Sherry Chandler

Keep a space clear on your calendar for Kentucky Writer’s Day, which this year is also inauguration day for our new Kentucky Poet Laureate, Jane Gentry. The ceremony is set for 10:00 a.m. EDT, Tuesday, April 24, at the Capitol Rotunda in Frankfort.

The event will include readings by past Poets Laureate Richard Taylor, James Baker Hall, Joe Survant and Sena Jeter Naslund.

Recipients of the Kentucky Arts Council’s 2007 Al Smith Individual Artists Fellowship in Literary Arts will be recognized.

And you’ll have a chance to hear Kentucky’s Poetry Out Loud winners, Trimble County High School student Dean Muir and Ohio County High School student Erica Martin. Poetry Out Loud is a National Recitation Contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.

The ceremony, followed by a reception on the mezzanine level of the Capitol, is free and open to the public

Much is going on this week and next here in Kentucky in celebration of National Poetry Month. I suggest you keep an eye on The Kentucky Literary Newsletter for a full list of events.

I hate to say this but my reaction to the first news of the shooting at Virginia Tech was mixed. Yes, horror and sorrow. But also dread of the media circus that is sure to follow. The New York Times this morning captures the way in which these high profile tragedies have become ritualized:

There must have been a time — maybe back in 1966 before live news coverage was common and Charles Whitman opened fire from a clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin and killed 16 people — when witnesses, officials and news announcers would find themselves at a loss for words.

The shootings at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo., in 1999 defined how mass shootings are handled — and publicly mourned. There have been similar tragedies since then, too many. Now everybody knows the drill.

But I don’t want to hear the cellphone recordings of gun shots, the teary on-the-spot tales of escape and terror. I definitely don’t want to watch Katie Couric shed her crocodile tears all over everything.

We wallow in the emotion of it; we’ve become voyeurs of violence. But no one will do anything about it.

To quote George W. Bush’s press spokeswoman, “the President believes that there is a right for people to bear arms.” That trumps everything.

Update: I have been taken to task a bit by a correspondent for being too harsh about people’s need to talk after a violent incident such as this. I would like to clarify that it is not the victims or the survivors I’m talking about here. Nor is it even the straight news reporters in the immediate aftermath. It’s that element of vampirism, and it will go on and on… And it ramps up our paranoia and our fear of one another.

Anyway, after five years of war and devastation, I am just emotionally exhausted.

So I’ll let Todd Swift offer a little perspective on the situation:

Yesterday’s gun massacre at an American university is a terrible act of violence; it has certainly set fingers wagging in the UK, where many commentators in the media (and elsewhere) have been quick to blame America’s “gun culture” and its “history of violence”. While it is true that there are over 200 million firearms in the US, and each year over 3,300 teenagers are shot and killed there, it is not clear that America, or the gun, is the main or only problem. The central role of violence in human experience is too complex an issue to be simplified. The pointing finger of blame is also the itchy trigger-finger, too often.

Europe, too, is, and was, violent. Mr. Ferry’s recent exploration of Nazi iconography (for which he was pilloried, as if the glamour of evil, its dreadful beauty, was not half the reason for its force, and the reason to resist it) should remind us that the 20th century had its epicentres of violence based not in America, but in Europe. Europe, of course, brought violence to the Congo, and through the slave trade, to the wider world. Europe’s destruction of indigenous peoples, its genocides, was a violent slaughter of epic proportions.

Read the rest.

Update 2: One more try at beating this dead horse. Because, I suppose, of the complexity of my reaction and the level of the noise, I keep getting off track about what is at the base of both that New York Times article and my sense of dread about what’s to come.

My discomfort is caused by the fact that the narrative is set. We have our stock characters, the innocent victims, the monstrous villain, the heroes. These are elements of melodrama and they do not require us to think beyond our assumptions about ourselves and everybody involved. All the players are turned to cardboard cutouts. All the right strings are pulled to evoke our hearts and not our brains.

And as I said yesterday, it ramps up our fear.

Update 3: Harry Shearer:

…what is the possible journalistic explanation for splashing Cho’s self-dramatizing poses and self-justifying bullshit over network and cable air? Did we learn anything useful during the spate of interviews of Charlie Manson years ago, except that he was one crazy motherfucker? Cho’s pathetic outpourings deserved to be put back where they came from–in a small room, with FBI guys sentenced to read/see and parse them Instead, a hundred thousand self-pitying mentally ill young men (and women?) have just been shown the road to glory one more time. A society in which it’s easier to become famous for killing people than for doing something useful or constructive is one remarkable place in which to live.

Thanks to Poppysmatus for the link.

Natasha Trethewey has won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third volume of verse, Native Guard.

Cormac McCarthy won in fiction for The Road, about which we’ve had a lively conversation (for us anyway) here on this blog.

The NYTimes has a full list of winners in Letters, Drama and Music