Slight Change in Format for Poetry Hickory 4th Anniversary Celebration

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.

Best of Poetry Hickory News

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.

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Best of Poetry Hickory Anthology
August 18, 2011 by wildgoosepoetryreview

"Something Knows the Moment" is Out

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

June 14 Poetry Hickory & Workshop

Bathanti Proves Poetry Can Make a Difference

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.

The Reports of Poetry's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

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

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

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.

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.

Campbell and Owens Collaborate on New Collection of Poetry

Reprinted from "Outlook" Newspaper (Observer News Enterprise, Newton, NC)

LOCAL POET’S NEW COLLECTION A COLLABORATION

“I never imagined writing a series of poems with someone else would be so easy,” says Hickory poet Scott Owens when asked about the process he went through with Florida poet Pris Campbell in creating their new collection of poems, The Nature of Attraction, due out from Main Street Rag on July 26.

“Poets tend to be rather hard-headed about their work, but Pris and I never really struggled with ego. I think we both became so interested in the developing story of our two characters, that we let go of all preconceptions of how things ought to be and just kept responding to one poem with another one. Before we knew it we had almost 30 poems, half of which she had written, half of which I had written, one of which we had written together, all of which we had revised together, and all of which combined to tell an interesting and coherent story. I think we both felt extremely lucky.”

Owens has become a fixture in the Catawba County and NC world of poetry. Three years ago he founded the monthly reading series Poetry Hickory and began editing the online journal Wild Goose Poetry Review. Two years ago he began writing a regular column on poetry for Outlook. Since that time, he has published 4 new collections of poetry -- this will be his sixth in all -- and more than 400 poems in journals and anthologies across the country. He has also given over 100 public readings of his work and become Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina and Regional Representative of the NC Writers’ Network.

Campbell does virtually all of her work in poetry from her home in Florida, where she is frequently homebound due to her contraction of CFIDS in 1990, prior to which she had been a clinical psychologist. This will be her fifth collection of poetry. Both writers have been nominated for 3 Pushcart Prizes and received a number of other awards for their work.

“The story,” Owens says, “is a love story that begins in unrevealed tragedy and ends in revelation and further tragedy, at least it seems tragic to me.”

The Nature of Attraction will debut at a book release party from 5:30 to 7:00 on August 5 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. The event will include a reading of poems by Owens and the playing of a recording of Campbell reading selections of her own. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and personalization as well. Refreshments will be served. Prospective readers can learn more about the book and its authors by visiting www.mainstreetrag.com/Campbell_Owens.html.

Two Acclaimed Writers to Lead Workshop at Poetry Hickory

Two Acclaimed Writers to Lead Workshop at Poetry Hickory

Raleigh, NC, writers Maureen Sherbondy and Richard Krawiec will offer a workshop on publishing poetry as part of the monthly NC Writers’ Network Writers’ Night Out, held at 5:00 on Tuesday, July 13, at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. The workshop will cost $10 per person and will be followed by Poetry Hickory’s Open Mic, beginning at 6:30 and then readings by both Sherbondy and Krawiec. The readings are free and open to the public.

Sherbondy is the author of two collections of poetry and has a third due out this year. She is also the author of a collection of short stories. Krawiec is author of two novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of poems, and is editor of a collection of poetry about cooking. Both have taught workshops and formal classes in a variety of locations and have received numerous awards for their writing. For more information, visit www.poetryhickory.com or contact Scott Owens at 828-234-4266 or asowens1@yahoo.com

Here is a sample poem from each author:

“Dorothy Discovers Sex and the City” by Maureen Sherbondy

After the tornado she thought
life would be dull and grey as Kansas
but on the new color screen
she watches Samantha bedding
a plethora of men. She relates
to Carrie, lately Dorothy’s been daydreaming
about a career in journalism,
she writes columns in her head
about storm preparation, the meaning
of dreams, archetypal figures, red shoes.
She’s contemplating a change of hair
style, maybe like Charlotte’s -- men
don’t seem to be drawn to ponytails
anymore. Aunt Em passed years before,
but Dorothy is certain she wouldn’t have
approved of the show. She turns to
the Weather Channel and monitors storms,
the forecaster’s smooth voice soothing
away her twister anxieties
even as she dreams of Oz.

