Sherry Chandler

They call it stormy Monday

It’s George Washington’s birthday, Google is playing Big Brother (a move that seems somewhat hypocritical, given Google books), Dick Cheney is still bragging with impunity about his war crimes, The NYTimes says millions of the unemployed will go for years without finding jobs, and last week’s snow has been replaced by this week’s drizzle. Seems like a good time to go play with the Code Organ. Thanks to Dave and Terry.

I should remind you of a couple of good readings this week in the local area.

Holler Poets Reading Series 22 is scheduled for Wednesday February 24th at Al’s Bar, 601 North Limestone, Lexington. Featured readers are Leatha Kendrick and Brett Eugene Ralph, music by underground legend Paul K. open mic begins at 8:00 p.m.

On Thursday, February 25th at 7 PM, Carmichael’s Books, 2720 Frankfort Avenue, Louisville, will host an event with authors Bob Hill and Jim Tomlinson that will be part reading, part reunion and plenty of fun. Longtime Courier-Journal columnist and author Bob Hill and award-winning Berea writer Jim Tomlinson will discuss their work and the unlikely paths that led two high school classmates from a small town in Illinois into writing careers that would converge in Kentucky decades later. The event runs from 7:00 – 9:00.

For other local reading events, check out the Kentucky Literary Newsletter.

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?

Announcements

Isn’t that a sterling blog post title?

I was thinking the other morning that, if I got to start over again with this blog, that I would just have numbered the posts. I would now be up to 3,239.

Oh well. Some things.

__________
Following Lance Mannion, here are some ways to help Haiti.

Doctors Without Borders
American Red Cross

__________

Mick Kennedy has asked us to remind everybody that they still have three days to get their submission in for The Heartland Review’s 2010 Joy Bale Boone Prize. January 16 is a postmark deadline. Guidelines at the link. Leatha Kendrick is the judge this year.

__________

The Review has also put out a call for art.

The Heartland Review and Morrison Gallery at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College invite submissions of artwork for a juried exhibition. The theme for the 2010 show is inspired by the idea of “organic setting.” Over the last hundred years artists have continually turned to organic design as a response to the growing ubiquity of mass-produced, machine-made and computer-generated designs. For some, organic is an attempt to reevaluate what it means to be “modern. “ We welcome works of art of every media type and style that address the topic of organic, organic design or organic setting through one or more of the following themes:

• Nature
• Natural Materials
• The Body
• Responses to Modernity
• Identity
• Environmentalism
• Urbanism

The Heartland Review asks for a $10 contribution for up to six entries to support the journal and the contest/show. Artists may submit up to six pieces; however, all artwork must have been created in the last six months prior to submission. The deadline for submissions is 1 February 2010. Finalists will be selected by a committee composed of two professional artists, two Morrison Gallery representatives, and one representative from The Heartland Review.

The artwork of these finalists will be displayed in the Morrison Gallery at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College and be published in the 2010 spring/fall issues of The Heartland Review. The artwork which best depicts an “organic setting” will be awarded the 2010 spring issue’s cover and a $250 cash prize. The gallery exhibit will run from 5 April – 14 May 2010, with a reception to be held on Thursday, 15 April.

Interested individuals should submit:

• A digital image of their work to be considered (no larger than 300 dpi resolution)
• Full identification of the work (artist name, phone number, title, medium, dimension, and value)
• A short artist statement, no longer than one page in length
• $10 contribution, with checks made payable to “The Heartland Review”

Send submissions or questions via email to: Mick.Kennedy@KCTCS.edu or creynolds0077@kctcs.edu; please include “Heartland Art” in the email subject heading.

$10 contribution should be mailed to:

THR Art Exhibit, c/o Mick Kennedy
Elizabethtown Community and Technical College
600 College Street Road
Elizabethtown, KY 42701

__________

Speaking of Leatha Kendrick, don’t miss the opportunity to read her List Poem at the Public Republic.

Also new at the Public Republic, Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s interview of Sheri Wright, “Poetry was a voice I didn’t know I had”.

The shape of a poem

I am taking an eight-week poetry class at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. Called “The Path of a Poem,” the class is led by Leatha Kendrickk. I take Leatha’s classes whenever they’re offered because she is not only a fine poet and a fine teacher with a wide-ranging knowledge of poetry and prosody but also because her classes always attract the best poets in the area, so the quality of the discussion is high and often technical.

All of which leads me to my point, which is that last night was my night to be critiqued and I had submitted the sonnet crown that has been languishing in my drawer in one form or another for, well, ten years if you go back to some of the root ideas.

The verdict last night was the same as always: there’s some great stuff here but it doesn’t quite make it all the way there.

