Sherry Chandler

I am off this morning to the Kentucky Women Writers Conference where I expect to spend the day celebrating writing with a fine community of writers.

For your catblogging poem, let me recommend this Jean Garrigue poem, Some Serious Nonsense for the Cats and Wolves which begins thus:

My cat peed in the coalbin, why?
Well, God himself asks many things
And gives no reason for the sky.
If we get used to life, that is the crime
Though distant evils rise and shine.
My cat peed in the coalbin, why?

And for your political commentary, I must recommend this Fresh Air interview with Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. You can also read an excerpt from the book at the site.

And let us send good karma to our friends in Texas, shoring up for Ike.

Update: Here is the NYTimes review of Bacevich’s book:

Andrew J. Bacevich thinks our political system is busted. In “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism,” he argues that the country’s founding principle — freedom — has become confused with appetite, turning America’s traditional quest for liberty into an obsession with consumption, the never-ending search for more. To accommodate this hunger, pandering politicians have created an informal empire of supply, maintaining it through constant brush-fire wars. Yet the foreign-policy apparatus meant to manage that empire has grown hideously bloated and has led the nation into one disaster after another. The latest is Iraq: in Bacevich’s mind, the crystallization of all that’s gone wrong with the American system.

I would love Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) if it only had this one great poem, “Pastoral,” in which she takes on the icons of southern poetry in a modified sonnet:

In the dream, I am with the Fugitive
Poets. We’re gathered for a photograph.
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
…
We’re lining up now — Robert Penn Warren,
his voice just audible above the drone
of bulldozers, telling us where to stand.
Say “race,” the photographer croons…

But then, on the very next page, she takes on Faulkner in a ghazal.

Miscegenation

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

…

Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus…

Native Guard takes its title from am elegant crown of sonnets concerning the Louisiana Native Guards, regiments of black soldiers who served with the Union Army. According to the end-notes, seven companies of the Second Louisiana Native Guards were sent to Fort Massachusetts, on Ship Island, to act as guards for Confederate prisoners confined there.

February 1863

We know it is our duty now to keep
white men as prisoners — rebel soldiers,
would-be masters. We’re all bondsmen here, each
to the other…

As those last words hint, Trethewey’s is not a tale of south bad/north good. It’s more north bad/south worse.

December 1862

…Still, we’re called supply units —
not infantry — and so we dig trenches,
haul burdens for the army no less heavy
than before. I heard the colonel call it
nigger work…

These soldiers are fired on in retreat by Union soldiers after one battle and after another, their white commanders refused to look for their wounded or bury their dead. When they were defending Fort Pillow in 1864, Bedford Forrest refused to acknowledge their flag of surrender and instead mowed them down. In a final insulting irony, their graves on Ship Island are washed away by Hurricane Camille while the Daughters of the Confederacy put up a plaque naming the Rebel soldiers who died there.

The poem that conveys this last information, “Elegy for the Native Guards,” is headed by an epigraph from Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”

Trethewey’s poems confront these violent contradictions with a formal restraint that for me gives them great power.

Native Guard won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007. A nice interview from the Online Newshour on that occasion.

Natasha Trethewey is coming to the Kentucky Women Writers Conference this weekend. She will read at 4:30 Friday afternoon in the Young Library on the University of Kentucky campus. The reading is free and open to the public.

Asked about his summer reading by Southeast Review editor Michael Garriga, Maurice Manning explains why he finds Melville and Hardy relevant to this modern world of today:

In the summers I try to read fiction since I have longer stretches of time. This summer I’ve read Jude the Obscure and a fair amount of Melville’s short fiction. Both Hardy and Melville fit nicely into some of my recent thoughts about our contemporary society, how it’s changed and what we seem to have lost, and reading them helps me to refine my own thinking. These forays always manage to offer some serendipitous results. A few days ago, I was in my local public library waiting to talk to a teenage book club and I was thumbing through some county historical documents, which included a record of deeds from the late 1790s. There I found entries for the sale of slaves, as well as entries for the return of slaves, apparently to keep the biological family intact–for the “purpose of nurture and solace.” I also found entries where parents had enlisted their young children for apprenticeships with local tradesmen. In one such entry, a 3-year old girl was apprenticed to a man to learn “spinning;” in another, a 6-year old boy was apprenticed to a man to be a “hatter.” Lots of things intrigue me here, aside from simply imagining the lives of these real people. First of all, the sad and wrenching history of slavery preoccupied Melville, and, as immodest as it might sound, I enjoy feeling a kind of fellowship with him. The rural and village trades were important to Hardy, especially how the loss of such trades was one of the significant costs of industrialization.

