Sherry Chandler

Links

First the heartbreaking: Dave Bonta on white-nose syndrome that is killing off our bats.

then the serious: David Ford’s interview of Helen Losse.

then the amazingly and amusingly techno: Quineau sonnets (via Matthew Lafferty)

And last, the just silly: Emergency Yodel Button (via Troy Teegarden)

Today, by the way, is the anniversary of the Gore vs. Bush election in 2000, the celebration of which puts us all in dire need of an emergency yodel button.

Stuff

From Boing-Boing. Link complements of Donna Rhae Marder.

“You Should Write a Poem About That!” Anybody ever say that to you? They’ve said it to me and, like Robert Peake, I often find I want to say, “No, you should write that poem.”

Owing to its frequency, it gets old. But apart from that, the response also intrigues me. It is different than the response comedians complain about, where, upon learning of their peculiar profession, new acquaintances will fold their arms and scowl, “Oh yeah? Then say something funny.” Instead, the “you should write…” remark is approving, a kind of conspiratorial wink-and-nudge. It is as if, through our conversation, they have stumbled momentarily in to the head-space where I, as a poet, must constantly reside—a land tinkling with musical profundity and linguistic charm. Alas, that ain’t always where I’m at.

Good news: Dodge Foundation Reverses Decision to Cancel Poetry Festival

Watermark asks “Been to an emergency room lately?”

I asked: Why? Why are you seeing so many more patients?

Because, I was told, so many more people are without insurance, and have nowhere else to go.

Do you think health care reform is irrelevant to your life?

Twitter Poetry on the Plinth in London

The connectivity of the Twitter poetry is sort of the opposite of the solitude celebrated at Windows Toward the World with a quote from Thomas Merton:

All I know is that here I am, and the valley is very quiet, the sun is going down, there is no human being around, and as darkness falls I could easily be a completely forgotten person, as if I did not exist for the world at all. (Though there is one who remembers and whom I remember.) The day could easily come when I would be just as invisible as if I never existed, and still be living up here on this hill. . . .And I know that I would be perfectly content to be so.

Better with Friends

Helen Losse begins her ten-page ten-part poem “”Where the Reverie is Apt to Lead” with the words:

This isn’t about prayer as such
but concerns the yellow flowers and the barking dog.

The poem is, of course, very much about prayer, and so is Helen’s entire collection Better with Friends (Rank Stranger Press, 2009) in which the poem appears.

Readers who know Helen’s work from her blog Windows Toward the World know that she is devoutly Christian, a reader of Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Better with Friends opens with two epigrahs:

Pray without ceasing
— 1 Thessalonians 5:17

and

Prayer . . . transforms our vision [to] make us see all [people] and all the history in the light of God, able to enter . . . that inscrutable freedom which is at work [in all of] human existence.
— Thomas Merton

The opening section of the book is titled “Prayer at the Open Window.” Here are a few lines from the title poem:

In the solitude, I ponder life’s meaning.
I have looked but not really seen.
Because a window is open

does not mean the air is full of light.

. . . Surely, something
hides in the darkness like a shadow in the fog.

Significantly, the last poem in the collection is called “Prayer in the Fog” and ends with these words:

I embrace these shadows—

though they may be untrue—
for this is the first morning this week,
I have awakened to a fog, so penetrable
I can walk into it and set myself free.

So the book circles round and round the question of prayer.

Helen’s style is relaxed and conversational, as though a friend were talking to you quietly, telling you her sorrows and her stories. She tells stories of train watching — which is “Better with Friends” — of “Church, When They Had No Pianos”

Feel the beat. The backbeat.
Feel the beat. Stomp with the feet.

She eulogizes Rosa Parks and mourns for New Orleans. And every poem is a prayer: for the needy, for the excluded, for racial justice, for peace. Each poem is a witness, a psalm against forgetting.

