Sherry Chandler

Baxter

The domestic nature of the male

Baxter and Possum are looking gaunt and fragile this year, which grieves me. They are sixteen this year. They were magnificent playful creatures in their day.

The white specks on the driveway are locust blossoms.

On to the quote

He forked some duck-and-turkey Whiskas into a bowl for Randy, who rubbed himself briefly against Cooper’s legs. Though they had met each other only a few months before, the cat was very much a part of the scenery in Cooper’s new life—which went to prove that you didn’t need to work at a relationship for years and years, didn’t it?

“Where’s your friend, Randy?”

He called the other cat Mrs. Macavity, because she came and went so mysteriously. In fact, Cooper wasn’t sure where she really lived. Apart from a couple of months she spent in his conservatory, caring for the five rather scruffy black-and-white kittens she’d produced in her basket one morning, her presence was unpredictable. He thought she might have an entire list of homes she called on when she felt like it. A meal here today, next door tomorrow.

Once a new home had been found for all the kittens among her family, Mrs. Macavity had returned to her old ways. She was much more a free spirit than Randy, who didn’t wander far from his warm basket next to the boiler in the conservatory. He used the cat flap to do whatever he needed to do in the garden, weighed up the weather, and either lay for a while in the sun or came straight back to his basket. He was an animal with a fixed routine and firm ideas of what was his territory and what wasn’t. Cooper liked that. He thought there was something in that attitude that enabled a person to establish a home. [pp 173-174]

—Stephen Booth, Blind to the Bones (Random House, 2003)

Drunk with spring

One plant that thrives on our place with no attention whatsoever — in fact, with some discouragement — is catmint/nip. Which makes this patch beside the garden a favorite place for our old black cat, Baxter, to take the sun and a nip.

In this particular shot, you’ll see a plant we had broken off. (There’s also a sprig of creeping charlie; we’re a haven for mints of all kinds.) When I first noticed Baxter over there, he was vigorously rubbing his face on the broken stems, but by the time I retrieved the camera, he was just mellow.

Glimpses

In my recent readings, I have run across two poems that capture a phenomenon we’ve all experienced when we’ve lost some one — catching glimpses of that person in a crowd, walking down a street —

In both of these Kentucky poets, the lost person is the father. First, from Jane Gentry:

For My Father
Athens, Kentucky

Hand
After the long failure of his farmer’s body,
after the undertakers wrestled him,
zipped in plastic like last season’s clothes,
. . . I left

As a train carried me into London
I saw him look up from some hammering beside the track,
his shapeless cap pushed back.
He waved an old-gloved hand at me
familiar as sunlight
and opened his joyful smile
in a greeting I was already past.

— Jane Gentry, from A Garden in Kentucky

And then from Dorothy Sutton

After He Died

I saw him everywhere. Each tattered,
sagging jacket shuffling around
the corner, the coat he used to wear.

The same as it was with our old black cat,
For the longest time after he died,
I caught glimpses of him from
the corner of my eye, spooky
shadow eluding my sight.

. . .

Loneliness limping after me
from room to room . . .

— Dorothy Sutton, from Backing Into Mountains

BTW, in the latest issue of Pegasus from the Kentucky State Poetry Society, you’ll find a review of Backing Into Mountains by Elaine Fowler Palencia. Elaine does Dot’s book much more justice than I did here on the blog. The review begins like this:

For a long time, poetry has been becoming more and more like prose. Most of the poems picked for Garrison Keillor’s daily poem on NPR, for example, are really little essays or anecdotes broken into lines. So it is with special pleasure that I read Dorothy Sutton’s collection Backing Into Mountains, which employs the full workshop of poetic tools to produce verse that is melodic, rhythmic, and unafraid of rhyme — eye, slant, alliteration and more — yet still originial and subtle in experssion. Read these poems aloud for the sheer enjoyment of getting your mouth around “endless mounds of tender chicken, / insanely delicious epiphanies / filling the platters of Paradise.”

— Elain Fowler Palenica, “Book Beat,” in Pegasus, Winter/Spring 2010

__________
Note: Poetry month First Friday at the Kentucky Coffeetree Café features two of my favorite area poets (I have so many favorite area poets — in fact, if you’re an area poet, you’re probably one of my favorites). But I digress. This time it’s J. Stephen Rhodes and Katerina Stoykova-Klemer. Music is by Little Maggie.

If you think you’ll go, you’d better reserve a seat. This event is very popular.

Cat and Golden Apples

from “Music from Spain,”

A tortoise shell cat pillowed in apples gazed at him from a grocer’s window. She pulled her round eyes closed as on little drawstrings. Eugene recollected that one street back a plaster bull dog, cerise with blue rings around the eyes, which ordinarily sat in the ground floor window of a hotel between the drawn shade and the glass, had this morning been taken away. Eugene had missed it—been cheated of it. As the cat opened her eyes again, he had a moment of believing he would know anything that happened, anything that threatened the moral way, or transformed it, even, in the city of San Francisco that day: as if he and the city were watching each other—without accustomed faith. But with interest . . . boldness . . . recklessness, almost.
— Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1947)

One I know, admire, respect, remarked a while back that s/he had undertaken to include The Golden Apples in a literature course but would not do so again because Welty uses the N word way too much.

The remark aroused my curiosity, so I pulled our copy off the shelf. I don’t remember having read this collection of connected short stories before. It is true that it has frequent use of the N word and appearances of African-American characters that seem caricatured. I think it might be a very difficult book to take into the classroom today, especially in an area that doesn’t tend to be what you might call culturally enlightened.

