Sherry Chandler

Yesterday’s news

Sometimes when I am emotionally drained or intellectually exhausted from tedious work, I’ll pick up a random copy from my stack of old New Yorkers, leaf through them back to front, reading the cartoons and the poems and sometimes a few pages of an article that catches my eye. Sometimes the whole article.

These back issues are supplied me by a kindly friend. I have tried subscribing to The New Yorker but I feel too guilty when the issues pile up unread. All that great writing, going to waste. I have the same problem with Poetry. I guess I’m just not a magazine reader.

But there’s something soothing about reading yesterday’s news. It’s gone and it no longer has to cost us any anxiety (well, most of the time). Sometimes it’s even silly.

Like for example, this piece by Adam Gopnik in the issue for August 28, 2006, Read It and Weep. Do you remember when the White House used to issue George W. Bush’s reading lists to convince us that he was, in fact, a man of gravitas and not just wasting his summers fishing and skiving off? Sort of like all that brush cutting on his beloved ranch and trying to look Reaganesque. I don’t think he cut much brush this last summer.

Anyway, the reading lists were the silly part. The article was actually quite serious and engaging. It discusses Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which showed up on Bush’s reading list in the summer of 2006, and what Mr. Bush might have learned from it.

I read it just before going to sleep last night. Said Gopnik:

Camus, the President should be reminded, did not come by this wisdom cheaply or at a distance; he came by it from the center of modern history. As “Camus at Combat,” a new collection of his editorials—he was a working journalist—makes plain, the experience, first, of the Nazi occupation of France, and then of the struggle of Algerian independence against France led him to conclude that the “primitive” impulse to kill and torture shared a taproot with the habit of abstraction, of thinking of other people as a class of entities. Camus was no pacifist, but he deplored the logic of thinking in categories. “We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology,” he wrote. Terror makes fear, and fear stops thinking. The way out of Meursaultism [central character in The Stranger] is to think about particular people, proximate causes, and obtainable objectives—not an easy thing to do in any circumstance and nearly impossible in the face of those ideologies, left and right, for which, Camus writes, “fear is a method.”

And upon awakening this morning, I encountered this poem in my reading:

For the Unknown Enemy

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.

— William Stafford, The Way It Is. New & Selected Poems (Greywolf, 1999)

When stuff comes together like this, I think I should maybe pay close attention.

George W. Bush is no longer in the White House, but there are still those who want to retain control and power over us through our fear of the other, that abstract enemy, that ideological apostate.

This has been my constant drumbeat here on this blog: if you let them make you afraid, you let them control you.

__________

Unfortunately, our government is still sending us the message that, if your crime is egregious enough and your power great enough, you never have to be held accountable.

Couch cat, wilderness cat

Photo by T R Williams

Our City is Guarded by Automatic Rockets

3.
There is a place behind our hill so real
it makes me turn my head, no matter. There
in the last thicket likes the cornered cat
saved by its claws, now ready to spend
all there is left of the wilderness, embracing
its blood. And that is the way that I will spit
life, at the end of any trail where I smell any hunter,
because I think our story should not end—
or go on in the dark with nobody listening.

— William Stafford, from The Way It Is. New & Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1999).

This is a poem in three numbered sections. I’ve only given you the last section. That’s not fair. Go and find the poem and read it.

You’ll also find an interpretive essay/memoir piece about Stafford by Jonathan Holder, “William Stafford: Genius in Camouflage,” here at Valparaiso Review. Holder says:

Like a fox, like a wildcat, Stafford lived his life in camouflage. He camouflaged his true nature.

. . .

There is another side of Stafford, though, that dispenses with camouflage. It is not affable. It is fierce. We glimpse this side, at the end of “Our City Is Guarded by Automatic Rockets . . .”

Some more thoughts on self-centered poetry

I’ve been reading again this morning in Eleanor Cook’s A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens (Princeton, 2007). Although most of this volume is taken up by a poem-by-poem exegesis, Cook has included a 30-page appendix called “How to Read Poetry, Including Stevens” that I, as a practicing poet, find most absorbing.

This morning I re-read the section “Logic: Line of Thought,” which begins

Here is a sentence from Wordsworth that will surprise many readers: “The logical faculty has infinitely more to do with Poetry than the Young and the inexperienced, whether writer or critic, ever dreams of.”

And, a page or two further on, Cook says:

All too often, we separate the process of thinking and feeling, but there is one great hazard in doing so. . . . Our terms for the way that emotions work can be reduced to such notions as expression and suppression, as if these were the only alternatives or indeed were simple matters. Worse, “expression,” any expression, becomes a good in itself in the ignorant anti-Puritanism of pop psychology. What happens, Eliot asked, when our feelings become separated from our thinking, and both from our senses, so that they function in different compartments? What happens to our capacity to feel? To use our senses? To think?

