Sherry Chandler

Journal mining

On this anniversary of passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,* I turn the page of my old journal to January 23, 1993, and find that I have made notes about Ursula K. Le Guin’s long essay called “The Fisherman’s Daughter,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (Grove Press, 1982). [Link is to a re-issue.]

I don’t remember reading this essay and yet, when I see the quotes I’ve written down, I think it must have had a considerable influence on my thinking. It’s the way we assimilate things I guess.

Take for example, this statement from Le Guin:

This sort of many namedness doesn’t happen to men; it’s inconvenient, and yet its very cumbersomeness reveals, perhaps, the being of a woman writer as not one simple thing — the author — but a multiple, complex process of being, with varous responsibilities, one of which is her writing. [p. 231]

And also this quote from Alicia Ostriker from Writing Like a Woman (Univ Michigan, 1983) as quoted by Le Guin:

“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” declares Virginia Woolf, but through whom can those who are themselves mothers . . . do their thinking?

Last year, I was moved to write a cycle of 17 acrostic poems based on the “maiden” names of my grandmothers, insofar as I could establish them, back to the eighteenth century. I thought at the time this was happenstance. I was looking to form to help me write voice poems (persona poems, dramatic monologues) about women who were part of Kentucky’s colonial, agrarian culture. I needed some way to find individual “voices” for these women about whom I knew very little. I tried one acrostic and I like the outcome, so I tried another, and then another.

Friends have asked me why I couldn’t just tell the stories. I gave reasons similar to those discussed by Ellen Bryant Voigt. But these names were important to me and I wonder whether my great desire to write poems based on the very names of my grandmothers may have been influenced by reading this essay sixteen years ago (sort of the amount of time it takes to raise a child, huh?

Speaking of which, Le Guin discusses the ideas of Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice, Cambridge, 1982) that I know have influenced my thinking. It begins with this statement from Le Guin:

No book by a woman who had children has ever been included in that august list [i.e., the Canon of English literature]. [p. 222]

This may be in part because, according to Gilligan, men are brought up to think in terms of their rights, women in terms of their responsibilities. Men think hierarchically and women do not. Therefore, “Great Artist,” being a hierarchical concept, is not a feminine concept.

Then there is this fragment, taken a bit out of context, that expresses what you might call a female writer’s ethic:

Nobody lives in great isolation, nobody sacrifices human claims, nobody even scolds the baby. Nobody is going to put their head, or anybody else’s head, into an oven: not the mother, not the writer, not the daughter—these three and one who, being women do not separate creation and destruction into I create/you are destroyed, or vice versa. Who are responsible, take responsibility, for both the baby and the book. [p.231]

To which, in 1993, I have written this response:

If Ursula Le Guin doesn’t think this is artist as hero, what does she think a hero is? To take responsibility for anything is hard. To take responsibility for the baby is the most heroic act of all. To take responsibility for anybody else, even my own babies who I made, even my parents who made me, is the hardest thing I can do. It is nearly impossible. To take responsibility for the baby and the book, too — shit, that is superwoman.

I wish I were superwoman. But I am not.

To which Le Guin may have answered:

To have and bring up kids is to be about as immersed in life as one can be, but it does not follow that one drowns. A lot of us can swim. [p. 235]

So could I swim? Yes and no.

At the time I wrote this, my sons were about to turn 14. They were starting a high school career and needed a lot of attention. I also had a somewhat demanding full-time job. I had lost my father about 18 months before.

I was writing. I see poem drafts in this journal. But I wasn’t publishing much, and I didn’t produce anything that could be called a book until my children were nearly finished with college, more than ten years after this journal entry was written. Even now, I haven’t published a full-length book of poems.

So I don’t know. I’d say I didn’t so much swim as tread water.**

But I didn’t drown.
__________
By the way, considering my previous journal mining about Joan Didion, I was amused to find that I had written down a comment that Le Guin had made about The Book of the Dun Cow (which I never managed to finish):

Almost worse than Joan Didion. (I said almost.) [p. 254]

I also like and can identify with this line:

I did not know how to write about women because I thought what men had written about women was the truth. [p 234]

__________
*That odd word suffrage, is from the Latin suffragium meaning “support, vote, or right to vote.” It may look like suffer, as in “to tolerate or allow,” but it has a different root.

**I wonder whether one great argument in favor of academic careers for poets is that such careers allow women their best chance to have both the book and the baby.

Fractal

Mandelbox Zoom from hömpörgő on Vimeo.

You can actually see this better if you click through and watch it at Vimeo.

Via Donna Rhae Marder

Another view of “theater”

About ten days ago, I shared a fiew of political theater frontier style from Virginia’s Western War 1775 – 1786. But Neil O. Hammon and Richard Taylor were writing from the point of view of the Virginia colonists. Not saying they were anti-Indian but their focus was on Virigina.

