Sherry Chandler

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.

An invocation

Snow is in the forecast again but I’m with Robert Frost here:

To the Thawing Wind

COME with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow-bank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do to-night,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ices go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

— Robert Frost, A Boy’s Will. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915; Bartleby.com, 1999.

Or here’s one from Katherine Mansfield that I picked up this morning from Your Daily Poem:

Winter Song

Rain and wind, and wind and rain.
Will the Summer come again?
Rain on houses, on the street,
Wetting all the people’s feet,
Though they run with might and main.
Rain and wind, and wind and rain.

Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow.
Will the Winter never go?
What do beggar children do
With no fire to cuddle to,
P’raps with nowhere warm to go?
Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow.

Hail and ice, and ice and hail,
Water frozen in the pail.
See the robins, brown and red,
They are waiting to be fed.
Poor dears, battling in the gale!
Hail and ice, and ice and hail.

— Katherine Mansfield

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun -”

Lyndall Gordon has written a new biography of Emily Dickinson.

Here is Jeanette Winterson’s review from the Times Online:

Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds:

The eccentric poet, the dressy adventuress, the top man in town, his outraged wife, his vulnerable son, a cache of poems and letters hidden in trunks and chests … it could be the plot line for a potboiler; it is the Emily Dickinson story.

This most reclusive of poets, unmarried, virtually unpublished in her lifetime, knew who she was and fired that knowing through her poetry. Everyone had a stake in inventing her, including her brother, sister and sister-in-law. Her wild truthfulness was unsettling; it was easier to turn from the authenticity of the poetic blast towards a fictional person who could be offered up as a softer, simpler explanation.

While Emily Dickinson was alive there was at least a physical presence that had to be reckoned with — as time passed almost no one saw her, but she was fiercely there — refusing, for instance, to aid her brother in a gift of family land to his mistress. When Dickinson died in 1886, at 55, the invention of Emily Dickinson became an industry — and a feud.

And here is an article from the Guardian written by Lyndall Gordon herself,
A bomb in her bosom: Emily Dickinson’s secret life

It was Emily herself who helped to devise the blueprint for her legend, starting at the age of 23 when she declined an invitation from a friend: “I’m so old-fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.” In place of the tart young woman she was, she adopted this retiring posture. Born in 1830 into the leading family of Amherst, a college town in Massachusetts, she never left what she always called “my father’s house”. Townsfolk spoke of her as “the Myth”.

On the face of it, the life of this New England poet seems uneventful and largely invisible, but there’s a forceful, even overwhelming character belied by her still surface. She called it a “still – Volcano – Life”, and that volcano rumbles beneath the domestic surface of her poetry and a thousand letters. Stillness was not a retreat from life (as legend would have it) but her form of control. Far from the helplessness she played up at times, she was uncompromising; until the explosion in her family, she lived on her own terms.

For one such as I, educated in a time when poets like Elizabeth Barret Browning and even Dickinson herself were sniffed at as neurotic poetesses, not quite up to canonical standards — Browning got a particularly bad rap, portrayed as a silly leech on the superior powers of her husband — the most refreshing idea put forward in these newspaper articles is that illness was not a weakness for these creative women so much as a tool. From the Times:

Gordon is right, though, in her argument that cites illness as control. A writer needs time and solitude, necessities not available to women of any class at that time, without some special circumstances overriding convention.

Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and, later, Virginia Woolf, Dickinson was able to use her vulnerability to excuse herself from domestic duties and tiresome entertaining. Her father sanctioned her “withdrawal” on medical grounds, and this gave her time to write. She began at about 3am, and kept herself to herself until noon. Later, she did not engage in family life at all.

Or, as Elizabeth Oakes expresses it in her excellent poetry collection The Luminescence of All Things Emily (Wind Publications, 2009)

Emily’s niece tells this story.
Emily stood before her bedroom
door, mimicked turning a key,
and said, “Freedom, Mattie.”

Going up the stairs was like leaving
the eye of a storm. . . .

As the WomPonies, from whom I stole these links, particularly Louisa Howerow, point out, much of this material is known, though it may not be widely known. Certainly Oakes has already covered it, though in poetic, not analytic form.

I am not so sure about Gordon’s argument that Dickinson was epileptic. I am not all that certain that such diagnoses can be made after the fact, though it seems to be a modern temptation. Nevertheless, such retroactive diagnoses at least treat the disease as real, rather than dismissing it as hysteria.

For an excellent consideration of retro diagnoses in the case of Mary Todd Lincoln, another of history’s crazy women, see Diagnosing history at I See Invisible People. As Terry says, “it is possible to be both feminist and bipolar, or schizophrenic as some have said, at the same time.”

The value of these retro discussions of diagnosis may lie in recognizing that a woman can be both brilliant and ill, just as a man can. Abraham Lincoln famously experienced depression and Doestoevsky had epilepsy. The discussion may also allow us to contemplate these women as fully adult human beings who were able to turn a liability into an asset. So establishing whether Gordon is correct or not in her diagnosis may not be as important as the discussion it engenders.

