Musings

2012 Poetry Hickory Schedule

2012-01-26T14:41:00.001-05:00

Great season ahead of us. Spread the news. Print and post or save the image and post online. Thanks

Country Roads Exhibit

2012-01-25T20:03:00.001-05:00

Bethlehem Branch Library Exhibiting Artist Series

"Country Roads"
Collaboration by Photographer Clayton Joe Young & Poet Scott Owens

February 2nd thru March 29th 2012

Opening Reception February 2nd 5:30-7:00 PM

Gallery Talk at 6:00 PM

The ongoing exhibitions of art and photography as "The Exhibiting Artist Series" at the Bethlehem Branch Library in Bethlehem, NC will feature "Country Roads", a unique collaboration of photography and poetry by Clayton Joe Young and Scott Owens from February 2nd through March 29th 2012. The exhibition includes a poetic pictorial book titled Country Roads: Travels Through Rural North Carolina (Blurb 2011). An Opening Reception to meet the artists will be on Thursday, February 2nd from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. with a gallery talk at 6:00 PM.

Clayton Joe Young is currently the Program Director and Lead Instructor for the Photographic Technology program at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, NC. In 2010, Young was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award at CVCC. He has won numerous awards with the North Carolina Press Association and North Carolina Press Photographers Association. In 2011 he won Best in Show at the Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition. His photography captures the rich heritage of our region of North Carolina .

Hickory poet Scott Owens is the author of seven collections of poetry, editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, author of "Musings", founder of Poetry Hickory, Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and a writer of reviews of contemporary poetry. He has been featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac and WFAE. His work has received numerous awards from the Academy of American Poets , the North Carolina Writer's Network, North Carolina Poetry Society, and Poetry Society of South Carolina. He currently teaches creative writing at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory , North Carolina .

The Bethlehem Branch Library is located at 45 Rink Dam Road , Hickory , NC 28601 ( Bethlehem , Alexander County ). For more information contact 828-495-8753

Life-Changing Moment

2012-01-25T19:00:00.001-05:00

Robert Lee Brewer (editor of Writer's Digest) has an "interview" and a couple of my poems up on his blog today. Here is a link: http://robertleebrewer.blogspot.com/2012/01/bending-rules-or-poet-has-to-be-poet.html

And the Winners Are . . .

2012-01-19T12:28:00.001-05:00

POETRY COUNCIL ANNOUNCES ANNUAL WINNERS

The Poetry Council of NC, a self-supporting, all-volunteer nonprofit organization founded in 1949 to foster a deeper appreciation of poetry in the state, has announced the winners of its annual poetry contests. Judges were permitted to select 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners as well as up to 3 honorable mentions in each contest category, with the exception of the book contest which has no 3rd place winner. Some judges elected to name fewer winners.

All winners will receive their awards, including cash prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, at Poetry Day to be held at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory on April 14. Winning poems will also be published in the Council’s annual awards anthology, Bay Leaves, and winning poets will be invited to read their poems at Poetry Day. An additional category for Performance Poetry is judged and awarded at Poetry Day. Information on any of the contests, Poetry Day, and the Poetry Council is available at www.poetrycouncilofnc.wordpress.com

The complete list of category winners and judges is as follows:

Oscar Arnold Young (book contest):
JUDGE: Paul Hostovsky, Medfield, MA & Ron Moran, Simpsonville, SC
1st The Swing Girl by Katherine Soniat, Asheville, NC
2nd Lie Down with Me by Julie Suk, Charlotte, NC
HM Rendering the Bones by Susan M. Lefler, Brevard, NC
HM An Innocent in the House of the Dead by Joanna Catherine Scott, Chapel
Hill, NC

Gladys Owings Hughes Heritage (free verse):
JUDGE: Darnell Arnoult, Harrogate, TN
1st “Babies Hurtling Several Stories” by Ross White, Durham, NC
2nd “Daddy Imagines a Good Death” by JS Absher, Raleigh, NC
3rd “The Museum of Broken Things” by Jane Shlensky, Bahama, NC

Charles Shull (traditional poetry):
JUDGE: Paul Bone, Evansville, IN
1st “Facts about Early America” by Ross White, Durham, NC (rhyming couplets)
2nd “Basic Bad Day” by Peg Russell, Murphy, NC (terza rima)
3rd “Featured Reader” by Alice Osborn, Raleigh, NC (sestina)
HM “On a Recent Engagement” by Michael A. Moreno, Rockville, MD (sonnet)
HM “Water the Lover” by Ellen Summers, Greensboro, NC (sonnet)

James Larkin Pearson (free verse):
JUDGE: Felicia Mitchell, Emory, VA
1st “Address to Monarchs” by Ross White, Durham, NC
2nd “My Mother’s Lake” by Ann Campanella, Huntersville, NC
3rd “What Burns for Light” by Lisa Zerkle, Charlotte, NC
HM “Circumventing the Circumference” by Terry Collins, Mount Airy, NC
HM “Things Fall Out of My Father” by Robert Moyer, Winston Salem, NC
HM “The Lesbians Next Door” by Alice Osborn, Raleigh, NC

Ellen Johnston-Hale (humorous verse):
JUDGE: Gloria Alden, Southington, OH
1st “Where Time Does Not Fly” by Susan Spalt, Carrboro, NC
2nd “The Voice” by Barbara Brooks, Hillsborough, NC
3rd “Arctic” by Lisa Zerkle, Charlotte, NC
HM “Black Friday” by Doris Dix Caruso, Burlington, NC
HM “Patience” by Jane Shlensky, Bahama, NC
HM “I Think They Got It!” by Janet Ireland Trail, Greensboro, NC

Charlotte Young (elementary school):
JUDGE: David Roderick, Greensboro, NC
1st “Jupiter” by Sydney Campanella (home-schooled), Huntersville, NC
2nd “Light Saves Us” by Paige Morrison (North Forest Pines Elem.), Wake Forest, NC
3rd “Blue” by Joellen Callahan (North Forest Pines Elem.), Wake Forest, NC
HM “Doves” by Sonja Woolley (Episcopal Day School), Southern Pines, NC
HM “Nature Walk” by Lilly Corcoran (Episcopal Day School), Southern Pines, NC

Carol Bessent Hayman (middle school):
JUDGE: David Roderick, Greensboro, NC
1st “The Pledge of Sausage” by Devon Stocks (Clarkton School of Discovery), Clarkton, NC
2nd “Pumpkin Patch” by Kenneth More [sp?] (Clarkton School of Discovery), Clarkton, NC

Sam Ragan North Carolina Connection (high school):
JUDGE: Natasha Trethewey, Decatur, GA
1st "Lesson of the Lark" by Maggie Apple of North Guilford High School
2nd Jennifer Comerford of North Guilford High School

Poetry Workshop

2012-01-17T10:47:00.001-05:00

Here is the description of a 6-hour workshop I'm giving in Asheville on Saturday 1/28:

From Inspiration to Publication: Poetry and the Writing Process with Scott Owens

Beginning and experienced poets will learn new methods of writing, revising and publishing poetry. Class discussion will focus on the writing process, from generative strategies to the revision process and beyond. Participants may bring up to 3 poems to the class for review. Owens is the author of 10 collections of poetry, and editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review. He is Vice President of the Poetry Council of N.C., and Founder of “Poetry Hickory”.

Meets Saturday, 10-4 pm. $75/$70 members.

I still need a couple more participants. Please help spread the news for me.

Register at http://www.twwoa.org/

Ekphrastic Opportunity

2012-01-12T12:35:00.001-05:00

GET YOUR POEM ON FOR A GOOD CAUSE

Hickory area writers and would-be writers are again invited to participate in this year’s Aroma of Art Fundraiser to benefit ALFA (AIDS Leadership Foothills-area Alliance), the Flynn Home of Hickory, and the Women’s Resource Center.

Aroma of Art consists of a month-long exhibit of works of art donated by local artists and auctioned off at the event’s Grand Finale on March 1 from 5:30 to 8:30 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse on the lower floor of the Hickory Furniture Mart. Poets can participate by writing poems based on or inspired by the donated works of art which will be on display at the Furniture Mart beginning February 2. A Kick-Off Party will be held that day from 6 to 8 at the Mart.

To be eligible, poems must be submitted to CVCC creative writing instructor and Founder of Poetry Hickory, Scott Owens, no later than 5:00 PM, February 14. Poems can be submitted by email to asowens1@yahoo.com or dropped off at Taste Full Beans in downtown Hickory. Poems must fit on one side of a 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper, and the submission should include the writer’s name, email address, and phone number, as well as the work of art on which the poem is based.

Entries will be judged by a panel of local writers. Up to 10 poems will be selected to be framed and hung as part of the exhibit for the rest of the month. Of those, 3 will be selected to be read aloud by the authors at the Grand Finale. Selected poems may also be published in a local newspaper. At the Grand Finale, the poems selected for display will be presented along with the matching work of art to the winning bidder.

Keith Flynn in Lincolnton

2012-01-05T14:42:00.002-05:00

Collaboration with Clayton Joe Young

2012-01-03T11:41:00.006-05:00

Okay, so I lied. Two posts ago, I said I would have two new books out in 2012. I didn't know at the time that Clayton Joe Young was going to produce a book featuring his photos and my poems which will be on exhibit at the Bethlehem Branch of the Alexander County Library throughout February and March (reception from 5:30 - 7:00 on Feb 2) as part of "The Bethlehem Branch Library Exhibiting Artists Series", sponsored by the Bethlehem Friends of the Library and the Bethlehem Community Development Association.

But he did. And now the book is already out. And it's beautiful -- thanks in large part to Joe's photos. It is 62 pages long and features 29 of Joe's photos and 25 of my poems (13 of which are brand spanking new). It is called Country Roads: Travels Through Rural North Carolina. It would make a great gift or collectors' item. And is just a wonderful thing to look at. I, for one, can't stop staring at some of these photos.

It is also expensive (at least by my "poor poet's" standards). Which is why I've only ordered 10 paperbacks and 10 hardcovers to sell. I did get Joe to sign each copy, and I've signed them as well. If you'd like one, I would be glad to mail it out to you (my postage is a lot cheaper than the press's, and the ones you could get from them wouldn't be signed).

Paperbacks are $29.95; Hardcovers are $41.95. Add $4 for shipping and handling. Call me at 828-234-4266 to work out details, or mail a check to Scott Owens, 838 4th Ave. Dr. NW, Hickory, NC 28601, or I can give you paypal info if you want to go that route.

Here is a sample poem just to whet your appetite:

Without Affectation

What would you call it,
this color of the natural world,
brown leaves and dirt,
khaki-almost-blonde straw,
gray trunks of trees,
occasional green of moss and cedar,
all blended under winter's fast-moving,
blue-gray sky --
a muted impressionism --
charcoal, sepia, ochre,
memory, regret, contemplation --
a color your eyes try to filter out.

Or, you can preview the entire book at http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2850653.
I hope to see you at the reception, and let me know if I can send you a book beforehand.

Poetry Gift Guide 2011

2011-12-02T17:00:00.001-05:00

THE POETRY GIFT GUIDE 2011

It’s that time again. I just watched the last leaf fall from the sugar maple in my backyard, so I know it’s time to start thinking about holiday gifts again. For me, and for so many like me, there could be no better gift than a book of poetry. Unfortunately, those who don’t read poetry themselves rarely know which book of poems to get for those who do, as can be evidenced by the Leonard Nimoy, Susan Polis Schultz, Jewel, and Treasured Verse books -- roughly the equivalent of holiday fruitcake -- on my shelves at home (please forgive me if you’re reading this and gave me one of those in the past). To help out those who know poetry-lovers but are not poetry-lovers themselves, every year I do a column suggesting certain titles from the year as ideal gift selections. I usually focus on the local and state level since there are other sources for broader selections.

This year I have two main recommendations. My favorite book of poems from 2011 is the very inexpensive anthology The Best of Poetry Hickory ($5, available at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory). Yes, I am the Founder of Poetry Hickory, but I would want this book more than any other from this year even if I weren’t. This anthology contains numerous poems that are my personal favorites of some of my favorite poets -- poems that I believe will be further anthologized and read for years to come. Robert Abbate’s “Ecco Homo,” Rhett Trull’s “The End of the Hour,” Tony Abbott’s “Blood Red of Late October,” Richard Allen Taylor’s “Playing Catch,” Ron Moran’s “A Blessing,” and others in this collection are among the best poems I’ve read in the last decade.

The single author collection of poetry I deem to be the best from this year is John Lane’s Abandoned Quarry: New & Selected Poems (Mercer University Press). Lane is widely known as an environmental writer, and these poems will not disappoint the reader looking for such work, but as they encompass Lane’s career they also dynamically explore the nature of humanity and the development of the individual. I have said of this collection that “among the thousands of books of poems I own, there is not a single one I will more often take from the shelf to reread.”

Now, for my many poet-friends whose new books I didn’t name in my two primary recommendations, please note that I also didn’t include my own new book, Something Knows the Moment (available at Taste Full Beans or through Main Street Rag), which I like a great deal but don’t feel measures up to the anthology or Lane’s collection. In the event your poetry lover already owns those two books, and mine, here are some others from this year that I strongly recommend:
If Words Could Save Us, by Tony Abbott (Lorimer Press);
Spill, by Malaika King Albrecht (Main Street Rag);
How Language Is Lost, by Celisa Steele (Emrys Press);
The Jane Poems, by Ron Moran (Clemson University Press); and
An Innocent in the House of the Dead, by Joanna Catherine Scott (Main Street Rag).

If you need additional choices, check out the available titles on the websites for NC presses like Main Street Rag, Lorimer Press, Press 53, and Jacar Press.

Two New Books in 2012

2011-12-02T08:42:00.001-05:00

I will have two new collections of poetry published in 2012. For One Who Knows How to Own Land, a collection of poems about growing up in rural South Carolina, was runner-up in the Future Cycle Press Book Competition and will be published by Future Cycle in March. Shadows Trail Them Home is a full-length version of the earlier collaboration with Pris Campbell, The Nature of Attraction. Shadows Trail Them Home more than doubles the size of Norman and Sara's story and creates what poet and critic Ron Moran calls a novel in poems. Shadows Trail Them Home will be published by Clemson University Press in October.

Review of Celisa Steele's "How Language Is Lost"

2011-11-15T05:49:00.001-05:00

Review
by Scott Owens

HOW LANGUAGE IS LOST
Celisa Steele
Emrys Press, 2011
ISBN: 9780977351640

Sometimes funny, sometimes profound, the poems in Celisa Steele's debut collection, How Language Is Lost, are always full of surprises. Who, after all, would expect a villanelle on the words we use for men and women ("Consider the Chickens and Other Lessons on Sex and Sin"), or a prose poem on the creation of a national grammar police ("Sin Tax on Syntax Passes House by Narrow Margin"), or a metaphysical conceit that ends in either post-dinner or post-coital satiety ("She Loves the Sushi Chef Whose Name She Does Not Know"), or an ode comparing ping¬-pong to poetry: "most like a poem / this onomatopoetic game / with its spondaic name"?

Just as these poems demonstrate that Steele is comfortable and effective in both formal and free verse, they also demonstrate that she is equally comfortable with either humor or seriousness. In fact, she masterfully exhibits an insightful understanding of the coexistence of humor and gravity in many of the same situations, making it clear that vital truth often exists in the most mundane of human experiences, even those we primarily think of as funny. Such is the case in one of my favorite of these poems, "Al Considers the Fucking Holy Spirit," where the surprising (given the topic of consideration) profanity of the speaker belies the profundity of his thinking:

You got to go at it slant . . .
. . . It's like cursive, or some shit –
no block letters, can't be too plain or obvious,
got to trust your instincts,
your sub-fucking-conscious.

While this poem apparently deals with the quest for religious faith, the same lines could be written about poetry or love or luck. Anything worthwhile will always be somewhat ineffable.

Equally ineffable, or perhaps irreducible to any sort of simple statement, is the sense throughout these poems of the presence of loss and the importance of language in our daily lives. The brilliant title poem, for example, tells us of the indigenous Argentinean Abipon people who, succumbing to European/Christian influences and diseases "gave way to farming, kneeling in naves" and discovered "their own shamans couldn't shape shift anymore." And when the last speaker of the Abipon language lies dying, no one understands "her articulation of the world to come, / the world lost." Thus, Steele demonstrates that the tragedy of the death of a language, of lost words, is the loss of a perspective, the loss of an expression of an understanding of the world, which is finally what any language consists of.

The lost language this speaker mourns, however, is not just language of the cultural or anthropological sort. It is also the language that is lost when one loses a loved one, and the wasted or terminated opportunities for further meaningful emotional exchange that accompany such loss. This sort of lost language is addressed in "Emily Confesses, to the Pedicurist," in which the speaker, asked to cut her mother's nails, "quit", "failed. At the end, / just knelt beside her chair, too tired to pretend." And the sense of loss is further addressed in "Elegy for a Scarf Borrowed from a Mother Now Dead and Left on a Trolley Car in Budapest at Christmastime" and in "I Bought a New Car the Year My Mother Died."

Celisa Steele has indeed made a wonderful debut. These poems possess all of the qualities a reader could hope for in a book of poems: lyricism, humor, compression, depth of feeling and meaning, memorable imagery, precise language, and perhaps most importantly, one surprise after another. A very enjoyable read that leaves the reader wanting more.

Review of John Lane's "Abandoned Quarry"

2011-10-17T22:07:00.001-04:00

Review
by Scott Owens
(first published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)

ABANDONED QUARRY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
by John Lane
Mercer University Press, 2010
ISBN: 9780881462418

You really can’t judge a book by its cover . . . front or back. All four blurbs on the back of John Lane’s Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems mention “nature” or “landscape. So, of course, as I started reading these poems I was predisposed towards finding environmental themes. Now, I admire Gregory Orr, Ron Rash, Kate Daniels, and David Lee, the authors of those four blurbs, a great deal, and certainly nature plays a vital role in Lane’s poems, but it’s not exactly the primary thing I experienced or reflected upon as I read them. I may be splitting hairs to some degree, but they’re important hairs to me, and what comes out most strongly from Abandoned Quarry are revelations not about nature per se but rather about human nature and about the relationship of human nature and the larger concept of nature in general. The reader is introduced, for example, to a very empathetic and later ironic understanding of the human proclivity for destruction in “Quarries,” an early poem about what the speaker of Lane’s more mature poems might consider “childish” desires:

Even as a boy I begged to be drunk
on immense stretches of emptiness--
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I longed to grow into a man and work
to quarry the emptiness outward
until all was level again.

Such revelations of human nature continue in what is, perhaps surprisingly given the early nature of these poems, the most memorable section of the book: “Early Uncollected Poems.” The poems in this section are uniquely sharp, each speaker’s perception wide open, uncalculated, unabashed, unrehearsed, and the tone is as much “in the moment” as any poems I’ve ever read. The effect, of course, is that wonderful transportation of the reader that only really good poems can manage, as in the Marxist “Sugar Cane”:

. . . You, the one with no shirt.
The one who shits where he works,
whose machete like a part of your arm
hacks the cane three times. It falls,
stripped of leaves and halved.
You move on. Again, the same motion.
And again the same. Then the gathering and loading.
This all day until the sun drops.
You’ve been at it since dawn.
For your work there is six dollars Belize.

An even more extreme transportation, one not just of place but also perspective, takes place in “Reptiles Teach Him About Hunting: Notes on Catching Crocodiles in Belize,” where the reader sees first from the perspective of the human hunter, “He fixes the croc’s red eyes in his lamp, / whispers, ‘It’s still up,” and then from that of the reptilean hunter:

. . . you
are the croc hunting for pond turtles.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You spark red, stay up,
until the light in you blinks out as buck shot
cracks the tight bone of your skull.

Very different in subject matter, location, and technique, but equally about presence, in fact bringing conscious attention to our tendency to pretend or substitute presence through intellectualization and the denial of difference or uniqueness is “Along the Little Betsie”:

If you are somehow here, so full of joy to have lost
the Little Betsie, you have learned a new skill, to clear
things up, the difference between what is
and what is not, like the river, far from you
which in your indifference you have allowed to be.

Finally, in “Shopping,” the poem from this section that comes closest to fulfilling the expectations established by Orr and the others, Lane grieves the presence that is lost through our submission to the endless cycle of consumerism, the loss of natural man. Even here, though, it is not simply the loss of nature that is grieved, but also the loss of nature within us: “Every purchase a little wildness / goes out of us / and the world gets smaller.”

To some extent, the issue of presence becomes the central issue of the entire book. It shows up quite clearly, for example, in “Seeing Wild Horses”:

If only I could tell you how wildness shows
the space between us and the green world;
how an island is the same island with our
presence, but with that presence we lose
some hope of seeing . . . .

What are the consequences of human presence on the natural world and subsequently on human being? How can the needs of human nature and nature be reconciled? How can the human need for nature continue to be met without resulting in the destruction of nature and the eventual destruction of man? Absent from nature, man suffers. Present in nature, nature, and eventually man, suffer. After seeing a wild horse for the first time, the speaker continues,

. . . I fight
some need to call it from that animal world,
then lose it in the shock of its leaving;
I call this the greed of human caring,
and count all my losses among its history.

As all of these comments indicate, it is not at all the case that Abandoned Quarry’s blurb writers are wrong. They are, in fact, to a large extent quite correct in their characterization of the poems. After all, the environmental manifesto expressed in “Allegiance” is as unarguably clear as that of the Lorax: “I pledge allegiance to the trees-- / the green republic of roots, limbs, / and leaves under which I stand.” And in what may be my favorite of the poems collected here, “This Morning You Wake in the City,” the speaker reveals the animus of the natural world in the most urban of settings:

the city isn’t simply city but built-up resins
actions of enzymes, castings of human desire.
so you wake to streets running to water
(still water, mountains across the inlet (still stone).

the yellow taxis are easy to call coyotes.
the signs on tall buildings no more
than the raised tail of a mule deer.

The problem with the prominent and repeated use of terms like “landscape” and “nature” in each of the blurbs is that it invites limited perception of the poems, invites thinking in clichés, and these are not beautiful tree poems or magical-mystical nature poems. Rather, they are poems that look at our relationship with nature and with our own natures honestly, deeply, and complexly, challenging the easy answers to our lives which fail to admit the frequently contradictory, illogical, tragic and plainly ugly sides of human nature and existence. Like the boy in “My Dead Father’s Bypass,” these poems tell deeper, more complicated truths than clichés, platitudes, or generalizations could possibly convey. And on a very practical level, the marketing of these poems as nature poems, wilderness poems, or environmental poems insures that they will be read only by those who least need to read them, those who already find themselves struggling with the challenges of environmental concerns.

Besides, the simple truth is no review, much less a 40-word blurb, stands a chance in hell of fairly suggesting the range, depth, power, vitality, and importance of these poems. Because of those qualities, among the thousands of books of poems I own, there is not a single one I will more often take from the shelf to reread.

100 Thousand Poets for Change

2011-09-24T10:49:00.003-04:00

I just sent my poem "Conjugal Rites" to President Obama, Representative McHenry, Senators Burr and Hagan, State Senator Allran, State Representative Hollo, and Governor Perdue as part of today's 100 Thousand Poets for Change initiative. I have other poems I may send them in the coming days. Here is a link to the 100TPC homepage if you're interested: http://www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange/.

Here is the poem I sent them today:

Conjugal Rites

I was the first she wanted to marry.
No surprise there. Every dad
a daughter’s first love. But then
she felt bad about excluding her mom,
decided the three of us should tie the knot.
We had to tell her you only marry one
other person, at least you plan it that way
and mommy and I were already married
to each other. She moved on to first
one brother, then the other, both of whom said
you can’t marry your brother. So then
she tried her best friend, a girl, asked
to be clear if girls could marry each other.
Already thrice denied what could we say
to make sense to a four-year-old.
Yes, of course, but only in some places,
only where love is not prescribed by law.

Flier for Hickory's 100 Thousand Poets for Change

2011-09-15T06:42:00.002-04:00

Flier for Hickory's 100 Thousand Poets for Change Event. Please post or print and post anywhere interested people might see.

NC Writers' Network Fall Conference Open for Registration

2011-09-08T09:32:00.001-04:00

NC Writers’ Network Fall Conference Open for Registration

One of NC’s largest annual writers’ events, the NC Writers’ Network Fall Conference, is now open for registration. The conference will take place this year November 18 through 20 at the Double Tree Hilton in Asheville, just a block from the entrance to Biltmore Estate.

The keynote address of this year’s conference will be given Friday night by award-winning novelist Silas House. Another highlight will be Saturday night’s performance by Asheville Poetry Review Founding Editor Keith Flynn and his band The Holy Men.

Master classes in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction will be offered by Sebastian Matthews, Tommy Hays, and Tony Abbott. Five workshop sessions, including 18 workshops in all spread across Saturday and Sunday, will feature instruction in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama from such well-known writers as Asheville’s Katherine Soniat and Holly Iglesias, Appalachian State professor Joseph Bathanti, novelist Ellyn Bache, nature writer George Ellison, and poets Scott Owens and Nancy Simpson.

A Marketing Mart with publishers and booksellers, Laura Hope-Gill, Nicki Leone, Stacy Hope Jones, and Laine Cunningham, will provide writers with an opportunity to create or refine an effective plan to pitch, promote, and sell their current, upcoming, or proposed books. Thirty-minute critique sessions with Bache, Cunningham, Rosemary Royston, or Jan Parker will provide in-depth literary critiques of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. And the Manuscript Mart will allow authors to pitch their manuscripts and get feedback from publishers, editors, and agents from Algonquin Books, Press 53, FinePrint Literary Management, John F. Blair Publishers, or Judith Ehrlich Literary Management.

As always numerous exhibitor tables will give participants the chance to chat with publishers, literary journals, support organizations, and other friends of writers.

Registration material and more information on the conference faculty can be found at www.ncwriters.org. All workshops and classes have limited capacity, and the conference is typically attended by several hundred participants, so early registration is important.

Lots of News from the Poetry Council

2011-09-08T08:47:00.001-04:00

LOTS OF NEWS FROM THE POETRY COUNCIL

The Poetry Council of NC is keeping quite busy these days, planning for its annual Poetry Day on October 1 in Salisbury while simultaneously starting up a new cycle of contests whose deadline for entry is November 21.

Poetry Day is a day-long celebration of poetry that will be held this year in the Crystal Peeler Lounge on the campus of Catawba College. Highlights of Poetry Day will include presentation of the 2011 Poetry Council contest winners, readings by those winners, the release of the council’s awards anthology titled Bay Leaves, and a live Poetry Slam competition. The event is open to anyone, and reservations may be made via the form found on the council’s website: www.poetrycouncilofnc.wordpress.com.

In 2012, the Council is moving Poetry Day from October to April to coincide with National Poetry Month. To facilitate this transition, the Council’s annual contests have already opened for submission and will close on November 21. The Council coordinates separate competitions for elementary, middle, and high school students, as well as adult competitions for free verse, traditional form poetry, light verse, and others. The Oscar Arnold Young Award is given to the best book of poems by a NC poet each year. Information on entering any of the contests is available on the Council’s website or by calling Ed Cockrell at 919-967-5834.

Entry in the youth contests is free, while most of the other categories have a $5 entry fee. First, second, and third place prizes ranging from $10 to $100 are given in most categories, and up to three honorable mentions are commonly named in each. All prizewinners and honorable mentions are published in Bay Leaves, and the poets are invited to read their poems at Poetry Day.

In 2012, Poetry Day will be held in Hickory, in the new Student Center on the campus of Catawba Valley Community College. Teachers interested in facilitating their students’ participation in the contests can contact Nancy Posey (nposey@embarqmail.com) for high school students or Michael Beadle (beadlepoet@yahoo.com) for elementary and middle school students. Local poet, Scott Owens, is available to visit classrooms to discuss these contests or coordinate workshops to get students started writing poetry. He can be reached at asowens1@yahoo.com.

Change in Venue for Hickory 100 Thousand Poets for Change Event

2011-09-07T19:25:00.002-04:00

Our venue for the Hickory 100 Thousand Poets for Change event has changed. Minetta Lane has gone out of business, so we will convene instead at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse, same date (9/24) and time (2:00-4:00).

We have 18 poets so far. Given 2 hours for reading, that should be about 2-4 poems per person, although you don't have to read any more than you want to (others will certainly fill in the blanks). We're going to do a "reading in the round." I'll start; then whoever has one that follows nicely can go next; and so on until we run out of time or poems.

Remember our themes are peace, sustainability, tolerance, diversity, civility, the arts, and education.

Remember to send me copies of the poems you read for a special NC 100 Thousand Poets issue of Wild Goose (due out 11/15). Previously published is okay for this special issue. I'll be collecting and selecting poems from across the state (perhaps as many as 150 poets), so I can't promise you acceptance until I see all the ones I get.

Remember also to send your poems to your legislators on 10/24. We want to flood their in-boxes with these ideas and with the presence of poetry. Here are the relevant addresses for the Hickory area:

President Barack Obama: contact form at http://whitehouse.gov

Representative Patrick McHenry: contact form at http://mchenry.house.gov

Senator Richard Burr: contact form at http://burr.senate.gov

Senator Kay Hagan: contact form at http://hagan.senate.gov

NC Senator Austin Allran: Austin.Allran@ncleg.net

NC Representative Mark Hollo: Mark.Hollo@ncleg.net

If there are other poets you want to invite to join us, ask them and if they say yes, let me know their names so I can get them "in the ring". Visit the 100 Thousand Poets website to see details on the other 499 events taking place on 9/24: http://www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange/

Review of The Best of Poetry Hickory

2011-09-06T12:02:00.001-04:00

Review
by Pris Campbell

The Best of Poetry Hickory Anthology

From my distant perch in Florida, I’ve long been convinced that something in the Carolina water breeds especially good poets. This anthology, packed with well-written, spell-binding poems, more than confirms my suspicions. These poems speak in an engaging voice to the reader rather than announcing ‘look at how good I am” by way of contrived metaphors or other poetic devices inserted simply for the sake of having them there. These poems are good. It’s not necessary for them to preen or crow to let us know it.

