Sherry Chandler

Motif 3: Work

MotesBooks has issued a call for submissions for Volume 3 of their Motif anthology series to be published in 2011.

The theme for the 2011 volume is Work. Submissions are accepted in prose (under 3,000 words) and poetry/lyrics (up to 3 pieces).

Submissions are by e-mail only. Submission deadline is September 1.

Follow the link for complete deadlines.

Meanwhile, Motif v2: Come What May (edited by Marianne Worthington) has just been released. This second anthology contains writing by 136 writers from the U.S. and beyond using various genres to address the theme of “chance.” (One of whom is moi.) Order direct from MotesBooks.com for $15 plus shipping, and keep your eye out for readings in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee.

Mr. Guthrie has a birthday

and besides it’s Bastille Day, so why not?

“from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters” is somehow more poignant than it once was.

Here’s Arlo singing it with the Boston Pops, of all things.

And this version too.

2010 Ruth Redel Poetry Prize

The Heartland Review has put out a call for submissions for the 2010 Ruth Redel Poetry Prize

First Prize – 250 dollars and publication in the fall 2010 issue of the The Heartland Review.

The Review asks for a tax-deductible 3 dollar contribution to support the contest and the publication. Please make checks out to The Heartland Review. Send a cover page with titles of poems, author’s name, address and a short biography (75 words, maximum.)

Names and addresses should NOT appear on the poems themselves. Poems should be typed and should be no longer than 30 lines.

Post mark deadline for entries is August 15, 2010.

Winners will be announced in October and invited to read at the Morrison Gallery Poetry Series.

Send a self-addressed stamped LEGAL size envelope in order to receive results.

Mail entries to:

Ruth Redel Poetry Contest
c/o Mick Kennedy
Elizabethtown Community and Technical College
600 College Street Rd
Elizabethtown KY 42701

Questions? Contact Mick.Kennedy@kctcs.edu

A guest review

A treat today. Margaret Ricketts has agreed to share her review of Mary Karr’s Lit: A Memoir. Her words begin below the line:

__________

Late in Mary Karr’s astonishing new memoir Lit (Harper, 2009), she goes to a Catholic priest for some spiritual counsel. Karr has recently become a recovering alcoholic and Catholic convert. As she says “More likely pastime? Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.” The priest wears a expression of “terrifying hilarity.”

Terrifying hilarity is the only phrase to describe Karr’s prior memoirs, which have whatever qualities you attribute to a book when the phrase instant classic repels the critic. An alcoholic father who takes the inward geographic cure: “Some drinkers go inward into a sullen spiral, and my daddy was one of those.” A manic depressive mother with occasional homicidal tendencies, who gives her daughter a love for Picasso and ee cummings, but who exists as an elusive mirage. Mary will spend much of her twenties and thirties “draining the poison I hope will kill her.”

In adulthood, still split between these two parents, “These two opposing collusi tore a rip in my chest I can’t seem to stitch shut.’’ In Lit’s prologue, Karr sets the scene for the barren end of her own drinking, “the cartoon idea I every night fail to get.” Not only is she drunk, Karr is also leaping two geographical and social chasms, from her Texas hometown, prime producer of Agent Orange to the People’s Republic of Cambridge, Mass. which produced the Vietnam War from the top end.

Tobias Wolf, author of This Boy’s Life and one of Mary’s first great strokes of good fortune gave her priceless advice — do anything to avoid hiding the truth in order to spare the writer’s vanity. As he puts it, “Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit. Tell your stories and your story will be revealed.”

Every reader and writer of memoir knows that subtext can be as powerful as text, that what is hidden can be as revealing and salient as the truth told. At seventeen, Mary flees to Minnesota as though to bury her demons in the five inches of slush and ice that bury Minneapolis five months a year. Despite her rapidly expanding ability to dismiss blackouts and frequent puking on the frozen sidewalk as bush league antics, as one sign of a “creeping ambition-deficit,” a theory belied by her academic ascent into the realm of letters — a Whiting Fellowship, a Bunting Fellowship at Radicliffe College — honors second only to the MacArthur genius grant seem to tumble magically upon her head, or so she would have us believe, omitting the endless hours of reading, writing and revision that must have gone into this. Despite a booze-addled brain, some acknowledgement of drive and ambition seems called for on Karr’s part. Toby Wolf’s advice notwithstanding, Mary’s false modesty rings, well, false.

