Quick hits: A 'new' Robert Frost poem; the penny's top advocate; the little farmer from the Super Bowl ad

The newly discovered poem by Robert Frost was written
in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1918. (Adobe Stock photo)

Laced with nature, deep and succinct -- Robert Frost's poems are a rich read. And it so happens, there's a previously unpublished poem by Frost to enjoy, reports Jay Parini for The New Yorker. "I opened “Nothing New” and saw at once that it was indeed something new. It was originally inscribed inside a copy of Frost’s second collection. . . that was found in a retired educator’s home library. . . It’s a good poem, short and aphoristic, from a period when Frost, writing at the height of his powers, had a special affection for poems of this kind: brief, rueful, tight, focused."

Taking truckloads of books to rural hither and thither after Hurricane Helene became this traveling librarian's mission. "In the 1930s, women employed by the Works Progress Administration rode pack horses through the mountains of eastern Kentucky, bringing books to rural residents in hard-to-reach places," reports Anya Petrone Slepyan of The Daily Yonder. "Nearly a century later, Kirsten Crawford Turner is carrying on that tradition, with the help of a truck and a U-Haul rather than a horse and saddle bags." Turner told Slepyan, "It started with one box of books on my porch. Now I have thousands." 

Weller would like to give every American
a penny for their thoughts. (A.S. photo)

 

Almost everyone despises pennies. "Except this guy," writes Joseph Pisani of The Wall Street Journal. "Mark Weller has been on a roll for three decades, arguing for the one-cent coin’s existence every chance he gets. When the penny is slighted in newspapers, it’s Weller who writes letters to the editor." Weller runs a pro-penny group and he keeps Congress abreast of all the benefits the penny affords. "He’s been to Capitol Hill countless times to convince Congress to keep the penny, which the U.S. Mint has been producing since 1793."

Fake meat is made of plants, which people are encouraged to eat. But it's also an ultra-processed food, which people should avoid. What's the low-down? Alice Callahan of The New York Times reports, "Here’s what we do — and don’t — know. . . . While it’s clear that eating red meat and processed meat is associated with health risks like heart disease, some types of cancer and earlier death, we really don’t yet know how fake-meat alternatives might affect our health in the long term."

Else M. Rike still uses a calculator
to do taxes. (Adobe Stock photo)

Even if you love your job, would you do it if you lived to be 100? Probably not. But that's not true for everyone. "Else M. Rike will be 101 years old on March 24 but doesn’t expect to take a day off to celebrate. She will be too busy preparing tax returns," reports James R. Hagerty for The Wall Street Journal. "Active tax professionals over 90 years old are rare but can be found here and there. . . .William D. Brew, who lives in Henderson, Nev., and will be 102 in March, continues to prepare taxes for a handful of clients. . . Wes Cobb, 94, a retired IRS agent in Keene, N.H., invites clients to spread out their tax materials on his kitchen table."

She's the Little Potato Farmer who could. She's also a little famous after a Super Bowl ad spotlighted her family's potato farm, which grows potatoes for Lay's potato chips. Her father, Jeremy Pavelski, is a fifth-generation farmer from Hancock, Wisconsin, reports Tyne Morgan of Farm Journal. "The Super Bowl commercial . . . was inspired by Pavelski’s story, after he hosted a farm tour for Frito Lay one day." Morgan adds, "The group was especially touched by Pavelski’s 7-year-old daughter, who is passionate about the potatoes her family produces."

Appalachian Journal publishes 50th volume, with looks at Helen Lewis, Rebecca Boone, Harriette Arnow and others

The latest issue of Appalachian Journal (Volume 50, Nos. 1-2) has been published by Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., marking the 50th anniversary of the peer-reviewed journal that began publishing in 1972. The issue includes a memorial for Helen Matthews Lewis, "the grandmother of Appalachian studies," who died last year; the conclusion of an unpublished memoir by Harriette Simpson Arnow, an exploration of Rebecca Boone’s life, and research on a 20th-century artist who "found a muse in the Southern Appalachians," ASU reports.

Patricia D. Beaver reflects on the life of her colleague and friend, Helen Lewis, focusing on the trips they made to Wales, Zimbabwe, and France, among other places, as well as their creative collaborations and Lewis’s passion for social justice and community building and Lewis’s poem “Loose Threads.”

