Poetry Hickory

Please click to enlarge image.

BURKE COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY CELEBRATES NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

On April 19, a fine Saturday, with redbuds abloom and gardens burgeoning, I drove over to Morganton for a special poetry event at the Burke County Public Library, one of the loveliest libraries I seen. Our libraries are the the heart of our communities, and being able to visit quite a few of them around our state has made my term as Laureate especially gratifying. This event pulled together four poets: Rand Brandes, Scott Owens, Ted Pope, and me. I'd not seen Rand nor Scott in years, and Ted was an unknown. I was looking forward to meeting him.

The event was spearheaded, in part, by Mindy Evans, whose work has appeared on this blog, as well as in the comments section. Mindy is hoping to further her development as a poet by enrolling in an MFA program. Which one remains a question mark. Any program would be lucky to have her.

Viranya Filipiak, the Adult Program Coordinator for the Burke County Public Library in Morganton,(828-437-5638 Ext.1208--just in case you want to give her a call to thank her for supporting NC poetry) organized the celebration and served as emcee. Here she is at the punch bowl afterward.




I was glad to see my old friends Rand and Scott and meet the kinetic Ted Pope, whose performance was riveting. The four of us made a pretty good team, if I do say so myself. Rand is Martin Luther Stevens Professor of English and Director of the LR Visiting Writers Series at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory. Scott was my POET OF THE WEEK, two weeks ago. Ted has recorded two collections of his poetry performances and performs frequently in Hickory, where there seems to be a lively poetry scene in the making.

In the audience was a novelist with whom I'd communicated only through blogging--Joan Cannon, whose Hilltop Notes is well worth a visit. In the photo of Joan below, you can get a sense of the spaciousness this library offers its patrons. Joan has given me permission to quote in this post one of her brief essays from her blog.



Ted talks with a member of the audience after the reading.







(RAND BRANDES)


TWO POEMS FROM RAND BRANDES'S READING:


How Little Light is Left

How little light

Is left



When all the bulbs

Burn out



One by one

First here



Then there

Like stars



Disappearing

In a clear sky



On a moonless

Night



For no apparent

Reason



The Last Class


I want to leave them, them to leave me

Feeling the poems’ pulsing lines in their veins

Hammering at the forges of their hearts,

But it’s just “Intro. to Poetry” and they’ve already sold

Kinnell and Collins, Hughes and Heaney

For 50 cents each to the college bookstore.



The room has grown silent and sleepy in the late morning

Light. The papers are piled high on my desk,

Titles peeping out like “The Illuminated Blake,”

“Lawrence’s Ladies” or “What’s Eating Plath,”

Not wanting it to end like this I impulsively pull out

“Great Poems Read by the Great Poets Themselves”,



Slip the disc into the slot and hit play: Yeats chants,

Thomas rages, Williams chatters, and then

We come to Kinnell, the last poet, the last poem,

“The Last Gods”— a poem I do not know,

But should have. Suddenly the goddess is spreading

Her legs as the sea surges around the rock



Upon which she lingers, the god wades out to her

Sliding blueberries and blood between her wet lips.

Mortals that we are, we sit silent, embarrassed

By the gift we have been given in communion

In a classroom on a Tuesday in December.

This is what it’s all about, I say, the power



Of words to call forth a love so elemental, so powerful

And profoundly deep, that we must, like Stephen Dedalus

On the strand, exclaim “O’ Profane joy” as the bird girl

Wades forth lifting her dress over ivory thighs.

We have been blessed, I say again, blessed,

So now go study for your final and the real test.
----------------------------


(THE COVER OF ONE OF JOAN CANNON'S NOVELS)

Joan's post of April 9:

ARE MINDLESS TASKS A HELP?


There are some times in your life when you can't keep track--of time, of tasks, of conversations even. There's a group of landscape maintenance workers buzzing and roaring around the house today. Each of them plods or rides along, heads down, eyes ahead like donkeys intent on getting one foot in front of the other. I wonder if their minds are as blank as their faces. Is there some unacknowledged collateral benefit in mindless activity? I'm reasonably sure the answer to that would be a qualified yes. However, surely it must depend on the mind that's unoccupied during the performance of these repetitive, uninspired and uninspiring jobs. The world is so full of them and the people who perform them, it astounds me to think about it.

