The 26th annual Kentucky Book Fair will be at the Frankfort Convention Center, 405 Mero Street, Frankfort, KY, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007. It’s free and open to the public. The list of almost 200 participating writers includes poets Wendell Berry, Frank X Walker, and former Kentucky poet laureates Jane Gentry and Richard Taylor.

Nov. 9, there is a symposium and preview day for teachers and librarians, who are granted a discount on all books. Click here for more details about the book fair.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.”
– John Keats

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
– Emily Dickinson

Cloudy day, and I’m ruminating on “the realms of gold.” I think of Pat Conroy’s letter to the Gazette about book banning. I’d recommend everyone read that letter in praise of English teachers.

***

… I see award-winning author Brenda Miller is at WVU this week to take part in a writer-in-residence workshop. Her debut book, “Season of the Body,” is an autobiography in essay form that takes us to places like Portugal and Utah, to explore not Portugal and Utah, but the deep caves of our hearts. The essay “Needlepoint,” for example, centers on her experience with a miscarriage. Poetry itself adds color to Miller’s voice in that essay. I want to read another essay, and another.

Read the rest of this entry »

 
Photo by Vic Burkhammer

Marged Howley read at the W.Va. Book Festival the second weekend in October. She has a B.A. in creative writing from Marshall University, and is working on a master’s at Ohio University. She has participated in the spoken word and poetry community in Seattle, WA, where she lived for about five years. Her work has appeared in Black Bear Review, Adirondack Review, Wild Sweet Notes II, Red Weather, Snowapple, and other publications. 
 
I inadvertently erased a few hours of sound I recorded on the second day of the West Virginia Book Festival. There went audio of Harry Gieg, whose poetry is strong; his demeanor, professional – he has a way of singing his poems. There went Marged Howley’s reading, and others, which I lament losing.

After I stopped fretting about that, I called Howley and asked her to read a poem from her first chapbook, “Stupid for Dreaming of Alligators,” out this year from JKP Publishing. She said she doesn’t have demo tapes and that sort of thing, but here she is, reading over the phone (not something she usually does)…a short poem, a snippet of sound, to tantalize people interested in her work:
56 seconds

The Cutting Board

The sky gets dark
enough for electricity,
and it rains, hard.

I’m in the kitchen,
separating, chopping.

By the window:
a cutting board, a mixing bowl,
two knives and a baking pan.
The sky peels back like integument.

It passes as it begins.
What happens now is chemical,
the crackle of lightning, the sting of lemon.

Fish scale wedges into my finger bed,
the window looks onto a still emptiness.

Air comes back
as I “pop, pop” vertebrae between my fingers.
The electricity dissipates
into the mixing bowl, into the margins,
and everything now
from green onion
to trout
is dead.

Photo by Vic Burkhammer 

Victor Depta’s “An Afterthought of Light” is a fine collection of poems about a tough topic — growing old.

This book resonates with me particularly because of my having helped care for my father-in-law for the nine years preceding his death. What an education, and one that I was not planning on receiving. It was a fast curve ball, for everyone involved, especially, of course, for my father-in-law.

Depta’s touchstone here is that very curveball — the experience of aging, its suffering, its powerlessness, its day-to-day slow hours, its sapping of energy and also its small victories.

The people in these poems transcend stereotypes.

“I really do have some happy poems, but not in this book,” he said. Depta peers into the face of hard realities, and he looks away with his heart and mind full of poetry.

Depta, publisher of Blair Mountain Press, is a native of Logan County, W.Va. Depta is not just a poet, but a whole business: He is a poet, playwright, author, educator (he’s taught at the University of Tennessee at Martin and Marshall University) and publisher. He has written many books of poetry, including “The Little Henry Poems,” published in 2005. His novels include “The Gate of Paradise,” “Idol and Sanctuary” and “Feasting with Strife,” which make up his W.Va. trilogy. The publisher of Blair Mountain Press, Depta has also written one non-fiction book and two volumes of plays.

To sample Depta’s reading and his poetic style, here he is reading “When the Time Comes,” the first poem he shared at the 2007 W.Va. Book Festival:
1:14 minutes

When the Time Comes

When the time comes—
yes it will, someday
she said to her eldest
against his jocular, frightened protests—
I want you to have
and the death list
like recipes for her loved ones
her brood, her clan
fragrant from the oven
began—

how frail she is, he thought
to enumerate, to amend
weighing her descendants
fine as an assayer would
grams of gold
their worth
though giving equally to the undeserved

and the division, small as keepsakes
was, he knew, the uncentering of their lives
and he wondered
what would they make of the gift
which sister would collect about herself
beyond the surge of sorrow
which brother about himself—

on whom will it converge
that which dispenses more than photographs in frames
more than knickknacks
when drugged and skeletal
it, too, is dispersed.

Photo by Vic Burkhammer

W.Va. poet laureate Irene McKinney pleased her audience with many poems at the 2007 W.Va. Book Festival last weekend.

