Parker is a graduate of Murray State University’s MFA program in creative writing and my son, who did some work in that program, is acquainted with her.

We also have in common our work as medical editors. That training is evident “Breasts,” a six-part, five-page contemplation cancer that mixes technical and sensual language set up like figure legends for a medical paper:

Figure C.   Recent radical mastectomy showing markings for
radiation. Incisions placed so that they will not show
when wearing evening dress or bathing suit.

Two devices don’t work well for Parker in this first chapbook venture. One is the poem “for two voices.” This may be a problem of my personal taste. In general, I don’t tend to like poems that entertwine two strands of meaning. I usually wind up picking the threads apart so that reading the poem becomes sort of like untying a knot. It’s difficult, I think, to do a poem like “Engendering: For Two Voices” in such a way that the two parts strengthen and build on one another. Although “Engendering” is, in many ways, a fine poem, I don’t think Parker quite pulls it off. The “Ulysses:Uxoria” section of “Archaic Fragments” works better because its use of two voices is simpler, less intrusive.

The other poem that doesn’t work for me is “Some Yellow Tulips,” a portrait of a holocaust survivor in rhymed couplets. Such subjects can be done in formal poetry. As an example, see Marilyn Taylor’s “In Other News.” But the poet has to be very careful to make sure the form serves the poem. As one who works a bit in form, I know that it’s easy to let it get away from you, to let the poem serve the form. Especially if you’re trying to bend the form to serve a narrative. I appreciate Parker’s effort in this poem. It contains some startling and moving images, especially the last line where the blowing yellow tulips “ravelled to a six-pointed star.” But the meter and rhyme are too regular, sometimes a bit forced.

Small flaws, born of personal preference, in a chapbook that is otherwise excellent.
A Walk Through the Memory Palace is Pamela Johnson Taylor’s first booklength publication. She is off to a fine start.

Let me remind you again that the price for the print edition of this book is $5.95, plus shipping. It would make a great stocking stuffer.

“woozy, reckless through the barricades”

The other day in the comments, Jessie Carty said “I love a good chapbook.”

Lately, I’ve come into possession of a number of good chapbooks from a variety of publishers, and I hope to bring them to your attention here in the weeks before Christmas, with the reminder that chapbooks, which usually sell for around $10, make great stocking stuffers.

First up is Marilyn L. Taylor’s Going Wrong, from the Parallel Press chapbook series. Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. The chapbook is saddle-stapled with cardstock covers with three-color cover art on nice cream-colored paper. It’s fat for a chapbook, offering 37 pages of poetry. It sells for $10.

Marilyn L. Taylor is poet laureate of Wisconsin. Marilyn is a master of formal verse who delights in the satiric mode. I think it was Robert Graves who said that poetry has two modes, the lyric and the satiric. Going Wrong manages to combine the two in personna poems in the voices of women who have, in fact, gone wrong. In love, of course. That’s what makes a lyric.

For the most part, Going Wrong is what you might call a lighter look at love. As, for example, the “Valentine for a Bashful Boy”

Lovely man, my shaggy puppy,
Why the frown? The visage droopy?
Does the lack of making whoopee
Make you feel all misanthropy?

It’s fair to call these verses comic but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re light. Well, the Valentine is pretty light, but others, like “I Miss You and I’m Drunk” reveal Taylor’s startling mastery of image:

Look at the way the moon just sits there
with its brights on, aiming
that yellowish beam across the water
at the lovers and the skinnydippers

and how the summer sawgrass
grabs me by the ankles, making me
stumble, making me think about
the flaming ache of falling down on top of you

Not every poem in Going Wrong is satiric. Some, like “To the Mother of a Dead Marine” and “In Other News,” take a daring look at the violent dark side of eroticism. What the poems never are is confessional free verse. They are all about language and its possibilities.

The chapbook is a catalogue of forms, some of which I probably am not sophisticated enough to recognize. Sonnets abound, and there’s a ballad and a villanelle, terza rima, and plain vanilla rhymed couplets. The chapbooks tour de force is a crown of sonnets called “The Seven Very Liberal Arts.” Those arts are Logic, Grammar, Music, Rhetoric, Geology, Arithmetic, and Astronomy. The crown has a poem for each art, each poem plays exquisitely with the language of the art in question. Here are a few lines from the sestet of “Grammar:”

Scribble suggestions slowly down my spine
with your intense, exploratory care,
and punctuate, with sharp intakes of air
the way my staves and strophes intertwine.

Here is a chapbook of poems for a wide audience. Those who say they don’t read poetry because it is difficult will find these poems very accessible and entertaining. Those who prefer texture and nuance will find it in abundance in Taylor’s language play and mastery of craft.

Only for licensed poets

But then all poets have license, don’t they?

Poetry Prescriptions from readwritepoem:

How to play along
1. Download the poetry prescription form (PDF format) and save it.

2. Make as many printouts as you want. You should be able to fit two forms on one sheet of paper. Do a little trimming, and you’re good to go.

3. Take the forms with you everywhere you go. Really — you never know when someone will be in need and when your poetic license will be their only hope for a remedy.

