Aroma of Art and Ann Chandonnet's "Red Lady"

Musings for February 19, 2009
Aroma of Art and Ann Chandonnet's "Red Lady"

For the second week in a row, this installment of “Musings” features poetry and artwork from the Aroma of Art fundraiser auction going on this month at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory.
Aroma of Art is a month long silent auction whose proceeds benefit three nonprofits, ALFA (AIDS Leadership Foothills-area Association), Humane Society of Catawba County, and Women's Resource Center. Local artists have donated works which are on display in Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and can be bid on there. Final bid winners will be announced at Aroma of Art’s Grand Finale, slated for February 28.
In conjunction with Aroma of Art, Poetry Hickory is sponsoring an Ekphrastic Poetry Event. Area writers have produced poems based on works in the Aroma of Art display. These poems have been judged by a panel of local poets, and selected poems have been framed and are on display next to the work of art they were inspired by. The selected poems will be read by their authors at the Aroma of Art Ekphrastic Poetry Event at Taste Full Beans on February 26 and then presented to the winning bidder at the Grand Finale.
The poem below was written by Ann Fox Chandonnet and inspired by Brian Legore’s untitled painting of a “red lady.” Chandonnet currently lives in Vale, NC, and is the author of 7 collections of poetry as well as various cookbooks, children’s books, and travel guides. She is a frequent participant in Poetry Hickory. Legore is a local writer and artist, an Associate Member of Full Circle Arts and also a frequent participant in Poetry Hickory.
For more information on Aroma of Art, visit the website at http://aromaofart.blogspot.com/ or call Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse at 828-325-0108. For information on the Ekphrastic Poetry Event or Poetry Hickory, contact Scott Owens at asowens1@yahoo.com or 828-234-4266.

Red Lady

Lady’s red but got the blues,
got the blues.
Stares at her shoes,
cannot meet my gaze.
Red lady’s got the blues.
Her mouth opens, then shuts.
Opens, shuts.

Spit out sorrow’s poison, lady--
Lady, angry as a boil.
Spit out sorrow’s poison.
Your sad red eyes
shadow your blue cheeks;
A storm cloud
crowns your brow like blue thorns.

Red lady, blot your tears
with your red, red hair.
Spit out sorrow’s bitter poison.
There is a blue sky,
a blue sky singing
sweet--sweet as a red bird.
Can you hear it now?

Pelicans

Musings for February 12, 2009

Pelicans

For the next several weeks, “Musings” will be dedicated to publishing poetry and artwork from the Aroma of Art fundraiser auction going on throughout February at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory.
Aroma of Art is a month long silent auction whose proceeds benefit three nonprofits, ALFA (AIDS Leadership Foothills-area Association), Humane Society of Catawba County, and Women's Resource Center. Local artists have donated works which are on display in Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and can be bid on there. Final bid winners will be announced at Aroma of Art’s Grand Finale, slated for February 28.
In conjunction with Aroma of Art, Poetry Hickory is sponsoring an Ekphrastic Poetry Event. Area writers can produce a poem based on one of the works in the Aroma of Art display and submit it for inclusion in the exhibit. Selected poems will be framed, displayed next to the subject work of art and presented to the winning bidder at the Grand Finale. Poets whose works are selected will also be invited to read their poems at the Aroma of Art Ekphrastic Poetry Event at Taste Full Beans on February 26. Poems should include the author’s name and contact information as well as the title of the AOA piece it is based on and submitted by February 17 to Taste Full Beans or by email to asowens1@yahoo.com.
The poem below was inspired by Joe Young’s photograph, Brown Pelican. Young is the Photographic Technology Program Director at Catawba Valley Community College. He is a photography graduate of Appalachian State University and currently a graduate student at Savannah College of Art and Design. His photography has been published around the world, and he has won numerous awards in photojournalism and fine art photography. Young currently has an exhibit at Davidson County Community College in Lexington, NC. Young resides in Hickory with his wife and daughter.
For more information on Aroma of Art, visit the website at http://aromaofart.blogspot.com/ or call Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse at 828-325-0108. For information on the Ekphrastic Poetry Event or Poetry Hickory, contact Scott Owens at asowens1@yahoo.com or 828-234-4266.

