Sherry Chandler

The Sideshow

The Sideshow collaboration is being hung today at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning here in Lexington. I have written my poem on glass, as have the other Mosaic poets, and we’ve faced the cosmic question: to mat or not to mat? The programs are designed, printed, folded. The ads are in the paper. We are all very tired.

Although Sideshow is its official name, for those of us involved it has been more of a WAMO, the acronym one clever member invented for the merging of our two groups, WAG and Mosaic. We have been working on this project since late last summer, meeting, retreating, potlucking, sharing work, writing grants. Grants that don’t get funded take as much time and energy as grants that do, but I rather suspect a funded grant adds energy to a project. I know for sure rejection truncates. Questions are reduced from “what can we do?” to “what can we afford?” Fortunately we found some creative answers.

Yesterday, driving home from my Sunday visit with Mom, I switched on All Things Considered. Ruth Levy Guyer was Noting the Synchronicity of Life. Was this in itself synchronicity? I am still more inclined to think it is coincidence. But that is probably because my brain chemistry is so pedestrian. Odd brain chemistry was Guyer’s explanation for synesthesia, the conflation of two senses that allowed Virginia Woolf to see words in color.

Ah, am I rescued then? Is this why some people can see poems while other people hear them? Perhaps after all it’s not a failure of imagination or intelligence that has kept me from being able to conceive of poetry as a visual art through all these months of trying. My brain is wired like Camille Paglia’s. I just need to accept that, struggle over.

Somehow I doubt it.

The opening is Wednesday night at 7:30, on the eve of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, a major happening in the area that I’ve been remiss in ignoring. But more on that later.

Sideshow opens Wednesday night as part of the Writers Block Party. We’ll see the culmination of all our work. Some of it really is brilliant. All of it is fun. We’ll have a clown and balloons and animal crackers and we’ll see our poems on the wall with the wonderful paintings and we’ll read our poems and we’ll put weariness behind us and celebrate.

If you’re in the area, come celebrate with us.

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Sideshow

SIDESHOW

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