Sherry Chandler

This photo is three or four weeks old but I think it’s pretty neat and I’ve been wanting to share it with you.

We planted this white pine as a live Christmas tree the year we moved to the farm, 1982. Our twin sons were rising 4 years old, and white pine was about as far as our budget would stretch. It was just about my height, 5 feet 6 inches.

We had several drought years after we moved onto the farm and the tree just sort of sat there for a while. When the rains came back, it began to grow and now tops 25 feet, about a foot a year, but it has always had that drought-stunted ugly spot in the low branches. Still, we’ve never considered cutting it. We’re sentimental about trees.

I’m telling you this now, not only because I took this neat photo but also because my son, who has been living with us for the last several years while he went to graduate school, moved out today to live in West Palm Beach. He’s on the road as I write this.

So the nest is empty a second time. And it is sad. But this time we know we can survive.

_____
In other news, my friend Georgia Green Stamper will be talking to Nick Lawrence tonight on Curtains @ Eight, WUKY, 91.3 on your FM dial, or streaming at http://www.wuky.org/index.html.

Georgia also has a segment of WUKY’s tonic in the can. tonic, the arts and music magazine with a twist, is only available online. Georgia’s segment is a conversation with Mike Graves, Leatha Kendrick, and me. More information when I have it.

The subject of both shows is, of course, Georgia’s new book You Can Go Anywhere from the Crossroads of the World (Wind, 2008).

Georgia will also be reading from the book at Joseph-Beth Booksellers on Sunday, June 22 at 2:00 p.m.

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.

Tomorrow is Kentucky Writers Day, an official state “holiday,” and to mark the occasion, the Kentucky Arts Council is sponsoring a reading and reception in the rotunda of the Capitol Building in Frankfort.

The reading will feature our current poet laureate, Jane Gentry, and two former laureates, James Baker Hall and Joe Survant. As an additional treat, the finalist and runner-up in Kentucky’s Poetry Out Loud competition will perform their winning recitations.

Readings are at 10:00 a.m. EDT with a reception to follow at 11:00.

This event is free and open to the public. I plan to be there.

Bill Goodman talks to Jane Gentry on KET’s One to One. You can watch the video or listen to the audio. Thanks to JimT for the tip.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the celebration of Kentucky’s writers, I give you a poem that Maurice Manning attributes to Gilbert Imlay, a man who might be called the first Kentucky writer. There is some irony in that, as there is about so much of Kentucky’s history. I’ve talked about Imlay here , here, and here and his novel The Emigrants here. The text of this poem, that appeared in the English magazine The Philanthropist on September 7, is from Manning’s excellent poetic biography of Daniel Boone, A Companion for Owls (Harcourt, 2004):

AN ODE TO KENTUCKY,
BY AN EMIGRANT

Hail modern Eden! — hail thy blooming sweets!
Thy promis’d favours, and thy fragrance, greets
My ardent wishes to salute thy plains,
And plant thy meadows with European grains.
Hail happy spot! that yields thy sweets profuse,
To waste in air, or rot in morning dews
Uncultivated—unenjoy’d by Man,
Reserv’d for latter ages in th’ Almighty’s plan.
No longer let thy fertile region waste
Its fruit (spontaneous fitted for the taste),
But let me now thy profited sweets caress,
Thy rich profusion taste, thy meads possess.
May heav’n inspire a train of honest swains,
emigrate, and cultivate thy plains,
And prove in earnest, what was said before,
That Eden now, is what in days of yore
It was to Adam, ‘ere the Garden fence
Had felt a breach from Satan’s impudence.
many sons of Freedom catch the fire,
And from those guilty madd’ing scenes retire,
(Which now envelope Europe more and more,
And threaten judgments on Great Britain’s shore)
To those sweet Arbours in Kentucky’s grant,
Whose rich production will supply each want;
Whose ample resources, with little toil,
Will crown their labours, and their cares beguile.
No taxes there oppress the lab’ring kind,
No tyrant Kings in chains their slaves to bind;
There are no game laws to prevent a man
From shooting hares, or pheasants if he can,
The Rivers there are free as we can wish,
And every man may catch a dish of fish.
No laws of primogeniture, to wrong
The most uncar’d for infant of the throng;
There are no lazy Parsons, who demand
The tenth or all the produce or the land;
Nor Pope, nor Bishop, to enslave the mind,
But all may liberty of conscience find.
No Burke’s, no Pitt’s, no Windham’s, nor Dundas’s,
To stigmatize you all as swine or asses;
There is no tax for “apeing your superiors,”
For all are equal there, and none inferiors.
There are no Nabobs, who from Indian plunder
Return, and GII their neighbours all with wonder;
No pamper’d hosts of pensioners you’ll find,
live upon th’ industry of mankind.
No hireling spies, nor foul informers there,
To herd amongst you, merely to ensnare
No harden’d crimps in government employ,
To steal your children, or your youths decoy
No prostitution stains that happy clime,
Because no Prince to patronize the crime;
But every man may there in peace combine,
He leaves his progeny a competes
Then hasten to Kentucky’s fruitful soil.
Nor longer in European fetters toil;
Possess this land of liberty and plenty,
Arid say “the despots of the earth have sent ye”

The quality of mercy is not strain’d;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this-
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea,
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.
— Portia’s speech from Act IV, Scene I of The Merchant of Venice, text from Project Gutenberg.

