Sherry Chandler

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.

Glimpses

In my recent readings, I have run across two poems that capture a phenomenon we’ve all experienced when we’ve lost some one — catching glimpses of that person in a crowd, walking down a street —

In both of these Kentucky poets, the lost person is the father. First, from Jane Gentry:

For My Father
Athens, Kentucky

Hand
After the long failure of his farmer’s body,
after the undertakers wrestled him,
zipped in plastic like last season’s clothes,
. . . I left

As a train carried me into London
I saw him look up from some hammering beside the track,
his shapeless cap pushed back.
He waved an old-gloved hand at me
familiar as sunlight
and opened his joyful smile
in a greeting I was already past.

— Jane Gentry, from A Garden in Kentucky

And then from Dorothy Sutton

After He Died

I saw him everywhere. Each tattered,
sagging jacket shuffling around
the corner, the coat he used to wear.

The same as it was with our old black cat,
For the longest time after he died,
I caught glimpses of him from
the corner of my eye, spooky
shadow eluding my sight.

. . .

Loneliness limping after me
from room to room . . .

— Dorothy Sutton, from Backing Into Mountains

BTW, in the latest issue of Pegasus from the Kentucky State Poetry Society, you’ll find a review of Backing Into Mountains by Elaine Fowler Palencia. Elaine does Dot’s book much more justice than I did here on the blog. The review begins like this:

For a long time, poetry has been becoming more and more like prose. Most of the poems picked for Garrison Keillor’s daily poem on NPR, for example, are really little essays or anecdotes broken into lines. So it is with special pleasure that I read Dorothy Sutton’s collection Backing Into Mountains, which employs the full workshop of poetic tools to produce verse that is melodic, rhythmic, and unafraid of rhyme — eye, slant, alliteration and more — yet still originial and subtle in experssion. Read these poems aloud for the sheer enjoyment of getting your mouth around “endless mounds of tender chicken, / insanely delicious epiphanies / filling the platters of Paradise.”

— Elain Fowler Palenica, “Book Beat,” in Pegasus, Winter/Spring 2010

__________
Note: Poetry month First Friday at the Kentucky Coffeetree Café features two of my favorite area poets (I have so many favorite area poets — in fact, if you’re an area poet, you’re probably one of my favorites). But I digress. This time it’s J. Stephen Rhodes and Katerina Stoykova-Klemer. Music is by Little Maggie.

If you think you’ll go, you’d better reserve a seat. This event is very popular.

Dorothy Sutton

Women writing in Kentucky today share two themes.

One is a loss of culture. Not nostalgia precisely, though it can look a little like it. Rather an urgency to record what was of value about the older skower ways before they disappear.

The second is an honoring of our elders, a need to record the extraordinary heroism of their ordinary lives (a phrasing I think I may have stolen from my friend Georgia Green Stamper).

In Backing Into Mountains (Wind Publications, 2009), Dorothy Sutton explores these themes with extraordinary grace, whether it be the Appalachian schoolbus drivers and mechanics of the title poem:

Your life depends on brakes and lights
up here in these Kentucky hills.
The school bus whines and groans to climb
through hollers, with creek-beds the only roads.
. . .
We try to maintain machines that can roll
without crashing, hold the young ones
back from the edge . . .

or Uncle Lester in “No Man’s Land”

One day he was husking the corn,
feeding the greedy, muddy pigs,
. . .
the next day halfway around the world
in Paris with the prostitutes of Pigalle
. . .
The next day mired in confused
trough trenches of muddy slop
. . .
the next day back in Pike County
slopping the hogs, begging the world
to stop . . .

This selection shows not only Sutton’s great compassion but also her craft: the circling around the sounds and images of pigs and slop in a way that is both humorous and heartbreaking.

Sutton explores far and wide in the matter of Kentucky, from Gorgeous George and Casey Jones to Robert Penn Warren and George Keats.

“Casey Jones” is one of my favorite poems in this collection. Having grown up in a singing/strumming family, as many of us here in Kentucky did, I love the play on the theme of this most famous of all train ballads (not to be confused with the Grateful Dead’s Casey Jones) .

We’re the children of “Casey” Jones
from Cayce, Kentucky. In 1900,
Casey Jones died trying
to find the time he’d misplaced somewhere
between Memphis and Mississippi.
. . .
They dug him out, one legend says,
one hand on the throttle, to increase his speed,
the other hand firmly gripping the brake.

Here is the central dilemma of the theme of loss of culture. We tend, us older folk in Kentucky, to come from timeless sorts of places but now we are very much caught up in the rush of time. Our roots are in the folkways, our branches embrace Richard Dawkins and Picasso.

