Friday morning musing

Well, well, well. Congratulations to Barack Obama for having won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. In the last eight years, Peace Prizes have gone to Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and now Barack Obama. I think perhaps the Nobel committee is sending the United States a message, inviting us to come home to what they see as our true role in the world.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Herta Müller, a Romanian-born German novelist with whose work I am not familiar.

Coming down to earth and closer to home, I had a big time at the Stars with Accents reading last night. Katerina Stoykova-Klemerer and James Brown put together a great set of readers with a wide variety of styles and genres from a great series of shows.

Accents, by the way, made the top three local radio shows in Ace Magazine‘s annual Best of Lex ratings. Not bad for a newcomer who interviews poets!

And speaking of interviewed poets, I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend and fellow Green River Writers poet Sheri Wright, who in her September 25 interview on Accents chose my Dance the Black-Eyed Girl as the notable book of the week. She read my poem “Toxicodendron radicans.”

Sheri and Sonja DeVries were partnered for a great interview. You can listen to the podcast of that show and most of the others at this link. Sheri has a couple of notable books out herself, including one that gets my vote for best title, Contains Scenes of Indigenous Nudity. Her discussion of the origins of that title and her musings on why “indigenous” nudity is okay while other nudity is considered pornographic are worth a listen, especially her reading of the poem “Contains Scenes of Indigenous Nudity, the Upper Half.”

You can buy Sheri’s books at Carmichael’‘s in Louisville.

By the way, WRFL was taping last night’s readings and I think highlights will be played on future broadcasts of Accents.