Patricia L. Hudson presents the facts of frontierswoman Rebecca Boone’s life, including provocative biographical details, including rumors of a child conceived while Daniel was away on a hunting expedition. Hudson’s research led to her first historical novel, Traces, reviewed in this issue.

The previous issue of the journal featured the first sections of a four-part autobiographical piece by writer Harriette Simpson Arnow, about her life with chronic illness and depression, caused by a pituitary tumor. The latest issue has the final two parts, detailing Arnow’s recovery from her first brain surgery and the recurrence of symptoms such as pain and vision loss, which prompted a second surgery in 1967.

The journal includes the work of four poets and several book reviewers, including Lana Whited’s essay, “Coming of Age in the Opioid Era,” reviewing Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead, and Erin M. Presley’s review essay of of Horace Kephart: Writings, edited by George Frizzell and Mae Miller Claxton. Kephart brought national attention to the Great Smoky Mountains.

To subscribe to Appalachian Journal or order a copy, go to appjournal.appstate.edu.

Holiday hits: From the gloomy octopus to the most gleeful holiday poem, let wonder guide your reading; and more ...

Illustration by Edward Koren, The New Yorker

By Heather Close

It's Friday! Take a moment to celebrate the uniqueness of our glorious planet and the joy of being alive. 

One little girl knows that there are rules for everything. So, when she decided to adopt a unicorn, she asked Animal Control for permission. And got it.

La Junta, Colorado, celebrates an unlikely friend, Aphonopelma hentzi, commonly known as the Oklahoma or Texas brown tarantula, which ranges as far east as Louisiana. This small town aims to become "Tarantula Capital of the World."

"Don't stand so close to me" was a popular song by the Police. It's also the mantra of the Gloomy Octopus--it doesn't sing. It throws things.

Need a lift out of winter melancholy? Reading about positive changes for birds and humans will make you smile.

Today, the hip Three Kings would bring gold, frankincense, myrrh and SPAM figgy pudding.

Heated, compressed and hopefully headed in the right direction, an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal explains fusion and what all the fuss is about.

Mermaids in Montana and mooncake makers in Philly's Chinatown are just two of the discoveries made by Boston Globe reporters who traveled across the nation and made some momentous stops.

Whether it's “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses, or music to cook and bake to, get those holiday play lists ready.

Still don't have a tree? There's still time. Pick a good one!

There are still so many good times to be had. A 'super-surge' holiday poem from The New Yorker will leave you feeling warm and hopeful.

New poet laureate wants Americans to encounter poetry in unexpected places; how about their local newspapers?

Ada Limón (Library of Congress photo / Shawn Miller)

Poetry was once a staple of rural newspapers, perhaps because they were the most accessible vehicle for literature, and poetry was once a staple of language classes. But as education and other facets of society have changed, it has become rare for poetry to appear in the pages of a newspaper.

Enter Ada Limón of Lexington, Ky., the latest poet laureate of the United States. She told Tom Eblen of WEKU-FM that she is still thinking about what she wants to accomplish as the nation's 24th poet laureate, but does think that she would like to encourage the appearance of poetry in unexpected places.

When Eblen noted that most poets laureate have some special project and asked if she had decided on one, or was still thinking about it, she said the latter. But she added, "I would like to see a project that might emphasize poetry in public spaces. I would love for people to have accidental and unexpected experiences with poetry."

Limón said the time is right for more poetry. "Right now, we really need poetry in our lives. . . . I really believe in its power and its importance to help us heal, and I think we're just moving from one chaotic event to the next chaotic event and not doing any processing and not doing any breathing . . . and I think poetry is that way of remembering that you are a thinking, breathing human being, living in the world."

So, perhaps readers would appreciate some calming poetry amid the chaos of the news. “I think it would be wonderful if local newspapers would publish poems again,” Limón told The Rural Blog. “I know some still do, but I don’t see it very often. . . . I say bring back poems in the press!”

Limón told Eblen that poems can "help people reclaim their humanity" and have a deeper appreciation of shared experiences, such as the death of  beloved relative. They are "the way we can remember that we're not alone, that someone else may have had that experience," she said. "It's not just empathy, it's the connection of all living things."