And right about now, Uncle Lester is crying “Whoa, damn you,” not just to the mule of the twentieth century but also to that last metaphor. Both of ‘em kind of got the bits in their teeth and took off.

Here’s a much better extended metaphor, from the Richmond Register:

Dublin poet Eileen Casey said recently of Sutton’s work: “The title poem of this collection pays tribute to the tenacity of the bus drivers of Appalachia, a cultural region in the Eastern United States, forced to breathtakingly negotiate very difficult terrain. In the same way, Dorothy Sutton takes each poem (and us) from one imaginative location to another, by the sheer force of her deep and intimate knowledge of what it is to be human. The poems are exquisitely crafted, steering through words, like those Appalachian bus drivers, trying to maintain machines that can roll without crashing, hold the young ones back from the edge, carry them all the places they need to go. These poems are a joy to read, in terms of capturing the cadences of lives lived and voices heard in the Kentucky of her childhood, different and yet the same as mine in Ireland. An emotional bridge is formed between Kentucky and the rest of the world, indeed a breathtaking reading experience.”

Dorothy Sutton is reading this Tuesday, March 9, at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning‘s Kentucky Great Writer series. It’s an evening to celebrate Wind Publications. Her fellow readers are J. Stephen Rhodes, author of The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (my remarks here) and Normandi Ellis, author of Fresh-Fleshed Sisters. The festivities begin with open mic signups at 6:30, featured readings begin at 7:30.

Eclectic Living Room

The Eclectic Living Room meets at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning one week before every Kentucky Great Writers reading to discuss and “celebrate” the work. The discussion is led by Leatha Kendrick, who is a wonderful appreciator of other people’s work and who, as a friend just said to me, reads like a writer. Most of those who attend the discussion are also writers. So, participants have an opportunity not only to explore the work that they will soon be hearing but also to hone their own writing skills. Each session ends with a writing prompt or exercise.

The Morris Book Shop is there to give participants a chance to look at and buy the books in question.

And sometimes, as last night, the group is privileged to have the publisher present to add his insights to both the writers and the publishing process.

At last night’s session we discussed the work of Normandi Ellis, Dorothy Sutton, and J. Stephen Rhodes, all three of whom have books out from Wind Publications and all three of whom will be reading next Tuesday, February 9, at the Carnegie Center as part of the Kentucky Great Writers Series (funded by LexArts). The featured readers begin at 7:30; the open mic begins at 6:30. Local folk, mark it on your calendar.

That address is 251 West Second Street, Lexington.

I consider all three of these fine writers personal friends and I have featured work by Steve, Dorothy, and Normandi here on the blog. I can attest that they are all great readers. It will be a fine evening.

I guess this reads a little bit like an infomercial, and I guess that’s all right. Who can you praise if you can’t praise your friends?

Dorothy Sutton

Dorothy M. Sutton ‘s bio says she was born in Todd County, Kentucky during the Great Depression, but that would make her older than I am, and I find that hard to believe. Like my own siblings, she began her education in a one-room schoolhouse and she has been publishing poetry in national journals since her days at Georgetown College in the late 1950s.

Dorothy says,

perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve done besides teaching at EKU is teaching Irish lit. in Ireland in ’96, and having one of my Darwin poems read by Richard Dawkins [Oxford U.] at the Royal Society in London. It’s the same society Issac Newton and Darwin himself belonged to.

You can read some of Dorothy’s Darwin poems yourself in her chapbook Startling Art: Darwin and Matisse (Finishing Line, 1999). In his foreword to this beautiful book, Guy Davenport said:

Mankind has been in a tragic fall all of this century. Our great hope is that the poets will guide us to when it will be “artfully fused together again.” Dorothy Sutton’s firm and careful eloquence makes it seem imperative that we keep winnowing the past for its enduring truths; that we keep entering rooms hung with paintings, poetry, and the other arts and sciences which speak revelations we’d thought “only lovers and nature could say.”

Here is “You Can Be Quite Deprived” from Startling Art:

You Can Be Quite Deprived

Before there was art,
it was something
that only lovers and nature could say.

You can be quite deprived
without realizing it.
One day, a painting, a strain
of music, a poem comes alive
in your eye, your ear, your hand,
whispers an immeasurably sad thing
so beautifully as to make you glad,
talks to you
in a quiet and steady hum,
blooms into a pungent jungle
of colors and sounds,
its resonant rhythms gently,
relentlessly stalking you
into the starkest, gloomiest
corners of your mind.

Admit it.
You were poor beyond measure
until you came into this room.