Sherry Chandler

I guess you’ll need Liquid Virgin.

Pucker up, gals.

(Think alum.)

via

from Gregor Mendel and the Cats

Up the monastery wall, the brewery’s yeast-scent
huffles. And the dusty cat, stretched high
over warm stones, swings her blunt snout this way
and that, yeastward and monkward, from
release to salvation. In the bright sun
her irises, like shutters, close,
leaving just a strip of liquid glint, the pupil’s
vertical box.

I am sleepless today, the cats of my childhood
mewling all night, their phantom shapes
alit on my ceiling. Cat backs, stretched, flexed,
cat tails in counterpoint. Such mystery,
to be of the body perpetually …

— Linda Bierds

This poem is from Linda Bierds’s First Hand (Putnam’s, 2005) of which Bierds says in her “Author’s Note and Acknowlegments:”

As they trundle through the centuries, swaying this way and that, from wonder to foreboding, the poems in this book rest most frequently at the inscape of science. It is there, in that innermost space lit by the nature of human achievement, that their interest and questions lie, their praise and disquietude.

An inquiry such as this, which moves from third-century-B.C. theories of buoyancy to twenty-first-century biochemistry, must acknowledge what are for many the global and spiritual implications of a science increasingly adept at creating, extending, and annihilating life. To help me with that task, I turned to the character of Gregor Mendel, whose work on the hybridization of peas forshadowed genetic cloning. …”

Bierds’s biosketch at Poets.org reads in part:

Because her poems are often laden with historical references and challenging language, Bierds is often described as a difficult and overly-intellectual writer. In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bierds responds to the notion of obscurity by saying: “In grade-school classrooms, there’s this notion that a poem is similar to a mathematical problem and that it has a solution. That’s very off-putting to people. They remember back to fifth or sixth grade and how they didn’t ‘get’ poetry then and probably never will. But they did get it, just in a different way. Much of the reputation that ‘poetry is difficult’ comes from this mistaken thinking that a poem has one answer.”

I do find these poems difficult but the fault is mine entirely, in my ignorance of science. On the other hand, while I seldom “get” a whole poem in the way the teacher might have liked, I often find passages like the one quoted above that are just exquisite, and very clear and simple.

Edward Byrne in Valparaiso Review says of First Hand:

Presenting Gregor Mendel as a primary subject in her poetry, Bierds provides readers with a persona representative of the conflicted scientist, whether historic or contemporary, seeking to unlock mysteries of the physical world while maintaining a vigorous faith in the mysteries of the spiritual world. By extension, this poetic persona and his actions also show evidence of the intrinsic clash — often attendant and sometimes inevitable — between a search for knowledge and a trust in one’s religious beliefs, a pair of pursuits at constant risk of incompatibility with each other for inquisitive people who maintain a great faith.

…

Elsewhere, in “Gregor Mendel and the Cats,” Mendel speaks of painting blue the backboards of the monastery’s bookcases. The poem discloses Mendel’s thoughts on the importance of using the mind (“We are minds here,” he begins) as well as the body (“And hands,” he continues), stretching one’s intellect for both practical knowledge and imaginative purposes.

In talking about the poem “Sunderance,” Byrne leads me to hope I am not the only reader not quite learned enough to keep up:

At times, comprehending archival information in Bierds’s poetry does demand a greater degree of active intellectual involvement, perhaps even firsthand research, by readers. Nevertheless, while searching for information is sometimes required for a full understanding of clues embedded within the content of the poems in each of Bierds’s books (and may be a contributing factor that hinders her ability to attract a larger audience), when engaging in the process one can achieve a certain amount of satisfaction and delight, not to mention enlightenment about some lesser-known facets of historical events or individuals.

Bierds’s wanderings in scientific history takes her from Mendel to Newton back to Galileo, forward to Hedy Lamar and on to James Watson and Dolly the cloned sheep, with a detour to some fishermen stranded on breaking ice near St. Petersburg. Oh yes, and Marie Curie makes an obligatory appearance who is paired with the artist Paul Cadmus, working on a WPA project.

