MY LAST DAY AS NC'S POET LAUREATE

My term as North Carolina's Poet Laureate officially ends at midnight tonight. The four years I've spent trying to represent our state's writers and readers have been full to overflowing. And no wonder. North Carolina is brimful with writers, as we all know, but even better, it is full of people who want to be a part of this literary community, people who work hard to keep it alive. I've tried to do my job as best as I could, but I leave frustrated by what remains to be done and how difficult these tasks become in the wake of our financial crisis. How long before we have another Laureate? Who knows. I hope it's not more than a year. In the meantime, I will continue to keep this blog going, and as always, I welcome your comments, suggestions, and your own poems and prose.

One of my good friends, Newt Smith, of the WCU English Department, spends his last day as a WCU employee today, too. I was asked to write a retirement poem for him, so I'm posting it today, one of my last "assignments," one that I enjoyed to the max! Newt and I worked together for a number of years in the English Department. The "cubicle" I mention in the poem does not refer to the laureateship! It refers to the tiny, tiny office I occupied for years as Poet-in-Residence at WCU. "Retard" is a play on how folks in the mountains pronounce certain words like stairs and retired. I have always thought "climbing the stars" sounded so much more poetic than climbing the stairs!

The doris in the poem is my friend doris davenport, whose work has been featured on both my blogs. Look her up.

As for Ghost Dogs, I didn't make that up. There are books about these manifestations, several of which have been published by Blair Publishers in Winston-Salem. Here is a brief description of Ghost Dogs of the South. (Blair)

Dog ghosts (dogs that have become ghosts), ghost dogs (humans who return as ghosts in the shape of dogs), dogs that see ghosts, dogs that are afraid of ghosts--all make an appearance in these twenty stories that illuminate the shadow side of man's best friend.

So, you can see this last occasional poem pulled in a lot of material. Why shouldn't a poem cast as wide a net as it wants? Spread its roots as deeply as it needs to spread them?



(Yellow Retro Roots, by Cindy Davis)




(Newt)


Retard

For Newt

Once I heard a woman,
when asked in downtown Sylva
how her husband was doing,
say, “Why, honey, he’s
retard.” I knew what she meant
and your neighbor Mildred when she said,
“I’m going to climb up the stars.”
That’s called climbing the Retard Track,

not the Tenure Track. Just imagine,
Newt, now you too can
climb up the stars. Or
spend all day doing
The Dawg, as our friend doris
calls it. I saw her do it
at Wordfest, at the Smoky Mountains
Bookfair, after Obama
won. (She sent me a jpg.) If you had
to think every day about tenure,
you wouldn’t be caught dead
Doin’ the Dawg. But now, dearest
Newt, you can do it
till the proverbial cows come
home, if your back doesn’t
give up the Ghost Dog and bring
you down. Just do The Dawg long
enough to feel like you’re really
and truly Retard, and then sit yourself

down, have a beer, look at the sky.
Listen to birds. Did we ever believe
they were out there when we had to work
in our cubicles? Don’t get get me
started on clouds. How they keep moving
on to another place, sort of like being
Retard. The sky’s a big dance floor.
The clouds like it like that!
They said to tell you,
my friend, that you’ll like it too.



(doris)

DEBRA KAUFMAN: Moon Mirror Whiskey Wind

Moon Mirror Whiskey Wind by Debra Kaufman.
Publisher: Pudding House Publications (ISBN 1-58998-770-5)
Price $10. S&H $2.50 for first copy; $1 for each additional two.
To order: go to www.puddinghouse.com and scroll down to “order form” on the left side bar.
You can print the form and send it with your check or credit card information to
Pudding House Publications, 81 Shadymere Lane, Columbus, OH 43213.
Or (faster and easier):
telephone PHP at (614) 986-1881 and leave a message with author name, book title, number of copies, your Visa or MasterCard number w/expiration date, and your mailing address and phone number.


Moon Mirror Whiskey Wind, Debra Kaufman's fourth collection of poems, obliquely tracks the life of a lonely girl steeped in fairy tales who tries to escape her small town's mores and create a new life. Poet and playwright Debra Kaufman is the author of Family of Strangers (Nightshade), Still Life Burning (South Carolina Poetry Society), A Certain Light (Emrys), and Moon Mirror Whiskey Wind (Pudding House). Her poems have appeared in many poetry anthologies and literary magazines, including Pembroke, Room of One’s Own, Virginia Quarterly Review, Greensboro Review, and Carolina Quarterly. Her plays have been performed throughout North Carolina and in California. She is working on a new collection of poetry and a full-length play, The Fairest. Debra grew up in several small towns in the Midwest. She moved to Durham, North Carolina, with her family in 1981 and has lived in Mebane for twenty years.





