My Laureate's Lasso

NEW POET LAUREATE CROWNED

2010-02-12T14:46:00.000-08:00

(At the state Capitol with Linda Carlisle, Head of the Dept. of Cultural Resources, and new Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers)

On Wednesday Feb. 10, Cathy Smith Bowers was officially installed as North Carolina Poet Laureate. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xAk6fOzaNE )I was delighted to place the laurel wreath on her head. My Lasso blog will now be archived here, so please visit it as often as you wish. The NC Arts Council will be setting up its own laureate website soon and will link to this blog.

Thank you for visiting this blog. Please visit my other blog now--Here, Where I Am, where I will be now and then featuring poets and new books from NC and elsewhere.

MOUNT JEFFERSON POETS--A CELEBRATION

2010-02-04T08:06:00.000-08:00

(Photo by Ranger Thomas Randolph, Mount Jefferson State Natural Area--
http://www.ncparks.gov/Visit/parks/moje/main.php )

What every mountain needs is young poets like the ones below to celebrate it every year! Mount Jefferson is one lucky mountain. Thanks to Mount Jefferson State Natural Area and Park, it has a program designed to encourage students who live nearby to write poems about it, and it has Ranger Thomas Randolph, who is devoted to keeping this program going. Just look at Ranger Tom's face in these photos! He's loving every second of it. He's proud of these young students and proud of their accomplishments.

If you go to an earlier blog post you will find the poets I chose in last summer's poetry contest, along with the history of this program--http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/2009/07/young-poets-celebrate-mount-jefferson.htmlNow, we celebrate Mount Jefferson's younger poets in grades Kindergarten-6, divided into two categories K-3 and 4-6. The theme was Mount Jefferson's seasons. I had a terrible time splitting hairs among these poems. I stood at my kitchen counter shuffling and re-shuffling poems. So many good ones! How could I choose? Here are my choices, along with photos of the poets. Congratulations to all of them.

And thank you teachers, students, and Ranger Tom for your good work in the name of NC's natural treasures and its poetry.

Addie Fairchild's poem in the voice of Mt. Jefferson right away caught my eye. I'll be honest--it was a toss-up between her excellent poem and Brianna McCoy's "Mount Jefferson Nature." Both had great images. Zachary Richards' "Mt. Jefferson's Bobcat" also thrilled me. It gave me goosebumps! Well, I even burned lunch while reading all these poems. That's what poetry does to you. Forget about multi-tasking while you are reading it. You have to give your heart and soul to it, all your attention.

I FEEL THE SEASONS (first place) This kind of poem is difficult to pull off, speaking as a non-human object or animal. She makes it work!

The trees that cover me are all f I feel the winter coldness on my face,
the trees that cover me are all frozen
My nose is frozen.
The air is windy

The snow is all around me.

I feel the spring breeze through my hair,

From the bottom up I'm green all over.

Animals waking everywhere,
Flowers swaying along with the wind,
Flowers all around me.

I feel the summer sun on my shoulders,

People climbing to my peak.

The fiery warmth touches me day and night,

Picnics on my tree covered skirt,

Fireflies all around me.
I feel the chill of all through my ruffled coat,

As time changes, days get shorter.

Leaves are falling through the brisk air,

The temperature is dropping down low,
Bright Colors all around me.

by Addie Fairchild

Westwood Elementary Schools
Westwood Elementary School

Addie Fairchild 1^st Place (Tent) Far Left

Zachary Richards 3^rd Place (Sleeping Bag) Second from Left

Zeb Duvall Science in poetry (Tent) Third from Left

Jamie Richey Unique Poetic Vision (Telescope) Far Right

Zachary Richards, Third Place (second from left in photo above)

Now, don't be confused. I'm skipping around to accommodate these wonderful photos Ranger Tom sent.

Here is Brianna's second place poem, and you can find her in this photo, third from left.

Mount Jefferson Nature (second prize, 4-6)

Listen quietly and you will hear

A musical sound that by no doubt

brings Joy to us.

The rippling brook gurgles quietly,

the water seems to say, "Peace, peace, peace.

A doe takes a drink form the gurgling brook

and swivels her head to take a look

at her fawn, who is sheepishly trying to hide

while peeking out from his mother's side.

A gray squirrel is alarmed to hear

the call of the wise old owl.

He must gather acorns

for he knows that winter is near!

The old owl watches the gray squirrel,

amused by his alarm.

As he glides swiftly down to hunt,

mice scurry all about.

So you see, Mount Jefferson Nature

has its own song,

to show us the way

that the mountain animals

end their winter days.

by Brianna McCoy

---A lovely poem, isn't it? And I admire the way she uses rhyme.

(Westwood Elementary first through third prizes and Honorable Mentions )

Mountain View Elementary students impressed me mightily, and I'd like to congratulate the teachers who have turned these very young students on so early to the joy of poetry.

Mikayla Mullis's poem charmed me, especially her images of tree limbs shining like diamonds and clouds so thick they feel "like a blanket covering you." I loved the haiku -like poems by Yair Valcasar, Jordan Potter, and their classmates. I just couldn't decide, so I gave a tie to Yair and Dustin Sheets for third prize. What a great way to begin showing students how poetry helps you focus on what you see!

Mountain View Elementary

Far Left 2^nd Place Mi Kayla Mullis (Back Pack)

Back row far Left 3^rd Place (tie)Dustin Sheets and Yair Valcazar(Sleeping Bag)

Honorable Mention EmilyFarmer, Victoria Osborne, Jordan Potter, Brandon Taylor, Quin Farmer

(Blue Ridge Elementary Honorable Mentions in Poetry)

Blue Ridge Elementary School outdid itself in this poetry challenge. Brianna McCoy and Karoline Keith wrote two poems I just couldn't resist. I chose Karoline's poem for first in the K-3 division. You will see why when you read it.

MT. JEFFERSON STATE NATURE PARK

I think it is cool that I can see

Mt. Jefferson from my front yard.

Mt Jefferson is big and tall,

It has lots of nature trails to walk and run

It is a great park for people and

animals to have tons of fun.

It's a safe place for our wildlife

friends to be

They are protected by park Rangers for you and me.

From the top of the mountain

you look out and see the horizon.

There are huge rocks to climb on

to enjoy all the beautiful views.

I'm so thankful to spend the day

with my family on Mt. Jefferson

to hide and play.

I'm very happy Mt. Jefferson is in Ashe County!

by Karoline Keith, age 8, Second Grade

Here is Mikayla's second place poem in the k-3 category.

Sun gleaming down on the trees filled with snow and ice.

Tree limbs shining like a diamond from the sun.

Animals running around without a care in the world

They are as free as birds soaring like eagles.

Mountains so high they touch

the sky. Sky so blue and clouds

so thick they feel like a blanket covering you.

by Mikayla Mullis, grade 3, Mountain View Elementary

Third prize is a tie. I was taken with Yair's poem, which has the immediacy of Japanese haiku.

Mount Jefferson by YairValcazar

Big trees

Lots of animals

Gray rocks

Tall mountain

Dustin Sheets was straightforward in his praise of Mt. Jefferson:

Mt. Jefferson is a good place to live

If you live there

it is cool.

It has a lot of stuff.

(grade 3, Mountain View Elementary)

Here is another poem that I really liked from the k-2 division.
Mount Jefferson by Jordan Potter

I can see...
deer
bunnies
squirrels
I can hear...
birds
bears
leaves crunching

If we had more poets celebrating our best loved places, our homes, our mountains, our rivers, our seashores, perhaps we would all take better care of those places, making sure that they are there for future young poets to enjoy! A friend, Sheila Kay Adams, ballad-singer and storyteller from Madison County, recently told me, "We are losing our homes." She suggested the state ask each county to choose two writers to compose either poetry or prose about their places and have them gathered into an anthology for North Carolinians to read and enjoy. These young poets have begun that project already. I salute them and urge other institutions around the state to do begin their own poetry projects. In this, my last blog post as NC Poet Laureate, I ask anyone who reads these student poems to write a poem or brief essay about a loved place that you hope will be saved and protected. You can email me through my other blog, "Here, Where I am." I will post what you send me.

UPDATE ON FUTURE OF "MY LAUREATE'S LASSO"

2010-02-02T14:29:00.000-08:00

Contrary to an earlier post, our new poet laureate Cathy Smith Bowers will not be posting to this blog. She will have her own site through the NC Arts Council's projected "umbrella site", which will also link to my Lasso archive. I will move a few of my Lasso features over to my "Here, Where I Am" blog, such as features on specific poets and new books I like. These posts will focus mostly on NC writers, but I am now able to give more attention to work outside our state. I invite you to visit "Here, Where I Am" and post comments. I'm also hoping to set up some "assignments" for interested writers, readers, and teachers.

I'll keep you updated on the status of the Arts Council's laureate site.

In the meantime, I'll be making the transition from Lasso to kitchen window! See you there!

POET OF THE WEEK: JOHN YORK

2010-02-01T10:51:00.000-08:00

(John York, NC Teacher of the Year, at the NC English Teachers Banquet in Winston-Salem)

John York has been a friend of mine for many years. He teaches English and creative writing at Penn-Griffin School for the Arts, has been a devoted member of the NC English Teachers Association, winning their Teacher of the Year award, and best of all, is a splendid poet, one of the best in our state. His chapbook titled Naming the Constellations will be published this summer in Spring Street Editions' chapbook series. He's a graduate of the UNCG MFA program; his work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, as well as in several chapbooks. His prizes for writing include a Literary Award for Poetry from Greensboro Review and the Poet Laureate Award, in 2008, from the North Carolina Poetry Society. His poems have recently appeared in Appalachian Journal, International Poetry Review, and Pembroke Magazine. The titles of his chapbooks are Picking Out (Nebo Poetry Press) and Johnny's Cosmology (Hummingbird Press).

"Naming the Constellations" appeared in Pine Needles and those who are interested may find it at NCPS website:

http://www.sleepycreek.org/poetry/laureatepoemlist.htm

Here are two poems from his forthcoming publication.

Egret

1

Against the black pines,
a great egret, so large, so white, wading,
then freezing above its reflection.

2

Every Independence Day
it returned to our pond where it pretended
to be two reeds and a patch of sunlight,
until the splash, the snaky lunge,
the image shattered, rippled, coming back,
the beak pointing skyward,
the momentary swelling of the neck.
How I wanted to sneak in
for a closer look but had no cover,
so the alarmed bird would spring up,
laboring, beating the air,
circling, then heading over the horizon
to another pond, a quieter place.

3

And I imagined the minnows, frogs, salamanders
all relieved, all gathering in the dark
to tell horror stories
of Snapping Turtle, Mr. Cottonmouth, Big Daddy Bass—
but saving a shuddering whisper for the Lightning Striker,
Death’s Angel,
and proclaiming the name sacred, a secret.

4

But here, smelling the shore mud
and listening to the water, the wind as quiet as bird’s breath,
I pretend to be the plumed wonder,
and, solitary, I wade in deeper, one step,
then, another—wishing I were never distracted,
never deceived by the radiant image
(a long beak, hidden wings)—
I concentrate, waiting for what’s moving below the surface,
a flicking shadow, breathing, moving toward my feet.

Substitute

It was a long day for my father, milking
to be done by sunrise,
then the noise, the shouting of drivers,
dump trucks kicking up dust,
rushing back and forth between the field
and the wide trench silo—
carved by a bulldozer, the one
that scraped away the apple trees—
trucks loaded by the green harvesting machine
eating its way down the rows of corn
leaving nothing but stumps,
the trucks roaring back to the trench, silage mounded,
the men putting it to bed
under a black plastic tarp, my father using old tires
to hold down the edges—
all the men sweating and covered in dirt,
tassel, bits of corn leaf.

After the fields were sheared clean,
after I brought in the herd, my father went
to do the evening milking.
How were four children to know that the tarp
was sacred, that the claws
of the dog, chasing us again
and again over the black mountain,
would make enough holes to ruin everything?

Daddy came in at dusk,
raged his dead cigar back to life:
with the voice of an angry god,
Dad commanded Smoky to come to the chain,
Smoky the blond shepherd-collie mutt,
Smoky the laughing dog,
and with tail between legs Smoky obeyed,
Dad attached the chain to the collar
and threw the dog into the car, sped over the hay field
down to the trench, jerked
Smoky around and yelled as he beat
the yelping, writhing animal with his fist, with the chain—
and I was the dog writhing and yelping,
it was all my fault.

I sat with my dog long
into the night, there under the clothesline,
until my mother coaxed me into the house.

And Smoky followed the sharecroppers one day,
up to the main road, where he was killed chasing cars.

CATHY SMITH BOWERS IS NEW NC POET LAUREATE!

2010-01-29T12:28:00.000-08:00

Photo credit: Jeff Davis. This photo of Cathy was snapped at the studios of WPVM when she appeared earlier this year on WordPlay, the station's program by, about, etc., "writers, their craft and ideas."

At last I can break the news! My friend Cathy Smith Bowers, a poet whose work I've long admired, has been chosen to serve as North Carolina's new Poet Laureate. Cathy will be "crowned" on Feb. 10 in Raleigh. More about that later. Right now I want to congratulate her and thank the search committee for its fine work. I pledge whatever help I can give to Cathy. She will be taking over this blog shortly, though I'll also be contributing now and then, as Cathy and I deem fitting. I'll keep my "Here, Where I Am" blog going, so visit me there.

In the meantime, go to the sidebar of this blog and click on Cathy's post in the Poet of the Week column.

GIVING MYSELF OVER TO GREEN

2010-01-26T12:16:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago, redroom.com asked its members to blog on the topic of "my favorite poem." How could I choose? One poem from all the ones I love? Then I took a look at our Aero garden and knew. Verde, que te quiero verde!

---------------------

Poets are fickle creatures. We fall in love over and over again.We can never remain faithful to only one poet. I began to understand this the day I forsook Wordsworth in my college Spanish class. My poetic guide. My first love. How could I?

What was I doing in a Spanish class anyway? Hadn’t my father instructed me to take either French or German, the latter being his grandmother’s native tongue?

He would have found it silly, the way my infatuation began, with a 75 rpm record bought during my senior year in high school. The Music of Spain. I listened at night after lights out to “Granada” and “Malaguena.” The hair on the nape of my neck trembled. The dark outside my windows beckoned.

And so, on the first day of classes in a small woman’s college in Georgia, I sat down to learn Spanish from a short rotund woman who demanded we call her La Senora, although she had never married. I read the classics of Spanish literature, moving inexorably toward the 20th century where in the anthology’s last section, I found Romance Sonambula and, and in the burst of a verde viento, the English Romantic poets became as dust to me. I fell in love with Federico Garcia Lorca. In Spanish. No matter how many translations of his work I’ve read over the years, the original Spanish has never lost its seductiveness, whether I read it silently or, better, aloud.

Verde que te quiero verde.

Verde viento. Verdes ramas.

El barco sobre la mar

y el caballo en la montaña.

Con la sombra en la cintura

ella sueña en su baranda,

verde carne, pelo verde,

con ojos de fría plata.

Verde que te quiero verde.

Not that I agreed with La Senora that everything sounded better in Spanish. Shakespeare? Wordsworth? Keats? No, I already knew that the language of poets is beautiful, no matter what it is. Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, French, English....Cherokee.

Garcia Lorca’s poetry spun me around, gave me a new way of experiencing language, my own language, which was now infused with the cante jondo of Andalusia.

Even now, years later, I recite those lines as a kind of mantra, Verde, que te quiero verde... and I still love the feel of them in my mouth. I love the deep song of them in my viscera. I have dreamed of trying to save Lorca in the olive grove, with only my child’s fingers pointed like guns at his assassins.

Verde, que te quiero verde.

Not even these lines can stop bullets. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. I know that.

But they live on in our daily lives, these words we love. They wait patiently for us. I had to reach middle age before Garcia Lorca’s duende found its way into my own poems.

Gone

Long before I could read Lorca

I wanted to give myself over to green

as he had and be lost like a sleepwalker

in it. I wanted to hide in the honeysuckle

and never come home if it meant I must stay

by the telephone, waiting for someone

to call with the doctor’s pronouncement,

my mother then turning to us saying

over and over again in my memory, Gone.

Such a word I would never repeat

to the oaks that held sway round my favorite pasture,

or blackberry bushes I dreamed would stay

unscythed by road crews sent forth to claim

right of way. Verde, que te quiero verde,

I’d gladly have cried if I could,

but where are such beautiful words

when we need them? And what if that’s all

this poem means now I’m middle-aged: words

as a way to want green back again

and myself in the throes of it,

even though I’ve learned enough about Lorca

at last to be quite sure that no verde

anywhere spending its June on this earth

could have outstayed for one blessed

second what waits at the end

of the line, always some bloodless voice

trying hard to sound human across so much

distance, its words still escaping me.

(from The Store of Joys, NC Museum of Art)

W.H. Auden said that art is a way of breaking bread with the dead. Each time a poet begins to write, or to read a poem, she takes the bread of those gone before and places it in her mouth. She does this over and over again. With one poet. Another, and yet another, living or dead. She loves the taste of the bread they share. So many poets. So many poems. By the end of her life she will contain, like Whitman, multitudes, and will never again try to answer the question, “What is your favorite poem?”

POET OF THE WEEK: ALEX GRANT

2010-01-18T07:51:00.000-08:00

Alex Grant is a Promethean poet, which I know sounds maybe a bit pretentious. But he seems to be everywhere--publishing poems in just about every journal and e-zine, writing poems non-stop, posting on facebook, making numerous friends. How does he find such energy, this transplanted Scotsman? Is he a shape-shifter? He calls himself Alex Cougar Grant, but I think he must be Coyote! His sense of humor runs non-stop. He's a craftsman of great facility and sometimes, I think, trickery. He loves a joke. He loves the English language and how to play with it and let it play him.

His new book Fear of Moving Water was released last fall from Wind Publications -http://windpub.com/books/movingwater.htm- and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Google him, find out more about him, read his poems. You'll be pulled in and realize again the pleasures of language

Fear of Moving Water is available from your local bookstore, from on-line vendors such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble, or from the publisher.

Fear of Moving Water, $15.00,
59 pages, ISBN 978-1-936138-02-9

Wind Publications
600 Overbrook Drive
Nicholasville, KY 40356

Alex's chapbook Chains & Mirrors (NCWN / Harperprints) won the 2006 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize and the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award (Best North Carolina poetry collection). His second chapbook, The White Book, was released in 2008 by Main St. Rag Publishing. His poems have appeared in a number of national journals, including The Missouri Review, Smartish Pace, Best New Poets 2007, Arts & Letters, The Connecticut Review, Nimrod and Seattle Review. A recipient of WMSU’s Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship and the Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets Prize, he lives in Chapel Hill, NC, with his wife, Tristi, his dangling participles, and his Celtic fondness for excess. He can be found on the web at www.redroom.com/author/alex-grant.

