Sherry Chandler

Hunters

From Colin G. Calloway’s The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007):

White hunters did not behave like Indian hunters. In Europe, hunting was the sport of gentlemen; hunting for subsistence was regarded as poaching. In North America, the gentry classes worried that it might indicate a reversion to an earlier, more “savage” state of development. Almost all backcountry settlers hunted, supplementing their crops and livestock, and they learned techniques from the Indians. In their dress, appearance, ways of living, ways of fighting, and the embryonic communities they erected, they displayed so many similarities to Indians that they worried eastern colonial authorities and sometimes shocked eastern travelers. For backcountry settlers as for Shawnee Indians, prowess as a hunter became an essential marker of manhood. But backcountry settlers rarely adopted or observed the morality of Indian hunting values. They paid scant regard to rituals and behavior the Indians said were vital if the game were to continue—game was so bountiful it was inconceivable that its supply might be finite. For Euro-American hunters killing game provided food and hides and demonstrated their mastery over the animal kingdom. They felt no kinship with animals as persons of other-than-human-form and saw no need to display respect, offer prayers, or give thanks to the animals they killed, let alone ask their forgiveness. [pp. 49-50]

As a result of all this hunting, the buffalo were wiped out of Kentucky before the end of the 18th century. The great herds that tramped the traces (essentially giant cow paths) that made the backwoods highways gave way to domesticated cattle. Today I find Kentuckians who are surprised to learn that buffalo ever inhabited Kentucky. They think of them as plains animals, I guess because of Hollywood images of great stampeding buffalo herds.

Fences and the European style of ownership changed the landscape and, as Calloway points out, changed also the meanings of the landscape.

Here is a selection from “Cottonwood” from Richard Taylor’s Girty (re-issued by Wind Publications, 2006):

I feel them before I hear them, hear them before I see them. Buffalo. Hundreds, maybe thousands of buffalo spilling over the rim of hills, thick as black bees when the locusts flower. I am filling my canteen at the spring when it happens. Ground under me begins to quake and tremble. I feel thunder in my ribs, a thumping as if my body were the stretched skin of a drumhead. Then the springwater begins to shimmy, just quivers in its pool, blurring the bottom out of focus. I hear something like the rush of wind through leaves before a cloudburst, a rumbling, troubled sound, but louder, tenser, charged with authority. It can’t be weather, for the sky is blank, cloudless.

Then off to the east I spot a puff of white dust on the horizon. It blossoms toward me, the low roar growing with the bloom which yellows as it nears. I can make out details now, the curly heads packed close to form an unbroken wall of hooves and humps, horns lowered and glossed among the black bodies, thick winter coats not shed yet. The size of them. Some bulls must be over 6 feet from hoof to hump, some the length of two ponies.

I am in the tree now, a cottonwood, 20 feet above them. I cannot see the ground for buffalo, for tons of hides and huffing steaks. . . . No grunts or whines come from them. Rather, the only sound is their weighted hooves, so many falling stones, and these crowd my ears to popping. Each is intent on motion, on keeping his place in the herd. A few feet away, the leaders swerve slightly, weave around my tree, and join again, still running, never once breaking stride. This is done routinely with that strange grace shared by bulky things and dancers.

Now I think of my horse, the stray I haltered a few weeks ago outside one of the river settlements, a sorrel mare socked white to her shanks. But too late. Before drinking at the spring, I tethered her to a sapling a dozen or so yards away. She is absolutely frantic. Her eyes are bugged out of her head and she is bleeding at the mouth where the bit has cut her. As the herd bears down on her, she whinnies her death song, a keening that cuts me like a woman’s shriek, like the first screeches of an animal in a trap. Shrill and terrifyingly human. It’s the last sound she makes as tree and horse drown in a black torrent.

. . .

Twenty minutes it takes them to pass.

Simon Girty was Daniel Boone’s evil twin in the mythology of the Ohio Valley frontier. Richard Taylor fictionalized the story of his life in prose and poetry. Girty is a brilliant hybrid from a man who has been immersed in Kentucky’s history most of his life. I strongly recommend it to you.

Trailers

I picked up this book trailer for Dennis Cass’s Head Case over at Diane Lockward’s Blogalicious. It won a Moby Award.

