Sherry Chandler

Charlie Whitt has set another identification problem for readers. Sez he:

For years I overlooked this pretty little plant. It first caught my eye while walking a trail on the Jesse Stuart land.
Now I spot it in many places. I took this picture in our hay field.

For those of you who aren’t Kentuckians, I think Charlie is probably talking about the Jesse Stuart State Nature Preserve, 714 acres of re-forested land in Greenup County.

Update: Rebecca at Pocahontas County Fare has posted some great photos of Blue-Eyed Grass.

…The fate of poetry depends on whether such a work as Schiller’s and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is possible. For that to be so, some basic confidence is needed, a sense of open space ahead of the individual and the human species. How did it happen that to be a poet of the twentieth century means to receive training in every kind of pessimism, sarcasm, bitterness, doubt? …Perhaps the specific trait of these last decades is that negative attitudes have become so widespread that the poets have been overtaken by the man in the street. As a youth I felt the complete absurdity of everything occurring on our planet, a nightmare that could not end well—and in fact it found its perfect expression in the barbed wire around the concentration camps and gas chambers. Brought up on Polish romantics, I obviously had to search for the causes of that contrast between their open future and our future laden with catastrophe. Today I think that, while the list of dreaded apocalyptic events may change, what is constant is a certain state of mind. This state precedes the perception of specific reasons for despair, which come later.

—Czeslaw Milosz in The Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983)

First comes despair, then we find the reasons? Is this so? Has despair become a habit of mind of poets? I’ve always thought not. Real despair means not writing at all. Writing is a way of taking action.