Here are some testimonials to his work:

"Alex Grant is a fabulist who spins language acrobatically into tales, tales into music, music into myth. Reading him (preferably aloud) is pure pleasure for the imagination, the mouth and the mind."
--- Susan Ludvigson

"If you value linguistic fluency, the flow of the English language along the warp of syntax, the weaving of image and rhythm into a tapestry of sound, you will find yourself immersed in Fear of Moving Water. Alex Grant brings his keen sense of language to every poem and he writes unashamedly out of the sheer pleasure of that language. Where does a poem's sense of place begin? In the naming of things. Grant names the world in all its multitudinous glories and terrors. Reading his poems kindles our desire to live again in that world."
--- Kathryn Stripling Byer, NC Poet Laureate & author of Coming to Rest

"I've always believed that poetry depends on two truths: the probity of mystery versus obscurity, and the musical resonance of words within the poetic line or phrase. Alex Grant probes a menagerie of mystery in these poems, and among the younger poets I've encountered, he is more finely attuned to the music of poetry than most. He is a poet to be reckoned with, and he is worth every nuance of the serious reader's reckoning. This is a book that compels our reading, and our re-reading."
--- Martin Lammon, Arts & Letters editor

"These historically savvy, philosophically ambitious poems demonstrate as much linguistic and syntactical dexterity as they do an expansive literary mind at work. Alex Grant casts his visionary net far and wide, capturing the dark and shimmering..."
--- Dorianne Laux

From the book:

NERUDA’S SUICIDE NOTE

- In memory of Spalding Gray

They say nothing ever changes

but your point of view.

Nothing – “some thing

that has no existence” –

this makes no sense.

I sit in the catacumbas

and listen to the rain

pound the papaya leaves -

my skin like confetti,

my heart a cheap lottery.

I have seen the tiger’s stripes –

they live between

the fine linen sheets

of an office-girl’s bed,

in the afternoon fumblings

of someone who is no-one,

with a heart bursting

like a red balloon

on a tap – the pieces fly

in all directions, you cover

your face with your hand,

and it sticks to your skin

like confetti, like phosphorus

launched from a Greek warship,

like the skin of a plum

peeled by a broken nail.

SECRET SONNET FOR THE COCKROACH

They live without their bodies for a week,

you know – subsisting on the head, the mind

alone - they flit like frogs beside a creek

whenever pounding footsteps come to grind

their crunchy shells into some pristine hard-

wood floor. You stamp on one, and six white eggs

are jettisoned inside a fibrous shard

they say is tougher than a whiskey keg.

Four billion years and evolution’s passed

them by – this crevice-living dinosaur,

resisting every futile fog and gas-

filled labyrinth - unlike the Minotaur -

bull-headed, eggless doorman of the maze -

that mythic locus Theseus embraced.

THE LONG, SLOW DROP

A wedge of salted cantaloupe

sinking in blue agave.

A bruised peach

in a white porcelain bowl.

The heart’s iambic thud,

like steps on maple floors.

Four strands of hair

in a lover’s mouth.

A zinc nail sunk in bitumen.

A black-haired boy

seen in a rear-view mirror.

A plum tomato skewered

on a bamboo stave.

A Chinese flag buckled

in the monsoon’s lull.

The white afternoon

turning to November dark.

- For the Haiku Master Issa, and his father

19 days into the late spring moon,

Issa pours sugar down his father’s

throat, rubs his feet and shoulders,

listens, in the early hours, to breath

labor like fading wind. He watches

him mouth unheard prayers, hears

the rattle in the gullet, the invitation

to the moon to walk with him again.

Delirium comes in many forms, but

none so blatant as necessity, none

so welcome as the inevitable stone

sinking back into amniotic blue.

HIS HOLINESS THE ABBOT

IS SHITTING IN THE WITHERED FIELDS

- after Buson

The mortal frame, the Haiku Masters hold,

is made up of one hundred bones

and nine orifices.

The mind this frame contains can be used,

or not used, to make the poem,

or become the poem.

Becoming is accomplished without thought,

making requires the application

of intent and will.

All change comes from objects in motion.

To capture the thing at rest, you

must be moving.

So, 7 days bereaved, Issa made his father’s

death poem: “A bath when you’re born,

a bath when you die – how stupid.”

Grief is a silk neckerchief covering a burn

around the throat, holding sound

down in the body.

And so we make these sounds without

thought – the heretic body burns,

intends, and moves.

READING AND SIGNING: CHEROKEE LITERATURE

2010-01-15T09:05:00.000-08:00

Reading and Book Signing: Cherokee Literature in Appalachian Heritage .

(Please go to http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/2009/11/appalachian-heritage-special-cherokee.html to see the post on this special issue.

The Museum of the Cherokee Indian will host a reading and book signing Sunday afternoon January 17 from 2-4 pm in the Multi-purpose room of the Education and Research Center. Michell Hicks, Principal Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, will introduce Cherokee writers featured in the new issue of AppalacAppalachian Heritage: A Literary Quarterly of the Appalachian South. This issue features works by twenty-one members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, with cover artwork and illustrations by Sean Ross, (EBCI.) Featured author of the issue is Robert Conley (Cherokee Nation) who is also Distinguished Sequoyah Professor at Western Carolina University and keeps office hours at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian as well.

This volume is the largest collection to date of contemporary literary efforts by members of the Eastern Band, and includes poetry, prose, essays, stories from oral tradition, and artwork. The Editor, George Brosi of Berea Kentucky, will attend the event, where Conley will read from his work. Authors will be available to sign copies, which will be sold through the Museum Store at $8 each.

MARGARET RAAB: In Memoriam

2010-01-06T13:55:00.000-08:00

Margaret (Peggy) Raab, one of NC's most accomplished and acclaimed poets, has died much too soon of cancer. Her funeral will be Friday in Chapel Hill. For her obituary, please go to http://www.chapelhillnews.com/news/story/54472.html. For a podcast of Peggy reading from her work, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu-Udyk_9PU.

Here are a few of Peggy's poems, as well as some comments by her many friends and admirers.

Paul Jones: Peggy was always talented and giving. In her last years, she realized many of her ambitions including becoming a full time faculty member in creative writing as director of the program at wichita statehttp://www.wichita.edu/thi

sis/wsunews/news/?nid=397
She also published at least three great chapbooks. Here she reads "Low Owl Illusion"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu-Udyk_9PU and "Transvestites in Waukegan"http://www.youtube.com/wat

ch?v=-ysVvVAz0Mo

Susan Meyers: Peggy was such an inspiration to so many, such a kind soul and so talented.

Dogwood Alarm

by Margaret Rabb

By pairs and threes they crash
and spin to the shoulder, drivers
stunned, unable to keep their eyes,
wheels, the tingle in their fingertips
from bark and open drifts of silk,
the looseblown momentary bloom.

April. They pass, retreat sideways,
floating away from the little accident.

A specimen tree in a suburban yard
is one thing, fertilized, gravid, buds
popped out all over, azaleas snapping
at its knees. But the woods at the edge
of plowed fields are another story, a waltz
at the dogwood diner, the dance that slays us:

four or five flowers hover over a branch,
crossed, notched, whiter than this world allows.

Two poems from Margaret Rabb's Shoulderable Shine

followed by a note on the author

Dante's Anteroom

In the middle of my life I found myself in a dark wood.

On one side, clouds settled like three or four trouble notes.

Then they moved, right to left, a slow freight

shuddering by the crossing grade. Or – I was looking

out the grate as a whistle shifted bars across the gate.

In the middle of life's way I found myself in dark woods.

On a landing a broom leaned out of a bucket.

Beyond the ferry wake, a slanted plume. Sunrays

slipped, then caught a jib and mainsail. Runnels hissed

to the rocks. White sheets cupped and held.

In the midst of life I found I was in a dark wood.

Rain scrimmed the air. It was all unclear,

a sandblasted flood I squinted through. Great,

I'd say, and try the other glasses in my pocket

but they only focused drops against the gray.

Just what I need now, cut loose and nearly blind,

an unknown coast closed in with rime.

Midway on life's journey I found myself in the dark woods.

At night the island might still be overgrown with fir,

starless but for piers and porches across water.

Black-green drooping boughs stir a diffuse

and moonish glow behind the clouds' light cover.

In the middle of the night my daughter's call –

old anger she'll never get over, oil and vitriol

against too much, too little, pitched and caught again.

Next night my mother's voice, scratched in pain,

near panic, twisted gut. Back to the ER

because – what else is there to do for her?

In my middle age, that darkening wood, I found myself

across the continental shelf from home. The flight back

skimmed high plains. Now I can't recall the place

for a waterglass, which drawer holds stamps.

No light outside since lightning hit the lamps.

Midway through my life in the dark wood

of Sylvania County, I found it was a hemlock forest,

a rhododendron hell. What could be more manifest

than native laurel thickets three stories high

holding pale petal spikes to claps of thunder in July?

My mother, nearly ninety, will not bathe or brush her hair

but sits askew all day in the black reclining chair.

After the middle of middle age a vision,

airy or ordinary, will not engage

but only aggravate a reader. Reactive fission

fuels the middle of middle age. A vision

from a line of Dante? Rescue mission.

Infernal fizzle pushed to the nuclear stage

over the edge of the middle. A middle-aged vision-

ary? Her ordinary will? Disengage

the dazzle. Any pen to any page.

For the straight road was lost. How hard a thing

to tell what wild, rough, dense or wooded was.

I turned too soon and drove too far, climbing

a one-lane gravel path. The gearbox buzzed,

the drop sheered off. Pines on that steep side.

Mills River understory ginseng and Solomon's seal.

I forced myself to turn back at the final hairpin.

For I had missed the right road. What hard work

to imagine for you, reader, this wood, savage and tangled,

and down where we breathe, air like condensed milk.

I lay low, gave in, adored the genes

that cool my children's bloodlines.

So bitter, so bitter is it, death is little more.

Past my mother asking for her father,

past my careless girls who husbanded nothing,

no harbor but clouds, no train but grief,

I left the right road. But the good I found

may be told: a shale never broken,

a shadow cove, whitewater at the cleft.

I stepped into the stream, sleepwalker woken

midway – myself dark words, dark woods.

Walking a Black Lab at Night

She pulled out to the leash's

end and disappeared.

From then on it was weird

air-fishing through the reaches

the cable gave her – reeling back,

casting and spinning – sudden slack

that dropped my wired wrist,

her hidden point I missed.

Margaret Rabb has been the artist in residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. She has taught at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, St Andrews College in Laurinburg, and the University of Washington in Seattle, and was awarded the 2006 Arts & Letters Rumi Prize by Coleman Barks. Her first book of poems, Granite Dives (New Issues Press, 2000), received North Carolina's Roanoke-Chowan Award. Her poems have appeared in journals from the Kenyon Review to Light Quarterly and have been awarded the Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry, the Phyllis Smart Young Prize from the Madison Review at the University of Wisconsin, the Lullwater Prize from Emory, the Hackney Literary Award, and the Wood Award for Distinguished Writing from the Carolina Quarterly. Her new chapbook, Old Home, was chosen by Fred Chappell and published last November by New American Press. Next year Rabb will direct the creative writing program at Wichita State University.

"Dante's Anteroom" was first published in Chelsea; "Walking a Black Lab at Night" was first published by theCincinnati Review.

NAZIM HIKMET POETRY FESTIVAL CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

2010-01-06T07:46:00.000-08:00

The second annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry festival competition is now open. The closing date is Feb. 19, so begin to think about the poems you wish to submit. For more information about the Festival, please go to www.nazimhikmetpoetryfestival.org.

The second annual Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Festival will be held on Sunday, April 18, 2010 in Cary, North Carolina. As we bring together poets and poetry lovers, participation of area poets will be an essential part of this Festival. Interested poets are invited to submit their poems by Friday, February 19, 2010. The selected poems will be published on-line at the Festival web site as well as in the Festival Chapbook, and the poets will be invited to read their winning poems and introduce their poetry at the Festival. Each finalist will receive an award of $100. Last year's winning poems can be found at the festival web site.The 2009 festival chapbook is available at Amazon.com.

GENERAL RULES:

Deadline: Entries received by Friday, February 19, 2010 will be considered for selection.

Submission Requirements:

(*) All entries MUST be submitted via www.nazimhikmetpoetryfestival.org

(*) All poems submitted to the Festival must be unpublished, original works.

(*) Each poet can submit up to three poems.

(*) The poems should be in English.

(*) The selected poems will be published on-line at the Festival web site as well as in the Festival Chapbookl. By submitting their poems, the poets grant NHPF all rights to publish the poems at these venues.

(*) After the festival, the chapbook will be available for purchase at amazon.com. The proceeds from the chapbook sales will be used to support future festivals.

(*) The poets will retain copyrights of their poems.

Selection & Notification

(*) Submitted poems will be evaluated anonymously.

(*) The contact information provided by the poets will not be disclosed to other individuals or organizations.

(*) The poets will be notified of their poem’s status by March 22, 2010.

POETRY SELECTION COMMITTEE:

John Balaban, Professor of English, Poet-in-Residence, NC State University

Kathryn Stripling Byer, 2005-2009 NC Poet Laureate

Greg Dawes, Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, NC State University

Joseph Donahue, Senior Lecturing Fellow, Department of English, Duke University

Jackie Shelton Green, Piedmont Laureate

Hatice Örün Öztürk (ATA-NC Representative), Associate Professor, Department of ECE, NC State University

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS:

This event is organized by the American Turkish Association of North Carolina (www.ata-nc.org )

Organizing committee: Buket Aydemir, Pelin Balı, Erdag Göknar, Mehmet Öztürk, and Birgül Tuzlalı

Contact: contact@nazimhikmetpoetryfestival.org

POET OF THE WEEK: JESSIE CARTY

2010-01-03T11:01:00.001-08:00

No one deserves to be the first POET OF THE WEEK on my 2010 blog more than Jessie Carty. Jessie is a young poet determined to follow the call of her passion for poetry. She will unashamedly share that passion with you, including her ambition to reach readers and other poets through as many avenues as possible She reads widely, she works hard to revise her poems, she submits work, and she remains open to as many guides and guidelines around her as possible. She is a faithful blog visitor, leaving supportive and appreciative comments, for which I am grateful. Jessie is the sort of young poet who will continue to grow, whose work will expand as her spirit expands through reading and, I hope, staring out her windows and letting her imagination weave its webs. "You have to be stubborn to make it as a poet" Maxine Kumin told me years ago when I was struggling to find a publisher for my first book. I'm pretty Sure than Jessie is stubborn enough to "make it."

It's a pleasure to introduce her as Poet of the Week.

Jessie's poems and non-fiction have appeared in publications such as The Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Journal andThe Northville Review. Her first chapbook, At the A & P Meridiem, was released by Pudding House Publications in 2009. Her first e-chapbook/2^nd print chapbook, The Wait of Atom, was released by Folded Word Press in November 2009. Her first full length collection Paper House will be released by Folded Word Press in March 2010. Jessie works as a freelance editor, writer, and writing coach/teacher. She is also the editor of Shape of a Box, YouTube's first literary magazine. Jessie received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is a member of AWP, Charlotte Writer’s Club, NCWN, NC Poetry Society and will serve on the new board for the Poetry Council of NC. You can find her around the web but most often at her blog http://jessiecarty.wordpress.com.

From Jessie's first chapbook “At the A & P Meridiem” (Pudding House, 2009)

6pm

Outside the pan, then inside its lip,

the rhythm of the dish rag

invokes a spell of domesticity

as the grease clumps

down the silver walls of the sink

and into the growl of the garbage disposal,

all hungry like a spirit animal.

I set the oven to preheat at 450

while I chop up a fruit salad.

Out the sliding glass door,

I toss rings of oranges

puckered like over tanned skin

into a brown compost pile.

Improvising, I prepare

a pot pie of mixed, frozen

vegetables and sliced chicken.

Here is a dash of salt, a turn

of the pepper mill, a finger

making a furrow across the top.

I taste the raw beginning.

I set a timer for 45 minutes.

As I wipe down the counter

and scrub up the sink, I stop

once in a while to flick

the light inside the stove—

abra-cadab-ra.

From – The Wait of Atom, her 2^nd chapbook, Folded Word Press 2009

(first appeared in Wild Goose Poetry Review)

The Wait of Atom

It wasn’t that he wouldn’t wait for her

or not even that he didn’t want

to wait for her, he just couldn’t

stand still. She couldn’t stand it,

the way his eyes became nearly crossed,

how he jangled the change in his pocket.

She’d complained before.

To keep his face from registering

annoyance, he began mentally listing

the noble gases by weight: lowest to highest,

using his hands in his pockets to count each one.

He could do this without moving his lips.

His face relaxed even though she was still

transferring her personal items

from a brown purse to a black one.

She had explained, on more than one occasion,

how her purse had to match her shoes. How

his belt should match his shoes and he’d learned

to keep his eyes focused on a point

just over her shoulder while he let his brain

scan the periodic table of elements.

Her upcoming full length book Paper House will be out March 2010 from Folded Word Press.

Paper House

Fold a sheet of striped

notebook paper in half.

Draw the shape of a house.

Trim the edges to form a roof.

Where you want windows,

cut a flap.

Place pieces of furniture

or people to peer at

when you peep

through the paper windows.

On the first floor, in the kitchen,

Mom raises

her stick arms. She can almost

touch the ceiling.

She’s closest to the door.

Above her is a bedroom

a girl looks out a window.

She’s next to a desk

with her arms out straight

as if she was trying

3^rd grade calisthenics. To the girls’

right is another room

with a bed, a lamp. Downstairs,

next to the kitchen,

Dad lies on the couch wearing boxers.

Black and white can’t show

his cigarette dripping red-tipped ash

onto the carpet, forming a hole.

From a project in progress. Ology. First appeared in Blue Fifth Review

Far and Wee

I

Breathing on trees was my hobby. I’d sit on the browned pine needles, leaning my head against the bark and I’d suck in as much air as I could through my nose then I’d let it go with my chin pointed up to the branches. I’d pretend I was blowing up a balloon as I willed my carbon to keep the trees growing up and out.

II

I was never good at making balloons. Impatience perhaps? The first long breathes are almost futile. The balloon just spurts the air back at you, but if you keep pushing past that the plastic will eventually give and expand from the center rounding out.

