Sherry Chandler

Harrodsburg Festival of Books and Arts

Over 50 authors and artists will exhibit their work on Main Street. Come meet, talk and get to know some of the best our state and region have to offer. I’ll be there, in booth 53, sitting in my brand-new Rite-Aid special folding canopy chair. Alas, I’ve had to cancel because of some personal problems. I am disappointed. But I was just a tiny player in this event, and I urge you to check it out.

Poems by template?

Michele Battiste is trying a template experiment in form here. She explains:

This is an experiment in form, in constraint. In March 2010, I blogged about the role of constraint in conceptual poetry. You can read that post here: “Tie it Up, Tie it Down” on Zapped Poetry.

What I hope to do here is to explore the limit of the template as a form, to investigate what sort of constraints it offers and how those constraints differ from, say, meter, rhyme and traditional forms such as the sonnet or sestina or villanelle.

To create my templates, I’ve co-opted an online program normally used for corporate marketing and research purposes: Survey Monkey. I’m interested in how the digital interface affects the writer’s experience, how the concept of “play” factors in the experience, how the digital interface either expands the limits of the forms or speeds their ruptures, and any ways that the writer can subvert the form. And when is the form exhausted? And is filling in boxes in responses to prompts an act of writing poetry?

Currently, I have three templates available. Once a poem is completed, you have the option of allowing me to post your poem on this website, either attributed to you or anonymously. You also have the option of remaining completely anonymous. So please click on a template and write. Or play. Or break the form. Have fun. Create one poem or many. And if you’d like to email me comments about your experience or your thoughts regarding the experiment, you can contact me at mcbattiste__at__hotmail__dot__com.

You have a choice of three types of poem, confessional, love, condemnation. Michelle has posted several confessional poems created by this template, but no love or condemnation poems. I wonder why that is.

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By the way, folks, there’s an Annual Chapbook Festival at CUNY. This year on May 3 & 4.

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And for those who’ve been reading here for a while: ‘Rock war’ ends as Ohio lets Ky. take river marker

Links to posts on the rock kidnapping story here

Kentucky Writers Day and other Stuff

The official celebration of Kentucky Writers Day, sponsored by the Kentucky Arts Council, takes place on April 23 at 10:00 a.m. in the rotunda of the Capitol Building in Frankfort. The event is free and open to the public. Featured readers will be current Kentucky Poet Laureate Gurney Norman and past Poets Laureate Jane Gentry Vance, Sena Jeter Naslund, Joe Survant and Richard Taylor. The first and second place winners of Kentucky’s Poetry Out Loud competition will also perform.

A reception will follow on the Capitol mezzanine. Wonderful chance to schmooze.

And I just discovered that KAC has a site featuring videos of Kentucky poets laureate reading at Kentucky Writers Day in years past, including some of James Baker Hall at what I believe was his final Writers Day reading after he was very ill. The same page has teacher’s resource materials for our laureates. A fine service from KAC.

The 14th Kentucky Writers Day Celebration at Historic Penn’s Store at Gravel Switch will take place on April 23, 24, 25. Follow this link for a schedule and this link for directions.

On April 21 at 7 p.m., The Heartland Review will present a reading by contributors to its annual Joy Bale Boone Prize issue, including first (E. Gail Chandler), second (Olga-Maria Cruz) and third-place (Libby Falk Jones) winners and this year’s judge, Leatha Kendrick. The reading will take place in the Morrison Gallery of the Administration Building. This event is free and opened to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

On Thursday, April 22, Hazard Community and Technical College is holding their 17th annual Evening with Poets (add a comma and that might make a nice painting “Evening, with Poets”) and celebration of Kudzu 2010. The evening begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Stephens Library on the HCTC Hazard campus. Jim Webb and Bianca Spriggs are featured readers. A little bird tells me that E. Gail Chandler won first place in the annual Kudzu poetry prize as well as in the Joy Bale Boone prize competition.

You’ll find an nterview with Dorothy Sutton at Public Republic, Charlie is My Darling. The Charlie of the old Scots ballad was Bonnie Prince Charlie, I think, but Dorothy has another Charlie in mind. Which one? Read the interview.