Excerpt from “Judging the Worth” by Richard Krawiec

my son hunches into my chest
it toooowl he says I agree
it is cold but his breath warms
my shoulder his chest protects my own
he burrows his arms between us
one hand pops free his fingers slide
over his thumb as if testing fabric
the weight and weave judging the worth
of this life he throws his head up laughs
his teeth small and bright as stars
the cherubic firmament of his face
radiates
around us hidden in the dark branches
of pines and hardwoods birds
chorus a greeting the cacophony
of their song edges towards clarity
if I can only stand still long enough
to listen

Review of Tim Peeler's "Checking Out"

Review
Checking Out, Poetry by Tim Peeler
Hub City Press, 96 pages
ISBN:

Aging can have certain surprising benefits: less hair to worry about, getting a drink without ID, and having enough knowledge and experience to forge meaningful relationships with those you admired in youth. Last year, I had the great pleasure of reviewing a book of poems by my undergraduate creative writing instructor, Paul Nelson, whom I hadn’t seen or communicated with in nearly 30 years. This year, I find myself reviewing a new book from another of my early “poetry crushes,” Tim Peeler.

I first encountered Peeler’s work about 20 years ago when I was still confused about what to write and how to write about it. His poetry then was about things that were very familiar to me--trailer parks, farms, small town Southern life--and it was written in a way that was approachable, observant, objective, and understatedly real. Those poems served as models to me, in a sense giving me permission to write in a certain way about certain things I had been wanting to write about and have been writing about ever since.

Today, Peeler remains one of my poetry crushes, and he remains as true to his poetic ideals as he does to his friends, family, and hometown of Hickory, NC. So, his new collection of poems, his fifth, entitled Checking Out, is as familiar and important to me as his poems of years ago. In fact, the details of his “Prelude,” which opens the book and mimics the ambition of Wordsworth’s poem by that title, could almost have been my own: “the barefoot child, / shirtless in overalls;” “the congregation of chickens;” “the sun [elevatoring] through / the maples beyond the meadow / where he’s seen angels;” “the forest floor . . . coated with crunch oak leaves, / broken branches, pine cones and needles;” following “the moonlit railroad tracks / out beyond town, skipping a tie, / toeing a rail, imagining animal eyes / in sinister bushes, thinking a poem / without knowing it yet.” This poem also introduces the setting for the rest of the book: “Four AM, the night audit finished, the motel silent / he wrestles the heavy notion of sleep.” One immediately suspects that, as in Frost’s “After Apple Picking,” this will be no ordinary sleep the speaker wrestles with.

Not surprisingly, the title of the next section of poems is “Place.” Over the years, Peeler has more successfully captured a sense of a particular time, place, and people than any other writer I know with the possible exception of Wendell Berry. And in these poems, he does it again, the more particular place this time being the small Southern town hotels he spent years working in. He begins, of course, at the beginning, with inspiration, the inspiration of the man who built the hotel, and the inspiration the hotel-clerk/speaker sought during long nights on duty: “What did he see when he / came out here past the town / after the dust settled on the war?” (II); “You wait for a face / long enough in a place like this; / it will come” (I). From there he begins to explore the memory of this place and time: “Once there was a three story motel building / with balconies that overlooked a drive-in screen” (III); “In the old days, / they’d leave a fourteen year-old boy / in charge of the motel / when they took an afternoon off / to drink some shine” (IV).

He continues, in the section called “Registry,” with the memory of people. He recalls “Stan” who “said he played at Notre Dame / then for the Sox,” but who it is discovered “had been lying / all along, magnificently, / profoundly, beautifully” (VII); and the “Rabb twins,” one of whom “could throw his voice; / the other . . . a mute” who “could / lip synch anything the other said” (X); and “the old men [who] sat for an hour each morning, / hashing and rehashing the past: a retired clerk, // an organ builder, an automobile dealer, a juke joint / entrepreneur, a retired English professor // till they died one by one, / sadly, all” (XIII).

In “Chaos,” Peeler characterizes the experience: “Chaos / when you are not war, / revolution, or murder / you are a Friday night / at a cheap motel” (XV). Then, he continues in this section to provide detailed illustration of the claim: “one woman had another / in a choke hold / pounding her dyed blonde head / against the gravelly parking lot” (XVI); “The night was busy, locals / rolling in off 64-70 / in a haze of marijuana / and George Dickel” (XXI).

Against this backdrop of place and people, a clearer image of the speaker begins to come into focus. In the section named “Swimming,” the reader begins to see that there is much more to the speaker than just his job. In XXV, perhaps my favorite of these poems, the speaker tells us:

I wrote a masters thesis
in a motel room, weekend
manager on duty, typewriter nights;
I answered complaints about myself.