Destiny and Johnny

She was a reader
of fashion magazines.
He was a leader
of reckless young men.
Impossible her name should be Destiny.
He was called Johnny, forever.
Her mother said, marry, him, why not,
a wedding, a home, sure, that’s life.
Her father said neither one thing nor another.
She draped herself in layers of scarves,
followed the make-up tips of stars.
The mirror, her friend, suggested one day
you could be one of them.
Johnny wanted only her body,
which she gave as a blessing,
while saving her true self for the future,
which stretched beyond this hick state
of corn and beans, corn and beans
and the smell of shit and terror and rage
that blew in from the hog farms south of town.
To board a bus in Des Moines and head—
where? All she needed
was a godmother who would say,
First thing, kid, go, and go now;
second, know it will be hard;
third, I have a friend
in the city who can help you.



To a Barbie

She dresses you in evening gowns,
pushes shoes onto your
achingly arched feet,
bends you at the waist
and forces you into Ken’s car,
Ken’s boat, Ken always
whisking you away.
She moves your arms:
wave hello, better wear your windbreaker.
How tiring to have a pink
smile painted on
over a smear of white teeth,
your eyes, the blue of a chlorine pool,
always open.
Would you be happier alone
in the kitchen with your miniature
stove and tiny, unbreakable cups?
Mmm, this coffee sure tastes good,
she says for you, then strips
you again, rakes the comb
through your coarse, bleached hair,
then drops you in hot sand
under a killer sun;
grit gets in your cracks
while she eats an ice cream cone.
Naked, you wait—pert, expectant—
fated never to be loved for yourself,
but only as the plaything
of this moody little girl
now coming at you
with scissors in her hand.



The Princess with the Brass Heart

The ill winds of March
blew in catbirds and starlings;
the damp drummed up dozens
of mice. She’d find them,
heads bitten off, in the grass
and felt as little pity
as the cats that did the deeds.
Something scratchy
in her voice now.
She painted her toenails
the dull red of dried blood
and started eating meat again.
Television, solitaire,
all the same to her
tarnished heart, dull eyes.
Her borzoi shadowed her,
head down, rib-thin.
Three times she turned away
the slight suitor who might save her,
then slipped into the mirror
where the dark queen reigns.

POET OF THE WEEK: JANICE TOWNLEY MOORE

Janice Townley Moore at Coffee With the Poets in Hayesville.

Over the years Janice Townley Moore has been working hard at the craft and technique of poetry. She has worked quietly, hardly ever calling attention to herself, but the writers with whom she has studied will attest to her talent and determination. Janice has taught for many years at Young Harris College, in Young Harris, Georgia, while living in Hayesville, NC, just across the state line. She's been instrumental in the renaissance of writing in the Clay County area, leading workshops and giving readings. I've known her since 1979. The attention she is receiving is long overdue, including the recent first prize in Press 53's National Poetry Contest, which I judged, not knowing of course that the three poems I immediately set aside as the creme de la creme were hers.

Here's her official biography:

Janice Townley Moore lives in Hayesville, NC, and is a member of the English faculty at Young Harris College in the North Georgia Mountains. In 2005 she published a chapbook, Teaching the Robins, with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have also appeared in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Cortland Review, and Apalachee Review. New work is forthcoming in The Pharos and Main Street Rag. Her work is included in several anthologies: The Bedford Introduction to Literature, The Poets Guide to the Birds, In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare, and Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia. She is actively involved in Netwest and serves as the facilitator for the monthly critique group.

For more about Janice go to Nancy Simpson's blog, Living Above the Frost Line.


Note to the King of Green Lawn Service


Your grass fails to intrigue,
programmed as cloned blades--
bermuda or centipede.
No pleasant wild onion reek,
luck of the four-leafed clover.
Where lies the allure of strawberries,
the first tiny hearts we ate
on a dare for their poison?
No ripe boys roll cigars from weeds
No queens of the May
sit splay-legged, threading clover
stem upon stem for the longest chain.
In your sad sod dandelions remain extinct,
their little parachutes never blown
by children with grass prints on their knees
into the wild green yonder
till our mothers’ voices call us in
across the patchwork giving up its light.



from Appalachian Journal



Supposedly

“The breath goes now, and some say, no:”

