Poet of the Week Archive: November, 2005

November 1 - 6: A Portfolio of Poems in Response to Hurricane Katrina

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, we encouraged North Carolina poets to share their responses to this heart-breaking disaster. This week we share some of those poems, immediate in their power, personal, yet moving as good poetry does toward the connections that hold us all together as readers and inhabitants of this country and this "place." Because the rebuilding of much of the Gulf coast after this hurricane and Rita and Wilma -- the ones that followed -- is ongoing, we are including some links for further aid and support. These were provided by my friend Sandra Burbank, and I am grateful for her efforts to find ways to enable each of us to help in very specific ways, such as supporting the re-stocking of local libraries that have been wiped out by the storms. Please note also the call from the Furious Flower Poetry Center for poetry as an instrument of healing in the wake of the storms. -- K.S.B.

We Can't Step into the Same River Twice

My daughter's worried that the Live Oaks in City Park
can't breathe underwater,
and the ducks who bit her small hands full of bread,
"Who will feed them?"
She imagines the Aquarium fish swimming away
quick as the silver flashes
of our pond's minnows, only freer. The elephants, large as memory,
will wade out
like ships from the zoo, rescuing smaller animals.
But a poem's
not a life line, and the poet, not a boat.
These places burning,
flooding at the same time; these buildings where I've said
to my daughter,
"This is where you were born, and your father and his father.
Your great grandparents
were married at St. Louis Cathedral.
Grandma Cherry
used to say the gardenias in New Orleans bloomed so much
the bees flew
drunkenly into her kitchen windows all afternoon.
And here,
here's where your father and I met. Because this is there,
we are here."
But we aren't there anymore. Nobody predicts when it will stop,
and no one
when anything will begin again. My friend's daughter
kneels, thanks God
for her house that has a tree on it.
She'll start
kindergarten elsewhere in borrowed plaid uniforms.
On TV the city's
sounds are hundreds of dogs calling for someone across this filthy
slow moving water.
A man and a woman paddle an air mattress with brooms
to anyplace else. "The city
is a bowl." An anchor says again, "The city is a bowl." until I too
am too full.

Malaika King Albrecht says: "My family and I have recently moved to Pinehurst. My eldest daughter was born in New Orleans and my youngest daughter in Greenville, North Carolina. Though I'm currently a stay-at-home mom, I have also worked as a rape crisis counselor and a chemical dependency counselor. I have been fortunate enough to teach creative writing to abuse survivors and to addicts in therapy groups and thereby combine my interests. I received a BS in psychology from Old Dominion University and then an MA in Humanities with emphases in Women's Studies, creative writing, and sociology. I was editor of the Dominion Reviewfor a year as a graduate student. I have had poems published in various literary magazines, such as Quarterly West,New Orleans Review, and Exquisite Corpse. Two poems were also included in the book Fire in the Womb: Mothers and Creativity.

The Revealing

Katrina slammed the Big Easy
hard,
hard.
Her juggernaut of wind and water
stripped the city of jazz and jambalaya
to its unbeautiful essentials,

washed away the puppet show, revealing
boulevards -- famed for parades
of clowns, jugglers, tinseled floats,
brass bands and brassy dancers --
now filled
with swill,

and the super bowl of the Superdome,
devoid of food and water,
crammed with hungry childen, frantic parents,
and folk too frail for struggle.
Even Satchmo's trumpet couldn't wail
a blues so deeply indigo.

Katrina didn't wait for Mardi Gras
to rip the masks from the gala facade,
disclose hitherto hidden faces
of destitution, wringing hands
of privation, averted eyes
of guardians, Plenty of po-boys, oh, yes;
po-girls, oh, yes, po-folks by the thousands,
riding too many streetcars named Desire,
too many riders dependent on
the uncertain kindness of strangers.

Sally Buckner edited the anthology Word and Witness: One Hundred Years of North Carolina Poetry (1999) and alsoOur Words, Our Ways: Reading and Writing in North Carolina(1995), both published by Carolina Academic Press, based in Durham. She is professor emeritus of English at Peace College and lives in Raleigh.

Intelligent Design

My students said the fingers of light
poking through the tree canopy belong
to the hands of God,

that He was at that moment reaching
down into the dim veil of forest
and caressing our eyelids with light;

the same Creator whose palms
open to us now wrought from dust
this terrible planet, brought

us here to a wood behind the school.
Here is our intelligent design, and we are
helpless in our father's fists,

paralyzed by erudite destruction, silenced
by our lack of civilization, the absence
of godliness next to the hands of God himself,

who has turned water into wrath,
leaving my students and me to wonder
if this is better assigned to accident.