Between check ins
I scribbled pieces of poems,
made up stories about guests,
. . . . . . . . . .

I can't remember how many times
I crawled under a motel building
at 3AM to change a fuse,
put the wheels back on a rollaway,
fixed a commode, walked through
pitch black, blessed by the moon.

I became the poet laureate
for the post office whores,
the random darling
of a small legion of fools,
the familiar of charming drunks,
a blundering father
in the no man's land
of the eighties.

When I dove into the pool
to clean the spot by the drain,
ten feet down, I felt
the dreamy pressure of the
whole world above me,
sensed that the water didn't
want to be there either.

And we continue to get these glimpses into the speaker’s deeper thoughts throughout the section named “Clerks:” “There is no afterlife” (XXVIII); “we thought we’d never grow old (XXXII). And, finally, we get an even rawer perspective on the business through the memorable serial character of “The Old Clerk,” in the section with that title.

At the end, like any good storyteller, Peeler brings it home with a poem that offers closure, in this case a satisfying perspective on the experience. In “I Say It Like a Prayer” (one of only two titled poems in the 52-poem collection,) Peeler tells us:

Some mornings I drive by the motel
where I worked for seven years, and
scenes come back to me in flashes:
. . . . . . . . . .

A man calls me one night
to complain about people talking
in the room next door. The rooms
next to him are unrented. Don’t
you hear all that? he shouts
when I get to his room. I listen
carefully to nothing, to silence.
You’ve got to do something about it;
you’ve got to stop them; it’s your job.
I walk next door, knock, turn the lock
and stare into the dark empty room.
You people shut the hell up I holler
angrily. I mean it damn it
I add for good measure. Thanks,
thanks the man tells me as I walk back by him.

Thanks, thanks I say to the motel
as I drive by to my boring safe job
which is rarely anything to write about.
Thanks I say to the ghosts that rise
with lead pipes and biker boots;
thanks I say to the vices and voices.
I say it like a prayer.

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.

Making Time for Poetry

Poet, Ann Chandonnet, wrote this profile of me, and last week the local weekly newspaper, Outlook, ran it. I love what Ann did with this, and after a student of mine told me his wife cried when she read it, I loved it even more. More than anything else I want my words to have an impact on the reader (I imagine this is the goal of most poets), so when an article about my words stirs a reader's emotions to the point of tears, it's pretty gratifying and a very complimentary reflection on the quality of Ann's writing. Thank you, Ann and Outlook. Pick up a copy of Outlook or visit the blog tomorrow for a poem from Joanna Catherine Scott, author of my favorite book of poems from the last several years and Poetry Hickory reader next Tuesday (2/9)

MAKING TIME FOR POETRY: A PROFILE OF SCOTT OWENS, POET
By Ann Chandonnet
The literary artist—the novelist, the essayist, the poet—must make time for his art.

Why? Because the literary artist is the most ignored artist of all in the United States.

In the Soviet Union (or whatever its politic name these days), they name battleships after poets. No such thing in the land of gummy worms and sound bites. Actors and embezzlers become celebrities while the poet is shunned like a leper.

Like the dedicated artist he is, Scott Owens chooses to stick to his literary guns. He makes time for what he feels is important. Although he has three children—one at home, two in college—he finds time. “Two mornings a week [my daughter] is in school,” he said in a recent interview. “When I was younger, I used to get up at 5 and have two hours to work. Now I just take advantage of time wherever I can find it. I take my books to the swimming pool when she swims. I take my stuff to her dance lesson.”

Owens was born in Greenwood, South Carolina. His life hasn’t been easy. He paid his way through college by working double shifts in a cotton mill. To make money while attending college, he gave massages, edited papers for fellow students and took on all sorts of part-time jobs. He has lived in Hickory for eight years, and teaches at CVCC. Two and a half years ago, he founded Poetry Hickory, a group that sponsors monthly readings at Taste Full Beans coffee shop.

As readers of his 2008 collection The Fractured World are aware, Scott was abused as a child. He has worked through that horrific experience, and his calm demeanor gives little clue to his early years. “At the bottom level, poetry was a way out—out of my feeling of desperation,” he explained matter-of-factly. “Poetry helped me think about the situation I was in, in my childhood and helped convince me that [life] didn’t have to be that way. Today poetry is how I know that I exist.”

