Storied Ground

-Barbourville, KY

Addressing a crowd of students, teachers, and writers at Union College's Schaffer Library, Kentucky Poet Laureate Gurney Norman evoked both the history and timelessness of place with readings from new and published writing.

Interspersing personal stories with passages from Crazy Quilt, the forthcoming book which he refers to as an "assemblage of short fiction," Norman drew not only a personal history, but a history of the area, into focus.

Even though his growing up years were divided between towns which remain hours of travel away by road, he is quick to point out that in a straight line, they are mere miles apart.

His mind's facility for that sort of connection has positioned him well for his new role as the Commonwealth's Poet-in-Chief. Through written and remembered stories, he traced a path from Harrogate, TN up through the Cumberland Gap, to Barbourville, Hazard and Allais, KY, the coal camp where he lived his early childhood.

Revisiting memories, whether through storytelling or traveling to the site of an important event (the last time he saw his dad, at a bus stop, the scene of his parents' first date, a railroad tunnel in Tennessee) is, according to Norman, a "ritual I conduct for myself, to remember that I am a creature of feeling."

Still, the true power of his vision is his ability to conjure living history in his audience. Merely by having shared memory of an old building, or a stretch of road, he connects everyone in the room to one another, and from there, to the world.

By the end, even students who had come for "extra credit," as they put it, were lined up for a chance to talk one-on-one. Perhaps that is his greatest contribution: his effort and ability to remind us of the community we share, sometimes even when we don't like it.