Sherry Chandler » Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Today is Robert Penn Warren’s birthday, commemorated as Kentucky Writers Day. I have had a fine day hobnobbing with Kentucky writers. A pleasure to hear the Capitol rotunda echoing with words from William Butler Yeats and Sylvia Plath, James Baker Hall, Joe Survant, and Jane Gentry.
Emmanuel Nfor, a junior from Western Hills High School (in Frankfort I think) and runner-up in Kentucky’s Poetry Out Loud competition recited Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness” and Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Those of us who have reached the age of forgetfulness looked with some tenderness upon a young man of seventeen taking on the Collins poem. The question about that rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem seemed portentous indeed in the halls of government. This is Emmanuel’s second year to place in the competition and he has one more year to compete. We will look for him back next year.
The first place winner, Amy Cordero of Pikeville High School chose Tony Hoagland’s “Beauty” and Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103 Degrees,” both poems that explore complex notions about mortality, sexuality, and notions of beauty. I was doubly pleased, first that Amy took on these difficult poems and second that a woman so young and beautiful could interpret them so well.
The three laureates were, of course, excellent, and Jane, in what you might call her state of the laureateship address, took time to recognize the network of teachers, librarians, and small press publishers who are promoting the literary arts in Kentucky. Charlie Hughes of Wind Publications, resplendent in Loony Toons tie, was forced to endure resounding and extended applause for his work in publishing, promoting, and writing poetry. “His book,” said Jane, “is called Shifting for Myself but he has been shifting for all of us.”
(Note: Wind Publications swept the fiction category at the recent Kentucky Literary Awards presented at the Southern Kentucky Bookfest.)
Jane’s remarks prompted this response from Jim Hall that I will pass on to you: “It’s a big tent, poetry, and some of us are making the call, “Come on in!” Added: Jim also noted the irony that a state with a well-deserved reputation for illiteracy should have so many internationally-recognized writers.
Here, from his long poem Audubon: A Vision, is a taste of the man to whom we all paid homage today, Red Warren:
VI
Love and Knowledge
Their footless dance
Is of the beautiful liability of their nature.
Their eyes are round, boldly convex, bright as a jewel,
And merciless. They do knot know
Compassion, and if they did,
We should not be worthy of it. They fly
In air that glitters like fluent crystal
And is hard as perfectly transparent iron, they cleave it
With no effort. They cry
In a tongue multitudinous, often like music.
He slew them, at surprising distances, with his gun.
Over a body held in his hand, his head was bowed low,
But not in grief.
He put them where they are, and there we see them:
In our imaginaton.
What is love?
Text from New and Selected Poems 1923 - 1985 (Random House, 1985).
One name for it is knowledge.
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