I generally find more meaning and potency in the past. Here in Kentucky (just outside Danville) that past has always felt close and I’ve always felt connected to it, sprung from it, like it or not. Down the road from my house is an old family graveyard. One of the graves there is for a woman whose first name was America. Even though I live in the middle of nowhere, sometimes it feels like I live in the center of it all.

Read the rest of this interview.

The folks at GoodReads sent me a message. It said, and I paraphrase, “it’s been 180 days since you added A Companion for Owls to your “currently reading” list. Would you like to update your list?”

A gentle reminder that I was not holding up my end, not being a good GoodReads citizen. No literate human being, it implied, could spend six months reading a single book, especially not a slender volume of poetry.

But GoodReads is wrong.

They don’t know how I read poetry books.

Very slowly.

Say, one poem a day. Or two. And I read them over several times. And then I sit and look out the window at the middle distance and absorb.

In the case of Maurice Manning’s A Companion for Owls, Being a Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, etc. (Harcourt, 2004), the reading time was especially long. There are several reasons for my lingering. One is that this volume of poetry is not particularly slender, coming in as it does at 128 pages. I’ve read shorter novels. Then there’s the fact that the collection deals with a period of Kentucky history in which I have a great interest. Mostly though, I was slow because I read it once through just to read the poems (of which there are about 90 pages) and then I read it through again to read the poems in conjunction with the endnotes (of which there are about 30 pages, including a 17-page divagation on the theme that it was Kentucky made English Romanticism possible).

Manning is a sometimes antic poet. Anyone who has read his Yale-Younger-Poet prize-winning Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions knows that he loves lists, shape poems, and a sort of schematic vizpo.

Take, for example, the poem below:

for which the end-note reads:

On April 24, 1777, Boone was shot in the ankle during an Indian siege at Boonesborough. The injury plagued him later in his life. That the state of Kentucky is shaped like a human foot is certainly a plausible comparison, though it is not one Boone explicitly made. He did however have intimate knowledge of sadness and would most likely have acknowledged that sadness often encircles joy.

On might infer that Boone left a large footprint indeed in Kentucky.

As with many contemporary poetry collections dealing with historical personalities, some of the poems in A Companion for Owls benefit from an explanatory endnote. Some, however, stand perfectly well alone. It seems typical of Manning, however, to decide that an end-note for one poem implies an end-note for all, whether needed or not. Some are very tongue-in-cheek. The note to “Advice to Rovers” reads:

It is not known if anyone ever came to Boone and asked how to be a Noble Savage.

Manning is also a metaphysical poet and the subject of his Boone poems is the relationship of man to God and nature. We are not dealing with Boone the hero here but with Boone the contemplative. He is also the Natural Man, if not the Noble Savage, a man with stated contempt for Jefferson and his expansionism. Boone as the American Adam is one of the few white men who actually experienced this new Eden. The irony, of course, is that he also partook of its exploration and its destruction.

The tone is set by the opening poem, “On God:”

Is there a god of the gulf between a man
and a horse? …

It is also set by poems like “Without a Vision,” which deals with the death of Boone’s son at the Battle of Blue Licks, the last battle in the Revolutionary War. In this rather intellectual book, it is the poem that touched me most:

Don’t ever name a son Israel;
and don’t ever follow a man hot
for blood into battle, because
he will bring blood upon you:
that is the one wage of vengeance.