Right now, I believe that in some circumstances, this half-unconscious trudging from one end of a day to the other might be a blessing. What I can't believe is that a lifetime spent like that can be anything but a curse.

Do you have an Oriental rug? A handmade basket? Even an Aran Island sweater? I knit (I used to knit a lot), but I can't do anything interesting without extreme concentration, and even then, I find mistakes that have to be corrected. How long does it take to get so skilled that you can stop paying attention? If you reach that stage, can the work become a kind of meditation? Try to imagine the hours and days, even years invested in producing beautiful crafts. Is the guy behind the walking mower making up poetry or a protest essay in the din of his machine?

That's the rub for me. I'm trying to make this little piece of disconnected verbiage fill that need for distance. Somehow, writing doesn't seem to fill that bill. A long time ago, there was a man who invented what he called "automatic writing." The name is self-explanatory. It was supposed to be helpful for the mentally ill. That is not what I want to do, not just out of the fear of embarrassment, but because it would be too self-serving and of no interest to a reader.

Maybe when enough time has passed after the loss of the person who was half me, not just mine, I'll find out how to use this craft of putting words on paper (or into the ether). If some day I think I can, maybe that's how I'll know I'm returning. Maybe what I should do is go and prune the pyracantha. It should take a long time.

The Fractured World, by Scott Owens

by Scott Owens
ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-120-3
88 pages, poetry, $14
Main Street Rag
http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/NewReleases.php

The Fractured World is a courageous examination of the long term effects of child abuse in our society. Owens' poems are at times heartbreaking, at times humorous, yet always triumphant.

--Tim Peeler

Scott Owens' poems grab the reader by the throat from the opening line and don't let go, unspooling down the page with verve and startling moments of insight and imagination. He's the real thing.

--Ron Rash


Nothing prepared me for the immediacy and yet intimacy of the poems in Fractured World. Nor the intensely painful revelations about our woundedness and vulnerability, not to mention our despair at being turned into empty vessels by the "game" of a world divided into sides always at war with each other. As "Taking the Field" declares, And this is the way/you play the game/...you are nothing unless you win, says the black booted man who draws a line and tells you, whoever stands/across that line/is your enemy.../and you must hit him/and you must beat him/until he falls... The irony in these often bruising poems is that the winner in this game becomes the lost one, the numbed and empty one who moves through his world either enraged or numbed. Scott Owens has given us a powerful, disturbing look at our contemporary fractured world.

--Kathryn Stripling Byer
NC Poet Laureate




(Photo by Damien Blankenship)

Scott Owens is the 2008 Visiting Writer at Catawba Valley Community College and coordinator of the Poetry Alive reading series in Hickory, NC. His first book of poetry, The Persistence of Faith, was published in 1995 by Sandstone Press. He has received awards for his work from the Academy of American Poets and the North Carolina Writer's Network. Recent work has appeared in North American Review, Main Street Rag, Pedestal, Georgia Review, Chattahoochee Review, and Cream City Review among others. Born in Greenwood, SC, he has lived in North Carolina, where he completed his MFA from UNCG, for over 20 years.



Fates Worse Than Death

One said dying slowly.
Another said living
and barely cracked a smile.
Many said extreme pain,
torture, in all its varieties:
burning, drowning, beating, crushing, starving,
cutting the body away in small pieces,
breaking down the mind bit by bit.
Others said insanity, loneliness, paralysis,
catatonia, coma, blindness,
isolation, deprivation.
One said watching others
be tortured,
family, friends, total strangers.

In a dry white season
they tried to teach us
the reach of human cruelty--
a bloody face turned upward,
the body suspended by elbows,
electrodes on nose, nipples...
A young guard walked in,
unsuspecting, unknowing.