--John Donne

In Michigan’s Museum I stop,
startled by a cube of glass
that holds the vial that holds
the final breath
of Thomas Alva Edison.
Who can tell if the air is real,
collected by his son
at Henry Ford’s insistence?
A task of false starts,
in this case endings,
I imagine Charles Edison
on his knees
listening at bedside,
like a doctor pronouncing,
capturing, he thinks, the last
of the genius,
but having to toss out one gasp
for another, and another
before he saves the final wisp,
genie breath, if uncorked
would shatter the cube, the ceiling,
blow the steel roof off this building.



first published in Golden Poetry (Brumby Publications)



Photos From Another State

Whatever room for romping
a wide back seat offered in the Forties
that day ours hosted a picnic.
My father lifted it out, lugged it
from the rhinoceros belly
of our black Desoto.
In the shade by the curving cliff
it became table and bench.
My mother brought forth
sausage left from breakfast
and three oranges like Christmas.
Lyrics from the unseen
creek trickled through laurel.
This was before Alzheimer’s and chemo,
the one time the rhino
with its hood ornament like a horn
reached another state
without needing new parts.
This was after my father
paid a week’s allowance
for my photo with the Indian chief,
arms folded across his chest.
Beside the wigwam
I quivered in white sandals.
On the trip home, in the back seat,
I spied on my father, his hand
making mysterious signals out the window
or pointing at something
I could never see.


first published in Southern Poetry Review


TEACHING THE ROBINS
If it's true what the Chinese say,
souls can filter into birds like those
two robins outside my window,
swooping down. Their feet land
on March's early green
at the same moment I am teaching
Emily Dickison's grief,
my throat more taut from last year's losses
than the students slumped,
sleeping under lowered brims
of their baseball caps.
The robins stare in at me. They listen
to my voice hobbling over "tombs,"
"the feet, mechanical." They watch me
pacing forth and back befhind the panes.
The students sleep on in their numbness
where poetry does not exist
in the lighted arena of their dreams.
I think of all the dead,
how they do not have to worry
about being dead. This morning
life is on the other side of the window
where one robin remains
like an eye coprehending me,
long after the other dies.


Previously published in Prairie Schooner
and included as the title poem of
TEACHING THE ROBINS, 2005



UNDER THE EARTH

Where the road slices
through Needle Gorge
animals of stone
root out of the cliff.

Their snouts, heads, shoulders
bulge from red clay
as if to catch the scent of
ancient water.

Eons piled upon eons
this is the only place
where the mountain lion
will lie with the lamb.

Stacked together,
the buffalo, wild boar,
oxen, the goat
with its grassy beard--

Did they all stop
before they reached
the saving water of the river,
caught in their final breath?

--Janice Townley Moore

Previously published in Southern Humanities Review
and included in TEACHING THE ROBINS

Here is a note from Nancy Simpson, posted on her blog, Living Above the Frostline:

I sometimes feel I know Janice T. Moore's poetry as well as I know my own. We have kept in contact about our writing down through the years. We touch base on the phone. She would sometimes ask, "Have you heard from the editors yet?" I'd say, "I got a rejection from X." She ask, "Anything in the human hand?" We consider it encouragement if an editor writes any kind word on the skimpy Post It size rejection, such as "send again" or even the word, "Sorry."


On the phone one time, I asked Janice where she keeps the poems when she is working on them. That was a long time ago and the place may have changed, but her answer was, "In the kitchen in my cookbook. I always have and still do keep my new and in process poems on a clip board and the clip board goes everywhere with me.

"What are you working on." I asked one day. She said, "Do you know the old road between Hayesville and the Folk School?
I'm working on a poem titled "What Lies Under the Earth." I have some images of huge animals. They're coming out of the bank, heading toward Brasstown Creek. "

"Yes, I've seen them."

She finished the poem, submitted it to Southern Humanities Review and it was quickly selected for publication. Later
UNDER THE EARTH was reprinted in LIGHTS IN THE MOUNTAINS: Stories, Essays and Poems by Writers Living in or Inspired by the Southern Appalachian Mountains (2003) and in Teaching the Robins, Finishing line Press 2005.)
You might like these stories:

THE HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU

My husband recently returned from hiking the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu. My first introduction to this "Lost City" was through Pablo Neruda's poem, a portion of which is below. For the past several days he has been telling me about his trek over this amazing road build centuries ago by the Inca before the brutal Spanish invasion of their homeland. He's also been recovering from a virus he picked up while there. I've let my laureate blog lapse, therefore.

I can't speak for this translation. I couldn't find the source. The translation I've had for years is by Nathaniel Tarn. If you go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1066501 you will find more about Macchu Picchu and Neruda.