On the other hand, all the characters in the book are sometimes treated like caricatures. It is not a strictly realistic work. The stories refer to folklore and mythology.

The whites in this complex collection of interconnected stories are not admirable. The stories seem to be about the way your culture catches you, drags at you, keeps you to their expectations of you. Morgana, Mississippi is a closed decaying culture that does not embrace difference. Or change. If you are poor white, you are to remain poor white. If you are “class” then you must act a certain way, even in the face of disaster. All the stories on some level are about those who attempt to escape and fail. In the story “Moon Lake,” three girls flee the confines of summer camp, find an old boat, and think they will use it to float out into the middle of the lake, outside the carefully marked off swimming area of the camp. But the boat turns out to be tethered and locked and they can’t get more than a chain’s length from the shore.

“Moon Lake” is anthologized elsewhere and it is one story from the collection that I had read. Like everything in Welty, it is beautifully written, but it always puzzled me. In context of The Golden Apples, its themes are much more resonant.

I didn’t resolve my own questions about treatments of race. It is not a modern book, times have changed, and the racial attitudes in The Golden Apples seem shocking. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe we weren’t meant to take that stuff for granted. Maybe we were. The white people of Morgana, Mississippi did. Welty doesn’t treat her African-American characters as wise, the way Faulkner did. But they aren’t any sillier than the white people.

Gutter cat

The night is as cold as its onan-semen
I’m writing to tell you

even now, where the alleycat is cantor
and the moon bends to drink
from the sewerage ditch, even now
at the mating of prick and palm with the little rabbi
beer-on-the-breath presiding . . .

— Albert Goldbarth, “Letter to Tony,” Comings Back (Doubleday, 1976)

A man’s poetry

The other day I was browsing around the archives at the Michigan Quarterly Review where I stumbled on the text of a 2009 Hopwood Lecture given by Ellen Bryant Voigt. In this lecture, she described herself as “essentially an earnest person,” and I was glad to read it because I’ve felt, in this age of irony, that I also suffer from the sin of essential earnestness, and if it’s good enough for Ellen Bryant Voigt, well, it’s good enough for me.

More than that, I confess to the sin of having a small mouth with thin lips, just right for compressing into a tight prudish line of disapproval. I check the mirror daily for a craze of hair-line pursing wrinkles along my upper lip.

Which is my way of saying there are certain types of humor that I just don’t get. I never quite felt comfortable with Zap comix, for example. All that hair and those exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics. My appreciation of Frank Zappa has limits. The National Lampoon of the 1970s often sort of creeped me out. (Though I’ll admit I thought Cheech Wizard was cute.) For that matter, the Brobdingnag sections of Gulliver’s Travels always struck me as pretty gross — but then I think they’re supposed to. And as for the Yahoos, well . . . But then I like horses.

[Just as an aside here, because I've been immersed in this stuff, Gulliver's Travels is supposed to be a book Daniel Boone carried with him into the wilderness of Kentucky, which is how there came to be a creek in Kentucky called Lulbegrud.]

As for Portnoy and his liver, give me a break.

Once upon a time, Elizabeth Bishop infamously refused to lend her work to a volume of women’s poetry, saying, if I recall this correctly, nobody would publish an anthology of men‘s poetry. Whatever the merits of that statement, I would argue that some things, including poetry, can only be written by men. And those same things are written for men.

Men’s poetry.

Which is my way of saying, I’ve been reading Albert Goldbarth‘s Comings Back (Doubleday, 1976) and pretty much totally failing to get it.

Take, for instance, these lines from “Some Poems Around Some Lights”

when the iron asserts itself out of my blood, and is jostled
through the heat in the form of ingots, or the sexual loneliness
seeps through my mattress, and hangs gray semen
stalactites into the dark below the bed . . .

My reaction to that, I am sorry to say, is “not my problem, never going to be my problem.” Unless, of course, I’m called upon to do his spring cleaning.

No doubt this is a cretinous reaction.

Onanism seems to figure in this collection quite a bit. And look here, I’m the mother of sons, and though I may be earnest, I’m not easily offended. At least, not by masturbation jokes.

I’m just not touched by it.

I suppose men may have the same reaction to poems about — what? dildos?

Okay, well look, I’m being silly.

More likely men are bored by poems about pregnancy and childbirth, nursing, yada yada.

As always, I say, if I read these poems by Goldbarth this time next year, I may find them brilliant. My theory is that literature speaks to you when you need it or when you’re ready for it.

And I understand the reason for this Rabelaisian sort of writing, that for all our airs and intellect, we are trapped in a body that demands and excretes and dies, that like old Nobadaddy we are prone to fart and belch and cough, that Marie Antoinette had cooties under those elaborately sculpted coiffures.

There is much in Comings Back that is brilliant. But there is too much in Comings Back. For me.

And it’s not just the obsession with jism and feces. The poems are long and ambling and brilliant. Comic and tragic. But they don’t pull me in.

One thing I do like is Goldbarth’s way with a metaphorical cat. As in “The Two Poles: a New Year resolution 1975”

. . . sorrow is here
to stay and the arch of a cat’s back bridges
the process of understanding grief and connects
something unspeakable registered in its eyes with
its fearful, uncontrollable sphincter, and we
if we could see in the dark a cat sees
would do the same for these sorrowful times . . .

Sorrowful times we certainly are in, still, again, 35 years later.

And this is my way of saying, here is your cat blog for Friday, Febraury 12, 2010 (Happy birthday, Abie Baby).