When a genetic scientist uses the term expression, s/he is referring to the action of a gene in the production of a protein or a phenotype, the gene expresses itself. When a poet speaks of expression s/he has something perhaps more lyrical in mind. In First Hand, Bierds shows us how to experience both kinds of expression firsthand.

From the New York Times:

When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls. Now Ms. Ryan is being inducted into one of the most elite poetry clubs around. She is to be named the country’s poet laureate on Thursday.

Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1994, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000.

Still, she has remained something of an outsider.

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”

I hadn’t paid much attention to Kay Ryan’s poetry until I heard her read at West Chester last year. I found her reading style wonderfully wry and funny and her work just wonderful.

I also sat next to her at one of the readings at that conference but alas, none of her talent rubbed off though I rubbed shoulders. I could no more match Ryan’s minimalism than I could match Naomi Nye’s expansiveness. But I am very very glad both poets are in my world.

Here is Ryan’s page at Poets.org, where you can read some of her work if you don’t already know it. I see that they have “Home to Roost,” her famous 9/11 poem, except that it’s not, as David Orr points out in the current issue of Poetry:

The only problem, of course, is that “Home to Roost” was written prior to September 11 and has nothing whatsoever to do with the attack, its aftermath, or the now-famous invocation of this specific phrase by Jeremiah Wright. Ryan enjoys tweaking clichés, but when a particular cliché is thrown into political relief—as often happens—then her poem tends to follow. It’ll be another five years before she can call this one her own again, which probably annoys her endlessly.

It’s good that Ryan has been named Poet Laureate because she is a fine and “accessible” poet, but also because she’s a woman. As Amy King points out here, Ryan will be only the 10th woman out of 45 poets to hold the office since 1937.

1945-1946 — Louise Bogan
1948-1949 — Leonie Adams
1949-1950 — Elizabeth Bishop
1971-1973 — Josephine Jacobsen
1981-1982 — Maxine Kumin
1985-1986 — Gwendolyn Brooks
1992-1993 — Mona Van Duyn
1993-1995 — Rita Dove
2003-2004 — Louise Glück
2008 — Kay Ryan

Here’s the best photo I’ve seen of Kay Ryan. I stole it from Poesy Galore:

From Lisa Levy, An Original Adventure, in The Believer:

…Hardwick’s genius was not limited to private letters [Ed note: These would be the private letters her husband Robert Lowell made public in his confressional poetry]. She too got to create herself, as a novelist, a teacher, and, most powerfully, as a critic. The bones of her biography are a classic fish-out-of-water tale, a Kentucky belle in the big city, but Hardwick was more like Walt Whitman tending the wounded in the Civil War hospital than Scarlett O’Hara at the Twelve Oaks barbecue—after all, she had a husband who needed constant bandaging (straitjacketing, really). Nevertheless she was a Southerner in the north; even though Hardwick didn’t put much stock in the idea that we “all are linked naturally to their regions,” as she wrote in her novel Sleepless Nights (1979), she does think “it is not true that it doesn’t matter where you live.” New York was hers, as Nights makes abundantly clear. Jim Lewis observes in his tribute to her on Slate.com that she was “one of the last survivors of a group of extraordinary women, many from the West or the South, who redefined the American essay: Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and M.F.K. Fisher, all from California, Mary McCarthy from Seattle.” She certainly harbored geographical ambitions. Her New York Times obituary recounts one from an interview in 1979: “My aim was to be a New York Jewish Intellectual. I say ‘Jewish’ because of their tradition of rational skepticism; and also a certain deracination appeals to me—and their openness to European culture.” Thus it is a bit twisted that though she floated among the Rahvs and the Kazins, the man she married was the deepest indigo of Boston blue bloods; and the analytical quality she associated with Semitism was not totally absent, but not dominant, in Robert Lowell, casually nicknamed “Cal” (for Caliban and Caligula, and for his tendency toward decadence and excess) by his prep-school chums. Yet anyone who ever read a word she wrote knows she did not suffer in silence. Hardwick remade herself as a New Yorker, but her feeling that she was never of the world she lived in, neither a real Jewish Intellectual nor at home with the Cabots and the Lodges, helped her find an original voice.