Vote For The 2010 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere

This from The New Yorker: Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?

I’m not sure how much I should rejoice when one monopoly trumps another. Because I don’t intend to buy a Kindle or an iPad and because I write poetry, books of which no one buys anyway, I’m not sure this cataclysm will cause much of a wave in my little backwater.

National Bookmobile Day

Today, which I’ve persisted all day in thinking is April 15, is actually April 14 and April 14 is the first-ever National Bookmobile Day.

For more than 100 years, bookmobiles have served rural, urban, suburban and tribal areas, bringing access to information and life-long learning resources to all classes and communities as a central part of library service. National Bookmobile Day will serve to highlight their value and extend their reach.

I got this bit of information from The Bourbon County Citizen, our local weekly. The Citizen quotes State Librarian and Commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Libraries, Wayen Onkst, as saying:

Our fleet of 85 Bookmobiles is the largest in the nation. And the celebration is especially significant in Kentucky.

When I was a girl, the local general store was a stop and a drop spot for the local bookmobile. Back in 2005, I made a post on the subject in which I said this:

During most of the years of my girlhood, my aunt ran the country store at Sweet Owen, a once-thriving community that, like many in Owen County, had been drained of population and businesses by paved roads and the automobile. Once a week the bookmobile came to Sweet Owen store and, after it moved on, left off a little stack of books that sat on a shelf to be checked out on the honor system. I spent many a summer afternoon sitting on a little bench on the store porch, reading from this rather eccentric assortment of books. It was there that I discovered Dr. Seuss, Moss Hart, and Lizzie Bordon, and it was there that I read The Thread That Runs So True.

The Thread that Runs So True is Jesse Stuart’s memoir of his life as an educator in Eastern Kentucky. According to my friend, Georgia Stamper, Stuart was instrumental in starting the bookmobile program in Kentucky. Her essay, “Jesse Stuart, the Bookmobile, and Me” won the 2007 Emma Bell Miles Award for Essay at the LMU Mountain Heritage Literary Festival

You can read an edited version of essay here. This version was published in the Owenton News-Herald. The relevant passage runs like this:

Then, last summer, talking with longtime Greenup County librarian, Dorothy Griffith, I learned that many believe Stuart literally talked Kentucky’s modern bookmobile system into existence. Again, I felt like I’d had the breath knocked out of me.

One of the first of those funny looking mint green bread trucks stuffed with books had sputtered to a stop in the rocky parking lot of my country schoolhouse. Afterwards, I was never the same. Maybe I would have gotten to college anyway. But I can’t imagine that I would be the same person without the hundreds – maybe thousands – of books I plucked from the bookmobile’s shelves during my growing up years. How had Jesse Stuart known I was hungry for books? There simply weren’t any at New Columbus Grade School except for our textbooks. The nearest library was fifteen, crooked miles away, and no one I knew owned more than a few volumes.

The world had navigated curvy, old Highway 330, then bumped down graveled KY 607 to stop and pick me up for the ride. Never mind that we had no cafeteria, no central heat, no indoor toilet. With books – Jesse knew – we could go anywhere.

While the bookmobile concept traces its roots to several early efforts, former Kentucky State Librarian James Nelson gives Jesse Stuart much of the credit for Kentucky’s modern bookmobile system.

“There is no question,” Nelson writes, “that the real genesis of the state’s famous fleet of bookmobiles occurred at the organizational meeting of the Friends of Kentucky Libraries in 1952. It was at this meeting that Kentucky author Jessie Stuart made an inspirational speech about the reading needs of rural families, and his comments got the right people motivated in the way that movements need to succeed.”

Louisville businessman, Harry Schacter, president of the Kaufman-Straus Department stores, was sitting in the audience that September day when Stuart stepped to the platform to speak. The contrast between Stuart’s rural Kentucky and Louisville’s neo-European Seelbach Hotel could not have been more stark. More significantly, the access to books and education available to the children who populated Stuart’s stories was vastly different than that enjoyed by the privileged Kentuckians gathered in the Seelbach’s gilded ballroom.