(Portion of Inca Trail)

Canto XII from The Heights of Macchu Picchu


Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.

Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.

Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.

Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.

Speak through my speech, and through my blood.

Pablo Neruda

Redheaded Stepchild e-zine

(When Redheads Take the Dance Floor, by Duane Kirby Jensen)

The new issue of Redheaded Stepchild is out---or I should say up. And it's well worth a click on the link.(http://www.redheadedmag.com)
One reason this zine is so good may be because it has our own Malaika King Albrecht as one of its founders and editors. Having Eric Helms as Associate Editor doesn't hurt either! Founding a zine for rejected poems was a brilliant idea, and I was honored to have two of my rejects published in the inaugural issue.

The Spring '09 issue provides an array of intriguing poetry. The NC poets included are Pat Riviere-Seel, Alex Grant, and Richard Krawiec. I was immediately caught up in Krawiec's poem. Let it be a teaser, despite subject, to go visit this zine's website.

Cancer

My mother was first,
a golf ball lump
blocking her throat.
The doctors claimed
it was allergy, the flu
until my brother screamed
"She can't breathe,"
and then they found it,
ambulanced her
at midnight
to Mass General
where a surgeon slit
a grotesque smile
from ear to ear
to open her throat,
remove the tumor
lymph nodes
her voice.

Ten years later
I drive my father
on his daily journey
for six weeks
to the clinic
where they dose
his prostate
with radiation.

The distant son,
I change my schedule
book flights
rush myself, my
prayers, beg God
to let them live
so I can hate
them some more,
hate myself,
the person I've become
running so hard
from them
that I run
smack into
their own skins.



Richard Krawiec has published 2 novels, a story collection, 4 plays and a poetry chapbook Breakdown (Main Street Rag). His poems and stories have appeared in magazines such as Shenandoah, Sou'wester, Witness, Many
Mountains Moving, and elsewhere. He has won fellowships from the NEA and the NC Arts Council.His website is http://home.mindspring.com/~rkwriter.

POET OF THE WEEK: JEFFERY BEAM

(Jeffery Beam reading at Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville)

Jeffery Beam has been one of North Carolina's most prolific and what I like to call "collaborative" poets for many years. He has worked with visual artists, musicians, dancers, and composers in projects that have produced beautiful works of art illuminating the interplay of creative spirits. Like me, he is a dog lover, a lover of language (of course), and a lover of the physical world, passionately engaged its metaphorical dance with our inner landscapes.

As my friend, editor and poet Shelby Stephenson has said,"Jeffery Beam's . . . vision is lyrical, yet exacting as dirt under a leaf, air in a storm. He is North Carolina's lead singer."


And another friend, poet Jeff Davis has featured him on his blog Natures at http://naturespoetry.blogspot.com/2008/07/wordplay-welcomes-jeffery-beam.html.

The following poems call up a reality charged with the sensory world made numinous through the music of language. (photos other than of Jeffery by K. Byer)

The Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice

Squirrel, embodiment
of Greed
The bird feeder a dragon's lair
to you, minus
the dragon
So many jewels precious
things to crack and suck

Your obsessive chattering
in the trees above
proves it
Angst bitterness
While unnoticed all about you
the ground's burgeoning
with loot







The Sting

With great stealth and smoke
approach our dome. For if not,
a flame, dry and burning, a dazzling
destruction, only
momentary,
will greet you.

You, who threaten, let
this pin-prick, this red
fever-bite, be a warning.
In our saracen tunnels,
we hold our own, asking
nothing.










Credo

Now, when I talk
it is not just to say
this or
that.
But it is to say
what is between.

Over there,
under the sycamore, runs
the argumentative
periwinkle.
The blue eye
of southern spring.

Over there,
chickadee whistle
& blue
bird.

Here swings
the blues’
rightful cadence.
Words’ melancholic
swarm, thick with
dribble, &
slang.

To my own self
be true.

To say what is
between:
the periwinkle,
the chickadee.

Originally published in the Asheville Poetry Review 10th anniversary anthology issue, 2004.



Walking on Apples

You think you know how it will be
smooth & crunchy unlike
a brain
Without ecstasy & with
much derision
the dull
thuds dropping
round you in the tall
grass
The bees
serenade

Instead
a lemon odor
from the dying bellies
A narrow track trampled
in the grass
leading to the woods
up which nightly
a solitary small beast comes
to take with hunger
& no greed
the rounded vapors left by wasp
& beetle

Originally appeared in essay, “William Carlos Williams and I Meet the Duende: A Poetic Voyage Through Nature to the Secret Heart of Things”, Nantahala Review, 2003.




