Sherry Chandler

All my people

Marianne Worthington is a woman of diminutive stature but expansive spirit, especially when it comes to her Appalachian roots. In her Finishing Line chapbook Larger Bodies than Mine, she explores those roots. The dedication to “all my people” takes in her kin in their sorrow, their pain, their human failings.

Women seem compelled to write poems about their grandmothers. I have written a fair number of them myself. Such writing, such remembering, is a way of honoring legacy. But, because grandmother poems are so common, they are very difficult to write. In inexperienced hands, grandmother poems risk cliché and sentimentality. Sentimentality is not to be confused with sentiment. Skilled craftswomen may rely on sentiment, a strategy Annie Finch would champion, but the line is thin.

So sure is Worthington’s craft, so strong her intelligence, that her grandmother poems sing us a new song of an old relationship. Worthington is fearlessly honest and without a trace of sentimentality:

Reading My Grandmother’s Diary

I believe her faith was clichéd
built on evangelists’ tracts and radio
sermons, the words on the air dropping
like sharp pebbles, pitting her wrists
and ankles where she tied herself
to the bed each morning unable to rise.
her mind picking its way through

another bitter day.

Though sometimes her vision is gentler and does partake of sentiment:

Porcelain

I wash Grandmother’s Japanese china,
a pattern with such an old fashioned name:
Arlene.

“Porcelain” is one of three unrhymed sonnets in the chapbook. They are my favorites in this 29-page collection. Worthington might be deemed a semi-formal poet. She uses a loose sonnet form but most of her poems are free verse, long of line and boxy in shape but with a strong underlying rhythms. Worthington is a scholar of traditional mountain music, and her immersion in music has influenced her poetic line.

The central portion of the book is devoted to poems about Father, including my favorite of the sonnets:

For the Young Girl Who Lost Her Father

I would not give him back to you, your father
as a healthy man. He would change who you
became. Instead I wuld give back your summers . . .

It is always a mistake to conflate the poetic voice with the poet, and Worthington is at work at a series of dramatic monologues about women in the early years of country-music radio. So she is known to take on a persona. Still, there is a strong autobiographical feel to this chapbook, a feel of honoring the past by looking at it with clear eyes.

I think Jeff Daniel Marion got it right in his cover blurb:

Haunted by the past, the poems in Larger Bodies Than Mine are incantations, spells changed with the hope of striking a balance in a world of struggle and suffering. In the face of brokenness and shattered remnants of lives, the poems themselves redeem loss and long for wholeness. Here is a strong and steady voice worthy of our hearing.

Larger Bodies Than Mine was given the Appalachian Book of the Year award in poetry for 2007.

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.

More items

Via Negative posting Honduran poetry here.

The Reluctant Poet Laureate

The Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature presents an opportunity to focus on the fine literature the state of Kentucky has produced, bringing it to the nation’s attention. Sarabande will publish one book annually of short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, a novella(s), or short novel. (Must be postmarked in July.)

Call for Submissions to Motes Books Motif 2 with the theme of “Chance.” Deadline September 1.

First Annual Ruth Redel Poetry Prize

Marianne Worthington

Of course, and thanks for the invitation. Here’s a new-ish poem from this manuscript I’m working on that includes “historical fiction” poems on women in early country music. (I hope the line breaks translate).

Cousin Emmy and Her Kinfolks
Showcar

My brother-in-law always drove the show
car, knew how to navigate every pig
track and back road without a map, could drive
safe in cities, too. Drop us at the load
out on time without a hitch. Cheerful he
was, and good hearted, a big grin to match
his wit. But Lord, he had enough of South
Knoxville still in him to park that show car
at a tilt under Mam�s old shed and prop
the door open, let his hunting dogs flop
in the back like a doghouse. So if you
were to come up on it, see that Cadillac
full of old yallow dogs, you�d think we were
right trashy. He kept the car shined up for us
and always tried to clean the seats, but we
were forever brushing dog hair
from each other�s hind ends before a gig,
blonde swirls and hanks we picked like strings,
strummed off quick
as a drop thumb on the banjo.

—Marianne Worthington, from Knoxville Girl, a work in progress

Marianne Worthington’s Finishing Line chapbook Larger Bodies Than Mine was named Appalachian Book of the Year Award for Poetry by the Appalachian Writers Association in 2007. She won the Sue Ellen Hudson Excellence In Writing Award in 2003 and was a 2005 finalist in the Sue Saniel Elkind Poetry Contest.

Marianne is editor of the just-published anthology Motif: Writing by Ear from MotesBooks for which she is hosting a reading in Knoxville this very day. If you happen to be down that way drop in to Carpe Librum Booksellers, 5113 Kingston Pike. Reading is from 2:00-3:00.

Marianne also hosts a dynamite radio show, Hillbilly Highway, each Wednesday from 3:00 – 4:00 on WCCR, University of the Cumberlands (99.4 FM). You can listen to the stream at this link. She plays “Roots with a twang and a curve! (no �hats� no Garth!)”