A Retrospective

To start National Poetry Month, let’s take a look back at 25 years of Alan MacKellar’s photography, an exhibit that is going up at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning this month.

To celebrate, the Carnegie Center will host a gallery reception from 5:00 – 8:00 pm on April 16, during the Gallery Hop.

AND

beginning at 8:00 with an open mic, the Center will host a reading to celebrate National Poetry Month and the release of Alan’s new Finishing Line chap, Chasing Shroedinger’s Cat. The book is available as a pre-publication right now and copies hot off the press will be available at the gallery reception and at the reading.

Other readers include Jan Isenhour, Director of the Carnegie Center. where she also teaches writing workshops. Her essays have been published in Wind and The Voice and The Quarterly of the National Writing Project. She is one of the KaBooM! writers and I’m here to tell you that her short story in the KaBooM! anthology, When the Bough Breaks, is a joy to read.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer is a poetic force in Lexington. She is the founder and organizer of poetry and prose workshop groups, which meet regularly in Lexington, Kentucky, and recently celebrated their two-year anniversary. She serves as Deputy Editor-in-Chief for the international multimedia journal Public Republic, and the host for Accents – a Radio Show for Literature, Art and Culture. This is a weekly program on WRFL 88.1 FM, Lexington, 2-3pm every Friday. She also owns the recently launched Accents Publishing, with the mission to promote brilliant voices in an affordable publication format, and to foster an exchange of literature among different world cultures and languages. Katerina is author of The Air Around the Butterfly. She also has a Finishing Line chap, The Most, available as a pre-publication order.

To round out this Finishing Line night, Sherry Chandler — that’s me — also has a Finishing Line chap, Dance the Black-Eyed Girl that is still in print and I promise to read some poems from it. For the rest of my bio, more than you’ll ever care to know, see the About page here.

Alan MacKellar wears many hats. He is professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Kentucky, and award-winning photographer, and a poet. I have known and worked with Alan the poet for about a decade now and I admire his work very much.

Here, in keeping with my tradition of posting Kentucky poets during National Poetry Month, is a sample.

I Fall in Love with a Sparrow

                      why not
an icy winter has relented
             cleared               for the day
        my windows
          opened to
a lone colorless bird
   on the fence outside

            he fills my room
              with notes    riding through
           on   a perceptible breeze—

like many-flavored kayaks
                           bobbing
on an awakened stream—

his octaves
       startle my
                           papers

       saturate my palette
            with Prussian Blue
                      Emerald Green
                  Pyrrole Red

— Alan MacKellar, reprinted by permission of the author