We live in a time of debased emotion. Probably every time has had its fair share, but ours is a time when debased emotion has become, through the magic of television, our prime source of entertainment. Every time a poor victim (and usually it is some one financially and socially poor) of fire, flood, or violent crime is featured sobbing and screaming on the evening news, we feed on their raw emotion like so many vampires. Or Romans watching blood sport. This is the worst kind of exploitation. It exposes venality in both watcher and weeper. It plays on our fears on one another. And it lays us open to be exploited in turn by those who want our money, our labor, and our votes.

Writers, poets, are not immune from this, especially not since memoir of the most sordid kind is what sells. (Lays us open to scams, doesn’t it?) And poetry as therapy is a hot thing. I have sat around tables where the content of the writing led me to wonder whether I could, in fact, be a poet because I have not been sufficiently abused nor have I seen any atrocities with my own eyes.

So yes, I do see what Eleanor Wilner is talking about. And I have written my fair share of outraged poems about the Iraq War because I don’t have to imagine what is happening there. I have seen it in vivid photographs.

All of this is not to say that poetry-of-witness is q.e.d. bad poetry. Or that those who have been abused or who have seen abuse should keep quiet about it. That’s called silencing and I’m agin it.

It all comes back to thinking. We can feel and think at the same time.

Once upon a time, who knows where, I read that women cry more easily than men. It’s the way we’re built. This stuck in my mind because I do cry easily. I consider it a curse. Because the minute my tears begin to flow, people start treating me like a child, one who is no longer capable of reason, one whose critical faculties have been turned off. The conversation is over. And I want to scream to the heavens, “God damn it, I can cry and think at the same time!”

I’ve been know to cry at an episode of “Laverne and Shirley,” and I can assure you that I don’t consider that great art.

I’ve also been reading this morning in Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler. These are poems of witness. These are poems that grab me by the heart and twist. They are exceedingly valuable poems because they teach us not to forget New Orleans and what happened there during and after Hurricane Katrina. But these emotional poems are also thoughtful poems. One obvious indication is that some of them are in form and one can’t write successfully in form without a certain distance, without thought.

They are hard-headed poems, without a whiff of sentimentality.

We would say, in my circles, these are poems that have earned their emotion.

According to Cook, Wallace Stevens recommended to a young writer friend not only that he read but also that he practice thinking “an hour or two a day, even if one is at first ’staggered by the confusion and aimlessness’ of one’s thoughts.”

Of course, William Stafford might be inclined to say that very aimlessness is a resource to be mined.

More than one way to skin a cat.

There is a certain silliness in the picture of a young poet sitting down to think for two hours.

It’s sort of dogmatic.

I don’t like dogmatism.

Which is the main reason the anti-I folk get up my nose. They seem so dogmatic about it.

The quality of mercy

Recently some one dear to me asked me to read William P. Young’s The Shack. It is not the kind of book I would be drawn to when following my own nose and if I had to talk about it as a novel, I’d have to say that it is pretty bad.

The man can’t write a tight sentence and he pulls his characters around by the leash of his message. Plus, he performs infuriating tricks like having his main (human) character exclaim “No kidding, Sherlock!” To which I have to say, if you have to bowdlerize your conversation with God you’ve lost me. And anyway, why not find an clichéd exclamation that you don’t have to bowdlerize. Just “no kidding” would have done.

In short, the whole thing reads like a Sunday School lesson, a question and answer session with the Christian God in his tripartite personnae: a black mammy, a vaguely Jewish handyman, and an Oriental will-o-the-wisp. [Added: I want to add here that these forms of God, being part of Mack the protagonist's own dream vision, are intended to be the forms of God that Mack needs to see at that time and not as what you might call a complete definition of God.]

And the questions lobbed have about as much substance as those you might hear at a televised political debate. Which is to say they seem picked to elicit answers that don’t get us too far from God’s talking points. I kept thinking I could ask God harder questions.

But I have a certain prejudice in this. I just really never have been able to tolerate being preached at. The Shack compares itself to Pilgrim’s Progress and I’ve always found that work to be a real yawner, too. So I’m not this novel’s audience.

Okay, so those are the negatives.

On the other side of the equation, as a book of popular theology, I have to say that The Shack provides a much-needed balance to the sheep-from-goats revenge-theology popularized by the Left Behind series. Full disclosure: I have never read a Left-Behind novel and, unless shackled in a stress position and forced to do so, I never will.

In The Shack, God is love.

The God of The Shack values mercy over justice.The Jesus of The Shack is more likely to cry with you over your losses than to melt the flesh off offending sinners. When asked about judgement, an avatar of God asks our avatar of humanity which of his children he will send to hell.