Jerry Jeff Walker, writer of 'Mr. Bojangles' and a godfather to 'Texas outlaw' and Americana music, dies at 78 in Austin

Jerry Jeff Walker at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in 2016
(Photo by Erkia Goldring, Getty Images)

Jerry Jeff Walker, who was best known for writing "Mr. Bojangles" but was also an influential figure in the music of his adoptive Texas and the development of the genre now known as Americana, died of throat cancer Friday at a hospital in Austin. He was 78.

He was born Ronald Clyde Crosby in Oneonta, N.Y., "in northernmost Appalachia," The New York Times notes. He got his stage name (soon afterward his legal name) in New Orleans, reports Melissa Roberto of Fox News. He wrote 'Mr. Bojangles' in the mid-1960s after a night in a New Orleans jail where he met a man who 'danced a lick across the cell'," writes Peter Blackstock of the Austin-American Statesman. The song languished, and Walker "was ready to give up on the music business" in 1971 until the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had a Top 10 hit with it, reports Matt Schudel of The Washington Post. "It soon became recognized as a standard." More than 100 artists have recorded it, Blackstock reports.

Walker's own recording career "spanned 51 years and he released 36 albums, including compilations," Roberto notes. "He became known as a mentor to musicians such as Garth Brooks, Jimmy Buffett, Guy Clark, Todd Snider and Lucinda Williams." He "had some trouble with alcohol and drugs," and his obituary notes his "rowdy performances and offstage excess." He settled in Austin in 1971, and "The Austin outlaw music scene he helped launch came to include Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt," Schudel writes. He "formed a group called the Lost Gonzo Band, evoking the untamed spirit of 'gonzo' journalist Hunter S. Thompson." He told Rolling Stone in 1974 that “Texas was the only place where they didn’t look at me like I was crazy," The New York Times reports.

His 1973 album Viva Terlingua, recorded in the virtual ghost town of Luckenbach, Texas . . . practically defined the new Texas sound, combining elements of country, rock and folk music with a touch of sagebrush poetry," Schudel reports. Walked had only five songs on the album, and the best-known "were by other writers, including Guy Clark’s cinematic 'Desperados Waiting for a Train,' Ray Wylie Hubbard’s honky-tonk anthem 'Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother' and Gary P. Nunn’s 'London Homesick Blues,' about a Texan stranded in England who longs 'to go home with the armadillo, good country music from Amarillo and Abilene'."

None of Walker's songs "has had the staying power or emotional resonance of 'Mr. Bojangles,' Schudel writes, citing in part a 2004 profile in Texas Monthly: "He said he was reading the poetry of Dylan Thomas and was conscious of using internal rhyme. He strummed a descending chord figure in the lilting time signature of 6/8, and the words and music came together. . . . Many people assume that the dancer described by Mr. Walker was African American, like Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, but that was not the case. In his autobiography, Mr. Walker noted that because the jails were segregated in New Orleans in 1965, the Bojangles he met was an elderly white dancer down on his luck."

Rural Assembly Everywhere virtual festival Oct. 26-30

Rural Assembly Everywhere, a virtual festival for rural leaders, advocates and allies, is coming up Oct. 26-30. It's organized by the Rural Assembly, a Center for Rural Strategies program that connects more than 400 organizations and individuals nationwide focused on improving rural policies and communities. 

Rural Assembly director Whitney Kimball Coe said it was critical for such people to be able to gather, even if it couldn't be in person. "Family meeting feels like an appropriate metaphor for what we’re trying to accomplish with Everywhere," she told Tracy Staley of The Daily Yonder. "We’re calling everyone together, from all places, all regions, all sectors, and backgrounds because it’s going to take all us committing to the future together, and we don’t leave family behind."

The festival will feature a diverse line-up of speakers, panelists, artists, and happy hour discussions. "The keynotes, panels, and breakouts will address both current and longstanding issues, such as the 2020 election, the pandemic, gender and race, climate change and resilience, and rural and Native youth leadership," Staley reports. "The event will also include artists from across the country who will weave songs, poetry, film, and humor into the program throughout the week."

Registration is free. Click here for more information or to register.

Some good advice: Remember 'The peace of wild things' as a pandemic transforms our daily lives

Spring Beauty flowers in Renkl's yard.
(NYT photo by William DeShazer)

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the world looks a lot different than it did a month ago for most Americans: social distancing, layoffs, constant news updates about the newly infected and government measures. But our world is changing in a much older way, and taking the time to revel in it can help us stay calm, Tennessee writer Margaret Renkl writes in The New York Times.