Diane, who has a new book out from Wind, Temptation by Water is interested in promotion and has used this video as an occasion to discuss ways to self-promote.

She has done her own trailer for her second Wind Publications book What Feeds Us. It’s a pretty nice piece of work:

Two ways it can be done.

Read Diane’s blog. She provides a lot of great resources for the struggling poet.

A little help from my friends

Well, a lot, really.

Let me recommend to you the latest Owenton News-Herald column by my friend Georgia Green Stamper, in which she said I hung the moon. (Also here.) Or at least my third of the moon.

My lifelong friend Sherry Chandler has taken such an ambitious approach to writing her family’s history that I’m fearful I may insult her by even calling it that. But since it was inspired by listening to her 90 year old mother talk about her memories of life and kin, I include it here.

A widely published poet and literary critic, Sherry has written an odyssey in verse [working title “Daughters of Rebecca”] that I believe will take its rightful place on the shelf of Kentucky letters.

Probably I don’t need to point out to you that Georgia is not an objective critic of my work. She is, however, a constant goad, al ife coach, who is constantly pushing me to ever higher achievement and without her nudging and sometimes shoving, I would probably not have written this collection of poems.

The book isn’t published yet, but you can find some of the poems in Kestrel for fall 2009 and spring 2010, in the Lousville Review for spring 2010, in the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and at the Other Voices International site, as well as in my two chapbooks (see sidebar).

Meanwhile, let me tell you that Georgia herself is no slouch. In addition to her biweekly column for the News-Herald, she is the author of a book of essays, You Can Go Anywhere (from the Crossroads of the World (Wind Publications, 2008). She is also a member of the Kentucky Humanities Council speaker’s roster and has become one of the most popular presenters of essay and personal memoir in the state.

First, you have to make oranges

I’ll be straight with you. Under ordinary circumstances I would probably not buy a book whose cover depicted a cow with a huge tongue hanging out of her mouth. But this book, called appropriately enough The Tongue (Wind 2004), has Tom C. Hunley‘s name on the cover, and I’ve been a fan of Tom’s since I first ran across one of his poems in Gumball Poetry back in spring of 2000. In fact, that poem, “How to Make Orange Juice,” is in this collection.

Here is what I said about “How to Make an Orange” back in 2000:

A very good Kentucky poet named James Baker Hall says it’s easy to tell when a piece of writing is a poem. It’s a poem if you want to hear the same words in the same order again. If you want to stop your friends and say “Listen to this!” then it’s a really good poem. “How to Make Orange Juice” is a poem I’d read to my friends. The language flows nicely off the tongue and it is original language.

So that was 10 years ago. I am about ten years more sophisticated a reader now and I think that what I said is not enough.

What I ask myself now is, why would I read this poem to my friends? And the answer is it’s not just the language, it’s the intelligence behind the language.

It’s a little quirky. It views the world from a viewpoint a little bit different.

How do you make orange juice?

It’s a trick question.

First you have to make the oranges.

Duh.

Because obviously you can’t “make” orange juice, you can only extract it.

Having made that little twist, that little jab at our flatfooted thinking, then the logical progression is

To do that, you have to become
an orange tree, which means moving
to Florida or Southern California.

Okay. That’s true. You can’t survive as an orange tree in Detroit.

But there’s another little twist, another side road taken:

If you go to San Diego, the beach
will beckon you, with its bikinis
and its waves, and you will feel the temptation

to take up surfing, which would get in the way
of becoming an orange tree. Stay focused
on your goals.

Okay, now I’m asking myself, where is this twisty path going to take me? Well, to a list of course:

. . . Visualize all things orange:
carrots bursting from the ground,
a field of poppies blossoming all
at once, like some unplanned party,

I love that one.

a haunted house peopled by jack-o-lanterns.
Eat only the orange M&M’s
in each packet. Make friends only

with redheads. Concentrate entirely
on orange juice,

Okay, we’re with the program now. But wait, there’s one more turn in this path

. . . which is not the same
as buying orange juice made from concentrate.

Ah, we’re back to the original question. How do you make orange juice? From concentrate.

But that’s so boring:

Stop looking for the easy way.

So it is with all the poetry in The Tongue: each one brings surprises, little twists and turns that make you laugh and sometimes that make you cry. And along the way, all manner of beautiful images, jazzy musical lines, and some playing with obscure forms.

