Sherry Chandler

I am delighted to discover that my friend and fellow poet, Wanda D. Campbell, who has been gracious enough to let me post some of her poems here, now has a blog of her own: Raven’s Shadow. Here’s a snippet from Friday’s post:

Gandhi said that if everyone lived by the principle of an eye for an eye, then soon the whole world would be blind. And indeed, I think it would be blind now, if not for the voices of the billions of ordinary people, not oil tycoons, not superstars nor world leaders, just ordinary folks, crying out for peace and forgiveness.

I couldn’t agree more.

And while you’re reading the rest of today’s post, page down to her tribute to her father.

from I See Invisible People:

In response to the new law banning abortion in South Dakota, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation has picked up the challenge. Cecilia Fire Thunder, President of the Oglala Sioux, issued a statement…

To me, it is now a question of sovereignty. I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.

Read the rest.

Update: and then there’s this from Yahoo news:

SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota (Reuters)- Abortion-rights supporters launched a referendum drive on Friday to overturn a South Dakota abortion ban designed to challenge the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing the practice nationwide.

A new coalition, South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, said it would try to collect thousands of signatures aimed at giving state voters a chance decide in November on what it called “the nation’s most extreme abortion law.”

It’s gonna be a long year.

Back in the days when I was a lowly graduate student T.A., I used to get a lot of whiners in my freshman comp classes. “I don’t know why I have to take this class. My secretary will correct my grammar for me.” I would respond that this class might be the most important one they would take in their college careers because “if you don’t understand the way the language works, you’re going to get jerked around by all kinds of slick operators.” And so we have been, as a nation.

As proof that you should not have slept through all those English classes, I direct you to this post, Modifiers are Evil, at Have Coffee Will Write.

No. Really. I mean it. When we allow people to use modifiers for the verbs that describe their actions we are allowing them to mitigate in some perverse way those actions. Take for instance the phrase: partially destroy. You can’t partially destroy something. You can destroy a part of something but that part destroyed is, well, destroyed.

Read the rest.

from the Kentucky Arts Council press release:

FRANKFORT, KY — The Kentucky Arts Council will be hosting the state finals for the Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest. On March 30, 10:00 a.m. EST, 20 high school students from 10 high schools will compete at the Hill Student Center on the campus of Kentucky State University, Frankfort. The winner of this competition will advance to the National Finals in Washington, DC in May 2006, where $50,000 in scholarships and school prizes will be awarded.

The competition presented in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, is part of a national program that encourages high school students to learn about great poetry through memorization, performance, and competition.

The finalists that will compete are: Brandon Evilla and Kendra Holloway, Christian County High School; Mason Scisco and Ross Johnson, Danville High School; Scott Ross and Amanda Redeke, Deming High School; Chauncy Rhodes and Antoyia Mallory, Doss High School; Michelle Rodgers and Katie Goldey, George Rogers Clark High School; Tiffany Logan and Ashley Underwood, Greenup County High School; Alexa Klein and Scott Whitehouse, Madison Central High School, Natalie Blake and Will Bates, Mercer County High School; Danielle DuMuro and Tawni Koch, Simon Kenton High School; and Price Dunlap and Dean Muir, Trimble County High School.

Kentucky Poet Laureate Sena Jeter Naslund, poet Frank X. Walker and Chairman of the Northern Kentucky University Theatre Department, Ken Jones will serve as judges. Special guest Dan Stone, Program Director for National Initiatives, National Endowment for the Arts, will attend the Kentucky Finals and award the state’s finalists.

“Poetry Out Loud has been a wonderful opportunity to engage Kentucky high school students with great poetry and the literary arts,” said Kentucky Arts Council Executive Director Lori Meadows. “The Arts Council is pleased to be a part of this national program.”

I wonder whose poetry they recite.

Silas House is the featured reader for this year’s Axton Reading Series at the University of Louisville. He will read on April 6 at the Ekstrom Library Auditorium.

This event will be the culmination of a two-day conference, Exploring Kentucky’s Sense of Place, during which geographers, historians, anthropologists and filmmakers will examine “some of the ways in which Kentucky is ‘claimed, remembered, wrenched, shaped, rendered, loved, and re-made…’”

Of special interest to the poets among us will be Lynell Edwards’s presentation on April 5: “Kentucky in the Verses and the Hedgerows: Notes toward a New Conception of the Pastoral in Poetry.” Lynell’s new book, due out soon from Red Hen Press, is the realization of her new concept of the pastoral. She read several of the poems to us that Morrison Gallery on Thursday, and I am looking forward to reading more.

Also on April 5, Nickole Brown will read poems from Sister. A Novel in Verse. And I am intrigued by the title of the Appalshop film, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,” which will show that same evening.

On Thursday afternoon (April 6) there’s “What’s Eating Mrs. Wolf’s Virginny and other essays and poems,” a presentation by Mary A. Kennedy of the Department of Pediatrics and a reading from Pleasure Ridge Park by Carrie Wright.

The event is free and open to the public.