Sherry Chandler

Last Friday, taking youse guys on A Tour of My Blogroll, I featured Sandra Beasley’s reflections on this year’s Poetry Out Loud national finals and smiled a bit at the notion of a Kentucky boy from rural Trimble County taking a stab at Langston Hughes’s “Weary Blues,” a poem from both a time and place very alien to him.

Looks like I get to smile out of the other side of my mouth now. Dean Muir’s performance was good enough to get him into those national finals. Only twelve finalists were chosen.

So Dean did all right for himself and more power to him!

He’s pictured here performing at the Kentucky Writers’ Day Celebration.

Meanwhile, taking some umbrage at my statement that Poetry Out Loud may be more performance than poetry, a correspondent has written to chide me gently thus:

…a good “theater” (or speech team) coach would be emphasizing the student’s understanding of the poem. It is what makes the difference between “acting at acting” and truly “interpreting.”

Erik Reece in the NYTimes:

MY home state contains the largest contiguous forests in southern Appalachia, which is home to the most biologically diverse landscape in North America. To sit quietly in such a place is an extraordinary thing to do. I have heard ovenbirds and black-and-white warblers, sometimes a wood thrush, as steep ridgelines rose around me, mountains older than the Himalayas. There is a lot to see in this forest: 250 different songbirds, 70 species of trees, bears, bobcats and my favorite nonspeaking mammal, the Southern flying squirrel.

Alas, many of these species are vanishing because their habitat is vanishing…

“A culture,” wrote the poet W. H. Auden, “is no better than its woods.” Over a million acres have been strip-mined in Kentucky since 1980, and the numbers in West Virginia are worse. Mountaintop removal sites across Appalachia will soon reach the size of Delaware. And much of that acreage has been “reclaimed” as pasture: companies spray the mines with a layer of grass seed and hope it takes.

But to replace the forest with a grassland monoculture does not reclaim what has been lost. A forest sequesters 20 times more carbon than a grassland, prevents flooding and erosion, purifies streams, turns waste into food and insures species survival. Reforesting wasted mine sites would replace failed industrial methods with a system that mimics nature. Toward that goal, foresters have planted two million high-value trees on 2,700 acres of abandoned mine land.

Appalachia’s land is dying. …

To right these wrongs, first we need federal legislation that will halt the decapitation of mountains and bring accountability to an industry that is out of control. Then we need a New Deal for Appalachia that would expand the Appalachian Regional Reforestation.

Erik Reece is the author of Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness. Read his entire op-ed piece here.