A haiku slideshow I put together in August 2008.

Covenant House in Charleston, W.Va., joined the YWCA in its national day to “Stand Against Racism” with a lively open competition featuring Charleston poets. This is a video clip from that poetry slam, at Covenant House, April 27, 2011.

Dale Katherine Duvernay, one of the poets at the event, came to the Mountain State from New Orleans after Katrina. She performed her poems with verve.

I received this comment and poem in an e-mail from Knopf Poetry today. Please peruse their archives at http://poem-a-day.knopfdoubleday.com/:

“Before the month is gone, the great Langston Hughes.”

Daybreak in Alabama

When I get to be a composer
I’m gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I’m gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I’m gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.

– Langston Hughes

CLICK live link to watch on USTREAM:
 http://www.ustream.tv/channel/poetry-out…

Anthony Braxton from South Charleston High represented W.Va. as our state Poetry Out Loud champion in this morning’s Region 1 competition. Anthony read wonderfully but was not selected as one of the last three standing from Region 1. Congratulations, Anthony, for making it all the way to the finals!

The very final 2011 national competition will appear on USTREAM Friday, April 29, 7 p.m. I don’t think any of these programs are going to be archived.

“Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.” — Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939

Hazel Dickens, a national treaure — rest in peace. Listen to the magic, the soul in her voice in this clip from “Hazel Dickens: It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song,” an Appalshop documentary by Mimi Pickering. You can order the whole film is available on DVD from Appalshop, Whitesburg, KY.

Today, we received this note via APPALNET listserv:

Hazel Dickens (born June 1, 1935, Mercer County, West Virginia, died April 22, 2011) was an American bluegrass singer, songwriter, double bassist and guitarist. She was the eighth child of an eleven-child mining family in West Virginia. Her music is characterized not only by her high, lonesome singing style, but also by her provocative pro-union, feminist songs.

* * *

Click here to read a Washington Post blog post by Matt Schudel about Hazel Dickens. There you’ll find a link to another YouTube video — a profile — by W.Va. Public Broadcasting.

* * *

TRIANGLE, VA. — United Mine Workers of America International Cecil E. Roberts issued the following statement today:
“The hearts and prayers of UMWA members and our families are with the family of our great friend, Hazel Dickens.
“Hazel was a real inspiration to coal miners everywhere. She was always supportive of better jobs, better lives and a better future for coal miners and our communities, and didn’t mind saying so. She was a strong, clear voice when we needed one, and was never at a loss for words when it came to describing the hard lives miners and their families endured.
“Hazel supported the UMWA throughout her career. When we were on strike, she raised money to feed our families. When we were organizing, she sent messages of support and encouragement. When we fought to eliminate black lung disease, she stood with us.
“Hazel was a child of the coalfields, yet she was a sister to us all. We will miss her terribly.”

Here’s part of a reading by Irene McKinney, West Virginia’s poet laureate, at the West Virginia Book Festival last fall in Charleston. Enjoy.

A pair of favorite quotations:
“. . . There is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
–Booker T. Washington

“I believe in a broad definition of what art is and who artists are: Barbers, cooks, auto detailers, janitors and gardeners have as much right to claims of artistry as designers, architects, painters and sculptors.”
– Frank X Walker

“On The Road” movie due out this fall – Boing Boing - http://t.co/f7s3fT0

I read to death a copy of “On the Road” in the early 1970s, and I’ve always remembered a quick impression of Charleston, jotted down while the narrator zoomed West:

“I took the Washington bus; wasted some time there wandering around; went out of my way to see the Blue Ridge, heard the bird of Shenandoah and visited Stonewall Jackson’s grave; at dusk stood expectorating in the Kanawha River and walked the hillbilly night of Charleston, West Virginia; at midnight Ashland, Kentucky, and a lonely girl under the marquee of a closed-up show. The dark and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinnati at dawn.”

–from Chapter 2, “On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac

To prepare the film cast, Gerald Nicosia taught a “boot camp” on Beat culture. The film will enter the world in a very different cultural context than the book did when it was written and published in the 1950s. This is a movie I don’t want to miss.

Since I was a child, thankfully, I’ve had many poems and quotations spicing my thoughts. Today, maybe because I read David Kirby’s “How to Read Poetry Today” in The New York Times last week, I’m thinking about the Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussycat.” It’s taking up space in my head something like the way a song might stick in your head, and maybe you keep softly singing the tune now and then for a week or longer. Perhaps as a result of this, I’ve been reflecting on the lives of friends I have known, people seemingly mismatched but who stick together, bewilderingly. The owl and the pussycat, you recall, danced together as they could only in a poem after they were were married:

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.