Robert Penn Warren Birthplace Museum

12/06/2025

We also bid a fond farewell to longtime committee member and treasurer Nancy Outlawe. Nancy joined to committee in 2019 and served 6 year, 3 as treasurer. We will miss Nancy and wish her well in her future endeavors. Thank you Nancy! You were one of the good ones. Now others can benefit from your faithful service and commitment.

12/06/2025

We bid a tearful goodbye to museum committee member, Tim othy Wayne Pulley. Rest in peace Tim.

Timothy Wayne Pulley 1959-2025

10/17/2025

Submitted for your consideration...
The poem "Pondy Woods" by Robert Penn Warren was published in 1966. Pondy Woods is the original name of Guthrie, KY,(aka "State Line" since the Tennessee/Kentucky border runs through the community), the birthplace and childhood home of Robert Penn Warren. In 1867, it was renamed for the president of the L & N Railroad. He was a Democratic State Representative, and the 21st Secretary of the Treasury, James Guthrie.

In 2025, a poet and retired teacher wrote a response to this Robert Penn Warren poem entitled "Pondy Woods Today". Enjoy

Pondy Woods Today
by J Alan R w/the Holy Spirit

The buzzards over Windy City*
are gone.
Replaced are they by mourning doves
singing an old, old sad song.
Big Jim’s, obviously,***
gone too.
The doves, way back then,
saw Jim run, hunted, hiding
in the no-firefly dark,
listening for horse’s hooves
and men’s mud-sucking boots,
sunk up to his nostrils
in a deep soupy swamp,
leaving only wide-open eyes
to search for flaming torches
when they would ride in.

And the doves sang, “oooo-00-oo,
he’s not the one.”

But a boy died,
and the teeth of the wolven pack
wanted any excuse
to chew on the bones of
someone, anyone
to fill their gnawing hunger.
The doves saw Jim hung,
after his beating,
on a cross,
as the town gathered
as if for a feast,
to wait for the last heave
of Jim's bare naked chest,
out, in, out, in, out
and not again.

And the doves sang, “oooo-00-oo,
too much like the One,
but this time not for sin,
but because of it.”

Poor, poor Jim, went
without a sound, and the crowds,
having their fill,
slowly staggered home.
But Jim’s blessed recourse
was shekinah glory
coming down,
And winged deliverers lifting him,
heaven only bound.

And the doves still sing, “oooo-00-oo,”
as the dew, like then,
still settles on the morn,
wheat heads rise up
to greet the sun,
and somewhere headed east,
the L & N’s whistle blows,
fading with the stack’s smoke
as if neither had ever been.

For the town of Windy Place,**
long ago called Pondy Woods,
the dove’s song will go on and on,
and silence will not have its sway,
Until the winds cease howling
at the moon.

*In 1840, the town now known as Guthrie, Kentucky, was called Pondy Woods.
**The name Guthrie means “Windy Place.”
***Big Jim is the name given a metaphorical reference to a local hanging in 1929.

09/20/2025

Our silent auction fundraiser was a huge success. A bottle of 12 year old Van Winkle reserve was won by Heath Shemwell for a bid of $1,500.

We are most grateful to Glenn Slack, proprietor of the Beverage Shoppe in Elkton KY for the donation of the bottle.

09/09/2025

08/26/2025

The Robert Penn Warren Birthplace Museum will be closed August 28-30 for Labor Day weekend. We hope you will have an opportunity to visit at another time.

07/15/2025

Submitted for your consideration...

Learning to Love RPW Poetry, Lesson #103

No one likes to wait. No one ever said, “I just love standing in lines, any kind of lines. I particularly enjoy how slow they move, and how there’s always some impatient one who tries to find a way to cut in.”

We all know how waiting feels to us. We know how anxious we get. We know how hard it is trying to be patient. We all know the thoughts we think about those ahead of us if it seems to us they are taking longer than we think they should.

But, in his classic 1976 poem, predictably entitled, “Waiting,” RPW goes beyond the thoughts and emotions involved in having to wait for anything. He even covers the physical sensations we all know so well, but does not let us stop there.

He puts us in various instances of waiting, where we get to personally experience the rigors of it, and then leads us into an examination of why waiting is such an ordeal for human beings. It’s not enough for us or RPW to leave the discussion about waiting at “I really hate waiting.” He wants us to dig deep into ourselves and figure out why we hate waiting, or at the very least, how we can best cope with it.

The overall structure and pacing of the poem, with its uncomfortably short lines and overly simple language, sets the stage for feeling the tension involved in waiting, not being able to go faster than you are.

The various examples of having to wait, one right after the other, which seems to go on and on, simulates having to wait for something that just never seems to end.

Further, he ups the ante on the anxiety involved in having to wait by including the anticipations and the uncertainties of outcomes unknown. To enter into waiting for anything at all, we have to have a really good reason for doing so and being willing to put up with the ordeal.

RPW wants us to feel like we are trapped or suspended in time. He wants us to have outcomes we yearn for. He wants us to feel the claustrophobia, the emotional heaviness of the whole experience. And he wants us to so yearn for a result or outcome that we don’t choose to prematurely back out.

But it’s the writing itself that drags out of us emotions we’d really rather just leave in the depths of our psychology. Try these words and phrases on for size:

“…there is no breathing beside you…”
“Until the doctor enters the waiting
room…”
“…you wish he’d take his G-d hand off
your shoulder…”
“…the woman you lived with all these

05/24/2025

A Poem About Robert Penn Warren, by Jeff Rogers, aka J Alan R
Good Day, Red!

by J Alan R w/the Holy Spirit,

April 24, 1905

“Good morning, oh prince of poetry!”

I say when I first spy

my sunrise partner

in sometimes rhyme and meter,

his scarlet robe a-flutter,

his flaming galero a-crest,

against my garden’s verdant

cedar,

And doffs his hat does he,

as if to say hello!

if he had one.

Perched on the dais of his royal throne,

my feeder's stash of every seed divine,

my prince searches endlessly

for the just right one,

But in his haste, finds, like before,

none.

And from my window I smile,

as my morning friend flies off again,

with vermillion breast all a-puff,

with rubicund wings full a-wave,

And touches his hat’s brim does he,

as if to say so long!

if he had one.

I finally say when I spy last his fiery tail,

once again, my friend

my still beak-empty muse,

“Good day, Red!”*

This poem, written on the 120th birthday of the most celebrated poetry the United States has ever known, Robert Penn Warren, by his friends called, “Red.”