III

Mom was the best at tying the ends of the balloons but my brother would do in a pinch. Like when we were waiting in the car once and to o entertain us, my brother blew up a balloon for each of us. My sister was in the front seat, bouncing her balloon back and forth against the windshield but I had taken a dare from my brother. I put the balloon under my shirt to pretend I was pregnant. I was rubbing my new rotund belly, saying, “Feel it kick!” When it popped, shrinking against the skin of my stomach it pulled the flesh up and in.

From an untitled project in progress but first appeared in The Dead Mule

Marrow

When the contractor began flattening the fields I had sold,

he turned over a small cache of bones.

From my back porch I saw him remove his hat, pull

his browning hand across his forehead.

He tossed the bones into the woods and leveled the spot,

prepping it for concrete.

In the dark of early evening I scooped up the bones. They were light

like bread and cold from the wet earth.

I warmed them in the oven of my palms, wondering if once

they were worn down by hours leaning into an axe,

or perhaps from grinding against a mortar to resize corn. They

could have been the foundation of skin, hope and tendon;

they could have belonged to the builders of pillars, of stone

circles, of sacrificial mounds, of children.

As I laid them down, I saw a body loose and those bones poking

through the skin like the skin was shale;

as the meat of the body moved down the shaft of the bone

like a candle melting on stone.

THE WORK OF WINTER

2009-12-29T12:59:00.000-08:00

The Work of Winter (from www.ncarts.org)

By Kathryn Stripling Byer

This time of year poet Adrienne Rich’s words bubble up into my

consciousness: “The work of winter starts fermenting in my head / how with

the hands of a lover or a midwife / to hold back till the time is right.” She

urges to “trust roots” and “learn what an underground journey / has been,

might have to be; speak in a winter code / let fog, sleet, translate; wind, carry

them.”

This time of year my imagination wants to trust roots. To go underground

where so much of our inner journey takes place. In other words, it wants

time to think about the origins of memory and language. It’s a time when I

pull out my Oxford English Dictionary, hold up the magnifying glass and

look up the sources of words I use everyday. Where did they come from?

How have they changed? Inevitably, this always leads me back to the

question, “How have I changed?”

Because I recently turned sixty-five, a truth that women of a certain age are

not supposed to own up to, I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “old.” I

don’t feel old, I just feel as if I’ve been around for a long time, learned a lot

(though not enough) and that I’m in my prime.

When I turned to the origins of the word “old,” I found that it’s a very old

word indeed, and that its root many centuries ago meant “to nourish.”

Tracking it into Old English, I discovered that it becomes “oeld,” meaning

mature and lasting, something to be valued. The word appears numerous

times in medieval writings, and nearly always in a positive context.

Knowing this, I now no longer mind thinking of myself being described as

“old.”

When we begin to think about how our language began, we are drawn back

to a speech that sounded earthy, no trace of Latin in it. A language of

survivors in a cold, rough landscape. Over the years that language changed

by absorbing words from all over the planet, but mostly words from French

and Latin. Just about any word one picks out of a dictionary contains a piece

of that history. The renowned English poet W. H. Auden once said that

every one of his poems is a hymn of praise to the English language. A poet

in any language feels the same way about what we call the mother tongue.

Our mother tongue nourishes us. Just as the word “eald” meant centuries

ago.

Each morning my husband reads a page from his “Calendar of Forgotten

English,” a ritual that began 5 years ago when I gave him the 2000 calendar

for Christmas. These calendars collect words no longer in use, or not often,

and they lie on our table, waiting to be read while my husband drinks his

coffee. Words like “flaws” (gust of wind) and “blague” (humbug). Old

words. And, finally, not forgotten. Here they lie beside the cereal box, the

jam and butter, another morning’s invitation to look back and realize what

the word “old” really means. Still here. Ready for another year. Pick a word.

Any word. And it will carry you back to the roots of our language, and

forward into a present made even richer for knowing how the past spoke

itself.

WORDS SHINING IN THE NIGHT

2009-12-22T12:13:00.000-08:00

I wrote this column for my Language Matters series during the winter of 2006. it seems as resonant now as it did then. I wish all my blog visitors a warm, safe, and restorative holiday.

Words Shining in the Night

By Kathryn Stripling Byer

Nothing brings our language into brighter focus than religious holidays. As we gather to

hear the words of this holiday season, we have lately become more aware of how those

words can both bind us together and push us apart. Just last Christmas, there was an

uproar over greeters at various stores using Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas,

as if the former somehow diminished the latter. Yet, many Americans do not celebrate a

traditional Christmas and many others do not celebrate it at all. Some, like certain Native

American tribes, never have, welcoming the solstice instead with their age-old earth-

based rituals.

So, what to do in our increasingly pluralistic society, where Latino, Arabic, Jewish, African, and

Asian voices are joining the chorus of celebrations? Can we agree at least on the meaning of this yearly

turning, that it pulls us back into the light, if we let it? And that the light can bring us

together, if we let it?

Perhaps learning some new words for light would be a good place to start. Tara, for

example. We English speakers think of Ireland and Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation. But the

word is also Urdu/Hindi for star, descended from the Sanskrit for “shining.” And this

time of year the star shining in the night carries special significance. In Spanish it is the

beautiful word estrella, and in French, etoile. The German star rings in the season as

stern, whose light cuts through the darkness and leads the way to revelation. In Arabic,

the haunting word shihab means flame. How can we deny this light shining in the

darkness, regardless of which word a culture uses to say it? We all light our candles this

time of year and watch the flames dance in the night.

I like the word shihab because it is the given name of a poet I admire, Naomi Shihab

Nye, American-born daughter of a Palestinian journalist and an American Montessori

teacher. For years she has worked to bridge cultural and religious differences, to heal the

divide that keeps us from being able to communicate with one another. Her voice shines

like a candle flame in this season’s dark night of suffering and war.

Her poem “Red Brocade,” begins: "The Arabs used to say,/When a stranger appears at

your door,/feed him for three days/before asking who he is,/where he’s come from,

/where he’s headed./That way he’ll have strength/enough to answer./Or, by then you’ll be

/such good friends/you don’t care. "

"Let’s go back to that," she pleads in the line that follows. No matter the language used, this

time of year we call out to light, not only to the flame of the sun returning to our

hemisphere, but also to the light of understanding. This season challenges us to believe

that our words for that light matter. Call it luz, lumiere, shihab, tara, it means the same

thing: the realization that we are called by the light to live together in peace.

HOLIDAY GARLAND OF BOOKS, part 1

2009-12-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

It's holiday book-buying time, so here are some additional suggestions for gifts. For more ideas, go to the side bar and take a look at the Books of the Week, as well as Poets of the Week. You'll find plenty to entice a reader there.

In part one of our garland, I've gathered three current books NC or former NC writers.

Here's a new book of stories by a long-time friend of mine, poet and Editor of Shenandoah, R.T Smith. I met Rod many years ago at the Critz Writers Workshop, where A. R. Ammons held forth to a motley crew of us aspiring writers in Virginia. Rod has published numerous books of poetry and has edited Shenandoah right up into the top ranks of the country's literary magazines.

This new collection, as Ann Pancake says, "is part bluegrass symphony, part speaking in tongues... it is the most beautifully sung story collection I have read in years."

George Singleton calls some of the characters "wonderfully warped, melodic, Appalachian" and others "flat-out idiomatic poetic," which ought to whet any one's appetite.

On the menu (consider them appetizers):
Cockers for Christ
Tastes Like Chicken
Sugar
Fig Honey
Red Jar
Ruminants.....
Sound good? You can go to http://www.irisbooks.com/ to order the boo

**************************************************************

John Amen's new book, At the Threshold of Alchemy, holds the same intensity and surprising turns of language and perspective that have marked his earlier work. I find his poetry energizing, instructive, exhilarating, and for those long dark nights that follow Christmas, it would be ideal for keeping one's imagination pulsing. John will be coming to WCU in the spring to take part in our WCU Spring Literary Festival, so I will be posting more about him in March.

"Poems such as these, and there are plenty in this book—John Amen’s third—keep resounding in the mind the way great poetry does...."
—Ricardo Nirenberg, Offcourse Literary Journal

John is the author of three collections of poetry: Christening the Dancer (Uccelli Press 2003), More of Me Disappears (Cross-Cultural Communications 2005), and At the Threshold of Alchemy (Presa 2009), and has released two folk/folk rock CDs, All I’ll Never Need and Ridiculous Empire (Cool Midget). He is also an artist, working primarily with acrylics on canvas. Amen travels widely giving readings, doing musical performances, and conducting workshops. Further information is available on his website: http:///. Contact: pedmagazine@carolina.rr.com

*********************************************************

Linda Annas Ferguson now lives in Charleston, SC, but she is a native North Carolinian. Her latest book, Dirt Sandwich, is just out from Press 53 in Winston-Salem.

Linda is the author of five collections of poetry, including Bird Missing from One Shoulder (WordTech Editions, 2007); Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk (Finishing Line Press, 2006); Last Chance to Be Lost (Kentucky Writers’ Coalition, 2004); and It’s Hard to Hate a Broken Thing (Palanquin Press, University of S.C. Aiken, 2002). She was the 2005 Poetry Fellow for the South Carolina Arts Commission and served as the 2003-04 Poet-in-Residence for the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C. A recipient of the Poetry Fellowship of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, she is a member of the Academy’s Board of Governors. She was a featured poet for the Library of Congress Poetry at Noon Series. Her work is archived by Furman University Special Collections in the James B. Duke Library. A North Carolina native, she now resides in Charleston, SC. Visit her website at http://www.lindaannasferguson.com/.

POET OF THE WEEK: GLENDA C. BEALL

2009-12-01T08:58:00.000-08:00

Glenda Council Beall's new chapbook, Now Might As Well Be Then, from Finishing Line Press (http://www.finishinglinepress.com/) deserves many readers. I was honored to write a blurb for it. Glenda has worked wonders for NETWEST as Program Director and deserves our thanks for supporting the literary arts in Western North Carolina. Her new book would make a wonderful Christmas gift for family members. Several in my family will have this chapbook in their stockings!

Often those "supporters" are so busy making sure other writers find what they need to become better at the writer's craft that they don't have time for their own work. That's why I'm so pleased to honor Glenda as Poet of the Week. She's a great SW Georgia girl, and, naturally, I believe those girls have a leg up when it comes to writing poetry!

Here are a few of my favorite poems from her new chapbook.

Woman in the Mirror

What happened to seventeen,
when I rode my mare
free as the river flows,
jumped over downed trees
splashed through narrow streams?

What happened to twenty
when I danced in the moonlight,
my slender form dressed in a gown
white and shimmery as pearl?

What happened to thirty
when I rode my Yamaha
down fire roads, mountain trails,
long black hair flying free?

What happened to those days
I ask the woman in the mirror.
Gone, she says, all gone, unless
you remember it.

In The Dark

Lying in bed, my cheek against your shoulder,
I remember a night, long ago, on your boat.
I was afraid. I felt too much, too fast.
But love crept over us that summer
like silver fog, silent on the lake.
We were never again the same.

We stepped like children through that door that led
to long passages unknown, holding hands, wide-eyed, but brave.
Here I am years later, listening to your soft breath
and feeling your warm smooth skin.
In the dark, now might as well be then.

My Father's Horse

Stickers tear my legs, bare and tan
from South Georgia sun. Long black braids
fly behind me as I sprint like a Derby winner
down the path.

Harnessed with hames, bridle
and blinders, Charlie plods down
the farm road. Tired and wet from sweat,
he is perfume to my nostrils.

My father swings me up. I bury
my hands in tangled mane. My thighs
stick to leather and damp white hair
high above the ground.

I want to sing in glorious joy,
but only croon a child's nonsensical
words, grinning for a hundred yards
between field and barn.

My father's arms are strong.
His hands are gentle. The horse
is all we ever share. For he has sons
and I am just a daughter.

A Long Lost Year
Music making was his talent
taken for granted like water
gushing from our well until
the surgeon’s knife nicked a nerve.

The purple wreath of grief hung
over us until one day above the strum
of his guitar, his notes rang true ―
a lovely instrument restored.

We wept with joy.
His voice is who he is,
has
always been.

He sings to me again, that same
rich baritone that won me on that first
day we met. I listen with a new ear,
and like a Sinatra fan,
I mellow out.

POETRY READINGS THIS WEEKEND

2009-12-01T05:35:00.000-08:00

This weekend offers two reading/signing events in the WNC area. Cecilia Woloch and Kathryn S. Byer will be featured in both. On Saturday evening at 7:00 p.m. at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva,Woloch and Byer will join Mary Adams as she launches her new chapbook Commandment, hot off the press from Spring Street Editions. Mary is a member of the WCU English Faculty; she has been awarded an NEA fellowship and saw her first collection, Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis, published by the University of Florida Press.

On Sunday, December 6, 2009, Malaprop's Bookstore/Café (55 Haywood
Street in downtown Asheville, NC) will host poets Kathryn Stripling
Byer reading from ARETHA'S HAT: INAUGURATION DAY, 2009; Julia Nunnally
Duncan with AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY and new, unpublished poems; and
Cecilia Woloch, author of CARPATHIA.

Kathryn Stripling Byer, poet laureate of North Carolina from 2005
through June 30, 2009, was born in Southwest Georgia but moved to North
Carolina in 1968 and has lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains ever since.
She is the author of five poetry books, including COMING TO REST
(2006), and most recently (in collaboration with Penelope Scambly
Schott) of the chapbook ARETHA'S HAT: INAUGURATION DAY, 2009. Writing
on the topic "Why We Love North Carolina" for the February 2009 issue
of Our State magazine, Kathryn Stripling Byer noted these particular
highlights of her term as Poet Laureate: the "generous community of
[North Carolina] writers . . . who continue to amaze me with their
talent and energy" and most of all, "the students I've met in our
schools . . . these young faces looking back at me, ready to say who
they are. May we all listen well to them." As poet laureate, Kathryn
Stripling Byer's primary goal was to "help make poetry accessible in as
many ways as I could," through frequent visits to schools and with
writing groups; appearances at bookstores, literary events, and a
variety of public celebrations; a regularly updated poetry page on the
North Carolina Arts Council web site; and her own generous laureate
blog -- as well as by continuing to write and give public readings of her
own poetry. In the process, she has demonstrated the perseverance and
constant delicate balance of energies required to lead a very public
life as a dedicated writer. Asked why she writes poetry, she recently
replied, "It's the best way I know to sing with the world" (Writer's
Digest interview with Robert Lee Brewer, July 2009). We are very happy
to welcome Kathryn Stripling Byer back to "sing" her poetry at Malaprop's.

Julia Nunnally Duncan writes both poetry and fiction. She has
previously published two collections of stories and a novel, and her
second novel, WHEN DAY IS DONE, is just out from March Street Press.
Her Appalachian poems have appeared in scores of literary journals,
and her first published collection of poetry, AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY
(2007), was named a finalist for the 2008 Roanoke-Chowan Award for
Poetry. She recently completed the manuscript for a second collection
of poems, AT DUSK. Rob Neufeld, book columnist for The Asheville
Citizen-Times, wrote of Julia Nunnally Duncan that she is one of four
Western North Carolina "poets to watch." He remarked that her poems
"make the greatest possible use of line breaks, so that individual
phrases glow like haiku observations. Metaphors develop naturally and
emotionally." In a recent article in North Carolina Literary Review,
Jeffrey Franklin observed of AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY, "Duncan always makes
the place solid, the people real, the situation, in all its emotional
complexity and perilousness, rendered with a deceptive simplicity that
quietly resonates. . . .[Her] people are as recognizably human as any
in Shakespeare[.]" Like our other readers for December 6, Julia
Nunnally Duncan is at once a dedicated writer and an experienced
teacher; she has served as a full-time English instructor at McDowell
Community College for nearly two and a half decades. At Malaprop's,
she will read selections from AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY and from her
manuscript, AT DUSK.

CARPATHIA is Cecilia Woloch's fifth poetry collection. Published in
2009, it went into a second printing about two months after its
official publication date. Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning
poet, has written of CARPATHIA, "The poems . . . are guided by an
exquisite lyricism and heartbreaking emotional honesty. . . . This is
a gorgeous book by a poet who is passionately alive in the world."
Cecilia Woloch has traveled widely and taught just as widely, offering
poetry workshops for children and adults across the United States and
in several locations abroad. She serves as a lecturer in creative
writing at the University of Southern California and is founding
director of the Paris Poetry Workshop. The recipient of numerous
awards for her writing, teaching and theatre work, in 2009 alone,
Cecilia Woloch has been recognized as a finalist in the California
Book Awards of The Commonwealth Club of California for her 2008
chapbook, NARCISSUS; as a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize in
Poetry at Nimrod; as the first prize winner of the New Ohio Review
Prize in Poetry; and as a Fellow at the Center for International
Theatre Development/US Artists Initiative in Poland.

Please join us in welcoming three distinguished poets on December 6,
and begin your holiday season with poetry!

Poetrio: Kathryn Stripling Byer, Julia Nunnally Duncan, Celia Woloch
Sunday, December 6, 2009, 3:00 p.m.
Malaprop's Bookstore/Café
55 Haywood Street
Asheville, NC 28801
(828) 254-6734
www.malaprops.com

APPALACHIAN HERITAGE: SPECIAL CHEROKEE ISSUE

2009-11-28T05:57:00.000-08:00

The fall issue of APPALACHIAN HERITAGE
( www.berea.edu/appalachianheritage ) catches the eye right away. Sean Ross's Mask Dancers peer out from the page, as if ready to leap. Ross's paintings invigorate the interior pages where poems, stories, and essays, some translated from the Cherokee language, await the reader, reminding us that the Cherokee people still live in these mountains, painting, writing, telling stories, and passing down their culture as they have always done.

Novelist and poet Robert Conley, now at nearby Western Carolina University as the Sequoyah Distinguished Professor of Cherokee Studies, is the issue's featured author. Years ago I invited Mr. Conley, living at that time in Oklahoma, to be a part of the Visiting Writers Series that I then directed. Everyone liked him so much that we invited him back several times. Now he lives here!

The issue contains a poem by a former student of mine, Debora Kinsland Foerst, the amusing "Settin' Up."

Debora has had her poetry and prose published in The Raleigh News-Observer, Writers and Books on www.ncarts.org, Kakalak, and numerous other publications and anthologies.

And there's Mary Brown's recipe for apple stack cake! Preceded by her poem in both Cherokee and English.

MariJo Moore's poem closes out the issue.

MariJo (http://marijomoore.com/) presents Spirit Speaking Gatherings & Intuitive Consultations and resides in the mountains of western NC, where she is currently working on The Boy With A Tree Growing From His Ear & Other Stories.