Unfortunately, the text of Stuart’s speech that day has not survived. But we know from newspaper accounts that he told his audience 80 percent of rural Kentuckians did not have assess to library service – a situation shared by 60 percent of all Kentuckians. We know that Stuart, the teacher, would have reminded his audience of Kentucky’s shameful illiteracy rate. We know – because this was Jesse Stuart – that he talked as if the future of the state depended on what he said that day. We know that when he finished speaking, Harry Schacter was an inspired man. Jesse Stuart had set him on fire.

Schacter had both the means and the connections to move mountains. In this case, he set about moving mountains of books to the rural areas of Kentucky. Within less than two years, over $300,000 dollars were raised to purchase bookmobiles, and hundreds of thousands of books had been donated. Eighty-four bookmobiles – reportedly they stretched along the route for a solid mile – were presented to the Library Extension Service at the State Fair in the fall of 1954. One of those came to Owen County. Kentucky has been the national leader in bookmobile service ever since.

There’s a granite monument dedicated to Jesse Stuart in the courthouse square in Greenup. But the vibrant fleet of Kentucky bookmobiles is a living memorial that will echo throughout all time, as Jesse once wrote, “telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.”

The stature of of Jesse Stuart in Eastern Kentucky cannot be overestimated. My young poet friend Matthew Haughton has written a long poem in tribute to Jesse that describes this statue. Matthew was raised in Greenup and felt that monumental influence. The poem is called “The Stiltwalker of Greenup County” and it is a very good poem. It’s currently in a book manuscript looking for a publisher. I hope some day to be able to share it with you.

Betty Gabehart Prizes

I’ve received this announcement from the Women Writers of Kentucky:

The Betty Gabehart Prize in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction is now accepting entries. The deadline is July 15, and winners will receive $100, two free passes to the conference, and an opportunity to read their winning entry during the conference. Please visit our Web site for submission guidelines.

I am very excited that Patricia Smith will be a presenter at this year’s Kentucky Women Writers Conference. She’ll perform at the Gypsy Poetry Slam on September 10 and teach a writing workshop on September 11 & 12. Nikole Brown will discuss Smith’s Blood Dazzler next Friday, April 16 at 12 noon at the Carnegie Center, 251 West Second Street.

Check out also the MotesBooks’ Gathering of Writers and Songwriters. Two dates: April 25-27 and May 20-22.

And Salt is accepting proposals.

Wildacres Writers Workshop

Last year I went, for the first time, to the Wildacres Writers Workshop. It was a wonderful experience. I was fortunate enough to receive the Katherine Osborne Scholarship, and I will be forever grateful. I wrote, I hiked, I partied (yes, serious me), I laughed, I made friends with some wonderful people and renewed friendships with some other wonderful people.

I posted a lot.

This year’s workshop is July 10 – 17 and faculty includes Janice Fuller, Ron Rash (workshop already filled), Philip Gerard, Lee Zacharias, Luke Whisnant, Gail Adams, Michael Parker, Abigail DeWitt, and Nancy Bartholomew.

The purpose of this post is to let people know that applications are still open for the 2010 scholarships, and the deadline for application has been extended until April 10.

The application is simple and the experience is wonderful.

Christmas at Keeneland

Preparations are under way here at our house for the Christmas at Keeneland Arts Fair over in Lexington next Saturday and Sunday.

Eighty-one artists will be there offering crafts from baskets to wood.

A great place to do your Christmas shopping.

The unfinished turned ornament shown here is made with tree of heaven (bowl) and ash (finial). The carved spoon below is cherry.

Look for TR at booth # 21. Visit his web page to see more of his work.

Look also for Toni Menk at booth #3. Toni is not only a great designer of glass beadwork but also a fine poet and a fellow member of the Green River Writers.

If you miss Christmas at Keeneland, TR will also have several pieces in the Third Annual Gallery & Gifts Holiday Market at the Scott County Arts & Cultural Center. The Gallery is located in the old jailer’s house, 117 North Water Street, Georgetown, Kentucky. The show opens on November 1 and will run through December 19. Gallery hours are 12 N to 4 pm, Tuesday through Saturdays, Sundays 1 to 4 pm.

And you can always purchase his work at the Kentucky Artisan Center or Appalachian Fireside Gallery.