Here are two great writers with poetic sensibility, both very different, but with ties to West Virginia.

Read Wil Haygood’s “Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson.” Reviewer Gerald Early calls it “one of the best biographies of a boxer ever written.”

Wil used to work at the Gazette. After leaving here, he embarked on an amazing career. He wrote a string of award-winning books and worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Boston Globe, and now at The Washington Post. Listen to an interview with Wil, on the Research Channel.

My wife Nancy went to Columbus last year to be a guest as Wil was honored and visited by friends virtually from all over the world.

Yesterday morning, I was playing around with a new app on my iPhone called Press Reader. I beamed up a March 8, 2010, Washington Post, and on Page One, there was a story by Wil Haygood in New York about problem politics centered on Rep. Rangel and New York Gov. Paterson.  Wil’s writing has a poetic flair, a gentle touch; it entertains and sticks with you long after you put the book down, or the news story.

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Pinckney Benedict, native of Greenbrier County, W.Va., is the featured author in the Winter 2010 issue of Appalachian Heritage, and in celebration of that, he will read at Berea College, Loyal Jones Appalachian Center Gallery, Berea, Ky., 8 p.m., Friday, March 12. Come at 7:30 p.m. for refreshments. For more information, call 859-985-3559.

He teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Ill.

Why Pinckney on a poetry blog? Well, his work is fed, by turns, with the fiction writer’s poetic sense of beauty, the strange and the dangerous.

Try out “Town Smokes,” a collection of nine stories.

This just in, verbatim, from Ted Webb of Morgantown Poets:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Author, educator and poetry editor Elizabeth Savage will be featured with Morgantown Poets at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 18, 2010, at Monongalia Arts Center (MAC).

The event is free and open to the public. The MAC is at 107 High Street, downtown Morgantown (beside Hotel Morgan).

Savage is an associate professor of English and co-director of women’s studies at Fairmont State University where she has been on the faculty since 2001. She is also the poetry editor for Kestrel: A Journal of Literature & Art.

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Get ready now for National Poem In Your Pocket Day coming up Thursday, April 29, 2010. Click here to read about it at poets.org.

Pick out a few poems you love, poems that would fit in your pocket, poems short enough to readily remember and share. Here’s one just about everyone knows.:

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

–Carl Sandburg

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What are some of your favorite poems? Please add your comment.

POETRY OUT LOUD: 2 p.m., Saturday, March 6, 2010. Students from around the state will participate in the poetry recitation contest. Chris Sarandon will emcee the event and Nikki Giovanni will serve as guest speaker.
Norman L. Fagan Theater of the Culture Center, State Capitol Complex. Call Jeff Pierson at 304-558-0240 for more information. Read Sara Busse’s preview story in The Charleston Gazette.

Please write a short poem or post a comment below. Share an event, a book title, a worthwhile web link…. Thanks.

“We write because we can’t not write. We want to make music out of our breath; we want to be under the power of an art that toys with us and could destroy us, but which allows us to get a glimpse of what’s real.” — poet Gary Young

Click here to find out more about Gary Young, recently named the first poet laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.

WVU’s Department of English and the Eberly College of Arts & Sciences present a reading by Mary Ann Samyn, author of “Beauty Breaks In,” 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 9, at 130 Colson Hall. Reception and book signing to follow.

Samyn has four other collections of poetry: “Purr,” “Rooms by the Sea,” “Captivity Narrative,” and “Inside the Yellow Dress.” She has won a Pushcart Prize and numerous other awards, including Outstanding Teacher at WVU.

Click here to sample her poems at Verse Daily.

David Bottoms, poet laureate of Georgia, will read at Huntington Museum at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 11. Bottoms has published eight books of poetry, including “Waltzing Through the Endtime” and “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump.”

He holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University.

Also, Mark Brazaitis and Mary Ann Samyn will read from their work at Marshall’s Memorial Student Center at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 21.

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Frank X Walker will be in Morgantown on Monday, Feb. 15. He is scheduled to speak in the Rhododendron Room of WVU’s Mountainlair at 6 p.m. Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. The program is co-sponsored by WVU’s Center for Black Culture and Research and the Appalachian Culture Committee-Office of Multicultural Programs.

Lucille Clifton, award-winning poet, dies at 73

BALTIMORE (AP) — Lucille Clifton, a National Book Award-winning poet and Pulitzer finalist, has died. She was 73.
Clifton’s sister, Elaine Philip of Buffalo, N.Y., said the former poet laureate of Maryland passed away Saturday morning at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore.
Philip said the cause of death was unclear but Clifton was hospitalized for an infection last week at a hospital in Columbia, Md., before being transferred to Baltimore.
The native of Depew, N.Y., won the National Book Award in 2000 for “Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000.” She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1988.
Survivors include three daughters, a son and three grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.

Frank X Walker — Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

By Vic Burkhammer
Gazette news editor
Notable African-American writer Frank X Walker returns to Charleston this weekend.
The West Virginia Center for the Book and the West Virginia Division of Culture and History will celebrate Black History Month with an appearance at 7 p.m. Friday at the Culture Center Theater by Walker, who also will be featured at other weekend events.
He will present his lecture “Some of Appalachia is Black” and address the definition of Affrilachian, a word he coined that is now in the Oxford American Dictionary. He also will read poems.
Some of his books, including “Affrilachia: Poems,” “When Winter Come: The Ascension of York” and “Black Box,” will be available for sale during a reception in the Great Hall following the lecture.
Walker also will be an instructor Saturday morning at the annual Writers’ Toolkit, an intensive creative writing workshop that encompasses poetry and fiction. Also on the program was W.Va. Poet Laureate Irene McKinney, but she cancelled her appearance. Doug Van Gundy will take her place, along with Anthony Viola, Rob Whetsell and Kaite Hillenbrand. The program runs 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Culture Center.
Both events are open to the public.
Finishing out the weekend, Walker will read at Bluegrass Kitchen, 1600 Washington St., on Sunday as part of “Love Jones Poetry,” hosted by Crystal Goodwoman with a Sade listening party at 7 p.m.

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