Anniversary of Verse

An Anniversary of Verse
NC Poetry Society Celebrates 80th Year with Statewide Readings

2012 marks the 80th year of the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the Society and its friends and members are celebrating that anniversary with a series of readings across the state organized by and featuring NC’s most prestigious poets.

It all begins with the state’s current Poet Laureate, Joseph Bathanti, on November 29. The reading and Open Mic to be held at 3:30 at the Scholars Bookshop (Appalachian State’s university bookstore) will include ASU professors and poets Hilda Downer and Lynn Doyle.

Six other readings will be held on December 1.

In Charlotte, Myers Park Baptist Church will host organizer Tony Abbott, Morri Creech, Annalee Kwochka, Alan Michael Parker, Dannye Romine Powell, David Radavich, and Lisa Zerkle at 2:00.

The Regulator Bookshop in Durham will feature readings by Betty Adcock, Noel Crook, and Marylin Hervieux also at 2:00.

Former state Poet Laureate, Kay Byer will host Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Joe Mills, and Julie Suk at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva at 3:00.

Another former state Poet Laureate, Fred Chappell, will be featured along with Malaika King Albrecht, Terry Kennedy, Val Nieman, and John Thomas York at the Community Arts Café in Winston-Salem at 2:00.

Peter Makuck and Mark Cox will read at St. Francis by the Sea in Salter Path at 4:00.

And Shelby Stephenson, Alex Albright, Marty Silverthorne, and Jim Clark will participate in a marathon reading from 9:00 AM to 3:15 PM at the R.A. Fountain General Store in Fountain.

All events are free and open to the public. For more information, visit the NC Poetry Society website at www.ncpoetrysociety.org

NC 100 Thousand Poets for Change Events

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.

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

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.”

Happy Anniversary to Us

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO US!

A little over a year ago, Barbara Burns, the editor of Outlook, and I hatched a plan to create a print venue for bringing more attention to poets in the Hickory area. We thought a column, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever we could manage, featuring a poem by a local writer would do the trick. It was not really a novel idea. In fact, the “poetry corner” was once a staple of locally-owned newspapers across the country. In recent years, however, that tradition seems to have fallen out of favor. That, combined with the fact that Hickory has become home to a surprising number of widely-published poets, made it seem the perfect time and location for just such a column to be reinvented.
We quickly decided on the name “Musings,” and a year ago today, the first installment of this column was published in Outlook. We decided the standard format of the column would be to include a poem and a brief biography of the poet, but we also decided to be flexible and occasionally venture into book reviews, interviews, and commentary on anything related to poetry. In fairly quick order we also expanded our scope to include poets coming to Hickory to read their work at Poetry Hickory or other local venues.
Not surprisingly to anyone who knows anything about poetry in the Hickory area, the first poet we featured in “Musings” was Tim Peeler, a native of Hickory and long-time fixture at CVCC and in the Hickory poetry community. From that beginning we’ve gone on this past year to publish 44 poems by 37 different poets ranging from NC Poet Laureate Kay Byer to local high school student, Jeni Conklin. Taken together, these poems form an impressive array of work (hmm, maybe an anthology should be in the future).
We have also featured information on events like Poetry Hickory, Aroma of Art, the Ekphrastic Poetry Event, Poetry Month, and the Women’s Resource Center Book Release Party for Voices and Vision. We have highlighted area poetry journals like Wild Goose Poetry Review and Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, local presses like Main Street Rag, vital organizations for poets like NC Poetry Society, Poetry Council of North Carolina, and NC Writer’s Network. Then, perhaps my personal favorites were the op-ed style columns on “The Top 10 Reasons for Going to a Poetry Reading,” “Why Poetry,” “Why Poetry Doesn’t Sell,” the loss of NC’s Poet Laureate, “How to Read a Poem” and other topics.
I discovered along the way that we were not as alone in this as I first thought. I found other weekly poetry columns in print, including Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” which is published in a large number of newspapers across the country, Bill Diskin’s “Poetryork” in York, Pennsylvania’s York Daily Record, Robert Pinsky’s “Poet’s Choice” in The Washington Post, as well as columns in The Lawrence Journal-World, The Oregonian, and England’s The Guardian. I am grateful that we are not the only ones who think such coverage of poetry is still justified.
I am also grateful to Barbara Burns, to the staff of Newton’s Observer News Enterprise, to the poets who continue to share their work with us, and of course most of all, to the readers of “Musings” and their continued understanding of the vitality of poetry today. I hope this will be the first in a long series of anniversaries to come.