Few marriages start on shakier grounds. All divorces are tricky to write about, especially when custody is shared and both parents stringently obey the commandment not to ask their child to pick the favorite parent. “Warren Whitbread,” the pseudo-ex-husband comes across as the Protestant work ethic in an Izod shirt, and hardly a rounded character.

The very rich really aren’t very different from you and me; they just have more elaborate and cruel ways of withholding money and affection than do the rest of us. Mrs. Whitbread’s advice to Mary on dealing with a collicky baby is classic — either slip the kid some phenobarb or send the brat home with the hired help until he gets over it. In their entire marriage Mary recalls precisely one phone call Warren got from his father.

When she finally stumbles into her first AA meeting, she is thoroughly convinced that she is merely there to “educate them to their cult’s fallacious thinking.” Yet after a few meetings, to paraphrase Karr’s epigraph from Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “An Old Story,” the grinning skull begins to take on flesh. (Another Karr trait to envy — her deployment of the perfect quote.) One of her AA compadres describes himself as an articulate ghost, a description that fits Mary to a T.

Unfortunately, once Mary gets sober she suffers one of the more predictable sequelae to ceasing one’s daily immersion in ethyl alcohol — an episode of major depression. “Each day becomes a gray tundra I wade across.” Prozac “sends color flushing back into the tips of leaves at least for a week or two” but suicide “becomes the one rabbit hole that will hide me: I can just cease to be.” After writing a few truly bathetic farewell notes, she purchases duct tape and a garden hose for the purpose of ending it all. But the image of her child makes such action impossible. “Looking into Dev’s face, I could almost feel the darkness leave me.”

After she recovers at Boston’s most famous literary loony bin, the one frequented by Robert Lowell, Mary accepts tenure at a university in upstate New York. The divorce finally goes through, not without monetary strain and bitter regret. As she wryly notes, “we’re inclined to gloss over our failure.” Since Karr is in the habit of letting the major characters in her memoirs vet the manuscript prior to publication, and her former husband declined to do this, one senses that Karr is bending a bit too far to protect him.

But Lit has many depths and riches. Buy it for the recovering alcoholic in your life, yes. But if you know someone who is trying to weave poetry into the warp and woof of daily life, the routine of traffic jams and babies with colic there could be no better gift.

The wrecking ball swings

Haiku is a poetry form that escapes me.

Even after more than a year of more-or-less continuous practice of writing haiku-like (haiku-ish) micropoetry, I wouldn’t say I hit more than one time in ten producing anything I’d call poetry, let alone a haiku. Though my readers sometimes express appreciation for posts I’d call complete failures.

Which leads me to wonder whether there’s something I just don’t get.

I would quote about the same odds for haiku I read — about one in ten hits, fewer than that are really powerful defined by the Basho standard.

But even classic haiku sometimes leave me feeling a little so what. Issa’s famous radish haiku, for example:

Harvesting radishes,
he points the way
with a radish

It’s a small charm, like a feather. Maybe I want something heavier, something to chew over like a mouthful of taffy.

I also sometimes have problems with reading collections of haiku, whether a one-author book or a journal. It’s somewhat like eating rice cakes. (There are some notable exceptions.)

All this established, I will now tell you that I read Barry George’s Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku (Accents Publishing, 2010) with considerable delight.

I am willing to entertain that it is the urbanity of these haiku that give them an edge — you are free to read that statement at least two ways.

Maybe the urban landscape of homelessness and politics offers a fresher field.

Nevertheless it takes a keen intelligence to find turns like this:

Labor Day rally —
the candidate turns toward
the glare of autumn

followed on the facing page by

autumn field —
two sides of the same flock
taking off, landing

These two poems stand alone well enough but I love the way they play off one another. I don’t know, maybe that violates the nature of haiku but for me, it adds depth.

And, in fact, though the haiku in Wrecking Ball don’t all relate so directly one to the other, they nevertheless resonate with one another to create a portrait of city life.

Barbara Sabol interviewed Barry George at Public Republic, and I found his discussion of the form helpful. He talks about his process and the ways in which his poems both are and are not haiku.

It amazes me, sometimes, how much controversy can rage among people who write haiku about what is and is not legitimate. For myself, I don’t think I’ll ever actually try writing something I define formally as haiku, but my encounter with George has helped me clarify a bit what is going on with me when I write the micropoems.

