Sherry Chandler

End of the masquerade?

My friend Gin Petty, paper artist extraordinaire, shared this photograph she took recently at Cumberland Falls. This panhandling raccoon has no mask. Gin speculates that he may have reformed but I figured the pickings are so easy there among the tourists that he has no more need to thieve. He sure does know how to pose for the camera, unlike our local rascal who remains camera shy.

We’ve been talking Golden Garden Spiders, which have been conspicous in their absence here this fall. I did see a lovely specimen on my grandfather’s gravestone up in Owen County on Sunday. I was there to transplant some peonies that had prospered too well and were obscuring my grandfather’s name: I. J. Chandler. I was sorry in the process to dispossess the spider.

Here is a lovely pastoral from E. Pauline Johnson, a Victorian era First Nations poet from Canada.

At Husking Time

AT husking time the tassel fades
To brown above the yellow blades
Whose rustling sheath enswathes the corn
That bursts its chrysalis in scorn
Longer to lie in prison shades.

Among the merry lads and maids
The creaking ox-cart slowly wades
’Twixt stalks and stubble, sacked, and torn
At husking time.

The prying pilot crow persuades
The flock to join in thieving raids;
The sly raccoon with craft inborn
His portion steals,—from plenty’s horn
His pouch the saucy chipmunk lades
At husking time.

— E. Pauline Johnson (1862–1913), from Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1895; Bartleby.com, 2003. www.bartleby.com/246/

A list

Asked to pick something as simple as a favorite color, I am apt to be catapulted off the Bridge of Death by the Old Man from Scene 24. About books I am as fickle as Gin (see comment to previous post). I can�t even claim to be serially monogamous because there�s genre to be considered. In mysteries alone, I have run through Agatha Christy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, John D. McDonald, Ross McDonald, Raymond Chandler, Dick Francis, Tony Hillerman, Edith Pargeter, Martha Grimes, P.D. James, Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, and now I�m looking to James Lee Burke.

from Secrets

This is how the pros do it:

Ruth Bavetta, an honorary Kentucky poet by virtue of her relationship to Gin Petty and me, is the person who introduced me to this idea of White Out poetry. She’s been working on a booklength White Out project, Secrets, and has agreed to let me post one page of it here. Secrets was created as an exercise in a workshop with Sarah Maclay. Ruth tells me that Sarah got the idea from Mary Reufle.

Ruth has the advantage, perhaps, of being a visual artist as well as a poet. She worked with a picture book – a yoga instruction manual – that she picked up someplace like the Good Will. Not only did she white out words – and the lower case is appropriate because, in such a big project, Ruth soon abandoned quick-thickening Liquid Paper for white acrylic paint – but she also blacked out the human figures to make silhouettes and then added bits of color.

When I asked her about the project, Ruth observed:

Some of the people in my group just used the book as a source for the words and order, which they then extracted to form a poem on a clean sheet of paper. Certainly shows how my thinking tends to veer off in odd directions.

Vive l’oddity! Although I like the simplicity of what I achieved with simple text on paper, one of the things I liked most about the exercise was the way it moved away from the linearity of most poetry. Ruth has taken this a step further.

My WaMo colleagues are working with books this weekend. Exciting to think what they may produce.

I’ve chosen “Triangle” to post here because it is very simple and will not overtax your monitor. I’ve put all my talking beforehand so as not to distract you from the thing itself. Click the image to see it full-sized.