Sherry Chandler

My appreciation of Leatha Kendrick’s poem “No Reason” is up at the Wom-Po First Annual Festival of Women’s Poetry.

I invite you to drop by and read and comment. Also take a look at the other 29 appreciations posted in November.

Or just browse around the Fest, maybe buy a book in the bookstore. It is Christmas shopping time.

(Speaking of which, check out this slideshow of book covers the Shayla Mollohan created. It’s really neat.)

Here are a couple of photos I meant to share earlier this month but somehow time got away. They were taken on November 5, the day the last nail was driven in our long hard slog to a roof.

Here is the last strip of shingles going down:

And here is what they’re covering, in part. The open slot is covered by ventilating mesh and that is covered by the capping shingles:

My first post about this roofing project was done in February 2005, not long after I’d started to blog. It’s got some clips from some pretty neat poems about roofing, one from Wendell Berry and one from David Rogers. Needless to say, I’ve long since lost my sense of its poetry.

Why did it take so long? Because it was a one-man job and that man arthritic. Because it was badly done to begin with and much had to be redone from scratch. (And if you ask why we didn’t contract to have this job done, read that last sentence again.)

For example, this gable had to be built over the flat roof that covered part of the kitchen:

So it’s been a long haul. But today it is drizzling and, as the squirrels search among the dogwood leaves for walnuts, I don’t have to be listening for drips. And I’m grateful for that.

First Tools

With a candleflame
I could create a holy place
a glowy breath to read by
to toast some bread
to guard me
from the hounds of night.

But all I’m given is a spark—
no, not even that.
Just two sharp stones—
one to hold
one to strike with—
and a craving for light.

— Mary E. O’Dell (aka Ernie)

I ran across this poem this morning in the Fall 1998 edition of Wind magazine, an issue produced back when Charlie Hughes and Leatha Kendrick were the editors. They did great work. The issue has poems by Diane Lockward, Robin Morgan, David Citino, and Charles Semones, among others.

My chick has gone home, hubby is doing Christmas at Keeneland, I am sated and alone in the house, planning to shun the kitchen for the easy chair, put my feet up and catch up on my reading of old-fashioned books.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in reading onscreen, here are a trio of poetry anthologies that I’ve been meaning to point you toward.

From the Academy of American Poets, Poems about Thanks and Gratitude.

And from AfterEllen, Lesbian Poetry Retrospective Part II and Part I.

Or, if you’re looking for something more vizpo and mixed media, try the Electronic Literature Collection 1.

At YouTube

Via

We were not always cruel to Griddlebone while she was wearing the Elizabethan collar. But she was never less than miserable.

Here’s the first two paragraphs of a poem by May Swenson that makes a charming portrait of the life our apartment-bound cats lived; our farm cats are not so homocentric:

from Waiting for IT

My cat jumps to the window sill
and sits there still as a jug.
He’s waiting for me, but I cannot be
coming, for I am in the room.

His snout, a gloomy V of patience,
pokes out into the sun.
The funnels of his ears expect
to be poured full of my footsteps.

. . .

— May Swenson, from To Mix with Time. New and Selected Poems (Scribner’s, 1963)

The poem darkens in paragraph three.

It’s all very well to laugh at Sarah Palin. Her turkey slaughter interview was pretty gauche, to say the least. ( See Bob Somerby on the downside of this hilarity.)

But what if you had to make a living working in a place like that:

Before you slice that ham or carve that turkey this Thanksgiving, take a moment to reflect on the hidden costs of bringing that food to your table.

Throughout the South, in rural areas along the hog belt and poultry belt, thousands of workers labor in poultry and meatpacking plants, sorting, cleaning, pulling, deboning, gutting, cutting, slicing and packaging turkeys, chickens, and hogs every day. Whether for Virginia-based Smithfield Foods or Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, these workers perform some of the most dangerous factory jobs in the nation and are subjected to repeated injury and inhumane treatment. Yet their plight is often overlooked. These workers have very few rights in an industry that has been allowed to exploit its workforce due to a lax regulation and enforcement.

Moreover, many of the workers doing the dangerous work of meatpacking are immigrants, often undocumented, and thus more exploitable. Companies have increasingly come to rely on an immigrant workforce that may not complain about harsh conditions for fear of being fired or deported.

The changing demographics of the rural South are key to supplying this booming industry. For instance, North Carolina, the second largest turkey-producing state and the second-largest swine-producing state, has the fastest growing Latino population in the country. According to the U.S. Census, the Latino population in North Carolina grew from some 76,000 in 1990 to almost half a million today.

This video, via Dave Bonta, strikes me as the best Thanksgiving message I can send you this year.

Porcupine in a Cherry Tree from Dave Bonta on Vimeo.

