Sherry Chandler

I’ve made my first post at The Peace Tree. Please go and take a look.

While you’re there, read Helen’s poem About More Than Just Springtime. That one will break your heart.

Read the other fine posts, too. Put it on your favorites list.

in the dogwood:

Thanks to T.R.’s diligence. But he’s a hard fellow to photograph.

eraclitean Fire offers this link to Medieval Woodcuts Clipart, just in case you have some old vellum lying around and feel like producing an illustrated manuscript..

Rocket Kids explains why she didn’t exactly make a poem a day in NaPoWriMo:

One of the reasons I came close, instead of making it, was that I stopped to revise along the way. I couldn’t help it.

It was inevitable that some one would pick Ron Silliman as a Thinking Blogger. As I said before, he’s sort of the granddaddy of us all. Now he has tagged his five Thinking Bloggers, including one that I kicked myself for not including myself: Geof Huth. That’s the trouble with lists. They’re exclusive.

Silliman picked Huth for:

using the form to create a critical language for vispo

Sandra Beasley of Chicks Dig Poetry , who served as coach for Alanna Rivera, the Virginia finalist, spent May Day evening watching the Poetry Out Loud national finals in Washington, D.C., where the impressive judges were Marilyn Chin, Garrison Keillor, and Kwame Dawes.

And then, something incredible…tonight Alanna Rivera placed in the top three, securing a $5,000 scholarship! And the girl who got first place–and incredible $20,000 prize–was the Washington, D.C. champion!

It’s a good day to live where I do.

The first and second place winners used extremely dynamic delivery styles, performing the poems as dramatic monologues; the winner, in fact, turned Anne Sexton’s “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward” into a showstopper, and will use her scholarship to attend NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts this fall. A dramatic style is great, and always a crowd pleaser. But what Alanna offered–and the reason the judges recognized her in the top three, I think–were poised and nuanced readings that honored the poet’s own voice. There’s something to be said for letting the words speak: at the end of the day everything else, from showy hand gestures to character accents to anguished pauses, is just distraction from the power of the original poem.

I’m with Sandra. One problem I had with watching Kentucky’s Poetry Out Loud finalists, whom I saw at the Kentucky Writers Day celebration in Frankfort on April 24, was that their presentations seemed to be more about performance than poetry. Dean Muir, the finalist, and Erica Martin, the semi-finalist, were accomplished young people, very poised, but I don’t think they had quite worked through to the place where they had understood the poems in their bones and blood.

I notice that the Trimble County Schools web page seems to think it is about theater. Muir intends to major in theater. Still, perhaps it’s enough that an eighteen-year-old from Trimble County (a county that’s 97.9% white with a population density of 55 to the square mile according to Wikipedia) should try to interpret a poem as urban black as Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues.” Certainly I have no quarrel with a program that pays young people to travel to D.C. and perform poetry before such a distinguished panel of judges.

Well, no serious quarrel anyway.