Sherry Chandler

from the NYTimes:

This week the poetry world is atwitter over the closing down of an Internet site that for the last year dedicated itself to exposing what it calls fraud among the small circle of poetry contests that frequently offer publishing contracts as prizes.

Alan Cordle, a research librarian who lives in Portland, Ore., has managed the Web site, www.foetry.com, anonymously since its inception a little more a year ago.

“atwitter”? Patronize much?

In honor of Earth Day tomorrow, it seems appropriate to post a poem from Richard Taylor. He is one of Kentucky’s most grounded poets, fond of quoting A. R. Ammons’ “In my yard more wordage / than I can read.” Richard was Kentucky’s poet laureate for 1999-2001. Poor Richard’s bookstore in Frankfort is a cultural center. His First Fridays at the Kentucky Coffeetree Café in Frankfort have become legendary. The poem below is from Earth Bones (Gnomon Press, 1979).

Subdivision

Where Angus grazed
the day before
is pasture scraped
in barren heaps,
red mounds of farm
the dozer wasted,
scads of tell-tale bricks
which stack as someone’s castle.

Where meadow caught the hillsides
in its palm
is now a fractured skein
of rifled birdnests, hutches,
groundhog holes,
a no-man’s-land
of frazzled rabbits, displaced toads.

Add to these casualties—
the ousted redwings, inchworms,
spores—
two poplars toppled
near the fence,
two weathered landmarks
whose topmost leaves,
aloof, still upright, cloistered green,
are last to get the news.