Photo Credit: M. J. Sharp




John the Baptist

The one who comes from above
Is over all
He who is earthly
Belongs to the earth
& speaks to the earth

Gospel of John
(Kalmia Bittleson, translator)

In Andrea del Sarto's painting of Saint John,
the voice crying from the wilderness
is soft & pliant, wreathed by
ivy in the hair - a natural halo.
John's a rugged youth,
splendidly smooth & hard,
draped royally in holy red & brown.
One finger & thumb
from the right hand
point heavenward & to the humble,
thin cross of sticks he carries
for a staff.
Already the fire of Grace
illuminates his face. And the coarse
curls surround him wildly,
umbrous & jungled.
Why does he, then, look down if
not to gaze at earth's lovely darkness
& the water's clear rinse?
For as he points upward, looking
down, the whole story
is told.
The light shining in the darkness, &
the darkness
which cannot hold.

Originally appeared in The Worcester Review, 1995






Pause

before you turn the page

Pause with me …

There
That’s it
The ancient place
The now place

Now go …







The Vision
Crow black night window beyond sleep beyond dreams wind shifts sky
Tree black full moon silhouette cloud window ceaselessly moving

( Jeffery in the woods. Photo credit: Bernard Thomas, Durham Herald Co.)






Jeffery Beam's Invocation, a limited edition hand-made chapbook (Country Valley Press) is due late summer 2009. The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems 1969 – 2007 (White Crane Wisdom Series - White Crane Books/Lethe Press), On Hounded Ground: Home and the Creative Life, an essay with poems (Bookgirl Press, Japan), and A Hornet's Nest, a quote book of Jonathan Williams - (editor, The Jargon Society) were published in 2008. His many award-winning works include Visions of Dame Kind (The Jargon Society), An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold (Horse and Buggy), The Fountain (NC Wesleyan College Press), and the online book, Gospel Earth (Longhouse). His spoken word CD with multimedia, What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems 1977-2001, was a 2003 Audio Publishers Award finalist. An expanded Gospel Earth (Skysill Press, England) will be published in 2009. The song cycle, Life of the Bee, with composer Lee Hoiby, continues to be performed on the international stage. The Carnegie Hall premiere with Beam reading and the songs performed can be heard on Albany Record's New Growth. His book-length surrealist gay-themed prose poem, Submergences, originally published as a chapbook in 1997 was reprinted in 2008 in Rebel Satori Press's Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism. On December 1, 2008 (World AIDS Day) in Boston, MA, composer / counter-tenor Steven Serpa premiered a cantata Heaven's Birds: Lament and Song based on three of Beam's poems from The Beautiful Tendons. Beam and Richard Owens (Damn the Caesars) edited a Jonathan Williams feature for Jacket magazine for late summer 2009 – which they hope will evolve into a book. Beam continues to work on The Life of the Bee, an opera libretto based on the Demeter/Perspehone myth, and a commonplace book on poetry and the spirit entitled They Say. The Broken Flower: Poems seeks a publisher. Beam is poetry editor of the print and online literary journal Oyster Boy Review and a botanical librarian in the Biology-Chemistry Library at UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina. www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/index.html





Jeffery Beam, 3212 Arthur Minnis Road, Hillsborough, NC 27278, jeffbeam@email.unc.edu, http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/index.html

ARTPARK: SUMMER SENSES

ArtPark is back with Summer Sensations! The irrepressible Jane Wood has this to say about the current gathering of student poems and display in Wilson, North Carolina.



"The elementary school where I presented ArtPark this spring was Rock Ridge Elementary; they have five 4th grades. How perfect, I thought, for encouraging the students to write their thoughts on "summer" with each class taking one of the 5 senses. First I discussed the value of writing from a stream of consciousness concept rather than "working" at sentence structure or rhyme. I then assigned one of the senses per class and allowed each 10 minutes to compose. This way I was assured of no parent or peer involvement. The students seemed excited to be freed up,so to speak, to put down thoughts as they came to them. It's a wonderful way to stress originality! And that's what ArtPark is all about - developing the imagination and independent thinking!"

Jane was especially happy with the sensory poetic energy this spring board generated. What a great way to begin the summer!