James D. Hogan teaches English and Creative Writing at South Iredell High School, in Troutman. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Statesville with his wife, Kelly, and their many animals. He is a graduate of Western Carolina University, and his poetry has appeared in the literary magazines NomadandGatherings.

Genesis

"Why can't I see that black kid's face?"
"Who is God, anyway? Why's grass
not another color? Was green made or what?

"You can," I say. "Don't look for lighter skin,"
adjust the rearview mirror, take her in,
fix the posture of her vowels, try to wipe

the southern off her lips, speed
through green tobacco fields
in back of busses that mix kids,

past Christian schools that don't.
Then it's time for last night's dreams:
hers was of a small green ghost

that came and kissed her on the mouth.
Mine's too frightening to tell:
The hurricane that struck last week

fell first as rain's soft patter to fatten
jungle leaves, crossed the sea, gathered
three hundred years' drowned voices,

Gambians'. This voracious hunger
landed at our shore, ate our pines,
spit them out like sucked-clean bones

and cats and wrens and fish, threw their
vengeful shoulders at our door. As if
I had answers to any of these questions.

Julie Fay is the author of Blue Scorpion (2005), which was chosen by Diane Wakoski as a finalist for Truman State University Press's T.S. Eliot Award. Her three previous poetry collections include -- most recently -- The Woman Behind You(Pitt Poetry Series, 1999). She's a professor of English at East Carolina University and for the year 2004-2005 was a Fulbright Scholar at Universite Paul Valery, in Montpellier, France. She divides her time between her homes in Blount's Creek, North Carolina, and Montpeyroux, France.

Little Boy's Truth:
An Interview on "NBC Nightly News"

"Pitiful, it's pitiful;
shame, shame."
The small black face
peers into the camera
like a pro.

"Don't you know
we need help here?"
His hand gestures out
towards a crowd
of dazed and dehydrated
family members,
sitting hopelessly
on a hot and littered pavement.

"We need water.
We need food.
Where is the help, man?
Where is the help?"

The camera pans away
to worse conditions
and other interviews.

But the little boy's face
is etched forever in my mind
along with his haunting words:

"Pitiful, it's pitiful;
shame, shame."

Janet Benway is happily transplanted from Connecticut to Brevard, where she lives, walks, and writes, enjoying the mountains and a circle of creative, spiritually-minded friends. She is a former editor and college English teacher. She has been published in journals and magazines such asLucidity,Bereavement, and Long River Run.

We Want the Songs
-the Songs of New Orleans-

The faces speak to us
out of the depth of rising water,
from the shadows of broken walls,
from the roof tops, from the windows,
from the crashing glass,
the moaning sounds,
the lonely wails of dogs who loved,
the screaming of a weary child,
the darkness of deserted streets.
They speak and when we turn,
the tears engulf us all;
there is not sun enough to dry them
or to turn canals back into roads,
to take away the misery of the
separations, the endings. Those faces
stay suspended in the midst
above the water
above the water
above the water.

We want the songs;
we want the singing.
We want the people who are the city;
we want them returned.
The sounds of surging rivers mingle
with the echos of their voices.
We are looking for this unmatched place
again; we need these people and their city.
We need the music
rising slowly
rising slowly
rising slowly.

Since childhood, Stuart Burroughs has been involved in writing, art work, and music. She read and began to write poems when very young. She graduated from UNC at Chapel Hill where her major studies were English, fine art, and education. Stuart has been a working artist, a teacher, and a tutor at various times throughout her life. She and her late husband moved to Chapel Hill in 1993 from Atlanta, GA, where their two children grew up. She continues to write poetry and as a pianist, enjoys sharing music with others. Her collection of poems, Beyond the Hills, was published in 2004. She is a member of NC Writers Network, the NC Poetry Society, and Noon Poets of Chapel Hill.

The Only World I've Ever Known

the river's vapors hover like a shade,
sheltering the banks and the water from the flames
Dante. The Inferno. Canto XV

The only world I've ever known, for good
or ill, lies within a bowl of mountains.
Even when the waters rise and the French Broad
overflows, it does not reach my door.

