KY: Kentucky Arts Council - Poet Laureate Jane Gentry Vance

I can’t think of any post I’d rather be called to than that of Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. So my heartfelt thanks for this opportunity, to Governor Fletcher, who appointed me; to the Arts Council and Lori Meadows and Wilma Brown, who oriented me; and to Jim Voyles of Louisville, whom I’d never met until this morning, who nominated me. Thank you to you all.

From its beginnings, Kentucky has been rich in writers, and never richer than it is today, so many fiction writers, poets, essayists, who are making a difference in the world, are giving pleasure and sustenance to so many readers, by practicing the art of storytelling that is the great connector of our hearts. I am honored to speak for this tradition, to get to travel around the state and advocate for its necessity, as Joy Bale Boone, Richard Taylor, James Baker Hall, Joe Survant, and Sena Jeter Naslund have done before me.

Why is Kentucky so rich in this way? Well, Kentucky is a state full of story-telling, and has been since before it was a state, when it was the first American frontier, the new Eden, in the 18th century. The first Kentuckians were adventurers, who left the comforts of settled homes to come to a dangerous, promising wilderness. To adventure, to self-challenge, to journeys into the unknown, story is a natural and inevitable response. And in one form or another, we are still telling that story.

This has made Kentucky a place with a soul, where Kentuckians, new as well as old, tend ultimately to feel at home in their landscape, whether in the delta of western Kentucky the mountains in the east, or the meadows of the Blue Grass. These landscapes tend to infiltrate our bones.

I come from a long line of people who’ve lived in the same part of Kentucky for a long time, people who were born story tellers because they lived startling stories and had them to tell, people who have lived within a ten-mile radius of Boonesboro since Daniel Boone and the Bush Brothers arrived there, decades before the rich Virginians who became the aristocracy. These hardscrabble frontiers-people imposed themselves on, and brought their children to, a wilderness that had been used, partly inhabited, and held sacred, by native Americans for centuries. The story-tellers among my family, as is likely typical of your family, too, included a preacher, two home-poets, several grandmothers who kept diaries, even a novelist who published, to the shame of her more tight-lipped kin, the violent story of her branch of the family. Really, almost everybody, down through our parents’ generation, sat on the porch in summer, around the fireplace or stove in winter, and relished the characters and anecdotes of that very day, or of days past. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, this is a fertile field, this awareness of place and what it makes us, that Kentucky writers continue to work.

Today we are in this rotunda with the likeness of perhaps the greatest native Kentucky writer, Abraham Lincoln. But for his hard-won, anguished vision of what it means to be fully human, and the simple, fire-filled words in which he expressed that vision, we might be living in a very different state, a very different country.

So what is it exactly that writers are good for? Why is good writing valuable currency in our common wealth? Because our stories, in the form of poems, novels, short stories, essays, newapaper pieces, songs, speeches, tell us who we are, where we come from, who we might become, just as Lincoln did, literally, in his Gettysburg address.

Stories generate soul, create gathering places for our hearts, minds, and bodies. Through the living worlds stories create, they lead us over and over into the practice of human being, because they focus on the concrete, the specific: the noon sun drawing heat out of a blacktop road, or the wind lifting the hair of a particular man. Art, writing particularly, subverts our longed-for comfort, subverts the destructive ease of generalizations, of refuge in doctrines and ideologies that lead us not to think and feel for ourselves.

I am honored to be chosen to advocate to Kentuckians that our stories are essential to our humanness, that the work of writing is to keep our hearts connected, to keep intact our sense of kinship: to each other, to our deepest selves, to our place on earth, to the earth itself. Kentucky’s long tradition of relishing localness, character, and the delightful arc of stories makes us the luckiest of story-tellers, having this rich, and yes, sometimes dark and sometimes bloody, ground to work.

Kentucky Arts Council
500 Mero Street
21st Floor, Capital Plaza Tower
Frankfort, KY 40601
502-564-3757
Toll Free: 888-833-2787
FAX: 502-564-2839

Page Updated: 06/26/2008