Our next story continues our celebration of National Poetry Month and the poets of Kentucky.

Crystal Wilkinson is a writer based out of Lexington who grew up on her grandparents' farm in Eastern Kentucky.

Through hard work and determination, Wilkinson has found success as a writer, having published a handful of novels, a poetry book, and most recently a cookbook/memoir.

She's also a recent inductee into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

Now from 2021 until 2023, she served as Kentucky's Poet Laureate, where she was a champion for the rich art and culture of our state.

Let's check out her work.

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ O Tobacco O Tobacco You are the warm burnt sienna of my grandfather's skin soft like ripe leather.

I cannot see you any other way but as a farmer's finest crop you are a Kentucky tiller's livelihood.

You were school clothes in August the turkey at Thanksgiving Christmas with all the trimmings.

I close my eyes see you tall stately green lined up in rows.

See sweat seeping through Granddaddy's shirt as he fathered you first.

You were protected by him sometimes even more than any other thing that rooted in our earth.

Just like family you were coddled cuddled coaxed into making him proud.

Spread out for miles you were the only pretty thing he knew.

When I think of you at the edge of winter, I see you brown, wrinkled just like Granddaddy's skin.

A ten-year old me plays in the shadows of the stripping room the wood stove burns callused hands twist through the length of your leaves.

Grandaddy smiles nods at me when he thinks I'm not looking.

You are pretty and braided lined up in rows like a room full of brown girls with skirts hooped out for dancing.

I'm Crystal Wilkinson.

I am a writer, a former poet laureate of Kentucky.

I'm an Afro-Latin poet writing about rural people, particularly rural Black people in Kentucky.

I was grandparent raised, so my grandparents had already raised their children when they took me in.

My grandfather had 64 acres of land, and because there weren't any children, other children four miles away, I think my imagination became my playmate.

To be raised by my grandparents makes me kind of old-fashioned, and so I think that I'm always thinking about them, and I'm always thinking about, well, who came before them?

I also think, again, that's an untold story of Black rural life, that I'm always trying to reach for that and to recreate that.

I wrote a lot of bad rhyming poems as a child, and it was just a form of expression.

I didn't -- I knew I wanted to be a writer, I knew I wanted to be a storyteller, but I didn't know that I wanted to be a poet.

And poetry for me has always been a respite.

Whole worlds and universes are conveyed in a short space of time with a poem.

There's always two things happening in poetry.

There is the concrete images that are there, and what makes it the most wonderful is what's sliding underneath.

Like, there's always something sliding underneath, I think, for the reader of poetry.

Part of that ambiguity gives space to us as readers.

Like, you know, you're reading about someone's life in a really distilled space and time.

The speaker of the poem is giving you, but yet there's room for you to slide underneath it and to learn something new, or to see something new, and to have something shifted.

█ █ █ █ Praise song for the kitchen ghosts.

Supper in my childhood was always on the table by six in the evening.

Lamb fries.

Frog legs.

Fried whiting or catfish.

Neck bones.

Fried chicken livers or gizzards.

Corn pudding.

Tall glasses of cold water pulled from the well or sweet iced tea.

Biscuits topped with cooked rhubarb, butter, and sugar.

After supper, we'd watch TV.

Sometimes I ventured out to catch june bugs or lightning bugs in a mason jar.

My grandfather nodded in the reclining chair.

My grandmother sewed or quilted but always had her eye on something in the oven.

Bread.

A pie for the preacher or someone who'd lost a loved one.

I read a book.

There was always something dead in the kitchen.

On occasion a squirrel or rabbit shot and skinned by my grandfather.

A bucket of recently caught fish.

A chicken with feathers.

I remember an entire hog's head in a galvanized tub, its tongue sticking out.

█ █ █ █ My grandparents hoisted the tub with the hog's head up on the stove.

It covered all four burners.

After it cooked all night, my grandmother made souse.

She used a hand-cranked meat grinder to make relish from cucumbers, onions, and green peppers.

By nightfall everything outdoors belonged to nature, but inside we were full and warm and fed.

█ █ █ █ Well, it's important that poetry is accessible.

Poetry is for the people, you know, whoever the people are and whatever the poems are.

I mean, I think that it was designed to be a spoken art.

It's always for the people, whether it's on the page or the stage.

It has to be accessible, I think.

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