Traditional Mysteries Remain Still
(Inspired by the painting “The Booger Dance Interrupted” by Sean J. Ross)

MariJo Moore © 2009

Rattle of old gourd seeds
keeping mysteries intact.
Red bandannas atop white sheets
floating in musical silence, impending beats of drum.

Masked dancers moving
among the senses of imitation,
feigning attacks,
pressing desires, causing women’s laughter.

Old ones draining shadows, gaining
strength from the young.
Young ones gathering wisdom, taking
experience from the old.

Interruption! Masked as righteousness
nevertheless, interruption
causing
cracks in the gourd rattles.

Seeds dispersing
falling onto dismembered grounds.
Going not to water,
germinating into silenced, soiled pauses.

Imitation no longer masked:
Cherokee see, Cherokee do, Cherokee “saved.”
Becoming simply stirrups
loosely attached to the saddles of plenty-costing religion.

But here, painted somewhere
in the darkest dawn of remembrance,
traditions continue and gourds mend.

Rattling of hidden seeds keep mysteries intact.
Colors imitating dance imitating
olden life.
Dance, Boogers, dance!

Note: The Booger Dance of the Eastern Cherokee is interpretive of the reactions to the greed of various invaders. By wearing masks that resemble the invaders, the dancers imitate their actions to lessen the seriousness of the intrusions. Once thought gone due to the Christian religion, the Booger Dance is now being reinstated.
*************************************************************

A fine Christmas surprise for family and friends would be a gift subscription to Appalachian Heritage.

POET OF THE WEEK: TERRI KIRBY ERICKSON

2009-11-23T09:06:00.000-08:00

Discovering a new poet whose work I really enjoy is like finding the perfect Christmas gift under the tree, something I've been thinking about lately, as the holiday season approaches. Terri Kirby Erickson is such a poet, and her new book of poems would make the perfect for gift for readers on your Christmas gift list. That Terri is a native North Carolinian and published by a Winston-Salem publisher, Press 53, only makes discovering her "more perfect." (Poetic license, there!)

Terri is an award winning poet. Her first poetry collection, Thread Count, was published in 2006. Telling Tales of Dusk was published in 2009 by Press 53. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, literary journals and anthologies, including A Prairie Journal, Blue Fifth Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Dead Mule, JAMA, Muse India, Oak Bend Review, Nibble, Paris Voice, Pisgah Review, Relief, Thieves Jargon, Toasted Cheese, Smoking Poet, Wild Goose Poetry Review and many others. In 2009, she was nominated for a Best of the Net Award and a Pushcart Prize. She has lectured at both the high school and university level, and has conducted numerous poetry workshops. Terri lives in Lewisville, NC . She has a beautiful website and welcomes her readers to visit:
http://terrikirbyerickson.wordpress.com/
>

Terri's first book, Thread Count, was published AuthorHouse in 2006

Excerpts from Telling Tales of Dusk( 8.5 x 5.5 paperback, $12.00, www.press53.com)

Queen Anne’s Lace

Queen Anne’s lace dandies up
a ditch, like embroidered hankies
in a farmer’s pocket.

Such tiny seed-pearl petals
seem hand-sewn by
seraphim to their purple

centers—yet they thrive
in common places, fine as tatted
borders, blanket-stitched to burlap.

Papa Never Learned to Read

Granny sat under a shade tree,
fanning herself with corn shucks,

while Papa stood waist-deep in

the river, baptizing. Folks rose up,
sputtering, and waded back to shore—

their sodden dresses and pant legs

heavy against their skin, their souls
light as Easter lilies. “I see no need

for such as that,” Granny said, to

anyone who asked. Still, she read
Papa scripture—the words warmed

by her breath and scattered into his

brain like dandelion seeds—where
once a week, they grew into a sermon.

Washing My Baby’s Hair over the Kitchen Sink

There is the weight of her small, solid head in my hand
and the feel of warm water, sluicing through her hair.
Eyes the soft blue-gray of herons’ wings,
follow my new-mother face, glowing.
Enthralled with each other, we
coo like doves in the milk-
scented air that my baby
breathes out and I
breathe
in.

County Fair

Pulled like rotten teeth from the open mouths
of mineshafts, massive pyramids of gleaming
coal dot the landscape of Kanawha County.
Coal dust fine and black as pulverized midnight,
covers everything for miles. Rows of ramshackle
houses kneel by the river like washer women
with their knees in river muck, and jagged
mountains cut the slate-gray sky

to ribbons. But the Kanawha River is long
and winding, and leads to a lone Ferris wheel
rising up from the bottomland, jaunty
as an Easter bonnet. Its rainbow-colored gondolas
call to mind a different tune than the dismal dirges
of Black Lung and White Damp. They carry the sound
of children’s laughter through the ground
and into the mines, like light.

A Great Smoky Mountains Book Fair

2009-11-17T11:03:00.000-08:00

(High School winners in the Great Smoky Mountains Bookfair Poetry contest: Mandi Dean, Edward Madill, and Nicole Bowers. Photo by Jackie Methven, Smoky Mountain High School, Sylva)

(The teacher on the left is Jennifer Nation, 6th grade teacher from Macon Middle School. The teacher on the right is Angela Pickens, 2nd grade teacher from Cartoogechaye Elementary School. In between are Allan Wolf, Newt Smith, and K. Byer in the rear, and up front are Caitlin, Celeste, and Brooke.)
As part of this year's Biannual Great Smoky Mountains Bookfair, we invited students from Haywood, Macon, Swain, and Jackson to send us poems for our first Bookfair Poetry Contest. Our categories were grades 1-5, 6-8, and high school. We didn't know what to expect. Would we get any poems? What would they be like? What would they be about?

We needn't have worried about the poems. Or the poets. They sent us their poems, our judges Newt Smith and Mary Adams agonized over the rankings, and behold, here are the winners! I know there are other poems in the submissions worthy of attention and enjoyment, though, and I hope to be able to post them in the coming days. We want to thank all the teachers who encouraged their classes to write poems for us, and we send a special thanks to the parents who are raising their children to love language and poetry. I'd also like to thank Newt Smith for his hard work in administering and publicizing the contest.

We announced the winners at our Poetry Alive session with Allan Wolf on Saturday afternoon. It was a blast, a rip, a jazzed-up experience with Allan's high energy presentation. The student poets were not intimidated, though. They all stepped right up and read their poems, not a quaver to be detected in their voices. As Laureate, I introduced each one, beginning with the 1-5 grade group.

Here' is Celeste McCall's winning poem, a praise song for her friend, who loves rice and Chicken (so do I!). Even better, she makes the birds sing when she's around. We all need a friend like this.

Aaliya My Friend

Your eyes are sparkly brown.
Your favorite food is rice and chicken.
Your favorite sport is gymnastics.
Your favorite vegetable is carrots.
Your favorite fruit is apples.

Aaliya, you make birds sing when you are around.
You make everything right.
You make me laugh.

Aaliya, I love you.

By Celeste McCall
Grade 2, Cartoogechaye Elementary School
Franklin
Parents: J.J. and Leah McCall

(Celeste reads her poem.)

Monika Palestino took as her subject the rose, that much loved subject. I especially admire how she says, "I/want you to/grow until you/get ready to go." Such a lovely poem. And by a 3rd grader. Was I writing poems like this when I was that age? No indeed.

Rose

You bloom. You’re
red. You’re pretty
and beautiful
and sometimes
big and wide.

People pick you,
but I don’t. I
want you to
grow until you
get ready to go.

I take the
petals off
the stem. I
put you in
my Bible to
remember you
always.

Monika Palestino
Grade 3, Blue Ridge School
Cashiers
Parents: Vickie and Zeirele Palestino

Second Prize, Grades 1-5

(Monika and Ashley pose for photographs.)

Ashley Foster's Sunshine makes me wake up and see sunshine as if for the first time. That light follows her everywhere, yes, it does, and I love her celebration of this everyday miracle.

Sunshine Everywhere

I love the sun.
You’re with me.

Sunshine
here.
Sunshine
there.
Every-
where
I go,
it
follows
me
day
and
night.
I just love
the
morning light.
Sunshine,
sunshine,
everywhere.

Ashley Foster
Grade 3, Blue Ridge School
Cashiers
Parents: Stuart Foster and Cindy Stiwinter

Honorable Mention, Grades 1-5

Caitlin Parris is a young poet bound to grow into the real thing. Her poem "Kathy" gives us the memorable details of this memorable woman's life. The ending is one I wish I'd written. Those water droplets dancing over the flowers---wonderful!

Kathy

I loved to watch her
in her big sunhat,
wiping the sweat
from her face,
kneeling on the ground
like she was praying.

The flowers she planted
were the most beautiful things
I have ever seen.

When she watered them,
the water would dance across them,
the sun shining over them.

Caitlin Parris
Grade 6, Macon Middle School
Parents: Angela and Kevin Jump

First Prize, Grades 6-8

Collaborative poems are fun to write; here's one that knocked our socks off (How do you knock socks off, I wonder? That's a phrase these poets ought to take as their next subject!) Brooke and Allan Wolf had a good time performing this one. Damon couldn't attend.

Braces
Under bite-----------------------Under bite
two years ----------------------- three years
Railroad tracks ------------------Metal Mouth
Brace Face---------------------- Tin Grin
Mouth Open--------------------- Stretched a mile
Ow! -----------------------------Ow!
Thread--------------------------- the floss
up, -------------------------------down.
Ow!------------------------------ Ow!
Food stuck------------------------ Tongue it out.
snthsn. ---------------------------snthsn.

Damon Johnson and Brooke Watson
Grade 6, Macon Middle School
Parents: Dennis and Diana Johnson
and Kevin and Dawn Watson

Second Prize, Grades 6-8

Edward Madill will soon give Allan Wolf a run for his poetic money when it comes to bringing a poem alive for an audience. This is a witty, perfectly paced poem that leaves us with a profound sense of what the poet calls "the mystery of life."

Your Mom

Your mom thinks she can talk,
To animals.
Which is cool….
But I still get freaked out,
Especially when she looks at my cat in the eye and
Sincerely asks him
“What’s wrong.”

To this my cat licks himself
(there were a couple of grungy spots).
He saunters over to the litter box and pees.
I smell a whiff of ammonia.
Your mom sulks to the living room couch,
dejectedly,
Audubon prints hanging in the
corner.

Your mom thinks she can talk,
To animals.
Which is cool….
But every time I see her walk past your “pets”
(The man you keep in the hamster cage,
the woman that lives in that cute miniature house
Out in your front yard,
Or even you—
With your nice nose and your okay figure),
I want to say:

“Hey!
Not only did you confuse the
Piss out of my cat,
But none of us know
What’s going on in your head….
Which is not cool.”

And I still remember that day when you asked:
“Doesn’t everyone’s mommy talk to animals?”
And for show and tell you brought in a poem,
Dictated to your mom by your parakeet.

And all the while
In the background of your house,
People whisper unheard syllables
About the sun, the moon, and the stars
(And maybe
Something about the circle of life,
Our place in the world, and all those questions
That keep us up at night)
To the thinning air,

Near the only window in your house.

Edward Madill
Grade 12, Smoky Mountain High School
Sylva
Parents: Debbi and Ted Madill

First Prize, Grades 9-12

(Edward Madill receives his check and certificate.)

I was so glad to see a sonnet, a real sonnet among the winners. I've seen too many fourteen liners whose poets call them sonnets when they really don't have any of the sonnet's earmarks. The ear is where the sonnet lives; just listen to the rhythm and rhyme of this poem.

The World’s Music

The noise that’s all around me fills my ears—
The bouncing, laughing, bubbly shrieks of glee.
A cry, a shout, and eyes welled up with tears;
Arpeggios formed in oddest harmony.
The school of bricks that looms two stories tall,
It swallows me into its rooms of chance,
With colors swirled on boards and down the hall,
And waves of voices twirling in their dance.
And when I seek my place of solitude
The trees whisper their stories to the wind.
The grasses sway and sunlight lifts my mood,
While birds sing under skies that have no end.
The music of the world is part of me,
And with it from the world I am now free.

Mandi Dean
Grade 10, Smoky Mountain High School
Parents: Jim and Lisa Dean

Second Prize, Grades 9-12

Nicole Bowers asks some of the most important questions a young woman can ask and she does this without sounding self-pitying. On the contrary she sounds mature and self-aware. Poetry enables her to say "out loud" what so many of us keep silent.

Is it Bad?

Is it bad
That I don’t believe in myself enough to say “that hurt”?

Is it bad
That I can’t say what my brain harbors and locks for days?

Is it bad
That even though on the outside
I am shining,
But so much more is wrong?

Is it bad
That I, a passable and pensive little girl,
Can’t decide what to do
On my own?

Is it bad
That I, even though I try, am still scared out of
My mind to tell how bad
That hurt?

Is it bad
That I, build walls, and block everyone off
To keep them from knowing
How I
Really feel?

Is it bad
That I get jealous,
And want so badly to be
That?

Is it bad
That I could never, even if the world were ending
Could say this out loud?

Is it bad
That I am
Quiet?

Nicole Bowers
Grade 10, Smoky Mountain High School
Sylva

Honorable Mention, Grades 9-12

Thank you, thank you to the students, teachers and parents who helped make this project a succes!

POET OF THE WEEK: MICHAEL CHITWOOD

2009-11-13T10:17:00.000-08:00

Michael Chitwood is a free-lance writer and a lecturer at the University of North Carolina. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The New Republic, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Field, The Georgia Review and numerous other journals. Ohio Review Books has published two books of his poetry--Salt Works (1992) and Whet (1995). His third book, The Weave Room, was published by The University of Chicago Press in the Phoenix Poets series (1998). His collection of essays, Hitting Below the Bible Belt, was published by Down Home Press in 1998. Gospel Road Going, a collection of poems about his native Appalachia, was published in 2002 and was awarded the 2003 Roanoke-Chowan Prize for Poetry. In 2006, he published a collection of essays and short stories called Finishing Touches. His collection of poetry From Whence was released in March 2007 from Louisiana State University Press. Tupelo Press published his book Spill in October of 2007. Spill was named as a finalist for ForeWard magazine’s poetry book of the year and won the 2008 Roanoke-Chowan Prize.

The following poems are from Michael's collection published by LSU Press, From Whence.

At the Wilco with some Founding Fathers

Down the Havoline, Quaker State aisle
goes Jefferson, if his shirt can be believed.
The red stitching over the right pocket
proclaims this man to be a namesake
of the author of the Declaration of Independence
and if you can’t believe a man’s shirt
what are you going to believe?
Hamilton, what a strange coincidence,
doubts aloud that the cashier
cannot access the safe and Franklin,
spook me out, is eyeing the better wines
while recommending the Appalachian spring water.
It’s all here—White Rain hairstyling spray, tic tacs,
flashlights, corn chips and nation-makers.
And now Jefferson, who wanted to be remembered
for penning Virginia’s statute on religious freedom,
says a standing silent prayer over a chili dog
before taking a bite and heading out
through the calibrated doors, he’s nearly six feet I see,
into the republic of Friday morning

Basement Barber

Here were said the words men say.
The oil stove winked its slit black eye;
it knew they did not have their way.

A whitetail made for the edge of the page.
Vitalis came before the talc.
My father’s dark hair began to fade.

Barrelhead Thurman palmed my scalp,
knuckled my ear when he was done
just to hear a little boy yelp.

They rode, hats off, through years of lies
on bus seats the county junked,
out-fished, out-hunted the ones who’d died.

My father’s dark hair began to fade.
The oil stove winked its slit black eye.
It knew he did not have his way.

The dead grow long and beautiful hair.
They have said what they had to say
to stir that basement’s damp, sweet air.

Morning Walk, Holden Beach
for Tom Andrews

Ghost moon in the upper right-hand corner
where we used to write our names—

Is it quiet there, Tom,
adrift from your drift of ashes?

I strike out towards the rising sun,
your blank blue, your murmur in surf

to my right, dunes and salt-blasted beachfronts
to my left. I can still see

the scribblings sand crabs left
in their nightly scurry for the day’s discards.

This page, like all the others, will be erased
soon, but for now there’s a line or two.

The waves unscroll their best bond,
a finish like a mirror under the sandpipers.

You’d like that, I think, text as pure reflection,
no scuff of us to mar the brief recording.

There are no hills here to look to for help
though the ocean seems upgrade at the horizon.

I sing a little under my breath, as the saying goes—
old JT, Dylan, even that God-awful

song about West Virginia where your urn lies,
my honest friend, at Point Pleasant.

The sun’s up now, full, and gulls yuck
at their own stand-up. I smell coffee

and turn, my back to the sun’s hot yolk,
to head for home, following my shadow.

Men Throwing Bricks

The one on the ground lofts two at a time
with just the right lift for them to finish
their rise as the one on the scaffold turns
to accept them like a gift and place them
on the growing stack. They chime slightly
on the catch. You’d have to do this daily,
morning and afternoon, not to marvel.

The One Day

We were behind on the job
so waited out the rain in the pickup.
Because the backhoe would mire
he shouldered the four-foot pipe joints
and brought them to us in the ditch.
The red mud clutched and tugged at his boots
and Bill laughed at his “Swan Lake”
as he fought through, lurching and staggering
when the mud would suddenly let go.
But he kept them coming, lugging the red joints
to us and then slogging back for another
while we slid on the gasket and fit the pipes together.
You can see how, pushing like that, he wound up,
two years later, with the tiny plastic piping of IVs
feeding into both arms and the three drainage tubes
snaking from under the patch on his chest.
His skin was a shade away from being same as the sheet
when I saw him in the ICU,
and he couldn’t have lifted the drinking straw
on the bedside tray.
But that one day he brought two hundred yards of pipe
and even the red earth couldn’t stop him.

POET OF THE WEEK: PETER BLAIR

2009-10-31T15:11:00.000-07:00

While judging the Nazim Hikment Festival poetry contest last spring, I kept coming back to a set of poem that moved me with their perspective and their language. They turned out to be by Peter Blair, a widely published poet who is now teaching at UNC-Charlotte. Peter did not make the final list of winners, but his poems stayed with me. They deserve a wide readership.

(See review at end of post)

Peter Blair’s first full-length book Last Heat, won the 1999 Washington Prize and was published by Word Works Press. Born in Pittsburgh, he has worked in a psychiatric ward and a steel mill, and served three years in the Peace Corps in Thailand.
Peter Blair has a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Iowa. He has worked in a steel mill, a psychiatric ward, and served three years in the Peace Corps in Thailand. He has published three chapbooks, INSIDE THE TRACKHOE, A ROUND, FAIR DISTANCE FROM THE FURNACE, and FURNACE GREENS all of which won national contests. His first full-length collection, LAST HEAT, won the 1999 Washington Prize and is forthcoming in February from Word Works Press. About his work, Alicia Ostriker has written:

"Peter Blair's poetry takes me right inside a place I've never been, the working life of a steel mill. God is in the details, and they are good and strong here."