I like to read poems I can relate to, poems that move me, poems that give me a way of seeing the familiar in a new light. This book did all of that in spades.

I could easily quote lines from every poem but space allows only a few. Those chosen were a difficult call but they give an idea of the range of themes covered in the anthology.

Robert Abbate asks in “Ecce Homo”:

What would Jesus do
once he could be lured
to the place of the fractured
pistol-whipped skull
and once, in the freezing air
he could be lashed to a barbed
wire fence outside Laramie

Maureen Sherbondy continues the theme in a different way in “Praying at Coffee Shops in the South”:

What are those public interludes with God?
Two men at Starbucks holding hands
bent over in prayer leaning into the invisible

Tony Ricciardell brings us back home as he speaks to his now helpless father in “Sins of My Father”:

If I spoke to your mother the way you speak to your wife you would have crippled me, wouldn’t you? If I called your mother bitch or whore, if I curled curses at her the way you hurled curses at my mother, you would have kicked me down the stairs, wouldn’t you?

Malaika King Albrecht’s poem, “The Riddle Song” brings tears as she writes of her father singing “I gave my love a cherry’ as he massages her mother’s useless limbs, hoping her mother is able to hear him, hoping she is looking at him as he sings.

Ted Pope views family from the other direction in “Bright Child” as he watches his daughter move swiftly from infant to adulthood:

….bright child holy child child of all my hope and reverence I
saw her coming down 4th St again today and today would not
be like any other day oh no today I’m going to follow her to
see where she goes to get that glowing external primal essence…

And Joseph Bathanti offers a bawdier view of the South in “Peaches”:

On a roadhouse bathroom wall
in the peach town of Gaffney, South Carolina
a woman’s body laminates itself
across the face of a condom machine

These poems are jewels. If I could I would string them around my neck so I could reach up and feel their glow whenever I liked. Needless to say, I highly recommend this book.

The Best of Poetry Hickory is available at Taste Full Beans Coffee House or from Scott Owens (asowens1@yahoo.com) for just $5 -- All proceeds to Taste Full Beans in gratitude for hosting Poetry Hickory for four years. A reading from the anthology will take place on September 13, 5:30, at Taste Full Beans, and will feature 27 of the poets selected for the anthology.

Revised Upcoming Reading Schedule

2011-09-02T13:47:00.005-04:00

REVISED UPCOMING READING SCHEDULE
Sorry about the confusion. I've had a couple of new requests to read and made a couple of mistakes in the previous listing. This one is about as up to date as I can make it. At most of these events, I will be reading from the new book, "Something Knows the Moment," but I will sometimes mix in some of my older favorites and a few newer ones. I still have copies of "The Fractured World," "Paternity," and "The Nature of Attraction" that I can sell at each event.

9/10, 7:00, Joe Milford Poetry Show, http://www.blogtalkradio.com/joe-milford-show
9/13, 5:30, "Something Knows the Moment" Release Party, Taste Full Beans Coffeeshop, Hickory, NC
9/15, 6:00, Lazy Lion Bookstore, Fuquay-Varina, NC
9/16, 7:00, Lincoln County Cultural Center, Lincolnton, NC
9/17, 1:00-4:00, Momentous Writing Workshop, Coastal Carolina University, Pawley's Island, SC
9/24, 2:00-4:00, 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Minetta Lane Center, Hickory, NC
9/25, 2:00, McIntyre's Fine Books, Pittsboro, NC
10/14, Writers’ Night Out, Mountain Perk, Hiwassee, GA
10/15, Perpetual Writing Prompts, The Writers' Circle, Hayesville, NC
10/16, 2:00, NetWest Annual Picnic, Location to be determined
11/3, 7:00, Royal Bean Coffeehouse, Raleigh, NC
11/6, 3:00, Malaprops, Asheville, NC
11/6, 5:00, WordPlay with Jeff Davis, http://www.ashevillefm.org/wordplay
11/18-19, NCWN Fall Conference, Asheville, NC
12/9, 6:30, Barnhills, Winston-Salem, NC

NC 100 Thousand Poets for Change Events

2011-08-30T22:25:00.003-04:00

NORTH CAROLINA STATE-WIDE ACTIONS!

In North Carolina we’re using the Subtitle, Writers for Education. Our state just cut 13,000 teacher positions because the legislature didn’t want to extend a 3/4 of 1 percent sales tax. The UNC School of the Arts barely escaped closure due to the mandated 15% cut to the university system. The NC Arts Council has had to reduce programming and staff. To show our support for the arts in general, and writing in particular, we are offering a series of workshops and readings throughout the state.

RALEIGH- Renowned poet Betty Adcock (Slantwise, LSU Press) will be sitting on the sidewalk outside Quail Ridge Books from 11 – 1 offering free feedback on any poems people wish to bring by.She will be joined by Richard Krawiec (She Hands me the Razor, Press 53) and Tim McBride (The Manageable Cold, Triquarterly Books). Richard Krawiec will be teaching a free workshop – Where are you? Where are you going? – to the Raleigh Divorced Women’s Support Group, led by Caroline Huerta. Dorianne Laux (The Book of Men, W.W. Morrow) is going to involve her students in emailing poems to NC politicians who voted to cut spending for the arts.

In GREENSBORO- poet and fiction writer Valerie Nieman, who publishes with Press 53, will teach a workshop for children. It takes place from 1-4 at the Witherspoon Art Gallery, and is called Peeking Behind the Mask -Each day we go about our routine lives, but inside we are superheroes or explorers, pirates or rock stars, hiding our secret identities behind a mask of an unassuming face and daily clothes. With the backdrop of Witherspoon’s current exhibition, “Persona: A Body in Parts,” we’ll explore our own secret identities and “peek behind the mask” of famous folks (real or fictional) to imagine their thoughts and lives. One way to enter this secret world is to write a persona poem – persona meaning mask – in which we give a voice to that alternate identity. Join poet and novelist Valerie Nieman in the Witherspoon lobby for a drop-in poetry experience for all ages. In addition, use a variety of materials to create your own magnificent mask to wear. At 3:00 pm we’ll celebrate with live improvisational jazz and a spoken word sharing.

Also, Press 53, in WINSTON-SALEM, is going to ‘stock’ the tables at Wolfie’s on 4th Street with poems. So all the customers will have an assortment of poems to pursue as they down their Wolfie’s frozen custard and Krankie’s coffee

COLUMBIA- Here’s a bit of an unmapped activity. Gail Peck, a Charlotte poet, is driving to the beach on the 24th and plans to stop at one of her favorite restaurants, Tuscan Bio in Columbia, NC, along the way and see if she can read a poem to the kitchen staff. Then, at the beach, she’s going to read a poem to the marshland.

In CARRBORO- Maura High, a member of the Black Sox poetry group, will be gathering other guerilla poets, taking to the streets, stores, and cafes to give away poetry books, and also leave poems, homemade and dada, on unattended chairs throughout the city.

Beth Browne lives in rural CLAYTON, surrounded by farmland. She writes, “I’m thinking I’ll do something radical like put The Red Wheelbarrow on yard signs and post them along my road like the old shaving cream ads.”

CULLOWEHEE- In keeping with the North Carolina ‘theme’ of getting as much poetry out into the community as possible, former NC Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer (Southern Fictions, Jacar Press, Coming to Rest, Black Shawl, Catching Light – all from LSU Press) will be be passing out poems to the hundreds of attendees at the Mt. Heritage day at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee.

NC Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer, who publishes with LSU (and whose limited edition handmade book of sonnets (complete with a Confederate battle flag pulped into the cover paper), Southern Fictions, Jacar Press released, is going to organize an event in SYLVA.

Michael Beadle will be strolling Main St., WAYNESVILLE reading poems!

In the TRIANGLE AREA of North Carolina, Alice Osborn (Unfinished Projects) will be leading a flash mob that intends to visit as many coffee shops in the area as they can hit.

CHARLOTTE- Barbara Conrad has organized an open poetry reading and music at Atherton Farmers Market Saturday 9:30-11:30. Thanks Larry Sorkin. Tanja Bechtler, Richard Taylor and all poets!

In CHAPEL HILL- Paul Jones (ibiblio.org) is going to organize a program to tweet 100,000 poems (hopefully) on Sept. 24. Everyone can join in on that.

Grey Brown (What it Takes), and Stephanie Levin (Smoke of Her Body, Jacar Press) will be at Flyleaf Books from 11 – 1, sitting on the sidewalk to offer free feedback to all poets, children or adults, who wish to bring a poem by.

From Appalachian State University in BOONE- Joseph Bathanti (Land of Amnesia, Press 53) and Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Unaccountable Weather, Press 53 – out in Sept.) are co-organizing a program we’d like to encourage everyone to participate in. On Sept. 24 we will be encouraging all NC poets and poetry lovers to email poems to NC’s elected representatives. We are going to try to flood the email boxes with poetry. This is an activity everyone can participate in locally, and it only takes a few minutes. No haranguing, no pontificating, just email a poem. Or two or ten. Putting poetry into the inboxes of politicians, hopefully in such numbers they can’t ignore it.

DURHAM event is at The Regulator, Ninth Street, Durham. Get feedback on your poems, and have a poem written for you. On Saturday Sept 24 from 11 – 1. Al Maginnes(Ghost Alphabet, White Pines Press) and Florence Nash (Crossing Water, Fish Music) will be available to offer feedback on their poems for all aspiring poets and poetry lovers – children or adults. Chris Vitiello (Irresponsibility, Ahsahta Press) will be dressed as the Poetry Fox, sitting at a card table with his typewriter to make custom poems on the spot for anyone.

ALSO, Fleur de Lisa, the award-winning (Best Original Song, Harmony Sweeps, D.C. 2009) women’s vocal group who write all original music using poetry as lyrics, will be doing a mini-flash mob on Sept. 24 as part of the 100,000 Poets for Change event. They will be showing up at various locations in the DURHAM area, including shelters for people and animal.

In HICKORY- poet Scott Owens will have a dozen or more poets “reading in the round” at Minetta Lane Center for Arts and Peace in downtown Hickory from 2:00 to 4:00. Participants include Bill Griffin, Tim Peeler, Rand Brandes, Tony Ricciardelli, Bud Caywood, and many more. Anyone who is interested should contact Scott at asowens1@yahoo.com or 828-234-4266.

Steve Roberts (Another Word for Home), Addy McCulllough, and others will take to the streets of WILMINGTON and write poems on the sidewalks in chalk.

Hillsborough Health Center, HILLSBOROUGH, on Sept. 24 at 3pm Debra Kaufman (The Next Moment, Jacar Press) will lead a free workshop on Write to Health.

ASHEVILLE- Laura Hope-Gill of the Wordfest Festival will hold an event, details TBA.
www.ashevillewordfest.org.

Slight Change in Format for Poetry Hickory 4th Anniversary Celebration

2011-08-24T20:20:00.001-04:00

The response from poets for the Poetry Hickory 4th Anniversary Celebration has been much greater than I anticipated. When I first planned on having this double book release party (my new book and The Best of Poetry Hickory anthology), I figured we would get between a half dozen and a dozen poets to come and read their one poem from the anthology, so I thought it would make sense to give the anthology a half hour and I would take an hour for mine. Then when we went over a dozen, I changed it to where we would split the time evenly. Now, we have 23 poets who will be there to read their poems from the anthology. So, I'm still having my book release party, but I'm going to do just a brief (10 minute) reading from "Something Knows the Moment" just as a "warm-up" for the anthology. We will split those readers in half and take a break in the middle so that people can buy books, get signatures and refresh their drinks.

I look forward to seeing you all at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory on September 13. The readings will begin at 5:30 and should wrap up around 7:00. I will have plenty of copies of "Something Knows the Moment," which retails for $14.95, and the anthology, which sells for just $5. If you can't make it, but you want a book, let me know, and I will work out the shipping with you. And by the way, we will still have Writers' Night Out at 4:00.

Here is a complete list of the poets currently scheduled to read their poems from what is a truly wonderful collection:

Jeanne Ackley

Hazel Benau

Jessie Carty

Bud Caywood

Ann Chandonnet

M. Scott Douglass

Bill Griffin

Helen Losse

Dennis Lovelace

Doug MacHargue

Shane Manier

Ron Moran

Scott Owens

Tim Peeler

Julian Phelps

Ted Pope

Nancy Posey

David Poston

Tony Ricciardelli

Molly Rice

Donnie Smart

Kermit Turner

Devona Wyant

and maybe more

Should be quite the Poetry Party. Come for the anthology; come for my book; come for the poetry; come to meet some of these poets; come for the wine; just come for the good time!

I hope to see you there.

Send a Poem to Your Legislators on 9/24

2011-08-23T07:32:00.002-04:00

Here is a letter from Joseph Bathanti and Kathryn Kirkpatrick about how we can send poems to our legislators on 9/24 as participants in the 100 Thousand Poets for Change initiative. Here in Hickory, we will have 16 (or more) poets reading "in the round" from 2:00-4:00 at Minetta Lane.

Dear NC Poets:

As part of a global initiative called 100,000 Poets for Change http://www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange/), we are inviting you to participate in an action on September 24. On that day, please e-mail your county representative in our state legislature and our state representatives in the Congress in D.C. a poem of your choice. We are hoping to fill the inboxes of our elected officials with poetry as a way of registering our desire for a saner democracy.

Please use the poem’s title for the subject line, and place the poem itself in the body of the email, with your name and the town you live in at the bottom of it. No additional message should be inserted. Our aim is for the poems themselves to be the message. The poem you elect to send does not have to be political, per se, though it can be argued that all poems are political. Of course the subject matter remains solely your choice. We request, however, that this action be one that underscores our dignity as poets and the integrity of our art. Our intention is not to shout at our politicians, or in any way insult them, but to present a powerful united advocacy for change – and to alert them to our constituency.

You should use a personal email account, rather than a business or government account.

You can download spreadsheets for both the State Senate and House on the General Assembly Website - www.ncleg.net. For your representative’s address in the House in D.C., visit http://www.house.gov/ and enter your zip code. For Richard Burr’s Senate e-mail address, go to http://burr.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.ContactForm and for Kay Hagan’s contact address, go to http://hagan.senate.gov/contact/

When you send your poems, would you also please copy us – joseph.bathanti@gmail.com and kjkirkpatrick57@gmail.com – so that we can keep a record of this action?

Thanks very much for being involved in this important initiative.

Very best wishes,

Joseph Bathanti and Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Best of Poetry Hickory News

2011-08-18T08:27:00.004-04:00

I proofread the Best of Poetry Hickory manuscript today, and I am nearly overwhelmed by the quality of work it includes. So many of the poems are ones that I could easily call my favorite of the year, my favorite by a particular author, in many cases one of my all-time favorites. Here is a short list of poems in the anthology that I just can’t stop reading.

Rob Abbate’s “Ecco Homo”

Maureen Sherbondy’s “Praying at Coffee Shops in the South”

Rhett Trull’s “The End of the Hour”

Tony Ricciardelli’s “Sins of My Father”

Tony Abbott’s “Blood Red of Late October”

Malaika Albrecht’s “The Riddle Song”

Richard Allen Taylor’s “Playing Catch”

And there are many, many more. Main Street Rag is printing 250 copies of The Best of Poetry Hickory. 84 of those copies will go to contributors, and a dozen or so to libraries, collectors, etc. That will leave only about 150 for “public consumption.” They will be on sale for just $5 each at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory starting Sep 13 until they sell out. If you can’t get there but really want one, let me know, and we’ll work out the shipping.

Thanks to all of the wonderful poets who have come to Hickory and shared their work with us this year. And thanks to Scott Douglass and Main Street Rag for supporting Poetry Hickory and for this generous contribution to the series.

Here is an excerpt from Robert Abbate’s “Ecco Homo” just to give you a taste of what’s coming:

The religiously
intolerant would not see
the Crucified in disguise.
They would not hear
the gentle spirit’s refrain:
Forgive them even when
they know fully what they do.

Posted in Uncategorized | Edit | Leave a Comment »
Best of Poetry Hickory Anthology
August 18, 2011 by wildgoosepoetryreview

Contents of Wild Goose Poetry Review Summer 2011

2011-08-10T09:08:00.001-04:00

Read it all at www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com

Contents
Katherine June Abrams, Links
Katherine June Abrams, My Grandmother’s Confession
Celisa Steele, The Feeder
Celisa Steele, Pie at 3 AM
Joseph Milford, Janitor Moonlighting
Joseph Milford, Jekyll Island Afternoon
Joseph Milford, Domestic Dispute After Reading Some Stephen Crane Poems
Susan Rooke, How Do You Like Me Now
Diane Webster, Funeral
Diane Webster, Home Alone
John Stanizzi, Kayak
John Stanizzi, The Hat
Doug McHargue, The Color of My Room
Maren Mitchell, Submission Requirements
Maren Mitchell, Why We Want to Fly and Swim
Ron Moran, Suppose the Return of Christ
Tim Peeler, Faith CLXIV
Steve Roberts, Inundation
Steve Roberts, The Fractal Tide
Rosemary Royston, Reasons Not to Wear Pantyhose
Rosemary Royston, Brief Encounter on Stairwell
Larry Schug, Green Heron in Rain
Helen Losse, Flowers Along the Railway: A NC Triptych
Aaron Poller, The Chicken Slaughterhouse of Dobson

Reviews
John Lane, Review of Abandoned Quarry
Celisa Steele, Review of How Language Is Lost
Ron Rash, Review of Waking
John Thomas York, Review of Naming the Constellations
Corey Cook, Review of What to Do with a Dying Parakeet

Corrections

2011-08-03T11:10:00.002-04:00

My previous post left off a reading at Barnhill's in Winston-Salem at 6:30 on December 9.

And the Lincolnton reading will actually be at 7:00 on 9/16.

So, the whole, accurate schedule looks like this:

9/10, 7:00, Joe Milford Poetry Show, http://www.blogtalkradio.com/joe-milford-show
9/13, 5:30, "Something Knows the Moment" Release Party, Taste Full Beans Coffeeshop, Hickory, NC
9/16, 7:00, Lincoln County Cultural Center, Lincolnton, NC
9/17, 1:00-4:00, Momentous Writing Workshop, Coastal Carolina University, Pawley's Island, SC
9/22, 5:00, Cellar 101, Fuquay-Varina, NC
9/25, 2:00, McIntyre's Fine Books, Pittsboro, NC
10/14, Young Harris College, Young Harris, GA
10/15, Perpetual Writing Prompts, The Writers' Circle, Hayesville, NC
11/3, 7:00, Royal Bean Coffeehouse, Raleigh, NC
11/6, 3:00, Malaprops, Asheville, NC
11/6, 5:00, WordPlay with Jeff Davis, http://www.ashevillefm.org/wordplay
11/18-19, NCWN Fall Conference, Asheville, NC
12/9, 6:30, Barnhills, Winston-Salem, NC

"Something Knows the Moment" is Out

2011-08-03T07:06:00.004-04:00

My new book of poems, Something Knows the Moment, is out. I got my copies yesterday. If you pre-ordered, yours should be arriving soon. If you haven't ordered yet, you can still get them from Main Street Rag or if you want a signed one, send me a check for $17, and I'll get one out to you, or you could come to the Book Release Party on September 13 at 5:30 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory.

Other scheduled readings include:
9/17 Coastal Carolina University, Pawley's Island, SC, 1:00
9/22 Cellar 101, Fuquay-Varina, NC, 5:00
9/25 McIntyre's, Pittsboro, NC, 2:00
10/4 Lincoln County Cultural Center, Lincolnton, NC
10/14 Young Harris College, Young Harris, GA
11/3 Royal Bean Coffeehouse, Raleigh, NC, 7:00
11/6 Malaprops, Asheville, NC, 3:00

I will also be teaching workshops at the NCWN Fall Conference in Asheville 11/18-19 and at The Writers' Circle in Hayesville 10/14 and will be on the Joe Milford Poetry Show 9/10 and WordPlay with Jeff Davis on 11/6

Review of Solo Cafe 8 & 9: Teachers & Students

2011-08-01T20:52:00.001-04:00

Review
by Scott Owens

SOLO CAFÉ, 8 & 9: TEACHERS & STUDENTS
Edited by Lenard Moore, et. al.
Solo Press, 2011
ISBN: 0941490505

I have never written a review of a magazine. It’s not the sort of thing I usually set out to do as most magazines don’t cohere tightly enough to be written about as a single piece. But I have written reviews of anthologies, and when I came across the 2011 issue of the annual journal Solo Café, it was clear that this was as much an anthology as it was a journal, and the subject of this journal/anthology, “Teachers & Students,” was of particular interest to me.

The various poetry and prose pieces found in this anthology are just the sort that bring great joy, contemplation, and insight to teachers, students and poets, and perhaps most of all to teacher-poets or poet-teachers, however one with such dual “citizenship” might identify oneself. One will find here a full range of learning and teaching situations, including “students writing their fierce and luminous poems” in Laura Boss’s “Workshop at the Great Falls, Paterson,” where “William Carlos Williams . . . looked / at these same falls so many decades ago” and both prose and poetic tributes to specific teachers, like Earl Sherman Braggs’s “Mrs. Davis,” who “farm plowed and pushed a field full / of books . . . . / taught Shakespeare till Shakespeare, / himself, shook / the classroom walls . . . . /” and made clear that in the world of her students, the world of ongoing race war, “’To be or not to be’ was never a question” but rather an existential imperative.

As Braggs’s poem suggests, learning is not always a simple matter of X’s and O’s. When things go smoothly, as presented in Sally Buckner’s “Teacher,” learning is a fine balance of knowledge and passion that meet as they might nowhere more powerfully than in a classroom:

I will fill your plate as full as you will let me. //
I’ll bring the bread,
and you -- with yearning green in your young heart
and eyes that can see newly each new moment --
You bring the wine.

On the other hand, sometimes learning is a struggle between creativity and correctness, between autonomous vision and received knowledge or expectations of obedience, as in Randy Pait’s “Boy in a Classroom” or Susan Meyers’ “First Grade,” where a young student, having excitedly colored “a bold yellow sun” belatedly discovers “Words her other hand, / . . . / has hidden from her: / Color the pretty ball red.”

Just so, this anthology provides what at times seems an exhaustive variety of educable opportunities, demonstrating learning from history (Kelly Cherry’s “War and Peace: Cliff Notes”), and philosophy (George Burns’s “Partly Heliotropic”), from art (Ray Gonzalez’s “The Long Library”), and books (Michael Harper’s “Negritude: a Poem Written When Everything Else Fails to Translate”), from teachers (Kevin Lucia’s “Physics”) and observation (Terre Ouwehand’s “Vital Signs”). Similarly, the selections here cover every level of education: first lessons (Shayla Hawkins’s “The Seed”), grade school (Lenard Moore’s “The Art of Living”), middle school (Lamont Steptoe’s “Instructions”), high school (Nancy Simpson’s “In Room Nine”), college (Ray Gonzalez’s “Fear of Dying”) and adulthood (Teddy Macker’s “Teacher”).

In addition to the poems, a selection of reviews and essays further examine the influences particular teachers have had upon their students who have become writers. Of particular note in these prose selections is the frequency with which the word “generosity” is mentioned in regards to a poet-teacher. It is there in Mary Ann Cain and George Kalamaras’s reflections on Judith Johnson and Muriel Rukeyser, in Karen McKinnon’s recollection of George Sidney, in Shelby Stephenson’s discussion of Guy Owen, and in John Tritica’s homage to Mary Rising Higgins and Gene Frumkin.

If I had known about this journal before it went to press, I would have certainly submitted a poem of my own, and so I add it here to those in Solo Café 8 & 9 not because I think it is as good as those in the journal but because I think it expresses what every teacher-poet knows and one of the things the wonderful writers collected here would like us all to remember. I include it as tribute to the spirit of the poet-teachers this volume celebrates and includes and as tribute to the poet-teachers that have been so instrumental in my own life: Galway Kinnell, Robert Waters Grey, Paul Nelson, Tim Peeler, Ann Carver, Hepzhibah Roskelly, Stuart Dischell, Fred Chappell, and many others:

All There Is to Say

If it happens that you find yourself
at the front of a room full of people
younger than you
listening to all you have to say
about what you think you know
and suddenly you hear
from an open window
you hadn’t even noticed was open
the voice of a mockingbird
as clear as the voice of God
singing in every language at once
you owe it to yourself
to stop in the almost silence
and say out loud, Listen

Joining the Conversation: A Review of David Rigsbee's "The Pilot House"

2011-07-26T08:49:00.001-04:00

Joining the Conversation
A Review of David Rigsbee’s The Pilot House (Black Lawrence, 2011)

(First published in "The Pilot" newspaper)

If you read enough poetry you come to realize that most, if not all, poets are involved in a dialogue that enriches each poem. Sometimes the involvement is a conscious one. You read a poem, put the book down and begin one of your own related to what you just read. Sometimes it is unconscious. Without realizing it, you carry a bit of a poem around in your head for weeks, months, years, and then write what you think is singularly yours, but others may recognize the relation to Whitman, Williams, Neruda. And sometimes it is something even less than (or perhaps more than) unconscious. You write from “something in the air,” out of the time, the world, in which you exist intellectually, emotionally, or physically. You respond unconsciously to a moment that other poets have likewise responded to or are simultaneously responding to. In that process a number of poets separately create a dialogue that is further joined by every reader who in their turn puts words to paper.

When I picked up David Rigsbee’s new book of poems, The Pilot House, and read the first poem, “After Reading,” I felt as if he and I must be writing from much the same experience, as if he had joined a lengthy, ongoing debate I was involved in and had been writing about for some time. The crux of that debate is summarized in Rigsbee’s brilliant opening lines:

I put down the book thinking
how purity is a curse, how it
puts us off the human
for whom it better fits
to turn away from the shore
in favor of the garbage and the grief.

To turn away from the safe, secure “shore” of “purity” and wade or swim into “the garbage and the grief” of human existence is indeed an unnerving venture, one that demands courage and unblinking honesty, but Rigsbee achieves this undertaking with admirable aplomb and sensitivity by using the familiar as a touchstone for the more disturbing. Thus, each poem resonates with previously unconsidered connections: Cary Grant hanging from Lincoln’s Mt. Rushmore nose and transcendence; Latin poetry and the mutability of what passes as even basic human knowledge; yoga and the inevitable passing of every human endeavor.

These are not poems to be taken or undertaken lightly. A brother’s suicide, a friend’s mastectomy, contemplations of one’s own mortality, a father’s death from cancer and the manic, last-minute struggle for his soul that precedes it, these are poems that readily admit the seriousness of life, and that look unflinchingly into the faces of fear, uncertainty, loss and hope all the while refusing the easy sedative of oversimplified explanations like faith, chance, or biology. These are poems that insist we examine the whole human experience, the good, the bad, the illimitably ineffable, and the hopeless and hopeful ways in which we react to it and try to create meaning from it.

Review of Ron Moran's "The Jane Poems"

2011-07-21T16:37:00.001-04:00

REVIEW
by Scott Owens
(first published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)

THE JANE POEMS
by Ronald Moran
Clemson University Digital Press (2011)
ISBN: 9780984259854

Simply put, this is a beautiful book! Anyone who has ever loved someone and lost them, anyone who has known love or loss, anyone who loves memorable, well-crafted, emotionally powerful poetry, will love this book, which reminds us of the vital lesson Galway Kinnell gave us thirty years ago in his best poem, “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight:”

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

These poems begin at the beginning of the speaker’s relationship with the title character, Moran’s late wife, Jane. In “The Courtship,” Moran charmingly tells us how he, as a young man, took off his tee shirt and mowed “the same // patch of lawn over and over” “on a chance she’d be riding // in a car down the hill that day”, “an offering of my unrehearsed // goods in early summer.” He follows this with poems of tender intimacy that show the relationship between the speaker and Jane growing over the years. In “Double Passage in Mid-Life,” he says to Jane, “I turn to fit the contour of your life.” In “Weddings,” he comments, “No surprise that we’re // getting into each other’s / dreams.” And in “Room by Room,” he fashions a wonderful analogy for how a marriage is constructed: “Room by room we are taming / this house built sideways / and close to a narrow street.” In poem after poem, Moran conveys the depth of this relationship through fresh, effective and vital imagery.

The second section of poems tells the story of how the speaker spent the last years of his 50-year relationship with Jane living with her illness and with all the feelings commensurate with such experience: stubborn optimism, fear, dread, sorrow, uncertainty. We first discover the illness along with the speaker in “Mirrors,” where he sits in the doctor’s waiting room trying to “flash” his “new smile” as if he “could // do something to face up to this . . . news now slowly coming to light / in pictures at the end of the hall.” Moran takes us through the various stages of emotion one faced with the illness of a loved one will inevitably experience. In “Tic Tacs,” he muses, “What will I do / if your heart closes up / like a sundrop after dark?” In “Jane” and “Foreplay” he answers the more important question of what he must do now, expressing empathy for Jane and accepting the responsibility of caring for her. At several points in this book, Moran thanks Jane for “saving his life.” In “The Breakdown” we see one of those points when we hear Jane helping him learn what to make of their experience with illness:

as we held
each other, I said “What am I going to do
when you die?”

and she responded, as if she would never die,
and that, hey,
we still had each other, and let’s make the best
of it now.