Owens’ healing is expressed in his latest collection of poems, Paternity, out this month. The germs of the collection lie in his own fractured upbringing and in the love he has for his young daughter, five-year-old Sawyer.

Some of the inspiration for Paternity comes from his “absolutely favorite poem,” “Little Sleeps-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight,” from The Book of Nightmares (1970) by Galway Kinnell. Owens’ second favorite poem, also by Kinnell, is “The Still Time.” Kinnell wrote The Book of Nightmares for his children, Maud and Fergus, and it has been called “a howl against the depravities of social injustice.”

Not all poets are sure they are deserving of the title. How did Owens know he was a poet? “When Robert Grey, the editor of Southern Poetry Review, was teaching me in a graduate level creative writing class, he said he wanted one of the poems I had submitted in class for the magazine. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe I am getting it after all.’ “Owens was 24 at the time of this revelation. Since then he has won many poetry prizes.

The beginning poet often feels lost. What advice does Owens have? “Read twice as much as you write. Make it twentieth- and twenty-first-century stuff that you are reading.”

And take your notebooks along to your daughter’s swimming class. Make time.

Jim Clark's One-Man Show Comes to Town

“Musings” for December 31

JIM CLARK’S ONE-MAN SHOW COMES TO TOWN

The word “miscellany” means “a mixed assortment of items.” Few writers can claim to have ever compiled such an assortment of their own work simply because few have the diversity of talent to produce work across a range of genres. Typically, poets write poetry; fiction writers write fiction; scholars write scholarship; and while writers might take an occasional dip into the neighbor’s pool, they tend to return to their own familiar waters pretty quickly.

Jim Clark, of Wilson, NC, is one of the few. Clark is a professor of Southern Literature at Barton College. He is also a musician, a poet, a short story writer, and a playwright. His 2007 book, Notions, includes poetry, fiction, memoir, criticism, history, a one-act play, and just for good measure, a cd of Clark’s music.

Not surprisingly given his range of interest and ability, Clark’s best work occurs when he blends genres. “Circles of Influence,” for example is both memoir and criticism as Clark traces his own development as a writer in a thoughtful revelation of the themes, personality and career of Byron Herbert Reece. Similarly, he updates the tradition of the folktale in “Moody,” a hilarious story of down home cleverness involving the disappointed aspirations of a would-be snake handler, preacher, and lover.

And he blends history, folktale, and verse in the poem “Black Dog Shadrack Mayhew,” reprinted below.

Clark will visit Hickory on January 12 to read from his work at Poetry Hickory, starting at 6:30 PM at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse. The evening will begin with an Open Mic, followed by Clark and fellow featured writer, Linda Annas Ferguson.

Black Dog Shadrack Mayhew
by Jim Clark

I’m the one they won’t tell about,
barn burner, horse thief, cheat.
In the hills of Corbin County, near
the Kentucky line, in the curve
of Horseshoe Bend, I carried
fifty-pound bags of sugar and corn
to my daddy’s still when I was ten.

I stirred the mash and kept cold
the water that cooled the worm,
and clapped my hands at the first
clear drop that clung from copper,
then fell into the waiting jug.
Underneath the chestnut tree
my daddy snored, drunk on profit.

When I was seventeen I asked
Abigail Simpson to be my wife.
Yes, she said, but hadn’t reckoned
on her Pa’s tight-lipped No, sudden
and final as a shotgun blast. That night
I sloshed kerosene on stable floor hay
of his new barn, struck the match
and held it, eye level, till the flame
licked my fingers, then dropped it.

I lit out for Tompkinsville, and there
lived for five loose and lawless years,
vowing never to ask another man
permission of what I wanted.
And what I wanted I took and people
all along those Cumberland ridges
gave me wide berth, and a name--
Black Dog Shadrack Mayhew.

Then war came, and fire and death
and thievery marched the valleys,
a smoky cloak of pestilence hugging
the ridges I rode. Under cover
of a uniform, gray, with a little box
of a hat, I robbed and killed and burned
my way back to Corbin County.

When they slapped the horse’s rump,
and I felt the stiff hemp bite
into my neck, I danced above the earth
and watched the smoke plait and curl
from the ashes of Jess Simpson’s barn.

