Sherry Chandler » Poets, Philosophers, and Dogs
Poets, Philosophers, and Dogs
I’m heading over to Lexington today for the opening day of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. I hope to hear Ann Telnaes’s convocation speech and, since I am sometimes a performance poet, sit in on Beth Ann Fennelly’s session on Four Ways Poets Can Use Sound to Make Meaning and later, since I try to write blank verse, the panel discussion on The Contemporary Life of the Traditional Literary Forms with Fennelly, Patty Friedmann, Dana Levin, and Neela Vaswani. Three or four years ago, I heard Andrew Hudgins make the statement that one could master iambic pentameter in an afternoon. Well, here I am, still struggling…
At that same RopeWalk Winter Weekend where Hudgins laid down his challenge, I met Cathryn Essinger. She’ll be attending the conference, and I hope to find her and get her to sign my copy of her new book My Dog Does Not Read Plato (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2004). Cathy is one of my favorite “ordinary” poets – and what an oxymoron that is. I mean by it a poet I can consider a friend as well as a hero and a role-model. Cathy’s first book, A Desk in the Elephant House, won the Walt McDonald First Book Award from Texas Tech University. Her intelligence is quirky and delightful and her poetry is matter of fact and utterly wild. Look at these few lines from “Wild Card,” how quietly we are taken into the strange:
The local newspaper reports
a Houston housewife has found
a three foot long snake indigenous
to California in her electric toaster.I need to talk to this woman. I want
to know what kind of bread attracts
snakes, if she goes to church on Sundays
and if she believes in chance.
Follow the links to sample more of Cathy’s poems.
My thanks to everybody who came out last night. A marvelous surprise to read to a packed room on a drizzly night more like November than March. For those of you who missed last night, the show will hang through April 30 and we’ll read again at the April Gallery Hop on the 15th.
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