The emotional process the speaker goes through in accepting inevitable loss as well as the responsibility of caring for another and learning to make the most of every experience we have culminates in “A Blessing,” perhaps the book’s most powerful poem:

I cup her hand leisurely in mine, closing
it slowly, feeling her tremors until my hand

calms hers, and I whisper, “Time to sleep”;
and as she does, I count interludes between
breaths, longer than ever before but steady,
then release her, knowing how blessed I am.

The final section of poems deals with Jane’s death and the speaker’s life afterwards. The first poem in the section, “Lines of Demarcation,” describes the speaker’s discovery of Jane shortly after her passing. It is one of the most powerful poems I have ever read:

she was on her back, her mouth
wide open
as before, but her thin and bruised body
did not twitch.

She was still, like a figure in a photograph,
not gasping
for breath as when I left her room.
I tried to close
her right eye, barely open, but it would not
stay shut.

The nurse said, “Do you want a few minutes
alone with her?”
I said I’m OK, which I was not, but I only knew
later
how much I was not OK and never would be
again.

The remaining poems take the reader through a second process: the process of grieving, remembering, and coming to terms with being alone. The poems describe the journey with remarkable honesty, admitting all the complexity, depth, and difficulty of grief without trivializing it with oversimplified platitudes, concluding only with a measured joy that might best be called, appreciation:

I keep thinking of E.M. Forster’s “Only connect,”
and all I want

is to rerun my life with Jane, beginning in June, where
under
an oak in Walnut Hill Park, we both asked, “Can it work?”
Yes, it did.

Ultimately, this book about love and loss becomes a celebration and an expression of gratitude. No more stirring tribute to the power of another in our life, to a relationship, to love, has been written. Nor has there been anything more helpful for any who face the prospect of living with a loved one’s dying. Moran has achieved those most poetic of ambitions, catharsis and relevance, transforming his life into art that is transformative for the rest of us.

Thinking About the Next Big Bang

2011-07-15T06:18:00.002-04:00

(first published in Outlook)

Thinking about the Next Big Bang in the Galaxy at the Edge of Town

In the Galaxy at the edge of town
there is still plenty of fresh air,
space is abundant, light
is spread evenly everywhere.

Children keep rattling wheels
moving forward, the machinery
of produce continues,
seven languages are spoken.

A homeless man seeks shelter,
jacket pulled tight around him,
orbs of eyes concealed
beneath rings of his hat’s brim.

Stockboys wait for beauty
to descend and need them, they dream
constellations in their hands,
spin cans to face the front.

Potentialities, polarities, cosmic
design are all worked out
in the commerce of heavenly bodies.
Everything moves in perpetual orbit.

A man walking between rows
wonders at the infinity of choice
spread out before him, thinks
one day decisions won’t matter.

At closing time they walk
towards the black hole
of windows, afraid of no
gravity but their own.

3 July Events

2011-07-09T05:08:00.003-04:00

3 July Events

July is typically a pretty quiet month for poetry in the Hickory area, but this month I'm involved in three big events.

Poetry Hickory featuring Helen Losse and John York, July 12, 6:30 - 8:00, Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse. Open Mic readers are Kim Teague and Brooke Johnson (1 10-minute slot open -- call me (828-234-4266) or email me (asowens1@yahoo.com) if you want it. Writers' Night Out 5:00-6:30.

Poetry Lincolnton featuring myself, M. Scott Douglass, Jonathan K. Rice, Helen Losse, Devona Wyant, Shane Manier, and Morgan DePue, July 15, 7:00, Lincoln Cultural Center (403 East Main St., Lincolnton, NC)

Greatest Writing Prompt Ever, 3-Day Creative Writing Workshop with Scott Owens, at Minetta Lane Center for the Arts and Peace, July 21, 28, and August 4, 270 Union Square, downtown Hickory. This workshop will get you writing and keep you writing for years to come. Appropriate for all genres. Revision and publication will also be discussed. Cost is $75. Email michael.minettalane@gmail.com or call 828-446-4451 to register. For more information, visit http://minettalanecenter.org/events_calendar/

Review of Nancy Posey's "Let the Lady Speak"

2011-07-08T06:53:00.000-04:00

Review
by Scott Owens

LET THE LADY SPEAK
by Nancy Posey
Highland Creek Books, 2010
ISBN: 9780982085820

So what makes a writer put into words all the joyous, difficult, embarrassing, sad truths of one’s life? Hunger. A hunger unlike that known by animals, a hunger that cannot be named but can be endlessly described. The same hunger that Nancy Posey knowingly saves for the last poem in her new collection Let the Lady Speak. Ironically, the summative hunger, the hunger of all humanity, she captures in the poem “Hungry” is the first hunger of humanity: Eve’s hunger to be, fully, to partake of existence consciously, to experience and speak truly. In the poem, Eve says, “Who could have blamed me if I had said, when asked / why, I was just so hungry, and the fruit looked so good.”

The poems in Let the Lady Speak seek to express, with a particularly feminine quality, that hunger for conscious, autonomous existence, and in expressing it to, at least temporarily and partially, satisfy it. James Agee’s classic book of Southern culture is called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a title taken from the ancient Hebrew text, Ecclesiasticus. Posey’s title could just as easily be Let Us Now Praise Famous Women, as the poems juxtapose the voices of Scarlet O’Hara, Guenevere, Amelia Earhart, Hamlet’s Gertrude, Eve, and Penelope with the voices of the poet, the poet’s mother, the poet’s daughter, etc. But Posey’s actual title hearkens back to a tradition just as old as that invoked by Agee, namely that of patriarchy and misogyny. Most of us have little difficulty remembering a time when women often had to be given such permission as the title implies in order to speak or at least be listened to, and so the hunger expressed in these poems is not just the human hunger to experience the world and speak of it but a somewhat more frustrated and still sometimes denied feminine hunger.

The wonderful thing about these poems is that this deep feminist subtext is just that, a subtext. The surface of the poems is much less serious, much more readily accessible, even playful, such that any reader, feminist or otherwise, philosopher or pleasure-reader, can find enjoyment in them. Take these lines, for example, from “Or Maybe the Day after That,” spoken by Scarlet O’Hara:

Right now I have no plans
to make plans. Instead,
I’m going to sit right here
at the foot of the stairs
and have a good cry,
and I don’t care if anyone
gives a damn or not.
Maybe tomorrow my thoughts
will come clearer — or
maybe the day after that.

Certainly there is a great deal about life and our approach to it for the literary critic, the hermeneutist, the philosopher to consider in these lines, but most of us, regardless of how “deeply” we want to read, would enjoy the playfulness of hearing Scarlet’s most famous line revisited and playfully combined with Rhett’s.

A similar playfulness appears in “unvoiced” poems like the wonderfully titled “Hippopotomonstosesquippedaliophobia,” which according to the epigraph means “fear of big words.” The speaker of this surprising and tender love poem begins, “Shunning Latinate constructions, I choose / instead the simple Anglo-Saxon / monosyllabic words.” Then, true to her word, she concludes with the monosyllabic proclamation, “We will share one sweet kiss.”

A considerably less playful revisitation of familiar perspectives is offered in several poems, including “Guenevere,” where the title character grows cynical and impatient with the limitations of traditional roles and expectations. She knows, as always, that she will “be set / free before” she bursts “into flames” and that “the one / who makes the move / will certainly expect” her “gratitude to burn / hotter than this fire,” but she has become disenchanted with this cat and mouse game in which she is always the object and never the subject, always the acted upon and never the actor. She confesses, “I now feel / cold as a winter cave, / surrounded but alone.”

Whether playful or serious, familiar or exotic, what arises from all of the voices of these poems is the singular voice of a contemporary woman full of the complexities such identity would imply. Sincere, accessible, insightful, and charming, ultimately, the poems in Nancy Posey’s Let the Lady Speak are in a voice we can all enjoy . . . and learn from.

Review of Gary McDowell's American Amen

2011-07-07T10:08:00.001-04:00

REVIEW
by Scott Owens
(first published in Pirene's Fountain

AMERICAN AMEN
by Gary L. McDowell
Dream Horse Press, 2010
ISBN: 9781935716044

“Between dawn and dusk / is purgatorial,” says Gary McDowell in “Forever Falling Off or Out,” a poem in his stimulating new collection, American Amen. Night, that time of the unconscious, these lines imply, may be heaven or hell, but either way it is beyond our powers to control. Thus, the proper concern of mankind is that time between, that time of striving, of committing sins and making amends, of doing what we can to make the best of our conscious existence.

In keeping with this existential positioning, the best of these poems explore the coexistent contraries of human nature--the selfish and selfless, the savage and loving--and the thin veil of comfort that separates these polar inclinations. The speaker of “Winter” tells us:

I am not that far removed
from cracking bones
to put food in my stomach
. . . . . . . . . .
---------------------------------
I am not that far removed
from eating only what I catch
---------------------------------
I am not that far removed
from being afraid of waking
to find my family vanished.

Part of what we do to fend off our own savagery in this purgatorial existence is embodied by this book of poems, by any art, by any objectification of our psyche. In “Too Damn Perfect,” the speaker tells us “I’m trying to translate my misgivings into precipitation.” The line makes a fair statement about the artist’s purpose--translating misgivings into that which moves things forward--and perhaps just as fair a statement of what we all should be doing.

No one should think, however, that such an examination of life will be inevitably and invariably somber. One of the joys of this collection, in fact, is the sense of humor and humility frequently exhibited by the poems. In “Weather, Weather,” for example, the speaker lists his “greatest moments: eight hours of consecutive sleep, / four cheeseburgers in ten minutes, two women in my lifetime.” And later in the same poem he acknowledges, “I know that my greatest moment will one day be clogged in glaciers” and “I sometimes / wish I had more to record.” Similarly, and perhaps ultimately, he acknowledges in “Back Home” that “it’s impossible to get this right.” Fortunately, for those of us who manage to find these poems, none of these humbling facts about human endeavor has kept McDowell to “get this right.” And I hope, as I suspect McDowell does, that all of us will take up the same challenge of making meaning where uncertainty is the only thing granted.

Poet Publishes Seven

2011-06-24T11:47:00.003-04:00

Here is an article about my forthcoming book from Barbara Burns at Outlook

Poet Publishes Seven
(first published in Outlook, 23 June 2011)

“These poems are necessary,” writes former NC Poet Laureate Fred Chappell about Hickory poet Scott Owens’s soon-to-be-released new collection of poems, Something Knows the Moment.

According to Chappell, Owens’s seventh book is “about the nature of God, the nature of faith, of doubt, of trust and distrust, disillusion and resignation.” And he adds, “Occasionally the subject of hope is addressed.”

Joe Milford, host of the Joe Milford Poetry Show, says of Owens that he “stares steadfastly into the unrelenting zero as if trying to pierce the other side of being itself with laser-like intensity.” He states that Owens “forces the reader to ponder his own nature and humanity,” and Milford concludes “there is a tenderness in this book that might shame you.”

Scott Owens is the founder of Poetry Hickory, editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, vice-president of the Poetry Council of NC, and an instructor of English and creative writing at CVCC.

His more than 800 published poems have received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writers Network, the Poetry Society of SC, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the NC Poetry Society.

Having read at hundreds of schools, libraries, bookstores and coffee shops, Owens describes himself as an activist for and through poetry. His articles on poetry can be read regularly in Outlook and on his blog at www.scottowensmusings.blogspot.com.

Something Knows the Moment will be released by Main Street Rag Publishing Company on August 2. Copies can be ordered now at an advance order discount of just $9 through July 19 at www.mainstreetrag.com.

Sample poems from the book as well as three other recent books by Owens can also be found at this website.

A book launch party and reading will be held at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory on Tuesday, September 13, at 6:30.

The Death of Poetry Revisited

2011-06-07T23:46:00.000-04:00

The Death of Poetry Revisited

Not quite a year ago, I wrote a column titled “The Reports of Poetry’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” in which I suggested the vibrant poetic community in the small town of Lincolnton, NC, was evidence of poetry’s continued vitality. I’ve just wrapped up accepting submissions to the annual Oscar Arnold Young Contest for an outstanding book of poems written in the previous year by a NC poet. As a result I have new information to support my claim countering the common supposition that nobody reads, writes, buys, or cares about poetry anymore.

The Poetry Council of NC received 25 submissions to the contest. That means there were at least 25 books of poetry published by NC writers in 2010 alone. Actually, from subsequent conversations with other writers, I know of 5 others that weren’t submitted. So, at least 30 books of poetry were published by NC writers in 2010, and I suspect there were even more than that. Regardless of the exact number, that is a lot of poetry for something “no one is doing or reading anymore.” I doubt there were that many novels by NC writers published in the same year.

The books came from both well-established poets like David Rigsbee, Joseph Bathanti and Stephen Smith and first-time book publishers like Malaika King Albrecht and Jodi Barnes. There were a lot from the Raleigh area, 9 in fact, but they also came from Pinehurst, Gastonia, Wilmington, and even Hickory. And they came from established presses like Main Street Rag, Finishing Line and New South Books, as well as newer presses like Jacar and Big Table.

The selection of one of these books as the outstanding book of poetry from last year will not be an easy task. There is a great deal of quality work represented here. I have written favorable reviews of 10 of them myself, and 1 of them was published after my recommendation. If I were the judge, I think I would have to draw straws to choose among my half dozen favorites. Fortunately for my own sanity I’m not the judge who has to make that selection.

The results of the contest will be released later this summer. The winner, second place finisher, and a couple of honorable mentions will be given the opportunity to read from their winning works at Poetry Day to be held at Catawba College in Salisbury on October 1. The winner and second place finisher will also have a selection of their work published in the Poetry Council’s annual anthology of contest winners, Bay Leaves. For more information, visit www.poetrycouncilofnc.wordpress.com or contact me at asowens1@yahoo.com or by phone at 828-234-4266.

Poetic Response to "The Gravedigger's Roots"

2011-06-02T08:39:00.001-04:00

A Poetic Response to “The Gravedigger’s Roots”
(first published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)

I don’t usually publish my own poems in my column, but a while back I did publish my poetic response to Jessie Carty’s book “Paper House” because the poem served as a sort of “review” of her book. I did the same thing after reading Tony Abbott’s “New and Selected Poems.”

The fact that a book prompts me to write a poem of my own says a great deal about the impact the book has on me. Writing a poem, after all, is not an easy thing to do. It would be easier just to move on to the next book. Some books, however, “move in” once you read them. They take up residence in your psyche -- the place where most poems are born.

Such was the case with both Carty’s and Abbott’s books and now with Robert King’s “The Gravedigger’s Roots.” This 2009 collection from Shared Roads Press consists of 51 poems written from the perspective of a persona whose significant role in the world is that of a gravedigger. While such a perspective might lead some to assume the poems are inherently macabre, what the reader finds instead is poetry with a wide range of emotional and philosophical contexts all connected by the ever-looming presence and awareness of that ultimate human reality, mortality. I personally found the poems to be refreshingly Romantic in their dealing with that common inevitability. The underlying message of these poems certainly echoes the work of both Whitman and Emerson, but the styles, language and imagery have all been updated to make the reading more immediately relevant and enjoyable.

Readers interested in ordering their own copy of “The Gravedigger’s Roots” can do so at www.sharedroads.net. Now here is my poetic response to the book. The italicized line is stolen from one of Kings’ poems.

The Keeper
after Robert S. King

Heel on shoulder,
hands gripping the shaft,
shift weight forward,
press down,
thin roots popping as the blade moves through,
lean back,
lift.

A hole the only thing it makes,
absence, empty space,
and yet without it, nothing grows,
necessity the smallest understand.

Most come here not to die
but simply to be dead.
Precious few come to live
and do the work
of keeping things going.

Annual Issue of Catawba Released

2011-06-01T12:54:00.002-04:00

Celebrating Catawba’s 2nd (or 14th) Year

Depending on your perspective, the new issue of Catawba, CVCC’s annual literary and arts journal released May 27, is either the 2nd or 14th issue of the journal. Not many magazines can claim such an uncertain history, but such is the fate of many things dependent upon changing annual budgets and the work of volunteers.

What is now Catawba began as Synaesthesia in 1987 as the brainchild of CVCC instructors Tim Peeler and Tricia Hayes. For four years Synaesthesia published art and literature by both CVCC students and artists and writers from around the country. When Hayes left CVCC, the magazine went into dormancy, only to be revived 7 years later by Peeler and Nancy Risch with the title Sanctuary.

Sanctuary, which focused more on student work, was published for 7 years before falling victim to budgetary belt-tightening. One more issue entitled Sanctuary was published as an online journal in 2009 under the guidance of Peeler, Jerry Sain, and CVCC photography instructor, Clayton Joe Young.

Then, in 2010, the format was once again changed to a print journal focusing exclusively on CVCC student work. The journal was renamed Catawba, and edited by CVCC instructors Peeler, Young, Scott Owens, Brian Morris, Kevin Keck, and Robert Canipe. The second issue in this format was released at a launch party at CVCC on May 27 with the assistance of Anne Williams and Linda Lutz.

At the launch party students whose photos had been selected were displayed while those whose poems and stories had been chosen read from their work. Featured student photographers included Weston Bethancourt, Joy Barr, Amy Frady, Micah Harshbarger, Todd Money, Ashley Mosteller, Tennille Mullery, Jessica Prieto, Lana Ruffini, Stephanie Turner, Tiffany Ward (Student Editor), and Chris Wood. Student poets were Bethea Buchanan, Jeni Conklin (Student Editor), Carol Howard, Spencer Huffman, Kaitlin Leathers, Dennis Lovelace, and Kim Teague. Short stories were published by Stephanie Jo Young and Micah Harshbarger.

Copies of this year’s Catawba can be picked up in the CVCC library or by contacting Tim Peeler at tpeeler@cvcc.edu. Here is a poem by Dennis Lovelace to serve as a sample of the journal’s contents.

Fatherhood by Proxy
by Dennis Lovelace

Standing at the bottom of the staircase,
“Girls, I’m going to work. Come and give
me a hug and a kiss.”
A herd of elephants descending
with you in the lead,
raven tresses surrounding your features,
head down, brown eyes peeking
up at me, “Can I have one too?”
Leaning down, your tiny arms encircle my neck
tightly squeezing, a peck on my cheek.
I feel the chink in my armor
as you slip past into my heart.

Rosemary Royston Blogs on The Nature of Attraction

2011-05-23T17:57:00.001-04:00

Wonderful Georgia poet, Rosemary Royston, whom I spent some time with this weekend at the Blue Ridge Book Festival in Flat Rock, NC, has written a blog entry on The Nature of Attraction. Here is a link to her blog: http://theluxuryoftrees.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/the-nature-of-attraction/

Last Things

2011-05-18T21:54:00.004-04:00

I don't usually post my own poems here, but I wrote this today after hearing the latest Apocalyptic prediction, and since it's all going to end on Saturday, I figured this might be my last chance for it to be read.

Poem for This Saturday's Apocalypse
May 18, 2011
by Scott Owens

Put your things in order.
Say your last farewells.
Make contrition, complete penance.
Say your prayers. Wait.

The signs are unmistakable:
earthquakes, Japanese tsunamis,
Mississippi floods, tornadoes
in the mountains of Tennessee.

The world ends again
this Saturday, the 12th time
in my lifetime. Of course,
the math might be faulty.

The numbers might not add up
and the words -- who can say
what they really say
until the end of days?

One thing only is certain:
one of these days
if we just keep guessing,
someone is bound to be right.

June 14 Poetry Hickory & Workshop

2011-05-17T09:43:00.001-04:00

Six Degrees of Collaboration

2011-05-14T07:29:00.003-04:00

Six Degrees of Collaboration:
An Essay on the Creative Process in the Second Person
by Scott Owens

(first published in Pirene's Fountain)

You decide to write a poem. You’ve read plenty of poetry, so you have some idea of what you’re doing. You figure you don’t need anyone’s help to do this. You certainly don’t need to collaborate with anyone. Nevertheless, as soon as you use the first word, in fact, as soon as you decide to write a poem, you enter into what I’ll call FIRST DEGREE COLLABORATION or UNCONSCIOUS UNILATERAL COLLABORATION. Everyone does it. It is, in fact, inescapable. Any use of language is influenced by every use of language we have encountered. Any attempt to write a poem is influenced by every poem we’ve encountered, even by the idea of certain arrangements of words constituting this thing we’ve learned from others to call a poem. It’s Frost’s line from “The Tuft of Flowers:” “Men work together, I told him from the heart / whether they work together or apart.”

With a finished draft in front of you, you realize that the poem echoes something else you’ve read, maybe something by Frost or Williams, Whitman or Dickinson, or maybe something more recent that you’ve read online, and you decide that the poem would gain texture and depth through intertextuality, by playing up that connection with another poem. So you find the piece being initially unintentionally imitated, and you make the imitation intentional, purposeful. You’ve just committed SECOND DEGREE COLLABORATION or CONSCIOUS UNILATERAL COLLABORATION. Not all poets do this, and I would guess that no poet does it all the time, but most good poets become at some point aware of their influences and utilize them on a conscious level. It remains a unilateral collaboration because the poem or poet being imitated played no active role in deciding to be imitated.

So you finish the poem, not really thinking that you’ve collaborated with anyone in an active way, but you decide, as so many poets do, that you’re proud of your creation and you want to show it to someone, someone, perhaps, whose work you admire, presuming that your admiration means they would appreciate your work as well. When you do, your audience is suitably impressed; however, they suggest that it might be stronger if you did something a little differently. Upon reflection you realize that they’re right, and you make the recommended change. Now you’re guilty of THIRD DEGREE COLLABORATION or CONSCIOUS BILATERAL COLLABORATION. Obviously, you intentionally, consciously, even pre-meditatedly accepted someone else’s help in this creation. Granted, it wasn’t an equitable bilateral collaboration. Your critiquer didn’t wield as much power in the final decision as you did, but nonetheless there were two conscious minds at work on the same product.

As you think about what you’ve just done, you come to the conclusion that you liked it. You surmise that most poets do it this way, and that since, to borrow a line from Frost again, “What worked for them might work for you,” you decide to do it again, only this time consciously so from the very beginning. You commit one or both variations of FOURTH DEGREE COLLABORATION: SERIAL CONSCIOUS UNILATERAL COLLABORATION, where you continue to imitate the style of a certain poem or poet; and SERIAL CONSCIOUS BILATERAL COLLABORATION, where you continue to seek the input of a particular audience. Perhaps, since the poems often derive from the same imitated source or are revised under the guidance of the same advisory source, they begin to cohere as poems with a related voice, perspective, or story.

And that’s when you dare go where few have gone before, into the dubious realm of FIFTH DEGREE COLLABORATION, a rarely visited place where even the word “collaboration” is no longer adequate to describe your actions. You realize as you hammer out the final details of a poem that it has been reworked to such a degree by the commentary of your critical audience that it has become as much his or hers as it is yours, that you have, perhaps unintentionally, taken the leap into SINGULAR COAUTHORSHIP. And in a moment of epiphany you also realize the ultimate irony of Frost’s “Mending Wall,” namely that the seemingly Cro-Magnon neighbor was in fact right, that “Good fences [do] make good neighbors,” albeit not because they separate, but rather because in maintaining them, we are brought together.

Having deviated thus far from the path of individual integrity, you finally give in completely to the dissolvent temptations of collaboration. You’ve come to learn that by surrendering absolute control, individual authorship, things do not, as Yeats feared, “fall apart,” but rather, perhaps, fall together. And so, you approach your collaborator with the idea of repeating this process not just on individual poems but on a sequence of poems, each consciously writing poems in response to poems written by the other, and each working together to revise poems begun by either of you, and determining together the nature of the poems that remain to be written to complete, or better, continue, the sequence. And since you are no longer certain which of you is responsible for any given poem, or line, or even word, you know you can only call this SERIAL COAUTHORSHIP, which must certainly constitute that most seditious, most subversive, and most insidious SIXTH DEGREE of COLLABORATION.

Review of Sara Claytor's "Memory Bones"

2011-05-11T21:39:00.000-04:00

REVIEW
by Scott Owens

MEMORY BONES
by Sara Claytor
Big Table, 2011, 32 pages, $12
ISBN: 9780984573356

Sara Claytor is simply a joy to read, although her poems are neither simple nor naively always joyful. Rather, Claytor’s work consistently demonstrates that she knows what makes poetry a pleasure to read. One of the most enjoyable characteristics of a good book of poetry is a strong and clear sense of place that involves the capturing of idiosyncratic language, regional details of landscape, material, manners, and means, as well as characteristic tensions, issues, and concerns.

Nearly all of these elements of a deeply engaging sense of place are illustrated with just 9 lines from “Julia’s Soul Food,” the first poem in her new collection, Memory Bones:

You childs have 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,
all young childs be
a gift from God.

The use of the Southern Black idiom in dialogue; the subtly suggested issues of racism, tradition, women’s roles, and religion; and the tensions inherent in the contrast of the white patriarchy’s demands for propriety and the more forgiving nature of Southern Black spirituality born from generations of enforced failure and frustration, all establish a sure and authentic sense of time and place. This sense of place is further established in subsequent poems through greater physical detail, as in these lines from “Motor Moseying:”

. . . We’d ride down
main thoroughfares, turn on badly paved country roads
which turned into red dirt roads where sad, tin-roof shacks
punctuated farmlands with fields of dried cotton stems,
leaning gray barns, horse lots, hog pens, henhouses,
thin-ribbed dogs barking beside woodpiles.

As important as a strong sense of place is for providing the reader with a firm footing from which to experience a book of poems, perhaps an even better book will have just as strong a sense of gender and voice. While the opening poem makes it clear that one of the thematic concerns of the book will be the “place” of women, subsequent poems trace the speaker’s attempts at defining that place for herself. Poems like “Fractured Film Negative” and “All That Jazz at the Empire Theatre” demonstrate the speaker’s earliest frustrations with how girls and women are viewed. “Youth’s Dumb Dreams” illustrates the limited range of options that result from such views:

. . . Janie and I would
giggle of what’s to come. We would become actresses
with lots of lovers, smoking Viceroys in emerald holders.
. . . . . . . . . .
Meanwhile, Anne Louise tagged along,
first to get her driver’s license,
never jealous of our dreams, she had hers.
Her mother taught her well.
Learn to arrange roses in crystal vases; cashmere is chic.
You can love a rich man as easy as a poor man.

And “Saturday Night Yesterday” reveals that even years later those learned limitations are not easily dispensed with.

Only in the final third of the book does the reader begin to feel that the speaker has wrested control of her own life and identity from the tyranny of culture and the phantoms of her past. In “Tricked,” we hear her resistance developing as she says

rubbing my knees
with your free hand
like I’d sit patiently
an obedient pet
panting quietly
in my yellow-orange kitchen
awaiting
your whistle
quivering

Then, in “Artistic Conceptions 1 & 2,” we feel the speaker’s self-actualization achieved through creativity and expressed in this remarkable contrast of artistic and biological creation:

my doctor unfolds the placenta
crimsons, lapis blues
swirling through his fingers
like wet jewels

And finally, in “little girl on the street,” we understand the speaker’s desire to use what she has learned through this process of self-actualization to help others as well as the mature acceptance of her own limitations and the subsequent ability to protect herself. Here she encounters a former student of hers who has run away from home:

she presses my arms
a faint smell of beer, cigarettes
I want to take her home
cocoon her
. . . . . . . . . .
moving away my husband whispers
You can’t save them all.
I look over my shoulder
she wiggles a jig at the curb
blonde ponytail fluttering
like frizzy feathers
yells an obscenity at
a passing car
. . . . . . . . . .
her high-pitched voice
lifting like a bit of
tissue paper
carried by the wind

This strong sense of place and gender makes Memory Bones unmistakably, uniquely, impressively, and transcendently the story of a Southern woman raised in the rural South of the 40s and 50s with all the appeal and universal relevance such a designation should entail. From childbirth to different relationships to a high school reunion to killing a dog on a Mississippi highway, these poems have everything a reader needs to make them meaningful and memorable.

Minetta Lane Center for Arts and Peace Fundraiser

2011-05-08T20:48:00.001-04:00

Local artisans helping to raise funds for new nonprofit

Hickory, N.C. – The Minetta Lane Center for Arts and Peace will be hosting an evening of music, artist exhibitions, poetry reading and light refreshments on Wednesday, May 11, at Taste Full Beans, 29 2nd St NW, in downtown Hickory. The event begins at 6 p.m. Consistent with the mission of The Center to be a gathering place for artisans, several local artists and writers will be on hand to help raise funds for the new nonprofit. A suggested donation of $25 will be collected at the door.

Hickory poet, editor, columnist, and college instructor, Scott Owens, will be reading from his various works. He will be teaching a creative writing workshop this summer at the Center, which is scheduled to open on May 27. Owens is the author of seven collections of poetry, over 800 published poems, and more than 500 published prose pieces. He is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the NC Writers’ Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC, among others. He is the editor of “Wild Goose Poetry Society” and “Room 234” and Vice President of the Poetry Council of NC. He has been a teacher for more than 20 years and has conducted readings and workshops at hundreds of schools, libraries, bookstores, and coffee shops across the South.

Also appearing will be Granite Falls native Michael Miller of the group Leaving Venus. One observer of the Charlotte-based group has written, “Considered by some as Indie Rock’s premier ‘underdogs’... Leaving Venus has quickly become a formidable presence, picking up a mantle that many critics say couldn’t be picked up again.”

Ellen Ball, a board member of the Center, will be on hand with her renowned collection of custom designed jewelry. Also, co-founders Michael Barrick and Heather Deckelnick will be present to answer questions about their plans for one of Hickory’s most historic buildings; and, Barrick will be reading from his most recent book, Exceptional Care, a Century Strong: A Mission of Mercy and Healing. Additionally, photographer Jon Eckard and writer Carmen Eckard will be present to briefly discuss their crafts.