The tenth and last section of “Where the Revery Is Apt Lead” :

Rumors of war happen daily; people ride bikes;
houses burn. But this is about where the reverie leads,

how the yellow flowers, the barking dog,
the poor cousins, every sun rise and sunset,

pond, lake, river, every person living
with trouble and laughter,

every memory, every color, every sound becomes
prayer—with God as witness—and this is about

when the lonely unite in unsullied silence
and open their windows toward the world.

Every poem in Better with Friends is an open window through which Helen sees the world with honest, compassionate eyes.

Some recommended reading

I have some off-line reading to do today, so I’ll recommend some links for your online pleasure and enlightenment.

Poem of the week at The Guardian’s Books Blog is Wilfred Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” I am an Owens fan so I like this one:

The story of how Abraham, in obedience to a direct command from God, almost sacrificed his only son, Isaac, is one of the most perfectly written short narratives in the Old Testament. This is the story that Wilfred Owen retells and revises in this week’s poem, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.

Owen, you’ll notice, keeps close to the language of the King James Authorised Version. He also restrains himself rhythmically, conforming to the trudge of iambic pentameter. We like our war poetry, whether by Homer or Owen, to convey authenticity and guarantee its integrity by raw images and rough-hewn reportage. Owen can give us raw and rough-hewn, but in this poem he stands back from his subject matter: he is here to preach. And his matter is serious and specific enough to justify that technique.

It’s not until the imagery of “fire and iron” (Abraham’s implements were simply fire, wood and a knife) that we see the parable to be constructed. Owen’s modernising tactics become increasingly clear. The Old Testament Isaac was simply “bound” to the pyre, but here we have “straps and belts”, and then, unmistakably, “parapets and trenches”.

. . .

Owen’s poem chimes for me with Barack Obama’s recent speech in Cairo, in which the command of conscience is to kill the ram of violent extremism. Obama’s fundamental subject, too, I think, is “the pity of War.”

On the subject of health care reform, I recommend this post by Avedon Carol:

Let me put it another way: Bearing in mind that in the time I’ve lived here the value of the dollar to the pound has ranged between about $1.55=�1.00 to $2.00=�1.00, �30K a year is a pretty comfortable salary here. One of the things that makes it so comfortable is that you already have, regardless of who you work for or if you even have a regular job, a completely portable deluxe healthcare plan that doesn’t cost you any extra money when you see your doctor or go to a specialist or get tests or have surgery or endure a hospital stay. You have pretty much full coverage (excepting your glasses and dentistry) for free delivery of healthcare at the point of use, with no argument from some insurance industry hack. If your doctor thinks you need an operation, there’s no arguing with insurance agents about it – your doc just refers you to the hospital specialists, you see them, they do what’s necessary, and no one sends you a bill. No paperwork, no desperate phone calls, no deciding you can’t afford vital treatment.

And why shouldn’t Americans have that kind of care, too? After all, you’re already paying for it – in taxes. Every time you pay taxes, regardless of your own healthcare plan, you also pay for someone else’s healthcare – Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, NIH, SCHIP, whatever – you’re paying for government health services and research (which, by the way, is also a subsidy to the commercial medical industry that makes use of the research and development at bargain rates) – only you’re paying for a lot of it more expensively than you need to because so much waste is involved in servicing the myriad different commercial providers who have their fingers in the pie. And then when you get your own commercial healthcare, you pay extra for the very fact that someone has to ask you to name your insurance company and give them your insurance details. No one ever asks me my insurance details here – they already know them, because they’re the same for everyone.

And A Waiting Room IS a Line by Lance Mannion:

I’m in line right now.

Not sure how many people are in the line with me.

Lots, probably.

We can’t see each other because our places in the line are widely separated.

Some of us are in an actual line at the reception desk at the doctor’s office.

But some of us are in line at home. Some of us are in line at work. Some of us are in line in our cars. Wherever the phone we’re hoping will ring any moment is, that’s where our place in line is.

We’re all in line, waiting to hear back from our insurance company.

Eventually, assuming the insurance company gives us permission to have the operation or the procedure or the test we need, we’ll all get into different lines.

We’ll wait in other virtual or actual lines to make an appointment to see the doctor or the specialist or the technician.

