Review of Joanna Catherine Scott's "An Innocent in the House of the Dead"

Review
by Scott Owens

AN INNOCENT IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
Joanna Catherine Scott with John Lee Conaway
Main Street Rag, 2011
ISBN: 9781599483184

Joanna Catherine Scott possesses a certainty that few of us can readily share. She knows that John Lee Conaway, a NC man who spent 16 years on Death Row following a double murder conviction before recently being granted a new trial which he still awaits, is innocent. She knows this and she knows Conaway with such conviction that she has legally adopted Conaway as her own son. As with all knowledge, hers is a knowledge born of belief, a belief the NC criminal justice system does not currently share.

In Scott’s amazing new collection of poems, An Innocent in the House of the Dead, she invites the reader into the experience of her coming to belief and peripherally into the experience of John Lee Conaway’s development into accused, prisoner, condemned, and loved one. No one else could have written this book, and regardless of one’s belief, no one should forgo the opportunity this book offers to share in the depth of emotion conjured by the very real and very human circumstances recorded here.

One of the charges often leveled at poetry today is that it is irrelevant, that it is written only for academes and other poets, that it is neither concerned with nor can play any role in the real world of the vast majority of people. Surely, An Innocent in the House of the Dead clearly and strongly refutes that claim. What could be more relevant to all of us than an examination of our criminal justice system through which our communal expectations are enforced and our own standards of behavior and ethics are tested? When not reminding us of the humanity of those involved in the incidents of Conaway’s life and her own progress towards belief, Scott’s poetry takes on a more activist stance, presenting a strong indictment of the cruelty, unfairness, and unreliability of a racist justice system, the institution of capital punishment, and a corrections industry centered on the issue of profit.

More than relevant, these poems are also accessible, but they go beyond mere accessibility as well. Due to their relevance, immediacy, and reality, as well as to the skill with which Scott has crafted these poems, they practically leap from the page into one’s heart and mind. They resonate with our appreciation of life and fairness and freedom and love, and with our discomfort with the standards of justice. They are as real as our realest moments. They will not leave us alone; they are both relevant and impactful.

I offer no excerpts from Joanna Catherine Scott’s An Innocent in the House of the Dead because the vitality of the book, the realness of the story it tells, would make any excerpting a form of mutilation. This is a book that needs to be read whole, in its entirety. Relevant, accessible, important and powerful — Joanna Catherine Scott’s An Innocent in the House of the Dead is poetry that will make a difference, but only if it is read.

The Poets Are Coming

THE POETS ARE COMING! THE POETS ARE COMING!

On April 14, poets from across the state will descend upon Hickory, NC, as Catawba Valley Community College hosts the Poetry Council of NC’s annual Poetry Day celebration. As many as 30 award-winning poets are expected, including Katherine Soniat of Asheville, Susan Lefler of Brevard, and Joanna Catherine Scott of Chapel Hill, winners of the Oscar Arnold Young Award for the year’s best book of poetry from NC.

This 62-year-old event will bring winners of the Council’s annual poetry contests together with poetry lovers as the winners receive their awards and share their poetry with all who attend. The event will also feature the debut of the Council’s 2012 annual awards anthology, Bay Leaves, and a live-judged Poetry Slam. Attendance is free and everyone is welcome.

The doors of CVCC’s Student Center will open at 9:20 for registration. The dedication of Bay Leaves will follow at 10:00, after which winners will be announced for the Charles Shull Traditional Poetry Award, the Charlotte Young Elementary School Student Award, and the Gladys Owings Hughes Heritage Award. All winners present will give a reading of their winning poems.

Before breaking for lunch, poets are invited to participate in the Poetry Slam. Entering the Slam requires a $5 entry fee and features awards of $35, $25, and $15 for first, second, and third place performances. Judging the Slam will be author, Emmy-winner, and coach of Slam Charlotte, Boris Rogers, also known as Bluz.

Following lunch, winners will be announced for the Ellen Johnston-Hale Light Verse Award, the Carol Bessent Young Middle School Student Award, the James Larkin Pearson Free Verse Award, the Sam Ragan High School Student Award, and the Poetry Slam.

The event will conclude with readings from the winners of the Oscar Arnold Young Book Award. For more information on Poetry Day or the Poetry Council of NC, visit www.poetrycouncilofnc.wordpress.com or contact Scott Owens at (828) 234-4266.

Poetry Gift Guide 2011

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.

Review of "The Sound of Poets Cooking"

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.

