Sherry Chandler

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).

The isolate, white male hunter

In The Land Before Her. Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (UNC Press, 1984), Annette Kolodny analyzes the mythology of Daniel Boone thus:

In the end, of course, the nation took to its heart the heroic mythology of the wilderness hunter . . . For, in fantasy as in life, if the wilderness was to be possessed by the cultivators, then it could be no place for the hunters; and if the hunters triumphed, then however appealing their gardens, the cultivators would have to be barred (or removed). And so, while historically the wilderness was given over, frontier by frontier, to the cultivators, in fantasy it forever remained the domain of the male hunter-adventurer (albeit stripped of his commercial and settlement associations). Daniel Boone emerged from his original incarnation as a brooding, meditative protector of settlements to become Boone the isolate, white male hunter, companion to the Indian. [p. 67]

It is just this mythological interface of forest and garden that Robert Morgan explores in his popular Boone. A Biography (Algonquin Books, 2009). Except that where Kolodny presents the forest as feminine and erotic to the men who made the myth, Morgan sees it as feminine and maternal: great mother wilderness opposed to father commerce. (I’ll grant some overlap here between the erotic and the maternal; the overarching point is the forest as feminine object of desire.)

Morgan’s book has been advertised as a portrait of the real Boone, but I found it more a portrait of Boone the larger-than-life hero. John Mack Faragher tries to sort fact from legend in his Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, and Meredith Mason Brown, in Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America, places Boone in the social history of his time. Both of these are books of standard biography, but I found Morgan’s book more a work of creative nonfiction or maybe even historical criticism. Morgan is willing to enter Boone’s mind, to tell you what the great man thought and felt. He concludes that the meeting between Boone and John James Audubon did take place, because it was right that the great woodsman and the great naturalist should have met. The fact of their physical presence in the same place at the same time is irrelevant.

Morgan really admires Boone; I would go so far as to say that he loves Boone and the lost forest of his myth. Identifying with Boone is not necessarily a bad thing. I find myself doing it. And Morgan is a poet, after all, an excellent poet, but probably more interested in the spirit than the fact of the matter, the truth of the heart. In a biography, what I perceived as the lack of objectivity made me uncomfortable. I can draw my own conclusions, build my own what-if castles.

The fact is, whatever else it may have been, Boone’s was always a commercial enterprise. Even the indigenous nations had turned commercial hunters by the time Boone enters the scene.

I argued with Morgan a lot, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I argue with a lot of books that I find valuable. I was uncomfortable enough with this book that I put it down for several weeks. I found him too willing to accept the positive and argue away the negative. Or maybe it was just my bitter feminist bent that doubted, maybe the truth of my heart is found in a different place.

When I came back to it recently I was more receptive. Possibly I was in a different emotional and intellectual place — I’ve found that I have to be “ready” to read some books — or perhaps it was because I’d reached the point in Boone’s life where settlement catches up with him and his footprint is a little more life sized.

Which is to say, exactly that point of his original incarnation as a brooding, meditative protector of settlements as opposed to Boone the isolate, white male hunter, the point where he talks to Filson, keeps a tavern, commands a militia.

Toward the end of the biography, when Boone is in Missouri acting as a sort of don on his Spanish land grant, continuing to find ways to explore and hunt, my skepticism returned. This is where arthritic aging Boone makes it all the way out to the Rockies, where he meets Audubon, where legend once again overlaps fact like the shingled land claims in Kentucky, and where Morgan believes and I doubt.

All that said, Boone is a beautifully written book, well researched, and with a comprehensive bibliography and set of notes. Morgan is excellent writing about the Shawnee, portraying them as neither savage nor noble. His picture of Boone’s life as a captive and Blackfish’s adoptive son is wonderful in giving us the texture of that life, i’s attraction for a man of Daniel Boone’s predelictions. Morgan is also very good in his portrait of Rebecca Boone. I give him high marks for that.

And I see in my sidebar that I have pulled a quote from William Stafford:

Poverty plus confidence equals
pioneers. We never doubted.