It is Poem in your Pocket Day and I thank Margo Berdeshevsky for reminding me of this passage in her Poet’s Pick last week.

Garrison Keillor threw a sonnet contest. Results, winner and 32 finalists, here. Or you can listen to a streaming broadcast of the show Sonnet in your Bonnet? in which members of the cast read the poems.

And also, in my list of local events this week, I, rather stupidly, forgot to mention that Lynnell Edwards will be reading from her new book The Highwayman’s Wife tonight at 6:30 at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington. The reading is free. The workshop afterwards is $25. Tonight’s event is, I think, the last of the CCLL’s New Books by Great Writers Series for this season.

Which reminds me, in turn, of Alfred Noyes’s poem “The Highwayman”. I submit this link to you as your bonus poem.

Also, while you’re planning your weekend, remember the reading and reception to celebrate the release of Leatha Kendrick’s newest poetry collection, Second Opinion (David Robert Books). The reception is from 6:30-8:00 pm at the Carnegie Center, 251 W. Second St., Lexington.

Though Alicia Stallings is not really tall, she gives the impressive of being long and thin. She has a long thin face with a long thin nose and her blond hair, cut jaw-length, is straight and sleek. She has a way of constantly smoothing the left forelock as she reads and tucking it behind her ear, though it had been securely tucked all along. Her voice is thin and reedy, a little hoarse. She sips water frequently. She is dressed in black; she is a poet after all, but her black capri pants have a bright red band and her shawl is decorated with silver threads and wine-dark velvet. She wears three inch black heels with rounded toes and an ankle strap. Across the vamp of the right one runs a green stem that continues across the left to culminate in a red rose that droops over the outside of the left shoe. She turns her ankles as she reads, tilting those high high heels like a child playing grownup.

From this thin reed of a flute, a sort of feminine panpipe, issues a lyric voice of some power and range.

Gamine is the right word for the look, gamine perhaps the right word for the intelligence that is at once mischievous, playful to the point of impudence, and a bit of an outlaw, though she does work in “received forms” and take as her subject matter the old Greek myths.

Perhaps I should be very careful to specify that I mean a bit of a poetic outlaw, a woman who will write a series of limericks on classical subjects for example, considering what Stallings posted on the Harriet blog on Monday before I heard her read on Tuesday:

I’ve been thinking a lot about translation, not just because I was on a panel about poetry, philosophy, and translation, but because I have been in the act of translation… that is “carrying across” boundaries–myself, my luggage, my family. Because of a paperwork glitch in a visa in 1997, which means he must check the “yes” box on the green form coming into the country which asks if you have ever had problems with the INS, my Greek husband still encounters difficulties when we go through passport control. We inevitably get sent to the Orange Room (or whatever it is called in the particular airport we are in), along with various resident aliens and visitors whose paperwork or appearance or demeanor has somehow sent up flags with the immigration officer.

So there we are, with a 3 year old who has been 10 hours cooped up on a plane, now running wildly around, getting shouted at whenever he crosses an ominous red line in the carpet, as we wait to find out if they will let my husband into the country, or, for some arbitrary reason or other, send him back on the next plane out. There are no rights here–no rights to an attorney, no rights just because you are married to a citizen. Everyone in the room is exhausted and tense. Some have the stoical resignation of those used to being under the arbitrary sway of civil servants. I wonder how many US citizens even know of the existence of such rooms and corridors, conviently out of sight, in the airport, behind which are interview rooms and restraining cells, limbos of all kinds, and some circles of hell.

I heard Stallings read at Georgetown College, where she claimed Kentucky roots, so they made it into the country and I can attest that son Jason is impishly cute. Knowing what they went through makes me double grateful for the experience of the reading.

If you have not read Stallings’ poetry, do. You’ll find a sampling of poems from her first collection, Archaic Smile, at this link.

Added: As Andrea points out below in the comments, Stallings blogs today about being in bourbon country and not able to buy a beer at a service station. Maybe she should have asked for a mint julep??

Ha ha.

Anyway, the posting is doubly appropriate because, as Andrea guessed, I did use this description of Stallings as one of my close observations for Leatha Kendrick’s Master Class in Poetry at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning (though I may have written it anyway, being always in the market for blog fodder). And also because Stallings discusses Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station,” which is one of the poems Leatha includes often in her workshop packets. And so the universe comes into one of its momentary alignments.

Here is Stallings:

Which in turn has been making me think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station.” I am an ardent admirer of Bishop, but it has taken me years and years to get over an initial dislike of this poem.

I had never much liked the “Oh, but it is dirty!” opening, or the somewhat self-consciously humorous “Be careful with that match!” The tone is hard to pin down (oily?)–bemused, almost affectionate, but also… well, condescending. The narrator finds it difficult to imagine why (oh why) someone would bother with such niceties as a doily or a begonia in such a dirty place. And then the flatness (deliberate of course) of the ending, “Somebody loves us all.”