I will give him the last word:

our culture’s appreciation of haiku has been hamstrung by the mistaken idea that their primary characteristic is seventeen (5-7-5) syllables. The fact of the matter is that the Japanese and English languages are so different that most writers and translators of haiku in English (and other Romance languages) don’t write according to any fixed syllable count.

Instead they – we – emphasize haiku’s brevity, immediacy, imagistic language, and intuitive quality as distinguishing characteristics. Furthermore, the fact that haiku’s power lies in its subtly and suggestiveness – in apprehension by intuition rather than through logical explication – makes it easy to discount in an academic culture that tends to celebrate intellectual and linguistic brilliance. What I think is probably most important, though, is a misperception that real haiku – as opposed to 5-7-5 Internet spam – is merely a highly specialized form of meditative nature-poetry. In short, people don’t realize the range of subjects, experiences, and emotions haiku can express.

As the “pioneering” haiku poet in the [Spalding MFA] program, I knew in advance that two of Spalding’s faculty members valued the Japanese short forms, but feared the rest of the faculty and my classmates might not take my work seriously. To my delight, what I encountered, instead, was a great deal of interest in and support for what I was doing. In fact, the response I received most often was something along the lines of Wow, I didn’t know that you could do so much with haiku; I didn’t know that it was such a contemporary form.

I may also dwell among the converts.

A chapbook on the level

I’ve probably made it clear here that I find Emerson difficult to read. It seems to me that he is long on words and short on meaning. Not only that, but in light of subsequent events his high-flown language and high optimism seem like so much moonshine. Take these excerpts from “The Poet”:

Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. . . . The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own patent.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. . . . For poetry was all written before time was.

It was stuff like this that discouraged me for many years from even trying to become a poet.

So when I have had too much of such bombast, it is a comfort to turn to a poet whose work is quiet and grounded. Such a poet is Dave Bonta and his Odes to Tools (Phoenicia Publishing, 2010). The twenty-five poems in this book contemplate the contents of the workshop, whimsically, philosophically, but never with self-aggrandizement.

Some samples:

from Ode to a Shovel

Digging with a shovel
always makes me hungry.
It’s too much like a spoon, I suppose,
& the soil is too close
to food here: heavy, brown,

& as full of foreign objects
as any stew.

from Ode to a Bucket

As a bucket ages,
its galvanized surface
takes on the look
of new ice — that blue-
white jigsaw puzzle —
or a flock of cranes.

Humble objects, a bucket and a shovel, as are the other tools considered here: a spirit level, a socket wrench, a hive tool. Yet it is a joy to see these simple objects through the eyes and language of this intelligence.

These poems do come from the center, and they show you where it is more convincingly than does Emerson. Makes me understand why I prefer Thoreau, a man who seemed much more grounded and aware of the world around him. After all, Dave can speak in a bit of the Emersonian style. Here he is describing how these poems came to be:

I think they were an attempt to come up with a lyrical critique of teleology — the belief that nature or history can be explained by some sort of ultimate purpose or design. Sometime in my late teens, when, like a lot of earnest young people, I was wrestling with questions about the meaning or purpose of life, it occurred to me that that line of questioning itself might be flawed, because it assumes that we are somehow tools, products of a toolmaker — someone with an ultimate plan for us. This notion, comforting as it may be to some people, fills me with dread: to think that your role in life is intrinsic, unalterable, utilitarian!

But then with these poems, I was asking, what if one actually IS a tool? Doesn’t a favorite tool often become more than just an instrument of the worker’s will?

These poems were originally posted on Dave’s blog Via Negativa, and they can be read there still. They can also be read from an image of the book through an interactive tool at the publisher’s site, where you can also hear Dave read a sampling.

So really, there is no need to buy the book. It is licensed under Creative Commons, in line with Dave’s belieft that poetry should be free for all. And yet, at the thoroughly reasonable price of $4.95 $6.95, why would you deprive yourself of the joy of this attractive volume, an artifact, a tool, in its own right. (I confess, though. I traded for mine. Dave is open to trade.)

I do want to mention that the book is written

For the veined octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) and the biologists who documented its tool-using behavior

What the heck –

I got nothin’ and it IS Ringo’s 70th birthday:

More info here.