Door prizes will be raffled to those that donate, and include gifts from Larry’s Music and Sound, Ella Blu, Gym Dance Cheer, Thad & Louise, “Say Cheese” Photography by Diane Whelton, and O My Soap, as well as Scott Owens.

The Minetta Lane Center for Arts and Peace exists to promote civility, understanding and peace through the arts. The Center is committed to reaching out with as many artistic expressions as possible to all segments of the community. It is the goal of The Center to empower staff, visiting artists, and patrons to utilize their talents fully in the promotion of peace locally, regionally, and globally. For the latest information, please visit the Minetta Lane Center website at: www.minettalanecenter.org.

_____________
Michael Barrick
The Minetta Lane Center for Arts and Peace
"Igniting the Spirit of Peace through the Arts"

270 Union Square
Hickory, NC
http://minettalanecenter.org/

New Online Non-fiction Journal

2011-05-05T05:31:00.003-04:00

I have started a new online non-fiction journal called "234." You can find it at www.234journal.com. This will be a blog-style journal which will publish continuously, i.e. as soon as we get an essay we like, we'll put it online. Our first post is called "Dealing with Death" by Charles Aguilar. My co-editors in this venture are Tim Peeler and Jerry Sain. Guidelines for submission are on the site. I hope you'll take a look and enjoy what we put up.

Essay on The Fractured World

2011-05-03T07:30:00.002-04:00

Here is an essay written about one of my books.

The Fractured World
by Chaz Aguilar
The Fractured World (Main Street Rag, 2008) is a collection of poems broken down into three sections: “The Fractured World,” “Suite Norman,” and, “Smoke Dissolving in Wind.” Scott Owens, the author, speaks openly about his experience with child abuse and how that experience affected his view of mankind. I do not have much experience in poetry, but this book resonates with me as an abused child myself. Loneliness and abuse are emotions that most people know about but do not understand fully. This book walks the reader through some of the author’s tough times and can give some perspective to those who want to understand, comfort for those who have experienced abuse personally, and insight to those who see abusive potential in themselves.

Tim Peeler, a NC poet and educator, referring to the first section of the book in his review says, “Poetry should disturb us; it should create an uneasy feeling in our stomachs” (1). I believe the author accomplishes this; for instance, in the first poem, “Fates Worse than Death,” the author takes a look at some of the possibilities in life that are worse than dying: blindness, isolation, and torture. The poem “Sunday Afternoon, Atlanta Fulton County Stadium” is about a man who surrounds himself with other people but never takes any action to make contact with the world around him. This anonymous man sits alone in total isolation. One of my personal favorites, “The Man in the Bottle” shows a man contorting himself into a bottle, seemingly desiring to be isolated and alone, cut off from his surroundings. Loneliness, isolation, and death are frequent in everyday life, and though the subject may be dark, the theme is familiar to most.

Scott Owens said in an interview, talking about themes in his book, “In The Fractured World it was the gnawing sense that until we understand the relationships between poverty, abuse, and powerlessness, we would only continue to create them” (2). This theme is most powerful in the second section of his book, “Suite Norman.” These poems are a narrative of Norman, a father, an abuser, and drinker, who is coming to grips with his weaknesses and the person he is becoming. The character is a compilation of people Mr. Owens knew, his father, his stepfathers, and a little of himself. In “Norman Learns How Not to Cry”, Norman tries to contain his emotions because it is unacceptable to show them; it is not how a man acts. Norman has to come up with excuses when he breaks that rule. In “Self-Awareness,” Norman is older and abusive to his family, but he is fully aware that they enjoy, even look forward to, the time he is not around.

“Norman in the Window, His Eyes Like Shattered Glass” is the turn for the worse for Norman. This is when he first acts out in rage. Norman always knew the anger was in him, but is very surprised when the anger comes out. All he could do is stand motionless and watch his family leave, his children crying and his wife’s face swollen. Abuse is never to be taken lightly, and in The Fractured World, this fact has not been overlooked. Reading these passages, I could feel the abuse the author was enduring: the pain, suffering, and fear that come with abuse. Having written over 800 published poems, the author’s experience, both as a writer and abuse victim, really comes out on the page (3).

In the third section, “Smoke Dissolving in Wind,” Owens’ book gets a bit lighter in tone. In “The Days I am not My Father,” the author realizes the joy in not repeating his father’s mistakes. His son is happy to spend time with him, without fear of repercussions. “Foundings” shows how it felt the first time he was close to his step-son. The apprehension within him is revealed when consoling a child that is not his own when the child’s mother is out.

Even with my own experiences with abuse and loss, I have not been through everything the author experienced, but he paints a perfect picture with words, describing in detail his feelings and experiences. I recognize myself in some of the situations and some of my reactions. I can see what he went through; feel those moments that I would not be able put into words. The words of the author seem to me to be a brave act, reliving those memories for others to learn from and change their perspective on life with abuse.

Generally, I agree with the author; this book is about loneliness, being powerless, poverty, and death. Just because the subject is dark, it should not deter others from reading this collection. The stories are powerful because they are true; the theme is painful because life itself is, and the book should be read by everyone. The concepts are familiar to everyone because life is not simple; in fact, the painful areas are easy to understand because abuse, poverty, and death are everywhere and are completely connected to everyone’s life.

In an interview, Mr. Owens said, “I think writing poetry has simply become one way in which I engage with the world” (4). I have changed my point of view on poetry itself. Creative expression does not have to revolve around butterflies and leaves, but can be powerful. Most importantly for me, I now recognize that I am not alone in my experiences with abuse as a child. Others have been through the same experiences I have been through. I recommend this collection for everyone, but highly recommend this book for anyone who has been through the same so they know that they are not alone. I would say to Mr. Owens to keep on engaging the world, for these are the painful subjects that need to be discussed, for myself and for all of the abuse victims in the world.

Notes
1. Peeler, Tim. redroom.com. Summer 2008. 2 April 2011. .
2. Diskin, Bill. redroom.com. 25 June 2010. 2 April 2011. .
3. "Scott Owens." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Mar. 2011. Web. 8 Apr. 2011. .
4. Benitez, Sandy Sue. Flutter. 2010. 2 April 2011. .

New Issue of Pirene's Fountain Features Reviews By and Of Scott Owens

2011-04-28T08:03:00.003-04:00

"Pirene's Fountain" has been one of my favorite online journals for years now. The editors are not only good judges of poetry but nice people as well. I feel fortunate to have been published in "PF" several times previously, but the new issue (April 2011) features a number of gratifying connections to my work.

Among the 100 or so poems in the issue from notable poets like CJ Sage, Lisa Zaran, Russell Ragsdale, Alex Grant, and Natalie Williams are 2 of my own, "Solitude" and "13 Ways of Flowers" and 8 of my haiku. Along with "Solitude," the editors have included 3 photos from my colleague and favorite photographer, Clayton Joe Young (his photos grace the cover of two of my books, "Paternity" and the forthcoming "Something Knows the Moment"). The photos in "PF" were the inspiration for "Solitude."

This issue of "PF" also includes two reviews of mine, one of Steven Roberts' "Another Word for Home," and another of Gary McDowell's "American Amen." There is also a review by Caleb Pletcher of "The Nature of Attraction," my most recent book, a collaboration with Pris Campbell. Finally, the editors have included my article on collaboration, "Six Degrees of Collaboration."

Here is a link to the entire issue: http://www.pirenesfountain.com/current_issue.html

I hope you'll visit and become a regular reader of "Pirene's Fountain."

Review of Annalee Kwochka's "Seventeen"

2011-04-22T09:35:00.001-04:00

REVIEW
by Scott Owens
(first published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)

SEVENTEEN
Poems by Annalee Kwochka
Running Poet Press

I wrote my first short story in twelve years the other day. I didn’t set out to write a story, but a scene that nearly materialized in real life refused to be dropped in my imagination, and as I began ‘disburdening” myself of it, it insisted on being prose. You may wonder what any of this had to do with a review of a book of poems (I know I would). The connection is that just as I’ve learned through 30 years of writing that the writer often has little choice in what or how they write, young Annalee Kwochka has already, at 17, learned that the writer has even less choice in deciding to write. “Mona Lisa Muse,” the opening poem of her precocious collection, Seventeen, makes that clear. “Poems,” she says, “are the fierce and ravishing aunt / whom you revere / but shrink from . . . . / Her knock is a tiny hammer on your skull, / so you’d better get that door, / . . . because this poem / has arrived.” So, too, has this poet.

The poems in Seventeen demonstrate Kwochka’s arrival in several ways, one of which is her versatility. From tankas, to ars poeticas, to typographical poems, to performances pieces, to dramatic monologues, Kwochka’s poems are consistently fresh, evocative, and surprising. Her “Window Seat at the City Bakery,” for example, masterfully uses spacing to control the reader’s pace and create impetus just where it should be. The way “Details” appears on a line of its own three times, and the way “forward” follows the push of white space after “To bear life,” and the way the parallelism of the last four lines create a satisfying sense of place (“Sitting somewhere on this planet, / This continent, this country, / This city, this street, / This seat by the window”), all work together to convey Kwochka’s own understanding of Mary Oliver’s imperative that, for the poet, paying attention is tantamount to prayer.

And Kwochka pays attention to the two things that are most important for a poet to pay attention to if her poems are going to be effective: imagery and language. We’ve already seen her attention to imagery, and in the wonderfully playful “Entry #1 from the Dictionary of Teenage Variations on the English Language, and an Example in Context,” we see her attention to language as she dissects the linguistic habits of mother-daughter communication.

Kwochka’s versatility is one not only of style but also of subject matter. She “pays attention” to nature in poems like “Window Seat” and “Green River Tanka,” to personal issues in poems like “Advanced Placement: Psychology” and “Burning,” to issues of relationships in poems like “Storms” and “Advents,” to social issues in poems like “Laws of Motion: Wake-Up Call” and “Laws of Motion: School Reform,” and to political issues in poems like “Seque for My sisters in Iraq” and “Exposition and Protest.”

It is through Kwochka’s willingness to explore, experience, and relate such a range of topics and influences that she is able to make statements that belie her youth, statements that express a greater understanding of the complexities of human existence than one would expect from one of her age, statements like this one from “Advent” that add a third dimension to Oliver’s equation of prayer and paying attention:

I need to love even though it hurts,
I need to love until it hurts
Because there is so much hurt here,
And loving is a better way to pray.

Review of Stan Absher's "Night Weather"

2011-04-19T15:08:00.002-04:00

REVIEW
by Scott Owens
First Published in Wild Goose Poetry Review, Winter 2011

NIGHT WEATHER
by J.S. Absher; illustrations by Katie Nordt
Cynosura Press, 2010
ISBN: 9780615429540

Although I have published about 3 dozen haiku in respected haiku journals like Heron’s Nest, Notes from the Gean, and Shamrock, my only training in the form has been my own reading and a few exchanges with Alice Frampton, Lenard Moore, and Curtis Dunlap. So, when I received a review copy of Stan Absher’s new collection of mostly haiku entitled Night Weather, I thought about how particular some haiku purists can be and decided I wasn’t really qualified or courageous enough to make any sort of statement regarding the quality of a collection of haiku. As I read through the book, however, I realized that it contains plenty of elements about which I do feel qualified to speak. The most significant of these elements is simply how enjoyable the poems are. These quiet meditations on perception are evocative, soothing, and subtly thought-provoking.

Not surprisingly given that most of the poems are haiku or similar forms, the strongest feature of these poems is their imagery. Time and again, Absher presents images that are pleasantly familiar and enviably well-stated such that I find myself constantly thinking, “Yes, that’s it. He got it just right. Perhaps my favorite, being a planter of trees myself, is “sweetgum:”

in the riprap
cold saplings
burning red

This image of life, regeneration, and resistance reminds me both of Roethke’s famous poem, “Cuttings,” as well as my own experience planting saplings in a thick bed of mulch.

Absher demonstrates in all of these poems what is undoubtedly the poet’s most important skill: keen observation. Nowhere is that more apparent than in “Ripeness Is All,” which I quote in its entirety below:

Weighting the low branches, vermilion
splotched with apple green, it hands
in easy reach -- not quite ready
to pick, but turn his eye away one
moment, it will bruise with neglect.

The exact moment never comes
when it falls easily to hand.
By day it holds the stem like
a hooked redeye, then over night
spikes itself on the stubble.

When is my time, he wonders,
when will I, trembling with plenty,
let go into the ripe void?
When will I steer
drunkenly into the blade?

This metaphoric representation of the ceaselessly anticipatory nature of human existence resonates not only with our own perceptions of the natural world but also with our unspoken impressions of life, and of course, with all the literary and personal associations we have with the concept of forbidden fruit. Such associative richness is what makes these poems, and all good haiku, and all good imagism, work. It is this quality above all others that make such poems enjoyable.

Organized around the theme of passing seasons, Absher’s poems have two vital lessons to teach us: pay attention; and be ready.

Review of Steven Sherrill's "Ersatz Anatomy"

2011-04-04T11:07:00.002-04:00

REVIEW
by Scott Owens
first published in Wild Goose Poetry Review

ERSATZ ANATOMY
by Steven Sherrill
CW Books, 2010, 120 pages
ISBN: 9781936370153

The poems in Steven Sherrill’s Ersatz Anatomy use the words “want,” “need,” “desire,” “longing,” and “yearn” 74 times. Those words appear at least once in 36 of the volume’s 74 poems, clearly suggesting that desire is the primary subject of this poetic inquiry. As if to erase any doubt about that, Sherrill offers such individual titles as “Preamble to the Treatise of Desire,” “Footnote to the Preamble,” “Treatise on Desire,” “First Amendment to the Treatise on Desire,” “Retort to the Treatise,” “Passion,” and “The Want Bird.” Similarly, among the many memorable lines related to desire, Sherrill writes, “It is the topography of need we traverse” (“Geese at 9000 Feet”) and “I am punch drunk with want” (“Sweet Grief”).

Such an emphasis on desire should not be surprising. After all, what emotion is more human than desire, and what desire stronger than the desire for knowledge, for certainty, for God. The earliest stories of human being(s) (Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Gilgamesh, for example) make it clear that the defining characteristic of human existence is desire. Those stories tend to cast desire in a rather ambivalent light. Specifically they propose that desire to be with or like God is good and desire for all else is bad, at least in any measure exceeding the very relative term “moderation.” Of course, the fact that human beings can only know God in very nebulous forms (burning bushes, pillars of cloud, thunder and lightning), heightens the sense of desire and redirects it towards things that might approximate religious rapture. It is no semantic accident that the word most often used for both religious and sexual fulfillment is the same--ecstasy--a fact not lost on the speaker of these poems.

Unable to achieve either fulfillment of the one desire that defines humanity or lasting fulfillment of desire in general, the nature of human existence is to live in uncertainty, to be subject to an “unknowable you,” our “doubt” to whom we “remain devout” “with true pause” (“Latter-Day Sonnet”). The real question then becomes not whether one experiences desire or doubt, both of which are inevitable, but what one does in such a state, whether one denies it; or better, manages to exist in a state of uncertainty without “any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats’ negative capability would suggest; or better yet, relishes that state, explores it, as the speaker of these poems does, inventing a capability that is neither negative nor positive but decidedly human: “Beyond hunger more hunger / Learn to eat the emptiness” (“Footnote to the Preamble”). The speaker of these poems understands that no teleological approach to human existence holds any satisfactory answers, and that the absence of such answers is inherently unsatisfying as well. What we are left with is the constantly difficult proposition that the journey is its own reward.

Sherrill signed my copy of Ersatz Anatomy, “For Scott, who shared my journey for many good years.” Nothing could be more appropriate. When we were both younger we took many journeys together, walking every set of railroad tracks and every creek leading from Charlotte, NC, just to see what we could see, hiking nearby wooded or mountain trails, climbing Crowder’s Mountain, working through classes taught by Robert Waters Grey, Robin Hemley, and Chris Davis at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. And of course, all of this was part of our mutual journeys towards becoming writers and men.

I’ve seen Sherrill only once since we parted ways some 18 years ago. In the interim we have both been married, divorced, and remarried, have both raised children of our own, and have both pursued with some success our careers in teaching and writing. Through all that, however, one thing has never changed: Sherrill is still at his best when on a journey, in this case, the kind of journey afforded him in a long poem where thought, perception, emotion, and reflection all interweave to (re)create an experience as authentic as any I’ve read. The poem “At the Shore of the Great Lake Michigan I Come Upon the Feet of Egon Schiele in the Moonlight” is a thematic and stylistic paragon of all that Sherrill undertakes in this book.

The poem begins innocently enough: “On the bluff above, a caveat -- Beach Closed. No Entry After Dark.” From that, few would guess that what would follow would be a refreshing meditation on the nature of religion, faith, and humanism. “It is well after dark and I am here” the speaker defiantly proclaims in the same stanza, and we follow him as he descends to the dark beach and discovers a piece of driftwood that strikes his imagination as “the feet of Egon Schiele.” A series of religious, historical, and personal associations then leads him to the poem’s final remarkable epiphany:

The nature of faith is, more or less, . . .

any goddamned thing I want it to be. Here I write the doctrines.
I am the Apostle and the acolyte . . . I am the deacon and the fold.

This is my church, my church, and I believe
in the feet of Egon Schiele
in the moonlight.

This epiphany of how art, beauty, identity, and hope are all found in the interaction of nature and human memory, of philosophy, science, and religion, clarify the humanistic and aesthetic understanding that is at the thematic and emotional center of all of these poems.

As “At the Shore of the Great Lake Michigan” illustrates, there is nothing easy about reading Steven Sherrill’s poetry. The poems are full of remarkable, often surreal imagery and surprising shifts in perspective, moving by an associative logic that challenges the most imaginative reader to keep up. Sherrill is not only negatively capable but very comfortable with contraries: faith and heresy; Apollonian control and Dionysian wildness; aesthetic smugness and endearing humility. None of that is easy, but anything that explores human nature without flinching at its complexity, with such unblinking honesty, can be cathartic and enlightening, and in any event, a hell of a lot of fun.

Review of Al Maginnes' "Greatest Hits"

2011-03-24T15:52:00.002-04:00

REVIEW
by Scott Owens
First Published in The Pilot and Wild Goose Poetry Review

AL MAGINNES: GREATEST HITS
by Al Maginnes
Pudding House, 2010
ISBN: 1589989317

I admire Al Maginnes, his optimism, his zest for life and passion for all things human, his empathy, his lyricism, his long but still seamless and uncluttered lines, his fluid syntax, his spot-on metaphors and conceits, his ability to tell a good story and reveal the significance of it with a subtlety that lets the reader experience the poem’s cathartic and epiphanous moment as if it were their own, and now his ability to be his own best editor. In his new book of poems, Al Maginnes: Greatest Hits, Maginnes selects from 23 years worth of poetry only 12 to be included as “greatest hits.” I’ve written half as long as Maginnes and don’t think I could do that. Somehow I’m sure all the poems I didn’t select would turn against me. The amazing thing about Maginnes’ selections, however, is that he got it right. I’ve read most of Maginnes’ work over the years, and if I had to choose just 12 to keep, it would be these.

Another of the more admirable qualities of Maginnes’ poems is their ability to capture the full sense of some vital human abstraction -- to be the kind of poem that leaves a reader nodding his head, if not saying, “Ah, yes,” in recognition and appreciation. It seems almost silly to single out poems from a collection of only 12, but singling out poems as illustration of one’s points is what a reviewer does. So, four poems in particular from this collection stand out for their embodiment of longing, regret, and perspective.

The first of these is “Sharks in Kansas,” a remarkable poem of romantic longing that imaginatively revisits the road not taken. The speaker of the poem tells us:

. . . For two years, she
and I tracked each other’s moves,
both of us in love with other people

and happy most days, but curious
about the quick flame of sun
on water we had seen in each other.

and later

When she said “Florida. Paleontology,”
I did not move to wrap her in the thoughtless hug

I might have offered someone else, but said
“Arkansas” and “poetry.” When she asked, “So, when
will I see you again?” we both knew the answer.

And all of this buried longing is sparked through a wonderful associative logic brought about by a news story concerning the discovery of fossilized shark remains in Kansas, which the speaker describes in a delightful conceit for that longing:

There are sharks, sharks in Kansas, still
swimming in water that has turned to stone,
bent in the memory of tides

to the exact angle I once saw her arm bend
across her lover’s shoulder . . . .

Another poem rich in associative logic is “Elegy with Clifford Brown Playing Trumpet.” This beautiful revelation of perspective about the importance of the “white space” or “negative space,” the absences, loss, and ultimately, mortality that give meaning to all human endeavor begins with a mystery the speaker is reading and ends in greater appreciation of the contributions of both musician Clifford Brown and poet Larry Levis and in a deepened understanding of the limitation as motivation. My favorite moment in the poem is the breathless unfolding of something as unimaginable to us all as death. The speaker tells us that somewhere in the laments of Larry Levis

lurked the hand that will come one day to touch us,
perhaps right when we are in the middle of things,

& lead us into a puzzle of streets
that we only understand slowly we will not
find our way out of, although that matters

less & less as the blacktop buckles and thins
to cobblestones, then to dirt, as we walk out of our shoes
until we are walking on nothing and then

we are not walking at all & the way back
to all we have left undone is forgotten.

The third truly remarkable poem is one of Maginnes’ best narrative reflections, and it also about perspective. In fact, “To the One Who Stole My Lawnmower” might be called a parable of perspective. The speaker of the poem reveals that not only has his lawnmower been stolen but that he knows the person who has stolen it and is aware of that person’s situation as well. The reader follows the speaker through all the usual stages: anger, guilt, blame-shifting, acceptance, and understanding to conclude:

. . . the truth is
the loss of my lawnmower has become a story
and, like most stories, gets told for laughs.
But I can laugh even when, like today,
I sweat like a rented mule, forcing
the motorless contraption I use to cut grass now
through high weeds, because my life is not yours.

The final poem that stands out for me differs from most of Maginnes’ work in that the lines are shorter and essentially syllabic, as opposed to his usual predominately tetrameter or pentameter lines, but “Legend” retains Maginnes’ characteristic syntactical mastery and his knack for embodying a common and vital human emotion--specifically, in this case, regret. The poem is about a lost opportunity to see and hear the folk singer Carolyn Hester in person, and the speaker concludes

Even if all she had done
was chant the famous names
of her dead husband or her
new god, even if she denied
completely or insisted
upon being defined by
her past, even if time has
done to her what it has done
to all of us, I should have gone.

In typical Al Maginnes fashion, the poems collected in his Greatest Hits achieve what is poetry’s most important task, the deepening of our experience of the world as human beings. This thin volume is a wonderful introduction to Maginnes’ lifework for those who have only now discovered it. It is also a perfectly representative selection of all that makes Maginnes’ work important for those who have been fans for years. Ultimately, it should be a standard part of any poetry lover’s bookshelf.

Review of Connie Post's "Trip Wires"

2011-03-19T06:59:00.001-04:00

REVIEW
by Scott Owens
First Published in Wild Goose Poetry Review

TRIP WIRES
by Connie Post
Finishing Line Press, 2010
ISBN: 1599246252

Good poems often remind us of what we already know and help us look at the essential points of our lives more deeply. Because they often look at things with brutal honesty, good poems also have the ability to scare us. Such is the case with Connie Post’s new book, Trip Wires, in which the best poems are also the most terrifying in their focus on loss and absence. The poem “It Won’t Be Long,” for example, makes clear why no matter how well prepared we think we are for loss, it is never as we expect. Made aware of the pending reality of a loved one’s loss to cancer, the speaker prepares herself:

I find myself on this transient road
. . . . . . . . . .
thinking I might know
what it will be like
when you are gone
. . . . . . . . . .
but when the phone rings
and all the purple vases crash to the floor
I realize I should have known
. . . . . . . . . .
the resounding difference between
the end of dusk
and total darkness

The understated devastation expressed in the concluding contrast of expectation and reality is one of the more harrowing moments I’ve read in poetry in quite some time, and it makes clear that preparation and imagination can never negate the absence that results from loss.

Another sort of devastation is addressed when the speaker of “Undoing a Poem” imagines going backwards to the nothing that existed in the place a poem now exists before the poem was, or perhaps all poems were, written.

Start from the end and peel back meaning
word by word, line by line
undress each stanza
. . . . . . . . . .
until you are alone in a room
. . . . . . . . . .
fall to your knees
grope the fallible floor . . .
until you fall back onto one rusty nail
then bleed backwards into the placenta
to the place where you found yourself
absent of all language
again

Again, it is absence, in this case the imagined absence of language, that sends a shiver up the readers’ spine.

Perhaps what is most revelatory and frightening about these poems is that they suggest we live amidst loss and absence all the time, not just when someone dies, or when words fail, but every day. The very lifestyles we have chosen to subject ourselves to are fraught with felt but unrecognized, and unaddressed absence. The poem, “One Monthly Donation,” for example, speaks of “the endemic solitude / built by a steady and proportioned life” and suggests “you plow steadily into the tyranny of your days // your needs surround you like a well built fence // enclose the backyards of self made urgencies.”

Poet and critic, Edwin Honig, has commented that, “In a large, mobile industrial society people tend to become indifferent about their ability to think or feel for themselves.” Isolated by the busyness of our daily lives, we need poems like those found in Trip Wires to remind us to be humble, to recognize that we don’t have it all under control, that, in fact, control is largely beside the point and that we are surrounded by the trip wires of loneliness and desolation. We need poems like these to shake us out of our comfort and complacency, to scare us into remembering the primacy of connection with self and others.

New Series in Morganton to Feature Local Writers

2011-03-02T14:00:00.003-05:00

NEW SERIES IN MORGANTON TO FEATURE LOCAL WRITERS

The Burke County Public Library is beginning a new reading series to be called “Wednesday Night Readings.” The readings will be held at the main branch library in downtown Morganton, and at least initially will feature primarily area writers.

The series will kick off March 9, at 6:30, with Hickory poet, Scott Owens. Owens, who teaches at Catawba Valley Community College, is the author of 6 collections of poetry, editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Vice President of the Poetry Council of NC, and founder of Poetry Hickory. His work has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the NC Poetry Society, the NC Writers’ Network, the Poetry Society of SC, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Owens’ latest collection of poems, The Nature of Attraction, is a narrative sequence focusing on the relationship of two characters, Norman and Sara. The collection was written collaboratively with Florida poet, Pris Campbell, and published in 2010 by Main Street Rag.

Joining Owens will be Lincolnton poet, Morgan DePue. Together, they will present a dramatic reading from The Nature of Attraction. They will each read a small selection of their own work as well.

Other readings in the series this spring will feature T.A. Epley, author of Ghosts of the Soon Departed, on March 30; Vale’s Ann Chandonnet, author of Write Quick: War and a Woman’s Life in Letters, 1835-1887 and The Pioneer Village Cookbook, on April 6; Morganton poet, Ted Pope and Hickory poet, Tim Peeler, co-authors of Waiting for Charlie Brown, on April 20; Caldwell Community College instructor, Nancy Posey, author of Let the Lady Speak, on May 4; Hickory poet, Kermit Turner, author of Sandy Ridge: Portrait of a Depression Family, on May 18; biographer T.J. Shimeld, author of The Four Foot Giant and the Vanishing Wheelchair, on June 1; and Winston-Salem poet, Helen Losse, author of Seriously Dangerous and editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, on June 22.

All readings in the series are free and open to the public. For more information on the series, contact coordinator, Mindy Evans, at 828-437-5638

Poetry Council Annual Contests Open for Submission

2011-03-01T07:19:00.002-05:00

POETRY CONTESTS OPEN FOR SUBMISSION

The Poetry Council of NC’s annual poetry contests are open for submission until May 31. PCNC sponsors annual poetry contests in 9 different categories, including best NC book of poetry, free verse, traditional form, humorous verse, and performance poetry. There are also separate contests for NC elementary, middle school, and high school students.

In most categories, first, second, and third place winners are named as well as three honorable mentions. Prizes range from $15 to $100. Winning poems are published in the Council’s annual anthology Bay Leaves and on the Council’s website, and all winning authors are invited to read their winning poems at Poetry Day, held this year on October 1 at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC.

To be considered, poems must be no more than 40 lines, previously unpublished, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Entry fees are $5 for individual poem contests, and $10 for the book contest, but there are no entry fees for the student competitions. Performance poems are limited to 2 minutes and will be performed and judged live at Poetry Day. Complete details and guidelines are available at http://poetrycouncilofnc.wordpress.com/ or from Ed Cockrell at 2906 Gait Way, Chapel Hill, NC 27516, (919) 967-5834.

Last year’s winners included well-known NC poets Tony Abbott, Alex Grant, Rhett Iseman Trull, Malaika King Albrecht, Sara Claytor, and Bill Griffin, among many others. The Poetry Council is a non-profit organization in its 59th year of working to foster a greater appreciation for and appreciation of poetry in NC.

Valentine's Day Poem by John Hartness

2011-02-18T12:02:00.000-05:00

A Poem by John G. Hartness

Valentine’s Day was Monday, and that put everyone in the mood for love poetry. This poem by Charlotte poet and novelist John G. Hartness is certainly not your everyday love poem, but it is related to Valentine’s Day, and I love the way it brings a surprisingly serious twist to the usual Valentine’s Day fare.

Happy Valentine’s Day
by John G. Hartness

On Valentine’s Day
I sat
in an orange plastic chair
staring at the snow
through a wire-mesh window
picking at bandages and thinking that even
here
I couldn’t find a place to belong.
Until a skinny too-tall boy with brown hair
walked barefoot
over to my window,
touched the old scar on my wrist
and said We All Hurt
Here.
In that dayroom with the busted radiator
and snowdrifts crowding the windowsills,
I began to melt
and blossom.