Hardwick died last December 2. Here is her obit from The Guardian:

Elizabeth Hardwick, who has died aged 91, was for nearly half a century a prominent figure in New York’s literary and cultural life. She was probably best known for her essays and her autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights (1979). But she was also famous for the company she kept. With her then husband, the poet Robert Lowell, she was one of the group of left-liberal intellectuals who founded the New York Review of Books in 1963. Her friends included such writers as Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Roth, as well as influential figures in the publishing world such as Philip Rahv and Jason Epstein.

Hardwick came to New York from the hinterlands. She was born into a large family in Kentucky, a southern border state that tends to produce literary sensibilities very different from those that flourish in the deep south. Her father was a left-leaning blue-collar worker who ran a plumbing and heating business. No doubt it contributed to her alienation from the mint julep school of southern writing that she was a city girl, from Lexington.

After graduating from the University of Kentucky and taking an MA in English, Hardwick moved to New York, where she studied briefly at Columbia University and set up as a freelance writer.

Here is her bibliography at the New York Review of Books.

And her bio at the KyLit site.

Obviously my interest here is the Kentucky connection, but I must wonder whether Hardwick would have wanted every biosketch to begin with a description of her marital long-suffering. Nothing I’ve read about her convinces me that she was of the long-suffering school of women so there must have been more to the marriage than her service to the great man.

When I was watchng Persepolis, I didn’t know whether I should be relieved that our country had not gone so far to the right or appalled that we had already given in so much to our own fundamentalists on women’s issues.

This news, from Suburban Guerrilla, is not reassuring:

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Patty Murray (D-WA) today called on the Secretary of Health and Human Services to stop misguided plans to put in place new obstacles for women accessing family planning services. This proposed rule change is a poorly-veiled attempt to roll-back women’s health care options before the current Administration leaves office.

…

One of the most troubling aspects of the proposed rules is the overly-broad definition of “abortion.” This definition would allow health-care corporations or individuals to classify many common forms of contraception – including the birth control pill, emergency contraception and IUDs – “abortions” and therefore to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.

The question here is not just birth control but who has control of a woman’s body.

Your thinking here should be along the lines of “First they came for late-term abortions…” This sh1t has to stop.

Here is a snippet of op-ed from Steve Bell, a British cartoonist who offended me mightily with his lampoons of Hillary Clnton a few weeks back. He is writing in The Guardian:

So should we tread warily, lest we are misunderstood? Of course we should. Cartoonists are some of the most painstaking, careful, shy and sensitive people on earth, yet we do play with fire, toying with other people’s (and of course our own) most deeply held beliefs and most cherished illusions. Is it possible to go too far? Of course it is? Should we go too far? Of course we should. That’s what makes our job so interesting. There’s no better feeling than, having taken a risk in a drawing, seeing the thing in print and knowing it works. The converse is also true, which is why I work in a bunker on the south coast.

When I first saw a tiny thumbnail of the offending Barry Blitt New Yorker cover I thought, for a fleeting moment, that I could understand why Obama supporters would be so pissed off. After all, here was a drawing depicting the worst possible caricature of their man: a smug Muslim and his gun-toting black-power wife who would burn the flag in the Oval Office beneath a portrait of Osama bin Laden. But then, surely that’s the point? If you take it that literally you literally turn yourself into an idiot (though not quite a psycho). I didn’t think it looked a particularly good drawing, but I couldn’t judge from a thumbnail.

Now, having seen the full image (along with unimaginable numbers of idiots and psycho-paths worldwide), I can say that I rather warm to it. I look at it, and it works, for me anyway.

I particularly like the expression on Michelle’s face. Cartoons don’t work as shopping lists of points to be made with labels tacked on to clarify things for the culturally deprived. Too much cartooning operates on that level, especially in the US. Cartoons need to be disturbing, and they should also dare to ask questions. People in the US aren’t generally fools (even though the fools have been over-represented of late, particularly in the current administration), though some may be a little over-literal, and these are not always the psychos. Not so long ago I drew a cartoon of Obama as rifle-range target, and received a torrent (OK, a very heavy trickle) of emails, mostly from concerned liberal supporters asking me if I really wanted him dead.