Spring has arrived. "Out in the woods, the trout lilies are opening near toadshade and bloodroot and mayapple, all of them reaching up from the cold soil to bloom in the brief sunlight of early spring, before the trees leaf out and the forest overstory draws in all the available light," Renkly writes. "Pull up a weed from the wet soil of the water-drenched garden and smell the rich life the earthworm has left behind. Just a whiff of it will likely flood you with a feeling of well-being. The scent of freshly turned soil works on the human brain the same way antidepressants do."

Being out in nature comforts Renkl, reminding her that her own worries exist in the "larger context" of nature's rhythms. "I can scroll and worry indoors, or I can step outside and remember how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless, a world that reaches beyond me and includes me too. The spring ephemerals have only the smallest window for blooming, and so they bloom when the sunlight reaches them. Once the forest becomes enveloped in green and the sunlight closes off again, they will wait for another year. Sunlight always returns the next year."

The op-ed reminds us of Kentucky farmer and poet Wendell Berry's timeless poem, "The Peace of Wild Things," in which Berry writes that being in nature eases his worries:

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Waffle House poet laureate travels to rural Georgia high schools to promote the arts and higher education

Karen Head

File under Sentences We Never Thought We'd Write: Waffle House has named a poet laureate.

Here's how it came about: The current and former CEOs of Waffle House, Walt Ehmer and Bert Thornton, are both Georgia Tech graduates. In a conversation at a recent alumni event, Thornton and Georgia Tech poetry professor Karen Head discussed how the college guarantees admission for any valedictorian or salutatorian in the state, but 37 of the 159 counties did not send a single applicant, Andrew Alexander reports for Atlanta Magazine.

Head, a first-generation college graduate, believes this is because students in many rural counties don't know many college graduates. "I told Bert I wanted to go out to the most rural schools in the most far-flung counties and talk about arts and poetry. I wanted the students to hear my story about going to college," Head told Alexander.

Head's nametag (Photo courtesy of Head)

At Thornton's suggestion, Head wrote up a proposal for the company's charitable arm, the Waffle House Foundation. She asked for a small grant to cover travel to 12 schools and also the college tuition of a poetry competition winner. The foundation approved her proposal and mailed her a Waffle House nametag with her name and the title "Waffle House Poet Laureate," Alexander reports.

Rural students nationwide are less likely to go to college, partly because of so-called "education deserts" with no local universities. Also, many rural high schools can't afford to pay an adviser to help students get ready for college, and many colleges don't make much effort to recruit rural students, too. And, Head observed, many rural students don't know any college graduates who can serve as a role model and source of advice.

Quick hits: New poet laureate is first Native American for the post; Pride event at small-town Ky. library draws opposition

Here's a roundup of stories with rural resonance; if you do or see similar work that should be shared on The Rural Blog, email us at heather.chapman@uky.edu.

Can we move away from fossil fuels without destroying communities that rely on them? Sam Adler Bell looks to the devastated coalfields of Appalachia: https://newint.org/features/2019/04/09/life-after-coal

Joy Harjo has been named the U.S. poet laureate, making her the first Native American to fill the post: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/733727917/joy-harjo-becomes-the-first-native-american-u-s-poet-laureate

Some residents in small Kentucky town opposed a LGBTQ+ "Pride Panel" at a local public library. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2019/06/19/lgbtq-pride-panel-kentucky-library-stirs-controversy/1497484001/

Writers Wendell Berry and Crystal Wilkinson speak up for rural America at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day

Moderator Debbie Baker talked with Wilkinson and Berry at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day. (Photo by Morris Grubbs)

Two great exponents of rural culture, writers Wendell Berry and Crystal Wilkinson, reflected yesterday about their work, rural America and its place in the rest of America.

Berry is an author, poet, farmer and philosopher who speaks for the old verities of agrarian culture and is one of the most widely admired writers of our time. Wilkinson, who teaches at the University of Kentucky, is the author of three widely praised books: The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence for rising African-American fiction writers), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries, based on her youth in rural Casey County, Kentucky.

Wilkinson and Berry had a conversation that concluded the fourth annual Kentucky Arts and Letters Day at The Berry Center in New Castle, which advocates for for farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy regional economies, continuing the work of Wendell Berry and his late father and brother, John M. Berry Sr. and Jr.