John G. Hartness is a recovering theatre geek who likes loud music, fried pickles and cold beer. His poetry has been published or accepted online in several journals including The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, cc&d, Deuce Coupe and Truckin’. He can be found online at http://www.facebook.com/l/62bfaEzgUmhtFtHwrzjAmQP5SxA;www.johnhartness.com. His first novel, The Chosen, is an urban fantasy about saving the world, snotty archangels, gambling, tattooed street preachers, immortals with family issues, bar brawls and the consequences of our decisions. He followed up The Chosen with Hard Day’s Knight, a new twist on the vampire detective novel and the first in a planned series of five books. His next novel, Back in Black (and Blue) is due out later this year.

Ekphrastic Joy, Take 4

2011-01-16T05:52:00.001-05:00

EKPHRASTIC JOY, TAKE 4

Ekphrastic poetry is poetry that is created based on viewing a work of art in a different discipline -- a painting or photograph or sculpture, for example. For the fourth consecutive year, the Aroma of Art, one of Hickory’s largest annual charitable and artistic events, invites area poets to write ekphrastic poems based on the art that will be exhibited at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory throughout the month of February.

The Aroma of Art, in its eleventh year, is a month long auction of paintings, photography, jewelry, sculpture, etc. all created by over 100 local artists to benefit the Catawba County Council on Adolescence, ALFA (AIDS Leadership Foothills Alliance) and Cooperative Christian Ministry. Last year’s Aroma of Art raised more than $10,000 for area charities.

Donations of artwork are accepted at Taste Full Beans until January 29 and then displayed there starting with the Aroma of Art Kick-Off Event on February 3. Bids are accepted throughout February, and the winning bids are announced at the Finale on March 3. Some winners, however, will receive not only the work of art they have bid on but also an original poem written about that work.

Writers are invited to submit poems based on the works on display in the Aroma of Art to Scott Owens by noon on February 15. A jury of local poets will select as many as 20 poems to display with the pieces in the auction and to be presented to the winners of the corresponding art work during Aroma of Art’s Grand Finale. At least three poems will also be chosen to be read at the Grand Finale.

Poems should include the author’s name and the title and creator of the “inspiring” work of art. The phone number, and email address of the author should be on the back or on an attached sheet. Poems may be submitted at Taste Full Beans or by email to asowens1@yahoo.com. Selections will be made by the end of the day February 16.

More information on Aroma of Art can be found at www.aromaofart.blogspot.com or by calling 828-325-0108.

Hickory Poet How-To, Part III: Submitting Poetry for Publication

2011-01-15T21:24:00.001-05:00

SUBMITTING POETRY FOR PUBLICATION

Continuing in our “Hickory Poet How-To” series, here are some tips on submitting poetry for journal publication.

1. Find the journals. www.duotrope.com maintains a database of over 3000 journals that publish poetry and fiction. Their database is constantly updated and includes a submission tracker program that will help you keep track of where you have submitted to and what the results were. You can find similar lists at www.pw.org (Poets & Writers) and www.newpages.com. Poets & Writers is a semi-monthly magazine that lists calls for submissions and upcoming contests, as does The Chronicle from Associated Writing Programs. The NC Writers’ Network emails a weekly newsletter to its members that includes calls for submissions. Main Street Rag has a similar monthly newsletter. If you like printed guides, you can find Poets’ Market in most bookstores or order The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses from www.dustbooks.com.

2. Start Locally, preferably with editors you’ve met or chatted with online. Good journals in the NC piedmont include Wild Goose Poetry Review, Dead Mule, Referential, Iodine Poetry Journal, The Pedestal Magazine, and Main Street Rag. If you’re taking classes at a college or university, find out about the school’s literary magazine and submit to it.

3. Research your targets. If you haven’t read a recent issue of a journal, then don’t submit to them. Without knowing what kind of poetry they’re likely to publish, you’re setting yourself up for multiple rejections. Most journals have either sample poems or entire recent issues available online. Make sure you follow the journal’s submission guidelines as well or your work will probably be rejected without being read.

4. Include a cordial, but brief, cover letter and biography (unless the guidelines specifically ask that you not include them). Here is a sample of each:

Dear Editors,
Thank you for taking the time to consider the following poems for publication in _____. They have not been previously published, nor are they under consideration elsewhere. A brief bio follows. If you need anything else, please don't hesitate to contact me by email, phone (828-234-4266) or post (838 4th Ave. Dr. NW, Hickory, NC 28601.

I hope you enjoy the poems and look forward to hearing back from you.

(Bio) Author of 6 collections of poetry and over 800 poems published in journals and anthologies, Scott Owens is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and recipient of awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writers’ Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. He holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro and currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College. He grew up on farms and in mill villages around Greenwood, SC.

5. Keep records. I use a database to track where I’ve sent the poems to and what the results were. Duotrope’s program is just as good. Some people use index cards.

6. Don’t simultaneously submit. Some will disagree, but most journals respond within 4 months, and having the same poem out at multiple places is confusing and creates a real possibility that you might anger an editor or even create a copyright violation issue. The way I see it, If I have time to submit the same poem to several places, then I’m taking time away from writing new poems.

7. Be patient. There is no sort of standard rate, but my first acceptance came with my 25th submission, and for the first couple of years 1 acceptance for every 15 submissions seemed the norm for me. That gradually improved over the years, and now I have about a 50% success rate with submissions.

January Poetry Hickory Postponed

2011-01-11T12:13:00.003-05:00

Due to inclement weather, January's Poetry Hickory and Writers' Night Out have been postponed until January 18. We hope everyone will be able to join us at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory: Writers' Night Out at 5:00; Poetry Hickory at 6:30.

A Gathering of Poets

2011-01-05T17:25:00.003-05:00

A Gathering of Poets, April 9, Community Arts Cafe in Winston-Salem. This looks like a poetry event not to be missed. 4 workshops with people like Fred Chappell, Kay Byer, Debra Kaufman and Joseph Mills! Here is the link: http://www.press53.com/GatheringofPoets2011.html

SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 8 AM - 6 PM
SPECIAL OPEN MIC EVENING, 7:30-9:30 PM, FEATURING A CAPPELLA POETRY BY FLEUR-DE-LISA
Held at The Community Arts Café, Fourth & Spruce, Winston-Salem, NC

SCHEDULE AND WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS

Check-in & Continental Breakfast: 8 - 9 a.m.

First Morning Workshop Block: 9 - 10:15 a.m.
These workshops will be offered again during the First Afternoon Workshop Block: 1:30 - 2:45 p.m.

Debra Kaufman: Polishing the Lines (Limited to 30 poets)
We write poetry to discover something about ourselves and our world, and to share what we learn with readers. We will look closely at how to strengthen our poems by focusing on the ways precise imagery and musicality in our lines reveal a poem’s intended meaning. We will explore ways to refine our images and enhance our musical
phrasing to better reveal to ourselves and our readers the deeper truths inside our poems. Please bring a poem you would like to work on.

Alex Grant: Compression in Poetry (Limited to 30 poets)
This workshop focuses on practical, tangible methods and techniques to help you strip down and polish your poems. We will focus on specifics, before reading and discussing poems which exemplify this approach, then working on your own poems. Participants will take away practical, understandable methods they can immediately
apply to both new poems and work under revision.

Joseph Mills: What’s in a Name? (Limited to 30 Poets)
Margaret Mitchell considered naming her story Tomorrow Is Another Day and Tote the Weary Load. F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested Under the Red White and Blue and The High Bouncing Lover to his publisher. None of these phrases has entered popular culture; instead we have Gone with the Wind and The Great Gatsby. Titles are not simply handy ways to catalogue works; they can be crucial elements. Without the title “Station in a Metro,” the reader would have little idea what Ezra Pound’s poem was about. In this workshop, we’ll consider the importance of a variety of titles from books, paintings, poems, and songs, and we’ll explore ways to develop intriguing, effective titles for our own work.

Terri Kirby Erickson: Marketing Yourself and Your Work (Limited to 30 Poets)
Google "Terri Kirby Erickson" and you will find her everywhere, from her personal blog, to online lit mags and book blogs. In 2010, her poetry collection, Telling Tales of Dusk, reached #23 on the Poetry Foundation's list of Contemporary Best Sellers thanks to the endorsement of nationally syndicated columnist Sharon Randall in her column entitled, “Best Reads.” No matter where you are in your writing process, it’s never too early to start selling yourself and your work. The difference between being an unknown poet and a widely read poet is effective
marketing. In this workshop, we’ll examine various methods and strategies to get you and your poetry noticed by readers, editors and publishers.

Second Morning Workshop Block: 10:30 - 11:45 a.m.
These workshops will be offered again during the Second Afternoon Workshop Block: 3:00 - 4:15 p.m.

Fred Chappell: Master Workshop (Limited to 30 Poets)

Kathryn Stripling Byer: Studio-style Master Class (Limited to 50 Poets)
In this studio-style master class, former North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer will select poems written by four poets in attendance to read and discuss in a studio-style forum with the four selected poets and then everyone in attendance. Attendees may submit one poem for consideration no later than March 15. Ms. Byer will select four poems for discussion, to be announced at the beginning of the master class.

Valerie Nieman: Every Picture Tells a Poem (Limited to 30 Poets)
Ekphrasis is a marriage of imaginations, that of the visual artist and the writer. In this poetry workshop, Valerie Nieman will discuss noted works, such as poems by Rilke, Auden, and Fred Chappell, and will take advantage of the Community Arts Café’s Gallery of the Arts to lead writing exercises using contemporary art as the source for new poems.

Other Important Times and Events

Lunch Break: 11:45 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. (Buffet lunch provided)

Faculty Reading With Special Guest Poet Isabel Zuber: 4:30 - 5:30 p.m.

Closing Remarks: 5:30 - 6 p.m.

Dinner on Your Own: 6-7:30 p.m.

Open Mic Reading with A Cappella Poetry by Fleur-de-Lisa: 7:30 - 9:30 p.m.
($5 cover, Free to Gathering of Poets Attendees.) Poets wishing to read must place his or her name in a bowl. Readers will be determined by a drawing at two different times during the evening. If the poet called is not present, another name will be drawn. Sixteen poets will be selected to read during this event. Each poet will have three minutes to read, and this will be strictly enforced to be fair to all poets.

Registration:
To register, visit the registration page.
Check box to select your desired workshops.
If workshop is full, you may check the "waitlist" box and you will be placed on the waitlist in the order you signed up.
Waitlists will be cleared if space becomes available.

Press 53 reserves the right to make last-minute changes due to cancelations by faculty. If a cancelation by faculty occurs, we will do our best to replace the workshop with an equally beneficial workshop, but no guarantees can be made.

To Register, click here.

Questions can be emailed to Kevin Watson at kevin@press53.com or by calling Kevin at 336-414-5599.

Hickory Poet How-To, Part II

2011-01-05T11:22:00.001-05:00

HICKORY POET HOW-TO, PART II

So last time we discussed the advantages for the would-be poet in Hickory to read, write, follow this column, attend Poetry Hickory, and take a class. If you missed that column, you can read it at www.scottowensmusings.blogspot.com. Today we’ll continue with a few more tips on how a poet in Hickory can “get started and keep going.”

6. Join the Club. Since 1932 the North Carolina Poetry Society has facilitated networking and development of poets across the state, bringing them together at least three times a year for annual meetings at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, coordinating annual contests in 14 categories, publishing an annual anthology of NC poems, distributing a monthly newsletter, maintaining an online calendar of poetry events, and sponsoring a series of workshops with established poets across the state. Information on “joining the club,” is available at the Society’s website at http://www.ncpoetrysociety.org/. An even larger resource for both poets and other writers is the North Carolina Writers’ Network. NCWN sponsors two annual conferences which feature nationally renowned guest speakers, workshops, classes, and readings. They also distribute weekly updates on opportunities for writers. Their website is http://www.ncwriters.org/. Beyond the state level the two most significant poetry organizations are Associated Writing Programs (http://www.awpwriter.org/) and the Academy of American Poets (http://www.poets.org/).

7. Network. Joining poetry support organizations and attending classes and readings will give the poet the chance to meet writers, editors, publishers and others interested in poetry, but many of those activities are not scheduled more than once a month or last only a short period of time. As with any vocation or avocation, the practitioner may need more frequent interaction with others to keep them motivated and to provide the connections necessary for continued development and success. Virtually every poet I know has a facebook page and is connected through that medium to dozens of other poets, editors, publishers, and readers with similar interests or backgrounds. Many poets also maintain blogs. Visiting these blogs provides information, ideas, and the possibility of “joining the discussion” about poetry.

8. Join or Form a Group. Very few, if any, writers create in a vacuum. Most writers have at least one trusted colleague who reviews their material before the writer sends it out for publication. Many writers belong to critique groups who share their work with each other and discuss ways of improving it. Virtually every creative writing class I have ever taught has resulted in the formation of at least one such group as those students who connected with each other in the class look to keep the energy they’ve developed together going.

9. Understand that the biggest part of writing is rewriting. I never stop revising a poem. In fact, many of my best revisions came after the poem was published. Most of the poets I know are similar in their practices. For most writers inspiration is at best only the beginning, and at worst a fallacy.

10. Submit. When you’re ready, when you think your work is good enough, and your will is strong enough to withstand rejection after rejection, send your poems out for publication. If you have been networking, then you probably know the editors of several journals fairly well by now. Start with them. That way you’ll know that it will be the editor and not a graduate assistant who reads them, and you’ll be more likely to at least get a personal note back perhaps even with suggestions on how to make the poem better suited to that particular journal.

There is a lot more to know about the submission process, but we’ll save that for the next column. Come back in two weeks for more.

2011 Litchfield Tea & Poetry Series

2011-01-04T08:34:00.002-05:00

2011 Litchfield Tea & Poetry Series

Please join us for these four free events,
our fifth year featuring a whole slate of talented poets.

Litchfield Tea & Poetry Series
First Thursday, Jan. – Apr.
3 - 4 p.m.
Waccamaw Higher Education Center
160 Willbrook Boulevard
Pawleys Island, SC 29585
Book signing after the reading
Refreshments: homemade confections by Deloris Roberts
Free & open to the public
843-234-3422

Jan. 6 Launch of Poetry Anthology – Kickoff reading for OLLI at CCU anthology

Join us for a reading by contributors of the newly released OLLI at CCU poetry anthology, Journey-Work of the Sea. Foreword by poet Dan Albergotti, cover art by photographer Phil Wilkinson. A wide range of poems written by students from recent classes and workshops taught by Libby Bernardin and Susan Meyers. Good reason to celebrate!

Contributors: Patricia Tanner Candal * Suzy Clancy * John Eveleigh * Sally Z. Hare * Charlotte E. Hedler * Helen Hilliard * Robert O. Jones * Michelle M. Ott * Sherby McGrath * Carol Peters * Annie Pott * Susan A. Scheno * George R. Sharwell * James M. Siegrist * Nancy Dew Taylor * Libby Bernardin * Susan Meyers

Feb. 3 Ken Autrey, Debra A. Daniel

Ken Autrey, of Columbia, is the author of the chapbook Pilgrims (Main Street Rag). His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere, including various anthologies. He teaches English at Francis Marion University. Previously, he served as a Peace Corps teacher in Ghana and a visiting professor at Hiroshima University in Japan.

Debra A. Daniel is the author of As Is (Main Street Rag, 2009). She was twice SC Arts Commission’s Poetry Fellow. She has also won the Guy Owen Prize and awards from the Poetry Society of SC and has been a Pushcart nominee. Her work has appeared in Smokelong, Kakalak, Emrys, Pequin.org, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Poetry Society of SC Yearbook. She and her husband Jack McGregor will also entertain us with their music.

Mar. 3 Ann Herlong-Bodman, Richard Allen Taylor

Ann Herlong-Bodman, of Mt. Pleasant, is the author of the chapbook Pulled Out of Sleep (Pudding House Press, 2010). She taught journalism and composition at USC and Lander University. She has also taught ESL in East Europe for the U.S. State Department, and she currently volunteers as an ESL teacher when she is not traveling and writing.

Richard Allen Taylor, of Charlotte, NC, is the author of Punching Through the Egg of Space (2010) and Something to Read on the Plane (2004), both from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. He is a former co-editor of Kakalak: Anthology of Carolina Poets.

Apr. 7 Scott Owens, Susan Finch Stevens

Author of six collections of poetry, Scott Owens is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Vice President of the Poetry Council of NC, and recipient of awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology and the Academy of American Poets, among others. He holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro and teaches at Catawba Valley Community College.

Susan Finch Stevens, of the Isle of Palms, is the author of the chapbook Lettered Bones, a winner in the 2008 Poetry Initiative of South Carolina Competition. She has been awarded The Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Marjorie E. Peale Prize and Kinloch Rivers Memorial Prize. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies.

Cosponsored by
Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Coastal Carolina University &
The Poetry Society of South Carolina

___________________________________

For further info about the featured poets, contact Susan Meyers, bardowl2@aol.com
Check out the Litchfield Tea & Poetry Series group on Facebook.

2010: A Year for Gratitude

2011-01-02T16:38:00.001-05:00

2010: A Year for Gratitude

One year ends; another begins. Convenient divisions for review, evaluation, resolution, and gratitude. 2010 was a great year for me in many ways. In regards to poetry, I wrote my 1000th poem and published my 800th. It was, in fact, my most productive year in regards to both writing and publishing. I wrote 240 poems and had 210 accepted for publication. I also had two books released from Main Street Rag: Paternity in February, and my collaboration with Pris Campbell, The Nature of Attraction, in July. I received 4 Pushcart nominations and 6 Best of the Net nominations, and I gave 35 public readings of my work. None of this would have been possible without the help of family, friends, editors, and colleagues, and I want to take a moment as the new year begins to publicly thank all of those who have been so helpful and supportive this year. For anyone I overlook, please know that I am nonetheless grateful and regret that the only thing more faulty than my memory is my record-keeping.

So, a sincere thank you and a robust best wishes for the coming year to all those listed below.

• Julie Owens, my wife.
• Damian Blankenship, Keegan Blankenship, and Sawyer Owens, my children.
• Phillip Fracaro, my father-in-law and one of my most devoted readers.
• Tim Peeler, friend and colleague.
• Pris Campbell, friend, collaborator, and reviewer of Paternity.
• Helen Losse, Nancy Posey, John Womack, Ann Chandonnet, Bobbi Ackley, Jessie Carty, Bud Caywood, Dennis Lovelace, and Tony Ricciardelli, faithful participants in Writers’ Night Out.
• Edgar Nucamendi and D.W. Bentley, friends, owners of Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse, and hosts of Poetry Hickory.
• M. Scott Douglass, my publisher at Main Street Rag.
• Clayton Joe Young for the cover of Paternity and being a constant source of inspiration.
• Jerry Sain, Donna Ross, Teresa Sumner, Amy Bechtol, and Kevin Rouse, supportive colleagues at CVCC.
• Barbara Burns, editor of Outlook and publisher of “Musings”
• Helen Losse, again, poetry editor of Dead Mule and reviewer of Paternity
• Jessie Carty, again, editor of Referential Magazine and reviewer of Paternity
• Ann Chandonnet, again, reviewer of Paternity
• Bud Caywood, again, poetry activist and reviewer of Paternity
• Ami Kaye, editor of Pirene’s Fountain and reviewer of Paternity
• Glenda Beall, poetry activist and interviewer
• Joe and Chenelle Milford, editors of Scythe and hosts of the Joe Milford Poetry Show.
• Jeff Davis, host of Wordplay.
• Jane Crown, host of the Jane Crown Poetry Show and editor of Heavy Bear.
• Jonathan K. Rice, editor of Iodine Poetry Journal and poetry activist.
• Janice Moore-Fuller, poetry activist.
• Bill Diskin, poetry columnist for the Independent Tribune
• Sandy Benitez, editor of Flutter and interviewer
• Karla Merrifield, reviewer of Paternity.
• Felicia Mitchell, reviewer of Paternity.
• Jackie Regales, reviewer of Paternity.
• Janelle Adsit, reviewer of Paternity.
• Joanna Catherine Scott, Tony Abbott, and Al Maginnes for their comments on Paternity.
• Antoine de Villiers for the cover of The Nature of Attraction.
• Tammy Foster Brewer and Carter Monroe for their comments on The Nature of Attraction.
• Caleb Pletcher, reviewer of The Nature of Attraction.
• Sara Claytor, reviewer of The Nature of Attraction.
• Ed Cockrell, poetry activist.
• Ed Southern, poetry activist.
• Nolan Belk, poetry activist.
• Steven Smith, poetry activist.
• Ron Bayes, poetry activist.
• Jim Clark, poetry activist.
• Devona Wyant and Shane Manier, poetry activists.
• Roxanne Newton, poetry activist.
• Susan Meyers, poetry activist.
• Margaret Boothe Baddour, poetry activist.
• Carol Rinehart, poetry activist.
• Mindy Evans, poetry activist.
• Viranya Filipiak, poetry activist.
• Sarah Greene, poetry activist.
• Eliot Lytle, poetry activist.
• Maureen Sherbondy, poetry activist.
• Jan Knotts, poetry activist.
• Ron Moran, poetry supporter.
• Tracy Mancini, poetry activist.
• Patricia Bostian, poetry supporter.
• North Carolina Writers’ Network, poetry supporters.
• North Carolina Poetry Society, poetry supporters.
• Poetry Council of North Carolina, poetry supporters.
• Poetry Council of North Carolina, poetry supporters.
• Malaprop’s Bookstore, poetry supporters.
• Quail Ridge Books, poetry supporters.
• McIntyres Fine Books, poetry supporters.
• Phillips & Lloyd Bookstore, poetry supporters.
• The Literary Bookpost, poetry supporters.
• Rosa Martha Villareal, editor of Tertulia.
• Malaika King Albrecht, editor of Red-Headed Stepchild.
• Jayne Jauden Ferrer, editor of Your Daily Poem.
• John Amen, editor of The Pedestal Magazine.
• Margaret Bauer, editor of North Carolina Literary Review.
• Eve Hanninen, editor of Centrifugal Eye.
• Alice Frampton, editor of Heron’s Nest.
• Vince Gotera, editor of North American Review.
• Zinta Aistars, editor of The Smoking Poet.
• Jen Michalski, editor of JMWW.
• Richard Krawiec, editor of The Sound of Poets Cooking.
• Harry Calhoun, editor of Pig in a Poke.
• Rob Greene, editor of Raleigh Review.
• Sam Rasnake, editor of Blue Fifth Review.
• Bruce Wheelton, editor of Word Salad.
• Scot Young, editor of Rusty Truck and Deuce Coupe.
• Scot Siegel, editor of Untitled Country.
• Dan Albergotti, editor of Waccamaw.
• Molly Gaudry and Troy Urquhart, editors of Willows Wept Review.
• Annmarie Lockhart, editor of Vox Poetica.
• Greg McBride, editor of Innisfree Poetry Journal.
• John DeLin, editor of ken*again.
• Aurora Antonovic, editor of Magnapoets.
• Christine Swint, editor of Ouroboros Review.
• Dave Bonta, editor of qarrtsiluni.
• Miriam Barr, editor of Side Stream.
• Fawn Neun, editor of Battered Suitcase.
• Lorin Ford, editor of Notes from the Gean.
• Jack Marlowe, editor of Gutter Eloquence Magazine.
• Anthony Kudryavitsky, editor of Shamrock.
• Ross Vassilev, editor of Opium Poetry and Asphodel Madness.
• James Clinton Howell, editor of Town Creek Poetry.
• Valerie Nieman, editor of Prime Decimals.
• Dale Wisely, editor of Right Hand Pointing.
• Dawn Albright, editor of Polu Texni.
• Heather Lenz, editor of Stepping Stones Magazine and Crimson Rivers Review.
• John Hartness, editor of Red Dirt Review.
• Linda Matney, editor of Imagining Heaven.
• Serena Tome, editor of Leaf Garden.
• Travis Hedge Coke, editor of Future Earth Magazine.
• Richard Pierce-Saunderson, editor of protestpoems.org.
• Karen Bowles, editor of Luciole Press.
• Dan Cuddy, editor of Loch Raven Review.
• Zvi Sesling, editor of Muddy River Poetry Review.
• Valerie Polichar, editor of Grasslimb Journal.
• Barbara Fisher, editor of Waterways.
• Ivan Brkaric, editor of Callused Hands.

And, of course, a thank you to everyone who bought a copy of any of my books or any of the journals or anthologies in which my poems were published.

Review of Lucille Lang Day's "The Curvature of Blue"

2010-12-30T18:12:00.001-05:00

Review of Lucille Lang Day’s The Curvature of Blue
Cervena Barva Press (2009), 90 pages, $15
ISBN: 9780692001813

Simplicity is typically a quality we think of as desirable, especially, perhaps, in poetry. Emerson said, “To be simple is to be great;” Whitman that, “Simplicity is the glory of expression.” They were wise, admirable men; surely they got it right. Simplicity is a word we associate with poetic concepts like beauty, clarity, and purity. Stevens said, “Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.” We might think of haiku and the apparent simplicity of imagery stripped of commentary as what Stevens had in mind. But then, haiku often has two images, the juxtaposition of which complicates things a great deal. We are compelled to seek the significant relationship between these two images, and as we pursue that relationship, we discover a nearly limitless range of possible “interpretations” of the images themselves; we discover a variety of “ideas” that cling to these “things,” demonstrating that what Stevens proposed was not, in fact, simplicity, and that simplicity is simply not possible. The problem is that inherent in the concept of simplicity is the idea of singularity, the condition of being uncombined, uncompounded, and unambiguous, and none of those conditions exist to a significant degree in human experience.

This is why Lucille Lang Day’s recent collection of poetry, The Curvature of Blue, conspicuously avoids and even demonstratively denies the existence of simplicity. Perhaps not surprisingly, Day’s scholastic and professional background features as much science as poetry, and few arguments for simplicity exist in the world of scientific research. Coming from such a background, Day’s poems not only avoid simplicity but seem to be about complexity more often than anything singular theme, seem at times to joyfully wallow in the compoundedness of things.

The first poem in The Curvature of Blue is a perfect example and a poem I absolutely love. It is called “At the Museum After Closing,” and Day’s bio will confirm that she does indeed work at a museum, but what makes the poem effective is the way she uses that experience as a metaphor for a book of poems, for this book of poems. Not that Day ever mentions poems in this poem–that would violate Stevens’ directive–but assuming the speaker of the poem to be the poet, it’s a short leap to seeing the museum as being the collection (book) of exhibits (poems) “created” by the curator (poet), and we’re off and running with a wonderful conceit. Greater complexity occurs when the speaker points out that she, like the exhibits (poems), but not an exhibit, is also inside the museum (book of poems), visible by but separated from the museum’s patrons (readers) by her glass office walls (limitations of language).

Metaphors are inherently complex, and this seems a particularly apt and fresh metaphor for poetry. We come to it for the poems, but we always find in addition the poet laboring there, looking back at the reader through glass walls of words, visible, but never quite within reach, both drawn more powerfully towards one another and towards creating significance by the frustrating nature and promising potential of such proximity. Of course, this metaphor also captures the emphasis on complexity that exists at the core of these poems. The speaker-curator’s somewhat awkward duality as exhibit and worker, as subject and object, her existence as seer and seen, her being here and not here, being real and not real, her simultaneity, her “andness” belies any suggestion of simplicity and frames the primary significance of these poems as it reveals itself in various surprising and epiphanous ways here and in other poems.

One of the most prevalent oxymoronic coexistences in these poems occurs in what may be the cleverest poem in the book–clever because it appears to be a fairly simple thing: a love poem. This, however, is a love poem whose primary vehicle for expressing that emotion is the language of science, a detailing of colors, plant species and statements about the universe. Right away, then the simple notion of separation between art and science, emotion and intellect, love and logic is called into question by the presentation of one in the language of the other. Day’s speaker continues her blurring of simplicity by using colors synaesthetically, claiming to “hear cinnabar, / olive, raw umber, magenta, / violet and chartreuse,” and then saying, “when you hold me, I feel / a surge of indigo, amethyst / and tangerine.” But the compounding won’t stop there. Having begun with the premise that “The universe is beige” (an apparently singular color), Day’s speaker (channeling Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty”) ultimately concludes:

. . . . Suddenly
stippled, mottled, streaked,
I don’t care if the universe
is the color of buckwheat
because iridescence spills
from you and me.

Thus it continues throughout this remarkable collection of poems, things we commonly think of as simple laid bare and revealed to be inextricably compound, intricately ambiguous, undeniably complex, shown in their truest light, as if Day’s motto came not from Emerson and Whitman but Whitehead’s injunction to, “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” Even such an unquestioned concept as contemporary apathy is challenged in “Letter to Send in a Space Capsule,” when the speaker writes to her post-apocalyptic audience, “It may sound strange, / but most people cared deeply about the planet / and each other.” One thing is clear: Lucille Lang Day cares deeply enough to look at things honestly, to admit complexity, and to never tire of exploring the bright, colorful, and infinitely varied and complicated fabric of human experience.

Hickory Poet How-To, Part I

2010-12-22T07:20:00.001-05:00

HICKORY POET HOW-TO, PART I
(first published in Outlook)

So, you want to be a poet in Hickory, NC? Many have tried; many have failed; and a perhaps surprisingly large number have done pretty well. A word to the wise, however; it’s not easy. There is not what could be called a lot of interest in poetry in Hickory (or anywhere else these days for that matter). There is even less opportunity for financial remuneration. So, whatever you do, don’t give up your day job to become a poet.