Here’s one called “At 24″ from her most recent poetry collection, “Vivid Companion” (WVU Press).
1:49 minutes

At 24

At 24, I had written and read until my eyes were bloodshot,
spending nights and early mornings in a fervor
of page-filling while the baby slept.
I was writing to save my life as I knew it
could be. I was writing to inscribe my body
on a stone tablet, writing in defiance and silence.
Nothing could stop me, I kept saying No
to the paper, I kept saying you can’t have me
to the Junior League, to the tiny streets, to impossible
jobs and prissy motherhood. I was certain
there was another way that didn’t involve
slavery, another way to love and work than the
simian forms evolved so far. One morning I drank
eight cups of coffee and wrote four poems
and I didn’t even care that my head was bursting
and I was lurching around while I scrubbed the bathroom.
Another time I left the children with my mother
and lay in bed all day reading a biography of van Gogh
and groaning. What a life, what a life.
I thought about Toulouse-Lautrec, that little freak.
I was a freak myself, but only in private.
I stared at his bronzes and terra cottas and oranges
until they pulled the color nerves out of my chest.
That was a long time ago and now I know that
I knew nothing then, and if I had I wouldn’t
have gone on. Dear Mr. President, I said, Dear Dean,
Dear Husband, Dear Our Father, Dear Tax Collector,
you don’t know me. I don’t know what I am,
but whatever it is, you can’t have me.

Joyce Carol Oates is visiting Charleston on Thursday, Oct. 18, to deliver the Betsy K. McCreight Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Charleston.

The 7:30 p.m. event is free and open to the public.

Musings:

What brilliance! She writes masterpiece after masterpiece.

Click here for my previous blog about Joyce Carol Oates’s visit. Enjoy a taste of her poetry. I know she isn’t visiting necessarily to talk about poetry, but my appreciation of “I Saw a Woman Walking into a Plate Glass Window” grows with each reading. I want to savor more of her poems like I have savored this one.

Click here for a story by Gazette reporter Bill Lynch about his e-mail interview with Oates.

Read a 2006 Oates story, “Landfill,” published in the New Yorker, available for free.

Before you go, feast on these five random Joyce Carol Oates quotes, for sustenance, for the road:

“Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn’t have the personality of a politician. We don’t see the world that simply.”

***

“Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.”

***

“All the desks of my life have faced windows and except for an overwrought two-year period in the late 1980s when I worked on a word processor, I have always spent most of my time staring out the window, noting what is there, daydreaming or brooding. Most of the so-called imaginative life is encompassed by these three activities that blend so seamlessly together, not unlike reading the dictionary, as I often do as well, entire mornings can slip by, in a blissful daze of preoccupation. It’s bizarre to me that people think that I am “prolific” and that I must use every spare minute of my time when in fact, as my intimates have always known, I spend most of my time looking out the window.”

***

“We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone — its value is incontestable.”

***

“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass was named a National Book Award finalist Thursday for his collection “Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005.”

The book, more than 10 years in the making, came out on Tuesday.

Read the rest of this entry »

Again, writers and book lovers of all ages, all interests, students, teachers, editors, publishers, sculptors, painters, spoken word artists, history buffs, gardeners, cooks, preachers, retired people, kids and their parents, biography enthusiasts, sesquipedalians and haiku breathers, couplet wrestlers and mythos acrobats, you name it: See you at the West Virginia Book Festival this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, at the Charleston Civic Center. Click here for a pdf of the schedule of this well-rounded, free festival. Last weekend’s Sunday Gazette-Mail ran a wonderful guide to the event by graphic artist Brenda Pinnell, and extra copies will be available.
Here is a list of some of poets on the program, not to mention all of the other renowned writers:

Jean Anaporte · Edwina Pendarvis · Victor Depta · Laura Treacy Bentley · John McKernan · Mark DeFoe · Alena Hairston · Irene McKinney · Steve Scafidi · Mary Moore · Carole Boston Weatherford · Marged Howley · A. E. Stringer · Harry Gieg · Terre Thomas · Doug Van Gundy

Yesterday, the Keyser Mineral Daily News-Tribune mentioned that Fairmont native Jennifer Merrifield was recently named a visiting instructor of English at Potomac State College of WVU. This is good news. She is the poet’s equivalent of a Heisman Trophy winner, with all the awards she has won.

Click here to read some of her poems online.

Of her appearance last fall in the literary magazine Fourteen Hills, one reviewer said:

” ‘Incognito’ by Jennifer Merrifield stands out, ‘fingerprint whorls on wineglass for I’m mute to my name my / tongue having / forgotten its place here with your lovely / big desk and plans outspread.’ “

Among the many places her poems have appeared is the anthology “Wild Sweet Notes II.”

She says, “Few things feel better than seeing a student surprise themselves with what they can do.”

Inaugural Concert: “An die Musik” (To Music), An Evening of Germanic Poetry, Song, and Chamber Music, Frank Center Theater, Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va., 8 p.m., October 27.
Paintings by James R. Graves ’89, Frank Center Gallery.
For more information, call (304) 878-5378. This event is part of a weekend celebrating the inauguraton of Suzanne Shipley, 15th president of the university.
Click here for directions to Shepherd University.

Read the rest of this entry »