His poems have appeared in CRAZYHORSE, RIVER CITY, POETRY EAST, and WEST BRANCH. He has received two Pennsylvania Council On the Arts Grants for poetry.

Peter lives in Charlotte, NC, with his wife and son.

Walking the Crosses with Jim Villano,

St. Vincent College Reunion

The newly cut grass over the graves

of the Benedictine monks says what

it always says: I’m green. I grow. I die.

The metal crosses marking each plot

line up over the hill, contoured

to the dips and knolls of the land.

They proclaim their names and dates,

like an inevitable iron grass that says what iron

always says: I was hot. I cooled. I rust.

Jim and I walk to the end of the line,

the most recent crosses, Father Ronald,

Father Alexander. We talk about all-nighters

studying for Father Alex’s economics finals,

Macro and Micro. Ronald, the Academic

Dean, knew all the favorite student haunts

off campus, told my father what he wanted

to hear: that I should be a Bio. major to get in

to Med. School. Heads down, eyes on the graves

where the crosses enter the earth, we can’t

say what we’re thinking. So we let the wind

whisper and lisp, what the wind always

says, I rush. I sigh. I’m nothing.

____________________________________________________________________

Discussing the Dream of Culture with Professor Kwaam

At the corner of Somprasong and Petchaburi

we sit at a rickety metal table. Our soup steams

in sidewalk sunlight. Cars crawl on the street

like the streams of ants up and down the shop wall.

His shiny head fuzzed with new hair,

eyebrows shaved clean, Kwaam smiles, ethereal,

kind: Thai and American cultures, two dreams

of one world, the Dharma. A few months ago

he taught me Thai and how to read palms:

A good way to hold hands with a girl. He winked.

Now, he's one day out of a monastery and saffron

robes. Noodles slip off my novice chopsticks.

My soup darkened by soy sauce, peanuts,

sugar, the strands disappear in my bowl.

Kwaam's noodles twine in clear broth.

At the plywood counter, I buy another soup.

The cook dunks a strainer of beef chunks

in boiling water. The red meat turns gray

and rubbery in bubbling froth. He dumps them

into a bowl with cilantro, sprouts, broth

and a fleshy lump of noodles. So, what is Dharma?

I set the dish on the table. Dharma is the empty

bowl. Joking, again. The sky's blue, like a bowl

overturned on market stalls and bleached

white buildings. The abbot took us to an autopsy.

They cut open a woman, removed the heart,

liver, intestines. He tells me about shriveled skin,

hollow rib cages arching over tables,

pails of limp, gray organs. Dharma.

My soup steams. My abdomen's distended.

The market gurgles ageless sounds around us.

I can't look at Kwaam's sad, triumphant smile,

or the emptiness deepening in his sunlit bowl.

Previously published in Visions International

The following were orginally published in Poetry magazine.

Bangkok, First day
1

100 off the plane.
Humid jet-fuel fumes
mingle with the jasmine lei
the Education Ministry staffer
eases around my neck.
In the distance
a mountain rises:
sapphire smog.

2

We drink quart beers at noon
in the outdoor market. Bright
blue tabletops. Tarps block
the white hot sun among whiffs
of charcoal and sweet coconut curry.
In the cool shadows of an overpass,
Pepsi crates totter on ice chunks
hidden under rags and sawdust.
Flames leap from a nearby wok.
The cook smiles: "Pak Fay, green
vegetables of fire. Eat them and cry."

3

On a blanket by the sidewalk,
people passing, a man's calloused toes
grip bamboo strands, thread them
through a round frame. His arm stumps
twitch above his lifting
calves and flexing knees. Beside him,
a stack of baskets grows on the cement.

4

At the temple, pineapple wedges
stacked crosswise gleam
on the vendor's cart, sliced
sunshine, brilliant
as the gold leaf peeling
from Buddha's face.

5

The exhaust-filled surges
of taxis, busses, trucks
thunder by the child
islanded in the intersection.
The twilight sun thickens
the air around him. He sells
jasmine flowers, holds them
dangling high over his head
as if saving them from a flood.

6

In a restaurant we order "soup."
Knotty viscera, tough gray rings,
and burgundy blood cubes
gleam in steamy broth.
"Come on," Ed laughs.
"Eat your entrails."

7

In the Mississippi
Queen on Patpong Road, her hands
rub my back, silky snakes
up and down my spine.
Swaying on platforms, girls
dance in bikinis, hypnotic
in swirls of incense and bar smoke.
I watch her oval sienna face
in the mirror's steamboat glitter,
eclipsed by naked legs. She whispers,
in my ear, "I do anything
for you. Try me."

8

"No one sleeps till dawn,"
we all say, walking, 4 am.
In a market gearing up
for morning, bloody eyes.
A just-slaughtered
buffalo's skull watches us
from behind the red mound
of its butchered flesh.

9

A sucking "woof," like a snuffed
candle flame against
my ear, the stone
clatters into metal
shop gates. "Farang! Foreigner!"
floats in from wherever
my fear is. We turn,
and six trishaw drivers lounge,
feet up on handlebars,
across the street.

Bangkok Roundabout

Movie billboards blot out a six-story building.
"This Week": a bare-chested man kung-fu kicks
on a flaming yellow background, leaps over
tiny scampering armies while cities burn.
"Coming Soon": a prisoner, handcuffed in blue rags,
towers sadly over the sidewalk. In painted insets,
a judge ponders scales, a woman fingers a gun.

Below, where the scaffold-poles rise from grass,
families live. A mother shifts a steaming pot
on a charcoal brazier. Her boy chases chickens.
Their laundry hangs under the burning cities
and the huge feet of the prisoner.

(originally appeared in PIGEON CREEK)

Friday For the River

After work, you bring a yellow envelope
stuffed with tips from The Wheel Cafe.
My check from St. Francis Hospital
bears the saint's image, arms raised in prayer.
This week we had two on suicide watch,
and a schizophrenic wrote his name in shit
on the quiet room wall. We stroll into the cold,
windless evening. It's Friday, an illusion
of completeness upon us. Walking twilit streets
to the river, we pass people jostling home
or cramming into happy hours. Lights switch on
along the wharf, and the sky's muted blue
corona fades behind Coal Hill.

The river gives back everything
the sky sends down. The bridge arcs into
its reflection, a perfect ellipse of girders.
The hill carries its dark complement, houses
clinging to its underbelly. Along West End,
the lamps set down spikes of light
that shiver in the gloom of the river bend,
the water surface invisible. You lean
against me, your eyes luminous
as the blue water. We look over the levee,
down into a stillness that contains us,
a stillness where a red full moon rises
into the depths of the Allegheny.

© All Copyright, 2000, Peter Blair.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.

THE DIVINE SALT
by Peter Blair
Autumn House Press (2003) 64 pages
ISBN 0969941977, Poetry

One of the qualities I admire most in a poet is good judgment, and Peter Blair has it in ample supply. In The Divine Salt, Blair tackles a tough subject gracefully with poems about his experiences as an aide in the psychiatric ward of St. Francis Hospital in Pennsylvania.

His good judgment shows up first in the all-important choice of the opening poem, “Driving to Work,” which perfectly sets the tone of the collection. St. Francis Hospital/ looms above Bloomfield,/ two wings of burnt brick, its medieval/ spire a dark candle flame./ I’ve seared my mind in its heat:/ belted men to a steel bed/ . . . walked them/out of electroshock. . . With this passage, Blair establishes himself as both a participant and a witness to the inescapable emotional brutality of life—if you can call it that—in a psychiatric ward populated with characters who suffer from acute mental illness, are often tormented and sometimes violent.

As a witness, the author is always present in the poems, though he wisely keeps the focus on the subject—usually a patient—rather than himself. In doing so, he tells a ripping good narrative in language that is plain but compelling, while managing to keep enough emotional distance from his subjects to avoid melodrama. In “Donna Lee Polito,” the speaker is a psychiatric aide (the author, based on his bio), who escorts a female patient from one floor of the hospital to another. We learn that the patient has been improving, or so it appears: this is her first time off the locked floor/ in months. . ./ She’s tried suicide five times in three years. . ./ She’s been fine for weeks: helpful, bright, written on her chart. Confident of her cooperation, the aide is stunned when Donna Lee makes a break for it. He chases her down the street, but she gets away. From the eighth floor window, nurses watched/ her run, a tiny wavering figure, escaping/ all of us. . . She jumped this time,/ vaulting over the red railing from the high cement/ of the Bloomfield Bridge down/ to railroad tracks and scrubby trees.

The action and drama of the events depicted in Donna Lee’s rush to suicide are quite enough for the reader to handle without having the author report on his feelings. Assuming this is either a true story or based on real events, the author/narrator must have been devastated. Again, Blair has the good judgment to report the events objectively. It is only later, in “Lunch Break Between Wings,” that he chooses to let us see his remorse, and even here, he writes with commendable restraint: A cyclone of leaves and dust whirls/ . . . like the blinding/ restless grief// she must have felt on the bridge, high/ above the ragged treetops, Donna Lee,/ lost in the air// above the tracks. The rustling wind dusts my eyes. The passage ends with his too-late lament, Donna Lee, don’t leave.

In “St. Francis Night Shift,” Blair speaks directly to the irony of trying to help people who don’t want to be helped. I’m an aide, but who do I aid,/ holding a patient down,/ as the nurse peels off jeans and underwear/ to expose the white flank of buttock/ to the needle? In “Doctor Strong,” a code phrase for “patient is violent, we need help!” we learn that Blair is sometimes the one helped and at other times, the helper. Sometimes I am Dr. Strong: my hands pin elbows and forearms, or pry a patient’s hand from an aide’s neck.

I looked up the web site for St. Francis hospitals (there are many, all associated with the Catholic Order of St. Francis). One of their guiding principles is that they “never make inappropriate or negative remarks” about their patients. Though many of the characters in this collection behave quite badly—punching out the medical staff, screaming, soiling their sheets—Blair holds true to this Franciscan ideal throughout the book. Not once does he stoop to disparage those who are afflicted with mental illness.

The title poem bears an epigraph in which the author reminds us that St. Francis himself was sometimes “laughed at as a lunatic and driven away with many insults and stones.” In contrast, The Divine Salt regards the mentally ill with compassion and respect. St. Francis would have been pleased.

Richard Allen Taylor

THE SOUL TREE: POEMS AND PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIANS

2009-10-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

Published and printed in Asheville, North Carolina by Grateful Steps Publishing.

The poet and photographer will be at the Great Smoky Mountains Book fair. The Soul Tree would make a perfect Christmas Gift. Or several.

To say that Laura Hope-Gill and John Fletcher, Jr. have put together one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen would be an understatement. Here is a collaboration that expands the definition of that word. It's a seamlessly interwoven collection of words and images that invite and inspire, in the the original meaning of that over-used term. Laura's poems show the depths of her poetic "inseeing, " Rilke calls it, and Fletcher's photographs open up the landscape that Laura sings into being with her words. The Soul Tree speaks to the landscapes of internal and exterior reality. In this collection those two landscapes have found harmony through two artists working together in celebration of what they love.

Laura Hope-Gill is in the process of being certified as a Certified Applied Poetry Facilitator by the National Federation for Poetry Therapy, working under the mentorship of poet and psychotherapist Perie Longo. The Director of Asheville Wordfest, a free poetry festival which presents poetry as Citizen Journalism, she consciously pursues ways of revealing poetry’s relevance to every-day life and not merely an “art form” whose only use is to beautiful. The Soul Tree: Poems and Photographs of the Southern Appalachians (Grateful Steps, Asheville) is a collaboration with local photographer John Fletcher, Jr. and is an application of her vision of poetry as a conversation between inner and outer worlds.

Renowned photographer John Fletcher has this to say about the beginnings of their collaboration.

"After visiting my landscapes website in the spring of 2008, Laura replied with an email containing an attachment titled, 'The Soul Tree.' I was stunned after reading the poem, then I noticed that there were 35 more pages to the document. My jaw dropped a little lower each time I scrolled to the next poem…36 in all. I was speechless.Not only was her writing beautiful and poignant, but her poetry brought new life to the photographs. I was also quite overwhelmed by her choice of photos…not the pretty sunset pictures that most people like. She was inspired by the photos that were my favorites…the mysterious and more abstract images that I feel personify my experience and observations.

Today I continue this pursuit by working as a staff
photographer for the Asheville Citizen-Times, shooting
weddings, and freelancing for regional and national
clients including, USA Today, The Associated Press,
MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and
the Asheville Chamber of Commerce."

Images and poems from The Soul Tree may be found at http://www.thsoultree.org/, along with ordering information and more about the two artists who have brought this lovely book into existence.

Here are two pages from the book.

COLLOQUY IN BLACK AND WHITE by NANCY DILLINGHAM

2009-10-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

Nancy Dillingham has a new book of poetry out from Catawba Publishers (www.catawbapublishing.com) titled Colloquy in Black and White. The poems are sometimes stark, always accessible. Nancy is a 6th generation Dillinghamm from Big Ivy in western North Carolina. She has published several books of poetry, as well as essays and articles. She lives in Asheville with her cat named Serendipity.

Nancy has been growing by leaps and bounds as a poet, and this new collection shows ample evidence of her growth. She is becoming a fearless poet, taking on subjects that might daunt others. She's a mountain woman who knows her landscape and its dark places well.

She can confront them, all the while singing the light and the love of place. She reads widely, she listens, she challenges herself, without losing the moorings that keep her steady as a poet and an inhabitant of these mountains. She will be at the Great Smoky Mountains Book Fair, and I hope that other festivals and reading series across the state will begin to take notice of her work.

Suite on Love

Sitting here
fifty years later
as you whisper me
happy birthday
and our younguns
sing around us
grown
with children of their own

I want to say
it is you
not the candles
on the cake
that takes my breath away

Too late coming to love
I made the usual blunders

A blush away from a baby
it was a tom-fool thing
for me to do
bringing you
country ham
cured sweet as honey
biscuits and gravy
stack cake

How could
I lie
with you
after you left me
for a roll
in the hay
with the first hussy
that gave you the eye?

Spitfire
you called me later
bleeding
like a stuck pig
where I struck
you with a piece
of stove wood
and you slapped me

Sitting here
as I think of all the pain
yours is the only music I hear
and I want to tell you
everything still seems the same
like the first time
clear as a bell

right as rain

Legacy

My aunt sat on her front porch
in a chair bottomed with strips of tires
slinging her crossed leg, dipping snuff

Your great-grandmother ruled
with an iron hand
and Grandpa was a rounder, she said

Double Dillinghams they were
cousins marrying cousins
Elbert and Mary

Owned land as far as the eye could see
all the way up to the Coleman Boundary

They say he courted her by bringing armfuls of flowers
picked by the roadside or out of other people's yards
traded his mule for a chestnut mare

Carried her around in a hand basket after they married
all the while making time with the hired help

The house stood right over there on the hill
where the graveyard is today--they gave the land

A smile threatened the corners of my aunt's wrinkled mouth
and a small rivulet of snuff ran down one side

After he died
Grandma didn't take to widow's weeds
said they didn't become her

She'd sit on the porch cooling Sunday afternoons in the summer
after cooking cut-off corn and baking soft butter biscuits
She'd throw back her head and cackle

I ought to have taken me a young lover
just to bedevil Elbert, she'd say

But he'd have dragged chains up and down the stairs at night
and, after my laying out, danced on my grave for spite

My aunt's face softened
A long time passed before she spoke again

We grandchildren would play on the porch
run the length of it back and forth
like fighting fire

or stand under the arbor eating pink grapes
clear as glass and sweet as honey
bees buzzing a halo over our heads

Sometimes when I look really hard
I can just see Grandma
coming over the ridge

her bright apron glowing
waving like a flag
calling me home

Signs

“Whenever you go looking for what’s lost, everything is a sign.”
Eudora Welty

I have not bled
this month, Mother
and I am afraid

Just yesterday
a bird flew into the living room
losing its way

I didn’t sleep a wink last night
A dog howled outside my window
and the clock didn’t strike

Must have been midnight
I saw Will’s first wife plain as day
standing over my bed

glistening with sweat
crying with no sound
holding her dead baby

all the while
Will sleeping quietly
beside me

I felt the same fear
I saw in her face
this time last year

You remember, don’t you, Mother?
You asked me to help with the birthing
It was my first time

You cut cotton strips
and bound her wrists
to the bedposts

I placed the small, round stick
you handed me
into her mouth

bathed her face
as you commanded her
to bear down

I remember most the silence
as I watched you wrap the baby—stillborn
in the same soft cloth

And I can never forget the look
in Will’s eyes at the funeral
when he finally raised them

and gazed at me
as if seeing me
for the first time

Tiny shivers
ran up and down my spine
and my whole body shook

as he took a sprig of white lilac
from his wife’s casket
and handed it to me

He’s out there now
on the front porch
drinking his coffee

staring over the valley
looking at rows and rows
of newly-planted fields

seeing the cattle
grazing on the hill
below the graveyard

the headstone visible still
in its rising up
and shining in the light

Daddy’s Girl

With a wink and a leer
her daddy holds
the cold open can of beer
tantalizingly near

tickling her nose
Through bow-like lips
eager as a baby bird
she sates her thirst

with a single sip
laughs a giggly
hiccupping laugh
then burps

Putting up one perfect hand
she catches a trickle of froth
as it bursts like broth
from her soft pink mouth

FIRST LIGHT: NCETA HIGH SCHOOL LAUREATE AWARD WINNING POETS

2009-10-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

HIGH SCHOOL DIVISION

First Place (tie)
Sarah Brady

Holly Springs High School (now attending UNC-CH)

Vocabulary Words

The oak tree outside my window is changing colors
in a kind of passive acquiescence it seems, the green fading and
shocks of crimson and burgundy cropping up each afternoon,
effervescent in the dappled sunlight.

Last year my eager classroom learned
chlorophyll, pigment, carotenoid.
These words we committed to memory meant no more to us
than the faded shots of far-off guns in far-off lands
or the true meaning of the white flower in Frankenstein
or the piece of paper encased in glass, guaranteeing life liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re maybe learning
all the wrong things in our cubes of classrooms.
Present tenses and past participles, the War of 1812,
the quadratic formula crowd around my ears and sure
I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance in two languages
but it doesn’t mean that I understand the meaning.
Patriotism. Warfare. Peace. Loyalty.

