Sherry Chandler

Friday, March 4 — University of Kentucky — A reading by Davis McCombs, Wendell Berry, and Barbara Kingsolver will be held in Memorial Hall on UK’s campus Friday at 7:30 p.m. The reading, which is free and open to the public, is part of a two-day symposium titled “Growing Kentucky.” The event is the latest in a series of symposiums that each year examine such subjects as food and arts, land use, food marketing, and environmental journalism. The symposium honors the life and work of Joy Bale Boone, Kentucky’s poet laureate from 1997-99, who knew well the state’s rural culture.

This today from Lexington Art League

The Lexington Art League has lost one of its most dedicated, colorful, creative and genuinely special members with the death last week of Steve May. Steve was an award-winning photographer and teacher, an art connoisseur, a caring mentor, a dedicated volunteer, and true friend of many, many who had the pleasure of his company. A memorial service has been scheduled for this coming Friday, March 4, at 6:30 at Loudoun House. Steve and his family are in our thoughts and prayers.

If you have a pretty good broadband connection, you might enjoy watching Strandbeest in action. If not, just go look at the photos of these strange plastic creatures that come to life in the wind on the beach.

Here is the squib from the site:

Since about ten years Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventually he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.

The link is from Donna Marder.

APRIL SELECTIONS FOR BOOKCLUB@KET
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April is National Poetry Month, and BOOKCLUB@KET is celebrating with a one-hour poetry special featuring books by five Kentucky poets:

T. Crunk’s Living in the Resurrection
Nikky Finney’s The World is Round
Jane Mayhall’s Sleeping Late on Judgment Day
Davis McCombs’ Ultima Thule
Frank X Walker’s Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York

This is how the pros do it:

Ruth Bavetta, an honorary Kentucky poet by virtue of her relationship to Gin Petty and me, is the person who introduced me to this idea of White Out poetry. She’s been working on a booklength White Out project, Secrets, and has agreed to let me post one page of it here. Secrets was created as an exercise in a workshop with Sarah Maclay. Ruth tells me that Sarah got the idea from Mary Reufle.

Ruth has the advantage, perhaps, of being a visual artist as well as a poet. She worked with a picture book – a yoga instruction manual – that she picked up someplace like the Good Will. Not only did she white out words – and the lower case is appropriate because, in such a big project, Ruth soon abandoned quick-thickening Liquid Paper for white acrylic paint – but she also blacked out the human figures to make silhouettes and then added bits of color.

When I asked her about the project, Ruth observed:

Some of the people in my group just used the book as a source for the words and order, which they then extracted to form a poem on a clean sheet of paper. Certainly shows how my thinking tends to veer off in odd directions.

Vive l’oddity! Although I like the simplicity of what I achieved with simple text on paper, one of the things I liked most about the exercise was the way it moved away from the linearity of most poetry. Ruth has taken this a step further.

My WaMo colleagues are working with books this weekend. Exciting to think what they may produce.

I’ve chosen “Triangle” to post here because it is very simple and will not overtax your monitor. I’ve put all my talking beforehand so as not to distract you from the thing itself. Click the image to see it full-sized.

As a passive participant in the world’s longest do-it-yourself roofing project, I was amused, in my recent reading, to come across two poems that made me wonder whether the male perspective might be a little different.

From Wendell Berry’s Farming: A Handbook (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970)

…we bent five days
in the sun, tearing free the old roof, nailing on
the new, letting the sun touch for once
in fifty years the dusky rafters,and then
securing the house again in its shelter and shade.
Thus like a little ledge a piece of my history
has come between me and the sky.
      “The New Roof”

From David Rogers’s The Secret Knowledge of Water (Wavelength/Albireo Press, 2003)

… I stand listening in the attic,
a now useless coffee can

in my hand, and feel just
a little sad and lost.
No leaks, but I am cut off
from some process

that has always taken things
where they need
to be. ..
        “New roof, first rain”

Now, it’s true that two instances do not make a data set but it is equally true that I’ve never seen anything lyrical about a leaky roof. Mostly I view a sound roof as an instrument for the joyful music of rain. The drip of a leak is a discord.

On the other hand, this difference may be one of age. I would estimate that both Wendell Berry and David Rogers were thirty-something when they wrote these poems. As I develop arthritic creaks and pops in my own framework whenever a storm front comes through (especially a cold front), I tend to consider a solid roof and a reliable furnace as valuable as my 403b.

OR – it’s possible that I need to take a little walk around the circle and view this whole roofing thing from another perspective. Two excellent poems here. I recommend that you find them and read them in their entirety.

I’m working with a collaborative group called WaMo. We’ve spent the last several months looking for innovative (fun) ways to combine poetry and visual art.

The visual poem to the left is the result of one exercise we did that I’ve been calling White Out Poetry. The base document was a print-out of a book review from Powell’s. The review, from The Atlantic Monthly, was written by Peter Beinart about Giles Kepel’s The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West.

This exercise was suggested to us by Ruth Bavetta. It’s adapted from an exercise she was doing in a workshop with Sarah Maclay.

I thought the result was rather interesting, and the group is going on retreat today to practice more mutilating of text, so I post “Used, New, and Out of Print” here as my Friday graphic.

I like the way the exercise forced me away from linear sense (in a very, very linear base document), the way the words cluster and can be read vertically and horizontally. I also like the texture caused by the White Out (in my case Liquid Paper) as it thickened and became more and more aggravating to work with and the pattern the whole thing makes on the page. I could never get a result like this if I set out to make a random pattern with my own words. I even like the bleed-through from the other side of the page – it’s just cheap copy paper. In short, I’m totally pleased with myself.

This whole exercise was done in an hour so there was little time to think – part of its value. You can see that I had a few second thoughts and wrote words back in but by and large I stuck with what my brush did and if my hand wiped out a phrase my left brain had meant to keep, I let that stand.

Click the image to see the full-sized piece.

WaMo stands for Women Artists Group and Mosaic poets. Our exhibit goes up on March 21 at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky, and we have an opening reading/performance on March 23 at 7:30. Mark you calendars.

Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow’s share?
…
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
…

–William Blake, from Songs of Innocence

For Judy, who looked into a deep, dark hole today.

from Georgia Green Stamper’s column “Georgia: On My Mind,” Owenton News-Herald, February 23, 2005:

February in Kentucky is a tease. It winks, and silly me – I always fall for its unreliable, but seductive promises. Like Charlie Brown, who steps up to kick the proverbial football year after year, even though he knows Lucy will snatch it away, I rush out each year in February shouting, “it’s almost spring.”

And every year, February toys with me. It warms my back as I search for the tender evidence of new grass. It whispers sweet possibilities in my ear; how about a new flowerbed over there, maybe an arbor here – or roses? Why not give roses another chance this spring? It even fills my head with highfalutin theological notions about the annual renaissance of nature. But inevitably, February pulls a sucker punch, and laughs, “not quite yet, my friend.”