Keene Entertainment Center (Keeneland Race Course)
11 am – 5 pm, Saturday, November 29, 2008
12 – 5 pm, Sunday, November 30, 2008
Admission: Free

Just in time for your holiday shopping, the Keeneland Art Fair has something for even the hardest to buy for person on your shopping list.

Held on the picturesque grounds of the Keeneland Race Course, this juried art fair will feature 90 of the region’s best artists and craftsmen.

Shoppers can expect to see the highest quality, handcrafted items including pottery, painting, metal works, glass works, fiber, weaving, photography, baskets and more. For those who need a break from their shopping, concessions will be sold on-site by Turf Catering. Admission and parking is FREE.

The Keeneland Art Fair is brought to you by Parks and Recreation, Keeneland Race Course, Mix 94.5 and WTVQ-TV. For more information, call 288-2925.

__________

My husband, T R Williams, will be there. Drop by and see us.

I have taken down my Iraq-War-cost widget, not because I am convinced that the season of war is over, but because I think any meaningful protest against the season of war is over. My best hope at this point is that some sanity returns to our imperialism and our war spending. We are a warlike expansionist nation and always have been, Republicans and Democrats alike. If Mr. Obama runs a successful war, I have no doubt that people left and right will like it just fine.

Via The Sideshow, this from The Daily Telegraph:

There is growing concern among a new generation of anti-war foreign policy analysts in Washington, many of whom stuck their necks out to support Mr Obama early in the White House race, that they will be frozen out of his administration.

Mrs Clinton is expected to appoint her own top team at the State Department, drawn from more conservative thinkers.

A Democratic foreign policy expert told one Washington website: “They were the ones courageous enough to stand up early against Iraq, which is why many supported Obama in the first place.” Their fear, he added, is that they will not now secure the mid-level posts which will enable them to reach the top of the Washington career ladder in future.

Suspicion of Mr Obama’s moves has been compounded, for some liberals, by the revelation that Mr Obama has for several months been taking advice from Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush.

His return to prominence in Washington represents a resurgence of the old school conservative realists, who were largely eclipsed during this Bush administration by the neoconservatives.

They place US national interests above the quest to defend human rights or to spread democracy. Progressives and liberals see Mr Scowcroft’s hand in the move to retain Mr Gates, an old friend, at the Pentagon and also in the expected elevation of Gen. Jones.

Others are troubled by an announcement on Friday night that Mr Obama will retain the White House political office, an institution recently associated with George Bush’s adviser Karl Rove, who has been blamed for running government as a permanent and highly partisan election campaign.

During the campaign, Mr Obama pledged to end “politics as usual” and the “perpetual campaign”.

But a spokesman for the Transition team said: “An Obama White House will be focused on meeting the next challenge, not winning the next election.”

And this from American Leftist:

With this aside, the article points towards three important issues related to US democratic processes. First, Obama’s abandonment of his antiwar advisors demonstrates how impervious the foreign policy establishment is towards even the most mildly dissenting view. US intervention in the Middle East has been historically bipartisan, and remains so.

. . .

Second, there is the fact that the institutions of the military-industrial complex, as manifest in the Defense Department, Homeland Security, the Pentagon and, yes, even the State Department, possess accumulated institutional values that cannot be challenged within the electoral process. It is acceptable for ambitious people who intend to make careers in these institutions to make aggressive errors in support of US policy, recalling Barry Goldwater’s famous line, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, but even the mildest criticism or public disclosure of internal decisionmaking processes is heresy.

Accordingly, that new generation of antiwar policy analysts in Washington has been taught a rather painful lesson. They won’t make the mistake of publicly expressing their antiwar views again, if anything, they will err on the side of utterances of a markedly violent, unilateralist kind, and the generation behind them will be instructed to keep their mouths shut as well. We are not just experiencing a short term fight over patronage within the Obama administration, but one that will shape the contours of acceptable dissent within the foreign policy establishment for many years. It is a great tragedy that will cast a long shadow.

Finally, there is the even more frightening prospect as to whether the US electoral process itself is merely an entertainment spectacle for the purpose of inducing the public to believe that it has a power that it does not, in fact, have.

I do agree, somewhat, with that last statement though with these reservations. First, as commentators like Glenn Greenwald have pointed out, Mr. Obama told us what he was going to do. People who are now disappointed were deceiving themselves. And second, it was not the left that elected Mr. Obama. He didn’t ask the left for votes, except insofar as he campaigned as an African-American. He campaigned to the center right.

Because I did listen to what Mr. Obama said, I am not now disappointed in what he’s doing. (Well, maybe the Gates appointment disappoints me.) I think he will be pragmatic, competent, and engaged. And that will be an improvement on what we’ve had for eight years.

As a man who is young and who has never stood still long enough to have to do the actual work of governing, a man who has never had what my husband describes as a profile in courage, Mr. Obama may be wise to surround himself with so many old hands. Certainly he seems to be erring on the side of caution.

Change? Not so much.