It’s all as distant to me as the struggle for color in a single autumn leaf.
War is that something in the headlines, peace the brass ring forever
reached for. Honor has been recycled into respect, love deemed too idealistic,
ethics murdered in the second-floor stairwell.
And in the end, I am lost,
stuck between textbook precision and real-life passion,
a choice that I will not make.

(Sarah Brady)

Erin Walklet

Cardinal Gibbons High School, Raleigh

A??π? (agape)

It echoes in my mind.
Eternally, slowly.
Resounding with nothing
Our ears could perceive.
It reverberates in my heart.
Aching. Clenching. Rugged.
I can’t forget as I
Dream.
Just dream.
Wisplike strands catch between my lips.
The whisper of fingers brushing,
And the concentration of your gaze is
Enveloping like the
Clouds rotating in heavenly
Traffic,
Hesitant as they paint the sky
Columns of sour orange and lingering pink,
Pausing as they turn towards the sun.
As I wait here,
Wait for the time to turn round,
Please remember even
When the night is a deep vacuum,
Locking your hands into empty shells
And the stars are shattered and blank,
Remember it crashes within me
As well.
It’s your choice I hold onto,
Your voice in the darkness that
I wait for. To the quiet I tell:
Stay when only the silence remains,
And company is the space between your thoughts.
Hold onto the hope that someday
From the hole something eternal will form.
Think instead of the way
Sea melts into sky and
The blueness begins to burn
Onto your eyelids.
The way that skin and sand and salt could
Comfort in an ironic way.
Two palms back to back,
Fitting
And sideways smiles
Reflected.
We made up our own words,
Counting the waves of spiraling light that surged and fell,
Dispersing on faces upturned, exuberant, and
It was enough.

(Erin Walklet)

Second Place: (3-way tie)

Courtney Duckworth

R. L. Patton High School
(Morganton, NC)

ode to karen dalton

pucker for me, babe:
break loose twelve bars fluttering solo
thru bent notes and fish-lip
pentatonics. i want glissando,
the electric meow of sirens, a junkyard
angel's catcall singular as gospel truth.
lay your banjo screeching pizzicato
into my palm, soften twelve-string ballads
with your teeth, malleable like gold leaf.
you could make chocolate melt
with that syntax, could erect
a bonfire seance for your cherokee
ancestors. belt trying again. sing it like
sculpting a dove out of butter,
like throwing a corn husk doll into
the wide open prairie, searching for it
barefoot, skirts hitched. i know
you're from oklahoma, babe, but
i don't think you're a hillbilly. you can
borrow my clothes, i promise;
you can sing love notes on the porch
when our feet are lying together (wife
& wife), folded upwards like casual
prayer to the sky. i'll tell you who
loves you the best, but i won't tell you
it's me.

(Karen Dalton, folk and blues singer/musician)

Chelsea Hansen

Penn-Griffin School for the Arts
High Point

Met Death

Met death on the street today
shook his hand
felt like my own

Met death on the street today
No scythe or black robe
just a brown cap and a briefcase
Hair was falling out like autumn trees

Met death on the street today
gravity pulls him down further than most
He slugs around like he’s running through water

Met death on the street today
His mouth was a chimney
smelled like a house set afire

Met death on the street today
I tasted his breath
He’s had a pack or two

Met death on the street today
Met his gaze
looking in the reflection on the water
eyes
like shards of glass

Maria Evans
Leesville Road High School, Raleigh (Now at UNC-CH)

A Breath
The smell of gasoline wafts past
in the wake of a faded blue Toyota.
Choking on fume-filled air,
a middle-aged man glances up
from his novel, his inhalation of
words having been interrupted.
In the wind are
precious pages of another world,
the scent of knowledge.
Another seat down, a woman glares,
popping echoes in her head—
this evening’s meal.
Chopping carrots, mashing
potatoes
requires consideration
as well, but first
here is the bus.
Sliding along metal rails
guiding hands more coarse
than sandpaper, more gentle
than a fawn. Catching the
sun, a gold watch
glitters from the delicate wrist
of an elegant woman running
from life.

Maria Evans

Honorable Mentions:

Allison Kupatt

Enloe High School, Raleigh

Cult Classics

Once Upon a Time, I walked with a zombie
And the spirits thought to leave me alone.
Ah, dreams and nightmares, they scare me equally:
All the secret meanings I want to avoid, lead up to
What I remember in the early morning.
I wish I could avoid the dead-fish stares
Of plastic stars and bleached smiles,
While the ghosts of the celluloid past glare through
The iron fences. I’m left with all those nightmares,
Flitting like memories while I stroll down boulevards.
Walking in the waking world is like
A bit part in a cult classic, only for me, the
Zombies and voodoo ceremonies are real—
They just take place at the subway platforms and coffee shops,
This has always been true, I just didn’t open my eyes.
Oh, I miss the Good Old Days, when
Zombies didn’t make house calls, and
I could relax amidst my toy box and cartoon reels.
There’s something to say for Ignorance and Bliss,
But still, those memories are all bittersweet.
I walked with a zombie one morning,
And it changed my ways, my knowledge for the world.
The spirits left me alone with the black-and-white ghosts.
I mediate the battle between dreams and nightmares,
And learn to be less afraid.

People dressed as Zombies for Halloween (Wikipedia)

Amanda Honey
Carrboro High School

Runners

Hot air rises from the concrete
in swift, promising ringlets.
The noon sun bearing down on
unsuspecting townsmen.
Runners take their ritual jog,
stealing through each trail in all their
paled, sweated, short-shorted glory.
Soft claps of conversation left in their wake,
only spoken between soles and dry Carolina clay.
Moistened breaths quickened and whispered,
living to quiet the air.
Slight ups-and-downs of chests
oxidizes blood cells and
gives the Earth reason to revolve once again.
Maybe if there was one skipped step
the world would cease to move.
And we would be sent tumbling
into the blazing sun,
bones incinerated into the body's
last action of that day.
Maybe.
But the jaunt is not slowed,
the step not skipped,
and these runners never still.

Rachel Thompson

Penn-Griffin School for the Arts, High Point

Aqua, Terra, and Zephyr

When a mothers’ child is abused by another, would the mother want revenge?

Aqua: I smiled when they sailed across me
Splashing their faces with the sea water
Gladly providing them with the molecule for life; the universal solvent.
But they dumped their trash in me
Leaving a scar twice the size of Texas in the center of my back.
Then blamed me when tsunamis crushed their factories
And when hurricanes plumaged their cities.

Terra: Initially, I didn’t mind when they cut off my limbs.
I was happy to give them firewood.
But they wouldn’t give be a break;
Kept on chopping off my arms and legs
Wired their own electric system through me.
Then blamed me when my blood boiled over
Destroying their precious wooden houses.
And when infertile soil wouldn’t grow the trees that they’d just cut down.

Zephyr: I gently moved their bonfire smoke
And brought the rains to dampen their factory smoke
But I started coughing after a while.
I got sick, and bringing the winds took longer.
Their cars and planes didn’t help either;
They started to tear a hole in my cloak, my armor, their armor.
Then blamed me when I rained their pollutants back at them
And when tornadoes tore their material things away from them.

Earth Seen from Apollo 17

Megan Przybyla
Leesville Road High School, Raleigh

Summertime

Late July:
Sunshine grates
On parched skin,
Scraping until red faces
Cower in the shade.
Humid air winds
Around languid limbs,
As sticky
And smothering
As plastic wrap
Around a squashed
Peanut butter
And grape jelly
Sandwich.
Flies zip by
With the buzz
Of an electric razor
At 6 AM
As angels
Crack their knuckles
With resonating
Booms!
From behind stone-gray
Fortresses.
The world smells like hope.

Song of the Angels by Bouguereau, 1825–1905.

About Our Poets

(All poets were invited to send biographical information.)
This year our Middle School poets were outstanding. Christopher J. Murphy (CJ) is fifteen years old. He was born and raised in Lincoln County. He has attended Lincoln County Schools since kindergarten. His hobbies include riding four-wheelers, hunting, fishing, and hiking with his friends. A member of the class of 2013, he says he is very proud that his poem won this award. He plans to go into construction upon graduation: anything but roofing! Falecia Metcalf lives in Weaverville, where she is an 8th grader at North Buncombe Middle School. She says, “I love to read and write. As for writing poems I really got kicked off this year when we started our poetry unit. Then from there I have kept on writing and actually couldn't stop! The poems come to me quicker than I can write them down sometimes. Mrs. Young, my 7th grade Language Arts Teacher at North Buncombe Middle School and sponsor for the NC Student Poet Laureate Contest, really encouraged me to write, along with my family.” Allie Sekulich has been devoted to writing over the years, and in 2007 & 2008, with the help of a great teacher, she entered numerous writing contests. In addition to winning second in a NC State Fair Essay contest, she entered and won The Raleigh News and Observer’s Character Education Essay Contest, receiving a pair of tickets to see a basketball game for that greatest of Universities, North Carolina State! Besides reading and writing, Allie plays piano and has a passion for figure skating. She is starting her 7th grade year at Neuse Charter Middle School in Smithfield.

Several of our high school winners recently entered college. Sarah Brady, a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill, is considering majoring in Journalism or English. She was a semifinalist for the Morehead-Cain Scholarship and the Thomas Wolfe Scholarship. She was named the News and Observer female scholar athlete of the year. At UNC, she hopes to write for The Daily Tarheel. Some of her favorite activities are reading, writing in her journal, backpacking, and running. Maria Evans, having graduated from Leesville Road High school, also is a freshman at UNC, where she attends as a Teaching Fellow. Writing will no doubt be an important part of her life as a teacher. Allison Kupatt writes poetry, short stories, and comics. She too is currently attending UNC-CH.

Rachel Thompson and Chelsea Hansen are musicians as well as writers. Both attend Penn-Griffin School for the arts in High Poet. Chelsea, the daughter of Scott and Tazmen Hansen, is a junior and a guitar student at Penn-Griffin. In ninth grade, she fell in love with writing. She has received an honorable mention in the haiku contest sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society. Rachel, the daughter of Gary and Lynda Thompson, is a junior and an orchestra student, a violinist,. She wants to write a novel one day. Her poetry has won honorable mentions in contests sponsored by the Phoenix Festival and N. C. Poetry Society, as well as a second prize from Muse on Greensboro, a contest sponsored by the Greensboro Public Library. . Amanda Honey, from Chapel Hill, attends Carrboro High School. Courtney Duckworth lives at the edge of the Blue Ridge mountains. She is 16 years old and a senior at Patten High School in Morganton. Her English teacher is Mr. John Zimmerman. This summer she attended Governor's School East in Raleigh, studying Poetry with instructor Chuck Sullivan. Megan Przybyla is a junior at Leesville Road High School. She is a voracious reader and loves the sticky sweetness of summertime. She is excited to be included in this booklet, which is her first publication. Erin Walklet is a junior at Cardinal Gibbons High School, a member of the Lancer Club and National Honors Society. She plays club soccer with CRSC in Raleigh. She would like to keep writing and is considering a degree in that field.

NCETA Student Laureate Poetry Contest
The contest is open to all North Carolina Students in Grades 6-8 and 9-12.
Awards
Each winner (Middle and High School) will receive $250.00 and a framed copy of his or her winning poem printed on a broadside. Each Second Place winner (Middle and High School) will receive $50.00. All winners will be recognized by North Carolina’s poet laureate at NCETA’s annual conference and have their winning poems published on the NCETA and the NC Arts Council Websites. If no poems qualify for the title of NC Student Poet Laureate, no award will be given and the reigning student laureate will maintain the title for another year.

Requirements
Updated requirements for the 2010 contest will be posted on the NCETA site (www.ncenglishteacher.org) and made available through other sources of information. The deadline is April 15.

Namesake and History
In 2007, Kathryn Stripliing Byer, North Carolina's Poet Laureate, and her family established the North Carolina Student Poet Laureate Awards in memory of her father, C.M. Stripling. Kathryn Byer has lived in western North Carolina since 1968, when she received her MFA degree from UNC-G. Her father, a farmer, became one of Georgia’s most respected spokesmen for agriculture and conservation. The love of language, literature, and teaching runs in the family. Her grandmother and great-grandmother were teachers, and her husband, James Byer, served as Head of the English Department at WCU. Their daughter Corinna was a 1996 Amy Charles and NCETA Writing Award winner.

FIRST LIGHT: MIDDLE SCHOOL WINNING POEMS

2009-10-22T06:39:00.000-07:00

MIDDLE SCHOOL DIVISION

First Place

C. J. Murphy

West Lincoln Middle School

Where I Come From

I come from the smell of
Fresh cut grass on an old dirt road, off
a two-lane black top.
Old lawn mowers shade the yard.
A squirrel dashes up an oak tree
in a stream of smoke and lead.
Grandma with a basket full of eggs,
Grandpa and Dad working,
Sharing a spit cup, working
In the old tin building,
Uncle Mike tuning his Camero,
Cousin Hannah, drinking a Nehi,
watching the chickens picking the ground.

My cousin Johnnie and me in the tree stand
in the old pasture by the creek,
watching the field like a hawk
through the scope of an ought-two-seventy.
(But when Mom yells “Supper’s ready!” we
Hop in the pickup with chicken and
blackberry pies on our minds.)
I walk in with mud on my boots
And Mom says, “What? Were you raised in a barn?”
(But after lunch, dressed up and armed
With Bibles, we hop in the truck
And head for evening service.)

Second Place

Falecia Metcalf

North Buncombe Middle School

The Rain

It starts out quietly,
slow and steady
each beat round and perfect.
Then ever so quickly
it becomes harsh and cold,
hitting faster and harder each time.
In the midst of it all
a shrill cry can be heard.
Where did it come from?
No one knows.
It haunts the night
and threatens to disappear,
although it never does.
I love the rain.
It brings out a dark side in me.
It makes me love scary stories
and ghosts.
It brings me peace, though,
in the worst of my nights.
It slowly sings me to sleep
with its majestic lullaby.
It doesn’t bring me anger or fear—
it soothes me.
There is something about it,
I would never guess,
That draws me to it
without ever uttering a word.
It carries me off to ride in the dark,
A person without a care,
yet it haunts me;
it loves me still.

Honorable Mention

Allie Sekulich

Neuse Charter Middle School

On the Ice

Deep lungfuls of the icy cold air
Step on to glowing white ice
On gleaming metal blades
Gliding like a swan
Cold wind brushes my face
Like soft satin feathers
Lilting to the music
I spin like a top
Never wanting to stop
Watching the world whirl
Jumping like a dolphin
Into the air for joy
Floating, as if I could stay up forever
Hit the ice, steady my blades
Dancing from one end to another
Turning, twisting, prancing
Power and Grace
My energy is endless, endless in joy and love
Never wanting to leave
This is my true passion
Fiercer, more alive than anything
It burns like a blazing fire
My second home is the rink
On two metal blades and the beautiful ice
Here I will be
Forevermore skating
I am a Figure Skater.

(Sasha Cohen's skates. Sasha is Allie's favorite figure skater.)

FIRST LIGHT: INTRODUCTION

2009-10-21T09:10:00.001-07:00

FIRST LIGHT: An Introduction (Excerpts from the book will appear over the next 2 days)

This second year of NCETA’s Student Laureate Awards, we received three times as many poems as last year, from schools ranging the length of North Carolina. We found poems as good as any student work I’ve ever seen, some of it better than what I see in current literary magazines.

None of the poems in this booklet could have happened without teachers who encouraged their authors. Nor could they have happened without the engagement of parents in their children’s education. The love of language, and the light that language brings, begins early, nurtured by reading and storytelling. Strong enough, it can withstand Facebook, Twitter, and text-messaging. I’d be willing to bet that the authors of these poems don’t spend much time staring at a computer screen for social networking. I’d guess they find the world around them more interesting than cyberspace. I hope so.

As you will see, I liked so many of the poems that I couldn’t choose just one for the winning slots in the High School Division. Sarah Brady’s Vocabulary Words and Erin Walklet’s Agape were equally well-made, with a maturity of voice and perspective that couldn’t be denied. Nor could I deny the rhythmic pleasure I felt reading Courtney Duckworth’s ode to karen dalton, nor the seductive imagery of Maria Evans’ A Breath. Chelsea Hansen’s encounter in Met Death sounded like a whip cracking in my head. All five of these poems echoed in my mind for days.

So did the four Honorable Mentions. It’s easy to shrug off Honorable Mentions, I know. I often did it when I received the results from contests I’d entered. But I don’t shrug off these poems. Not Allison Kupatt’s perfectly paced Cult Classics. This poem shows a mastery of tone that a more experienced writer might envy. Rachel Thompson’s Aqua, Terra, Zephyr gives the Earth itself her voice, and Amamda Honey’s Runners makes the lines as energetic as the subjects they bring to life. And whoever thought of angels in summer cracking their knuckles with big “booms”? I couldn’t get Megan Przybyla’s angels out of my mind. Her Summertime gave me a new perspective on the season.

Thank goodness I didn’t have to brood as long over the Middle School Winners. Right away C.J. Murphy’s Where I Come From stood out for all the reasons good poetry sticks in the mind: imagery that opens up the world in which it’s set, a voice that knows how to journey through that place with knowledge and humor. Falecia Metcalf’s The Rain, by contrast, creates a private world of imagination as she listens to the rain. Finally, Allie Sekulich takes to the ice with all her senses alert and alive in On the Ice. These three Middle Schoolers are sure to be heard from again as they move through their remaining school years.

Enjoy this year’s winning poems, to be posted here over the next week. They deserve to be celebrated. They give the first light of new voices, using language to illuminate, move us, and, above all, delight us. Their work is introduced by our “warm up band,” John York, Nancy Posey, and me. John is one of our state’s finest poets. Nancy is beginning to publish her poems in various journals. And I am coming to the end of my Poet Laureate term, feeling optimistic about the future of North Carolina poetry.

Kathryn Stripling Byer NC Poet Laureate, 2005-2009

Great Smoky Mountains Book Fair: Aspiring Writers

2009-10-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

Aspiring writers can find advice at November’s benefit book fair
(from The Sylva Herald)

Writers who are as yet unpublished can obtain some expert advice next month, and they won’t have to leave the area to do so.

As part of the Great Smoky Mountains Book Fair, which will be in Sylva on Saturday, Nov. 14, Edmund Schubert will offer a free writers’ workshop devoted to how to get published in any genre.

The program will be held at Sylva First United Methodist Church from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. While there is no charge to attend, pre-registration is required. Please call City Lights Bookstore at 586-9499 by Tuesday, Nov. 10, to reserve a place at the workshop.

The book fair appearance will mark Schubert’s return to Sylva to offer this program for a second time. He came to City Lights in February and had a full-capacity crowd for the workshop, which covers everything from the difference between a query letter and a cover letter to selling novels, non-fiction books and articles, and short stories.