At any rate, Gordon is an excellent writer, so I look forward to reading this volume.

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

A formalista valentine

Cover art: A Cabillero Valentine by M. Styborksi

Valentine
      (After Kate Light’s “Saf-T-Man”)

I never handed over my whole heart,
although I gave you use of one big chunk.
Indulge imagination. Let’s depart
from romantic ideals of self-sacrificial bunk,
my former Valentine: honeyed words, inside
a private envelop that cuts the tongue . . .
— Robin Kemp, from This Pagan Heaven

I confess. I wanted to talk to you about Robin Kemp’s This Pagan Heaven (Pecan Grove Press, 2009) on this particular day just so I could use a snippet of her anti-Valentine sonnet.

Robin was born in New Orleans (on Mardi Gras day, which, that being a movable feast, tells us both much and little) and I first “met” her during the Katrina disaster. I later met her in the flesh at West Chester, where she is known to hang out with others of her persuasion — a type of poet one might call post-modern formalists. Or even feminist formalists. Robin is listowner of Formalista, a list dedicated to women who work in form.

“Owning” such a list is a political move. Many strongly feminist poets think women should eschew form because of its association with the dead white European males of the literary canon. But then Robin is an activist poet and many of the poems in This Pagan Heaven are political. The title “Pantoum for Ari Fleischer” might be a give-away.

Formalista, with its overtones of subversion, is an appropriate term for Robin. She uses the sonnet to satiric purpose throughout this, her first collection, on subjects of love. politics, and “The Lady Poet’s Auxiliary.” Okay, that last one is not a sonnet, but with its rhymed couplets and triplets, it is very formal.

Meanwhile have you used your mind today?
We caught and candied it so it would stay:
Remember, you’re a girl. So write that way.

Stil the heart of This Pagan Heaven is a series of poems about New Orleans, the pagan heaven of the title, during and after Katrina. Robin is a fierce poet, she looks right at things, especially in the ten-page, nine-part jazzy free verse poem called “Bodies”

3.

yellow plastic butterfly barrettes
floating in dirty brown water
their pigtails dangling below
growing into the scalp
of a girl floating face down
at the corner of Piety and St. ______

“this is my south”

where is this baby’s mama?
where is this baby’s Officer Friendly?
where is this baby’s National Guard?
where is this baby’s America?

And I have to quote section 9:

will the last President to leave New Orleans
please leave the lights on?

For all its fierceness, the collection also contains tender poems of love, like “Dreaming of your Hair” and “Kissing in the Carwash” and tributes to nature, like “The Pelican Sonnet” and “Red Moon,” a poem about watching an eclipse of the moon.

My favorite love poem is in rhymed couplets, “Moving the Rose,” which has as its subject not only Robin’s long-term commitment to her partner but also their removal to Atlanta, an inland place where they have to learn how to live.

Roses do not do well close to house,
our Georgia guide to gardening discloses:

. . .

We have to move the new, still-healthy rose
before it enters some corrupted phase.
You dig around the base, I hold its tendrils
stretched overhead, two green canes thin as pencils.
Teamwork, mujer. Roots settle in new loam.
Together we bear the living away from home.

Turning birds into words

I’m holding in my hand a small chapbook by James Brush called a gnarled oak. This chapbook is a very limited edition. James published a few copies himself to give as gifts and I snagged a copy by the time-honored ploy of asking for one.

It’s a classy looking little book, just plain white paper but with some of the sharpest black and white photos I’ve seen. They’re almost pellucid in their use of light — and the same adjective could be used to describe the micropoems in this chapbook.

These poems are from James’s micropoetry blog a gnarled oak, “where birds turn into words.” I love that subtitle. The poems are cross-posted at identi.ca, where I “met” James.

a gnarled oak includes four seasons of poems that James wrote as a daily meditation on what he observed walking neighborhood trails in and around Austin. James says:

My favorite neighborhood trail follows a north-running stream down to a pond. There are ducks in winter, herons in summer, and songbirds year-round. Besides birds, I’ve watched snakes, deer, rabbits, turtles, and butterflies going about their business. There’s also a Red-shouldered Hawk who likes to pose but doesn’t want his picture taken.

In January, I started doing weekly counts to see what birds we have and when they’re around. As of now, I’ve recorded almost sixty species. In addition to birding, I wrote haiku and haiku-like poems to add substance to my observations and also as a way of focusing and paying closer — deeper — attention to the wild lives going on all around.

The result is a gift to us all, because — though the chapbook a gnarled oak is a very limited edition — the micropoetry blog a gnarled oak is there for us all to read.

Hard to excerpt micropoems, so I’ll just give you the full text of one of my favorites and hope I have James’s blessing:

Goldfinches and sparrows
hold still as statues;
A falcon has stopped time.

James also blogs and posts longer poems at Coyote Mercury. He has self-published his novel, A Place Without a Postcard He writes about the decision to self-publish here.