Kakalak

KAKALAK

“Musings” for November 19

If you look up the word, “Kakalak,” in the dictionary, you probably won’t find it. If you google it, you’ll find a listing in the Urban Dictionary that says “an endearment of the Carolinas . . . which conveys a willingness to laugh at oneself and one’s origins while still remaining proud and affectionate towards them.” To those of us who grew up in the country of North or South Carolina, that sounds about right albeit it sounds quite a bit more highfalutin’ than we ever thought it was. If you’re a poet, the word has taken on quite another meaning over the last few years. It has become the title of an exciting annual anthology of North and South Carolina poets and visual artists put together by Charlotte-based writers Lisa Zerkle, Richard Allen Taylor, and Beth Cagle Burt.

The 2009 edition of “Kakalak” came out this summer, and the 136 page anthology features works by a wide range of area writers, including such notable authors as Gail Peck, Mark Smith-Soto, Alex Grant, Steven Lautermilch, Bill Griffin, Don Mager, Carolyn Moore, and many others, including, I’m proud to say, myself. The anthology is built out of the annual Kakalak contest which was won this year by SC poet Heather Dearmon.

The anthology is available for purchase for $15 through Kakalak’s website at www.kakalak.net, but Hickory area residents will be able to purchase it firsthand at December’s Poetry Hickory, to be held at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse at 6:30 on December 8. Poetry Hickory that night will feature an as-yet-to-be-determined number of writers from this year’s anthology. Known participants will include myself, Zerkle, and Burt, Lynn Stanton of Charlotte, Allison Elrod of Davidson, and Sally Miller of Charlotte. Organizers expect about 10 writers in all, so the evening promises to be a sort of sampler platter of some of the best poetry being written in our area.

To whet your appetite, I’m reprinting Elrod’s poem “First Fig,” which received an honorable mention in this year’s competition:

First Fig
by Allison Elrod

The fig tree has spread its generous
canopy across my late summer side yard.
Its branches are heavy with fruit.

Every day now, the figs grow softer
and fuller; they are taking the rain
and the warmth of a hundred summer days
and making them over into pleasure;
taut green skin and soft pink flesh.

Wearing only my nightgown
and my work boots, I have come
outside at dawn like some
post-modern Eve, yearning
for a taste of the fruit of the tree. I reach up
into the branches, reach up for the fruit
that hangs just beyond my reach,
the fig whose skin is just beginning
to bear the flush of readiness.

Maybe I am Eve. After all,
isn’t the light in my garden still
what came of “Let there be light?”
And isn’t everything to come
in human history beginning
on this very day, this very morning,
when this very fig--the one I am holding
in my hand--is finally ripe?

Or maybe, I am
a middle-aged woman outside
in my nightgown at six a.m.--
filled with happiness so pure it feels
like innocence--savoring the sweetness
of summer’s first ripe fig
before the light shifts,
before history resumes,
before I come inside to wake you,
temptation on my mind.

Lader Brings Landscapes of Longing to Hickory

LADER BRINGS LANDSCAPES OF LONGING TO HICKORY

In a review of Bruce Lader’s new book of poems, Landscapes of Longing, I explained that “these poems are all about the daily struggle to attain or maintain perspective. One poem after another proposes answers to the question: what can we learn from each other, from our lives as human beings, from the inevitability of disappointment, despair, longing in all its innumerable varieties.”

Lader’s work acknowledges that the world is not an easy place to live in, at least not with dignity and integrity. Confronted on a daily basis with unfairness, disillusionment, confusion, and the apparent perpetuity of longing, how do we maintain any sense of equilibrium, focus, perspective, and ultimately, hope. And yet, Lader’s poems illustrate again and again that we do. Despite frustration, injustice, contradiction, and failure, we continue to struggle on, against all odds, and insistent upon what we know to be good and fair and right.

If this sounds to you like the existential image of Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill only to have it roll back down every day, then it won’t come as a surprise that the middle section of Lader’s book is titled “Interviews Following the Sentence of Sisyphus.” Lader, however, doesn’t rely just upon esoteric mythological figures to relay his message about human existence. He presents these ideas in characters we all recognize, perhaps know personally, perhaps even have been at one time or another in our own lives.

The first and perhaps most memorable of the many voices Lader uses to explore this theme of existential persistence is that of a teacher at a school for troubled boys. In several of the book’s best poems, this speaker helps the reader see beyond the surface, to see the humanity behind the stereotype and statistic as these boys struggle not just for survival but for justice and opportunity as well. My favorite of these, “Attendance Check” is reprinted below.

On November 10, Lader will visit Hickory to read as part of the Poetry Hickory series along with fellow NC poet, Alex Grant. The reading will begin at 6:30 PM at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. For more information, contact Scott Owens at 828-234-4266 or asowens1@yahoo.com.