My Favorite Book of Poems in Years

My Favorite Book of Poems in Years

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my favorite poem from the last few years. It was “Album” by Felicia Mitchell. Today I’m writing about the author of my favorite book of poems from the last few years. I read about 100 new books of poems every year. Half of those I don’t like enough to finish, but the other half all impress me, many of them enough to motivate me to write a review of the book. Reading that many poetry collections makes choosing one as a favorite quite difficult, but the one that I’m declaring to be my favorite is simply the one that has lingered in my mind the longest. The remarkable lyricism and compelling narrative of Joanna Catherine Scott’s Night Huntress made reading it an unforgettable event.

While I’m discussing favorites, I’ll mention that the most enjoyable poetry reading I’ve ever given took place last spring at Catawba College. What made it so enjoyable was not just the hospitality of the college or the 200 or so students in attendance, but the person I was reading with. This was my first time meeting Joanna Catherine Scott, and it was a meeting I’ll never forget.

That night I discovered that Scott was a beautiful speaker and an unequaled intellect, and when I subsequently read more of her work, I realized she was simply the most impressive writer I had encountered in many years. Her poetry and prose are both lyrical and accessible, familiar and exotic, concerned with both individual and international issues. In a review of Night Huntress, I recently wrote, “Scott possesses the true writer’s gift, the gift of empathy, the ability to see inside another’s pain, loss, hope without being blinded by it.”

Scott has applied that empathy to stories and poems about everything from Vietnam veterans, to a family’s loss of their daughter, to prisoners on death row, and on February 9, she will share those stories with the audience at Poetry Hickory, held at 6:30 in Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. Scott says her intention at that reading will be to tell the story of how her novels The Road from Chapel Hill and Child of the South led her to Death Row and her current project, a collection of poems entitled An Innocent in the House of the Dead.

I anticipate that this will be one of my favorite Poetry Hickory events not only because Joanna Catherine Scott will be reading, but also because her co-reader will be Felicia Mitchell, and the Open Mic readers will be Poetry Hickory favorites and two of my favorite people, Jessie Carty and Tony Ricciardelli, and first-timer, Bill Blackley, former President of the NC Poetry Society.

Here is a poem from Scott’s Night Huntress (first published in Damazine) to whet your appetite.

In Which You Tell Me You Have Set Islam Aside

I used to dream, you say, that one day
I would take a pilgrimage to Mecca,

but I have given Islam up.
I have taken my name off all the lists.
I no longer go to pray,
although I pray to Allah in my heart.
I thank him for the Qur’an,
which I also have inside my heart.
Get knowledge and understanding,
it instructs me.
And so I read and read and think,
and argue with myself, and others too,
and have become a wiser person
on account of it,
which is why I have set Islam aside.
What point is there,
I came to understand,
in fighting with an enemy
who has the upper hand?
What point in setting myself up
for persecution by the guards and warden
because I wear the Muslim cap
and fast for Ramadan?
A man must act upon his wisdom.
So I have set aside the kufi.
I do not abase myself.
I have light within me, though.
They cannot take that away.

… And I Drive Home in the Rain
The fallen sky laying itself out
and laying itself out along the road
like grey-clad pilgrims
abasing themselves full-length
and rising,
and then the abasement,
and the rising up again,
end-to-ending themselves
like inchworms inching their way
across grey countryside
toward the holy city,
pelted on, and blown up
into a thousand falling fragments
by lumbering grey trucks.
Gathering themselves together.
Shaking off the insult.
Rising and abasing.
Rising and abasing.
And being blessed for it.
And blessed for it.
That glittering
spinning of the wheels.

Now for a Little Self Promotion

Only two weeks remain for Advance Orders of "Paternity," my new book from Main Street Rag. Advance Orders qualify for a discounted price of just $9 plus $1 shipping. The regular price, effective after February 1, will be $14 (plus shipping where applicable). Orders can be placed online at http://www.mainstreetrag.com/SOwens_2.html.

Thanks to all those who have already ordered a copy. The book is due for release on Feb. 15.

In case you need more information, I'm pasting in a few comments from my pre-publication readers. You can also see a couple of poems from the book by following the Main Street Rag link in the first paragraph.

I have about 2 dozen readings scheduled across NC, SC, and GA, this spring, including Catawba College, Mitchell Community College, Wayne Community College, Charleston County Public Library, Burke County Library, Alexander County Library, Gaston County Library, Wake Tech Community College, Durham Tech Community College, Wilkes Community College, Malaprops, Osondu Booksellers, Green Rice Gallery, Phillips and Lloyd, Caldwell County Library, and McIntyre's. Once I firm up a few dates, I'll post the complete list here. I hope you'll make it to one of the readings so I can thank you for your support in person. I still have a few dates open, so if you know of a place you'd like me to read, let me know.

