Showing posts with label Nancy Posey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nancy Posey. Show all posts
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Flier for Hickory's 100 Thousand Poets for Change
Flier for Hickory's 100 Thousand Poets for Change Event. Please post or print and post anywhere interested people might see.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Lots of News from the Poetry Council
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.
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.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Review of Nancy Posey's "Let the Lady Speak"
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
New Series in Morganton to Feature Local Writers
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
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
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