Lader has published poems in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, the New York Quarterly, the Humanist, International Poetry Review, Harpur Palate, New Millennium Writings, Margie, Poet Lore, and Asheville Poetry Review. His first full-length collection, Discovering Mortality, was a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell Award. He is the founding director of Bridges Tutoring, an organization educating multicultural students. A New York City teacher for many years, he was a Writer-in-Residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Colony, and has received an honorarium from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. His latest book, Landscapes of Longing, will be available for purchase at Poetry Hickory or can be ordered from Main Street Rag at http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/NewReleases.php


Attendance Check

Swapping cigarettes, jabs, chips,
they drift like Rockaway waves
from the boys home into the classroom,
ninth graders no one would bet on,
discarded by split parents.

The deck of misfortune they inherited
keeps shoving them to grow up
the hard way, hustles them
to hazardous fringes,
rips off their blooming.
A hot tide of easy dope
has begun to nettle attitudes,
submerge questioning minds.

and yet their feisty, undefeated spirits
grapple with prison sentences
of poverty; shirtless torsos
flaunt scars, coded storylines
of tested identity,
graffiti pledges of belonging.
Their dicey hands are mauled,
notched, and zigzagged from brutal
battles to breach a barbed-wire fate.

Jumpy after all-night scuffles
with gangs prowling Times Square,
they dodge and gamble to exist,
smell like a crowded gym, fists ready
for fast money, to get over
on teachers, settle scores,
stay afloat in the system chiseling them.


First published in The Humanist

October Poetry Hickory Video

Here is a link to Jessie Carty's video excerpts from October's Poetry Hickory. The featured writers were Debra Kaufman and Helen Losse. Open Mic readers included Faze, Anthony Straight, DW Bentley, and me (reading from Pris Campbell's new book "Sea Trails" from Lummox Press). Pris is virtually homebound due to her health, so she doesn't have the opportunity to read her own work in public. Her poems can be quite "sexy" at times, which might make it a bit strange for me to read, but they're excellent poems and I relish the opportunity to share them no matter how it might seem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbvqb9zNPSY

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.

Poetry Day to Have Hickory Flavor

POETRY DAY TO HAVE HICKORY FLAVOR

Every year since 1950, the Poetry Council of North Carolina has held a one day celebration of poetry, designated as Poetry Day, at Catawba College in Salisbury. This year Poetry Day will take place on October 10, and it will have a definite Hickory flavor.
This year’s Poetry Day will include the usual speeches and exciting performances by the group, Chambergrass, and Poetry Out Loud (a national high school recitation project) participants, but the highlight of Poetry Day this year, as in every year, is the series of readings by winners in the Council’s annual poetry competitions. The Hickory flavor in this year’s celebration comes in the Sam Ragan Contest for High School Students and Undergraduates, where three of the winners are students from Hickory. Recent St. Stephens High School graduate, Liz (Megan) Monish placed second in that competition, and CVCC students Jacob Gryder and Keegan Blankenship were both recognized as honorable mentions by judge Joseph Milford .
Readings will also be given by the winners of the Council’s six other competitions. These winners include, among others, such NC notables as Shelby Stephenson, long-time editor of Pembroke Magazine; Sara Claytor, author of Howling on Red Dirt Roads and a recent reader at Poetry Hickory; Joseph Mills, author of Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers; Dannye Romine Powell, former Book Page Editor at the Charlotte Observer; Tony Abbott, author of Leaving Maggie Hope; and Bill Griffin, author of Snake Den Ridge and another recent visitor to Poetry Hickory.
Another highlight of the day will be the debut of the Council’s annual awards anthology, Bay Leaves, which will include all the winning poems from this year’s competitions. Copies of Bay Leaves will be available for $9.50. Copies of Bay Leaves, first published in 1952, and all books entered into the Council’s Oscar Arnold Young Book Competition are archived in the Catawba College Library.
Poetry Day activities will begin at 9:20 A.M. in the Peeler-Crystal Lounge on the campus of Catawba College. Admission is free and open to the public. Lunch will be available for $15 per person. Questions about Poetry Day or the Poetry Council of North Carolina can be addressed to Ed Cockrell at 919-967-5834 or by email at edcockrell@hotmail.com. Additional information, including registration forms, are also available at the Council’s website: www.oldmp.com/poetrycouncilofnc.com