Now I watch the venerable city, held
in a bowl between lake and sea, where Percy
and Faulkner launched bright words
and old men drew the blues up from their grief
in a wooden hall called preservation,
the city of dance and dark where the dead
lurk above the ground and absinthe flows
from wormwood into gall, where sex and food
and even Elysium do not spell paradise -- now I watch
as the city drowns.

Displaced, displaced and nameless,
they plead from rooftops
above the liquid streets,
apocalypse an understatement.

Safe in the world I've always known,
I welcome people to the wedding
of our son. We dance and laugh
as if the world were not coming to an end
in one old city, as if chance
had not run out with all its chips and cards,
drowning its sorrows with the green fairy,
no more parades with masks
and coins or white umbrellas, the blues
always was good music to die by.

Fire and water fill my mind
and one chiseled face,
a young black woman dying, her rescuer
extends an orange slice,
an orange slice, what was he thinking?

while another man holds her, helpless,
in his arms.

Susan Lefler lives in Brevard. Her poetry has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage, Wind, and other journals. Her photographic history, Brevard, was published by Arcadia in 2004. She is a contributing editor for Smoky Mountain Living.

To read "Labor Day Eulogy," Kathryn Stripling Byer's response to the Katrina disaster, click here.

Opportunities to help

Library aid:

Friends in Need

North Carolina Library Association Katrina Relief

Louisiana Library Association

Mississippi Library Association

ALA Katrina Secure Donation Page

Katrina poetry project:

The Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University is launching a project that will respond in some meaningful way to the Katrina tragedy. It is called "Mourning Katrina: A Poetic Response to Tragedy." It will be a national poetry-writing project to which those directly and indirectly affected by the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina can respond through poetry and have their poems read by established poets and teachers of literature. After those directly affected have been given water, food, and shelter and have been reconnected with families, they will need to respond in some way to the horrific events that have changed their lives forever. They will go through the process of grieving, reflection, expression and ultimately healing. I know that writing will speed up this process. Those poets and teachers of literature responding will feel a sense of contributing in a positive way to this situation as they engage in a process that will help victims deal with this trauma. Another objective of the project is to produce a CD of selected responses that will be sold to raise money for the Hurricane Katrina relief effort and will provide those who wish to understand the scope of this tragedy an opportunity to hear from those who lived through it.

I am being guided by this wisdom: "When people are proactive, they disregard the things they have no control over and focus their energy on things they can do something about. This energy is positive and enlarging." If there is no need for this project, we will know soon enough because the response will be small, but if there is a real need, the response will be large and will bring with it its own momentum and support. My task as director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center is to bring vision to a center whose mission is the promotion of African American poetry through education, research and publication. However, my responsibility as a human being is to respond with humanity and with more than numbing silence, rage, and disbelief.

I hope you will sign on to help me launch this project. Please let me know if you would like to review the journals of a few of the respondents. Or let me know if you have a direct way to get to some of the victims of this tragedy.

Please send this message to others who might help in this project. I am gratified that so many have already committed their support.

Joanne Gabbin
Executive Director
Furious Flower Poetry Center
gabbinjv@jmu.edu
Furious Flower Poetry Center
MSC 1501,
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
PHONE: (540) 568-2694

November 7 - 13, 2005: Patrick Bizzaro

I have been a fan of Patrick Bizzaro's poems for more than twenty years. In his work, the reader finds a blend of the hard-edged world combined with tenderness and an eye for detail that might surprise someone coming across poems with titles like "Violence" and "Alone at the Palace Burlesque." Yet this juxtaposition of the world we live in, with its threats of violence and of lives disrupted, and the longing for our better selves that emerges in passages like "Trust your steps to lengthen/ once you have faith/ something invisible/ will be there/ to hold you" is what makes us the hopeful animals we are and what makes Pat Bizzaro's poems such a joy to read. Pat Bizzaro writes poems that know when to laugh and when to weep. He is one poet whose work I always look forward to reading, because the poems always surprise me.
-- Al Maginnes

Al Maginnes's third collection, Film History, was published in 2005 by Word Tech Editions. His other books areTaking Up Our Daily Tools (St. Andrews College Press, 1997) and The Light In Our Houses (Pleaides Press, 2000), which was the winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Award. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. He is on the faculty of Wake Technical Community College.

TWIN CITIES
for Resa

Lightning, eruptions of fire
in paper mills, electric wire
touching pavement. One space became two
cities, the Twin Cities,
the Queen Cities of the Lake,
the every-cliche cities,
the Italian-Catholic-boy-bowing-
his-wavy-head cities,

the cities of sawdust-floored bars and cold beer
shoved down mahogany tables, where
heavy women brace themselves against the winter's freeze.
These are the cities where people shiver from
unpredictable snows, the lake's effects.
Absence of sun makes them mean.