4. Fill in the form as completely as possible, putting the prescription in the open area just below the Px symbol. Make sure you sign the form, or it’s not legal. I mean, it’s not legal anyway, but it should be legal.

5. Think about creative ways to get the forms into the community. Do you want to slip some on cafe tables at your favorite place to eat? How about sliding a few into literary magazines? Into poetry books at your local library? You could even put them up on public bulletin boards. (Whatever you do, please don’t litter and don’t do stuff that’s illegal. We don’t want you getting into trouble or making big messes.)

Feedback to readwritepoem

__________
P.S. This via Colin Kelley: New Stephen King e-book delayed

NEW YORK — The latest weapon in the publishing price wars: Stephen King

Scribner announced Wednesday that the digital edition of King’s “Under the Dome,” a 1,000-plus page novel, would not be released until Dec. 24, virtually the end of the holiday season and a month after the hardcover.

E-books have already been delayed for Sen. Edward Kennedy’s “True Compass” and Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” as publishers try to prevent the cheaper digital editions from taking sales from hardcovers, which, until recently, cost more.

“Given the current state of the marketplace and trends in digital book pricing, we believe that this is the most appropriate publishing sequence for this particular 1088 page work of fiction,” said spokesman Adam Rothberg of Scribner’s parent company, Simon&Schuster.

Thanks to an online price war among Target.com, Amazon and Walmart.com, the hardcover for “Under the Dome,” ”Going Rogue” and other popular November releases can be pre-ordered for $9 or less, a strong source of concern among publishers and independent booksellers, who cannot afford to charge so little.

If you would like to keep up with all of Wal-Mart’s less-than-savory doings, check out Wal-Mart Wednesdays over at Have Coffee, Will Write or become a regular reader of The Writing on the Wal.

All my people

Marianne Worthington is a woman of diminutive stature but expansive spirit, especially when it comes to her Appalachian roots. In her Finishing Line chapbook Larger Bodies than Mine, she explores those roots. The dedication to “all my people” takes in her kin in their sorrow, their pain, their human failings.

Women seem compelled to write poems about their grandmothers. I have written a fair number of them myself. Such writing, such remembering, is a way of honoring legacy. But, because grandmother poems are so common, they are very difficult to write. In inexperienced hands, grandmother poems risk cliché and sentimentality. Sentimentality is not to be confused with sentiment. Skilled craftswomen may rely on sentiment, a strategy Annie Finch would champion, but the line is thin.

So sure is Worthington’s craft, so strong her intelligence, that her grandmother poems sing us a new song of an old relationship. Worthington is fearlessly honest and without a trace of sentimentality:

Reading My Grandmother’s Diary

I believe her faith was clichéd
built on evangelists’ tracts and radio
sermons, the words on the air dropping
like sharp pebbles, pitting her wrists
and ankles where she tied herself
to the bed each morning unable to rise.
her mind picking its way through

another bitter day.

Though sometimes her vision is gentler and does partake of sentiment:

Porcelain

I wash Grandmother’s Japanese china,
a pattern with such an old fashioned name:
Arlene.

“Porcelain” is one of three unrhymed sonnets in the chapbook. They are my favorites in this 29-page collection. Worthington might be deemed a semi-formal poet. She uses a loose sonnet form but most of her poems are free verse, long of line and boxy in shape but with a strong underlying rhythms. Worthington is a scholar of traditional mountain music, and her immersion in music has influenced her poetic line.

The central portion of the book is devoted to poems about Father, including my favorite of the sonnets:

For the Young Girl Who Lost Her Father

I would not give him back to you, your father
as a healthy man. He would change who you
became. Instead I wuld give back your summers . . .

It is always a mistake to conflate the poetic voice with the poet, and Worthington is at work at a series of dramatic monologues about women in the early years of country-music radio. So she is known to take on a persona. Still, there is a strong autobiographical feel to this chapbook, a feel of honoring the past by looking at it with clear eyes.

I think Jeff Daniel Marion got it right in his cover blurb:

Haunted by the past, the poems in Larger Bodies Than Mine are incantations, spells changed with the hope of striking a balance in a world of struggle and suffering. In the face of brokenness and shattered remnants of lives, the poems themselves redeem loss and long for wholeness. Here is a strong and steady voice worthy of our hearing.

Larger Bodies Than Mine was given the Appalachian Book of the Year award in poetry for 2007.

Some things to read

Heads-up!

The Fall 2009 issue of New Southerner Magazine is out, with great poetry by Jessie Carty, Ida Cerne, and Michael Jackman, a great essay by Jason Howard on mountaintop removal, and some nifty bread pudding recipes from Ellen Birkett Morris.

And let me remind you that you still have 17 days to submit to their writing contest.

Meanwhile qarrtsiluni , featuring their 2009 chapbook finalists, has introduced a podcast and has announced their next issue theme: words of power: curses, spells, charms, prayers, incantations, mantras, sacred scriptures, explicit performative utterances, oaths, or legal instruments.

Check out the online version of the winning chapbook, Pamela Johnson Parker’s A Walk Through the Memory Place.. It’s an elegant piece of online mixed-media design.