Sherry Chandler

ScrewingAmerica mentioned today that Jimmy Carter, #5 in the Goldberg 100, has been featured in Fine Woodworking magazine, a publication of particular interest in our household for thirty-ish years. (I guess he really is capable of building those Habitat houses and not just of making photo-op appearances choking up on the hammer.) So I went working to see whether I could find anything online and came up with this little quote from the Reader’s Gallery:

“I like to work with green wood,” said Carter, “and on occasion use only tools that were available during Colonial times.” Since leaving the White House, the statesman turned avid woodworker has built about 150 pieces of furniture using many of his own shop-built tools, such as this hand-screw clamp. Made of wood harvested from his family’s land, the 1 1/2-in.-square hard-maple jaws measure 7 1/2 in. long, while the 12-in.-long alternating dogwood and black-walnut handles and dogwood threaded rods give the clamp a 6-in. throat capacity. “For threading, I used a tap and die given to me in 1984 as a full fee for making a speech to a university.” The clamp is finished with oil.

No mention, though, of Jimmy Carter’s novel, his children’s book, or his poetry. The Library of Congress has a little article about Carter’s collection, Always a Reckoning (Random House of Canada, 1994), and a really neat photograph. And you can go to The United States of Poetry to read and view a video of Carter reading a poem called “Considering the Void.”

I’ve read worse poetry. Well, I may have written worse poetry.

One of the joys of travelling around about the state doing this and that is that I get to meet more poets. Last fall at the Kentucky State Poetry Society annual meeting, for example, I met a poet with a most exquisite voice, in both the physical and the poetic sense. I was lucky enough to meet her again at the Appalachian Writers Workshop this summer, only this time in Lee Maynard’s fiction workshop. Her name is Wanda D. Campbell, and she has very graciously agreed to share a poem with me.

I chose this one because it’s almost housing time and I will miss the smell of tobacco curing in the barn. But I won’t miss – and haven’t missed for going on 40 years – the kind of backbreaking labor described in this poem. (Actually, in my family, women didn’t house tobacco so my experience is limited to setting and stripping. I was a good hand to strip tobacco in the days when it was carefully graded at the bench and tied into hands.)

Tobacco Patch Princess

Ninety degrees
in dry September fields
all day long I lift
eighty pounds of green.

I am tiger lily dust
moistened from dew within,
my cocoa hair,
streaked with caramel strands.

Scarred, calloused hands
twice their age,
touched by manly nails,
hoist these sacred stalks

until sinewy limbs
longing for apple tree shade
send me to drink divine
colorless warmth.

When the sky people
with their glory eyes
peep through holes
in their velvet blanket

I fall clean
upon fresh sheets
and make love
to my peace.

– Wanda D. Campbell
first published in Story South as Tobacco Mistress]

*****

The current issue of StorySouth features Tom Hunley of Western Kentucky University and Steel Toe Books. There is also a review of his collection The Tongue from Wind Publications.