For example, they sum up their history like this:

Once the Indian nations had relinquished what is now Kentucky, the vast area became public domain, that is, the property of Virginia. When the governor and, later, the legislature decided that the land could be acquired by Virginia citizens, those citizens, who moved onto it, fought for it. Their property rights were important to them. In fact, in keeping with John Locke’s influential Two Treatises on Government, most of the Western settlers regarded property rights as more important than freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion.* Of course, they all agreed that they must have the right to bear arms against their ever-present enemies.

. . .

In retrospect, it is clear that the West was won almost entirely by the efforst of the citizens of Virginia, both native born and those who migrated from other colonies, especially Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Had it not been for the efforts of Virginia, the original United States would likely have been confined to the area between the Atlantic Ocean ahd the Appalachian Mountains. [p. 203]

From the point of view of the Native peoples, that boundary was much to be desired. In The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007), Colin G. Calloway shows us this same 1786 treaty negotiation from the Native American perspective:

About 150 men and 80 women finally came to meet the American commissioners at Fort Finney in Jauary 1786. . . . The oldest chief, Moluntha, a Mekoche civil chief, led the procession, beathing a small drum and singing, followed by two young warriors each carrying the stem of a pipe, painted and decorated with eagle feathers and wampum, and by other dancing warriors, all “painted and dressed the the most elegant manner,” reported commissioner Richard Butler. The Shawnee men entered the council house by the west door, the women by the east door, and the dancing warriors waved the eagle feathers over the commissioners. Kekewepellethe gave a short speechand the chiefs shook hands with the commissioners, but the warriors and women held back. “The reason they give,” wrote Butler, “is that the heads of the people should be on easy and familiar footing, but that the warriors and women, who are the strength of the nation, more distant, till peace is certain. Nonhelema, “the Grenadier Squaw” was there—Major Ebenezer Denny compiled a vocabulary of Shawnee words based on interviews with her during the conference.

Most of the Shawnees who came to Fort Finney were Mekoches. After the Revolution they had returned their war belts to the British, signifying their intention to remain at peace. They were the most conciliatory division of the Shawnees, and their traditional responsibilities included healing and negotiation. The Americans they met, however, were inno mood for conciliation. Richard Butler had been a trader among the Shawnees, spoke their language, and had two children by a Shawnee woman, but he had fought with Colonel Henry Bouquet against the Shawnees in 1764 and was a veteran of the Revolution. George Rogers Clark, the other American commissioner, had made a name for himself as an Indian fighter during the Revolution and led assaults on Shawnee villages in 1780 and 1782. At the siege of Vincennes in 1779, he had tomahawked Indian prisoners within sight of the British garrison and tossed their still-kicking bodies into the river. “To excel them in barbarity,” he declared, “is the only way to make war on Indians.”

. . .

In return for peace, the commissioners demanded hostages to ensure Shawnee compliance and offered to grant the Shawnees portions of their own lands. Kekewepellethe replied that it was not the Shawnee custom to give hostages: “When we say a thing we stand to it, we are Shawanese.” As for the land, he continued, it was not for sale: “God gave us this country, we do not understand measureing out the lands, it is all ours. You say you have goods for our women and children; you may keep your goods, and give them to the other nations, we will have none of them.” The Americans “were putting them to live on ponds, and leaving them no land to live or raise corn on.” The Shawnees would agree to the Ohio River as their boundary and nothing else. He handed the commissioners a black wampum belt. When they refused to acceptit, he laid it on the table. [pp. 80-82]

At this point, Clark swept the wampum belt onto the floor and trod on it.

The object here was not to make peace but to bully the Shawnee into giving up their land without a fight.

Butler was killed and scalped at St. Clair’s Defeat in 1791.

In 1793, after Mad Anthony Wayne had taken over the U.S. Army in the west, John Graves Simcoe, lieutenant governor of Upper Canada [a Brit], wrote

It appears to me that there is little probablility of effecting a Peace, and I am inclined to believe that the Commissioners do not expect it; that General Wayne does not expect it; and that the Mission of the Commissioners is in general contemplated by the People of the United States as necessary to adjust the ceremonial of the destruction and pre-determined extirpation of the Indian Americans. [Calloway, p. 98]

Journal mining

From my journal for June 22, 1992, a Monday:

I am stuck here with the prospect of an entire lunch hour with no book. Nothing in particular that I want to say. No conversations close by that I can eavesdrop on. A good time to practice Zen eating, but the problem with Zen eating is that this is the cafeteria and the food is boring of taste and texture.

A young man down the way just reached into a plastic merchandise bag and pulled out two carrots, unscraped, untrimmed, definitely unsticked. Sort of the epitome of unprepared. This is a young man in bill cap, T shirt, shorts. The woman in the floral print dress — drop waist — who ate across from me, on the other hand, had her carrot sticks nicely cut up and ate them daintily — the young man bites off big crunchy chunks and chews vigorously for a long time, working his handsome clean-shaven jaw. The woman also had her carton of skim milk and her single one-inch chocolate chip cookie. Which she ate nibble nibble.

