Turning Out the Vote (With Hard Cash)

The Sheriff's Department has launched an investigation into vote-buying allegations at an early voting site. On the first day of early voting, witnesses at the Civic Coliseum complained that voters who had been hauled to the polling place had been overheard complaining that $5 was too little recompense for the trouble of wading through this year's long ballot. Election Commissioner Steve Roth confirmed that he has asked Sheriff Tim Hutchison to look into these allegations, which, if proven, could involve Class C felonies. Election workers also complained that the driver who was transporting these voters had violated regulations by attempting to enter the polling place.

Dogwood Republic

Does the Dogwood Arts Festival supersede the First Amendment? That's apparently what some fest officials thought last week when they tried to curtail County Commission candidate Greg Mackay's campaign activities on Market Square. The 2nd District Democratic contender says his meet 'n' greet handshaking of Arts Fest patrons raised the ire of two women identifying themselves as Dogwood representatives. They told him he would have to keep his activities confined to the area around the storefront that's serving as Democratic headquarters. "All I was doing was shaking hands on a public street," he says. "I can do that on Gay Street. I can do that on Kingston Pike. It doesn't have anything to do with the Dogwood Arts Festival." Dogwood Arts head honcho Bob Neel says city codes give the festival control over the square, and all activities have to be approved. He says campaigning is a form of soliciting and therefore subject to the rules. Mackay, a former Election Commissioner who knows his way around the U.S. Constitution, doesn't buy it. "The second lady told me, 'If we let you do it, we'll have to let everybody do it,'" he says. "And I said, 'And? This is America.'"

Bon Voyage, Choucoune

Last week's high tide apparently seemed like fine sailing weather for one mariner—or, at least, his ship. The S.S. Choucoune, a single-masted vessel with a small cabin, had been beached at Sequoyah Park just downstream from Looney Island since last fall; for the six months that its keel was sunk deep in the Sequoyah mud, the ship—its home port of Key West proclaimed on the stern—had become a tourist attraction and had spawned a rich bounty of gossip and speculation, especially concerning what the Tennessee codes had to say about beachcombers' rights and when shipwrecks become public domain. However, we noticed with some melancholy this past weekend that the Choucoune had departed from our shores. At this point we don't know whether it was reclaimed by its mysterious captain or the not-quite-tamed Tennessee River.

Cool Beans

Poet, journalist, and sometime Knoxvillian Chuck Dean will be remembered longer than most of us will. A year ago this week, Dean died suddenly at the age of 32, but left behind a wealth of music articles in Rolling Stone and several other major magazines. But at night, in his spare time, he wrote poetry.

Dean's verse so impressed New York psychiatrist Murray Schane that the doctor spent months collecting it.

A few weeks ago, Dr. Schane printed copies of Dean's collected works in a ring-bound volume of 300 pages. Chuck Dean, American: Collected Poems, 1988-1997 isn't for the squeamish, scores of poems with violent, sexual, and religious imagery, many of them conjuring images of his childhood in rural South Carolina. One opens with a characteristically provocative line, "I dreamed I got killed in a chickenfight." Dean's picture appears on the cover, looking as curious and apprehensive as we remember him. Dr. Schane has been encouraged in his efforts to get Dean's poetry and journalism national recognition.

The last poem in the collection, "Untitled (I Told You Once I Was Tired)" is one of the longest. It's dated April 21, 1997, the day before his death in midtown Manhattan.