Sherry Chandler

Woo Hoo! Break out the champagne! It’s a red-letter day.

Or, more accurately, Thursday will be a red letter day. Why?

Because some snippet of my June 6 post on D-Day will be read on Open Source’s Blogsday 2006 program.

What is Blogsday?

Based loosely on Bloomsday, which celebrates “Ulysses” as an evocation of the whole world in a single day (in Joyce’s case, June 16, 1904), the idea is create a mosaic portrait of our country from excerpts of blog posts written on the same day. (In our case this past Tuesday, June 6th.)

After assembling the excerpts we bring in two accomplished and agile actors to read them.

Open Source is one of my favorite media enterprises. Here’s how they describe themselves, from their About page:

Open Source is a conversation, four times a week on the radio and any time you like on the blog. We designed the show to invert the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: we aren’t a public radio show with a web community, we’re a web community that produces a daily hour of radio.

This means that we rely on our listeners and readers — whom David Sifry calls “the people formerly known as your audience” to help us produce the show. At its most basic, we look for this production help in the comment threads of this website. Every time we have an idea for an hour of radio we post it to the site. That show may not go on the radio for another month, but we immediately start reading comments — suggestions for guests, questions for guests, suggestions for ways to frame the show or reading material — and following up on them.

You can listen to Open Source on a number of public radio stations around the country, by podcast, on XM satellite radio, streaming live at WBGH or KUOW2. Or you can go to the blog and listen to any of the past shows.

These Blogsday casts are very effective. I am doubly flattered this year because I was featured in last year’s cast too. If you’d like a preview, you can still hear that one at this link. My few seconds of fame come at minute 22:41, just before Juan Cole and James Wolcott.

To make this altogether better, that “exceptional writer” and my friend Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write has also been selected for Blogsday 2006.

I’ll have my ear glued to the speakers. I hope you’ll be there too.

From this morning’s NYTimes online:

The head of the Library of Congress is to name Donald Hall, a writer whose deceptively simple language builds on images of the New England landscape, as the nation’s 14th poet laureate today.

Mr. Hall, a poet in the distinctive American tradition of Robert Frost, has also been a harsh critic of the religious right’s influence on government arts policy. And as a member of the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Arts during the administration of George H. W. Bush, he referred to those he thought were interfering with arts grants as “bullies and art bashers.”

…

Mr. Hall, 77, lives in a white clapboard farmhouse in Wilmot, N.H., that has been in his family for generations. He said in a telephone interview that he didn’t see the poet laureateship as a bully pulpit. “But it’s a pulpit anyway,” he said. “If I see First Amendment violations, I will speak up.”

As for the rest of the job, “I have a terrible miscellany of thoughts,” he said.

As it happens, I have just been reading Without, Hall’s grief journal in poetry for his wife, Jane Kenyon. Kenyon died of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 1995. Houghton Mifflin published Without in 1998, so it was written while grief was very raw. This was my first extended experience with Hall’s work, so I can’t really speak to his being in the “tradition of Frost.” He is, I suppose, more in the tradition of poets laureate than was Ted Kooser, being from the northeast and widely recognized by the publishing establishment. But it might be refreshing to have a poet laureate who does not spurn politics.

Without is an affecting book, one of the few books of poetry that I have read through at a sitting. It is not pleasant reading, I don’t know whether it is always poetry, but it is always an honest look into the heart of grief, and as such a comfort in a way to those of us who see our own grief coming.

A small poem from the collection:

Air Shatters in the Car’s Small Room

Distracting myself
on the recliner between
Jane’s hospital bed
and window, in this blue
room where we endure,
I set syllables
into prosy lines.
William Butler Yeats
denounced with passion
“the poetry of
passive suffering.”
Friends and strangers
write letters speaking
of courage or strength.
What else could we do
except what we do?
Should we weep lying
flat? We do. Sometimes,
driving the Honda
with its windows closed
in beginning autumn
from the low motel
to Jane’s bed, I scream
and keep on screaming.

More on Donald Hall from the Washington Post and National Public Radio.

Thanks to Valerie Loveland for the links.