Here are the comments I promised. I think all three of these readers got the book just right.

Poems of aching tenderness. PATERNITY explores with a discerning, clear-eyed sensitivity the daily small delights, frustrations, and purely unexpected miracles that, taken together, make up the building blocks of one father's personal salvation.

--Joanna Catherine Scott, author of Night Huntress and Fainting at the Uffizi



In Scott Owens' lovely book of poems, PATERNITY, we have a remarkable account of how his very special relationship with his young daughter, Sawyer, has saved him from the darkness of his own childhood. The poems are engaging in the deepest sense--funny, touching, and full of the kind of wisdom we all need as parents and family members to sustain the balance of daily life. How can anyone resist a girl who makes up the word, "effluctress," to describe what only a four-year old can see.

--Anthony S. Abbott, author of The Man Who.

I’ve never been this strong before/ can only hope I’ll hold this joy, writes Scott Owens in “Naming.” Poem by poem, Paternity builds a father’s world—its fears and joys, its vows, which are too often and too easily broken. Looming over the lives of his children is the childhood of the man who speaks these poems, memories which make the poet grateful for the days I am not my father. It is this ability to feel the weight of the past on his present life and the work of resisting that past even as he builds the present his children live in that makes Paternity a book that should be read not only by parents but by anyone interested in poems that can disturb and console in the same breath.

--Al Maginnes, author of Ghost Alphabet

"So Norman Died Of Course" Recieves Special Mention in Pushcart Prize Anthology

I'm sure my publisher would rather I not do this, but I've had several people ask me where they can see the poem "So Norman Died, Of Course," which received a Special Mention in the new Pushcart Prize Anthology, so I'm going to post it here. Of course I'd prefer that you buy a copy of "The Fractured World" from the Main Street Rag online bookstore at http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/books.php. You could also buy a couple of the other fantastic books MSR has published recently. My personal favorites have been Irene Honeycutt's "Before the Light Changes," Paul Hostovsky's "Bending the Notes," Sara Claytor's "Howling on Red Dirt Roads," and Joanna Catherine Scott's "Night Huntress" (maybe that plug will defuse the publisher's anger a bit). The poem first appeared in the now defunct "Charlotte Poetry Review," edited by A.J. and Lisa Jillani (true patrons of poetry), so it's no longer available in any other print form. Anyway, here is the poem.

So Norman Died, Of Course

So Norman died, of course,
like everyone, but being
Norman, of course,
he couldn’t die like everyone.
He couldn’t die no
ordinary death.
He had to die
all over the place at once.
He had to die
all into things.
He had to spread himself out
like a warm day
and lie there like everyone
dying, slowly turning
into something else.

So he left his fingers
on the ground and they
turned into earthworms
and wriggled away.
And he let his ears
fly free, the wings
they’d always wanted
to be. And he let his eyes
roll into the ocean
to become pearls
held tight in oysters’
clamped shut shells.
His hair spun itself
into spider webs
that stretch across your face.
His skull opened itself
for chipmunks and night things
to nest in. His face
became a flower with one eye
that winked open
in the morning, winked
closed at night.
His leg became a persimmon
branch, its unripe fruit
turning your mouth
inside out. His heart
hardened into stone.
His bones picked themselves up
and wandered to the river
and threw themselves in
and flowed downstream
until a beaver gathered them
together for his dam.
His lips turned into blades
of grass that whistle
with every breeze.
His arms transformed
into wild lime trees,
covered with spines
and yellow fruit,
inviting, forbidding,
letting nothing go easy.
His tongue flew into the wind
and was never heard from again.
His skin had grown so thin
it easily changed into birchbark
and started peeling away.
And his hand,
his hard right hand
which never learned to hold
anything gently turned into
a leaf that held wind,
rain, sunlight upon it,
then let everything go.

Review of Joanna Catherine Scott's "Night Huntress"

Review (First Published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)
Night Huntress, by Joanna Catherine Scott
Main Street Rag, 2008, 67 pages
ISBN: 9781599481074

There is prose poetry, and then there is poetry that looks like prose. Joanna Catherine Scott’s book Night Huntress is one of the best examples of true poetry in the guise of prose poetry that I’ve ever encountered. A lot of poetry today, prose or otherwise, seems prosy--no sense of rhythm or lyricism, no sense of the line. Despite being arranged on the page more like paragraphs than traditional lined poetry, the poems in Night Huntress are unmistakably poetic. Scott herself questions the classification of these as prose poems. She says most of them were initially delineated but were changed to a denser prose style in a last minute editorial decision, which would explain why, as I read the poems, I kept pausing as if there were line breaks, and why I felt they were the most poetic, most lyrical prose poems I had ever read.