I profited from my second reading of the book because the voice of the Boone poems doesn’t indulge in quite the same pyrotechnics found in Lawrence Booth or the speaker in Manning’s third collection Bucolics (Harcourt, 2007). Not that it’s quiet, exactly. But it is as Bobbie Ann Mason said in the Oxford American:

Maurice Manning is a wry skeptic with a streak of romanticism. In his work, each iota and instant matters.

You have to pay attention.

It took a while for me to understand this voice. Once I did, I came to like it a lot, not for what it says about Boone necessarily but for what it says about Manning. As Mason has said, his heart is in Kentucky and it shows in these poems, which might be seen as both celebration and elegy for the wilderness that was and the man who is most identified with it. Perhaps best stated in “Notes on ‘The Natural Man’”

                                                            …Filson said
this country could someday be a polis, a princely
city-state, he called it. …You want
the truth? I was rather friendly with the Indians!
It was the pro-polisites who decided we should kill
the Indians in order to civilize them. I came here
a man of relative peace and all of a sudden it’s wide
streets, evangelists, and courthouse squares…
I’ve got three dead Indians on my soul: What kind
of civilization is that?

Arthur Sze, from an interview in Rattle (winter 2007). He is talking about creating the writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts:

I think the Greeks had a phrase called “hermaion,” which means a lucky find, something that’s a bit of thievery, a bit of trickery, because it’s derived from Hermes, the god of mischief and invisibility. But the Greeks believed you could—if you were truly aware and awake—find these lucky finds anywhere and everywhere. …One day James Stevens said to me that one of the crucial mysteries of art was the disparity between intention and effect. An artist can intend to do one thing but ultimately one loses control and the effect can be very, very different or totally unanticipated. I thought it was very profound, and I hadn’t thought of it or articulated it in that way. So I feel like I constantly learn from my students.

Much has been made lately of Sarah Palin’s attempt to ban books when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, though I think more should be made of the fact that the local librarian was having none of it. (Speaking of acts of individual courage. Time says “The librarian was aghast.”) The currently-circulating list of books Palin supposedly banned is erroneous because the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons Baker, stopped her in her tracks.

(Side note: You can read the much-circulated e-mail from Anne Kilkenny about Sarah Palin here at Washington Note, where Steve Clemons has also pasted this interesting photo of the Wasilla Public Library circa 1950.)

(Second side note: I’ve seen Wasila, Wasilla, Wassila, all from good sources. Google goes with Wasilla.)

I must say that I have developed a great deal of admiration for librarians over the last eight years. I remember how they resisted the Bush administrations attempts to secretly pry into citizens’ library records by using National Security Letters.

Anyhoo, from my husband’s favorite newspaper, The Guardian, apparently the U.S. is not the only nation given to censorship, Poet’s rhyming riposte leaves Mrs Schofield ‘gobsmacked’:

“Today I am going to kill something,” says the unnamed protagonist of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure. “Anything. / I have had enough of being ignored and today / I am going to play God.”

Duffy, one of Britain’s most admired poets, might have been tempted this week to feel the same way, following the news that the exam board AQA had ordered schools to remove from its GCSE curriculum an anthology containing the poem because it supposedly glorified knife crime.

Happily, in a move that may suggest she did not intend her work to be taken literally, Duffy has chosen the more measured response of penning a poem in reply. The verse, entitled Mrs Schofield’s GCSE and published here for the first time, makes reference to acts of violence in Shakespeare’s plays: Othello killing Desdemona, Macbeth’s dagger delusions, Tybalt’s stabbing in Romeo and Juliet.

“What it seems to me to be saying is that Shakespeare - the greatest writer - some of his stuff is a bit dangerous [too],” Duffy’s literary agent Peter Strauss said yesterday. “It’s saying, look at what’s been written previously before you criticise this.”

He described the decision to remove Education for Leisure from the syllabus as “absolutely ridiculous. It’s an anti-violence poem. It is a plea for education rather than violence.”

…

The Mrs Schofield of the poem refers to Pat Schofield, an external examiner at Lutterworth College, Leicestershire, who complained about the poem and who welcomed the decision to ban a poem she described as “absolutely horrendous”.

