Patsy Evans Pittman appeared at the New Martinsville Public Library on Wednesday to talk about her new book, “Blood Kin & Other Strangers.” Last Saturday, she was signing her books at Borders in Barboursville. She’s been signing her books in Parkersburg, and she’s going back in August. She’s even going to be at the Preston County Buckwheat Festival, in Kingwood, September 25-28. These stories and poems, written over a period of many years, are drawn from her Appalachian heritage as she takes on the notion of family. It’s drama pure and simple, characters that snap to life, surprise endings, stories with titles like “Cousin Joyce’s Second Wedding,” “Once on a Carousel,” “A Fine Day to Die.” She has traditional verse like “Blackberry Time” that calls to mind a special person, a special time. She riffs through more experimental lines, for instance, in a piece like “Aphasia” that underscores love’s sometimes lonely obligations.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Scuse’ me, while I barge into this blog with a photo and few notes from an event Vic has been promoting in MountainWord | thegazz.com ed

Jayne Anne Phillips reads a poem as part of Monday’s tribute event to West Virginia Poet Laureate Irene McKinney. Chip Ellis, Gazette photo.

Last night’s homage to the powerful, vivid poetry of W.Va. Poet Laureate Irene McKinney drew a crowd of more than 100 people to the cool confines of the Scottish Rite Temple auditorium in downtown Charleston, W.Va. McKinney, set to read herself, was, alas, absent at the gazz/FestivALL Charleston 2008 event, from the trials of coping with cancer treatment. Yet as one reader noted, she was certainly there. How could she not be when her luminous poems were there, her life’s DNA encoded into words, certainly as rich, imagistic and evocative as any poetry ever to come out of the hills of West Virginia.

Maggie Anderson, one of the readers and a poet with family roots in the state, offered up a memorable and apt connection. McKinney stands less in the line of American poets and more in the tradition of British and Celtic poets, Anderson noted, like Yorkshire-born Stevie Smith and Ireland’s Seamus Heaney. Denise Levertov, an American transplant but Essex-born, is one of McKinney’s favorite poets, she added. Read the rest of this entry »

Poets are scheduled to turn out to honor W.Va. poet laureate Irene McKinney, 8 p.m., tonight, Monday, June 23, 2008, at The Scottish Rite Temple, 406 Capitol St., Charleston, W.Va. (beside Kinko’s). Featured writers: Jayne Anne Phillips, Maggie Anderson, Diane Gilliam Fisher, Jeanne Bryner, Doug Van Gundy, Kate Long and Devon McNamara. McKinney will also read. Sponsored by the Charleston Gazette, thegazz.com and FestivALL Charleston.

Here’s a sample poem from McKinney’s most recent book:

Atavistic

I wanted to walk without clothing
in the woods beside the creek,
and to come to the barn at night

and sleep beside the horses, curled
in the smell and scratch of hay
with the bitch and pups.

The life of the house was flat,
filled with monotonous talking,
passing to and fro among the rooms,

and for what. My mother hated
animals, the way they ate the
food and dirtied the floor.

They were her enemies; she fought
their right to be there and
would have wiped them off the earth

if she could have. If a cat or a dog
came too close to the back door she
threw scalding water on it, and

was righteous in her anger, shouting
that they were not human and
didn’t feel real pain.

If we must choose sides, I said
as a child, I take
the side of the animals.

– Irene McKinney from “Vivid Companion”. © Vandalia Press. Reprinted with permission.

Click here to check out earlier blog posts about Irene McKinney.

***
Continue reading…cat haiku rolling in, and did I say, “Send poems”? »

W.VA. SCENE: Nitro-St. Albans Bridge, photo by Vic Burkhammer

I requested some light-hearted cat haiku, and Sal Buttaci obliged. Thanks Sal!

He also sent a West Virginia Day poem that’s charming:

CELEBRATING WEST VIRGINIA DAY

I can’t say born and bred
in this mountain state
the way my wife Sharon
can trace her roots
centuries back before
West Virginia
became another star
in the fabric of our flag.

I was Brooklyn-born,
New York-/New Jersey-raised,
but one day in the 1950s
I saw the light on a visit
to Beckley, WV, and swore
one day I’d be back for good.
Who knew how prophetic
those words would be!

This is God’s Country,
land of the rolling mountains,
home to good people of faith,
patriots everyone.
I am proud to breathe
the air of this great state.
And not a day goes by
I don’t thank God

for giving me a preview
of heaven right here on earth,
letting me walk these streets,
my hand in the hand of Sharon,
blessed like angels and saints
who walk celestial roads,
happy God joined us and set us down
in the beauty of this almost heaven.

#
(C) 2008 Salvatore Buttaci

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Courtesy photo of The Red Wheelbarrow bookstore, Paris

ON WEST VIRGINIA DAY coming up Friday, W.Va. bloggers are calling for us to resist stereotypes! I’m joining in to avoid the merely black and white dualisms, on one hand the other hand, the red as opposed to the blue, right/left. The best poems rely on what Allen Ginsberg called “the lion of the real” in seeking truth. News magazines and editorial pages seek to do this too, but poetry trusts “the thing itself” perhaps more and the explanation less.

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Photo by Vic Burkhammer

Who: Irene McKinney, West Virginia’s poet laureate.
What: Poets come out to honor a writer of excellence.
When: 8 p.m., Monday, June 23, 2008.
Where: The Scottish Rite Temple, 406 Capitol St., Charleston, W.Va. (beside Kinko’s).
Why: It’s an exquisite thing to do — way, way worth doing.

Featured writers: Jayne Anne Phillips, Maggie Anderson, Diane Gilliam Fisher, Jeanne Bryner, Doug Van Gundy, Kate Long and Devon McNamara. McKinney will also read. Sponsored by the Charleston Gazette, thegazz.com and FestivALL Charleston.

RELATED:
> See Kate Long’s article on the event.
> Click here for one of a few previous MountainWord posts about McKinney, this one audio of a poem called “At 24″ she read at the West Virginia Book Festival in Charleston last fall.
> And view Long’s W.Va. Public Broadcasting interviews with Irene McKinney, three of them available on YouTube. They are a delight. Watch them here:

Cat photo by Vic Burkhammer

Click here to send your original, light-hearted haiku to MountainWord.  Haiku tend to be about nature and include a season word, but not necessarily.

Or call in and leave haiku on my voicemail too at (304) 348-5184.

See previous cat haiku blog post here.

Here’s another one from strangeplaces.net, to get you going:

Terrible battle.
I fought for hours. Come and see!
What’s a ‘term paper?’

The Open Content Alliance is fascinating! It’s so important, especially to rural areas like West Virginia, and it’s still just starting to rev up, now while Google is digitizing — what? — 3,000 books a day? This stuff astonishes me…. What do you think?

If life throws me no curveballs Saturday morning, I’m heading to Malden, W.Va., to another one of Norman Jordan’s 10 a.m. poetry workshops. The workshops have been on second Saturdays of the month this year since March (when we were all snowed out). Two of us attended the one in April, and I had to miss last month… some kind of family curveball. Jordan, West Virginia’s most widely published Affrilachian poet, hosts a workshop in association with West Virginia State University. His workshop is helpful, full of careful, candid, wise critiques. Maybe I’ll see some of you there tomorrow.

Here are directions from a workshop press release sent out and quoted here the first time back in March:

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Check out the summer reading clubs at Kanawha Public Library. It’s still not too late to sign up. Click here.

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