SUMMER SMELLS

…LIKE ROSES

by Damaris Sontes


… LIKE POOL WATER, CHLORINE
by Madison Hux


…LIKE LEMONADE
by Luis Rodriguez


…LIKE THE SALTY OCEAN
by Caroline Smith


…FRESHLY CUT GRASS
by Maddie Eatman


…SWEAT
by Wayne Hittell


…HOTDOGS ON THE GRILL
by Grayson Dail

SUMMER SIGHTS

…CRANE IN THE POND EATING FISH,
FOX RUNNING FROM MY PAPA’S DOGS,
HONEYBEES DANCING AND BUZZING,
FROGS HOPPING FROM LILYPAD TO LILYPAD
by Austin Wells


…THE BIG SUN IN THE SKY
by Kody Williams


…A RIVER WHERE I GO FISHING
by Auston Applewhite


…FLUTTERING BUTTERFLIES,
DRAGONFLIES OVER THE POOL,
ANTS MAKING NEW HOMES,
AT NIGHT - THE MOON
by Kayla Crisp


…KIDS PLAYING IN THE SAND AT THE BEACH,
WATER SPLASHING OVER MY FACE IN THE POOL
by Katelyn Davis

SUMMER SOUNDS

…WAVES AT THE OCEAN CRASHING ON THE SAND,
KITES MAKING A “WOOSH” IN THE WIND
by Morgan Turner


…BOOM! BOOM! (THUNDER.) IT’S GOING TO RAIN
by Allexis Bullock


…KIDS SCREAMING, “NO MORE SCHOOL!”
by Noah Vick


…BIRDS SINGING
by Naize Strickland


…THE BUZZING OF BEES,
HISSING OF SNAKES,
THE SWEEPING OF A BLANKET
AS IT’S PLACED ON THE GROUND
FOR A PICNIC
by Dustin Holley


…THE LAST DROP OF RAIN
FROM THE LAST SPRING SHOWER
by Dylan Joyner

SUMMER TASTES

…SWEET FRESH CANTALOUPE
by Cooper Dean

…LEMONADE ON A HOT DAY,
SALT WATER WHILE SWIMMING IN THE OCEAN,
SWEAT RUNNING INTO MY MOUTH
by Courtney Hittell

…FRUIT SMOOTHIES COOLING ME OFF
by Morgan Loflin

…STRAWBERRIES, BLUEBERRIES, WATERMELON
by Hunter Thorne

...GREEN DELICIOUS CUCUMBERS
by Madison Hinnant

SHRIMP
by Abbott Bass

…ICE CREAM AND POPSICLES
by Ethan Glover

HOT DOGS, CHEESEBURGERS, ICE CREAM
by Brendan Hurley

FRESH GARDEN PEAS
by Sara Beth Howard

SUMMER TOUCHES

…FOOTBALLS, SOCCER BALLS, BASEBALLS,
ROCKS TO SKIP ACROSS THE WATER
by Colton Turner


…A PERSON’S LIFE
WHEN YOU PLAY TOGETHER IN THE SUMMER
by Jessica Stevens


…SAND TICKLING MY TOES,
MOM’S HAND TAKING ME INTO THE WATER
by Reina Navarro


…BABY SQUIRRELS, BUMBLE BEE STINGS
by Senaida Macamio


…MY ARM’S WEAVING THROUGH WATER
LIKE A BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY
by Catherine Laporte


...SCALY FISH, SLIMY FROGS,
THE TEXTURE OF SUMMER THINGS
by Jonathan Bullock

TWO ESTATES, by David Rigsbee

Last month I received a letter from David Rigsbee. His friend Shelby Stephenson had suggested he write me about his new book. Although I've never met David, I know that he is a prolific and splendid poet. That he reviews regularly for the online journal The Cortland Review, that he has traveled widely---. But there is so much more to know about David Rigsbee, and if you go to his website, you will begin to see what I mean.

And if you google him, you will find interviews and all sorts of interesting items to keep you locked to your computer screen for all of an evening, if not longer. I encourage you to do so!



(David Rigsbee, Paris, 2004)

David, who teaches at Mount Olive College in Mounta Olive, NC, has a new book out from Cherry Grove Collections, and this is what the editor of the series as to say about his work:
The elegant poems of David Rigsbee’s Two Estates evoke landscape and history, art and memory, in densely sculpted lines:

David is the author of six previous collections, including Cloud Journal (Turning Point Books, 2008) and The Dissolving Island (BkMk Press, 2003). His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Ohio Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many others. He is the recipient of grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Virginia Commission on the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and The Academy of American Poets.



(David with his daugter Makaiya Bullitt-Rigsbee in Washington, DC, 2001)

Here are a few poems from Two Estates.