Nettles and buffalo wool

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid watching Fess Parker re-invent Daniel Boone, I never gave a thought to how he kept himself clothed, especially in spotless if historically incorrect fringed buckskin. And Mr. Boone never wore a coonskin cap in his life.

Still, it turns out clothing was a major issue for the settlers in Kentucky. John Mack Faragher, in Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (Henry Holt, 1993), states:

A man who came out [to the frontier] with two changes of clothes in the spring was walking around in rags by the fall, and many people returned to the settlements simply because of their humiliation at their state of undress. [p. 152]

Buckskins were used but they weren’t as satisfactory as textiles, especially when they got wet. Even the indigenous nations preferred woven cloth, except for leggings and moccasins.

In Women in Kentucky (Univ Press of Kentucky, 1979), Helen Deiss Irvin attributes the solution to the frontier clothing problem to one woman, living in Harrodsburg:

When Ann Kennedy Wilson Poague Lindsay McGinty—frequently widowed by frontier hazards—settled in Kentucky in 1774, she brought with her a spinning wheel, said to be the first in the future state. And when she moved to Harrodsburg in February, 1776, she began to think of ways to solve an urgent problem among the settlers there: a shaortage of warm clothing. What small planting area they cleared was used for corn, for food took precedence over flax. Yet they needed clothing immediately. Experimenting with the fibers of “nettles and other weeds,” according to her daughter, she arrived at an acceptable substitute for flax.

With her children, she ventured out of Fort Harrod to gather nettled, and weighed the weeds down with sones in the creek, to let the water rot off the outer stalk. Later she “spread, rotted, broke, swingled, and hacked” the weeds, twisting together several stands of fiber, and she used these strands to weave a frail fabric on a home-built loom. Further experiment led her to interweave her nettle-thread with buffalo wool, producing “linsey-woolsey.” This strong warm material was soon in general use, flax replacing nettles as soon as it could be raised. [p.13-14]

I’m not so sure that Irvin is correct in attributing the invention of linsey-woolsey to Ann Kennedy Wilson Poague Lindsay McGinty. I think this cloth was known in the Colonies for some time, though perhaps not in this nettle and buffalo wool combination.

Also, it’s a bit of a simplification to say that corn was grown to feed the people. Corn was also grown because it was a crop that didn’t need much tending and a crop of corn could be used to “improve” a parcel of land, a requirement for staking a claim. Potatoes were also used.

Not much is said about the role of the potato in settling the United States, but if given a choice of potato or corn as a subsistence crop, I think I’d pick the potato.

And anyway, Faragher gives credit for the nettle cloth to the women of Boonesborough, a rival settlement.

—the women of Boonesborough devised a way to weave the fibers of wild nettles with buffalo hair to make a serviceable, if coarse, cloth. [p. 152]

One last note. Cloth of nettles was not an invention of the American frontier. It was known in Scotland and the Scandinavian countries. Nettles are still being used as natural sources of fiber for cloth.

I’m not sure, but I think indigenous peoples also made use of buffalo wool.

So perhaps this “invention” wasn’t so much an invention as an adaptation. European settlers borrowed much from the culture of indigenous peoples.

’sang

Digging ginseng for sale to China being one of the few ways Appalachian residents have of making a little cash money off the land, I was interested to learn that Daniel Boone was one of the first Kentuckians to try to exploit this particular natural resource.

Here, from Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America (LSU Press, 2008), is what Meredith Mason Brown has to say about the ginseng trade in the late 17^th century:

Boone’s ginseng efforts [in 1787-1788] reflected that Kentucky, though on America’s western frontier, was part of a global economy. The Chinese treasured ginseng, which was believed to increase mental activity and potency—perhaps because its forked root, to one possessed of a strong imagination, looked vaguely like a two-legged human (its Chinese name, jen-shen, means “man-shaped”). Ginseng roots that were old and wrinkled were particularly esteemed because the plant’s long life was thought to be transferable to its consumer, For many years wild ginseng root had been exported from North America, much of it ultimately for the Chinese market, ever since a French Jesuit priest reported his discovery of ginseng in the woods near Montreal. The total recorded amount of ginseng shipped from Britain’s continental American colonies in 1770 was over thirty-seven tons. In February 1784 the Empress of China, the first American ship to trade with China after the Treaty of Paris was signed, sailed from New York harbor with almost thirty tons of ginseng in her cargo. The backers of the voyage, including the American merchant Robert Morris, made a fortune, selling to the Chinese primarily ginseng from western Virginia and Pennsylvania and selling to the Americans Chinese tea, silk, cotton, and porcelain. After the ship returned to New York in May 1785, the success of the venture was widely reported in the American press. The Chinese had paid five dollars a pound for the ginseng that made up most of the ship’s cargo. [p. 213]

One thing I just noticed in keying this text in is how far Brown goes to distance himself from any belief in sympathetic magic: “was believed.” “looked vaguely,” “to one possessed of a strong imagination.”

The other thing to notice is that it was then and has been since the merchants who make the fortune from such trade. The supplier takes the risks and gets little. Boone’s efforts, like all of his efforts to strike it rich after the Revolution, didn’t pay out. Though he shipped enough root in the spring of 1788 to yield the modern equivalent of half a million dollars, his keelboat was swamped when it ran into a log-jam and his ginseng was damaged. And then, it turned out that he wasn’t the only frontiersman shipping ’sang. By the time his sons got their goods to Philadelphia, the market was glutted and prices had plummeted.

Forest as commodity

Reading this morning in James Lee Burke’s Black Cherry Blues (Little, Brown and Company, 1989), I was struck by this sentence:

I looked out over the night sheen of the river, at the circle of mountains around the town and the way the timber climbed to the crests . . . [p. 91}

It is true that Burke's detective, Dave Robichaux, is in a logging town but it is also true that this is the way we've come to speak of wooded areas. And the first definition of timber is the wood of growing trees suitable for structural uses.

That is the way we've come to think of a woods, as a commodity. Even the Daniel Boone National Forest is often under threat from those who calculate its worth in board feet.

It's a very Enlightenment idea, according to Robert Pogue Harrison. In Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, he traces the origin of the notion of forest-as-commodity to 18th century France, to one Monsieur Le Roy, warden of the Park of Versailles, writing in Diderot's Encyclopédie. Harrison explains:

Forests are useful for many human purposes: heating, energy, manufacture, shipbuilding, revenue, and even more intangible things such as aesthetic pleasure, landscape, parks, and so forth. In the Age of Enlightenment the forest is subsumed altogether under this concept of usefulness. Given that the Enlightenment is so much a part of our cultural heritage, we fail at first glance to grasp the revolutionary aspect of this new, all-embracing concept of usefulness. Lurking in the concept of course is the idea of profit—forests as a source of revenue and taxation—and we know that considerations of profit would soon come to dominate the entire European enterprise of forest management by the state as well as by the particular forest owners. Enlightenment presides over the reduction of forests to the status of a material resource in need of strict management.

. . .Le Roy never once mentions the issue of wildlife. The forest as habitat has disappeared. If habitat is not an issue for Le Roy it is because the forest has already been conceived of in terms of its use-value. Use-value, in turn, has been linked to the concept of "rights"—the right of the state, the rights of the private owners, and the rights of posterity. Nowhere is there any mention of the rights of the forest's wildlife. [pp. 120-121]

So, while General Braddock is slashing his military road through the forest to make the west safe for “civilizing” by our Enlightenment founders, Europeans were turning forests into wood farms. More from Harrison:

. . . Descartes. . . presumed to find his way out of a forest of randomness and confusion by following the straight line of method. In his Discourse on Method Descartes employed a mere anaology, but we are now in the position to see to what extent the analogy takes on a lieteral dimension of its own. . . . How do you walk in a straight line through the forest? To begine with, you plant your trees in rectilinear rows, as German foresters did. [p. 123]

The word civilize, of course, comes from the Latin cives, or citizen, that is, a member of the city. And cities tend to build walls, or fences, to keep the wild things at bay. To survey the land into plots, build fences, clear the woods, these were civilizing actions of the highest order to our Founders.

