Sherry Chandler

Trailers

I picked up this book trailer for Dennis Cass’s Head Case over at Diane Lockward’s Blogalicious. It won a Moby Award.

Diane, who has a new book out from Wind, Temptation by Water is interested in promotion and has used this video as an occasion to discuss ways to self-promote.

She has done her own trailer for her second Wind Publications book What Feeds Us. It’s a pretty nice piece of work:

Two ways it can be done.

Read Diane’s blog. She provides a lot of great resources for the struggling poet.

More on technology vs contemplation

and lots of other stuff:

via Have Coffee, Will Write

Mr. Robinson has a birthday

From the YouTube site:

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson dances in a deleted scene from the movie “Cafe Metropole” (1937). This is the deleted opening scene in its entirety.

Robinson’s tuxedo from the movie is now on permanent display at the Black History Museum in Richmond, VA (USA)

Bill Bojangles Robinson was born on May 25, 1878 and died November 25, 1949.

Another, more provocative, cut dance routine here.

Gum Tree Canoe

Just because it’s a beautiful May Sunday afternoon and I don’t want to spend a lot of time at this computer and I love John Hartford and this one is sweet and gentle:

May 4, 1970

Let me also bring Charles Whitt’s poem up out of the comments:

Kent Revisited

There was a lengthy inquiry,
and when it was over
they said no one was to blame.
It was just one of those things.

Like when the old woman
was found frozen to death
and her electric meter in custody
in a warm room.

—Charles M. Whitt

I was 25 years old. I was newly divorced. I had lived through the assassinations of John F and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Watts Riots. The Civil Rights Marches. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I had seen most of the boys and young men in my life living under that Sword of Damocles called the draft and the Vietnam Police Action.

My entire youth was marked by tragedy. I don’t think I realized at all what a tragic event occurred at Kent State.

Mr. Seeger has a birthday

This one cuts out just when it gets good, but I love the sound of the voices singing on Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday celebration. He’s 91 now, I hope he’s still singing, in Ry Cooder’s words, Three Chords and the Truth.

Stuff # 7

By way of Kate Bernadette Benedict, I have discovered this SpokenVerse channel at YouTube, at which I was immediately attracted to this reading of “A Conservative” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Don’t let the picture of Glenn Beck defer you. Play it at YouTube to cut out the middle man of embedded streaming.

Speaking of Kate, there is a brand new issue of Umbrella up. I invite you to explore.

Kate also has an incisive poem in the green issue of Soundzine, as do my friends Antonia Clark and Mary Meriam. I invite you to explore there, too.

Meanwhile, qarrtsiluni has completed its Health Issue, which includes my poem “Relics” and a bunch of other good stuff. Look around there, too. Co-editors Susan Elbe and Kelly Madigan Erlandson write in their summary:

Our hope was to focus on and highlight health — both the radiant, full-bodied, energetic variety, and the various ways health is impaired or depleted. We struggled to balance the issue, hoping to equally include pieces that celebrate the joy we experience in health and that explore the grief in our disease and dying. We were continually surprised at how difficult this was, as the majority of submissions we received focused on ill health.

We wondered why the focus seemed more on our dis-ease than on our vibrancy. Is it that we use writing to, as Gregory Orr says, “(sing) the pain back into the wound?”

Revealing of my age and health status that I tend to want to read that last sentence “sing the back pain into the wound.”

Rumors have reached me that the Dead Poets Society of America is planning a second annual Dead Poets Bash in Lexington Cemetery on Wednesday, May 5, at 3:30 p.m. If/When I know more, I’ll let you all know.