Sherry Chandler

A different kind of bombing

Bombing of Poems is an art project in which cities that have experienced aerial bombing in the past are now bombed with poems. Bombing of Poems over Warsaw consisted of dropping one hundred thousand poems printed in bookmarks from a helicopter over a symbolic location in the city. The poems were printed in two languages and they are by Chilean and Polish contemporary poets more info www.loscasagrande.org

This event took place in August 2009.

My thanks for Mark Brown. This is perhaps old news, but it’s good news.

And you may be interested in this bit of follow-up to the Les Paul playing zebra finches: The day an egg stopped the rock-chick show

Dorothy Sutton

Women writing in Kentucky today share two themes.

One is a loss of culture. Not nostalgia precisely, though it can look a little like it. Rather an urgency to record what was of value about the older skower ways before they disappear.

The second is an honoring of our elders, a need to record the extraordinary heroism of their ordinary lives (a phrasing I think I may have stolen from my friend Georgia Green Stamper).

In Backing Into Mountains (Wind Publications, 2009), Dorothy Sutton explores these themes with extraordinary grace, whether it be the Appalachian schoolbus drivers and mechanics of the title poem:

Your life depends on brakes and lights
up here in these Kentucky hills.
The school bus whines and groans to climb
through hollers, with creek-beds the only roads.
. . .
We try to maintain machines that can roll
without crashing, hold the young ones
back from the edge . . .

or Uncle Lester in “No Man’s Land”

One day he was husking the corn,
feeding the greedy, muddy pigs,
. . .
the next day halfway around the world
in Paris with the prostitutes of Pigalle
. . .
The next day mired in confused
trough trenches of muddy slop
. . .
the next day back in Pike County
slopping the hogs, begging the world
to stop . . .

This selection shows not only Sutton’s great compassion but also her craft: the circling around the sounds and images of pigs and slop in a way that is both humorous and heartbreaking.

Sutton explores far and wide in the matter of Kentucky, from Gorgeous George and Casey Jones to Robert Penn Warren and George Keats.

“Casey Jones” is one of my favorite poems in this collection. Having grown up in a singing/strumming family, as many of us here in Kentucky did, I love the play on the theme of this most famous of all train ballads (not to be confused with the Grateful Dead’s Casey Jones) .

We’re the children of “Casey” Jones
from Cayce, Kentucky. In 1900,
Casey Jones died trying
to find the time he’d misplaced somewhere
between Memphis and Mississippi.
. . .
They dug him out, one legend says,
one hand on the throttle, to increase his speed,
the other hand firmly gripping the brake.

Here is the central dilemma of the theme of loss of culture. We tend, us older folk in Kentucky, to come from timeless sorts of places but now we are very much caught up in the rush of time. Our roots are in the folkways, our branches embrace Richard Dawkins and Picasso.

And right about now, Uncle Lester is crying “Whoa, damn you,” not just to the mule of the twentieth century but also to that last metaphor. Both of ‘em kind of got the bits in their teeth and took off.

Here’s a much better extended metaphor, from the Richmond Register:

Dublin poet Eileen Casey said recently of Sutton’s work: “The title poem of this collection pays tribute to the tenacity of the bus drivers of Appalachia, a cultural region in the Eastern United States, forced to breathtakingly negotiate very difficult terrain. In the same way, Dorothy Sutton takes each poem (and us) from one imaginative location to another, by the sheer force of her deep and intimate knowledge of what it is to be human. The poems are exquisitely crafted, steering through words, like those Appalachian bus drivers, trying to maintain machines that can roll without crashing, hold the young ones back from the edge, carry them all the places they need to go. These poems are a joy to read, in terms of capturing the cadences of lives lived and voices heard in the Kentucky of her childhood, different and yet the same as mine in Ireland. An emotional bridge is formed between Kentucky and the rest of the world, indeed a breathtaking reading experience.”

Dorothy Sutton is reading this Tuesday, March 9, at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning’s Kentucky Great Writer series. It’s an evening to celebrate Wind Publications. Her fellow readers are J. Stephen Rhodes, author of The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (my remarks here) and Normandi Ellis, author of Fresh-Fleshed Sisters. The festivities begin with open mic signups at 6:30, featured readings begin at 7:30.