Look out around you:
the pipe wrench circles
a drunken lasso above a tire-iron
head. Men wearing layers of steel inside
their skulls will butt you
in the nose if you're not careful
about who the hell you bump into.
Don't walk with your elbows
out through just any conversation.
Always check the size of the talk.

Even little guys at the pool
table shorten up to bunt.
Here every beer bottle turns sideways
to make room for the sullen swing.
You better duck,
you better watch your pretty brown skull.

These people will argue over
which lake is greater.
They can prove it too that not every
good beer comes in a green bottle.
For these people, a six pack is nothing more
than three sets of twins.

These are the twin cities, connected at
the burning mill. Go visit. Sit by my mother's
kitchen counter, dice vegetables for soup,
knit the tiny sweater of my memory.
In a house so heated in winter
you may bless us both through the tiny halos
of your arms. Then go outside, oh sainted one,
and throw the ultimate
iceball at the Polish girl next door.
Blame her closed and blackened eye on me.

Patrick Bizzaro joined East Carolina University in 1983, where he is professor of English and the founding director of the University Writing Program. He is the author of thirty books, including literary studies, poetry collections, and pedagogical works. Every Insomniac Has a Story to Tell (Greenville, NC: Independent Press, 2004) -- from which this poem is drawn -- is his second full-length collection of poems. He has also published six chapbooks in addition to his first full collection, Fear of the Coming Drought (Mount Olive College Press 2001). His poems have appeared in over 100 magazines and won for him New York Quarterly's Madeline Sadin Award and LaSalle University's Four Quarter's Poetry Prize. His critical work includes two books of criticism on the writings of Fred Chappell: Dream Gardenand More Lights Than One (LSU Press 1997 and 2004). Both of these books of criticism have been nominees for the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Award and the Society for the Study of Southern Literature's C. Hugh Holman Award. Mr. Bizzaro lives in Greenville with his wife, Resa. Their first child together, Antonio, was born in the summer of 2004. Mr. Bizzaro is also the father of Jason Bizzaro, of Charlotte, and Krissy Vestal, of Greenville, and the grandfather of Madeline Rose Vestal.

November 14 - 20, 2005: Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Kathryn Kirkpatrick lives as I think a poet should -- at the top of a mountain in an artist-designed house that she and her husband have made even more artful and welcoming over the years. Surrounded by gardens, and in the company of two dogs and two cats, Kathryn writes remarkable, deeply felt, beautifully nuanced poems that range over the gamut of human experience -- poems rooted in mythology, in history, and in personal experience, in which her subjects are always brought powerfully and dramatically to life.

I came to know Kathryn when she was a freshman in the 1970s at Winthrop College. Even then, at the age of eighteen, her gifts were apparent to all who knew her; so multi-talented was she that her professors in every academic discipline tried to lure her into their specialties. She would undoubtedly have distinguished herself in any field she chose, but happily, for those of us who know her poems and for those who may just now be coming to them, she decided that literature would be her life's work -- the making of it and the teaching of it. Even as she finished her Ph.D. at Emory in Interdisciplinary Studies and British Literature, she was writing mature and insightful poems and publishing them in fine literary magazines. Now she has two superb collections, which have won prestigious awards, as well as two chapbooks; and she has won residency grants from the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, in Ireland, and the Eastern Frontier Society, in Massachusetts, among other honors. I am not surprised at the recognition she's getting for her poems. Nor am I surprised that she has managed to pursue her scholarly interests, regularly publishing books and articles in Women's Studies and Irish Studies. But it is for her poems themselves and for her friendship that I am happiest. I have seen some of her new, as yet unpublished work, and I am delighted to say: Keep an eye on this poet -- she will knock you off your feet. -- Susan Ludvigson

Susan Ludvigson is Professor of English at Winthrop University. Her published books include seven titles from Louisiana State University Press, most recently Sweet Confluence, New and Selected Poems(2000). Her next collection, Escaping the House of Certainty, will come out from LSU Press in the fall of 2006. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Witter Bynner Foundations; from the National Endowment for the Arts; and from the North Carolina Arts Council and the South Carolina Arts Commission. She has represented the U. S. at writers' meetings in France, Belgium, Canada, and Yugoslavia.