I ask myself why I keep resurrecting this monster. Over the years I’ve been forced to abandon any number of poems by the knowledge that they were never going to quite make it. As William Stafford says, we have to write our bad poems as well as our good ones.

But this poem is different.

Maybe it’s just my way of running scales. Even master musicians have to do it. Maybe this is just my practice piece, the poem where I burnish up my formal chops.

But why bother with form? Part of the reason is explained by this passage I ran across this morning reading in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones. Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). The question was: Would you be offended to be called a formalist?. The answer, in part:

I wouldn’t be offended but I think it would be a mistake. “Formalist” to me sounds like a kind of doctrinaire position. I totally believe in form; but quite often, when people use the term, they mean shape rather than form. There’s the sonnet shape, fair enough, but it’s not just a matter of rhyming the eight lines and the other six; they happen to be set one on top of each other like two boxes, but they’re more like a torso and pelvis. There has to be a little bit of muscle movement, it has to be alive in some sort of way. A moving poem doesn’t just mean that it touches you, it means it has to move itself along as a going linguistic concern. Form is not like a pasty cutter — the dough has to move and discover its own shape. [p. 447]

If you think about that — you don’t impose a sonnet shape on a poem, you write a poem that discovers its shape as a sonnet.

Sounds mystical but it’s a matter of running the scales until your fingers bleed and then, if you also have some talent (not necessarily genius), you can improvise, you can be free-form within the form.

I think that’s why I keep worrying at my sonnet crown. Every time I ratchet it up to the next level of competence, I discover a level beyond that.

If I can get it right, maybe I’ll have become a poet.

Which, when I think about it, will never happen. If one practices poetry, one is always becoming. That’s part of the deal.

Licking Valley Writers Workshop

I will be signing from 4:00 to 5:45 tomorrow at the Licking Valley Writer’s Workshop sponsored by the Licking Valley Campus of Maysville Community and Technical College.

The event will be held at the historic Prizing House* and will be followed by a dinner with music by Rusted Clay. After dinner, and Kentucky’s Poet Laureate Gurney Norman will deliver the Clay Lecture.

The signing includes a stellar collection of Kentucky’s authors: Gurney Norman, Frank X. Walker, George Ella Lyon, Anne Shelby, Leatha Kendrick, Diane Gilliam, Jill Morgan, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, Marianne Worthington, David Dick, Karen Angelucci, Lynn Shaffer, Buck Pennington, and Britt Kennerly.

On Saturday, workshops will be presented by Walker, Gilliam, Lyn, Shelby, Norman, and Kendrick.

This Licking Valley Writers Workshop was conceived and created, as was the Licking Valley Campus itself, by Bruce Florence, a woman of vision. I, for one, am very grateful to her.

__________
*A prizing house was a place where cured and graded tobacco was “prized” into hogsheads for shipping.

Leatha Kendrick

City Spring

These bare sticks ready to break
into flame, into billows,
clouds
                           brought down to paradise us
for a season. Cumulus pears shadow
streets again, and night�s
                                                      cold compress
flattens jonquils. We slide under the sun�s
acute eye toward her full face,
                                                      that slow-built
mandala of summer. Though afternoons pillow
bare arms, spring ground�s too cool
for lying down. Heady with gaudy odors,
sudden color
                                                     surely we�ll ascend
despite ourselves, along with blades of grass.
Our soles touch
                                                    earth�s faint echo
under feet of asphalt, through wheels
that never pause. Ah! April�
sulking lover,
                                                    faithful in our intemperate time.

— Leatha Kendrick, from Science in Your Own Back Yard (Larkspur Press, 2003)
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Leatha Kendrick is the author of three volumes of poetry, the most recent one, Second Opinion (David Roberts Books, 2008). She currently leads workshops in poetry and life writing at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, KY, and directs their reading series, New Books by Great Writers. Her poems and essays appear widely in journals and anthologies including Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia; The Kentucky Anthology�Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State; and I to I: Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists.

You can find a further sampling of Leatha’s work at this link.

Ernie O’Dell

First Tools

With a candleflame
I could create a holy place
a glowy breath to read by
to toast some bread
to guard me
from the hounds of night.

But all I’m given is a spark—
no, not even that.
Just two sharp stones—
one to hold
one to strike with—
and a craving for light.

— Mary E. O’Dell (aka Ernie)

I ran across this poem this morning in the Fall 1998 edition of Wind magazine, an issue produced back when Charlie Hughes and Leatha Kendrick were the editors. They did great work. The issue has poems by Diane Lockward, Robin Morgan, David Citino, and Charles Semones, among others.