…

Contacted by the Guardian last night, Schofield said she felt “a bit gobsmacked” to have a verse named after her. She described the poem as “a bit weird. But having read her other poems I found they were all a little bit weird. But that’s me”.

You can read the riposting poem at the link.

Addendum: More on the subject of libraries via Lambert at Corrente, this McClatchy article on libary use as an economic indicator:

Check it out.

That’s what users of public libraries are doing these days. In an effort to stay entertained and informed without breaking the family budget, people across the country increasingly are taking advantage of the best deal in town: everything — books, CDs, DVDs — is free.

“That’s pretty typical,” Stanislaus County Librarian Vanessa Czopek said. “When the economy goes in a slump, libraries see more usage.”

The American Library Association says use nationwide was 10 percent higher in the past year than during the 2001 economic downturn, when it tracked a similar spike in visits and circulation. Libraries recorded 1.3 billion visits and patrons checked out more than 2 billion items from April 2007 to April 2008

Addendum the Second: Via Heraclitean Fire, Scottish poet Rob MacKenzie says it is high time the authorities clamped down on gangs of poetry-reading teens:

It’s good to see the authorities finally getting to the root of the problem of street violence. For years it’s been obvious that studious poetry-reading youths have been terrorising our streets, and how it’s taken so long for the authorities to make the connection between poetry readers and knife crime is beyond me. In almost every knife-related murder in London this year, a copy of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem has been framed on the offender’s bedroom wall. In one case, a recording of the poem being recited backwards was found, with the words, “Kill for Satan” clearly audible around 1.12min. One knife-wielding teenager told me, “It’s all Duffy’s fault. Before I read that poem, I liked to play Risk every evening with my friends. And look at me now! I’m out on the street every night with my bread knife and a copy of Mean Time in my jacket pocket. My best friend, who’s just sawed a goldfish in half, he’s into Wallace Stevens, and he just can’t stop reading Harmonium when he’s not beating up innocent passers-by.”

The Kentucky Arts Council has announced the 2008 Governor’s Awards in the Arts, and I was most pleased to see that Charlie Hughes, poet and publisher, of Wind Publications is receiving the Media Award

for his unwavering promotion of the literary arts in Kentucky. His electronic periodical, “Kentucky Literary Newsletter,” not only promotes literary events and opportunities, it also acts as a network for the Kentucky community of writers of all genres.

Governor Steve Beshear will present 8 other awards in the Capitol Rotunda on October 1. If you could have been in the Capitol Rotunda on Kentucky Writers Day, April 24, and heard the spontaneous applause and seen the standing ovation given to Charlie by his fellow writers, you’d have some idea of the affection we all hold for this untiring man.

From the KAC press release:

“The recipients of these awards are a testimony to the value of the arts in Kentucky,” said Gov. Beshear. “They actively demonstrate how the arts are a tool for building vibrant communities, enhancing economic development, creating successful learning strategies and enriching individual’s lives.”

The Governor’s Awards in the Arts recipients are selected in nine different categories, with the Milner Award being the most prestigious and the first, which was established by the Kentucky Arts Council in 1978, after the late B. Hudson Milner.

I was pleased too to see Vince DiMartino among the recipients. My son played trombone at Centre College under Vince’s direction in I believe the jazz ensemble and the pep band.

You can read the entire list at the link.

I am a little slow getting this news because I have not been paying attention to the news this weekend.

From the International Heral Tribune:

The revolutionary Pakistani poet Ahmed Faraz, whose name is synonymous in South Asia with modern Urdu poetry, died Aug. 25 in Islamabad. He was 77.

The cause was kidney failure, said his son, Shibli Faraz.

He was earlier reported to have died while being treated in a Chicago hospital after a fall in Baltimore, but he returned to his homeland, where he died.

Popular among both the cognoscenti and the general public, he was one of the few poets from the subcontinent whose verses were read as well as sung. He was in great demand at the mushaira, social gatherings - usually after dusk - at which Urdu poets recite their poems.

Often compared to legends of the past like Mohammad Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Faraz was as popular in India as he was in his own country.

