Sherry Chandler

I learn from the Kentucky Literary Newsletter & Calendar that the winners of the Kentucky Literary Awards for 2004 are: .

Fiction — The Coal Tattoo by Silas House
Poetry — The Total Light Process by James Baker Hall
Nonfiction — A Taste of the Sweet Apple by Joanna Holt-Watson

The awards were presented at Western Kentucky University & The Southern Kentucky Bookfest, April 15th

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.

There’s still time to catch the end of the Kentucky Author Mountaintop Removal Tour – a reading at EKU’s Posey Auditorium from 2-4 is free and open to the public. Touring authors will read from their works and share reflections on their mountaintop removal tour. Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and Kentucky Riverkeeper took these authors on a tour of mining sites in three counties.

Authors expected to be present include: Erik Reece, Mary Ann Taylor Hall, Bob Sloan, Kristin Johannsen, Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Silas House, Anne Shelby, Ed McClanahan, Bracelen Flood, George Brosi, Artie Ann Bates, Ann Olson and Graham Shelby.

A fund-rasing dinner from 5-7:30 p.m. is $30 per person/$50 per couple. Click here for more details.

I’m not going to try to catch you up on The Family Research Council’s “Justice Sunday” event at Highview Baptist Church , described as a “megachurch,” in Louisville on April 24, at which Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist will simulcast to thousands of churches his argument that “The filibuster was once used to protect racial bias, and now it is being used against people of faith.” If you don’t know about this event, you can read their own publicity here and the NYTimes about it here.

I just want to let you know that there’s an interfaith protest rally at Douglass Boulevard Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), 2005 Douglass Boulevard, Louisville at 2 p.m. Central Presbyterian Church 318 West Kentucky Avenue (4th and Kentucky) Louisville at 2:30 p.m. Co-sponsors are the Clergy & Laity Network, The Clergy & Laity Network of Kentucky, and DriveDemocracy.org.

For more information, contact Richard Mitchell of the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice.

Dorothy M. Sutton ’s bio says she was born in Todd County, Kentucky during the Great Depression, but that would make her older than I am, and I find that hard to believe. Like my own siblings, she began her education in a one-room schoolhouse and she has been publishing poetry in national journals since her days at Georgetown College in the late 1950s.

Dorothy says,

perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve done besides teaching at EKU is teaching Irish lit. in Ireland in ‘96, and having one of my Darwin poems read by Richard Dawkins [Oxford U.] at the Royal Society in London. It’s the same society Issac Newton and Darwin himself belonged to.

You can read some of Dorothy’s Darwin poems yourself in her chapbook Startling Art: Darwin and Matisse (Finishing Line, 1999). In his foreword to this beautiful book, Guy Davenport said:

Mankind has been in a tragic fall all of this century. Our great hope is that the poets will guide us to when it will be “artfully fused together again.” Dorothy Sutton’s firm and careful eloquence makes it seem imperative that we keep winnowing the past for its enduring truths; that we keep entering rooms hung with paintings, poetry, and the other arts and sciences which speak revelations we’d thought “only lovers and nature could say.”

Here is “You Can Be Quite Deprived” from Startling Art:

You Can Be Quite Deprived

Before there was art,
it was something
that only lovers and nature could say.

You can be quite deprived
without realizing it.
One day, a painting, a strain
of music, a poem comes alive
in your eye, your ear, your hand,
whispers an immeasurably sad thing
so beautifully as to make you glad,
talks to you
in a quiet and steady hum,
blooms into a pungent jungle
of colors and sounds,
its resonant rhythms gently,
relentlessly stalking you
into the starkest, gloomiest
corners of your mind.

Admit it.
You were poor beyond measure
until you came into this room.

It occurs to me that, since posts fall off the bottom of the page here at a fairly rapid rate and searching the archives is a drag, it might be a good idea to do a sort of index of poets Kentucky featured so far this month. I have eleven days left and I’m pretty sure I’m going to run out of days before I run out of poets. But then there’s always next year…

James Baker Hall
Brenda White
Joanie DiMartino
Alan MacKellar
Jean Tucker
Frank Steele
Mary “Ernie” O’Dell
Jesse Stuart
Mark Brown
Elaine Fowler Palencia
Jim Wayne Miller
Georgia Wallace
Sena Jeter Naslund
Joe Survant
Davis McCombs
Wendell Berry
Margaret Ricketts
Tom C. Hunley

I am way out of date in my information about Tom. He’s sent me an e-mail to bring me up to speed:

I have another full-length collection with Wind. It’s called The Tongue. Also, I won Pecan Grove Press’s chapbook contest, and the winning book, My Life as a Minor Character, is just about to come out. (It’s been printed, I have some copies, but they haven’t mentioned it on their website or made it available at Amazon yet).

One perk of doing this blog – I learn a lot.

Tom Hunley teaches writing at Western and publishes Steel Toe Books . If I understand it right, Steel Toe publishes one poetry collection a year. This year’s book by Jennifer Gresham has been delayed (Tom will let me know when it’s available, I hope), but last year’s excellent Einstein Considers a Sand Dune by Stephen Doyle is worth your attention.

Tom’s own collection, Still, There’s a Glimmer , is available from WordTech Editions of Cincinnati.

Although I first met Tom last year at the Kentucky Writers Conference, I first encountered one of his poems at Gumball Poetry for spring 2000, here. This issue was called Heavy Metal , an odd place to find this graceful dancing poem. Here’s what I said in my comments then: “The language flows nicely off the tongue and it is original language. …Each issue of Gumball Poetry has one poem that delights me. This one is it for Spring 2000. It is exactly the kind of poem I’d like to find in a Gumball capsule.” Here is that poem:

A while since I put a new poem up on the poem page. Have been distracted by family concerns of one kind and another.

I couldn’t make the Sideshow reading at the Lexington Gallery Hop on Friday so decided I’d put up a little bit of nonsense called “Three Rings” that I did playing around with overhead transparencies and my marker set. It looked better hanging from a helium balloon. Many thanks to Joanie DiMartino for reading my poem for me.

All the Sideshow readings are over, but the show hangs until April 30. If you find yourself in the vicinity of the Carnegie Center, drop in and take a look.