Sherry Chandler

James Baker Hall Memorial Prize in Poetry

New Southerner announces ‘James Baker Hall Memorial Prize in Poetry’

New Southerner is pleased to announce the James Baker Hall Memorial Prize in Poetry, an annual award to be offered along with the magazine’s literary prizes in fiction and nonfiction beginning this fall.

Hall, who died June 25 at his home near Sadieville, Kentucky, was slated to serve as final judge in poetry for this year’s contest. His widow, author and poet Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, has agreed to take his place. Her most recent works include Dividing Ridge, a poetry collection, and At the Breakers, a novel.

“Jim’s life and work embody New Southerner’s spirit and the sense of community and creativity we hope to inspire,” said Bobbi Buchanan, editor-in-chief. “We’re proud to honor his memory with an annual award in his name.”

Hall, 74, was a prolific writer, beloved teacher and critically acclaimed photographer. He authored several poetry collections, including Praeder’s Letters and The Mother on the Other Side of the World, as well as the blackly comic coming-of-age novel Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings.

Hall graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1957, earned a master of arts at Stanford, and taught at several universities before becoming an English professor at UK in 1973. He served as director of UK’s creative writing program for 25 years and was named Kentucky Poet Laureate in 2001. Among his many awards, Hall received a Stegner Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Prize and an honorable mention in the San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival.

The New Southerner Literary Contest opened April 1, and submissions of poetry, fiction and nonfiction will be accepted through Oct. 1. The winner in each category will receive $200, publication in the magazine’s winter issue online and publication in the annual print anthology.

In addition to Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, this year’s final judge in fiction is Janna McMahan (author of Calling Home and The Ocean Inside) and in nonfiction, Cathleen Medwick (author of Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul and contributing editor to O, The Oprah Magazine).

A $10 entry fee covers up to three poems, each up to 50 lines; or a single work of fiction or nonfiction, up to 5,000 words. Entries must be the author’s original, unpublished worked and suitable for publication in New Southerner. The quarterly online magazine is dedicated to promoting self-sufficient living, environmental stewardship and local economies. It seeks to publish relevant articles, art and literature, as well as works by writers with a Southern connection, and works written with a Southern slant or that focus on Southern issues, people and places.

Complete contest guidelines are available at www.newsoutherner.com. From the menu, click “Submissions,” then click “Contest Submissions.”

Memorial for James Baker Hall

from the Lexington Herald-Leader:

One of Hall’s friends, poet Maurice Manning, made the sniffling crowd burst into laughter by reading Hall’s irreverent poem The Old Athens of the West Is Now a Bluegrass Tour, which includes these lines:

Lexington, dear heart, you old whore

You didn’t know you were for sale ’til you’d been bought

Rowdy, low-rent, coal money named J.W. in town on weekends for the game

Big Lincoln

Tossing big bills and quarters at your best fast-dance band

Then passing out on the table.

Memorials

Ace Weekly’s James Baker Hall Memorial issue downloadable at this link. Or if you want to go direct to the PDF, here.

By the way, in the photo on the Ace site — Wendell Berry, Jim Hall, Ed McClanahan, & Gurney Norman — I just want to add the caption: One of these things is not like the others.

Of course, there are several ways you can group them. Two poets laureate in the group.

Thanks to Ann Lederer from drawing my attention to this issue.

I should also announce the James Baker Hall Memorial that will take place in Gratz Park here in Lexington on July 11 from 4:00 – 6:00. (If the weather is forbidding, the ceremony will move inside the Carnegie Center.) Afterwards, there will be a reception in the Carnegie Center, with food and drink and poetry. Please celebrate Jim, if you wish, by bringing along a poem to read. And please forward this message to any friends. Check the Kentucky Literary Newsletter for updates.

James Baker Hall (1935-2009)

The Mother on the Other Side of the World

a yellow cat from the next field over hungry finds
her way to the feed bowls inside our toolshed atop
the deepfreeze our striped gray lets this happen
then moves low to the ground
into position crouching outside
staring at the only escape
too frightened now
to eat the stray too stares at it
neither can see the other
for the longest time
something dark emerges
almost audibly circles
of their silence their
motionlessness pulse out
into the greater commotions the spins and counterspins
including the entire backyard the neighboring fields
many horses the adjoining areas
each of us moving in God knows
how many different directions at once
these two cats one almost wild
the other almost domesticated
get their version of it
line up perfectly
great longing compacted
their own little seesaw
the whole backyard seesaws
the mother on the other side
of the world
many fears
but only this one silence
the stray’s tail was all I saw
of her when she got out of there
that night beginning the plot of this story
I was to see about that much of her
again the next night in my headlights
at the side of a narrow road
a half mile away
yellow eyes
echoing outward the darkness it was
gonglike and out there in the expanding middle
I was to see more and more of her
in the days to follow
she hangs out in the culvert
I pull off the road and climb down
with a plastic cup of food
emptying it out on a scrap board I took down there
she stays at the other end of the culvert
as though she’d never ever come closer
sweet talk doesn’t run her off
but she prefers quiet it seems
occasionally she’ll have a dead mouse
or chipmunk prominently displayed
a gift for me perhaps or maybe
a reminder of the role
she allows me to play
she never lets me see her
lick herself or sleep

— James Baker Hall, The Mother on the Other Side of the World (Sarabande, 1999)

And now Jim Hall has gone to join that mother on the other side of the world and my world is diminished. He touched my life. His influence was profound. He will always be part of me, down where the deep-feeders lie.

__________
Normandi Ellis invites memories of JBH here.

Another tribute here, with a poem.

Robert Penn Warren

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.

Kentucky Writer’s Day, April 24

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”

Cat with Shawnee

from The Buffalo
crossing the yard to the old wall
I'm drawn along a circle
through each thing a full moon
seen over a considerable area of the earth
including the vast oceans rises
and walks down the wall
and through me
in the evolving white shape of a cat
for years these stones lay afield
gathering his footsteps even the clicks
sound old and have come a long way
his fur slipping through my hands
what did my ancestor hear
upon seeing the Shawnee step into
this moonlight with a small stone taken up
and shaped to his use what did the Shawnee hear
when the gun was cocked where did the sounds go
when the buffalo were slaughtered...

— James Baker Hall, The Mother on the Other Side of the World (Sarabande, 1999)