Imagine having to live
with the knowledge.
Imagine how he sees people now
from the corners of his eyes,
how he hurries home each day,
squeezes the handle,
cracks the door.
Imagine how he holds his wife,
his children,
afraid of what his own hands might do.
--------------------


Saving the Earth

Collect a variety of soils:
red clay from river banks,
black dirt from under rocks,
white sand from beaches.
Use milk jugs, coffee cans,
oil drums sealed tight.

Cover mounds of good earth
with plastic tarps, sheets
of tin. Bury the edges
with fallen things,
trees and fences,
houses and walls.

Store it in cellars
and bathrooms, closets
and stairwells.
Bury it in coffins,
carefully marked
for resurrection.

Pack it in snuff cans
to make it compact
and portable. Stack them
along the walls. Pile them
in windows. Carry
what remains in plastic bags.

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



Taking the Field

And this is the way
you play the game
the only way
to win.
And this is the man
with the huge right hand
and the black shining boots
and the pounding gullet
who calls you boy
and tells you
you are nothing
unless you win,
you are nothing
and stands above you
and stands before you
and draws a line
and tells you
whoever stands
across that line
is your enemy
your enemy
and you must hit him
and you must beat him
until he falls
and if he gets up
you must hit him again
and if he gets up
you must take him down.

And these are the hands
and these the feet
and this the body
you give up for the game.
And these are the clothes
you wear, these
the bold numbers, these
and draws a line
and tells you
whoever stands
across that line
is your enemy
your enemy
and you must hit him
and you must beat him
until he falls
and if he gets up
you must hit him again
and if he gets up
you must take him down.

And these are the hands
and these the feet
and this the body
you give up for the game.
And these are the clothes
you wear, these
the bold numbers, these
the bright colors, this
the iron mask.
And this is the map
that shows you the way
and these the people
who cheer you on
and tell you to go
And you go
to play the game
the only way
to win.
---------------------




On the Days I Am Not My Father

I don’t yell. I don’t hold inside
the day’s supply of frustrations.
My hands stay open all day.
I don’t wake tired and sore,
dazed from senseless, panicking
dreams. On the days I am not
my father I hold my son
when he cries, let him touch my face
without flinching, lie down with him
until he falls asleep, realize
that just because he has a sharp tongue,
just because he’s sometimes mean,
just because he is smarter than me
doesn’t mean he’ll become my father.

On the days I am not my father
holding you is enough until
holding you is no longer enough
for either of us. I listen well.
I let things go unfinished,
in an order I didn’t plan.
My mouth is relaxed. My teeth
don’t hurt. My face stays
a healthy shade of pink all day.
On the days I am not my father
I don’t fill the silence with my own
irrational rants. I don’t resent
the voices of others. I don’t make fun
of you to make myself feel better.

On the days I am not my father
I don’t care who wins
or loses. The news can’t ruin
my day. I water plants.
I cook. I laugh at myself.
I can imagine living without
my beard, with my hair cut,
without the fear of looking
too much like my father. On the days
I am not my father I romp
and play, I don’t compare myself
with everyone else, the night
is always long enough, I like
how much I am like my father.
----------------------------------

Love and the Daughter

There is little you’d take as truth from him,
but this pounding death seems impossible
to imagine even from one who dreams voices
into walls, eyes in every pane of glass.

In the season of dogwoods and Judas trees
your father calls to tell you Stuart is dead --
a heart attack brought on by morphine
taken to treat the phantom pains of a lost leg.

The ghost of your image moves mourning
before the door, spring’s tender green
turning in panic behind you. Your anger,
inconsolable, will not unknit itself.

What you mourn is not the loss of life,
but a world of childhoods, your own, your brother’s
strapped to his iron chair, your mother’s innocence
sacrificed to angers that would not go away.

I want to prick the howls from your tongue,
bring down your fists on these faces
looking up from memory’s dark pools,
open your eyes to spring’s season of crying.

At night, in the mirror, sometimes you see
his face, unsoothed, your own, clenched tight,
my half-wanted hands easing you back to me,
spooning away anger like tears unwilling to cry.