If, despite these unfortunate facts, you are still interested, then here are some tips on how to get started and keep going.

1. READ. Whether you’re in Hickory or Paris, this is the most important element of developing one’s prowess with language. Read everything, of course, but in particular read good contemporary poetry. Anthologies like Contemporary American Poetry and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems are a good place to start. You can find the poets you identify with there and then seek out their books to read further. There are also over 1000 regularly published poetry journals in America, many of which are available for free online. Nearby examples include Wild Goose Poetry Review (www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com), Dead Mule (www.deadmule.com), and Main Street Rag (www.mainstreetrag.com).

2. WRITE. Seems intuitive, but I know many would-be writers who get so caught up in the “busy-ness” of being a writer, that they never get much writing done. Aside from one’s job and family, the only thing a writer should be doing more than writing is reading. There are two possible keys to this process. First, one can schedule his or her writing for the same time every day, just like exercising or bathing, and stick to it. If family and work make that difficult to manage then one can purchase a nice journal and carry with them everywhere and write during whatever free time presents itself.

3. Read “Musings” (this column). The column comes out every other week and is also available online at www.scottowensmusings.blogspot.com if you miss the paper. It will include details on upcoming poetry events in the area, profiles of poets giving readings in the area, sample poems, and the occasional exploration of various poetry topics and issues (like this one).

4. Attend Poetry Hickory and Writers’ Night Out. On the second Tuesday of each month, two well-published writers and three Open Mic readers are featured at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. The featured writers read for about 20 minutes each, and the Open Mic readers for about 10 each. The featured writers usually have copies of their recent books to sell and sign as well. The readings start at 6:30 and are free. They are preceded by Writers’ Night Out, sponsored by the NC Writers’ Network and also free, which begins at 5:00. These are networking sessions attended by anywhere from 10 to 20 area writers, including several “newbies” as well as 3 journal editors, 2 creative writing instructors, and 4 writers who have published at least 5 books each.

5. Take a class. Both CVCC and Lenoir Rhyne offer creative writing classes every semester. If you already have your degree, you can sign up to audit the class as a way of honing your skills and increasing your motivation to write.

Okay, that’s a start. Come back in two weeks, and we’ll continue with the list.

Promises to Keep: A Review of Debra Kaufman's "The Next Moment"

2010-12-15T17:53:00.001-05:00

Promises to Keep: A Review of Debra Kaufman’s The Next Moment

The Next Moment, Poems by Debra Kaufman
Jacar Press, 2010, 64 pages, $13.95
ISBN: 9780984574025

What keeps us alive, motivates us, makes us human are our relationships and the obligations they entail. Frost knew that and memorably expressed it in his lines:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep.

Now, in The Next Moment, Debra Kaufman reminds us of the vitality of those relationships as well as the sometimes overwhelming difficulty of them.

Ranging across relationships with grandparents (“Knitting”), parents (“Smile”), spouses (“Nice”), and children (“The Drought Speaks”), Kaufman creates a detailed and honest “atlas of the difficult world” (thank you, Adrienne Rich) that defines who we are, who we have always been, as human beings. And Kaufman goes on to remind us in other poems that when, through such things as death, maturation, and divorce, those relationships seem to fade from prominence, the ever-present relationship with ourselves remains (“Epiphany”), and those other relationships always inherently linger there (“Last Words”), a fact made clearest in these lines from “Hope and Despair Are Not Opposites”:

The body experiences one moment,
then the next,
is always in the present,
while the mind spins into the future
or loops back to the past.

This duality of human existence is treated again both stylistically and thematically in the collection’s two best poems: “Minestrone, Rainy Day” and “Too Late / The Scream.” These two “braided” poems combine two poems each in a perfect marriage of form and function. In the former, one string of words illustrates how meticulous attention to detail and routine is used to assuage and even combat the fear, guilt, and uncertainty, the “unraveling” effects, caused by the depression, abandonment, and drug abuse presented in the contrapuntal other string of words. Similarly, in the latter poem, participation in art and writing is used to balance and resist the terror, the undoing, created by the unthinkable awareness of our children’s mortality and vulnerability.

It is certainly common enough that a book of poems contains one or two brilliant pieces. In The Next Moment, such brilliance is the rule rather than the exception, and it manifests not only in the form of the poems but also in frequently resonant phrasing. One line, for example, in “After a Drink or Two You’re Beautiful” memorably summarizes a child’s experience of living with an alcoholic mother: “Such heaviness, so many empties.” Another example of Kaufman’s facility for phrasing comes from “Last Words,” where the last stanza rivals the power of Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”:

I wish he’d die, now, quickly.
But first would lay
his rough hands
on the crown of my head.

The theme of a father’s loss treated in this poem is addressed with equal poignancy in “Comes a Time”:

In a black-and-white snapshot
proof that he once held me aloft:

my infant fist clutching his finger,
worry and wonder in his gaze,

the world opening--
our world of earth and air,

touch and smell,
grasp and release.

If it is true that we can judge a person by the company they keep, then certainly judging a poet by whose work they call to mind is a fair means of assessment. Frost, Adrienne Rich, Dylan Thomas . . . poetically speaking, Debra Kaufman is indeed a fine host for an outstanding selection of guests as her work takes its place at the table remarkable and memorable poets.

Return of the Poetry Gift Guide

2010-12-09T13:09:00.001-05:00

RETURN OF THE POETRY GIFT GUIDE

(first published in Outlook

One of the most talked about columns I wrote last year was the one in which I recommended several collections of poetry as best gift selections for the poetry lover on everyone’s list. Of course, some of that talk was by poets who resented the fact that I hadn’t included their book in the column. Despite those dissatisfied readers, I think a column suggesting books of poetry that might please the discerning poetry reader is useful at this pre-holiday time of year.

It would be somewhat disingenuous, not to mention foolish, of me to not begin my recommendations with at least a reminder that I had two new books of poetry published this year myself: Paternity and The Nature of Attraction, both from Main Street Rag (www.mainstreetrag.com) or “orderable” from me at asowens1@yahoo.com. As quick summary, I would say Paternity is a book of poems about the joys and struggles of parenting while The Nature of Attraction is a narrative sequence of somewhat risqué poems about a relationship. You’ll have to decide which would be more appropriate for your gift designee.

Among the many books of poetry released this year by people not named Scott Owens, the one I think consists of the best poetry is The Real Warnings (Anhinga Press) by Greensboro poet Rhett Iseman Trull. Apparently, I’m not alone in that judgment as that book won two of the state’s three poetry book awards. Another strong collection is Lessons in Forgetting (Main Street Rag) by Pinehurst poet Malaika King Albrecht. These poems about living with a relative suffering from Alzheimer’s would be particularly appropriate for anyone in that situation.

For some reason, 2010 seems to have been the year for the poetry anthology and the selected works. Two strong and interesting anthologies published this year are The Sound of Poets Cooking (Jacar Press), which features poems about food and recipes from poets across the state, and Echoes Across the Blue Ridge (Winding Path), which features poems from and about the southern Appalachian Mountains, both topics which seem ideal for gift-giving.

Several established poets had their “greatest hits” collections, books which gather selected poems from their previous books, published this year. Such collections are, of course, always of high quality and give new readers the opportunity to experience poems that might have fallen out of print. Chief among those in NC this year were Davidson poet Tony Abbott’s New & Selected Poems (Lorimer), Stephen Smith’s A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworth’s (Main Street Rag), and David Rigsbee’s The Red Tower (NewSouth).

Finally, for local readers who enjoy a trip down local history lane, Tim Peeler’s impressive collection Checking Out (Hub City) recounts in poetry his seven years’ experience as manager of Mull’s Motel here in Hickory. Of course there are dozens of other collections of poetry I would mention if given the space, but visiting the websites of the publishers listed for these ten selections will give the poetry shopper all the variety they might need. Most collections of poetry can also be ordered from the poet, which has the advantage of giving the shopper the opportunity to get the collection signed. Happy shopping!

Review of Stephen Smith's "A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths: Selected New and Old Poems"

2010-12-08T16:00:00.002-05:00

Review of A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths: Selected New and Old Poems
By Stephen Smith
Main Street Rag, 2010, 108 pages
ISBN: 9781599482576

(first published in "Wild Goose Poetry Review")

Stephen Smith’s new book of poems, A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths: Selected New and Old Poems, 1980-2010, is really two books of poetry. The first, united under the Roman numeral “I” in the book, might well be called A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths since the poem by that title is the last poem in the opening section, but it would be more revealing to call it “Living In the Shadow of the Bomb,” since that idea seems to be a unifying undercurrent in this first section. One could argue that if that title suggests the poems are mostly about life in the 50’s and 60’s in America, then it could be used for the second section, called “II,” as well. Such an argument, however, ignores two key facts regarding this second section of poems. First, it would be most appropriate to simply call the section, “The Bushnell Hamp Poems,” since every poem in the section deals with the world of Smith’s loveable old (as in first collected in 1980) character by that name. Second, the difference between the world of the two sections is that the first deals with the 50’s and 60’s South of the suburban middle class, those who were most worried about the bomb, while the second deals with a slightly older and considerably more rural and lower than middle class South, a South that seems at times to be an updated version of the South portrayed in the novels of Erskine Caldwell. Taken together, then, the two sections create a fairly wide and deep view of the South over a span of some 30 to 40 years.

One thing the poems in both sections share is the sense that they are real. There is no pretension or intellectual affectation here. The poems feature people we know, although in the case of Bushnell Hamp and his friends we might not always want to admit it. The stories and emotions are revealed with such clarity that time and again they move the reader to either tears or laughter, usually because we recognize ourselves in the narratives or revelations of motivations, anxieties, failures, and successes. Former NC Poet Laureate, Fred Chappell, comments about the book that Smith manages “to find the general in the specific, the universal value in the local detail, to grasp the small part that will imply the whole.” Smith, himself, discusses this practice of seeing ourselves in others in his poem, “Love,” when he says, “what we love / in lives of strangers is an inevitability / we perceive as just.” This comment follows the narration of a celebrity love triangle where each participant ultimately receives their “just desserts.”

Smith’s ability to reveal the universal in the specific is even more apparent in “Cleaning Pools,” where he tells a story that illustrates how shared labor between father and son creates an understanding that goes beyond words:

Sheet lightning streaked
over the Chesapeake, and I began to notice
how after each flash, I went momentarily blind.
“It’s strange,” you said, finally, and without
my having spoken a word, “how quickly the pupil
closes to the light and how complete the darkness is.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . Perhaps,
as you said, it is like death, this sudden light
and inevitable darkness. Or perhaps it is the
purest grace. It says what fathers and sons
mostly cannot say.

And, again, in my favorite poem in the collection, “Coming Back to the Old Emptiness,” he uses the story of an abusive grandfather to portray social determinism, the parental desire to protect, the mutability of all things human, and the familiar necessities of understanding and forgiveness in what he calls “impossible love:”

So my grandfather rises
from the depths of the Depression
to flail my father (then a child
younger than my small son)
with an electric cord
. . . . . . . . . .
My grandfather is dying tonight,
the madness of eighty years--
. . . . . . . . . .
all of it crumbling.
. . . . . . . . . .
Because we suffer impossible love,
my father grieves tonight for his father
just as I grieve for mine,
and my son, safe in his bed,
will learn of these cruelties
only in a poem, which itself must
someday crumble, its dust rising in
final dissolution.

Unlike so many poets today, however, Smith is not always morbid, depressing, or heavy. He recognizes that amidst the grave seriousness of our lives, there is also great levity. The Bushnell Hamp poems take full advantage of this levity, but its presence in Smith’s perception of the world is made apparent even before the second section of poems and without the use of the dialect which characterizes the Bushnell Hamp poems and helps (re)create their levity. One example is “Dear Michael,” where we hear the story of a boy whose wit makes the best of essentially falling into a urinal at a roller skating rink:

What must happen to everyone
who ceases motion happened to you: the world
rolled out from under. And to save your life
you put both hands in the urinal
. . . . . . . . . .
your pink
fingers frozen among the soggy cigarettes
and dead gum
. . . . . . . . . .
you asked me, “Want some spearmint?
How about a Lucky Strike?”

Similarly, in “Cricket Poem,” Smith’s appreciation of humor comes through as we hear about a young man who spills a box of 100 crickets in his car only to later have them interrupt a potentially fruitful moment:

She was about to moan yes
when a cricket whispered in her ear
and another called from
the glove compartment
. . . . . . . . . .
the cricket tabernacle choir singing
in ninety-nine part harmony
Nancy Nancy Nancy Nancy
save yourself forever.

Equally entertaining are the moments of irony Smith notices, such as the no smoking sign in a doctor’s office after a terminal prognosis is given in “Sign for My Doctor’s Waiting Room,” or the accidental destruction of turtles, sole survivors of the Woolworth’s fire, beneath the wheels of fire trucks, in the title poem.

Ultimately, the appreciation of the humor, importance, and urgency of life experienced by those who populate these poems, those who populated mid-20th century America, is driven by the looming shadow of the bomb. That motivational presence is conveyed in “Fallout Shelter, October, 1962” and in “Bomb Dream,” but the same sense of urgency is present in “Nothing,” in “Fluid Drive,” and in many of the Bushnell Hamp poems, suggesting that while the threat of the bomb may have led some to a greater appreciation of life, it served mostly as a more imminent and tangible presence of the death sentence, the indeterminate “green mile,” we all live with. Thus, perhaps, the overarching message of these poems, the understanding which Smith expresses, is that mortality is our greatest motivator.

Review of Shaindel Beers' "A Brief History of Time"

2010-12-02T19:54:00.001-05:00

Review of A Brief History of Time, by Shaindel Beers
Salt (2009)
ISBN: 9781844715053

What’s not to love about Shaindel Beers’ first collection of poetry, A Brief History of Time? It is confessional, political, classical, formal, imagistic, language-driven, realistic, fantastic, sensational, conventional, innovative, consistent, personal and diverse. Almost anything you want from poetry --unless you want facile, sentimental drivel -- you can find here. This book could be used as a companion piece to a fairly large dictionary of poetics, illustrating a great number of the concepts and terms spoken of in the practice of poetry. There are 4 sestinas, 2 sonnets, a villanelle, and a ghazal; there are wide-ranging examples of a seamless stream of consciousness technique and crystal clear and straightforward conventional narratives; there are metaphors and motifs, references and allusions; and through it all there is vivid imagery and a facility with sound and language that lets the stories, thoughts, and perceptions unfold fluidly down the page. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, Beers’ virtuosity is not limited to the technical aspects of poetry but extends into her selection and expression of subject matter as well, offering significant insights and opportunities for understanding in areas of both personal health, psychology, and relationships and broader issues of social justice.

Focusing just on the versatility Beers displays in these poems might be misunderstood to suggest that the book lacks cohesion. In fact, however, the poems revolve quite provocatively around a central idea suggested in the book’s ambitious title. Taken together, they form a sort of narrative of a young woman’s personal and social development towards self-actualization in late 20th century America as she becomes increasingly aware of the inconsistencies between what has been promised and what is actual and as she explores the possibilities for reconciling these differences. The story is not linear because any story that strives for realism will resist linearity. The story is “brief” because it arises from and focuses on a life that is still incomplete. Nevertheless, the story is wide-ranging because Beers recognizes that any segment of any human life seen honestly and accurately will constitute a microcosm of all human life, of “history.”

It is the unblinking realism, the haunting familiarity, of these poems that is most appealing about them. Auden said the poem “must say something significant about a reality common to us all,” such that its “readers recognize its validity for themselves.” Otherwise, we might ask, what would be the point. Beers writes about things that matter and things we recognize, and time and again she gets it just right, so right, in fact, that the reader finishes nearly every poem feeling as if they’ve just read a record of their own thoughts and experiences.

Perhaps the most impressive poem in the collection is the first one, the title poem, which in some ways serves as a model for the entire book. This free verse stream of consciousness journey from mixing coffee through Virginia Woolf, dinosaurs, annuities, “People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People,” The Last of the Mohicans, and a 1983 Cutlass Supreme to an image of the moon as a baseball reveals a personality that wants it all to make sense, understands it never will, but finds purpose in the effort. She muses (more poetically than this excerpt can achieve), “There seems to be a message here, but I don’t know what it is . . . . nonetheless, I keep on trying . . . . My regular duties . . . . pouring Gatorade, wiping away sweat and shards of bicuspids and incisors . . . . just another type of insanity . . . . doing the same thing the same way and expect[ing] different results. I did it to help people . . . . by writing these untruths.”

As these lines, this poem, and indeed this entire book suggests, the separation between what is of concern personally and what is of concern socially is much narrower than we usually, for the sake of convenience, conceive. It should not be surprising, then, to discover that the poems I find most powerful are those that appear more personally probing but in the process produce lines that bear larger social implications as well, such as these from “Flashback:”

When you are four, you don’t realize
that a road can go on forever, take you from forest
to wheat field to desert, that there are worlds you
have never known. Worlds where the dull sound
of your mother’s body hitting a wall, a door, the baby’s
changing table are as alien as saying I love you.

It is through the consideration of such personal poems that we begin to recognize our own potential for the greater social responsibility expressed in lines like these from “Rewind:”

If we could invent
the automatic rewind, bodies would expel

bullets that would rest eternally in chambers,
130,000 people would materialize
as the Enola Gay swallowed the bomb,

landmines would give legs and fingers
back to broken children.
Right now, teeming cancer cells

would be rebuilding blood and bone.

Perhaps the most worthy ambition of poetry is to help us achieve greater empathy and understanding, to help us recognize the universal through the familiar. Shaindel Beers accepts this challenge of the poet. The speaker of one of her poems chastises herself for lacking the courage to stand up for “things that matter, the stuff of life and death.” A Brief History of Time may very well be the penance for that lack of courage as these poems face unflinchingly that task of promoting our ability for compassion and action.

Review of Alex Grant's "The Circus Poems"

2010-12-01T05:11:00.000-05:00

Review of The Circus Poems
Poems by Alex Grant
Lorimer Press, 2010, 53 pages, $16.95
ISBN: 9780982617137
http://www.redroom.com/author/alex-grant
http://www.lorimerpress.com/CircusPoems.html

Alex Grant says he loves the circus. And why not? We all do. And his new collection of poems, titled The Circus Poems, illustrates why. Grant begins his book with a quotation from artist Marc Chagall: “For me, a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world. A circus is disturbing. It is profound.” That statement conveys so much of what we all find appealing about the circus. It is “like a world,” or better yet, like the world, like our world, only better. Better because whereas in our world the oddities, the personal foibles, even the freakishly super abilities are hidden from view by closed doors, pulled curtains, family secrets, the masks of normalcy we all wear, in the world of the circus, they are paraded forth, laid bare for all to see in the safe enclosures of tents and rings and stages. Safe because the circus comes and goes, “appears and disappears,” unlike our daily lives, and we decide whether or not and how often we will enter that world. Safe, in other words, because we don’t live in the circus; the residents of the circus are not us, not our family, not even our neighbors.

Nevertheless, what makes the circus world most appealing is that it is still relevant because its occupants are, in a number of ways, very much like us. Thus, while they appear different, they remain hauntingly, “profoundly” and “disturbingly” familiar. Archetypally speaking, if the circus is a microcosm of our world, then the residents of the circus, particularly the residents of Grant’s circus, represent those who populate the world . . . us. Just as we understand that everyone in our dreams is a manifestation of some part of the dreamer, it is clear that every character in these poems, every figure in the circus, manifests some aspect of the poet and the reader, some aspect of who we are as people.

The first of the figures Grant presents us is “The Ringmaster,” he who controls, who narrates, who keeps things “contained in a small box . . . on a shelf,” just as we attempt to direct our lives by keeping them contained in the boxes of home, job, routine, and just as we attempt to control the interpretation of our lives by collecting memorabilia, photographs, letters, journals, etc. and keeping them in small boxes on a shelf. The reader’s, and thus all of our, complicity in these efforts to control and contain is made clear by a subtle shift to second person in the last line as Grant names something we all collect: “The brittle shards of day under your fingernails.”

Another such archetypal figure is “The Human Cannonball” who echoes Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation” as he is constantly propelled by forces he neither sees nor understands while he “dreams the same dream night after night.” He also becomes Sisyphean in the way he is described as “a subterranean voyager riding towards his nightly salvation.” The nature of this salvation is unnamed, of course, because it will be different for each reader: religion, family, money, etc. What is most interesting, however, is that even the certainty of this salvation is brought into question as the audience all have “knives glinting in their hands.”

In each poem Grant presents in the image of a circus figure another statement on what it feels like to be human. In “The Tightrope Walker,” for example we are shown the necessities of risk and uncertainty inherent in the human condition, as well as the uncertain redemption gained through self-awareness and self-declaration: “Smile fixed dead ahead--we all walk without the net, . . . high wire Hottentots in love with the world . . . . each body singing of its own downfall.”

Interspersed among these poems of subtle conceits are others that are not clearly circus-related but that, like the circus poems, cause us to think about the nature of human existence. “The Road to Archangel,” for example, follows up imagery of human atrocities and suffering with this statement about our resilience:

to be born human
is like coming up for air in an infinite ocean
and finding your head inside the only ring that floats--

and you hold on to the ring, you can breathe the air,
and somehow you reach the shore, and this,
. . . is only the beginning--and here I stand,

alone in the forest, looking down at the ocean--
Body of water. Breath of salt. Beginning.

As that poem suggests, Grant explores the full range of human nature unblinkingly, including those elements he, along with most of us, would resist, and a lesser poet would deny. The best image of these elements of humanity comes from the book’s best poem, “Trampling Down the Vintage,” where Grant weaves together the stories of John Brown and the Nazi genocide of Gypsies, characterizing the source of these atrocities archetypally as “a black-capped judge // deep in the sleep of ignorance,” whom the speaker must confront:

All my life, I have felt your hands around my throat,
your gloves thick and warm, smelling of nothing.

We will meet again, in a field out beyond today,
stripped, like holy men, holding our arms in the air.

This is not Grant’s first circus. He has already written a significant number of impressive, engaging, deeply meaningful poems in his previous books, but none have been more resonant than these because these function as a unit, each one adding texture to the one before it and to the work at large. Simply put, The Circus Poems is not just a good collection of poems but an important one, and one of my favorites this year.

Review of David Rigsbee's "The Red Tower: New & Selected Poems"

2010-11-18T09:51:00.001-05:00

Review of The Red Tower: New & Selected Poems
by David Rigsbee
NewSouth Books, 2010, $24.95, 192 pages
ISBN: 9781588382313

Like countless others, Thoreau, for example, or Camus or Whitehead or Sinatra, I have been haunted most of my life by a single question. Stephen Dobyns put this question into words in perhaps his best known poem, “How to Like It.” David Rigsbee, in his new collection of poems, The Red Tower, has an answer to that question. In his opening poem, “Harp,” he concludes, “Pointless speculation, and yet / / that is what I did with my life.” Granted, “pointless speculation,” may not sound like much, but one shouldn’t judge that summation of human existence and endeavor too harshly. After all, with the exception of that special certainty granted by what we call faith (others might say imagination or fantasy or denial), as far as we can ever know, all of our efforts to explain and understand the nature or meaning of life are ultimately speculative, and lacking the truth that is necessary to make one’s efforts truly meaningful and purposeful, they must be deemed in all likelihood pointless as well. More importantly, however, the answer to the question, “How do we like it,” that Rigsbee provides in The Red Tower is that we embrace the uncertainty of our existence, and all that entails, in other words, that we try.

Such uncertainty is a frequent source of frustration, sometimes even depression or desperation, but it is always also a source of possibility and purpose. I think of Robert Frost’s wonderful poem, “The Road Not Taken,” and how any attempt to determine the nature of the road Frost is suggesting one should take is frustrated by the poem’s embrace of uncertainty, leaving one with the conclusion that Frost’s real point is not which road one should take but only that it is one’s willingness to choose a road and pursue it that makes “all the difference.” In other words, it matters most that one is willing to try. Rigsbee’s poems in The Red Tower have a similar undercurrent. He recognizes that his answer to the question is an embrace of uncertainty, which creates possibility, and each of the poems in this book clarifies how one pursues possibility, what one might encounter in that pursuit, and what consequence might occur along the way. The first clarification comes in his second poem, “After Reading,” where he declares, “Purity is a curse . . . / It better fits / to turn away from the shore / in favor of the garbage and the grief.”

The next clarification comes in his third poem, the book’s title poem, “The Red Tower,” where he attempts to discover meaning out of his brother’s death, finding instead no transcendent answers. He declares that “Yeats was wrong when he wrote / that God talked to those long dead,” and adds, “Even if / God talked to the dead, what could / He possibly say to them?” This is not the first time anyone has asked this question, and Rigsbee makes clear that it shouldn’t be the last. If God is to have any real meaning to humanity, then this question needs to be asked repeatedly and persistently. The doubt expressed in those lines is repeated in the next poem, “The Apartment,” as well, where he tells us that “Saints were said to emerge from their cells / and pause, before going forth out of the spirit, / in their rope belts, into the stony forests.” If even saints pause between the realms of the spiritual and the physical, between life and death, then how could the rest of us expect any certainty, any correctness, any purity in our choices?

The four poems mentioned thus far are all from Rigsbee’s new poems, so it’s not surprising, perhaps, that the subject matter and attitudes they express are similar. It is most interesting to note, however, that the same perspective exists in the selected poems from his seven previous collections as well. My favorite of his expressions of this embrace of uncertainty comes from “The Stone House,” a poem in memoriam of Edmund Wilson, whose very life embodied the necessary dialectic between ontology and epistemology, what one might call the balancing act of being human. Rigsbee proclaims:

Wanted: a sky-blue life,
wild valleys brought to heel
by threshers and the queer tame men
walking the swath of a glacier.
Wanted too, a meaning for these footsteps,
these crawfish on the stone ledge, crawling
back to the river, and the tiny water-shrew
there, particular and bashful.

We want both to be and to make meaning out of or discover meaning within being. Embracing this balancing act and the effort necessary to persistently create meaning from it is also central to another of my favorite of Rigsbee’s older poems, “Equinox.”

It is the equinox, and today I feel
the thrall that reconciles the animal
and the hole, cloud and lake, the sexes.
The ticking at the window grows . . .
but in the kitchen the summer flies still swirl.
I hunt them all, as if nothing
should learn to expect the impossible.

Negative eloquence . . . /
is why the fire saves nothing, discards nothing.

Rigsbee stresses appreciation of the difference between life, which is clearly eternal, and individual life, which is decidedly not. He also stresses the necessary duality of living and being aware of living, being in the moment and aware of being in the moment.

Finally, in “Caught in the Rain,” another of Rigsbee’s best early poems we hear the same message in perhaps his clearest words as he contemplates the freshness of world metaphorically washed clean of loss, regret, the ever-present past by rain:

It will be
like falling in love again

to feel the sky-chilled rain
wanting to press my shirt
into the likeness of my body

until I am the submissive one,
part bird, part worm, part of
what is without reason . . .

knowing only the present tense.

Throughout his decades-long work, Rigsbee has encouraged us to live better, to make life better, by embracing the present tense, by submitting to an understanding that each of us is only a moment, by embodying Keats’ idea of negative capability: “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any [or at least too much] irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is lesson that will do us all good and that we need to be reminded of regularly.

Imbued with the Spirit: A Review of Echoes Across the Blue Ridge

2010-11-13T14:26:00.002-05:00

Imbued with the Spirit: A Review of Echoes Across the Blue Ridge

Echoes Across the Blue Ridge (Winding Path 2010)
Edited by Nancy Simpson
238 pages, $16
ISBN: 9781450701525

What makes the Appalachian Mountains so special? Certainly one distinctive quality is age. Where else can you see stone so old it crumbles, trees left alone to grow as big around as houses, houses bent on one knee but still lived in, and traditions as old as . . . well, as old as the hills?

Things, even people, are allowed to grow old here without someone knocking them down in the name of progress or shuffling them off to a nursing home. And that’s how the real magic of the place happens, because, in one respect, nothing dies here -- not really. Sure, physical presence may come and go, but the essential character of things is retained in stories, poems, songs, artifacts, traditions, and, most of all, memory.

The word “haunted” has a negative connotation in most places, but one can hardly read about the southern Appalachians without that word or a synonym being, if not named, then at least implied. Robert Morgan uses it in his Introduction to Echoes Across the Blue Ridge: “The deep valleys seem haunted by the natives who once lived there.” Kay Byer uses it in a comment quoted by Nancy Simpson in her “Note from the Editor:” “our most haunting artifacts.” The first poem, “Beyond the Clearing” by James Cox, certainly suggests it by referring to “a place sublime / where spirits sing invisibly.” And the first two stories, “Rendezvous” by Charlotte Wolf and “The Third Floor Bedroom” by Lana Hendershott, are, to some degree about the sensation of being haunted. And despite the usual expectation that non-fiction wouldn’t involve such fanciful ideas as spirits and haunting, even the first essay, “The Oldest Answer” by Steven Harvey quotes Bettie Sellers saying, “My bent was to espouse the unseen that’s in the woods at night.” To which, Harvey adds, “It is the need to fill all this haunted otherness with something human.”

All of this repetition of the word “haunting” or the sense of being haunted reminds the reader that the implication of the word is in fact not limited to an unpleasant habitual visitation but rather to a persistent presence of spirit, a presence that may be desired, embraced, just as I, a flatlander, have been haunted by images of Cade’s Cove, Caesars Head, Graveyard Fields, and the Devil’s Courthouse since visiting them as a child and returning to them as often as I can manage. This usually pleasant but sometimes unsettling lingering of spirit is closer to the type of haunting the writers in Echoes Across the Blue Ridge have discovered in these mountains and expressed in these pages.

