Sherry Chandler

The second issue of the rejuvenated Oxford American is out – the Southern Food Issue. In it, Carson McCullers celebrates “The Great Eaters of Georgia,” Andrew Hudgins writes an “Ode to Manna,” and on pages 99-100, Silas House tells us “how fried chicken saved my family.” “Everybody Loves the Colonel” is the story of Silas’s grandmother, Mae House, who kept their family together working in the original Sanders Café in Corbin:

So the day after Jasper [House] went to prison for his first two-year stretch, Mae walked to the mouth of the holler to board the bus that would take her the twelve miles into Corbin, where Sanders had set up business. It was December, and a war was on. I imagine her in a long wool coat and a dress with little violets printed on the fabric, clutching her purse the whole time as she studied the faces of the other passengers. That day she had carefully counted out her last ten pennies to board the bus.

Mae’s accomplishments are as heroic in their way as the Colonel’s. But did she know the secret recipe? You can find out for $4.95.

Four from the Green River Writers will be reading tonight from 7:00 - 8:00 at the Morrison Gallery, Elizabethtown Community College: Mark Brown, Gail Chandler, Sandy Brue, and Armando Feler. If you happen to be in the area, be sure to stop in.

Other Morrison Gallery readings this month include Jennifer Gresham, 12-12:50 on April 13 and a Poetry Month Celebration featuring Davis McCombs, 7:00 - 8:30 on April 21.

Crossposted at the Green River Writers blog.

Steven R. Cope says of Jim Wayne Miller (and also here) that his poetry, especially in Copperhead Cane, is “…really good, in a way that leaves us going off mumbling to ourselves, staring deep into corners, smiling gummily at strangers” (from Kentucky Voices: A Bicentennial Celebration of Writing, Kentucky Center for the Arts, 1992). Copperhead Cane (Robert Allen Moore, 1964) is a series of elegiac sonnets written in memory of his grandfather. Miller’s first book of poems, it might also serve as an elegy for the tobacco culture that was definitive of Kentucky farming and central to its literature for over a century. “Hanging Burley” is from Copperhead Cane.

Hanging Burley

I’m straddling the top tier, my wet shirt clinging;
Under this hot tin roof, sweat balls and rolls.
Smothered in gummy green, my seared eyes stinging,
I’m hanging tobacco on peeled pine poles.
A funeral mood below me on the ground:
A blank-faced filing past the loaded sled;
A coming with a solemn swishing sound;
Tobacco borne as if it were the dead.
Even the children, shadowed by our grief,
Hang broken leaves and ape the studied pace.
— Let burley come, and save each frog-eyed leaf,
Till every wilted stick is hung in place,
Till gazing on the naked, empty field,
We see row after row your death revealed.