Mr. Longfellow had a birthday yesterday

I had intended to post this yesterday, which was Longfellow’s birthday. But I got distracted, so I’m going to let it go out today

A Psalm of Life

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

&mdash Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Lounsbury, Thomas R., ed. Yale Book of American Verse. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912; Bartleby.com, 1999

I had to memorize this one in high school. I’ll bet Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell did too. Maybe they should revisit the penultimate and the antepenultimate stanzas.

A salmagundi

Harry Rutherford, of Heraclitean Fire, has started a new blog interprise called A London Salmagundi: Being a Hotchpotch or Gallimaufry of Divers Things etc. It’s the place to go to find your photo of the Common Potoo (which I think is a bird) or a photomicrograph of a dinosaur bone. or a YouTube of Jerry Lee Lewis on the Steve Allen show in 1957.

It was through Harry’s Salmagundi that I discovered F*ck Yeah, Victorians, a tumblr site that has been fascinating my husband for about a week now. it’s not a site for the squeamish, but it is certainly a window into the wierder side of Victorian culture.

If you think you might prefer to do something wholesome, like crochet, look to Pocahontas County Fare for your links to Free Crochet Patterns, Especially Old Ones .

Thinking about old crochet, old lace, I thought I might go looking for an old poem on the subject. Here’s what I found:

Old Flemish Lace

A LONG, rich breadth of Holland lace,
A window by a Flemish sea;
Huge men go by with mighty pace,—
Great Anne was Queen these days, may be,
And strange ships prowled for spoil the sea—
For you—old lace!

Stitch after stitch enwrought with grace,
The mist falls cold on Zuyder-Zee;
The silver tankards hang in place
Along the wall; across her knee
Dame Snuyder spreads her square of lace,
A veil—for me?

The Holland dames put by their lace,
The bells of Bruges ring out in glee;
The mill-wheels move in sluggish race:—
Farewell, sweet bells! Then down the sea
The slow ship brings the bridal grace—
The veil—for me!

Manhattan shores—a New World place,
The Pinxter-blows their sweetest be:
And now—come close, O love-bright face—
Bend low—…
        Nay, not old Trinity,
To Olde Sainte Marke’s i’ the Bowerie,
Dear Hal,—with thee!

—Amelia Walstien Carpenter, Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. An American Anthology, 1787–1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900; Bartleby.com, 2001

Dear Hal, I’m guessing, is the proposed bridegroom. And a pinxter here, I think may be the pinxter azalea.

And then I found this, which sort of pulls it all together, except maybe for the bawdy Victorians:

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ‘ flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ‘ they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ‘ wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ‘ lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ‘ ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ‘ dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ‘ treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ‘ nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ‘ to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ‘ his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ‘ nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ‘ death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ‘ beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ‘ joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ‘ Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems. London: Humphrey Milford, 1918; Bartleby.com, 1999.

Time flies

Seems like a good enough day to post some birthday poems.

Here’s the one from Robert Burns; in its beginning at least it seems appropriate to the day we have here and in its ending it expresses a generosity of spirit I can but aspire to:

Sonnet on the Author’s Birthday

On hearing a Thrush sing in his Morning Walk

SING on, sweet thrush, upon the leafless bough,
Sing on, sweet bird, I listen to thy strain,
See aged Winter, ’mid his surly reign,
At thy blythe carol, clears his furrowed brow.

So in lone Poverty’s dominion drear,
Sits meek Content with light, unanxious heart;
Welcomes the rapid moments, bids them part,
Nor asks if they bring ought to hope or fear.

I thank thee, Author of this opening day!
Thou whose bright sun now gilds yon orient skies!
Riches denied, thy boon was purer joys—
What wealth could never give nor take away!

Yet come, thou child of poverty and care,
The mite high heav’n bestow’d, that mite with thee I’ll share.

— Robert Burns, Poems and Songs. Vol. VI. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001

And here one in celebration of Robert Louis Stevenson that charms me. May it charm you to and bring a smile to this blustery day:

Stevenson’s Birthday

“HOW I should like a birthday!” said the child,
“I have so few, and they so far apart.”
She spoke to Stevenson—the Master smiled—
“Mine is to-day; I would with all my heart
That it were yours; too many years have I!
Too swift they come, and all too swiftly fly.”

So by a formal deed he there conveyed
All right and title in his natal day,
To have and hold, to sell or give away,—
Then signed, and gave it to the little maid.