Pelicans

They were military before it was cool,
skimming sound and surf beneath the radar
in attack or surveillance formation, fanned-out
V’s leaving little below concealed,
non-coms mostly, grunts of the animal
world, gangly and ungraceful,
profiles like pterodactyl forebears,
anatomy prehistoric, obsolete,
having skipped the last evolutionary
paradigm shift, yet somehow still surviving,
not the fittest by far, nothing like tern,
gull, osprey. Who would think
something this big could dive
beneath the waves and still come out whole.

To Feel What Might Otherwise Be Lost

To Feel What Might Otherwise Be Lost
Musings for February 5

Linda Annas Ferguson and I share a lot in common. We’re both poets; we’ve both lived in North and South Carolina; we both grew up in a mill village; and we were both scarred by the rites of passage such a childhood seems to entail. In fact, we have both written poems extensively from that experience of a mill village childhood, and we even occasionally discuss the pipe dream of a much larger collection of poems from that perspective by ourselves and other poets ranging from Molly Rice to Ron Rash. After all, if you grew up in the Carolinas prior to the 1970s, chances are your life was touched by the cotton mill industry. Now, the lifestyle created by those mill villages is disappearing, and perhaps some record of it ought to be saved.

One place that record is preserved is in the four books of poems by Ferguson: Bird Missing from One Shoulder (WordTech Editions, 2007); Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk (Finishing Line Press, 2006); Last Chance to Be Lost (Kentucky Writers’ Coalition, 2004); and It’s Hard to Hate a Broken Thing (Palanquin Press, University of S.C. Aiken, 2002). This is the important sort of work that Ferguson has done as one of our area’s most active poets, but mill village life is not the only subject she bends her pen to. Equally impressive among her work are the poems that deal with growing up as a girl in the South, with being a woman in the South, with suffering and loss and persistence, with, ultimately, being alive in the world today.

I wrote in a recent review of Ferguson’s latest book, that “Bird Missing from One Shoulder does what most poetry aspires to do, to save what might otherwise be lost, the world not simply as it happens but as it is felt.” Ferguson’s poetry is not just history, not just autobiography, not just perception, but all of that infused with the permanence of emotional impact, with the timeless revelations of how it feels to love, to struggle, to persist, to lose, to grieve, and to ultimately keep going.
On February 10, Ferguson will bring her work to Hickory, back to the county in which she was born. She will read as part of Poetry Hickory at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse, starting at 6:30. It will, undoubtedly, be a cathartic evening for all those who attend, an evening which helps us all better feel what might otherwise be lost.
The poem below is not part of Ferguson’s mill village work, but rather explores another vital subject, dealing with Alzheimer’s. It is taken from Bird Missing from One Shoulder and will soon be reprinted in the anthology Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease

My Mother Doesn’t Know Me

To her, I’m the mild-mannered woman
who cooks her meals.
She is going to leave me a tip
when she finds her purse.

She sits for hours, eyebrow
cocked in a wrinkled study,
as if she can fathom
the distance between us,

saves pieces of thread
in a coffee can,
picked from her afghan all day
while both our lives unravel.

Thanksgiving, she put a hammer
in the oven at 400 degrees,
spent the rest of the day
on the back porch step,

wanting only to leave
this strange house,
silently wringing her hands
as if her body could not contain her.

Ekphrastic Poetry to Serve Larger Purpose

EKPHRASTIC POETRY TO SERVE LARGER PURPOSE

Ekphrasis is the graphic, and sometimes dramatic, description of a visual work of art. The word is derived from the Greek roots “ek,” meaning “out,” and “phrasis,” meaning “speak.” When combined, these roots originally referred to the calling of an inanimate object by name. Today, the term is most often used to refer to a work of art that is based on another work of art in a different media. For example, a poem about a painting would be called an ekphrastic poem. Similarly, a painting of a sculpture would be considered ekphrastic.

The practice of ekphrastic work is a common exercise in all arts today. Think of the number of films you’ve seen that are “based” on novels, or the number of paintings that refer to specific characters or scenes from literature. In the past year in Hickory, Lenoir Rhyne University, Full Circle Arts, and Poetry Hickory have all been involved in ekphrastic poetry projects, where poets have been invited to compose works based on painting and photography exhibits.

Now, for the second year, Aroma of Art (AOA) is including an ekphrastic poetry event as part of their 8th annual benefit art auction. Aroma of Art is an important annual fundraiser for AIDS Leadership Foothills area Alliance (ALFA), the Humane Society of Catawba County, and the Women’s Resource Center. Donated works of art will be displayed at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse during the month of February, and silent bids on the pieces will be accepted throughout the month. Winning bids will be announced at the AOA Grand Finale, February 28.