Even when I recognized the skill in it–the control of the diction (grease-impregnated wickerwork” “quite comfy” “hirsute begonia”), which, perhaps implied, is above the diction level of the attendants, the control of assonance (”heavy with grey crochet”)–how “dirty” and “oily” somehow combine to make “doily”–I still had trouble liking the poem. The only parts I liked without reservation were “Somebody waters the plant,/ or oils it, maybe” and the ESSO-SO-SO-So part.

It doesn’t seem so condescending to me now, more arch and poised and humorous

…

So I guess what I mean to say is I’ve come around to “Filling Station.” I like it, I admire it, though it still isn’t my favorite Bishop poem.

If you haven’t read “Filling Station,” it is here. And I urge you to read the whole of Stallings analysis of the poem here.

Just to let you know, I’ll be doing the First Friday reading with Leslie Shane at the Kentucky Coffeetree Café in Frankfort on October 5, 7:00 p.m. Singer, songwriter, guitarist Samuel Tyrone Cotton and bass guitarist Danny Kiely will provide the music. Cover is $10. Cover is divided among the evening’s presenters.

You all know who I am.

I hope.

Leslie Shane is a fine poet who lives in Monterey and does book binding and typesetting for Larkspur Press. She will be reading from her first book, a collection of haiku, Point of Rock, published by Larkspur.

Larkspur has operated for over 30 years in rural Montery producing fine hand-set, hand-bound editions for many local writers.

Cotton’s guitar stylings combine classical techniques and blues, using classical right-hand arpeggio runs with blues chords. I don’t know his work, and I’m looking forward to closing that gap in my education.

Hope to see you there.

It’s Women’s Equality Day:

August 26 of each year is designated in the United States as Women’s Equality Day. Instituted by Rep. Bella Abzug and first established in 1971, the date commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Woman Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave U.S. women full voting rights in 1920.

And I can’t think of a better way to celebrate it or to spend a Sunday evening than by going to Peace Work, an interactive program of poetry & music about cultivating peace with George Ella Lyon, poet, & Roberta Guthrie, cellist.

The program’s title “Peace Work” comes from quilting. It echoes the quilting bee as a community event where women gathered to stitch fragments of their lives together in beautiful patterns. Piece by piece the quilt emerged. Our hope is that, through listening to poetry and music and writing whatever response they call up, participants will experience peaceful hearts. At the closing of the program those who wish will place their peace words on a large poster with a quilt border.

The event takes place at 4 pm at the Quaker Meeting House, 649 Price Avenue, Lexington (map).

The event is free and open to the public. Donations will benefit the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice.

Yesterday was a beautiful day to fly, though it didn’t seem so when hubby and I set out from Paris in the dark and the fog. The little Conair shuttle that was to take me to Cincinnati was dripping with condensation and my window seat was fogged useless.

But when the plane began to accelerate for take-off, the fog rolled away in streams of water and I had a beautiful clear view of the Bluegrass draped in mist. A little mountain range of fog followed the Licking River into the Ohio, and even that broad stream had its share of rising vapor. Later, crossing what was probably West Virginia, the hollers and valleys, the whole catchment structure, were outlined in mist while the tree-covered mountains stood out green.

I caught the ten o’clock shuttle to West Chester from the Philadelphia airport at ten and was in my dorm room by eleven.

Last night I was fed on filet mignon and asparagus with a Chilean red wine. I ate at the same table as Robert Shaw, who is here with his wife and brother. But since it was a table for eight and I was four people away, I didn’t get to talk to him or even hear anything he said.

Kay Ryan was the keynote speaker. She read what she called her “increasingly dessicated” work in a lovely new music building on campus. Ryan was a fine reader, relaxed, witty, unpretentious, unself-conscious. She had her audience in the palm of her hand.

Have my conference with Molly Peacock at ten.

Addendum: Have just been correcting typos and misspellings in the posts of the last few days. I am appalled at myself. Put it down, please, to exhaustion and a laptop screen that displayed text in about six point type.

Last Friday, taking youse guys on A Tour of My Blogroll, I featured Sandra Beasley’s reflections on this year’s Poetry Out Loud national finals and smiled a bit at the notion of a Kentucky boy from rural Trimble County taking a stab at Langston Hughes’s “Weary Blues,” a poem from both a time and place very alien to him.

Looks like I get to smile out of the other side of my mouth now. Dean Muir’s performance was good enough to get him into those national finals. Only twelve finalists were chosen.

So Dean did all right for himself and more power to him!

He’s pictured here performing at the Kentucky Writers’ Day Celebration.

Meanwhile, taking some umbrage at my statement that Poetry Out Loud may be more performance than poetry, a correspondent has written to chide me gently thus:

…a good “theater” (or speech team) coach would be emphasizing the student’s understanding of the poem. It is what makes the difference between “acting at acting” and truly “interpreting.”