As Philip Dacey says in the cover blurb,

Like a pop artist, Tom Hunley creates with bright colors and sharp lines. In the face of disaster, he responds with the kind of insouciance praised by Whitman and practiced by a Buster Keaton . . .

Tom’s other books include The Octopus, winner of the 2007 Holland Prize from Logan House Press and the delightfully named chapbook My LIfe as a Minor Character, which was co-winner of the Pecan Grove Press chapbook contest for 2003.. Tom is also the publisher of Steel Toe Books.

Where I’m from

In his inscription to my copy of his new poetry collection, Body and Blood (Wind 2010), Charlie Hughes wrote “I hope you enjoy these poems from where I’m from.”

It is an apt statement because, indeed, I did enjoy the poems and because these poems are from a particular place and time. Charlie Hughes is a poet grounded in the physical, the feel, sound, taste of tools and crops, creeks and rivers of rural Kentucky. Here you will find Fords and Farmalls, John Deeres and International Harvesters, Studebaker pickup trucks (my grandfather had one), log chains and wringer washers. You will also find baseballs and cane poles, sparrows and turkey buzzards, cows up to their bellies in pond water on hot summer days. You will also find poems about a farm boy’s mystical link with nature, like “The Stone”

At first the boy did not hear the stone speak.
It was not a large stone.
It was only the wind in the sycamores, the boy thought,
perhaps water babbling in the riffles of the stream.

So the boy lifts the stone out of the creek and puts it in his pocket, where he carries it all his life, for reasons he cannot quite fathom.

As the man grew gray the stone became lighter.
And still each day the gray man listened for the voice
he’d failed to hear that long-ago day by the stream.

The voice of the stone that the boy/man can never quite hear — that he can never stop listening for — echoes throughout these poems.

The collection is in four parts, and each section begins with a poem after George Ella Lyon’s famous “Where I’m From.” I love Charlie’s list poems, they are evocative without being romantic. Perhaps this is more true for me than for others, because Charlie and I had pretty much the same childhood. But I have a keen eye for sentimentality, and these poems, though heavy with sentiment, never fall over into the sentimental. They are also funny, ironic, satiric, and sad:

I’m from the muddy swirl of Cecil’s Creek,
the polluted currents of Salt River
where bare-assed boys swam beneath
dead hogs, flood-beached and bloated . . .
I’m from the aroma of new-mown hay,
tobacco hanging in the barn . . .

— from “Where I’m From”

Reading this passage always makes me think of Crum, Lee Maynard’s tale of boyhood in West Virginia and a novel I love. But Charlie is seldom gritty, more often lyric.

I’m from cold water and aching teeth, a rusty cup
hanging from the pump handle

— from “Where I’m From, II

or humorous:

I’m from brown tarpaper, four rooms
and a path at the end of Rob Road,
muddy ruts too deep
for the ’47 Hudson.

— from “Where I’m From, III”

I’m from Providence Road —
the house that overlooks
the cemetery—the hill that took our sleds
between the limestone slabs
and granite stones
of silent Presbyterians.

— from “Where I’m From, IV”

As Linda Parsons Marion points out in her blurb, Charlie is a man with an eye for the absurd. (See the cover photo.) His humor shows up in poems like “Love,” which compares that emotion to a skunk in the crawl space and “Women Talking,” one of my favorites:

Theirs are not the voices of men.
Their words do not swagger—
they lilt like autumn warmth,
devoid of consonants.

They do not scuff their words
in gravel.

Body and Blood travels a roughly chronological arc from boyhood to age. I was about to write that it also moves from the nostalgic to the elegiac, but “nostalgia” is too cheap a word and, in fact, the whole book is an elegy with comic interludes. To quote Linda Marion again:

This elegiac collection’s deepening range should surprise no one familiar with [Hughes's] deceptive shallows . . .

There is a passion among poets — writers — of my place and time to capture something precious that is disappearing with a dazing rapidity. I see it in Wendel Berry, in Maurice Manning and Davis McCombs. I see it in Jane Gentry. In Georgia Stamper. And in Charlie Hughes. The loss is most obvious in our missing mountains — and Charlie has his “Lament for Mountains.” But we also feel the loss of a certain kind of community, I think, a time before we could be connected with some one on the other side of the world and so, perforce, we had to love the people next door. Or maybe now we just feel the weight of our years, the loss of our elders that turns us into elders, maybe Charlie speaks for us in his poem “Melding”

Before the current of the Salt River
washes any memory of me away,
I want to say . . .