For the Virginians, particularly, the Jeffersonians, a farm, a landed estate, was the highest order of civilization.

And if I had been Rebecca Boone, bringing what was left to me of my ten children over into a forest filled with wolves, bears, panthers, and hostile indigenous warriors, I have no doubt that I would have wanted the forest cleared away.

Though some see Daniel Boone as some sort of mystic of the backwoods, he was also a man who saw the forest as a commodity — an unending source of pelts.

The irony for men like Boone was that, in clearing the way for civilizing, they destroyed their own way of life. But it would have gone anyway, because indigenous and whites alike were overhunting.

How Braddock marched into slaughter

“Who would have thought it.” Ted Franklin Belue reports these to be General Edward Braddock’s last words as he died on the battlefield at Great Meadows on July 13, 1755. Four horses had been shot from under him.

I have posted about this battlefield before, how it became a major tourist attraction for those boating down the Ohio River into Kentucky in the 18^th century (here and here). The massacre was, in Belue’s words, a “crucible” for European Americans. And it was, incidentally, the making of a young Lieutenant Colonel named George Washington. Everybody who was anybody in frontier Kentucky was there: Daniel Boone, John Findley, Dr. Thomas Walker. (Boone was there as a teamster, not a soldier, though he had the rank of sargeant.)

Here is Belue’s description, from The Hunters of Kentucky: A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750-1792 (Stackpole Books, 2003), of the army he led out from Fort Cumberland on May 29, with the intention of “hack[ing] a war road 110 miles long along an old Indian path — leveling rises, building bridges, blasting out stumps, clearing brush, filling holdes — to deliver men and artillery to Ohio’s dogleg with the Monongahela to oust the French from Fort Duquesne . . . [p. 61]

On May 29, the mighty twenty-two hundred lumbered from Fort Cumberland, an unendingly unfolding phalanx twelve feet wide and stretching more than a mile along Nemacolin’s Path, blaxed three years earlier by Colonel [Christopher] Gist and Col. Thomas Cresap. Braddock’s army was a polyglot of English, Dutch, Africans, Catholics, Protestants, jews, Irishmen, and Scotsmen, followed by wagons, artillery, cattle, and swarms of venereal camp followers. Visitors passing nights visiting fire pits were taken aback at the myriad dialects and languages. But on race was conspicuously absent: Indians.

Braddock deemed the “exotics” troublesome. His three-day meeting with Algonquins and Iroquoians ended with a broadside &mdash: “No Savage Shall Inherit the Land.” Enraged, the Indians left to join the French. [p. 62]

And that was Braddock’s undoing. Had he employed indigenous scouts, he might not have marched his mighty army blithely into ambush.

A view of Rebecca Boone

From Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America (LSU Press, 2008):

While Boone and Stoner were out in Kentucky looking for the Fincastle County surveyors, Shawnees had begun to raid settlers near Castle’s Wood. The settlers along the Clinch gathered into the small forts they had built hurriedly and watied. Boone’s family was at Moore’s Fort, not far south of Castle’s Wood. As at many of the little forts, discipline was lax. Rebecca Boone decided to do something to make it less so. One time when many of the men were outside of the fort playing ball and others who were not playing were lying around, all without their guns, Rebecca Boone and some other wives, along with Rebecca’s oldest daughters, Susannah and Jemima, went out the other side of the fort with loaded rifles, fired a round of shots, and then ran back inside and locked both gates. The men sprinted back to the fort and ran around in terrified confusion when they discovered that the gates were bolted. Some men jumped into the pond. The women laughed at them, though the men did not think the joke was at all funny. Some of them threatened to have the women whipped, but that caused fistfights to break out among the men. Yet discipline did impove, especially after Boone came back and was placed in command of the fort. [pp. 62-63]