After we get out of that line, we’ll wait in another line for the day to come when we can go to the office or hospital or the lab where we will then wait in another line to see the doctor or the specialist or the technician who will perform the operation or the procedure or the test we need.

And after we’re finally out of those lines, there are still other lines—at the pharmacy, back at our doctor’s office for the follow up, by the phone again to argue with the insurance company because somebody’s decided that the operation or the procedure or the test we were told was covered isn’t covered.

Of all the objections to national health insurance, the silliest and most baffling to me is that it will mean we’ll all have to wait in lines to see the doctor.

Helen Losse and Dave Bonta have poems up today that I would definitely recommend you read.

__________
P.S. Here’s another Mannion missive to the world you might like to read:

[Louis] Menand [in the New Yorker] is reviewing a book by Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing , a literary survey of the last seventy or so years that attempts to trace the effects of creative writing programs on the shape, direction, fads, and styles of American fiction. Menand, though, seems more interested in the questions, can people be taught how to write and if not (the answer he leans towards) what good are workshops?

. . .

Students at creative writing programs are learning from each other all the time. But what are they learning?

According to Menand, they aren’t learning to write well. They are learning to write what is fashionable well. This is what McGurl’s looks at in The Program Era, what has been fashionable and how fiction writing programs have responded to and shaped those fashions.

I went off to Iowa full up to my eyeballs with the works of Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Herman Melville, only to find that just about every other fiction writer there was only interested in what was in the New Yorker that week. . . .
Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason were the literary heroes of the day.

Minimalism was the fashion.

You’ll notice that among my literary heroes of the time there’s nobody who could be by any stretch described as a minimalist.

The upshot of this was that one of the lessons I learned at Iowa was that Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason were my mortal enemies.

Helen Losse, Poetry Editor

Asked about her editorial trajectory, Helen Losse tells Nic Sebastian:

Oh my goodness, an �editorial trajectory� sounds like something that makes me want to lie on the floor and stay there a long, long time.

Which is why I love Helen and why I’m proud to be a member of the family at the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Other words of wisdom from Helen:

Most of the poets I accept see this in my first reply: �Being published in the Mule is more than just gathering another publication credit; it�s more like joining a big ole southern family. So, welcome.� The Mule is a family that publishes poetry. We are a community that is quite inclusive. We�re liberal and open. We are representative of the south. And because we are a family and a school, we have reunions, take sabbaticals, offer classes; we have fun.

. . .

An editor should know how to reject a poem without rejecting the poet.

Read all of this interview at Very Like a Whale

Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Helen Losse No Comments

Playing for Change

Playing for Change:

From the award-winning documentary, “Playing For Change: Peace Through Music”, comes the first of many “songs around the world” being released independently. Featured is a cover of the Ben E. King classic by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it travelled the globe.

…

Join the Movement to help build schools, connect students, and inspire communities in need through music.

Via Windows Toward the World.

Seriously Dangerous

As a sort of follow-up (and possibly a rebuttal) to my discussion of Dorothy Allison the other day, I point you to this post on Windows Toward the World. Helen features an Allison quote and a “Seriously Dangerous” poem.

I was actually sort of disappointed that nobody stood up for Allison the other day. Surely some of you all have read her work.

__________
And while we’re talking about stories that must be heard, Susie Madrak features another one:

PINEHURST, N.C. A former Army medic made famous by a photograph that showed him carrying an injured Iraqi boy during the first week of the war has died of an apparent overdose, police said.

Joseph Patrick Dwyer died last week at a hospital in Pinehurst, according to the Boles Funeral Home. He was 31.

The photograph, taken in March 2003, showed Dwyer running to a makeshift military hospital while cradling the boy. The photo appeared in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts worldwide, making Dwyer became a symbol of heroism.

Dwyer laughed when a reporter told him of the photo and its widespread circulation, and he tried to deflect focus to his entire unit. His mother, Maureen, said then that the photo embarrassed her son because it singled him out while other soldiers were doing the same thing.