POET OF THE WEEK: Shelby Stephenson

(photo by Jan Hensley)


Anybody who knows anything at all about NC literature knows who Shelby Stephenson is. He's a force of nature. A one-of-a-kind character. A non-stop poet. A wide-ranging editor. A generous friend to other writers. A musician and singer. A man close to the land, living now on the farm where he was born. Here is his "official" biography on his website.

Shelby Stephenson grew up on a small farm near Benson, in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina. “Most of my poems come out of that background,” he says, “where memory and imagination play on one another. I have written many poems about the mules we worked until I was in the seventh grade and, after that–the tractor. My early teachers were the thirty-five foxhounds my father hunted. The trees and streams, fields, the world of my childhood–all that folklore–those are my subjects.”

After leaving the farm for college, he graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (B.A. 1960) where he also studied law, University of Pittsburgh (M.A. 1967), University of Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D. 1974), and worked as a radio and television announcer, salesman, right-of-way agent, and farmer. He is now professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke where he has edited Pembroke Magazine since 1979. The state of North Carolina presented him with the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature. And he has received the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Memorial Award and the Playwright's Fund of North Carolina Chapbook Prize.

In addition to a poetic documentary: Plankhouse (with photographs by Roger Manley), he has published Middle Creek Poems, Carolina Shout!, Finch’s Mash, The Persimmon Tree Carol, Poor People, Greatest Hits, and Fiddledeedee. With his wife Linda he has also made the CD and cassette: Hank Williams Tribute. They live on the farm where he was born.

I can vouch for all these books. They live on the bookshelf devoted to Shelby. I can vouch for the cd, too. My late father liked it a lot. He was a big Hank Williams fan. So am I. Shelby's latest books ia Family Matters:
Homage to July, the Slave Girl
Here is Allen Grossman's endorsement:

“An intense and heart-breaking poetic narrative which, in its exploration of historical and personal materials, holds affinities to the work of Susan Howe and to James Agee’s classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Family Matters is a strenuous questioning — and exposure — of the fictions of ownership, whether of persons or places, graves or farms.”
--Allen Grossman, final judge, 2008 Bellday Prize competition


2008. Bellday Books. $14 plus $2 shipping & handling. Available from the publisher at www.belldaybooks.com



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The Candy Man
I

Came with his punchboard.
I pushed out numbers for choice prizes.
Once a month the promise went out over the countryside.
The Watkins Products Man, too.
Had a chicken coop tied to his front bumper.
He’d take a chicken as payment, say, for horse lineament.

Did you work to satisfy your credit at Pap’s commissary,
tense up when you entered the store?
Did the farmers there court the drinkstand to give you room?
Did you ever punch a board or trade eggs for pretty things?

I did have a Candy Man.
I did not wish for hair to let down to dry his feet at footwashings.
Sometimes I gave him an eyeful and lost him.
In the fall when colors called my face shadowed his window.
At dusk, the table set with fatback and molasses−his skin twinged until a voice
sang for me alone until the tune went out of hearing.

II

Mr. Charlie Parrish’s Store loomed way up Paul’s Hill.
I would walk with eggs in my pockets to swap for merchandise,
lean against the colddrinkbox and listen:

Hallo! Heck, I garn-dam-tee
you this: no ragged-assed farmer’ll
get in no field today; tractors’ll
mar up over the mufflers, I tell you−
row a boat in the ditches down yonder by Paul Coats’s sloughs.

Tom’s Roasted Peanuts float in a Pepsi Heck guzzles.
He’s no holier-than-the-learned race of farmers who’ll tell you:
Workworkwork and what do you get?!
Bonier and bonier and sloppy-assed in debt!
Sleeves waving, he lowers himself down the sandy, shackly, wooden steps.



--------------------------------------------
George William Stephenson
I

Greatgreatgrandpap George’s grandson−I called him Grandpa William−was born
of Martha Johnson and Manly Stephenson, on the farmof “badlybent”George,
off state road number 1517 in PleasantGrove, Johnston County,North Carolina.
As a boy William hired himself out to Deb Wood to cut wood;
helped his Uncle Naz, mauling and splitting rails
and hauling them home.
He picked cotton,
pulled corn, tended garden, raised goats, too,
hogs aplenty snuffling paths harder when he’d pass with slops for the trough,
slipping in his boots on the hill.
He moved across Middle Creek to Polenta, crossed the creek on a footlog, walked paths
through woods.
One dark night a goat jumped up,
scaring the daylights out of him:
“If the goat had not bleated, I think I would have died.”

II

July was born ninety-eight years before I was.
Grandpa William was sixtyseven that year−1938.
He split wood for thirty cents a cord.
Got tired of helping Naz maul and haul those gums.
Hunted wild turkeys, rabbits, and squirrels.
Set traps in the swamps, catching anything he could: otter, mink, raccoon−
one hide brought a dollar.
A yea and nay man.
Couldn’t read or write.
Joined the church and started preaching.

And Grandmuh read the Bible to Grandpa every night.
Grandpa would listen, for he couldn’t read or write.
He couldn’t read or write.

You know that families moved in with one another back yonder,
a kind of underpinning: Manly and Martha with William and Nancy.
Martha had a skip she learned in Polenta.
Nancy joined the church in 1910.






(Linda and Shelby Stephenson, photo by J. Hensley