Forgiveness is an act that benefits the forgiver, in that it rids her of a burden of hatred and judgement. Finding God in your life is not the same as being religious, and in fact, religiously following a set of rules might hamper your spirituality.

One of the most delightful exchanges in the novel (and there are some delightful passages in spite of what I said earlier) occurs when Jesus proclaims that he never asked anyone to become a Christian or even to ask What Would Jesus Do? He did not, he said, intend to become a role model.

There has been a confluence in my reading toward reconciliation lately.

On Friday, I found this passage in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry:

Trigant Burrow cautions us, in his essay The Social Neurosis, not to “fall a prey to the common illusion that a disorder in social behavior is a disorder outside of man’s own organism.” The typical fallcy of normality, he believes, explains conflict “not as a condition of mind common to both contending parties, but as the ‘wrongness’ of the other fellow, the other group or the other nation.”

And over the weekend, this from William Stafford, in Writing the Autralian Crawl, when asked in an interview whether the four years he spent in an internment camp as a conscientious objector during World War II had defined him or “steeled” him as a man of stong convictions:

I suppose four years in a concentration camp, wherever it is, would make a difference, but the reason I reacted to “steeled” is that if we’re not careful—and that’s why I place my feet with care in this world—if we’re not careful, any extreme experience like being in a camp for four years, you know, drafted into it and held there, will so tilt us that we’re not ready. It seems to me the intellectual life and the life of the arts depends on a kind of readiness, and so many of my firends who were in this experience were in fact locked into an attitude toward society that is very disquieting to me. I mean you can become addicted to losing fights with any society you’re in, and I just feel nervous about it. I’m probably betraying more of that past in the way I respond to this, than in what I say about it. I feel nervous about overreacting to any experience.

. . . no matter what’s happening in society for me . . . I still learn from the people around me, as a writer. I don’t feel full of insights and ready to proclaim for sure, discoveries, but even under the extreme circumstance of being put into camp for four years, I found it interesting to talk to the people who were holding us there, you know, the bosses, and so I would have this feeling today that it’s not a cops and robbers problem in society, it’s a kind of mutual problem in society. . . . I don’t locate the trouble in the bad guys so much as I do in some kind of phase that maybe we’re all going through.

I’m not exactly sure where all this confluence will lead me. Someplace better than the last eight years, I hope. Certainly to a renewed effort to stop seeing the world as armed camps of good and evil.

__________
Added: Border fences are not a good thing.

Running across the log pond

From William Stafford’s Writing the Australian Crawl (Univ Mich, 1979):

Well, most of the poems I write I don’t send out at all. And of those I send out, maybe of tenth of them finally get published. So that means an awful lot of them get rejected, even ones I think are all right. I look at it this way: you can run across a log pond—you know, where they’re floating the logs at a sawmill—by stepping on one log at a time. And if you don’t stay on a given log very long, you can go hopping clear across the pond on these logs. But if you stop in one, it’ll sink. Sometimes I feel a writer should be like this—that you need your bad poems. You shouldn’t inhibit yourself. You need to have your dreams, you need to have your poems. If you begin to keep from dreaming or from trying to write your poems, you could be in trouble. You have to learn how to say “Welcome . . . welcome.” Welcome, dreams. Welcome Poems. And then if somebody says “I don’t like that dream,” you can say “Well, it’s my life. I had to dream it.” And if somebody else says “I don’t like that poem,” you can say, “Well, it’s my life. That poem was in the way, so I wrote it.”

Sunshine (not turpentine) and dandelion wine

I was doin’ pretty fine around my own particular Old Kentucky Home late yesterday but all I shot was these photos.

If I could save time in a wineglass...

Sunshine, paper clips, and rainbows

A book of verses underneath a bough / a loaf of bread etc.

Only in this case, it happens to be William Stafford’s Writing the Australian Crawl, which does have some verses in it. (BTW, Robert Peake on Writing the Australian Crawl)

And the wine is Barefoot merlot, which I recommend as a good cheap red. (I sort of suspect that dandelions would make a whitish wine.)

You may note that everything outside the window looks pretty brown and shabby. Some of it is needle fall from the pine, but we haven’t mowed the grass for weeks. No rain, no growth.

William Stafford

From “Making a Poem / Starting a Car on Ice” in Writing the Australian Crawl, (Univ Michigan Press, 1979):

There are worthy human experiences that become possible only if you accept successive, limited human commitments, and one such is the sustained life of writing. It is far from an austere, competitive, fastidious engagement with the best, as outsiders might think. A writer must write bad poems, as they come, among the better, and not scorn the “bad” ones. Finicky ways can dry up the sources. And a poem may be indictable for weaknesses, without thereby yielding itself to “correction”: there may be flaws necessary for even the faltering accomplishment embodied in the poem. To avoid the flaws might lead to one big flaw — the denying of leads that carry the writer on. [p. 67]