Under Cancer


On his birthday, my father the idea
greets my mother the flesh in a dream.
My father the stone draws me up a foreign hill
where a keyhole focuses an arbor
on a basilica in which he will not be found
or remembered. My father the wind
gives my face what is denied both the foot
and the mind, sweeping its words with a hand
broom, among which will be found,
like a nugget, his caesura.
Then I pause, drawing breath,
and walk to the ledge where my father
the evening greets me in the darkening
branches of a pine.

At Todi
Clouds merge with stone.
Pigeons grip moss that trims the stone.
As hard as their roots, trees
rise like statues, and the grass
they dapple in the short run
the hills pick up as an effect, and spread.
At a curve’s far reach, you meet
a shrine placed by shrewd peasants
to defeat expectation:
energies are already transforming
hard trees into their harmless shadows.



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

Never Forget


A standard dove would gargle
all day, gnats dangle their pulsing clusters
like water-balloons. And the ground
be overrun with ants and scarabs
rearranging the earth. Figs
about to touch ground from the most extended
branch would note
how the necropolis corrects dissolution
with architecture. How domes
rewrite hills, and fields, grown and cut,
reduce the river’s pull
where gravity is quietest and most
conspiratorial, a drift
content that a single painter restore it
from allegory to realism. Clouds
would process their variations
across the countryside all day.
What both bird and butterfly did would go
by the same name. And that ecstasy
pouring from the stone would pass
through wheat’s variations,
when the mower appeared mounting the hill,
its red dome and puff of smoke
so like the scythes of the painters.



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

Into the Wall
An anvil-shaped cloud
spreads its iron shadow
across the hill adjacent to our town.
As on a floor viewed upside down,
other clouds, in turn, suggest
figures of the moment,
requiring only the arrival
of the next bit of future to cancel
the suggestion. The struggle
is ancient: clouds’ agon drives the painter
into the wall, attempting impossible
compressions proper to time beyond
a lifetime. Here, where the sound
of a scooter merges with a wasp’s nest,
a pack of flies beats up a swallow—
until the next frame. Or the classical
head turns with its look
of a god disappearing into time:
things are as they are,
turning in middle air,
and as they will be,
emerging from the rock.



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

Campanile

The stones they shouldered above
stay above: their quarters are still
the plain, impersonally stuccoed flats
snail-clustered across the valley.
They know up always ended where
a campanile diffused sound and figure
meant to charm God, or else
to arrest Him. The faces are familiar:
Mussolini had one—and Gramsci—
below-wall faces atop solid, compact builds.
Today the sky is repeating something about
its clouds, how they were one stimulus
for the adulation of the flesh,
for Fra Angelico’s heaven-limiting
bodies. Any heaven from this moment
takes on the likeness of bodies
who passed from the labors demanded
of stones, and rose again, matching hills
in whose folds and valleys swallows
making their barrel-and-rollout
menace the tassled wheat.

ALL THAT IS LEFT, by Judith Harway

Although this blog is devoted for the most part to North Carolina Writers and Books, I'm featuring a new book by a friend of mine who has poetic ties to the state by way of her friendship with me, Susan Lefler, and Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin. Susan and Jeannette have had their poetry featured on our ncarts.org site in the past. The four of us came together through the Hambdige Center for the Creative Arts in Rabun Gap, Georgia. Judith and I worked as workshop leaders there for two summers, with Susan in attendance. Susan in turn pulled Jeannette into our circle of friends, and we have stayed in touch ever since.

Near the end of May Judith read from her new book at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva. We all gathered for the occasion; the reading was mesmerizing and the discussion wide-ranging. Here are the four friends afterward.



(Jeannette, Susan, Judith, and me)


The haunting story of flight and arrival in Judith Harway's All That Is Left reminds us of the dire, even deadly, choices that history can thrust upon innocent people: "A journey starts/when it is time to go." Harway's poems trace, in memorable terms, the impact of large historical currents on the lives of individuals.

