When you’re a rural Kentucky boy with an account at the general store because your daddy has steady work at the mines, why, it requires more than a little nerve to leave the tobacco fields, run past 9-to-5, take the hurdles and the long jump, land, and be a poet. When you’re a rural Kentucky boy wearing flowered shirts and purple scarves, with a face tattoo you got in Estonia and both ears pierced, why, you might be inviting stares at the diner when you visit Mama but the rush of feeling at the Fair among the hay, the honey, the pigs, the tractors, oh, it takes you by surprise each time. (little poemed thought, yours truly) Portrait of the poet Ron Whitehead with tractor wheel at the State Fair