Sherry Chandler

On Thursday, I received a postcard announcement that the deadline for entries has been extended to February 11, so there’s still time to get your poems in. I’ve lost my guidelines so I can’t remember the entry fee right now — it’s cheap and you get a subscription to The entry fee is $5 for one poem. Poems no longer than 30 lines. No identifying info on poem — send a cover sheet. Sponsor for the contest is the Heartland Review. Prizes are $175, $100, $75. The judge is Davis McCombs, winner of the 1999 Yale Younger for his collection Ultime Thule. For more info, you can e-mail Mick Kennedy or call 270-769-2371, extension 4202.

Mail entries to:

2005 Joy Bale Boone Prize
c/o Mick Kennedy
Elizabethtown Community & Technical College
600 College Street Road
Elizabethtown, KY 42701

Here is last year’s winner by Mary E. O’Dell, aka Ernie:

Considering Blindness

What matters in that
last tick of light
will be only that - the light.
Not inked numbers on a ledger
nor a silver spoon
nor seven pounds of volumes
on a subject indexed to its dearest jot
not even passion with its dense aromas
its clung flesh.
Final spark from the final star
will fall into a face upturned
the wide eyes pleading.
A lightning bolt will do
or a firefly,
an ember that could catch the house
and keep it burning.

I hold in my hand the slender, handsome volume that is the latest issue of Wavelength, Fall and Winter 2004. Wavelength was a well-kept secret, at least to me. I only discovered it last year when I attended the inaugural Kentucky Writers Conference down at Western and met its editor and publisher David Rogers. David is a soft-spoken man and a delighful poet who puts this little magazine together as a labor of love. You can subscribe to Wavelength: Poems in Prose and Verse ($15/3 issues) or submit by writing to:

David Rogers
1573 Fisher Ridge Road
Horse Cave, KY 42749

The current Wavelength features such notable Kentucky poets as Jane Stuart, Dory Hudspeth and, ahem, Sherry Chandler. You’ll find my entry, “Walking to Ramsey’s” on my poetry page. It is an evocation of spring.

Photo by Alan D. Wilson, www.naturespicsonline.com

I saw a Great Blue Heron yesterday, when I was driving to and driving from work. (Almost made the drive worth it.) This morning of February 5th, 2005, the sky is clear and starlit. We have the kind of hoarfrost that always makes me think of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (It’s that word “rime.” Coleridge was pretty silly sometimes.) The Big Dipper hangs directly over my head wherever I stand. The hoot owls should be mating right about now, and since spring does not subscribe to an ownership society, I live in hope that a few short weeks will see it shed its abundance on us all.

Addendum: Great blue herons are rare in Kentucky. The US Geological Survey puts them at less than one per 15-mile radius in both the Christmas Bird Count and the Breeding Bird Survey. For years, I have seen the occasional bird along Paris Pike, a 12-mile stretch that follows the old buffalo trace from Paris to Lexington, Kentucky. When the bulldozers destroyed the wet-weather pond where I usually saw them, I was afraid that would be it. But I’ve seen a few this year and last. So I suppose the millions of dollars in wetland replacement was efficacious. And, Georgia, we may have seen the same bird. A friend about a mile down the road from you has also seen a Northern Harrier, a rare raptor for Kentucky. Must be something about that old horse farm cum housing development that still attracts birds.