He enjoyed a near cult status in the pantheon of revolutionary poets. In India and other countries outside Pakistan, he was best known for his ghazals - poems expressing the writer’s feelings, especially about love - which were popularized by leading singers like Ghulam Ali, Mehdi Hasan, Runa Laila and Jagjit Singh.

…

An advocate for the poor and downtrodden, Faraz raised his voice against capitalists, usurpers and dictators. In the 1980s, he went into a six-year self-imposed exile in Canada and Europe during the era of General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, whose military rule of Pakistan he had condemned at a mushaira and whose power seemed to drive him to heights of inspiration.

Some of Faraz’s poetry in English translation here, a ghazal here and here. Information about the ghazal form here.

[Ed. note: this post should not be construed as a party-line statement.]

The Liars

A LIAR goes in fine clothes.
A liar goes in rags.
A liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes.
A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.
And the stonecutters earn a living—with lies—on the tombs of liars.

A liar looks ’em in the eye
And lies to a woman,
Lies to a man, a pal, a child, a fool.
And he is an old liar; we know him many years back.

A liar lies to nations.
A liar lies to the people.
A liar takes the blood of the people
And drinks this blood with a laugh and a lie,
A laugh in his neck,
A lie in his mouth.
And this liar is an old one; we know him many years.
He is straight as a dog’s hind leg.
He is straight as a corkscrew.
He is white as a black cat’s foot at midnight.

The tongue of a man is tied on this,
On the liar who lies to nations,
The liar who lies to the people.
The tongue of a man is tied on this
And ends: To hell with ’em all.
To hell with ’em all.

It’s a song hard as a riveter’s hammer,
Hard as the sleep of a crummy hobo,
Hard as the sleep of a lousy doughboy,
Twisted as a shell-shock idiot’s gibber.

The liars met where the doors were locked.
They said to each other: Now for war.
The liars fixed it and told ’em: Go.

Across their tables they fixed it up,
Behind their doors away from the mob.
And the guns did a job that nicked off millions.
The guns blew seven million off the map,
The guns sent seven million west.
Seven million shoving up the daisies.
Across their tables they fixed it up,
The liars who lie to nations.

And now
Out of the butcher’s job
And the boneyard junk the maggots have cleaned,
Where the jaws of skulls tell the jokes of war ghosts,
Out of this they are calling now: Let’s go back where we were.
Let us run the world again, us, us.

Where the doors are locked the liars say: Wait and we’ll cash in again.

So I hear The People talk.
I hear them tell each other:
Let the strong men be ready.
Let the strong men watch.
Let your wrists be cool and your head clear.
Let the liars get their finish,
The liars and their waiting game, waiting a day again
To open the doors and tell us: War! get out to your war again.

So I hear The People tell each other:
Look at to-day and to-morrow.
Fix this clock that nicks off millions
When The Liars say it’s time.
Take things in your own hands.
To hell with ’em all,
The liars who lie to nations,
The liars who lie to The People.

—Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920; Bartleby.com, 2000.

The new issue of Umbrella is up today and I’m pleased to announce that I have a couple of sonnets therein, along with the always excellent Marilyn L. Taylor and Anne Higgins, who has a new chapbook forthcoming from Finishing Line, Pick It Up and Read. I had the pleasure of getting to know both Marilyn and Anne at West Chester in 2008, and getting to know their work. Both are delightful human beings and powerful poets.

The issue contains a clutch of other poets, some known to me by name only, whose work I am looking forward to exploring, pluse “Kindred Prose” by Rachel Dacus, Eric D. Lehman, and Arlene L. Mandell.

Editor Kate Bernadette Benedict describes the issue thus:

Here’s to Autumn and a new Umbrella issue, a miscellany. Even when there is no announced theme, sometimes a theme emerges anyway. As summer ends, here we have a number of poems that explore ripening, the coming of age, night thoughts, memories, an awareness of death—not a “hurrahing in harvest” in the manner of Hopkins but more of an equinoctial melancholy that looks ahead to the near and inevitable winter solstice. A little wryness and eros leaven the bread and the poems run the spectrum from the strictly formal to the prose line. Here’s to eclectism!

I hope you’ll take a look at my poems and then peruse the entire issue.