Sherry Chandler » 2006 » April » 26
from Normandi Ellis:
Each year, more than 192,000 American women learn they have breast cancer. It could be someone you know.
According to the most recent figures available from the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 46 million Americans have no health coverage. Imagine what a diagnosis of breast cancer might mean to that individual. These people represent our friends, our colleagues, our families.
That is why on April 27th many, talented friends and artists are banding together to create a benefit event like no other in Richmond KY. From 7-9 p.m. friends of Judy Sizemore, a fellow artist and breast cancer patient, are showcasing their musical, performance, and literary talents to bring awareness to breast cancer and to the medically underinsured.
Storytellers Octavia Sexton and Mary Hamilton, musicians Beau Haddock, Sue Massek, John Gage, Randy Wilson, and Roberta Schultz (of Raison D’Etre), writers Leatha Kendrick and Anne Shelby, among many others will perform at the Richmond Area Arts Council stage on Water Street in Richmond. The gathering of friends represents the wide variety of talents in the performing arts and literature that Judy Sizemore has encouraged through her work as an arts coordinator for the Kentucky Arts Council. Her talent has been to nurture artists, educators, and the communities they serve. It seems fitting that the arts community wants to nurture in return.
“It would be difficult to find this variety and scope of talented Kentucky artists sharing the same stage again. We’re doing this to benefit our friend,” said Jennifer Rose, Berea musician, singer and performance artist, “but also to raise awareness of her situation; one that many women find themselves in.”
“The arts community in Kentucky is remarkable not only for its creativity and vitality but also for its compassion and commitment to using the arts as a vehicle for social change,” Sizemore replied. “I am humbled and honored by the kindness that has been extended to me and my family and the effort that is being made to draw awareness to these issues.”
There is no admission to the performances, but there are opportunities for donations. A silent auction of work by Kentucky’s talented visual artists kicks off the evening performances. Doors open at 7:00 p.m.
For more information, contact: Normandi Ellis (859) 985-3021 or (502) 320-2839 or normandiellis24@aol.com
This post was written by sherry
Gin Petty sent me these photos of kudzu and graciously has agreed to let me share them with you. The first photo shows a barn, the second a house. Abandoned, I hope. Kudzu is scarey stuff!
This post was written by sherry
Sez I to my son, “Northrop Frye says no work of literature should be emotionally depressing.”
Sez my son to me, “He obviously hasn’t read Jude the Obscure.”
This post was written by sherry
From James Robert Payne’s introduction to Complete Poems of Joseph Seamon Cotter (University of Georgia Press, 1990):
Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., was born September 2, 1895, in Louisville, Kentucky, one of three children born to Maria E Cotter, née Cox, and Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr. Both parents were members of the Louisville educational community. Before her marriage, Maria Cox served as teacher and principal, and the senior Cotter had a distinguished career as teacher, principal, and poet. Joseph Cotter, Sr., had been a precocious child who learned to read at the age of three, benefitting from the stimulation of a mother who had the gifts, according to her son, of “a poet, storyteller, a maker of plays. …Cotter Sr. was principal of the Louisville school named for his friend Paul Laurence Dunbar at the time of Cotter Jr.’s birth, and by then the family was relatively well off and in their own home at 2306 Magazine Street in Louisville. Propitiously, the younger Cotter was born at home in the very room in which, on Thanksgiving of the year before, Dunbar had read his poems at a family party. As Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr., later proudly recorded: “Here for the first time in the South he [Dunbar] read the Negro dialect poems that afterwards made him famous.” Although the younger Cotter would completely eschew the dialect style that we see in much of Dunbar’s and the senior Cotter’s work, the circumstances of the young Cotter’s birth were auspicious. The young man was born into a strong family tradition of poetry traceable at least to his father’s mother and highlighted by his father’s literary achievements and the family friendship with Dunbar, one of the most highly regarded poets of his day.
Cotter graduated from Central High School with honors at fifteen, and entered Fisk University in the fall of 1911. During his second year, both he and his older sister Florence, who was also at Fisk, contracted tuberculosis. Florence died on December 16, 1914. the father wrote that it was the son’s intense grief over the death of his sister that “discovered to him his poetic talent.” Fighting illness and grief and unable to return to college, Cotter went to work for the Louisville Leader. He published a poetry collection, Band of Gideon and Other Lyrics, in June 1918 and was at work on a sonnet sequence, “Out of the Shadows,” when he died on February 3, 1919.
Rain Music
On the dusty earth-drum
Beats the falling rain;
Now a whispered murmur,
Now a louder strain.
Slender, silvery drumsticks,
On an ancient drum,
Beat the mellow music
Bidding life to come.
Chords of earth awakened,
Notes of greening spring,
Rise and fall triumphant
Over every thing.
Slender, silvery drumsticks
Beat the long tatoo—
God the Great Musician
Calling life anew.
This post was written by sherry