This year, poets are invited to view the works of art at Taste Full Beans, starting February 1, and write their own original pieces inspired by the work they see. Approximately 20-25 poems will be selected, framed, put on display with the work of art they were inspired by, read by the poet at a special pre-finale event on February 26, and finally, given to the person who places the highest bid on the subject work of art.

Poets interested in submitting their work can email their poems to me at asowens1@yahoo.com or drop off their work at Taste Full Beans. Deadline for submission is noon, February 17. A panel of judges will determine the poems that will be included in the display and the reading. Submissions should include the poet’s name, the name of the work of art the poem is based on, and the name of the artist.

Printed below is one of the poems included in last year’s Poetry Hickory / Aroma of Art Ekphrastic Poetry Event. The poem has subsequently been published in the journal Pirene’s Fountain:

The Persistence of Field by Scott Owens

after Carl Moser’s photograph “Raking Hay”

This field goes on in time,
wrapping around mountain, years, generations.

What are two men against a mountain,
to plow it, sow it, lay it straight,
maintain fenceline and productivity?

He has worn this hat every summer
for thirty years, flattening fields
he claims as his own,
but even as he fights the horses
to keep them in line, knock down
a season’s worth of weeds,
even as he grips the reins
and guides the blade,
he can’t help but notice
white breath of queen-anne’s lace,
orange fire of asclepias tuberosa.
For more information on Aroma of Art please call Taste Full Beans staff at 325-0108.

Review of Glenis Redmond's "Under the Sun" (Wild Goose, Winter 2008)

Review of Glenis Redmond’s Under the Sun (Main Street Rag, 128 pages, $14.95)

I’ve heard Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, and Evie Shockley read their wonderful work, and I’ve read the extraordinary prose of Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, and now there is another name to add to the pantheon of powerful black women writers. That name is Glenis Redmond. I’ve not yet heard Redmond “perform” her poetry, although her credentials as a finalist in the National Poetry Slam and her reputation as a performer speak highly of her stature in that regard. I have, however, just finished reading her new collection of poetry, Under the Sun, and found it brilliant and enjoyable throughout.
When I teach expository writing, I explain to my students that a thesis statement is a contract with the reader, a promise of what the essay will provide. Few books of poetry offer such a contract; far fewer deliver. Redmond’s collection begins with just such a promise, and does indeed deliver upon that promise. The promise comes in the opening poem, reprinted in its entirety here, my favorite from the collection.

Scripted Hope

Name every nighttime shadow.
Call them out
from every corner,
every crevice of the past.
Fill yourself with the power
named survival.
Your voice will flower silver
into a circle blooming
of compassionate witnesses,
burning trembling lights.
In the brightness
my voice becomes your voice,
your voice becomes mine.
Together, our voices form
a tight constellation of hope,
a calligraphy written in stars.

This poem of imperative the writer speaks to herself describes writing as a ritual of resurrection, a séance of sorts in which the absent and the dead speak through the living poet, giving her poems the voice, depth, and resonance of historical context as she gives them the same through personal and confessional context. It is a powerful and timely message for poets throughout the world to attend to.
Of course, such an imperative would only seem insincere if the poet were not ready to follow her own directive. In fact, however, the poems of Under the Sun do exactly what “Scripted Hope” scripts. The book consists largely of a series of portraits, some celebratory, some mourning. The portraits range from the historical to the personal, indicating how the two interpenetrate in the formation of an individual, a family, and a people. There are historical portraits of Zora Neale Hurston, Fanie Lou Hamer, and a slave named Patience, literary portraits of Celie from The Color Purple, family portraits of sisters, daughters, grandmothers, uncles, brothers, and fathers, and self-portraits of the speaker in love, the speaker in mourning, the speaker as teacher and student, daughter and mother.
It is a diverse and vital family album that shows the importance of love, resistance, revolution, faith and courage in the progress of African-Americans throughout history and still today. The fundamental vitality of these qualities is made clearest in one of the more epic poems in the collection, “Sacrum,” which forms a sort of “Middle Passage” on the family level as it traces the trials and tribulations of the speaker’s father, beginning with the “Ivory Coast” and a “Virginia Plantation,” proceeding through a “Jim Crow history” and “a malnourished man-child at the Air Force recruitment office,” continuing “down dark alleys into the pool-shark dens . . . . leading to his favorite amber liquids of Jack Daniels and Jim Beam, “ and finally concluding with “Our familial bones breaking . . . . Our sergeant in charge leading the way, / a crooked man walking with wings.”
While the poems acknowledge the past lovingly, obligingly, and graciously, it is important to note that the final poem is written not in past tense, however, but in present. As the poem stirringly states:

Though we are raw to our bones
there is nothing an no one else left
to carry this fresh regret
so we hobble down life’s hollow corridor
and whisper with intent
we are not finished yet.
This chore takes more than triage
a simple labeling of things.
We must turn the sacred papers
of every holy book
touch each other like sacrament
give up apathy for Lent.
Understand
the vowels
I and u
‘til they become
u, me and we.
We do not get up from the table of our discontent
‘til all the bread is broken
and fish multiplied
every hungry mouth
fed and every heart, soul
realized.
Dearly beloved,
we are all gathered today,
amen has not been said because
we are not finished yet.

Review of Paul Nelson's "Sea Level" (Wild Goose, Winter 2008)

Review of Paul Nelson’s Sea Level (Main Street Rag, 71 pages, $14, www.mainstreetrag.com)

I remember Paul Nelson as a very even-handed teacher, treating the good poem and the bad one with the same respect, recognizing and valuing the student’s effort above the quality of the product, quietly and sincerely interested in everything that went into the work and even more in what had been, intentionally or otherwise, left out. That was 25 years ago, and I haven’t seen or spoken to him since. What great joy it is, then, to discover that his new collection of poems, Sea Level, is the perfect testimony to his education legacy.
These are meditative poems, achieving what my best focusing experiences have done for me, at once calming and provoking, familiar and deepening, ultimately helping the reader gain or regain a vital perspective. The last stanza of “Machias River Meditation” serves to illustrate my point:

My father carved a full-sized loon, shavings and dust
piling at his feet as the shape from poplar took
its place in air. It will never be a loon.
But if I carried it down to the marsh,
set it on one of the mounds, sooner or later
an eagle or osprey, perhaps ambitious marsh hawk
would stoop, helplessly, as some decoyed
hunter in the fall would be compelled by the sitting duck,
the fear of missing something,
to stud its painted feathers with steel shot
chilled by passing briefly through the universe.

Such perspective is repeated in the wonderfully balanced poem, “Fishing:”

Below the barber shop, perched on ledge
above a deep, rich pool, men stand on thumb-ish boulders,
or wade the strength of the eddy, casting
filaments as spiders do, toward nothing but hope,
that promontory. This is metaphysics.

Under the bridge, salmon
cleave shadows and rocks, roll up, leap,
thrilling hell out of anyone, as they steer
toward some ignoble backwater
to drop their eggs, squirt milt all over the gravel.
This is truth.

Between the cast and the fish floats the fly.
All winter long a grown man with fat fingers,
under a high-intensity lamp, hangs above a tiny vise,
slowly wrapping silk and hair and fluff around a hook’s shaft
devising an amulet, having failed all summer long
to raise a fish. He knows a man is lucky
if even inspiration hits once or twice a lifetime,
though some, infinitely patient, gifted with presentation,
do better. This is art.

These lines also illustrate the geographical underpinning of the manuscript. Living in North Carolina, where there is a town named Sea Level, I expected these poems to be bound to a particular location, and they do, indeed, have a strong sense of place, albeit not the one I anticipated. In this case, the place is Machias Bay, Maine, where the author grew up and has periodically lived and worked throughout his life. This sense of place is captured in the luscious imagery of each poem, as in “Eucharist:”

. . . I plane full throttle, roar
down the black belly of the lake, cottages,
one lamp each, streaking by, then downriver
through the gullet beneath the green, rib-cage bridge,
its port and starboard lights, then out, out,
into the iodinic air, sheering weed-rafts
and swells of tide, deaf to what I am saying,
my mouth a seven mile windsock.

The sea level of the title, however, is not simply a place, but also a frame of mind (think of the imperative homophone “see level”), a philosophy almost, existential and environmental, stoic and transcendental. This very human and humble frame of mind is hinted at in the title poem, where the speaker wonders “What won’t I remember, inexactly?” and further developed in poems like “Sea Smoke,” which ruminates on the temporality of human striving:

. . . Now I am content with
dragonfly breath on my corneas, thinking
I may have scratched the surface.
I am aware of the long gray body of fog
still well off-shore, beyond Cross Island.
I see in my mind my wife’s beautifully articulate
bare feet on the marsh, the fading
impression she makes on moss,
goose and eel grass.