Testimonials for All That Is Left:


“All families, as Judith Harway knows, are haunted. We’re haunted by the ghosts of ancestors who, in turn, are dreaming of us, their descendants. In this elegiac suite of poems, Harway captures the delicate threads that bind these two worlds, lost to each other. It’s a stunning work that will pierce your heart.”—Joseph Skibell

“Judith Harway’s ALL THAT IS LEFT gathers a family’s history into poetry, right down to the least detail—the scrap of cabbage left in the soup pot, the almost fleeting imprint of a night’s waking dream, the various misunderstandings and connections that can haunt or nourish for a lifetime. Throughout this book, the longing for what Barry Lopez calls the ‘spine of narrative’ holds the poetry true to what it means to be an inhabitant of a particular place where one’s connections to history tangle and transform. Family, the inner and outer journeys of its members, and the expectations and responsibilities it places upon those members, remains a living source in these poems. Through them what is left is the human story. The ongoing song of survival.”—Kathryn Stripling Byer

“‘We die as many times as we close our eyes on memory’ reads an epigraph in Judith Harway’s wonderful new book All That is Left, and I’m grateful Harway does not close her eyes on memory. In these richly detailed and languaged poems of family and memory, history provides setting, imagery, gossip, terrors, and music... In one of the ‘Last Words’ poems, the grandfather says, ‘What the Torah asks of us is that we mouth each word as if our lives hang on it.’ Judith Harway’s poems do just that.”—Susan Firer

“Judith Harway’s All That Is Left is a mystic seance with poetry as medium bringing back the spirits of her Jewish lineage and those murdered in the Holocaust, honoring and incarnating them in her own being—the lives they lived, the love they felt—and in the process coming to terms with her Jewish identity. Her book shines like a Shabbat candle between the dark of history and an uncertain future.”—Antler

About Judith:

Judith Harway’s poetry has appeared in dozens of literary journals, as well as in The Memory Box, a chapbook published by Zarigueya Press in 2002. Her work has earned fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Hambidge Center and the MacDowell Colony. She is on the faculty of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

ISBN 978-1934999523, 104 pages, $18.00

Judith's book may be found at Barnes & Noble, Powell's, and Amazon online.

POEMS FROM THE COLLECTION

Before the Pogrom


Early spring.
A dark room lit
by candles. Children
on the floor before
a smoky hearth,
toes of their shoes
cut off for growing.
Smells of soup
and cabbage,
damp socks hung
to dry. Straw mattresses
piled high with winter
quilts. Outside, a shawl
of rain drawn over
evening’s face. Flocks
of goats lie huddled
on the leaky sod
of rooftops, handcarts
turning home
down muddy lanes.
A gathering of relatives
who stare into
the slow shutter of history,
afraid to move.

At Pesach
the Haggadah tells us
of a time of bondage,
of the flight
of the Israelites from Egypt
into the wilderness
of freedom. Plagues
rained on the land.
The hand of the Almighty
smote even babies
dead. This is the way
I understand the day
my grandmother’s family
left Meskaporichi:
there never was a choice:
A journey starts
when it is time to go.


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

Free ...
—Solomon, sailing into New York Harbor

as, to court the obvious, a bird
one of the raucous swirl
diving for offal in the steamship’s wake

as young men doff their hats and crush
against the rail, stunned by the engines’
lurch towards silence, a dull humming

after nineteen days of roar; or free
as sunlight, pale and hesitant, an aura
petaling the Statue on her island,

bigger than imagining. A free ride
yours, across the North Atlantic
hiding first in folds of darkness

down below then slowly learning
that a man can be so quiet
no one notices the absence of his name

upon the manifest. Free as the bread
of strangers, weevily potatoes; free
as tears, as prayers that praise God freely

though you ask him nothing.
“Land of the Free,” a crust of island
rises to meet the ship like certainty

you’ve nothing left to lose, you’re free
to take your chances, for good or ill, in this
the only world I’ve ever known.



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Tending the Past— for Chaie

Wrap your feet in rags. Come stravaging
home down a lane between potato fields
as daylight waters down to dusk
and hearthstones stir with fire. Take off


your shawl. Bend to your stitchery
by candlelight, pretending not to laugh
at your brothers singing Etel Betel’s tochter
und Chaim Yankel’s zohn. Unpin your hair

and brush it to your waist at bedtime.
It is better not remembering
some names, some times: just drop them
like a glove, their loss unnoted

in the mystery of how this world rolls
over us. Rolled in the same old quilt
wake up a million miles away
from Meskaporichi. Though home

is all you see, even with closed eyes,
bend to your stitchery until the whistle sounds
then shuffle out into grey streets
where lamps already glow. Walk slowly

in your flowered shawl and listen
past the cartwheels’ clatter, shouts and horns,
the streetcars’ racket down the Bowery
for a voice as gentle as your father’s was

then take a man from home and love him well.
Take his name, although its syllables pile up
like fallen chimney stones. Brush out your hair
and sow the rugs of your apartment

with hairpins and tears. Wrap your son in songs
you carried from the shtetl, feeding him
on things kept to yourself
no one can make you tell.