Berry and Wilkinson said they had both had the experience of having their work discounted as too rural. One of Wilkinson's potential editors wanted "a modern book, not a country book," and another editor wrote a third party, "If she wants to write something more contemporary, let us know."

"I feel like I sort of stuck to my guns because I think that the agrarian story, the rural story, is so important," Wilkinson said. "I almost see it, not overtly so, as a mission -- but certainly in my heart -- and if I never get to New York, I'll be fine, and I'll keep telling stories of our people." That won a big round of applause.

Berry recalled writing, around 1960, an early manuscript of poems that an editor shared with a rising young poet, who said "the experience of the present and the coming world was urban, and this poetry was wrong because of its content," he said. "I don't think either of us decided to write about rural people because they're so interesting. . . . You go with what your inheritance is."

Berry took issue with Paul Krugman's Nov. 8 column in The New York Times, headlined "Real America versus Senate America," about the extra weight that the Senate gives rural voters. Krugman "made an absolute distinction between real America and rural America," Berry said. "People are convinced that the definitive experience, if not the only experience, that's of any account," is urban. "Paul Krugman is an economist. He knows that people have to eat, presumably . . . Well, my next project is to get rural America enrolled in the United Nations."

Rural poet Donald Hall, former poet laureate, dies at 89

Donald Hall
(NYT photo by Bob LaPree)

"Donald Hall, a former poet laureate of the United States who found a universe of meaning in the apples, ox carts and ordinary folk of his beloved rural New England, died on Saturday at his home in Wilmot, N.H. He was 89," David Kirby reports for The New York Times.

His plainspoken verse and deep respect for nature reminds readers of Robert Frost and earned Hall the position of poet laureate in 2006. The son of an unhappy dairy farmer, he grew up in suburban Connecticut, but in 1975 moved to the New Hampshire farm that had been in his family for generations; he would live there for the rest of his life.

A prolific writer, Hall wrote not only poetry but essays, short stories, plays, textbooks, children's books and memoirs. As a diehard Boston Red Sox fan, he wrote two books about baseball that rang with Hall's poetic flair: In Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, he wrote "In the country of baseball, time is the air we breathe, and the wind swirls us backward and forward, until we seem so reckoned in time and seasons that all time and all seasons become the same," Kirby reports.

He received a National Medal of Arts in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. "His other honors include two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Silver medal and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry," Kirby reports.

U.S. poet laureate launches reading tour of rural places

Smith

U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith has launched a pilot project to visit rural areas, where she says book festivals don't often take her. "I'm tasked with raising the conversation about poetry . . . What I'm interested in within that larger framework is talking about poems and poetry in places where those conversations don't often happen," Smith told Andrew Travers with The Aspen Times in Colorado. "I've been excited about going into small, rural communities that don't necessarily have access to those kinds of regular programming."

Smith, who was appointed last year by the Library of Congress, kicked off her tour earlier this month with a visit to New Mexico. On Jan. 13 she held a reading at Cannon Air Force Base outside Clovis, an agricultural town on the eastern plains of the state. On Jan. 14 she visited Santa Fe Indian School, and the day afterward visited Santa Clara Pueblo, a Native American community north of Santa Fe, Mary Hudetz reports for The Associated Press. She is expected to visit rural Kentucky and South Carolina in the coming months, Travers reports.

A creative writing professor at Princeton University, Smith won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for her work Life on Mars. Her memoir Ordinary Light was a National Book Award finalist in 2015.

Summer seminar for teachers will focus on Appalachian culture, literature, art and music

Public school teachers from across the country can have the opportunity to travel to the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia to learn about Appalachian culture, literature, art and music during the NEH Summer Seminar for Teachers hosted by Shepherd University’s Appalachian Studies Program. The July 10-30 seminar will be held on the campus in Shepherdstown and will feature road trips to area attractions.

