Sherry Chandler

This and that

Thanks to the Poetry Hut Blog for reminding me that time approaches for the National Book Awards. You can find the lists of finalists here, including the poets.

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Here’s something I picked up from Harry that I think you’ll love:

A spectacular and extremely rare textile, woven from golden-colored silk thread produced by more than one million spiders in Madagascar, goes on display Wednesday, September 23 in the Museum’s Grand Gallery. This magnificent contemporary textile, measuring 11 feet by 4 feet, took four years to make using a painstaking technique developed more than 100 years ago.

This unique textile was created drawing on the legacy of a French missionary, Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar in the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué worked to collect and weave spider silk but with limited success, and no surviving textile is now known to exist. Previously, the only known spider-silk textile of note was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, and it was subsequently lost.

Click through and watch the video.

BTW, Harry recently celebrated his fifth blogiversary, so I invite you to go over and congratulate him. I remember when his blog was called Stormy Petrel.

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The Dead Mule has its October 2009 issue up. Bucha neat stuff, include three poems by my old buddy Charlie Hughes, who deserves an award for the best Southern Legitimacy Statement going.

National Book Awards

Mark Doty has won the National Book Award for poetry for his book Fire to Fire.

Morning Edition has a nice feature on the awards here, and the National Book Foundation promises video of the awards dinner and readings soon.

Mark Doty blogs here.

Doty is an amazing poet, though I was sort of pulling for Patricia Smith for any number of reasons: because she is a woman, because she is an African-American woman, because she is a performing poet, because she is writing about New Orleans, which must not be forgotten, because Blood Dazzler a new work and not a collected, and because she is a dynamite poet.

Much optimism among the award winners that the U.S. has turned a new page with the election of Barack Obama.

Left me wondering whether, if enough people believe this change is so, it will indeed become so.

I am willing to sprinkle fairy dust, to click my ruby heels together, close my eyes, and hope that we will find it has all been a bad dream.

Let it be so.