I am probably going to get myself into trouble for saying this but, while I wasn’t particularly amused by the New Yorker cover (I am not the best audience for satire as my satiric husband will tell you), I am not ready to join a letter-writing campaign to protest it. Liberals seem to deal in “stern letters” of protest and see where that has gotten us.

Instead, I invite you to view this David Horsey cartoon. And this from Kentucky’s own Joel Pett.

The Curious George parody of Obama is racist; this New Yorker cover is not. (Thanks to BoGardiner for reminding me.)

See also The Poor Man.

An independent woman, milliner and poet. Here from Ellen and Jim Have A Blog, Too, a snippet of her poem “A True Tale” of receiving an offer of marriage from one who “thought to’ve found my person more amiss.” Mary had some kind of deformity, which may be why she became an independent businesswoman, but apparently was not why she remained one:

Much more, he spake, but I have half forgot:
I went to bed, but could not sleep a jot.
A thing so unexpected, and so new!
Of so great consequence—So generous too!
I own it made me pause for half that night:
Then waked, and soon recovered from my fright;
Resolved, and put an end to the affair:
So great a change, thus late, I could not bear;
And answered thus: ‘No, good Sir, for my life,
I cannot now obey, nor be a wife.
At fifty-four, when hoary age has shed
Its winter’s snow, and whitened o’er my head,
Love is a language foreign to my tongue:
I could have learned it once, when I was young,
But now quite other things my wish employs:
Peace, liberty, and sun, to gild my days.

Read more of Mary’s poetry and a bio at Ellen and Jim Have A Blog, Too.

I was somewhat delighted to find an 18th C poet named Mary Chandler. My sister-in-law of fifty years is named Mary Chandler and she is just about this feisty.

Yesterday afternoon when I left the office, got into my car for the drive home, and turned the ignition key, all I got was a series of clicks. Rats! sez I and I gets out my handy-dandy cell phone and called Triple A.

Had to wait about 40 minutes, long enough to get hot under the collar in the July sun, for the nice young man to show up with his charger, But once he arrived, it took him about ten minutes to diagnose my problem and get me enough juice to start my engine, then I was on my way again.

My headlights were turned on, and though the car is supposed to and always has turned them off for me when I turn off the ignition, I suspect this time something didn’t quite work and the headlights drained my battery. My car is 11 years old. Soon it will hit puberty.

I wonder, though, don’t they have jumper cables for airplanes? According to The Daily Yonder:

Congressmen Ben Chandler (D-KY) and Norm Dicks (D-WA) were scheduled to tour the coalfields of Central Appalachia by air Saturday, to view the effects of mountain top removal coal mining. The two congressmen were to take a plane from outside Washington, D.C., to Hazard, Kentucky, where they would meet Saturday with local residents.

The trip never got in the air. Somebody left a switch on in the plane overnight, running down the aircraft’s battery. The plane wouldn’t crank up Saturday morning and Chandler and Dicks were left grounded in Washington.

Some at the rally were not surprised, and suspected that the federal Office of Surface Mining intentionally bolluxed the trip. Members of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, who helped organize a rally in Hazard that was to meet Chandler and Dicks, felt the trip could have been sabotaged. KFTC has long battled the Office of Surface Mining, the federal agency that organized the trip for the two congressmen and is charged with regulating coal mining.

“They must think we’re stupid,” said John Roark, a resident of Vicco, Kentucky.

Chandler’s Legislative Director, Jim Creevy, said that Rep. Chandler pledged to reschedule the trip, but offered no date for when this would happen.

Is there only one airplane in Washington, D.C.? Only one battery? Don’t they have chargers? No AAA for Congressmen??

Or is this excuse as lame as it seems?

From the BBC News:

A videotape of a detainee being questioned at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay has been released for the first time.