Guest artists include novelist and playwright Silas House, poet and activist Frank X Walker, storyteller and award-winning “liar” Adam Booth and Contemporary American Theater director Ed Herendeen. Rachael Meads, performing arts director at Shepherd, will conduct musical and cultural events and 2006 West Virginia Professor of the Year Dr. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt will serve as principal discussion leader and seminar director. Participants will study the literary art of Lee Smith, Denise Giardina, Fred Chappell, Ron Rash, and Nikki Giovanni, as well as the work of House and Walker. The deadline to apply is March 1. For more information click here.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Ted Kooser talks to Daily Yonder about writing about rural America

Ted Kooser

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Ted Kooser has spent much of his career writing about rural life. Kooser recently sat down with Daily Yonder writer Dale Mackey to discuss his writing process, inspirations and what it means to write about rural America.

Kooser told Mackey: "Maybe forty years ago I published a poem, 'Spring Plowing,' about field mice moving their nests into a fencerow to be safe from the plow, and a woman who had seen the poem wrote to me and said that she would never again pass a freshly plowed field without thinking of those mice, and it came to me at once, 'This is my job, to show people new ways of looking at things!' And that’s what I’ve done."

Even when one of his poems is about an urban subject, is still has a rural feel, Kooser said. He told Mackey: "I’ve written lots of poems about people I’ve observed in cities, but because I like to isolate my subjects, to push all the other people out of the frame and thus put the focus on one or two people, it may seem that my subjects are walking the streets in small towns. I don’t think I could write a poem in which I described a crowd. For me a crowd is a lot of separate poems standing around together."

"From childhood I seem to have dreamed myself into the lives of others: What would it be like to live in that house, with those people? What would it feel like to be that man, looking out of his homely face? What would it be like to be handsome?" Kooser told Mackey. "I’m very thankful to have survived into my seventies and to have had grateful readers and to have received those honors, but I earned those readers and honors by sitting by myself, writing, morning after morning, and I have always known that my best work comes out of isolation. My writing has brought me into contact with thousands of people, but at every public appearance I have wished I could be at home with my wife and my books and my dog." (Read more)

USA Today lists best festivals in the U.S.; many promote tourism in rural areas

Now that the weather is heating up throughout most of the U.S., festival season is on the horizon. USA Today "teamed up with a panel of festival experts to find the best music, food, culture, art and film festivals in the U.S," Lydia Schrandt reports for USA Today. Readers were then allowed to vote for their favorites, and some of the winners include festivals in rural areas or with rural resonance.

Among the best music festivals, No. 2 was the Electric Forest Festival, a four-day music fest in Rothbury, Mich., a village with a population of 424. An estimated 50,000 people attend the festival every year. No. 7 on the list is Bonnaroo, a four-day festival held on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tenn. The festival had more than 90,000 attendees last year.

For poetry enthusiasts, the Best Cultural Festival list includes the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev. The six-day event is "an annual celebration of the ranching and rural West," says the organization's website. Also on the list are the Texas Renaissance Festival, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Frozen Dead Guy Days, Cheyenne Frontier Days, Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and Festivals Acadiens et Créoles.

No. 2 on the list of Best General Food Festival is the Bounty of Yamhill County, located in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The Bounty of Yamhill County "is a three-day annual event that celebrates this vibrant community of famous wineries, celebrated chefs and sustainable family farms. No other locally sourced food and wine event can boast such nationally recognized participants," says the organization's website. No. 9 on the list is the Beaver Creek Food & Wine Weekend, a four-day event in Beaver Creek, Colo.

For a complete list of best festivals, click here.

'Wendell Berry's mission, in word and deed, is the defense of the earth,' Bill Moyers says in new show

Farmer-author-poet-philosopher Wendell Berry is the focus of the latest Moyers & Co. program on public television stations, starting tomorrow. Bill Moyers interviewed Berry before an audience (a rare event for Berry) during a sustainabilty conference this spring at St. Catharine College in Kentucky, where Berry and his daughter Mary have started an ecological agrarianism program to address issues of land use, agriculture and food, which Berry has been writing about for decades.

"He is one of, if not the great, writer in American letters right now," writer Bill McKibben tells Moyers. "He understood what was happening on this planet a long time before anybody else. He's, you might say, a prophet of responsibility."

Berry talks about his recent forays into environmental activism, including a sleep-in at the Kentucky governor's office to protest mountaintop-removal coal mining. "We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not," he tells Moyers. "The only question we have a right to ask is, 'What's the right thing to do?'" Check local TV listings for stations and broadcast times. Berry's fellow Kentuckians can see the show Sunday at 11 a.m. on KET and 6 p.m. on KET2.