The final word on this perspective comes in the book’s final poem, “Springfall:”

I’ve heard the various faiths
mock the breaking lakes, inland,
the march of trees at the pasture edge,
swelling, thickening toward the bloom
of dropsy fruit, huge, ancestral
roots of blowdowns, gaping in air.
Not one such word of man
has delivered more than hope.
------------------------------------------
I have decided not to live at all,
at least, not by my own hand.

I don’t often find it useful to compare poets, but as I read through Sea Level, I find myself thinking of Gary Snyder repeatedly as Nelson creates a remarkably compelling riprap of human existence, a living testimony of a man apparently content with but never fully happy about life on Earth.

Review of Janice Moore-Fuller's "Seance" (Wild Goose, Summer 2008)

Review of Séance by Janice Moore Fuller (Iris Press, 2007, www.irisbooks.com)
ISBN: 9780916078874

The speaker of Janice Moore Fuller’s poem “Angled. Mosaic. Companion.” from her collection Séance says,

Youth loves puzzles, séances with missing
voices. But you and I need the steady
fullness of a carpet rolled flat.

And that is what the poems in this collection do, rolling flat the fabric of memory and perception to help the reader see what we almost certainly would have missed otherwise, the secrets of love, mourning, forgiveness, things that live in the catacombs of the human heart, but through close contact take up residence in objects and places which become channels for communication between past and present, living and dead, here and elsewhere. In “Weeding Sylvia’s Grave, Heptonstall,” it is the headstone that contains Plath’s silent wish for room and time to write. Talking of both weeds and the flowers visitors have left, the speaker says

I’ve gathered them to fall
one by one into the rubbish bin
(as she must have done
dropping failed off-rhymes,
half-closed tulips,
thorny lines that wouldn’t sing)
even these roses that don’t bear
pressing--red, her favorite--
my gift snipped from Lumb Bank,
Ted’s temporary home.
The quotidian pulled away
from a clean new page.

Ironically, in other poems it is the quotidian which serves as repository and conveyance. In “Hydrangea,” for example, the speaker, while sitting in an old porch swing, comes to understand her grandmother’s acceptance of a limited experience of the world.

. . . she seesawed there
on the porch swing,
mesmerized by the hydrangeas
circumnavigating the yard--
hyacinth to fuchsia,
all the cosmos
she hoped for.

In poem after poem, the reader is transported to the time and place of the speaker’s experience and through the speaker to the time of the emotion, thought, spirit inscribed in material things. In “Midnight in the Convent, Spoleto,” for example, the speaker conveys the reader to a place of lonely, fearful visitation from the past:

I pretend I am one of them
waking to thin
light through the cell’s
lone slit . . .

. . . The stones
know I’m alone.
When the lights shut,
. . .

. . . The timer stutters,
“sorry,” under
its breath. My heart
thumps toward a dark

something big. It wants me to pause
before I press
the flashlight, wait
before I break

the terror with my tiny beam.

While these places are sometimes as exotic as the Galapagos or Lake Annaghmakerrig, they are just as often as common as parts of the body. Such is the case in perhaps the strongest, and certainly one of the tightest and most resonant, poems in the collection. In “The Grand Cartographer Recharts the Belly,” the speaker lays clear the impact of experience on the geography of one’s own body.

All those speed bumps, gutters, detours.
It was never flat terrain.
Chicken pox left pot holes, deeper
than gall bladder swerves the surgeon tore.
Twins left speed bumps, curves, and gutters. “Detour
here,” she tells new lovers, who restrain
but always speed. Bumps. Gutters. Detours.
It was never flat terrain.




The ultimate lesson in the poems of Séance seems to be to look deeper into the things of our lives, to recognize the value of things and to know that (in the book’s most memorable phrase) “nothing / gets killed for good” (No Pasarán). To not do so is to doom ourselves to live as the frigate birds in “Ornithology” who “clack/ against the life they’ll lead . . . / waddling toward the cliff’s runway . . . / wide-winged, / lonely . . . . “ To do so, helps us more readily “lurch forward / for a mother’s chant, a father’s words” (“Séance: On the Road from Stradone”). If restricted to a one line statement about this book it would be this: In memory resides revelation. In these poems too.