Not that every piece in this anthology deals with the past or memory or spirit. Some of the selections deal with other reasons people are attracted to these mountains. Ellen Andrews comments on the beauty and sense of community in the mountains in “Homing:” “We are connected not by school uniforms / but by a raging lust for these purple mountains.” And in poems like Gene Hirsch’s “Where It Comes From,” we see even more closely the intimate relationship between the human and the natural: “Love / sprouts from lichen, / in the shade, by the lily pond . . . / in the thicket / of a chapter of floating / leaves / beneath the silky / hairs of a willow.”

Even the descriptions of nature are, however, frequently haunting, as in Janice Townley Moore’s “Photos from Another State,” where she describes the sound of a creek as “lyrics from the unseen.” Similarly, Jennifer McGaha’s reverie in “Looking Glass” is punctuated by images from the past: “You see your great-grandmother, her long, gray hair pinned in a bun, stooping over the quilting loom by the black wood stove in her cabin, and you see her strolling in her garden, her brown, crinkled hands pulling a green bean fresh from the vine.” And Susan Lefler’s harrowing story “The Spirit Tree” tells of one little girl’s attempt to use the spirits of nature and tradition to fend off the hazards of her mother’s emotional disorder.

Whether spirits of joy or grief, familiarity or strangeness, there is no doubt that the southern Appalachians are possessed by a presence that transcends the physical and temporal. In the same way, the poems, stories, and essays in Echoes Across the Blue Ridge are possessed by the various spirits of these mountains, leaving us standing, in the words of Janet Sloane Benway’s poem “Sugarloaf Mountain,” “in awe, / even in the face of sorrow.”

Art Speaks -- A Unique Collaborative Art and Theatre Project

2010-11-06T11:59:00.001-04:00

Art Speaks – A unique collaborative art and theatre project

Saint Stephens High School (Hickory, NC) students from Sue Hardy’s Drawing II, III/IV, & Visual Arts III and Molly Rice’s auditioned class of actors, writers, and singers Play Production have collaborated to produce a magazine-style book, art display and performance called “Art Speaks”. The artists and actors have worked closely together in dialogue as partners. The artist and actor together have chosen a persona to bring to life – some include making death, fear, confusion, a secret, broken cell phone, and dog tags speak, among others. The actors have created monologues, poetry, prose, and songs based on their chosen persona and the artist has created art work from their favorite medium.

Forty-six artists and actors met on Tuesdays and Thursdays during class to be a part of each other’s art as it was created. The project was kick started by Irish poet Adrian Rice who shared the “Muck Island” box a joint book made with Irish artist Ross Wilson. Muck Island is housed at Tate Gallery and Harvard University.

Artist Sue Hardy and Poet Molly Rice have teamed up as well to enjoy the experience with their students. Both teachers agreed that it was refreshing to focus on their own artistry since being a teacher leaves little time for creating outside their classroom.

“Art Speaks” will be performed in a unique walk-through production where the audience will get an intimate look at the students’ work.
Saturday Nov. 13th at the Hickory Museums of Art’s Coe Gallery at 4pm. This one-of-a-kind event is free to the public.

In the afternoon, the book “Art Speaks” will be launched.

Books, art prints (for framing), and CDs of the original music produced for the project will be sold. This project has been documented on film and a DVD of the work in progress and performance will be sold at a later date.

For more information, or to order copies of the books, prints, or CDs, contact Molly Rice at mollyrice@embarqmail.com

Scott Douglass a Saint?

2010-10-24T06:27:00.002-04:00

SCOTT DOUGLASS A SAINT?
Dedication of Poetry Council's 2010 Anthology, "Bay Leaves", to Poet, Editor, and Publisher, M. Scott Douglass

Anyone who has ever worked with Scott Douglass knows that he is no saint if sainthood necessitates the qualities of eternal patience, total abstinence, gentility of speech and manner, and holiness, whatever that means. If, on the other hand, one’s definition of sainthood focuses more on such things as “wonder worker, source of benevolent power, intercessor (in this case, between poets and their potential audiences), and selfless behavior” (all part of theologian, John Coleman’s definition), then no one is more deserving of the title Patron Saint of Poets, than Scott Douglass.

In Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Waiting for Icarus,” the character of the mother says: “poets [are] a trashy lot” and then “[those] who love such are the worst of all.” It was just such a love of poetry and poets that nearly 15 years ago led Scott Douglass to the painfully difficult decision to give up a rewarding and personally satisfying career as a dental technician to begin publishing poetry. He thought that editing a journal and operating a small press would both help other poets find audiences and stimulate his own creativity. He has written and found publication for hundreds of his own poems, including 5 books, but e quickly discovered that most of the creativity being stimulated was spent on the editing, production, marketing, and distribution of other poets’ work. Fortunately, for all of us, he usually found the selfless work of helping others perfect their poetry, achieve publication, and connect with their audience personally satisfying.

Since the first Main Street Rag chapbook and the first issue of Main Street Rag, the magazine, in 1996, Scott has edited 59 issues of the Main Street Rag and published somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 individual books, many of those as part of MSR’s annual chapbook competition begun in 1999 and annual book competition started in 2001, both of which provide substantial monetary awards to the winners. That record of publication comes out to more than 50 titles per year, roughly 1 every week. Is anyone else anywhere publishing that much poetry? Most of the poets I know don’t even read that much poetry.

A very rough analysis of MSR’s titles reveals that Scott has published books by authors from at least 30 different states and 4 different countries. True to his roots, however, Scott’s largest source of authors, by far, has been North Carolina. He has published books by more than 60 authors from this state, including both the well-known and the brand new, and they have all been of the highest quality from both a literary and production perspective. MSR books have received awards from virtually every competition out there, including the Oscar Arnold Young Award in 3 of the past 6 years.

And Scott hasn’t stopped in his quest to have a meaningful and lasting effect on the world of writers in North Carolina. He has also undertaken the production work for many other journals, publishers, and organizations, including the production of Bay Leaves since 2004. And to further help poets connect with their audience, he has helped organize and sponsor 6 reading series in Hickory, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Fuquay-Varina, and Kansas City, MO, and coordinates writing workshops at a variety of venues across the state.

Poet, Editor, Publisher, Publicist, Activist, Dental Technician, and friend, Scott Douglass has borne many titles well. The Poetry Council of NC is honored to recognize the invaluable contributions he has made and continues to make to this organization, to poets across the state and the country, and to the world of poetry in general. For all of these contributions, we dedicate the 2010 issue of Bay Leaves to M. Scott Douglass, who perhaps after all, should hereafter be known as Saint Scott.

The Well-Balanced Plate: Poetry and Multi-Tasking

2010-10-11T18:50:00.002-04:00

The Well-Balanced Plate: Poetry and Multi-Tasking
by Scott Owens

Reprinted from NC Writers’ Network News
Fall 2010 Issue, September 2010

Most days that title is a lie. When I teach young writers I encourage them to maintain balance in their lives, to not obsess on writing to the detriment of relationships or finances. I even offer them advice on how to do it, how to set up schedules that permit appropriate levels of attention for all of one’s needs as a person and a poet. In truth, however, schedules rarely work the way their drawn up, and the impetus for writing, just as the need for the relationships and money, is not easily contained. So the usual truth is that most poets lead lives that are recklessly unbalanced.

Today, however, I had a moment of acute self-recognition as I drove in to school with a backpack full of 75 freshman composition essays in the seat beside me, a box full of copies of my new book of poems, and 3 toddler carseats spread across the middle row of my minivan. And I have to admit I felt a sense of pride in who I have become.

I have plenty of friends with young children. Some of them don’t work, and none of them write poetry. I often envy their ability to concentrate on raising those children. It’s not so much the time they have with them. In fact, I’ve been able to manipulate my schedule such that I probably have as much time with Sawyer as they have with their children. It’s more the ability to focus on what is properly their number one priority, to not feel distracted by vocation or avocation, to always know what duty deserves their unmitigated attention, to be able to readily set aside any distraction and divert to the whim of the 4-year-old.

I also have plenty of friends who are teachers but do not have children and do not write poetry, although some have children or write poetry. I often envy them as well. I often fear they are probably better teachers than I. I feel certain they don’t carry around essays for days on end looking for moments between obligations to review and score one or two at a time. And I’m even more certain that they have the opportunity to read more current scholarship than one is likely to find in the new issues of Cricket or Stone Soup.

And then there is the admittedly much smaller group that I probably sometimes envy more than any other, those friends who have managed somehow to construct lives that allow them to be simply poets, no children, no professional obligations outside of what they do in the world of poetry. I imagine they spend hours every day reading Poetry, Paris Review, Georgia Review, scouring the pages of Poets & Writers for exotic residencies and publication opportunities, and reading widely from a variety of new collections of poetry which they receive at no cost because they have the time to write reviews of the ones they like. And, of course, I imagine they have the freedom from other responsibilities necessary to stop whenever a line, image, or idea occurs to them and start the process of writing that new poem, or to hunker down with two fingers of scotch and hammer out the revision they know a poem has been needing, or to vanish for half a day in the real or virtual daydream world that sometimes seems necessary to allow a poem to go from vague intimation to concrete, clear, and thoroughly-explored experience.

I am certain these descriptions of the lives I imagine my friends enjoy are horribly, unfairly, and almost comically exaggerated, but feelings of envy and frustration are perhaps inevitable when one realizes he had a new poem floating around in his head that has been unfortunately lost to the banter of three toddlers in a weekly afternoon playdate, or that he could get through this pile of essays if only he didn’t have to stop every five minutes to answer yet another question about the source of rain, or that the fear he has that he’s not giving his children what they need and that his parenting is horribly inadequate would go away if he could just make the desire to write poetry and the need to plan the next day’s classes disappear.

That is the mental and emotional state of conflictedness and distraction that I exist in most of the time. I’ve learned to accept the low-level discomfort that being there creates. But on this particular morning, surrounded by the concrete evidence, by the imagery the poet within me would say, of who I am, I felt instead a satisfied sense of self-knowledge, even perhaps of clear purpose. There have been periods in my life when I was poet and teacher, but not parent. There have also been times when I was parent and teacher but not poet. And there were a couple of years when Sawyer was an infant that I was parent and poet but not teacher. During all of those periods, I knew that something was missing. I could not have told anyone why, but I knew that I felt incomplete.

Please don’t think that I’m putting forth any sort of sanctimonious argument that this is what everyone needs or should be doing. And please don’t think that I’m patting myself on the back for being the great male multi-tasker or anything like that. All I’m saying is that for me, parenting and teaching feed my poet; teaching and writing help me know how to parent; and writing and parenting make me a better teacher. And I do suspect that such complementarity does or would help others feel greater satisfaction as well. Most of the time I’m not exactly cognizant of the way these three areas of obligation work to create one whole person, but on this particular morning I felt a sort of epiphany that this triple existence, while frequently exhausting, is always a source of some level of pride, an endless source of motivation, and a means of feeling complete. Ultimately, I understood in that moment that this is the life I’ve wanted and despite other moments of doubt, guilt, and simple exhaustion, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Bathanti Proves Poetry Can Make a Difference

2010-10-07T14:52:00.003-04:00

Bathanti Proves Poetry Can Make a Difference

One of the charges occasionally leveled at contemporary poetry is that it has become irrelevant. Whenever I hear that claim I can’t help but wonder what contemporary poetry the speaker is reading. I read about 100 new poetry books each year and perhaps thousands in various poetry journals, and I will admit that a percentage of those seem pointlessly self-involved: poems about writing poetry; poems written such that only other poets could appreciate them; poems that are mere self-expression. I will admit that even I occasionally write such poems, since other poets and myself are also among my audience. That percentage, however, seems to be a very small one. Most of the poetry that I read is about experiences, ideas, and perceptions that have a broad base of interest and appeal: politics, religion, philosophy, living in the 21st century, joy, loss, regret, all the various faces of human endeavor, success, and failure, and, of course, like all art, beauty and truth.

I can think of no better example of the vital relevance of contemporary poetry than the work of Joseph Bathanti. For decades Bathanti has been deeply involved in the “real” world both in and through his poetry. As a poet and educator (currently at Appalachian State University), Bathanti is the author of 12 creative and scholarly books and has won virtually every award available, but it is the subject of his poetry and the ways in which he uses poetry to change people’s lives that are most deserving of acclaim and that illustrate his vital relevance.

Bathanti’s various involvements in criminal justice began when for fourteen months as a VISTA volunteer, he taught and coached inmates, started Alcoholic Anonymous chapters at two prison camps, coordinated work and study release programs, developed job and parole plans for inmates on the verge of release, and conducted a weekly creative writing workshop, culminating in the publication of an anthology of inmate writing and art work. He followed that up by teaching a Learning Lab at Huntersville Prison and living as a house-parent for abused and neglected children. During this time, he also became involved in death penalty work and appeared on radio and TV as a staunch abolitionist.

Over the past 33 years, Bathanti has lectured, read his work and conducted workshops in a variety of prisons, training schools, battered women’s shelters, homeless shelters, daycare centers, nursing homes, soup kitchens, barns, gyms, train depots, and fish camps. He served as a Humanities scholar through the Georgia Humanities Council on a writing/performance project with AIDS patients at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital. For ten years, from 1991-2001, he taught an annual week-long creative writing workshop at a North Carolina prison road camp in Stateville. And during the academic year 2005-06, he weekly took a group of creative writing students into Boone’s homeless shelter, Hospitality House, and facilitated a writing workshop among the residents there. This initiative resulted in an anthology, featuring the work of the residents and Appalachian State University students.

Most recently, in March of 2009, he guest-edited the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing, an anthology of prisoner writing published through University of Michigan’s Prisoner Creative Arts Project (PCAP); and also conducted creative writing workshops in Detroit and Ann Arbor prisons.

Bathanti will facilitate a poetry workshop sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society, from 5:00 to 6:30 on Tuesday, October 12, at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. The workshop will be followed by October’s Poetry Hickory, where Bathanti and Robert Abbate, author of The Courage of Straw and instructor at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, will be the featured writers. Poetry Hickory will begin at 6:30 with shorter readings by Bill Griffin, Julian Phelps, and Bethea Buchanan.
Cost of the workshop is $15 for NCPS members and $25 for non-members. Membership information is available at http://www.ncpoetrysociety.com/. Registration can be reserved by contacting Scott Owens at asowens1@yahoo.com or 828-234-4266. Space is limited, so early registration is encouraged. Poetry Hickory is free and open to the public. The poem below, which deals with issues faith, beauty, and everyday ways of coping, can serve as a sample of what those in attendance will hear.

The Last Time I Drank with Phil
by Joseph Bathanti

I’m drinking
in the Rose Garden
at Mellon Park with Philip.
Out all night, we find ourselves
burnished in the high
dawn of Easter, Sunday
sun dripping yellow plates
from the Sycamore’s wet green shade.
Spider webs catacomb
the primrose. Angels
spray from silver fountains.
Goldfinches float above
the sequined lawn.
So much light
we shield our eyes,
like the first mendicants,
two old friends, stumbling
upon the risen Christ,
uplifted emerald
bottles of warm Rolling Rock
igniting.

Review of Richard Allen Taylor's "Punching through the Egg of Space"

2010-10-03T07:55:00.001-04:00

Review of Punching through the Egg of Space, by Richard Allen Taylor
Main Street Rag, 2010, 75 pages, $14
ISBN: 9781599482385

Sometimes it’s easy to make singular statements about a book of poems. Perhaps the poems in the book cohere around a single narrative, theme, or style. Such singular statements, however, while convenient, usually accurate, and sometimes even helpful, often belie a vital variety and richness in the poems that make them much less artificial than the critical singular statement suggests.

The poems in Richard Allen Taylor’s new collection, Punching through the Egg of Space, vigorously resist any such singular classification, which is not to say that the volume lacks cohesion. There are several currents that run throughout the poems. There are, for example, a significant number of poems about food, writing, and aging. But it would be grossly misleading to say that the book is about any one or even all three of these topics. There are also a number of poems about being Richard Allen Taylor, which within the literary historical context of Confessionalism the reader understands as being about being human. In fact, one of the many strengths of this text is the seamlessness with which Taylor makes us recognize ourselves in poems that seem to be about him. Nevertheless, to say that Punching through the Egg of Space is Confessionalist would also be unfairly and unnecessarily reductionist.

Tony Abbott says this “is a book of joyous affirmation.” Ann Campanella says it is “a song of joy.” And Anne Hicks says “these poems contemplate the role and responsibility of the individual in this world.” They are all right, of course, but neither life nor these poems are simple enough to be described in such singular statements, and recognizing this, Campanella adds that the book is about “the paradox of the human heart” and presents “a constellation of humor, gravity, and exuberance.” It is exactly this combination of qualities that makes Punching through the Egg of Space such an enjoyable read. These are poems written about what it feels like to be alive in the 21st century, a topic immediately relevant to any reader today. As such there is often humor, sadness, irony, philosophical musing, conviction, the loss of conviction, complete uncertainty, surprise, sentimentality, and throughout it all an unmistakable humanity.

Speaking of one friend to another recently I said of the former that he is “a real guy.” I couldn’t possibly explain what I meant by the phrase, but from these poems I suspect Richard Allen Taylor embodies exactly that quality, a real guy who happens to be very good at finding the perfect word and the perfect image to help the rest of us understand what he means.

I thought I would quote a number of poems to make my points in this review, existential lines about the value of effort in “Landing” and “Outbound,” about the irony of success in “After the Moonwalk,” lines illustrating Taylor’s remarkable imagery in “Moonrise -- North Buncombe County, NC” or “Fancying I Know More about Soil Erosion Than the Artist,” lines revealing Taylor’s perspective on writing in “Obscurity,” “White,” or “Token Rebellion,” but lacking the space to give all the deserving poems, lines, and images their due, I will instead conclude with an excerpt of “Playing Catch,” my own favorite poem from the collection and allow it to serve as a teaser to encourage you to read more:

Watch this kid. He throws the ball
across the plate, chases it to the backstop,
hurries back to the pitcher’s mound,
throws the ball again and again, shouting
gentle encouragements.

A munchkin in a Yankees cap, she just stands there,
never swings the bat, shows no interest in hitting.
. . . . . . . . . . //

I try to remember what it was like
to be learning the fundamentals--
love, heartbreak, sacrifice.

This kid makes all his errors
on the giving side, and I root for him.

Review of Ami Kaye's "What Hands Can Hold"

2010-09-30T14:20:00.001-04:00

Review of What Hands Can Hold by Ami Kaye (Illustrations by Tracy McQueen)
Xlibris, 2010, 132 pages
ISBN: 9781450031080

I don’t believe in fate, providence, or predestination, but I’m willing to admit that on more than one occasion in my life things have happened with a certain sense of synchronicity. Recently, for no reason I could fathom, I went through a renewed interest in short imagistic poetry -- haiku, certainly, but other similar poems as well. And then, unannounced, I received a copy of Ami Kaye’s new book of poems, What Hands Can Hold, which consists almost entirely of poems that are frequently short, and nearly always successfully imagistic.

Only two of the 63 poems in What Hands Can Hold, are consciously derived from haiku and its related forms (both are titled “Senryu”), but the influence of an aesthetic commonly thought of as Eastern, is manifest. Certain poems, like “Shadow Hands” bear a great deal in common with haiku -- brevity, focus on two seemingly disparate images that resonate when placed, without commentary, together:
against the bright light
hands dance to make a shadow
a black swan rises in
graceful silhouette.
Other poems contain one or more stanzas that come even closer to the traditions of haiku, as in this stanza from “Hands:”
cupping water
the flowing urgency of
silt-green rivers.
And some poems are built entirely upon short, imagistic stanzas, as in “Tea House:”
That last
conversation
left interrupted

when the call
came,

the rush
to leave,

the scrape of wood
against

cherry-blossom
wallpaper,

the silence
afterwards.
The form, nearly always effective in these poems, is particularly so in this one, where the brief, perception-heavy phrasing mirrors the fragmented, methodical processing of a speaker confronted with a tragic parting.

While, as suggested in the volume’s title, Kaye employs the motif of hands and the many uses of hands -- creation, communication, support, prayer, praise, service, revelation, control, love -- to bind these poems and mark them as part of a unified manuscript, the poems really cover a wide range of topics and themes, from love and parenting to politics and loss. And while Kaye is lyrical and adept no matter what topic she explores, she is perhaps at her best, in the love poems. Take, for example, “Curvature,” a beautifully sensuous love poem that transitions seamlessly from one image of curvature to the next, beginning with that of a smile and proceeding as follows:
I am captured entirely

slave to your mirth
no need for words, silence builds

restless and charged, it
changes the quality of touch

air crackles between us, extravagant,
quickening, lightning fast

like the curve of light
when a rainbow is made

or the curve of your arms
when I’m in them.

“November Rose” is another sumptuous love poem with a number of those haiku-influenced stanzas, but it is also one of the most complex poems in the collection. Ostensibly about a very late-blooming rose, “born from frost . . . / deep in whose petals / burns a hot heart,” it is not only about the speaker’s love for the person who brings her the rose, or his love for the speaker, or even the speaker’s love for things that resist decay, that manage to create or be created out of destruction, it is about a love of so many things -- simple things like roses, poetry, music, language, and complex things like the very human existential resistance to death, decay and inevitability that paradoxically deepens and is deepened by the willingness to love despite the great risk such willingness necessitates. This paradox of love born from the awareness of loss’s inevitability becomes the central theme of the text; perhaps it is the central theme of all human texts. This theme is most clearly stated in “Intimations of Mortality,” where the speaker proclaims, “The hint of impermanence brings with it / the agony, the passion to live.”

Even when the stories presented by the poems are most full of pain, the love still remains, as in the heartbreaking political narrative (two uncommon traits in this book), “Snow Globe,” in these lines from “Sins of Omission,” “She wished, she wished she had / inked on vellum to bear witness, / to tell him what she never said before: ‘You matter’”, and in “Senescence:”
She helps him change
and it hurts, even though
she’s used to his empty eyes
by now.

She feeds him
oatmeal, an orange,
a meal that drags
into a couple of hours

and when she
washes the dishes
. . . //

She remembers
the times his fingers
laced with hers,
how he always knew
when she needed his touch.

It is just this fresh, deep, and wide treatment of a theme so vital to contemporary human existence that makes Ami Kaye’s What Hands Can Hold both significant and timely. It is also what makes me glad that I had begun to look at short poems with short lines in a new appreciation, and that for whatever reason Ami Kaye decided to send me a copy of this book. So, while I still spurn the notion of destiny, I do find great joy in the presence of and from the consequence of what I might prefer to call serendipity.

2010-09-21T06:12:00.001-04:00

POETRY COUNCIL COMPLETES WORK, PREPARES FOR POETRY DAY

The Poetry Council of North Carolina, an organization that for 58 years has worked to foster a greater appreciation for and appreciation of poetry in NC by sponsoring contests and events for adults and children, has concluded its work on this year’s competitions and is preparing now to highlight the winners of those competitions at its annual Poetry Day, to be held October 16 at Catawba College in Salisbury.

This year’s big winners include Greensboro’s Rhett Iseman Trull, recipient of the Oscar Arnold Young Award for the best book of poems published by a North Carolinian, for her book, The Real Warnings. Trull will be spending a great deal of time in Hickory this year, appearing at Lenoir Rhyne as part of their “In Their Own Words” visiting writer series on September 16 with NC Poet Laureate Cathy Smith-Bowers, returning in the spring as Lenoir-Rhyne’s writer-in-residence, and reading at Poetry Hickory on March 8.

A recent visitor at Poetry Hickory, Tony Abbott, who read here on September 14, received second place in the book competition for his New & Selected Poems. Other finalists in the book competition who have read at Poetry Hickory in the past year include Linda Annas Ferguson and Alex Grant. Award recipients in other categories also include recent and upcoming Poetry Hickory readers: Sara Claytor and Bill Griffin, both of whom read last year; Richard Allen Taylor, who is part of November’s event; and Malaika King Albrecht, who will read with Trull on March 8.

Poetry Day events begin on October 16 with registration at 9:20, followed by the dedication of this years’ awards anthology, Bay Leaves, honoring Main Street Rag Publisher and Editor, M. Scott Douglass, for his unparalleled contributions to the NC poetry community. The highlight of the event will be the recognition of category winners and readings from those winners. Following lunch, entertainer Bob Whyte will perform. Poetry Day is open to the public. Lunch can be reserved for $8 at www.poetrycouncilofnc.wordpress.com. A complete list of this year’s winners and sample poems from Trull and Abbott can also be seen there.

The Catawba County area is well-represented on the Poetry Council by locals Scott Owens (Vice President), Bud Caywood (Free Verse Contest Manager), Nancy Posey (High School Contest Manager), and regular Poetry Hickory attendee, Jessie Carty of Charlotte (Humorous Verse Contest Manager). The Poetry Council is a 501c3 non-profit organization. Further information on Poetry Day, or the Council’s annual contests, or details on how to support the Council is available on the website or by contacting President Ed Cockrell at edcockrell@hotmail.com or Scott Owens at asowens1@yahoo.com.

The Reports of Poetry's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

2010-09-10T13:34:00.001-04:00

The Reports of Poetry’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Over the past 20 years I have heard and read more times than I can count that nobody reads poetry anymore, nobody buys poetry anymore, and nobody cares about poetry anymore, that in effect, poetry is dead. But everywhere I turn I see evidence quite to the contrary. The most recent of that evidence came to me from a town where one might expect there would be little poetry and little interest in it, a town with a population under 10,000 and only a small branch of a community college, the town of Lincolnton, NC, where a group has started a series of Open Mic readings called Poetry Lincolnton that takes place at 7:00 on the first Tuesday of each month at Generation Bean Coffeehouse.

I read as part of that series recently and was blown away by the size of the audience and the enthusiasm the participants had towards poetry. Organizers of the series, Lincolnton poets, Devona Wyant and Shane Manier, and Generation Bean owner, Kym Miller have sparked a great deal of energy about poetry in a place where one might not expect to find any interest at all.

One of the things that I enjoyed most about this reading was the “performance vibe” of the local readers. For those not familiar with the notion of performance poetry, it is a diverse blend of poetry, song, recitation, music, theater, and sometimes movement that will vary greatly from place to place and person to person. Different manifestations of this oral art might be called slam poetry or spoken word. The particular style of performance poetry displayed during my visit to Lincolnton was clearly influenced by rap music, and characterized by confrontational themes, frequent rhyming in short lines, and a fast pace, all of which make for an enjoyable and often surprising event.

I so thoroughly enjoyed the readings that I invited the group to share their work at Poetry Hickory, and on September 14, at 6:30, Wyant, Manier, and Morgan Depue will do just that as their performances will constitute the Open Mic segment of Poetry Hickory at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. The featured writers that night will be NC Poetry Society President and retired Davidson Professor Anthony Abbott, and recent UNC Wilmington MFA graduate Jason Mott. To whet your appetite for the evening’s poetry, here is a poem from Shane Manier.

We are poets

We will raise the sun with hands like Gladiolas in bloom.
We will learn to walk like the elephants,
and our arms will extend like an art form
becoming triumphant trumpets.
We will push the laughing eyes back
with palms as steady as a Buddhist monk.
And we shall burn in the fires of ambition
while marching to our birth of revision.
Because this is our day.
This sky is ours to sizzle with our fingers,
we will drip the sound of inspiration
and it will flow sweeter than perspiration.
We will turn adjectives into nouns
because our thoughts are profound.
We are the carving on the stone,
after the monument has fallen down.
We are more than historians spoon feeding textbook givens,
more than story tellers or musicians,
more than friends, lovers and "fam".
We are the voice inside you
when you need the strength to rise again.
We are the wet rag that soothes your head,
the noble words that honor our dead.
We are the reminders, truth finders,
the seekers of wisdom,
and the power to break free from what imprisons.
We are individuals, defenders, dream welders.
We are poets.

Joseph Bathanti to Lead Poetry Workshop at October Poetry Hickory

2010-09-02T14:14:00.001-04:00

World-renowned poet, educator, and activist, Joseph Bathanti will facilitate a poetry workshop prior to October’s Poetry Hickory at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. The workshop, sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society, will begin at 5:00 and extend to 6:30 on Tuesday, October 12, and will be followed by Poetry Hickory, which will feature readings by Bathanti, and Robert Abbate, and a 30-minute Open Mic.

Cost of the workshop is $15 for NCPS members and $25 for non-members. Membership information is available at http://www.ncpoetrysociety.com/. Deadline for registration is September 28 and can be reserved by contacting Scott Owens at asowens1@yahoo.com or 828-234-4266. Registrants will be asked to send a poem of 30 lines or less to Owens for possible discussion during the workshop. Space is limited, so early registration is encouraged.

Here is a profile of Bathanti’s work:

Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, Joseph Bathanti is the author of six books of poetry: Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; This Metal, which was nominated for The National Book Award, and won the 1997 Oscar Arnold Young Award from The North Carolina Poetry Council for best book of poems by a North Carolina writer; Land of Amnesia; and his new collection, Restoring Scared Art.

His first novel, East Liberty, winner of the Carolina Novel Award, was published in 2001. His latest novel, Coventry, won the 2006 Novello Literary Award. He is also the author of They Changed the State: The Legacy of North Carolina’s Visiting Artists, 1971-1995, and a collection of short stories, The High Heart, winner of the 2006 Spokane Prize.

He is the recipient of two Literature Fellowships (in 1994 for poetry and 2009 for fiction) from the North Carolina Arts Council; The Samuel Talmadge Ragan Award, presented annually for outstanding contributions to the Fine Arts of North Carolina over an extended period; the Bruno Arcudi Literature Prize; the Ernest A Lynton Faculty Award for Professional Service and Academic Outreach; the Aniello Lauri Award for Creative Writing (2001 and 2007); the Linda Flowers Prize; the Sherwood Anderson Award and others.