Got marquee? This arts idea is downright poetic

Many a small town worth its salt has a movie theater marquee waiting for some terrific homebred poetry to entertain and enlighten the masses, and an arts alliance in need of a good community involvement idea. Thanks to some bright folks in Stevens Point, Wis., and to the marquee value of having a daily blog as well-read as the Daily Yonder, here it is: The Haiku Marquee Project, in which the state's student body -- from pre-school to high school -- has been asked to submit haikus for display at the town's Fox Theater this fall. (Yonder photo)

Reads the release in the Stevens Point Journal: "This is a cooperative venture between the Arts Alliance of Portage County, the Sanders family, which owns the Fox Theater, and the Woodrow Hall Jumpstart Award. The two haiku will be posted on the marquee each month, and 10 honorable-mention poems will be displayed in the Fox Theater show window. Haiku should consist of three lines and no more than 17 syllables. Poems must be the original work of the poet."

Qualified? Interested? Poets may submit no more than three haiku to: Haiku Marquee, Fox Theater, 1124 Main St., Stevens Point, WI 54481; or email them to jimpollock@charter.net. The deadline for submissions is Sept. 14. Include your name, address, phone number and, if you are a student, grade level.

Wendell Berry, author, farmer and intellectual, to give prestigious Jefferson Lecture tonight; online

Poet, essayist, novelist, farmer and conservationist Wendell Berry will deliver the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities tonight at 7:30 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The National Endowment for the Humanities will be video-streaming the lecture live. The annual lecture is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for intellectual achievement in the humanities. (Photo by Pam Spaulding)

Berry, of Port Royal, Ky., has been described as a "21st century Henry David Thoreau" and has "spent his career meditating on our relationship and responsibility to the land and community," according to the NEH website. He has written more than 40 books of poems, essays, short stories and novels. His Jefferson Lecture, "It All Turns on Affection," inspired by a passage from E.M. Forester's Howard's End, will focus on our ties to place and the environment as expressed through literature and history. Berry is delivering the 41st lecture.

For more information about Berry and the lecture, click here. The live-stream will be available here.

Poems inspired by small-town upbringing made Indiana prof a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

UPDATE, Aug. 8: Manning read to a full house as featured poet for the Holler Poets event on July 27 at Al's Bar in Lexington, Ky., Candace Chaney reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader. Many Kentucky writers attended.

Poet Maurice Manning used his experience growing up in Danville, Ky., population 10,000, as the basis for his latest volume of poetry, The Common Man, that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. "It really was a tremendous surprise," Manning told Jennifer Brummett of The Advocate-Messenger in Danville. (Photo contributed to Advocate-Messenger)

Manning, an associate professor of creative writing at Indiana University, said he considers the poems in The Common Man as "tall tales and legends" still heavily based on his childhood in Central Kentucky. "A lot of them, I think, sort of have their genesis in stories that I’ve learned from my grandmothers," he told Brummett. "They’re tales from a world gone by, and more local in their doing and thinking and experience." He added, "In my memory, Danville had real local characters around. So it’s a little bit elegiac — implicit in the book is the acknowledgment this small community I knew growing up and was part of has changed." (Read more)

Glimpses of the book are available on Amazon.com. Poem titles include: "Moonshine," "Hey, Sidewinder," "Sowing Butter Beans with a Stick" and "A Wringer Washer on the Porch."

Poet paddles pols after they fail to pass budget

April is National Poetry Month. It's also the month in which many state legislatures are supposed to complete their business. In Kentucky, for the third time in five biennial-budget sessions, the legislature adjourned without passing a state budget, forcing a special legislative session and a possible shutdown of non-essential services when the new biennium begins July 1.

The debacle moved Constance Alexander, a poet-playwright who writes a column for the Murray Ledger and Times, to put the situtation in rhyme, using as a template Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey at the Bat." Here are some excerpts:

The outlook isn't brilliant for the Bluegrass State today.
Tomorrow's not much better and the landscape's gloomy gray.
No budget passed in Frankfort after sixty days in session.
The void in leadership is vast enough to cause depression. . . .

Slots at Churchill Downs were nixed but sexting's still okay.
The legislative logic makes no sense, it's déclassé. . . .

Kentucky cannot move ahead by mortgaging tomorrow,
Yet sleight of hand in budgets past have led to current sorrows.

For the full poem, click here.