But little of that matters to any but other poets and perhaps the more astute readers of poetry who recognize lyricism when they hear it. What does matter to most readers is the story, in this case, the compelling story of a tragic accident and the lives it affects. Scott possesses the true writer’s gift, the gift of empathy, the ability to see inside another’s pain, loss, hope without being blinded by it. The calm, almost objective clarity with which Scott relates the story in these poems is heart-rending. The final stanza of “At the Grave” illustrates the beautiful and intricate detail that Scott, encompassing, like the skilled painter, background and foreground, uses to make images and events become experiences:

"Crows sit in the trees. They are like professional mourners, with their black robes and their harsh cracked voices and simulated grief. One of the boys goes to stand under a tree, looking about him for a stone, but the graveyard is fastidiously cared for, not a stone in sight that does not bear a name. So he takes off his shoe, with the liturgy behind him, and flings it up into the tree, and the crows rise in a great black clatter, big as dogs, barking and rushing back and forth, as though the casting of the shoe has broken up the tree itself, and it has risen in a rage."

And yet, Scott never tells the reader what to feel, but plunges us headlong into a stream-of-consciousness that creates the experience so vividly, so honestly, on all its levels that certain feelings are inescapable. The reader is drawn into the various perspectives surrounding the accident right from the start. In the first poem, “How They Insist,” the narrator of these poems, whose identity will only become clear much later in the narrative, reflects on the difficult period of transition to adulthood where loss seems so common and so tragic:

". . . how they will, how they insist it seems, generation after generation, before they are full grown, when they are right there on the cusp, right there between the pupa and the full-blown moth, right there, poised in metamorphosis, with no thought of what has come before, who has done it, no thought of all the flower-decked crosses up and down the roads, give in to some compulsion from another world, a world that wants them now, this minute, just the way they are, teetered on the brink of opening."

Scott’s view of the accident is comprehensive. She thinks of every perspective and of every moment before, during, and after the event itself and relates them seemingly from the inside, as if they were hers or those of someone so close to her that maintaining the objectivity that permits the clarity the poems convey should be impossible. Yet it is that seemingly impossible objectivity which make the poems work as in this excerpt from “At the Grave:”

"They have all come, the friends of the dead girl and the ruined boy. Even the bus boy from the nightclub has come, his face ashen with responsibility. They have brought flowers with them. They hold them in their hands. “Ashes to ashes,” says the priest, and , “dust to dust.” The flowers surge into the sunlight. They eddy at the surface of the dug red grave, as though the air inside is too dense for them to fall."

It is difficult to believe the experiences are not her own, that she is not the dead girl, the ruined boy, the mother or father or friend of the dead girl, the father of the ruined boy, and finally, and most completely and perhaps most factually, the mother of a friend of the dead girl who recognizes in the sheer proximity of tragedy our own intimate involvement in life and loss, whose comfort is shaken to the core by this, sending her on an introspective journey into the value and nature of life. It is this vicarious journey which the reader gets to undertake through Scott’s incredibly detailed and comprehensive narrative. Thanks to Scott’s ability for empathy, her talent for writing poetry whose secret message is not just “me, me, me,” but which enables the reader to say “me, too,” that makes even just reading the book a cathartic, life-changing, life-deepening experience not to be forgotten. I am often impressed with the work of poets. For this work, however, it would be more accurate to say that I am grateful.

New Wild Goose Online

The new "Wild Goose Poetry Review" is now online at www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com. This issue is the first to feature links to the Wild Goose Poetry Review blog where authors have left comments on their poems and readers can do so as well. We're hoping this will stir up more conversation about the poems, poets, and poetry in general. This issue includes poems by Sam Rasnake, Felicia Mitchell, Richard Krawiec, Jessie Carty (featured), Gabriel Shanks, Daniel Casey, Curtis Dunlap, AD Winans, Harry Calhoun, and many others. My reviews of new books by Mitchell, Krawiec, Linda Annas Ferguson, Sara Claytor, Joanna Catherine Scott, Terri Kirby Erickson, David Rigsbee, John Amen, Bruce Lader, and Pris Campbell are also in this issue. The reviews give me a great opportunity to comment not just about individual poems, books, and poets, but to express my ideas about contemporary poetry in general. I hope you'll at least read those about Ferguson's, Scott's, and Campbell's books. I think I venture further towards "making statements" about poetry in those than in some of the others. In any event, over the next couple of weeks, I'll post those reviews one-per-day or so here as well to create a searchable archive of all of my reviews (at least those the initial publisher will allow me to reprint here). Look for them starting tomorrow

Poetry Hickory 2009-2010 Season