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Poetry News For October 19, 2008

Poetry News:

  1. The newly released “Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook” pulls together as-yet uncollected essays and stories by Charles Bukowski, written from 1944-1990
  2. Poetry being ‘frozen out of schools’ claims Children’s Laureate
  3. “A lot of my poems are informed by Detroit … Even when I wasn’t living in Detroit. I can’t help it.”
  4. The poetry of childhood is rarely simple; even an apparently straightforward poem of childhood memory,
  5. U.Va.’s Rita Dove to Receive Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award Oct. 18
  6. Brad Pitt teams up with Warner Bros. for ‘The Odyssey’
  7. Atkinson is as comfortable riffing on pop culture (Willie Nelson, “Three Days of the Condor”) as she is on Cicero, John Milton and Herodotus
  8. In this election year when the cost of health care looms large for most of us, anybody would profit from reading this sad lyric by Roger Fanning, an only child who nursed both parents to their expensive graves within a single year.

Stories Of ‘Appalachia’ Unearthed In PBS Series

Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs dies

video link

Eddie Holland is one of my favorite poets. I have a couple of very peripheral Motown Records stories (I was born in ‘67, after all.) Maybe I’ll write them out sometime.

The pride of Inkster, Michigan:


Marvelettes video.

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Frankie Silver(s)

A lot of my Gran’s folks lived in Burke County, NC & around Morganton. For a few generations, the women in that part of my family never married, had kids by multiple partners, and also gave their own surname to their kids (instead of the man’s). So I haven’t had much luck with my genealogical research for that Whisnant line LOL. Anyway, speaking of Burke County, North Carolina…

there is an Appalachian murder ballad called “The Ballad of Frankie Silver(s)” — it isn’t as well-known as like “Omie Wise” or other murder ballads. The story is that Frankie allegedly took an axe to her husband and afterward she allegedly confessed via the ballad’s lyrics. (From the scaffold, even.)

There is a (great) documentary “The Ballad of Frankie Silver” at Folkstreams and you can watch it online. [warning: contains hillbilly music]

Frankie Silver got hanged on this day in 1833

This dreadful dark and dismal day,
Has swept my glories all away.
My sun goes down, my days are past,
And I must leave this world at last?

Oh! Lord, what will become of me?
I am condemned, you all now see,
To heaven or hell my soul must fly
All in a moment when I die. . . .

[the rest of her confession]

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If you've clicked on a tag, you will see posts from my blog that have featured that tag. At the bottom of the page is a list of all the tags I've ever used on this blog. -- Jilly