Schubert is the author of a novel, titled “Dreaming Creek,” and is also the fiction editor of Orson Scott Card’s (author of “Ender’s Game”) online science-fiction magazine, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show. An anthology from the magazine was recently published as a book, with Schubert as editor.

To register for Schubert’s free workshop, or for more information, call City Lights at 586-9499.

The Great Smoky Mountains Book Fair is a fund-raiser for the new Jackson County Library. In addition to Schubert’s writing workshop, it will include entertainment and book appraisal opportunities.

The all-day event draws some 50 regional authors to Sylva Methodist to sell and autograph their books, with 20 percent of sales going to the new library.

For complete book fair information, visit online at www.gsmbookfair.org

FIRST LIGHT: INTRODUCTION

2009-10-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

POET OF THE WEEK: PETER MAKUCK

2009-10-19T14:00:00.000-07:00

Peter Makuck is, to quote his editor at BOA Editions, "the best." It's hard to argue with that when your read his poems. Peter is not only a splendid poet, he founded and edited Tar River Poetry for almost thirty years. He's also a sharp book reviewer. He's published four books with BOA: Where We live (1982), The Sunken Lightship (1990) Against Distance (1997), and Off Season in the Promised Land (2005). His book of short stories Costly Habits (U. of Missouri Press) was nominated for a Pen/Faulkner Award. His work has appeared in The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Poetry, and North American Review. With his wife Phyllis, he lives on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina's barrier Islands.

In April Peter sent me his new chapbook Back Roads, the first poem of which is titled "Drag Racing."

From the diner hangout
we'd simmer toward that long dark stretch
flanked by graveyards
where even the dead were divided,

kill our lights and let the dark come in.
We revved up.
Someone signaled with a match.
Tires screamed
and roared for that blind curve at the end.

Win or lose,
we'd be back and back for revenge.
Ten as now
we'd burn and squint into that flying dark.

---------------------------------------
Peter has a new book forthcoming from BOA Editions in the spring, a New and Selected, so be on the lookout for it. Here's the cover.

What follows is brief collection of Peter's poems, the first three from Off Season in the Promised Land. (Boa Editions)

DUSK WATCH

We were sitting on the roof deck,
four friends with a bottle,
maybe six months after he died,

low sun melting on an emptiness
of ocean, waves almost quiet,
when into view floated a line

of brown pelicans,
hedge-clippers with wings,
more than a dozen

in a slow motion glide
along a curving sickle of sand
suddenly veering,

wings motionless, fixed,
as if we were in somebody’s sights,
Gerda saying they were his favorites—

characters comic
and soulful at the same time. Then,
as if called, one bird

left the cortège and returned,
turned tightly over the roof
four or five times,

the last an eyelevel pass
before he angled off
to follow that long dark line.

We looked at each other
and finally laughed, Gerda too,
her eyes wide and wet.

We felt the wind
pick up, saw waves whiten,
but until the water went black

and the bottle was empty
we went on talking, nobody
saying a word.

In memoriam Bodo Nischan

OCEANIA FISHING PIER

We’re jigging for blues,
sunset doing its fiery fade, showy
as this tourist couple that ambles out,
all spiffed in summer whites,
glasses of zinfandel, hot for something to see.

And as if to please,
a guy gets a screamer strike on a live bait rig.
Now a twenty pound cobia slaps the planks,
and the woman in white wrinkles her nose
with a line you might have predicted:

"He's not going to keep that poor thing, is he?"

Then it gets worse.
There’s a trawler two hundred yards off the beach,
pulling nets through what’s left of the sunpath,
a blizzard of gulls at the stern.

“So pretty,” she says at my shoulder, “isn’t it?”

No, it's not pretty, I want to say.
When you see a squall of gulls
behind a trawler on a sunset sea,
don't think beauty,
think bycatch: small blues and menhayden,
spots and croaker, unsellable mullet
littering the surface for acres,
feeding the gulls.
Think trawl doors that plow the bottom,
kill coral, fill the crannies
and hiding holes for next year’s fry.
Think analogy:
harvesting corn with a bulldozer.

Pretty still echoes in the air,
and she is too.
Lips glistening with wine, she asks
if all this ain’t as pretty a postcard?

Looking down at the cobia opening
And closing its mouth, dying, slowly
dying, I tell her it is.

MINDING WHAT’S THERE

I’m browsing shell beds
and trying to work though
the one about who we are
when we forget to practice
who we are,

only half aware of the ocean
taking itself seriously,
a tall white tumble and hiss.
I should know the ebb
from flood by sound alone

but it’s a clump of seafoam,
stranded and iridescent,
like an enlightened mind,
that tells me
about the effort of arrival.

Shells crackle under foot,
bits of scallops and olives,
whelks and razors,
then a black isosceles
bigger than an arrowhead

stops my restless ramble
and has me stoop.
Two inches from base to tip,
shiny as obsidian, but sharp—
edges themselves tiny teeth,

a dark design, perfect
for ripping and sawing,
changed only in color
since fallen eons ago
from a jawful of others.

Its edge draws
a bead of blood on my arm,
those zigzag fins
beyond the surf zone at dusk,
sometimes an attack,

that girl we taunted
in high school ages ago
with “Sharkey,“
her sidelong glance
and crooked teeth.

I let it fall into the dark
of my pocket, testing
its edge with my thumb,
climb from the beach
and cross the road.

At the end of our drive
the neighbor’s black cat meows
and sprawls on its back for a scratch—
sign of forgiveness,
perhaps even luck,

our mailbox empty to prove it,
pinetops giving sound to the wind,
the cat now rubbing my bare legs,
that sharp black tooth—
nothing I ever expected.

The following poem appears in The Poets Guide to the Birds, from Anghinga Press, edited by Ted Kooser and Judith Kitchen.

Egret

Nature is a haunted house
—Emily Dickinson

Twilight was losing its color.
On either side of the high-rise bridge,
endless archipelagos of eelgrass spread below me,
far-spaced herons
and egrets like dazzling white flags,
mullet breaking parts of the marsh mirror,
birds in their final moves, feathering off
to a distant tree line of peaks and valleys,
a reminder of vital signs on a screen.

Up close, an egret's white
might be slightly stained
with mud from the thrash of a fish
and you might be upset
by the greedy gold of its eye
before the beak-stab
and the bullwhip snap of its neck.
But farther off,
these birds are something else,
that blinding white letter S
made by the same lethal neck
against a wall of tall grass—
it stands for what?
Salvation? Surrender?

In a depth of field,
still but for the slo-mo stride
or dip of beak,
they might be garden statues,
placed just so
at inlets or sandspits
in the rich tidal green
to urge inner movement,
these lone white icons
I saw once in number
at a sunset rookery on Goat Island,
making me think
there must be a law
that has them in heaven at night.
But during the day,
just when we need them,
they touch the eye
with the right kind of light.

Some days,
just in off the ocean,
under churning black clouds in our boat,
we cross the Beaufort Bar,
and out of the corner of sight,
that flash of white
is the substance of my mother's prayer
come from a distance beyond belief
to see me back safe.

As I stood looking down
from the five-story bridge,
an egret,
as if conjured, lifted from reflection,
dipped its long wings into heavy air
and rowed out of sight
to a rookery on the far side
of the bridge.

A sloop passed beneath,
a tear of burnished teak,
with flames at the stern
and two figures trying to douse them.
But that was a trick of distance,
for, a moment later,
as the sloop moved further off,
a scent reached up—
the black and red of grilled meat
that now turned me back
through the dark,
hungry for the colors of home.

STUDENT POETS CELEBRATED AT N.C.E.T.A. CONFERENCE

2009-10-18T06:36:00.000-07:00

(With Nancy Posey, Director of NCETA's Student Writing Awards)

Yesterday's drive over the mountains to Caldwell Community College was fraught with uncertainty. I didn't know how the weather was going to turn out, and I wasn't sure about the directions Mapquest had given me. Yes, I got lost. And I decided asking folks at service stations and Kentucky Fried works better than the internet if you're lost.

Sure enough, thanks to the cheerily helpful woman at KFC, I found Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute. Nancy Posey, past president of the NC English Teachers Association and this year's Director of Student Writing Awards, greeted me as I walked in with a big box of First Light booklets.

Lunch was just what we needed after a cold, windy morning: soup. White chili, red chili, chicken noodle, cabbage-sausage. Both the white chili and the cabbage soup were great, and to be honest, I was having a hard time paying attention to Elaine Cox announcing the Teacher of the Year because I was enjoying that soup so seriously! After Elaine's presentation, the Student Awards were presented, the first being the Wade Edwards Fiction Award, followed by the Watterson-Timberlake Essay presentations, the subject this year being "Memoir."

Then, it was time for POETRY. Because of weather and distance several of our student winners couldn't make it, but all of our Middle School winners did, even Allie Sekulich, all the way from Raleigh with her parents Mike and Kim and her siblings Summer and Nick. C.J. Murphy, his teacher Lydia Dunn, and his mother made it from Hickory, and Falecia Metcalf and family were in the audience, as well, having driven over from Buncombe County. Falecia's teacher at N. Buncombe Middle School, Julie Young, was there, too.

These young poets were understandably nervous about reading their poems to a large audience, so I offered to read their work for them, after presenting their awards. That was the best part of the day! Reading them aloud, I realized all over again how good these poems are.
Here we are after the program.

(From left, C.J. Murphy, Falecia Metcalf, me, and Allie Sekulich)

Only one high school awardee attended, our first place winner, Sarah Brady. She, too, traveled from Raleigh with her mother Rebecca. She read her splendid poem, Vocabulary Words, to nods of appreciation from the assembled teachers.

(Sarah Brady and her mother Rebecca)

The Ragan-Rubin Awardee this year was Sheila Kay Adams, an old friend. How old I won't reveal. We sat together at lunch, Sheila with her ibook, scrolling through a long piece of prose. John York was to my other side, enjoying his chili. Perfect lunch companions!

(Nancy Posey presenting Sheila Kay Adams with the Ragan-Rubin Award)

Sheila's presentation was a reading from her laptop, a new book she began a while back, "weird," she said, but I'd call it magical. Sheila is a born performer, right down to her gold shoes, which you'll see in this photo of Sheila signing books after the program.

After the book signings, Sheila Kay received yet another award--the Little Debbie Cupcake Award, which she gratefully accepted from John York.

Please visit the NCETA website at www.ncenglishteacher.org for more information about the association and the Student Award programs.

I will be presenting the winning poems this coming week on my blog. That's when you will see why I fell in love with them and why I couldn't decide among the High School submissions and ended up declaring so many ties.

FIRST LIGHT: 2009 Student Laureate Poetry Awards

2009-10-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the big day, the day when the students who have won the second annual NC Student Laureate Poetry Awards will be recognized at the yearly conference of the North Carolina Engligh Teachers Association held at Caldwell Community College. These awards were established two years ago by my family as a way of bring poetry more into the student awards lineup at NCETA, thereby encouraging the reading and writing of poetry in our public schools.

The awards are given for the best poems by middle and high school students. John York is first readier and I am final judge, as each year's Poet Laureate will be. The student Laureates receive monetary awards, as well as books. This year they, their families, and assembled teachers will also be receiving a chapbook of the winning poems, First Light.

Here is the list of winners. You may find out more about NCETA's student writing contests by going to http://www.ncenglishteacher.org/. I will be posting the poems themselves, along with photos from the awards ceremony when I return on Saturday.

MIDDLE SCHOOL:
First Place:C.J. Murphy
“Where I Come From”
W. Lincoln Middle

Second Place:Falecia Metcalf
"The Rain"
N. Buncombe Middle

Honorable Mention:Allie Sekulich
“On the Ice”
Charter Neuse Middle

HIGH SCHOOL
First Place:Sarah Brady
“Vocabulary Words”
Holly Springs High, now at UNC

Erin Walklet
“Agape”
Cardinal Gibbons High

Second:Courtney Duckworth
“Ode to Karen Dalton”
R.L Patton High

Chelsea Hansen
“Met Death”
Penn-Griffin School

Maria Evans
“A Breath”
Leesville Rd. High, now at UNC-CH

Honorable Mention:Allison Kupatt
"Cult Classics"
Enloe High School

Rachel Thompson
“Aqua, Zephyr, Terra”
Penn-Griffin

Amanda Honey
“Runners”
Carrboro High

Megan Przybyla
"Summertime"
Leesville Road High School

WILL INMAN, ONE OF NC'S OWN, HAS DIED

2009-10-15T11:08:00.001-07:00

Jeffery Beam has written me of Will Inman's death. Beam and Inman had corresponded for years, and Jeffery had published Inman's work in Oyster Boy Review:

The Wilmington, NC born, Duke University educated (his papers are there), and Tucson, AZ beloved poet recently died after a long illness. Although it had been a long time since he lived in North Carolina, Carolinian's should acknowledge him as one of the most individual, socially conscious, and widely acknowldeged poets to have come from our state.

The Arizona Star published an obituary that gives readers a sense of who Inman was and what he accomplished as a poet and activist:

"Over six decades, Inman committed to paper words both tender and nurturing, as well as thought-provoking and spiritual. Yet it was pragmatism more so than poetry that infused his final prose — the obituary he penned for himself earlier this year. Inman died Saturday after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease. He was 86.

Inman, born William Archibald McGirt Jr. in Wilmington, N.C., began writing and publishing in the mid-1950s, using his mother's maiden name. In his autobiography, "Memoirs of an Activist Poet," Inman reflected on his diverse experiences: growing up in the South, seeing racism firsthand; his activities as a union organizer and a member of the Communist Party; working as a writer, editor, publisher and teacher; and candid reminiscences of his college experiences and his bisexuality.

Inman earned a bachelor's degree in English from Duke University. He taught at Montgomery College in Maryland and at American University in Washington, D.C., where he was poet in residence. "
To read the complete article, please go to http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/311993

Inman's work is fascinating, well worth total immersion. Please take this opportunity to get to know more about Will Inman. To read some of Inman's work published in Oyster Boy Review, here are the links:

http://www.oysterboyreview.com/archived/11/inman.html
http://www.oysterboyreview.com/archived/14/InmanW-Eden.html

Kakalak 2009

2009-10-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

KAKALAK 2009, Anthology of Carolina poets, flaunts one of the most beautiful covers I've seen in a good while. Edited by Lisa Zerkle, Richard Allen Taylor, and Geth Cagle Burt, it has become a yearly tradition of Carolina poets gathered between handsome book covers. Yes, it awards yearly prizes for poetry and art, and it has special portfolios of poets' work. I've chosen some poems and images from the book that I myself like, a subjective gathering. I hope they will give you a taste of what the entire issue is like. Sharon Sharp's photographs of windows captured my attention right away. Sharon is, as most of you know, also a fine poet. KAKALAK may be further tracked and ordered from http://www.kakalak.net/. The anthology's poets have been giving readings around the Carolina's, so keep your eye out for any Kakalak folks scheduled to present their poetry in your area.

I begin with a poem by Susan Lefler, one that resonates strongly at this stage of my life as my husband and I worry over aging parents. Lefler lives in Brevard, NC and writes for Smoky Mountain Living. She has workshopped with Cathy Smith Bowers and is active in the WNC poetry scene.

Hanging My Father

Climbing an abandoned stair, plunging
into empty air—cerebellar atrophy they call it.
My father lives in a nursing home nearby.
I live in the midst of a whirlwind:
fall after fall and I am called to fix it.

Who hangs from rocks on ropes,
I ask myself, who dangles in mid-air,
lashes themselves to peaks, slices
into rock to access clouds? Who knows
the way to hold the weight of a man,
to break his fall and how to lower
him past canyon and crevasse to solid ground?

I head to the outfitters at the edge of town.
“I want to hang something,” I say,
entranced with ropes in every color, pulleys,
belts and carabiners glittering from hooks,
daisy loops of web guaranteed, I’m told,
to hold 4000 pounds. “What do you want
to hang?” the young man behind the desk
inquires. “My 91 year old father,” I say firmly.
“What do you want to hang him from?” he asks,
being a man who knows what it is to hang
from a cliff for no particular reason. “From
the bathroom ceiling,” I tell him.

We devise a plan: five carabiners (red)
two mountain daisies with a simple lock, a silky
piece of web, eye hooks in the ceiling…
it just might work. My father was a pilot
after all. He knows harnesses and parachutes
and easy landings. He knows wings.
He knows what it is
to find your way homeward in the dark.

Susan Lefler

Whenever I open a magazine and see Mark Smith Soto's name in the table of contents, I turn to his poem right away. You can click on this image to make it larger. I apologize for the quality of the page reproduction.

----------------------------------

("Early Autumn Icicles," by Sharon A. Sharp, Canon Powershot A570 image.)

---------------------

Kimberly Glanzman was second place winner in the Kakalak awards that this year were judged by Bob Hickok. She is a student in Charlotte's Queens University's MFA program.

("Gathered Light," by Sharon A. Sharp, Canon PowerShot A570 image.)

Coyla Barry lives in Chapel Hill. Her most recent chapbook, Swimming Woman, was recently published by Finishing Line Press.

POET OF THE WEEK: CATHY SMITH BOWERS

2009-10-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has read Cathy Smith Bowers knows what I'm about to say, that she is one of the finest poets writing today, that her work fuses narrative with exquisite lyricism, as well as wit and vulnerability. Her new book, The Candle I Hold Up to See You, is just out from Iris Press.

ISBN-10: 1604542020ISBN-13: 9781604542028 Published: Iris Press, 05/01/2009 Pages: 96
Cathy will be reading at City Lights Bookstore, http://www.citylightsnc.com/, this Friday night (Oct. 16) at 7:00 p.m.

Cathy Smith Bowers is a native of South Carolina. She was a winner of the 1990 General Electric Award for Younger Writers and a South Carolina Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared widely in publications such as The Altantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, The Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and many others.
Cathy’s first book, The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas, was published in 1992 as the first winner of the Texas Tech University Press First-book Competition in their Poetry Award Series, subsequently named for Walt McDonald. Iris Press republished The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas in 1997. Iris Press published Cathy’s second book, Traveling in Time of Danger, in 1999. Iris Press published Cathy’s third book, A Book of Minutes, in 2004. Cathy teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte.

To view a portfolio of Cathy's work over her past several books, please go to http://www.irisbooks.com/bowers/bowers_port.htm.

Here are two poems from her new collection.