Joyful, yet fearing to believe too much,
She took the deed, but scarcely dared unfold.
Ah, liberal Genius! at whose potent touch
All common things shine with transmuted gold!
A day of Stevenson’s will prove to be
Not part of Time, but Immortality.

— Katherine Miller; from Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. An American Anthology, 1787–1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900; Bartleby.com, 2001

Green towel, Goldbarth

Photograph by TR Williams

from The Leave-Taking

. . .

I’m going to the hills for a while, I hear
you can spear down game there with a toothpick,
and if you leave the door unlatched, your only skulking in
will be the night air’s, not a chill air, it curls
on your chest like a kitten. . . .

— Albert Goldbarth, Comings Back (Doubleday, 1976)

By the way, Poetry Daily this week features Why All This Music?

Wherein Goldbarth, Badgered by The Georgia Review into Conducting a Version of an Interview, Sighs and Accepts a Few Queries from Poets in the Audience, on the Condition that These Questions Come from the Bodies of Their Poems, and the Answers (Such as They Are) Come from the Bodies of Goldbarth’s Poems (with a little verbal glue in non-poem form in italics)

Katerina’s book of charms

The poems in Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s The Air Around the Butterfly fill me with bright delight at the same time that they break my heart.

How is this possible?

It’s magic, I think, and I think I don’t want to analyze magic too much, don’t want to find the man behind the curtain.

I read the poems in English. On the facing page is the same poem in Bulgarian, a language for which I don’t even know the alphabet. So I think perhaps these may be the runes, the cabalistic writing that distills these gemlike poems from the chaos of the air around the butterfly. Except of course that we have dark associations with the notion of a cabal and there is nothing dark about these poems.

Nor anything secret. They are all as open and vulnerable as a child and as filled with wonder.

So the delight comes from the simplicity of the language. Like the best of haiku, Katerina makes simple statements in simple sentences. Nothing compound or complex in this collection.

Some of the poems are only three or four words long, including the title.

And yet —

Just as the best haiku will surprise you with an unexpected yoking of ideas, so do Katerina’s poems. Take, for example, “Reluctance,” which you will find in its entirety here (along with other sample poems). It begins like this:

The Spare Tire
Is constantly afraid
That one day
It will be his turn
To start carrying the weight
Of the car
In which
He has been riding

It’s like a Aesop fable with a spare tire instead of a crow.

The heartbreak is easier to explain. These are poems of great loss, loss of country, loss of family, loss of mother.

In a section of the book called “E.T. and I Phone Home,” we find the poem “Phone Calls”

In a forest
tall and gentle
in our respective meadows
on an appointed night
E.T. and I phone home.

It takes much time
to dial all the digits
to press each button
then release it
in a long row of
unforgiving numbers. . .

Home is so far away — as it is for all of us in a way — and the poem taps in to our great loneliness, our great homesickness. But the whimsy of it, the chutzpah of taking an image worked to death and somehow making it fresh. That is what charms.

Like magic.

During this first year of grieving for my mother, I have mentioned several times my appreciation for the poems of grief that I’ve encountered in my reading. Reading them taps into my own grief, lets me cry and share and heal a little.

That is what the best poetry is for.

One of the things.

So the poem in this book that shatters my heart into the tiniest pieces and for which I am most grateful is this one

Last Time

Last time I saw my mom
she was entering the earth.
Entering the earth on a cold day
without a jacket.
Without a hat or a scarf. . .

There it is, stark and loving and oh, so sad.

The Air Around the Butterfly is a pretty book. My copy has textured card stock covers, is printed on heavy cream-colored paper. Occasional title words are picked out in red. The chaos on the cover was drawn by Inna Pavlova. The book has a nice heft, it is satisfying to hold in the hands, easy on the eyes.

Reading the poems is a little like eating peanuts. A simple act, a small bite, and so you turn the page. And the next thing you know, you’ve eaten the whole jar.

Except that once in a while you have to stop and look out the window at the birds and let the poem sink in. They stay with you, these poems.

__________
On Saturday, February 6, Katerina Stoykova-Klemer is conducting a free workshop at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. The workshop is called “Bigger Than They Appear: How to Write Very Short Poems.” This is a thing Katerina really knows how to do, so if you are in the area, you should grab the chance. Hours are Noon to 2 p.m.