It shows 16-year-old Omar Khadr being asked by Canadian officials in 2003 about events leading up to his capture by US forces, Canadian media have said.

The Canadian citizen is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in Afghanistan in 2002.

He is seen in a distressed state and complaining about the medical care.

The footage was made public by Mr Khadr’s lawyers following a Supreme Court ruling in May that the Canadian authorities had to hand over key evidence against him to allow a full defence of the charges he is facing.

Mr Khadr, the only Westerner still held at the jail, was 15 when he was captured by US forces during a gun battle at a suspected al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.

During the 10-minute video of his questioning in Guantanamo a year later, he can be seen crying, his face buried in his hands, and pulling at his hair. He can be heard repeatedly chanting: “Help me.”

You can view the video at the link.

Link from Jeralyn at TalkLeft.

Scanning the comments there gives some indication of what a controversial issue this is. For myself, I think the boy was a child when he was taken prisoner and should never have been kept for six years at Guantanamo Bay as though he were a major terrorist, without even the rights of the Geneva conventions. I don’t think we should have held any prisoners in that way but it’s particularly egregious in this boy’s case. I’m not so naïve as to think that 15-year-old boys can’t be dangerous. But we do not treat children that way.

For three decades or so now, I’ve been very concerned about the way children have been turned into warriors of hate for various guerrilla or resistance or rebel or terrorist groups. They are children and very maleable. To turn them into killers is possibly the worst crime I can think of. I am appalled that our government has exacerbated the crime against this child.

As for whether the events recorded on this tape amount to torture, that is not even a conversation we should be forced to engage in.

I have been wanting to see Persepolis since I saw a preview at Lexington’s Kentucky Theater earlier this year. Having finally got it through Netflix, however, I left it sitting on the table for several days, because I thought watching it would take concentration and mental energy. And I was right.

I am not a great appreciator of the graphic novel. I haven’t even read Maus, though it sits on our shelves and I appreciate Spiegelman’s New Yorker covers. I tend to think of graphic novels as sort of a guy thing, though I also know that that is rapidly becoming a dated attitude.

I was very taken by the graphic look and feel of Persepolis, however. The minimalist style, a look that might be characterized as the dark side of South Park (though, okay, South Park is not without its own dark side — maybe the tragic side), the use of silhouettes in black and white, was often very affecting. This is not the computer-animated cutesiness of Disney et al. The film is also a monument to the revolutionary power of pop culture. For one thing, it is the animated film of a graphic novel (comic book) so its very genesis is pop. But, as Frank Zappa was a force in solidarity-era Poland, so our heroine is inspired and consoled by black market tapes of Iron Maiden.

Because the story is a child’s story — I was amazed near the end of the movie when our heroine is about to get married to learn that she is only 21! she had already had experience enough for several lifetimes — the form allows Marjane Satrapi to convey the simplicity of the child’s vision while maximizing the terror that is a child’s experience of war, repression, prejudice.

Like Reading Lolita in Tehran, Persepolis gives one an idea what it’s like for a woman living under a repressive fundamentalist regime and also an idea why leaving the country isn’t all that satisfactory a solution. Nafisi’s vision is more analytical; Satrapi’s gives us raw emotion and some delightfully iconoclastic characters (the grandmother and uncle). There are moments of truly wicked humor in the film.

Satrapi also deals with the clumsiness or just plain evil Middle East involvement of the West, from the installation of the Shah to the arms dealing in the Iran/Iraq War. Her focus is not so strictly domestic. When one of the women says of the religious revolution, “It can’t be any worse than life under the Shah,” I couldn’t help but think of how much worse life is now for women in Iraq since we deposed Saddam Hussein and facilitated a fundamentalist takeover.

I was deeply moved and I think this is a movie that all of us should see, especially now when the Bush administration keeps beating the war drums and painting Iran as the greatest evil in the axis thereof. If you see the human face of your enemy, it is not so easy to hate her.

You will find a number of perceptive reviews and a plot synopsis at Rotten Tomatoes.

Persepolis, by the way, was the Greek name for the ancient capitol of the Persian empire.