Sherry Chandler

I have been lazy about posting this week, gentle readers. After the KGAC fair last weekend, it took us three days just to get thoroughly warm again, especially because the weather has stayed dreary. The tent is not yet completely dry, though it has been erected in the back yard all week.

And then I had a poem to write for Leatha Kendrick’s Poetry Writing II class at the Carnegie Center. A poem a week — this week we had to use a pine cone as a metaphor for one of our parents. Next week, a sestina — a form before which I quail. (There’s a joke in there somewhere but I’m too tired to find it at the moment.)

Now I am off to the Kentucky State Poetry Society’s annual meeting at Kentucky Dam Village, where I hope to see no blond and demonic children. After all, I’ve already raised my own, who were blond and demonic enough once upon a time (sorry boys!).

I hope to see many of you there. For the rest, here is some reading matter and I leave you in the good hands of Poppysmatus, trusting that he won’t get me locked out of the public libraries again.

How the City Sank by Nicolai Ourssoff in the NYTimes

Good Night, and the Good Fight, NYTimes op-ed by Neal Gabler

Holy Smurf, UNICEF! at I See Invisible People

Checking Accounts, review by Carol Tavis of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (Random House, 2005), review originally from the Times Literary Supplement

Why Americans Can’t Write Political Fiction. An Essay by Christopher Lehman in The Washington Monthly (A Kentucky connection here in that he pretty much trashes All the King’s Men.)

Dynamic Design: The Structure of Books of Poems by Natasha Sajé, originally in Iowa Review, Fall 2005

THE CONTESTER: Who’s Doing What to Keep Them Clean by Kevin Larimer in Poets & Writers [I picked this link up from Wind Publications' Kentucky Literary Newsletter.]

Cat

The fat cat on the mat
    may seem to dream
of nice mice that suffice
    for him, or cream;
but he free, maybe,
    walks in thought
unbowed, proud, where loud
    roared and fought
his kin, lean and slim,
    or deep in den
in the East feasted on beasts
    and tender men.
The giant lion with iron
    claw in paw,
and huge ruthless tooth
    in gory jaw;
the pard dark-starred,
    fleet upon feet,
that oft soft from aloft
    leaps upon his meat
where woods loom in gloom –
    far now they be,
    fierce and free,
    and tamed is he;
but fat cat on the mat
    kept as a pet
    he does not forget.

– J. R. R. Tolkien