Sherry Chandler

I’ve been buying books again. So far I’ve spent nearly $100 on poetry books. For me, that is a fortune.

I feel freer to do that at this conference because I’m here with the help of a scholarship and funding from the Kentucky Arts Council. Usually my budget won’t tolerate registration, travel, and books. I feel very rich.

I’ve bought books by Kay Ryan, X.J. Kennedy, A.E. Stallings, Timothy Steele, Rachel Hadas, and Robert Darling. Fortunately, poetry books are slim but still, I fear so many purchases plus the books and materials we have been given may throw me overweight at the airport. It’s probably a good thing I decided that I really didn’t need four pairs of shoes for a four-day conference, though considering the distance from the cafeteria to the music building where events are being held I sort of regret the comfy Merrill sandals I left behind.

The NEA gave us a whole shopping bag of materials, including the Poetry Out Loud anthology, and cds and DVDs created in support of The Big Read and Shakespeare in American Communities. And West Chester University gave us the first cd in the WCU Poetry Salon feature, on which Kay Ryan reads and discusses her work. I am really looking forward to getting into that one, though I’m not going to try it here. Too busy. Too distracted.

Too interested in conversations. I’ve talked to people from the UK, Canada, Oregon, Texas, Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, and Maryland. Lots of Pennsylvanians, of course. Lots of teachers and professors, MFA students, but also people who work as body builders, medical writers (not just me), mathematicians, promoters, lawyers. And only one joke so far about Kentuckians and guns (you would have been proud of the way I laughed that one off), though one man did ask me how it was I thought Mitch McConnell can say all that stuff without giggling. “Does he really believe it?” he asked, “or is he just stupid?”

The two conditions don’t strike me as mutually exclusive but I don’t think Mitch is stupid. Nor do I think he believes everything he says. But that’s another story.

People tend to come back here again and again (three, six, nine times), so it is actually sort of like Hindman in that there are lots of old friends and a comfortably laid-back friendly atmosphere. The faculty mingles with the students and the students become the faculty. Much partying after the last reading, also like Hindman, though the beverages don’t have to be so clandestine (it’s a dry campus, though). I suspect those parties are where the real connections are made but so far I’ve been way too tired to go out drinking after midnight.

And anyway, I have a sonnet to write every day. Here I thought Leatha Kendrick was tough asking us to write a sonnet in a week. But I love Molly Peacock’s workshop.

In short, I’m settling in and knuckling down.

If you want some more about the flora and fauna, see my comment to Rebecca and Charlie W. linked on the sidebar.

Calvin was given to me eight years ago by Mrs. Stowe, but she knew nothing of his age or origin. He walked into her house one day out of the great unknown and became at once at home, as if he had been always a friend of the family. He appeared to have artistic and literary tastes, and it was as if he had inquired at the door if that was the residence of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, upon being assured that it was, had decided to dwell there. This is, of course, fanciful, for his antecedants were wholly unknown, but in his time he could hardly have been in any household where he would not have heard Uncle Tom’s Cabin talked about. When he came to Mrs. Stowe, he was as large as he ever was, and apparently as old as he ever became. Yet there was in him no appearance of age; he was in the happy maturity of his powers, and you would rather have said in that maturity he had found the secret of perpetual youth. And it was as difficult to believe that he would ever be aged as it was to imagine that he had ever been in immature youth. There was in him a mysterious perpetuity.

—from Charles Dudley Warner, “Calvin, the Cat,” text from Roger Caras’ Treasury of Great Cat Stories (Galahad Books, 1987)