Cool Radio

When she calls and asks
f I will drive her to the mall,
our city’s newest labyrinth

of glittering stuff, I know my sister
has come back to me, back
from November’s shock of blood,

the exams, the x-rays, the surgeon’s
winnowing blade. She is one week
out of the hospital, chemo bag

draped casually across her shoulder,
spilling its slow promise
into her veins. Odd how stylish

in the mall’s fluorescent lights,
a Gucci or von Furstenburg,
its pale blue plastic shiny

as the toy shoes and purses
we used to play grownup in.
I loop my left arm through her

frail right, her tired gait lanky,
almost chic, steady her against
the teenage throng, tattooed

and pierced and spiked, past
racks of skirts and dresses, tier
upon tier of stiletto heels

like the ones our dead mother
in her younger years
suffered in so beautifully.

At the base of the escalator,
beyond The Limited and The Gap,
a girl too young for fashion’s

fleeting realm spies the apparatus
around my sister’s neck. “Cool
radio,” she whispers to no one

as we all step on together.

Solace

Each morning in my mailbox
or tucked into a quiet cove
of my front porch, another
burden of solace
reminding me again
my husband is dead.

Last week, an oval cardboard box
decoupaged in stars, inside, its nested
offering—a cache of still-warm eggs
gleaned from my neighbor’s henhouse.

Yesterday, a Peruvian prayer shawl,
the warp and weft of its holy weave
climbing, like girders of a bridge,
its sturdy warmth.

And today this handmade flute,
turned and hollowed and carved
by Laughing Crow, enigmatic
shaman of some distant plain.

See its little row of holes
lined up like perfect planets,
as if having not yet learned
the universe had collapsed.

See my lips pressed to the tiny
breathless gape of its own mouth.
As if my lungs could conjure anything.
As if it were the one needing to be saved.

NORTH CAROLINA POETRY SOCIETY

2009-10-12T11:16:00.001-07:00

While cleaning out my box of photos today, I found this one taken at a NC Poetry Society gathering at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines. My book Black Shawl had won the Society's annual Brockman-Campbell Award, judged by Billy Collins, and I was there to accept the award and give a poetry reading. From the left you can see me in an earlier version, Sally Buckner and Shelby Stephenson sitting side by side, and standing, Isabel Zuber. Sally has been one of our state's literary stalwarts, editing anthologies, teaching poetry, writing and publishing her own work. You will find a feature on her latest book, Collateral Damage, on our ncarts.org archive of Writers and Books. Shelby's latest book. Family Matters: Homage to July, won the Bellday Award and was featured on this blog just a few months ago. Look on the side bar, and you'll see that he was a Poet of the Week, as well. Isabel Zuber's two chapbooks are Oriflamb and Winter's Exile. Her full-length collection Red Lily is forthcoming from Press 53. Picador published her novel Salt a few years back.

The NC Poetry Society is a great group of writers and readers. If you haven't joined, please consider doing so. Go to their website, http://www.sleepycreek.org/poetry, and read their poem of the month, Borges and Me, by Maria C. Rouphail, take a look at their activities, and read news of their members. When you go to a NC Poetry Society event, you'll meet some of our best poets, like Sally, Shelby, and Isabel, as well as Pat Riviere-Seel, Bill Blackley, Susan Meyers, Bill Griffin and so on and so on into what seems like poetic infinity! And you'll have fun, too.

(Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humamnities, where the NCPS meets.)

Brenda Kay Ledford Wins Paul Green Award

2009-10-11T06:49:00.000-07:00

Brenda Kay Ledford has just announced that she's received the 2009 Paul Green Multimedia Award for her poetry book, SACRED FIRE, from North Carolina Society of Historians at the History Place in Morehead City, NC, during their award’s ceremony in October. Some of Brenda Kay's poems will be featured here soon.

This is the fourth time Ledford has received the prestigious Paul Green Award. She got the 2005 award for her poetry book, PATCHWORK MEMORIES; the 2006 award for collecting oral history on Velma Beam Moore; and in 2007, for SHEW BIRD MOUNTAIN. A native of Clay County, NC, Ledford was an honor graduate of Hayesville High School. She earned her Master of Arts in Education from Western Carolina University and studied Journalism at the University of Tennessee. She’s former Creative Writing Editor of “Tri-County Communicator,” at Tri-County Community College.Ledford is a member of North Carolina Writers’ Network, North Carolina Poetry Society, Georgia Poetry Society, Byron Herbert Reece Society, North Carolina Storytelling Guild, and listed with “A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers.” She’s appeared on “A Common Cup,” over Windstream Communication channel 4 television and read her poetry.Her work has appeared in “Our State,” “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” “A Journal of Kentucky Studies,” “Appalachian Heritage,” and many other journals. Finishing Line Press published her poetry books, SHEW BIRD MOUNTAIN and SACRED FIRE.For details about the Paul Green Award, go to: http://www.ncsocietyofhistorians.org/; http://www.brendakayledford.com/; http://blueridgepoet.blogspot.com.

PAMELA RICHARDSON: Poet of the Week

2009-10-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

(Pamela Richardson reads her prize-winning poem Deliverance at the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival last spring.

Pamela Richardson's poems stood out immediately as I was reading the submissions for last year's Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival. I was especially impressed by Warning About Mangos, finding its sensory world hard to resist, and placed her work at the top of my my judge's list. Her poem Deliverance was one of the eight final winners and can be found at http://www.nazimhikmetpoetryfestival.org/ along with the other winning work. The festival booklet, by the way, will soon be available as a real publication from amazon.com. Pamela lives in Charlotte, NC and teaches composition at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. When she is not teaching or writing, she enjoys martial arts and yoga.

Warning about Mangos

Mamí had warned me to stop
eating mangos, but I didn’t listen
and blisters grew on my lips; desire
for the sun spread the harvest across
my shoulders, and I lay
covered with newly budded bubbles
waiting to burst, to release
warm fluid across my chin
and down my back.

Abuelita, whose eyebrows, thick
and black with random weeds of gray,
framed by glasses, round and large,
that dipped to the end of her nose
and with a bun on her head, tightly
wound, white and silver frosting,
separated by steel gray swirling
across her scalp into the ball, watched
over with me the summer when sun
and mangos kept me in bed.

Through mesh, canopied across
the bed, protecting me
from further dangers, the room
seemed filled with fog, and I
stared at the mosquitoes
and Palmetto bugs, six-legged winged
warriors on the net, waiting
to attack, waiting for the canopy
to fall, for me to be exposed
with blisters, red, tender and thoughts
of the mangos’soft sweet fruit.

From the bed, into the hot,
translucent air, I trembled
and pulled myself to the hallway
with the concrete rash below
my fingertips, running across
the wall as I followed the powdered scent,
pulling me to her door. Abuelita,
draped in thin, cotton nightdress,
only ankles and arms exposed,
pulled the comb across her scalp
as her hair, dark gray and silver, wrapped
around her back and over her shoulders.

The summer Abuelita stayed with me,
I played in the sun’s heat,
ate too many mangos, and peered
through the sliver of translucent air
when the door let go and fell back.
Mi abuela slid the comb
through soft silver across her breasts,
the breasts Abuelito caressed, that held him close,
the stream that wrapped around his body,
Moncho, the father of her children.

(Pamela Richardson at the Hikmet Poetry Festival)

Back Room

The scent of aged mahogany
guides me through haloed dust
toward high-back beds stacked
in the corner. Reaching,
my fingers slide across
brown and maroon hues.

The bed, mended,
a smoke-stained two by four,
awkwardly attached with flat, rust
circles, hammered deep. Rough
splintered edges hover
just above the dark metal
spikes, not allowing the broken leg
to go unnoticed.

Another piece leans humbly
with cracks reaching across,
sloping upward from one lover’s head
to the other, ending its journey
just before the end. I think
of the lovers’ pasts as I stand
with armoires that hold my
reflections in glass,
quivering, pale, and fragile.

Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival

2009-09-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

Last spring I was invited by Professor Mehmet Ozturk of NC State University to be a part of a special project, the first Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival . The poetry competition organized as part of this year's festival received over 250 poems from 90 poets. The poetry selection committee included, in addition to me, Jon Thompson, Joe Donahue, Greg Dawes, Erdag Goknar and Hatice Orun Ozturk. The contest received over 250 poems from 90 poets. Can you imagine the job a judge has with that many entries! Then try to imagine reaching consensus among five other judges! Eight poems were selected as winners and two poems received honorable mentions. The winning poems were submitted by Judy Light Ayyildiz, Katherine Barnes, Jeffery Beam, David Need, Pamela Richardson, Christopher Salerno, Tony Tost, and Chris Vitiello. The poems by Guney Acipayamli and Mimi Herman received honorable mentions.

Over the next few days I will be featuring work by Pamela Richardson, Guney Acipayami, and Peter Blair, who was on my list of finalists but did not make it to the final list of winners, alas. The 2010 Hikmet Festival is already being planned. And a booklet of the program and the winning poems will be published soon.

SCENES FROM THE NAZIM HIKMET FESTIVAL LAST SPRING (Photos by BORA)

Mehmet Ozturk with festival organizers and volunteers

(Winning poet Pamela Richardson chats with a member of the audience.)

Winning poet Katherine Barnes and her daughter Rebecca Tighe sample the food.

POET OF THE WEEK: SARA CLAYTOR

2009-09-17T07:35:00.000-07:00

SARA CLAYTOR

A native Tar Heel and former teacher of literature, writing & communications at various NC universities and public school systems, Sara Claytor holds two graduate degrees from UNC-CH. Winner of the 2000 Thunder Rain Award in poetry, she was the featured poet for L’Intrigue. Recipient of numerous poetry prizes, two short stories have received first place in Sensations Magazine competition; also first place in short fiction at the Virginia Highlands Festival and first place in The Charlotte Writer’s Club Elizabeth Simpson Smith Award. Fiction and poetry have appeared in over 100 publications, including: New Press Literary Quarterly; Miller’s Pond; California Quarterly; Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies; Spire; The Crucible; The Pedestal Magazine; The Savannah Literary Journal, The Pisgah Review. She worked as fiction editor for a small press specializing in mystery-suspense and as co-editor of the former Internet literary journal The Moonwort Review. Pudding House Publications published her chapbook “Reviving the Damsel Fish” (2007). A full-length poetry book, “Howling on Red Dirt Roads,” was published by Main Street Rag in 2008. Another full-length poetry book “Keeping Company With Ghosts” is under contract with Rock Way Press.

Howling on Red Dirt Roads

poems by
Sara Claytor

MAIN STREET RAG PRESS

ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-148-7, ~78 pages, $14

* * * This book was selected for publication after finishing as a finalist in the 2008 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award * * *

Howling on Red Dirt Roads won second prize in the Poetry Council of NC Oscar Arnold Young Contest for best poetry book in NC for 2008.

from HOWLING ON RED DIRT ROADS

Julia's Invisible Fences

When I smell Clorox, I see your teeth simmering
like bone ash on asphalt, your head cap of pigtails
tinted red, the freckles scattered across your cheeks.

You were my black mother in starched fruit-patterned
aprons, pink velveteen palms flashing as you fluted
piecrusts, ironed white sheets with perfect edges.

You told me haint stories, sewed colorful feed sack
dresses for my dolls, introduced me to radio hymns,
gospel, boogie beats. Together, we sang for Jesus,
clapping our hands, shaking our shoulders.

Once I went to your African-Methodist Church
where we danced in the aisles and shouted Amen's.
I ate three pieces of chocolate cake at the noon lunch.
Stomach aching, I was sick in the outhouse while you held
my head. Afterwards, the church ladies fed me ice cubes
and gushed over my long, blonde curls.

On the screened back porch, the white mother served you
food in a stained tin plate, iced tea in a Mason jar. Your
bathroom was behind the garage. The white mother always
checked to see if you had stolen her dime store jewelry.

You didn't know pain in your belly from me or a stretching
of the thighs; no one told me about invisible fences
separating mother loves.

Part of my heart moved down that red dirt road to your house
with its blue porch rocking chair and yellow birdhouse nailed
above the tin roof. I was your 'baby gal,' even after I graduated
from college, visited you last in a nursing home where you kept
a photo of blonde three-year-old me tacked on the wall above
your bed?right beside the picture of a white Jesus.
-----------------

NEW POEMS

Julia says: "These three poems are part of the “Julia poems.” All of these are new poems, not yet published, but a continuation of the story of Julia in the middle section of the book “Howling on Red Dirt Roads.” Then I am sending a more abstract poem that I rather like for it is not a “downer.”

Cobwebs

Julia was ironing on the screened-in

back porch, her forehead sweat spotting

the white mother’s wrinkled blue-flowered

dress with thin straps, the dress where

her breasts popped into view if she

leaned over slightly. If men were present,

her eyes lowered to the flesh mounds.

I was hanging around, nothing else to do

at the hot noonday, gibbering with Julia

about new kittens under her log smokehouse.

The white mother brought Julia iced tea, served

in a Mason jar kept under the kitchen counter,

boiled in hot soapy water after Julia drank.

It was the first time I saw that, but not the last.

No more than four or five years old then.

I remember embarrassment, shame, anger.

Slammed out the screen door, ran behind

the old gray board garage where spiders dangled

in giant cobwebs. I cried until I felt a spider crawl,

smashed it, yellow glob stuck in my palm

where I spit and spit and spit.

Julia’s Soul Food

When Julia ironed,

aromas of heated cloth,

white sheets faint with Clorox,

towels smelling of sunshine

permeated the back screened porch.

Sometimes she talked

about Jesus, how we needed time

to ponder like Mary,

listen to dream messages like Joseph.

We had to pray, praise, pardon.

The white mother taught me

a Southern woman needs stability,

depends on men, the family King Lears.

My black mother Julia

taught me when the ground turns,

trees cast no shadows,

a young child

can be a gift from God.

A Thin Heartache

I hear you in the backyard, Mother,

talking to Julia,

in tandem as you hang white sheets

on the clothesline; you

squealing at my grey-striped cat

peeing in the garden dirt; you

moaning because I spilled grape soda

on my Easter dress.

In that backyard,

a persimmon tree shed its red fruit

near the gray garage, attracting deer,

eyes blinking like miniature Christmas

lights. I thought magical creatures lived

in our backyard at night; you

warning me that the dark was dangerous.

Many whiskey days, clanking radiators,

pewter nights in that fading Victorian house.

But all things decay. All things must end.

Now hearing on windblown days,

an empty jangling of a chain

in the backyard’s forgotten wreckage.

The Power of Questions

The darkest days on earth never destroy

as much as we think, even though fading

wallpaper and stains in the sink contain

evidence of miserable despair,

even though earth convulses

with underground sobbing and the shrill

of small, wild voices.

Like in film noir, we tramp through shadows,

cynical, hopeless, our footprints lost

in hot sand, struggling for answers.

Still, we look for covered objects,

peel to their centers.

We never give up on revealing

what’s inside, or why, when, where, how?

I'M BACK! NOW WHERE TO BEGIN?

2009-09-01T14:18:00.000-07:00

(On top of the world in Oregon!)

WHERE TO BEGIN? WITH NC WRITERS AND NEWS, I MIGHT AS WELL FLIP A COIN. THERE'S ALWAYS LOTS TO BLOG ABOUT. BUT JUST TO GIVE YOU AN IDEA OF WHAT TO EXPECT IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, HERE ARE A FEW POSSIBILITIES:

NEW BOOKS. WELL, OF COURSE. THEY ARE STILL COMING, FAST AND FURIOUS. I'LL BE WORKING UP A LIST SOON.
POETS OF THE WEEK. NO SHORTAGE OF THOSE! ON TAP ARE GERALD BARRAX, JOHN YORK, MIKE CHITWOOD, CATHERINE CARTER, THE FABULOUS WINNERS OF THE NC ENGLISH TEACHERS ASSOC. STUDENT LAUREATE CONTEST, SEVERAL STAND-OUT POETS FROM THE NAZIM HIKMET FESTIVAL COMPETITION LAST SPRING...AND SO ON, AND ON.
THE GILBERT-CHAPPELL PROGRAM, STILL GOING STRONG

FESTIVALS, DEADLINES, MAGAZINES, E-ZINES, AND ANYTHING ELSE THAT I'D LIKE YOU TO KNOW ABOUT.

HAPPY SEPTEMBER FIRST!

P.S., PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF THE TEE I'M WEARING IN THE PHOTO. IT'S FROM LAST SPRING'S ASHEVILLE WORDFEST. WEAR YOUR POETRY TEE-SHIRTS WITH PRIDE, AND IF YOU DON'T HAVE ONE----- GET ONE.

SHADOW BOX: Fred Chappell

2009-08-08T13:23:00.000-07:00

(http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress/bookPages/9780807134528.html)

Four years ago Fred Chappell sent me a beautiful broadside of The Foreseeing, telling me that it was a new kind of poem he was now exploring, the "embedded poem," or a poem within a poem, and that it was devilishly difficult. In this poem, the voice of the woman is embedded in that of her partner, who is beginning to realize that she is in love again. The two voices work with and against each other, forming a whole. Call it poetic counterpoint. The "inlaid" poem. Better yet, call it stunning, an enviable achievement.

Now these poems, at which Fred has been working since The Foreseeing, have been gathered into a new collection from LSU Press: its title appropriately enough is SHADOW BOX. Last night, August 7, at City Lights Books in Sylva, NC Fred read from SHADOW BOX, with his wife Susan presenting the woman's voice in the poems. The two of them gave a haunting, at times beguiling, performance.

(Joyce Moore introduces Fred to the audience in the bookstore's Regional Room.)

Spotlight
The hamlet sleeps under November stars.
Only the page of numerate thought toils through
The darkness, shines on the table where, askew
And calm, the scholar's lamp burns bright and scars
The silence, sending through the slot, the bars
And angles of his window square, a true
Clean ray, a shaft of patient light, its purview
Lonely and remote as the glow of Mars.

Brian's wife, the poet Catherine Carter, gets acquainted with Dana Wildsmith, who drove several hours from Georgia to be with Fred and Susan. Catherine's first book, The Memory of Gills, won the Roanoke-Chowan Award two years ago and was highly praised by none other than---Fred Chappell.

Dana Wildsmith, a long-time friend of the Chappell's, has published several collections of poetry, as well as numerous essays, the most recent being in The Sun, published out of Chapel Hill. She lives in Bethlehem, Georgia.

Fred will be on hand for the NC Literary Festival in Chapel Hill in September, as well as at the Smoky Mountain Bookfair in November, to name just a few opportunities for hearing him and Susan read from his new book. This new collection by the author Lee Smith calls our "resident genius," deserves all the readers it can get!

City Lights contact information:
more@citylightsnc.com
phone: (828) 586-9499
web: http://www.citylightsnc.com

Poetry Hickory

2009-08-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

Please click to enlarge image.