Bathanti’s various involvements in criminal justice began in 1976 when he left his hometown in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to come to North Carolina as a VISTA Volunteer assigned to the North Carolina Department of Correction. For fourteen months as a VISTA, he taught and coached inmates, started Alcoholic Anonymous chapters at two prison camps, coordinated work and study release programs, developed job and parole plans for inmates on the verge of release, and conducted a weekly creative writing workshop. Out of this workshop came an anthology of inmate writing and art work, edited by Bathanti, called Bewteen Ourselves. As a VISTA, Bathanti also worked with a Charlotte agency, ECO (Ex-Convicts Organization) where he edited The ECO Journal and served on ECO’s Board of Directors.

After leaving VISTA, he began his teaching career at Central Piedmont Community College where he taught not only English, his major area of study, but also taught in the Criminal Justice Department, and taught as well a Learning Lab at Huntersville Prison, just north of Charlotte. During this time, Bathanti and his wife Joan (also a former VISTA) were house-parents for abused and neglected children, many of whom were adjudicated youth and status offenders. Also, during this time, he became involved in death penalty work, was a member of Charlotte Citizens Against the Death Penalty, and appeared on radio and TV as a staunch abolitionist.

Over the past 33 years, Bathanti has lectured, read his work and conducted workshops in a variety of prisons, training schools, battered women’s shelters, homeless shelters, daycare centers, nursing homes, soup kitchens, barns, gyms, train depots, and fish camps. He is the past Chair of the North Carolina Writers’ Network Prison Project, and served as a Humanities scholar through the Georgia Humanities Council on a writing/performance project with AIDS patients at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital. He is the winner of the 1995 Ruth Ann Blankenship Prize, given annually by Statesville, NC Fifth Street Ministries for work in its battered women’s shelter, My Sister’s House, where he taught a weekly creative writing workshop. In 1998, he was awarded the Viola Kimbrough Parker Diversity Award by Mitchell Community College for his work to promote diversity and multiculturalism. He is the recipient of 1999 Ernest A. Lynton Faculty Award for Professional Service and Academic Outreach (specifically in the area of prison outreach and advocacy), presented annually by The New England Resource Center for Higher Education, with support from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He has been awarded grants by the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Puffin Foundation for his work among marginalized populations. For ten years, from 1991-2001, he taught an annual week-long creative writing workshop at a North Carolina prison road camp in Stateville, NC with legendary prison writing teacher and Black Mountain College graduate, Fielding Dawson.

During the academic year 2005-06, he weekly took a group of creative writing students into Boone’s homeless shelter, Hospitality House, and facilitated a writing workshop among the residents there. This initiative resulted in an anthology, featuring the work of the residents and Appalachian State University students, called Voices from the Hospitality House. He has taught courses on prison literature (one of his academic specialties) at colleges, universities churches, and writers’ conferences

Bathanti’s prison writing has appeared in some of the nation’s premier literary journals, including Shenandoah, Poetry International, The Greenfield Review, Pembroke Magazine,The Davidson Miscellany, Florida Humanities, The Phoenix, Witness, The Journal of Public Service and Outreach, Our Era, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Blue Mesa Review, Cafe Solo, Lost Horse Press Anthology of Human Rights Poetry, The Sound of Poets Cooking, Aethlon, Cotton Boll, The Sun, Harpoon and others.

His poem “Cletis Pratt,” about a Vietnam Veteran sent to prison, is the winner of the 2007 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize, awarded annually by the Nuclear Age Foundation in Santa Barbara, California. His prison writing has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won a Blumenthal Readers and Writers Series Award.

Most recently, in March of 2009, he guest-edited the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing, an anthology of prisoner writing published through University of Michigan’s Prisoner Creative Arts Project (PCAP); and also conducted creative writing workshops in Detroit and Ann Arbor prisons While in Michigan he spoke on matters of criminal justice at the University of Michigan, Shaman Drum Book store, and was interviewed about his prison work and writing on WDET, Wayne State University public radio station. Under the sponsorship of Michigan Prisoner Reentry Initiative (MPRI), he also spoke at Eastern Michigan University, and Artist Village in Detroit.

Profile of Tony Abbott

2010-09-01T17:17:00.002-04:00

Poet, Scholar, Teacher, and Novelist to Appear at Poetry Hickory

Over the course of a lengthy career in the arts and letters, Anthony Abbott has distinguished himself well beyond what most could hope for in not one area but several. As an instructor, he spent more than 30 years as a distinguished member of the English faculty at prestigious Davidson College, serving as Chair of the department for the final 7 years of his career. As a scholar he authored the noteworthy studies Shaw and Christianity and The Vital Lie: Reality and Illusion in Modern Drama.

As a novelist, his first foray into the field, Leaving Maggie Hope, was awarded the Novello Award. And as a poet, his first collection, The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Most writers and scholars labor in obscurity hoping to achieve just one distinction equal to any of these.

Unlike others, Abbott also has not rested on his laurels but has followed up these successes with the publication of a second novel and four subsequent collections of poetry, the most recent, New and Selected Poems, having come out earlier this year from Lorimer Press. He has also continued to give back to the NC literary and academic community, teaching classes at Catawba College, serving as this year’s President of the NC Poetry Society, serving as past President of the NC Writers’ Network and the Charlotte Writers’ Club, and providing assistance on a local level as one of last year’s Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets and on Lenoir Rhyne’s Visiting Writers Series Advisory Committee.

On September 14, Abbott will join Bolton, NC, poet, Jason Mott, as featured writers at Poetry Hickory. The reading will be held at 6:30 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory and will be preceded by a meeting of the NC Writers’ Network’s Foothills Region’s Writers’ Night Out at 5:00. All events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Scott Owens at asowens1@yahoo.com or 828-234-4266, or visit the website at www.poetryhickory.com. To give readers a sense of what to expect, here is a poem from Abbott’s New & Selected Poems.

Blood Red of Late October

Blood red of late October in the South,
and from the cemetery to the college campus
on the hill, the leaves bathe my eyes. I
turn each corner into dazzling surprise.

In my mine’s eye, she walks toward me.
I show her my favorite tree. I pluck three
leaves for her and watch as she carries
them away. This is new found grace,

and in the space where sadness once lay
the small white flower of hope grows.
In the South, October lingers, the gold
sun glances off the trees. November will

come with its cold rain soon enough,
I know. I turn the dazzle inward
and down. It courses through the veins
and lofts me toward the breathless light.

Review of David Manning's "Continents of Light"

2010-08-31T15:05:00.001-04:00

Review
Continents of Light, by David T. Manning
Finishing Line Press, 2010, 29 pages, $14
ISBN 9781599245362

There are days when I’m driving down the road or sitting in a coffeeshop and I see something so remarkably tender that I feel for a moment like I honestly love everyone. It’s a nice feeling, albeit usually brief. David Manning, it seems, has had similar epiphanous moments of agape, written poems about those moments, and recorded them in his new collection of poems, Continents of Light.

The poems in Continents of Light are by and large memorial poems, memorials to the particular objects of love they are about, to those in love, and to the human capacity for love, and by reading these poems, the reader achieves his own epiphany, the sudden understanding that the desire to memorialize is itself a form of love, one that poets in particular are familiar with. In “Opus Anonymous,” Manning wonderfully captures the romantic hope of poets to get something important so right that that thing lives on in the words of the poem: “Perhaps she escaped from his dreams / and fell between stanzas into / the white spaces of his poems.” And for Manning, this desire to memorialize becomes something even more. As suggested in “Duende,” it becomes duty: “I cannot turn my face away. / God has found me and I have / no place to hide.”

The flip side of great love, however, is great loss. Reading these poems one feels that Manning has loved well and lost much and understands more than most the nature of the longing that results from having loved and lost, the longing not to simply have something one has never had but to have again what one has known, grown accustomed to, and integrated into one’s fabric of being to such a degree that it seems no longer desire but necessity. The reader shares this understanding in poems like “Too Old for Vicky:” “I have lost the color / of her eyes . . . . // Vicky has been taken // beyond all nights and assignations. / Taken to the bosom of one / much too old for us all.” Perhaps it is even stronger in “Coastal:” “I feel you waiting / where I cannot find you. / I follow you / from empty room to empty room.”

The emotional undercurrent of these poems, the longing for connection or reconnection, is so strong that it carries the reader away. This is, perhaps, clearest in “Skipping Stones”

. . . their voices startled me
from far across the lake. I hope

my thoughts reach you this way
sometimes, . . .
distracting you in mid-breath,

soft as the touch of a stranger
in a crowd, . . .

. . . If only
there were this lake

and nothing else between us
I could skip my words
across to you like stones.

This poem is undoubtedly very personal, but the reader can’t tell who this long lost “you” is -- a lost wife or child or parent, even perhaps the speaker’s own past self. Such lack of clarity is often the death of a poem, but in this one, the ambiguity makes it possible for the reader to fill in the blank as they need to. It becomes the white space between the stanzas where Manning has already spoken of memorializing those we love, and the emotions are so familiar and so solidly imagined (made into image) that the poem succeeds regardless of who the “you” becomes to the reader -- the world, God, or my favorite, the reader, such that this becomes, in Dickinsonian tradition, Manning’s “Letter to the World.”

Review of Steve Roberts' Another Word for Home

2010-08-24T19:08:00.001-04:00

Review of Another Word for Home, by Steve Roberts
Main Street Rag (2010), 70 pages, $14
ISBN: 9781599482491

In Steve Roberts’ “The Lamp, the Glass and the Pencil,” arguably the best poem in his new collection, Another Word for Home, an employer asks the speaker, “Do your poems always center around / Yourself?” The simple implication of the question is that there is something wrong if every poem “centers around” oneself--rampant egotism or narcissism, perhaps, or some unhealed woundedness that causes the self to be the lens through which all perception is filtered . . . but wait a minute; with or without woundedness, the self will always be the lens through which perception is filtered, and to ignore rather than explore that fact is to indulge in a larger sort of egotism by which one presumes their own experiences and perceptions to be objective fact rather than acknowledging the way the self influences what one sees, hears, feels. The employer in the poem is certainly not the first to level this sort of criticism at what has in the past and might still be termed confessional poetry. Both this employer and these prior critics would do well to read a bit a further as five poems later, in “Business,” the presumably same speaker gives as good a justification for the confessional tendencies of these poems as I’ve ever encountered when he remarks: “I have learned / The unsaid can manufacture // Disturbances.”

These two poems illustrate several impressive characteristics of Roberts’ collection. First, of course, there is the vindication of confessionalism, which I’m sure was not anything Roberts set out to do, but which is nonetheless resoundingly achieved in poems like “The Ground Firms Up the Wet,” “Bonewhite Plane Drones,” and “Gyre.” And, given that the book begins with the line, “I locate,” and repeats that idea of locating the self amid the maelstrom of perception, memory, and circumstance that is reality in poems like “Gyre” (“derive the location / Of the sun from an oak’s restless / Shadow”) and “Location, Location,” perhaps the creation of poetry “centered around” the self is exactly what Roberts set out to do. It may be instructive to recall, after all, that in Rosenthal’s original conception of confessionalism the only differences between poems identified as confessional and traditional lyrical poetry were the absence of masks and the “customary bounds of reticence or personal embarrassment.” Flipping forward to the last poem of the book, “Under Construction” places these confessional poems firmly within the rubric of another hermeneutical context, that of deconstructionism, as the complex psychic presence of memory and past perception must be constantly reevaluated in the construction of one’s ever-evolving self.

The second characteristic of Roberts’ book made apparent in “The Lamp, the Glass and the Pencil” and “Business” is an integral part of the book’s deconstructionist context, namely, the habit of creating linked poems, usually by providing an answer in one poem to a question that arose out of a poem several pages prior. Such is the case not only in these two poems, but in virtually every poem in the book, including “The Ground Firms Up the Wet,” which prompts the reader to wonder about the source of the “Mother’s denial, / Rage and revenge,” and wait expectantly for other poems to clarify the father’s alcoholism, the daughter’s schizophrenia, and her own sense of failure as the sources of these feelings. The effect of this sort of linking is that the poems create a sense of a single, unified story, compelling the reader forward and creating a simultaneously satisfying and disturbing sense of vraisemblance as we recognize what we already knew but hesitated to admit -- that no experience is self-contained, that everything, every word, every choice has innumerable causes, consequences, and reverberations both large and small.

As remarkable a feat as it is to vindicate confessional poetry and simultaneously create a complex and meaningful lifelikeness in poetry, perhaps what is most impressive in these poems is the sense of control with which Roberts writes. Many of these poems are based on disturbingly intense emotional experiences and all of them on the frustrating and sometimes frightening complexities of human relationships, and yet, there is not a poem among them that could be considered a rant. Similarly, condescension, cynicism, sarcasm, self-indulgent cleverness, rage -- all the things we might expect from a survivor’s story of emotional unrest -- are entirely absent, replaced instead with such careful and precise choice of words, phrasing, and arrangement of lines that what results is a voice of calm, evenhanded sincerity that the reader responds to with empathy and complete trust. The technical mastery that creates such a response from the reader results from painstaking control at every level of composition. A brief scanning of endwords illustrates that Roberts is much more conscious of the vitality of line breaks than many of his contemporaries. The tightness and subtle regularity of his lines and stanzas makes clear that he carefully orchestrates every detail of his poems. Observe, for example, the absence of superfluous syllables in these lines from “Boot Up,” where every word conveys vital meaning and image despite the ironic and self-deprecatory last statement:

At the nub
Of the cross-beamed, rivet-rusted
trampled one-end

To-the-other fishing pier,
No more human structure, no more
Outpouring of expectation.

From here on, it’s nothing
But ocean, the source of our amoebic,
Word-failed selves.

Roberts is keenly aware not only of the sound of these poems but also the shape of the poems. Several of them, in fact, have a “concrete” appearance. Each of his first three Angelika poems, for example, are set typographically in the form of what I first thought to be a vase, calling up thoughts of Keats, but is later revealed in “Embryonic” to be “An hourglass-figured woman.”

There is so much more that can be said about Steve Roberts’ Another Word for Home, but these three characteristics are the most significant. Nothing else is needed to mark it as a book that is worthy of being read by all who enjoy the ways poetry works and is relevant to the real world, and as a book that I will read again and again.

Review of Rhett Iseman Trull's "The Real Warnings"

2010-08-17T10:42:00.002-04:00

Review
The Real Warnings, by Rhett Iseman Trull
Anhinga Press, 2008, 84 pages, $15
ISBN 9781934695111

I want Rhett Iseman Trull’s book of poems The Real Warnings to have the subtitle “Taking Chances Because What Else Is There” because that is the message of these poems. Presented as one part apology, one part tribute to love and parenting, and all parts acknowledgement of the difficulty of choosing to take risks and the impossibility of choosing not to, The Real Warnings provides vital testimony to the importance of fortitude, persistence, and faith in humanity and oneself.

The opening poem (one of the best) of the collection presents this perspective summarily. The speaker “warns” her parents, “You will burn yourselves on me,” and admonishes “Forget about sleeping / I’ll dominate the prayers you keep sending up . . . . / For every greeting card poem, I will write four / to hurt you. Some will be true.” But she advises prophetically, “You will take one look at that new life screaming / into the world, and open your arms.” As a new parent, myself, I have no difficulty identifying with this course of emotions.

“The Last Good Dream” presents another image of our willingness to take risks, this time in regards to love,
. . . we give
with unthinned hearts, little knowing
how even if banked by the best words

and buoyed by honesty, love can fail.
Or maybe we do know
and unharbor ourselves anyway.
And “Introducing My Brother in the Role of Clark Kent” puts a more specific face on what we’re willing to do for love and how even as we recognize the cost it has exacted from us, we know we would do it again: “he’s calculated that he’s spent / seventy-one-point-two percent of the last three years in her / presence, mostly happy, unwilling to trade a day of it.” One poem after another provides such portraits of persistence despite the warnings and even knowledge of the dangers involved: “The Boy in the Full-Length Women’s Fur Coat” “thinks of her, // the girl he keeps loving / and losing;” the speaker in “Everything from That Point On” says, “I loved you most in that moment, knowing // even as I slipped my arm up the back of your shirt, hooking us // together, that you were about to cut me loose;” and “Hanna” in “Study of Motion” says, “Pursue Joy Now” and moves “to San Francisco” to “do what she loves.”

No naïve romantic, however, the speaker of these poems knows that in pursuit of joy there will be frustration, failure, even desperation, and she knows the appeal of that desperation, that “what feels like the end is the end / only if you pull the trigger” (“The Ice Is Our Only Light”). She knows that along the way the frequently unsatisfying nature of life will lead us to almost unimaginable acts to feel again just the possibility of joy, as in “The House of Pain” where she remarks, “As you leave, what begins to haunt you / is not the blisters that bangle your wrist like opals. / It is not the awful things he did to you / but the yes that you roared as you let him.” Thus, these usually hopeful poems are at times painful, at times heartwrenchingly so, as in the best of them all, “The End of the Hour:”
. . . The hour’s over.
Today’s final question: not why
the scars but where? Where else
did you do that?
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . I
start to remove my blouse, to offer
a look at the marks I scored
that no one’s ever seen. For a moment
I feel human, all masks put away. I will show
her all of it, ugliness I’ve covered until now, but
That’s enough, she scolds, jotting a furious
phrase in her notes before opening the cabinet
with her heel and storing, again, my file.
. . . . . . . . . .
Don’t ask, I think, if you don’t want to know.
but I say, I’m sorry, sorry familiar
as breath, Sorry, sent out the door half-
unbuttoned.

But what matters most to the anti-nihilist, the existentialist who speaks these poems is the refusal to give up. So, in “Counting Miracles” we hear from a mental hospital resident:
We’ve learned a thing or two
about miracles for the common man,
. . . a nest of robins about to hatch;
fast cars on the highway, going somewhere;
in the sky, webs of lightning . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
The stars know the danger
of even a bingo-paced Wednesday and light
themselves every night in celebration
of the simple fact of our survival.
And in “The Night before Depakote,” we’re told simply, “It’s enough that we live.” And in “Last Word,” we hear perhaps most clearly from the poet herself the proclamation, “I don’t really want to be a concrete / signature. I want to grow old choosing ink over blood / with which, on the flank of the world, I’ll set my brand.” And, then, since the “last word” is really just the last word in this book-length struggle for hope, we read in the final three poems of the rewards for this victory over despair: “The streets of my heart while sun-licked, well-trafficked, amazed, / hosted a previous traveler or two, but none until you / paused to point out beauty I missed” (“The Streets of My Heart”); “Jeff and I, for the better / part of a year, have been trying to start / a life inside me” (“Sonogram on the Way to Earth”); and “Maybe // we’ll bring into this world five children and ruin / every one” (“Heart by Heart the House”). Such hopeful planning should be the final breath of every difficult day.

New Wild Goose Poetry Review Online

2010-08-09T08:01:00.002-04:00

The new issue of Wild Goose Poetry Review went online last Wednesday, and it has already had over 1200 views. The most popular item in the issue so far has been the review of "The Sound of Poets Cooking," with nearly 100 views. The review of Rhett Iseman Trull's "The Real Warnings" has been second most popular with about half that many views, followed by three poems by Maren Mitchell. The most gratifying part of this release for me has been the number of people leaving comments and the conversations about poetry that have developed as a result.

If you haven't checked it out yet, go on over to www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com and read some good poetry or reviews, and leave a comment or two while you're there. Other poets in this issue include Harry Calhoun, Debra Kaufman, Austin Rory Hackett, Doug MacHargue, Linda Marion, Tony Abbott, Jean Rodenbough, Clare Martin, and more. There are also reviews of new books by Ami Kaye, Richard Allen Taylor, David Manning, and Steve Roberts.

Review of "The Sound of Poets Cooking"

2010-08-06T09:03:00.003-04:00

First Published in "Wild Goose Poetry Review" and in a modified form in "Outlook"

Review of The Sound of Poets Cooking, edited by Richard Krawiec
Jacar Press, 2010, 172 pages
ISBN: 9780984574001

It happens to all of us at one time or another. Late of an afternoon, we start to feel a certain emptiness, as if something is missing, something needed. We call it hunger or craving. And the more we try to ignore it, the stronger it gets. Maybe we long for something light and refreshing, or something heavier, meaty. Maybe just something sweet. Or maybe we can’t figure out exactly what we want. And that’s when we know that the answer to our appetite is surely a buffet. And that’s just what Richard Krawiec has arrayed before us as editor of The Sound of Poets Cooking. Whether we long for something exotic, something familiar and comforting, something spicy, salty, or even a bit saucy, this enticing collection of delectable delights is sure to satisfy.

To be clear and leave metaphor behind for a moment, The Sound of Poets Cooking is a new, 172-page anthology of poems about food accompanied by related recipes, from Krawiec’s fledgling press, Jacar Press. And it is an impressive debut, featuring wonderful work from poets both familiar and new, including two NC Poets Laureate, Fred Chappell and Kathryn Stripling Byer, and numerous other standards: Joseph Bathanti, Kelly Cherry, Jaki Shelton Green, Susan Ludvigson, Joanna Catherine Scott, Shelby Stephenson, and more, wrapped in a clever cover with an image of Buddha cradling a pomegranate, eggplant, carrots, tomatoes, sweet potato, chef’s knife and some spiky yellow fruit I’m not familiar with, appealingly conveying the mixture of spirituality and whimsy one might expect from poetry about food.

Of course, individual poems and individual recipes from the collection prove both enjoyable and useful, but like any good recipe, The Sound of Poets Cooking also masterfully blends disparate elements to create what might be experienced as a single savory delight, a cohesive record of the diverse ways in which the culinary arts and poetic arts are woven into the fabric of our memories, our experiences, and our daily emotional and intellectual lives. Here a reader finds the mock heroic tetrameter couplets of Chappell’s “Pot Luck Supper: Aunt Lavinia Strikes” delicately balanced by the therapeutic free verse of Grey Brown’s “Scrambled.” Or the stick-to-your-ribs heaviness of Debra Kaufman’s “Minestrone, Rainy Day” relieved by the joyful ad-libbing of Alice Owens Johnson’s “Gumbo.” Or the formal propriety of Jim Clark’s “Sunday Dinner” harmonized by the titillating temptation of Deborah Kolodji’s “Eggplant Parmigiana.”

As for the recipes, there are many I intend to try my hand at, including the onion pie, the Brussels sprouts & goat cheese risotto, and the coconut cake, but like Lenard Moore’s daughter, the one I look forward to the most is the three cheese macaroni and cheese.

To whet your appetite a bit more here is a sampler platter of some of my favorite lines from The Sound of Poets Cooking. Bon appetit!

from Scott Douglass’ “Bread Crumbs:”
. . . I fill
each page with bread crumb words,
a trail for someone, sometime
to follow back to me

from Anne Barnhill’s “Tiramisu:”
Don’t give me puffy white clouds
Fat as marshmallows
To lounge on when I die.
. . . . . . . . . .
Just place a generous block of tiramisu
In front of me;
. . . . . . . . . .
Sin straddling goodness--
Delicious as Dante.

from Pat Riviere-Seel’s “Road Trip Conversation:”
Beside you now I am ravenous
for the ripe figs of your fingers
folded around the steering wheel.

from Michael Beadle’s “Fromage:”
For a flash of free verse, I invoke
the Goddess of Gorgonzola, //
who bids me long life
as long as I use her bounty //
upon this holy cracker of truth,
this snack we have to share //
as the Muenster metaphor
melts in our minds.

from Susan Meyers’ “Fork: Song for the Misunderstood:”
May the fork in its daily travels discover
an insatiable mouth.
May the mouth
always adore the fork’s repetitive tune.

Reading in Lincolnton, NC

2010-08-06T07:11:00.002-04:00

Paternity Reviewed by Felicia Mitchell

2010-08-03T09:08:00.002-04:00

I was thrilled when I picked up the new issue of "North Carolina Literary Review" (http://www.nclr.ecu.edu) to find a wonderful review of "Paternity" on page 228. The review is called "Images of Childhood" and was written by one of my favorite poets and scholars, Felicia Mitchell, English Department Chair at Emory & Henry College in Virginia.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the review (thanks to Felicia and NCLR Editor, Margaret Bauer):

Some say that it is never too late to have a happy childhood, it probably is, but perhaps it is never too late to experience the magic of childhood, which is what Owens conjures up in these child-centered poems.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Childhood functions as a catalyst for the exploration of a concept of paternity that embraces individuality, innocence, and childhood potential, along with the exploration of how children shape the poet's own identity.

"Nature of Attraction" Released

2010-08-02T12:05:00.002-04:00

Last Friday I gave a reading at Green Rice Gallery in Charlotte with M. Scott Douglass, editor of "Main Street Rag" and Jonathan K. Rice, editor of "Iodine Poetry Journal." It was a wonderful evening, highlighted for me by the release of my new collection of poetry, "The Nature of Attraction," a collaboration with Florida poet, Pris Campbell.

I read from the book for the first time that night, and received a lot of wonderful compliments from those in attendance. The next day I went to the NC Writers' Conference in Chapel Hill, and yesterday was "family day" at home, so this is my first chance to announce to everyone that "The Nature of Attraction" is now available, and if you've already ordered a copy, it's probably in the mail.

If you haven't ordered a copy, you can pick one up at the Book Release Party this Thursday, August 5, from 5:30 to 7:00 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. I'll give a reading, and I have a recorded reading by Pris that I'll play as well. We'll serve wine and snacks, and I'll be signing books for any who purchase them.

If you can't make it to the Release Party, you can order a signed copy from me (email me at asowens1@yahoo.com) or Pris, or you can still order a copy from Main Street Rag (www.mainstreetrag.com)

Here are some comments about the book from several people who got to look at it before publication:

You hear multiple voices in The Nature of Attraction, but not by contrast, more by the harmonic way these voices mesh together, the way words and ideas fold together to form an image, a phrase, a meaning that transcends an individual thought and becomes something shared. That's how it is with this collaboration between Pris Campbell and Scott Owens. In these poems, a lifetime passes for Sara and Norman, a lifetime of great joy and great sadness, of longing and resignation that wanting isn't always enough. Throughout this rollercoaster ride, it's hard to tell where Scott ends and Pris begins and vice versa because the narrators' voice remains steady. A challenging feat handled adeptly by two very fine poets; an extremely worthwhile read.
--M. Scott Douglass, Publisher/Editor Main Street Rag

Baudelaire once wrote, "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling." This stirring, painful, and wondrous poetic exchange between two master craftsmen breaks the traditional mould while at the same time reinforcing it. The personas created by Owens and Campbell speak truths that many of us often deny. "The Nature of Attraction" is truly a marvelous read that is surely not for the faint of heart.
--Carter Monroe, Publisher Rank Stranger Press

I read the poems in “The Nature of Attraction” while on a commuter bus on my way home from work. I read them through clear skies and into a storm. A man’s teeth will always be/as large as his fear. I read them pressed against the window, shirt slightly open. Maybe I should give in to my body’s bending/toward her. I read them while everyone else was asleep or trying to be. A star lies on her pillow. Her bed lights up the room. I read them the way a flag has no choice but to unfurl itself to the wind. When her stomach churns/and the moon buries itself deep. I read them the way love might, with lightning all around. Maybe I can get away/without doing anything at all.
--Tammy Foster Brewer

I hope to see you all this Thursday and to soon hear your reactions to our narrative collaboration.

2010-07-23T11:19:00.001-04:00

BEALL WORTHY OF MVP

If MVP meant “Most Valuable Poet” and some organization deemed to present such a prize, Glenda Beall would be my nominee for the inaugural award.

In the world of NC poetry, there is no doubt that central NC--Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Durham--is the hub of activity. We keep things going pretty well in the Hickory area, but relative to the critical mass of poetic endeavors in the Triangle, Hickory might rightfully be considered “the provinces.” And if Hickory is considered the provinces, then what might one call Hayesville, where Beall has lived for 15 years?

And yet, thanks in large part to Beall’s unwavering commitment to poets and poetry, the Hayesville area is home to one of the most vibrant poetry communities in the state. Beall has long been a leader in the organization NCWN West, more commonly Netwest, which facilitates networking, publishing and learning opportunities, and communication among the writers of NC’s far western counties. She has served as Program Coordinator, Website Administrator, and Publicity Chair. In those capacities, she has helped dozens of western NC writers find publishers, audiences, and the support of other writers.

Beall, however, hasn’t stop there. To give area poets an opportunity to share their work and gain exposure to writers from outside the area, she also founded a reading and discussion series, called Coffee with the Poets, held monthly at Phillips & Lloyd Bookstore in Hayesville, and has contributed to the founding of two other reading series in the area as well. And having concluded a career of public and private school instruction, she continues to teach writing at the John C. Campbell Folk School and Tri-County Community College.

She has carried on this service to writers while also pursuing her own writing career, resulting in the publication of poems, stories, essays, and articles in a wide array of journals and anthologies, and culminating last year in her poetry collection Now Might As Well Be Then.

On August 10, Beall will give a reading of her work at Poetry Hickory, 6:30 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. Here is a sample poem from her recent collection.

Miracle of Love
for Barry

You brought me spring in winter.
The cold melted away, as jonquils
bloomed and tilted delicate edges
toward the sky.

You brought me youth when I was old,
you found my childhood self.
You touched me with your tenderness,
a touch of love so deep my spirit wept.

You brought me sunbeams in the storm.
When dark clouds formed above me,
you opened bright blue mirrors overhead
for sun to shine down on me.