A young woman has sat down on my left with veggie soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. The soup she has filled with crackers to make a sort of batter and the sandwich she has sliced very carefully into bite-sized chunks with her knife and fork. She is drinking Mountain Dew from a can with a straw in it. She eats with her right hand only. Left hand lies in her lap. Our carrot chomper, by contrast, has both forearms on the table — no elbows.

I have no real reason to stay here longer, having finished my own bowl of veggie soup — uncrackered — my square of cornbread that I ate with my fork and my carton of milk sucked through a straw. Nectarine, too, under-ripe on one side, over-ripe on the other. But I am curious to see what else our young cruncher has in his yellow plastic bag that says “Brendamore’s The Sports Professionals.” And there it is — an apple and a pear, which he chomps juicily from the core — both elbows on the table now — like eating corn on the cob.

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.”

Journal mining

From my journal for September 26, 1992, a Saturday, at Deer Creek Lake State Park in Ohio:

The mist rises off the lake and floats up and away to a direction I think is southwest. And a little clear strip is left next to the shoreline and you think that’s it, the mist is clearing, and then more little fingers of mist begin to rise up out of the clear place and soon that strip of lake is covered in mist again — and it rises & rises & rises. A lone motorboat comes out from the shore and growls off down the lake, a diminishing spot of gray in the gray. Fish rise & make little eddies.

Stories of Katrina

All summer we have had our eyes on the Gulf shore. So now that the well is capped and we are trying to get some kind of honest assessment of the damage, I hope we don’t lose focus, decide the thing is over, as we have done with Katrina.

Five years since that hurricane, and the still the extent of the damage has not been gaged.

I want to draw your attention to some stories about Katrina.

Natasha Trethewey, a poet whose work I admire a great deal, was on Fresh Air on Wednesday to talk about her new memoir Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Univ Georgia Press). She speaks of her grandmother’s death and burial in a church that had not yet been rebuilt and how the aftermath of Katrina ruined her brother. You can here a podcast and read an excerpt of the book at the link. The excerpt begins like this:

Somewhere in the post-Katrina damage and disarray of my grandmother’s house is a photograph of Joe and me — our arms around each other’s shoulders. We are at a long-gone nightclub in Gulfport, The Terrace Lounge, standing before the photographer’s airbrushed scrim — a border of dice and playing cards around us. Just above our heads the words High Rollers, in cursive, embellished — if I am remembering this right— with tiny starbursts. It is 1992, the year the first casino arrived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and, with it, a new language meant to invoke images of high-stakes players in exclusive poker games, luxurious suites on the penthouse floor, valet parking and expensive cars lined up in a glorious display of excess. Scenes from a glamorous casino someplace like Monte Carlo or Las Vegas — nothing like the gravel parking lot outside the club, the empty lot beyond it, and the small, run-down houses on either side, each with a chained-up dog barking into the night.

The role of casinos in the overdevelopment of the Gulf Coast is one that we need to remember. Trethewey makes it obvious that, though the casinos may have brought prosperity to some, they did only harm to the part of Gulfport where her family lived, that part of the disaster was natural but part was man-made.

When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as “Little Vietnam” because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders — as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden. Even now, it is a place that outsiders assume to be dangerous or insignificant — run-down and low income, a stark contrast to the glittering landscape of the post-Katrina beachfront with its bright lights and neon bouncing off the casinos onto the water. Were North Gulfport not along the main thoroughfare, making it necessary to drive through to get to the beach, it might be easily forgotten.

The poet Raymond McDaniel, who grew up in Florida, has also written a post-Katrina collection, Saltwater Empire (Coffee House Press, 2008). In the writing of it, McDaniel made use of oral histories of Katrina survivors collected and archived on the web at Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster and Oral History & Memory Project.

I haven’t read the book but what I pick up from context is that the “found” poem constructed from these oral histories is only a part of the collection, a poem in several parts that serves as a framing device.

But McDaniel didn’t get permission to use these clips and the poet Abe Louise Young, who worked in collecting the histories, thinks that he has done a great wrong by appropriating the stories of those survivors, who had made it very plain that they wanted control of their own stories since they had control of so little else. McDaniel argues that, because the archive is open access, it has become public domain.

The Poetry Foundation has posted two essays, one from Young: The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I. What are the ethics of poetic appropriation?

And one from McDaniel: The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I. IReflections on found poetry and the creative process.

Because I write historical poetry and because I am interested in questions of ownership on the web, I find the two essays of high interest and recommend that you take a look at them and at the comments they’ve elicited.

Does the quality of the poetry excuse the appropriation? Was it appropriation? Why didn’t McDaniel ask permission? Even just as a courtesy?

I also suggest that you explore the oral histories themselves at the archive Alive in Truth. They will make your heart ache all over again.