Eclectic Living Room

The Eclectic Living Room meets at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning one week before every Kentucky Great Writers reading to discuss and “celebrate” the work. The discussion is led by Leatha Kendrick, who is a wonderful appreciator of other people’s work and who, as a friend just said to me, reads like a writer. Most of those who attend the discussion are also writers. So, participants have an opportunity not only to explore the work that they will soon be hearing but also to hone their own writing skills. Each session ends with a writing prompt or exercise.

The Morris Book Shop is there to give participants a chance to look at and buy the books in question.

And sometimes, as last night, the group is privileged to have the publisher present to add his insights to both the writers and the publishing process.

At last night’s session we discussed the work of Normandi Ellis, Dorothy Sutton, and J. Stephen Rhodes, all three of whom have books out from Wind Publications and all three of whom will be reading next Tuesday, February 9, at the Carnegie Center as part of the Kentucky Great Writers Series (funded by LexArts). The featured readers begin at 7:30; the open mic begins at 6:30. Local folk, mark it on your calendar.

That address is 251 West Second Street, Lexington.

I consider all three of these fine writers personal friends and I have featured work by Steve, Dorothy, and Normandi here on the blog. I can attest that they are all great readers. It will be a fine evening.

I guess this reads a little bit like an infomercial, and I guess that’s all right. Who can you praise if you can’t praise your friends?

Cool light from a soul at the white heat

Luminescence is cool light, an excitation of atoms not caused by heat, a physiologic or chemical glow. It is a light that does not consume.

Such a cold light, such luminescence, may seem an odd thing to associate with Emily Dickinson, who asked “Dare you see a soul at the white heat?”

In The Luminescence of All Things Emily (Wind Publications, 2009), Elizabeth Oakes looks at Emily Dickinson’s life but she looks at it slant, mostly from the perspective of the supporting players: Emily’s sister Vinnie, her brother Austin who lived next door and supported the sisters after their father died. Austin’s lover Mabel (who edited Emily’s poems) and his wife Sue (for whom many of the poems were written). Tom Kelly and Maggie Maher, the hired help.

The Dickinson household was an odd mix of cold and heat. The distant parents, the two unmarried sisters, the sexually estranged Sue balanced over against the affair between Austin and Mabel, who sometimes trysted in the parlor of The Homestead, with, one has to assume, the collusion of Emily and Vinnie. The once-popular notion of Emily Dickinson living a cloistered sort of life vanishes with any kind of close reading of her poems. Oakes, by shining the light a little wider, illuminates just what white heat lurked “Beneath the Amherst Calm:”

Conventionalism,
Austin wrote to Mabel,
is for those not strong
enough to be laws
unto themselves.

Oakes is obviously steeped in the Dickinson papers and she knows her stuff. She also knows how to find the poetry in the stuff. She writes a plain free verse style of poetry, no pyrotechnics of technique, but her way with an image is masterful, from the first poem, which defines agoraphobia as a snow globe:

There’s a medical name for it now,
but a snow globe will do as well.

Tell us how you know so much
in your quiet world . . .

We shake and shake that snow
globe, and the snow just falls
faster.

to the antepenultimate, “Emily’s Room”

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. . . .

In between, nuggets of delight, as in the ending lines of “Mabel in the 1920′s: from a Photograph:”

Only the memory
of Austin’s hands holds
her waist in now.

Or these lines from “Standing before a Copy of Emily’s white Dress”

Sometimes words are enough. Sometimes
they rub against each other like a hired
man warming his hands before a fire or
the thighs of a woman gone plump.

There’s a quatrain I wish I’d written.

One of the most arresting poems in the collection is the portrait of “Emily’s Hands.” Her hands “meant to . . . scrub clothes on a washboard, to shuck / corn in a cold barn” send my mind to Melverina Peppercorn and the other tough farm women of the 19^the century. Of course, that was not the life Emily led, but still

. . . the pens they used in those
days must have looked
so small in Emily’s hands

How that stands our mental picture of Emily on its head.