Sherry Chandler

Five cats, a guitar, and an engraving

This Polaroid snap was taken in 1976 in an apartment on Woodland Avenue in Chicago. The cats in the foreground are Cynthia, Gremlin, Griddlebone, and Jenny-any-dots. Over behind the guitar case is the matriarch Teufelsdröckh.

To see the Dürer referenced below, follow this link.

From Santa Lucia

          . . . All women
are masochists. I was so young, believing
every word they said. Dürer is second rate.
Dürer’s Eve feeds her apple to the snake;
snaky tresses, cat at her feet, at Adam’s foot
a mouse. Male fear, male eyes and art.

— Robert Hass, Praise (The Ecco Press, 1979)

Jim Lally

A Hanging

1)

My life, tied up
in the middle of house chores,
loses itself in hanging clothes
on the line between
the tulip poplar and red maple.
This is a job I make meticulous
with unnecessary arranging
and sorting by color and shape.
Suddenly, I sense someone
behind me.
“That’s alright,” she says,
“don’t stop hanging.”
I hear her camera clicking.
“I’m doing a photo essay
on bed linens and dish rags.
It’s one of the best-selling subjects
at my gallery.”
An artist, it seems, from Pasadena
has accidentally
made her way to my dead-end
road to ask for directions
to the covered bridge.

I keep on hanging
every item from my basket;
by then she’s discovered
the chickens – framing
the hens in the falling down
barn yard while trying to avoid
the roosters.

“I grew up on a farm,” she says,
“but where I live now,
there are laws against clothes lines
and domesticated fowl.”
“Wow!” is all I can say.
“You’re in the middle of nowhere,”
she says. “How did you find this place?”
“Every nowhere is somewhere,” I say
and notice her foot prints in places
she’ll later regret.
“I’ll send you some prints,”
she says, getting into her car.

2)

Four a.m.
summer solstice
the cat wants out
the rooster crows
and I suddenly remember
the clothes
hanging on the line
………….. a ghostly image
of flapping sheets
on someone’s upscale
California wall.

— Jim Lally, from his chapbook Stick Tight Man (Accents, 2010), used by permission of the author

Here is Jim Lally’s bio from the Accents Publishing web page:

Jim Lally is a Lexington poet known for his curly white beard and straggly ponytail. He is a member of the Poets’ Supper, Poezia, and Holler writers’ groups, as well as the founding member of Writers at Artcroft. He graduated with a degree in English from Brescia College, where he was the editor of the school’s first literary magazine. Jim has been the Spoken Word Artist at the Walk for the Arts in Berea for the last two years. He is a partner with his wife, Jennifer Gleason, in the organic farm business of Sunflower Sundries. His poetry ranges from the irregularly scattered to the tangle of the stranglehold.

His chapbook, Stick Tight Man, was, I believe Accents Publishing’s first publication.

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.

Smelly cat

IV

catpiss smell,
the pink bloom open:
I press a leaf
of the flowering currant
on the back of your hand
for the tight slow burn
of its sticky juice
to prime your skin,
and your veins to be crossed
criss-cross with leaf-veins.

— Seamus Heaney, “from Field Work” in Selected Poems 1966-1987 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990)

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).

Cats and Goblins

from Goblin Market

Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
“Lie close,” Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
“Come buy,” call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.
“O! cried Lizzie, Laura, Laura,
You should not peep at goblin men.”
Lizzie covered up her eyes
Covered close lest they should look;
Laura reared her glossy head,
And whispered like the restless brook:
“Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds’ weight.
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes.”
“No,” said Lizzie, “no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us.”
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
One had a cat’s face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat’s pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry.
Lizzie heard a voice like voice of doves
Cooing all together:
They sounded kind and full of loves
In the pleasant weather.

— Christina Rosetti. Read the whole poem here.