Class

For my high school graduation
we went to the Western Sizzler
where my father, telling no one,
had reserved a private room.

He never believed in his own kindness,
and so he said nothing when I chose
a regular table. I was ashamed.
My boyfriend usually ate
at the Steak and Ale.

My family had no debts. No stocks either.
Just the slow rise of a savings account
like water from a ceiling leak
into a rusty can.

But there were no leaks,
everything steadily tended
through long days of honest work
which left us at the end
of it all with only enough
for the chopped sirloin platter
and a room that stood empty
because we never arrived.

First American Woman Solos in a Fixed-Wing,
Heavier Than Air Machine, 1910

I dreamed of flying under bridges
upside-down
or diving swift-like toward
the rushing ground at Curtiss Field.
He says
I'm just to check the wires, guide forward
and then back across the runway,
says if
crashed they'd blame his Pusher plane
or him.
To teach a woman how to lift
herself from earth in this frail fabric plane
is bad enough,
but flight, alone, intoxicates
like drink, like money, power.
So when I find
the throttle lever blocked and take
away the piece of wood,
I know the price
they'll pay, years on, to see me risk my neck,
a freak because I'm first.
My hands are ice.

Southern Dialectic

My uncles would make fun of my long I,
call it Yankee, something I'd put on
as if that diphthong might expand
into a self not consonant
with all the forthright syllables
of Southern/woman/working class.

I'd bristle with chronology:
a military kid, a childhood overseas,
humorless (as anyone might be)
sounding out identity from
Filipino, German, Texan drawl.
Who knows? Perhaps I had an ear
for what could silence me.

I'd stand in the red clay
of a southern afternoon,
sun blasted, alone, the heat
riding roughshod over me,
and pitch my voice into that swollen air.

It all comes back to me now.
It all comes back to me.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick lives in Vilas and is a professor of English at Appalachian State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University, where she received an Academy of American Poets poetry prize. Her first book of poems, The Body's Horizon (Signal Books, 1996), won the Brockman-Campbell award, selected by Alicia Ostriker. The North Carolina Literary & Historical Association awarded the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize to her second collection, Beyond Reason (Pecan Grove Press, 2004). Chapbooks include Looking for Ceilidh (Mill Springs Press) and The Master's Wife (March Street Press). Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, Florida Review, Kalliope, Shenandoah, Sojourner, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, and other magazines. As a feminist scholar she has produced editions of the Irish and Scots novels Belinda, Castle Rackrent, Marriage, and The Wild Irish Girl for Oxford University Press's World's Classics Series. She is also the editor of Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities (University of Alabama Press, 2000).

Ken Rumble's poetry often has a jiggle in it.

You know when there's something loose in your car engine, and you hear it rattling around on the highway, but the engine is still running? You're worried, but you're also in a hurry, and almost there.

Actually, no -- that jiggle in the engine means it's broken, and Ken's poems aren't broken. Ken Rumble's poetry is more like when a kid brings a shoebox to elementary school with a small animal in it. The box has holes punched in the lid and masking tape wrapped around it. You hear a little scratching noise from inside when the kid puts it on the desk. Maybe the box scoots a centimeter as something inside tries to get out. A toad or a mouse. Or a skink.

Ken pushes the poetic line, and he pushes it hard. He pushes the sense of the line against the line breaks. Locate the nouns and map their relative positions to their verbs and you'll see all the diagonals. His is a poetics of struggle against containment—getting words to mean by sheer arrangement. Even when he is writing discrete sentences in a more prosaic form, the small, isolated paragraphs permute and interfere with each other. The poem becomes a system at sixes and sevens. You worry that the poem will break down.

We're back to the rattling-car metaphor again, not the animal-in-shoebox one. I'm wanting to write about pistons and cams here.

Okay. Music differs from noise along an axis of organization -- you listen for some organizational facet that's lacking in, say, the din of an elementary-school cafeteria. This is the reason we aren't buying CDs of elementary-school cafeteria noise. Ken Rumble's poems, at many internal points, are showing the wear of language stretched to contain meaning. It's hard to optimize the sentence—we all know this. We flip around words and sentences and paragraphs in our e-mails to each other in order to say the most in the fewest words, in order to be unambiguous. This is called "putting the language under pressure." Ken's poems, in their line breaks and sentence tensions, reveal these tactics of making meaning out of words, and expose the code of understanding itself. There is the hiss of a pressure release.

Now, take the top off the shoebox, kid. --Chris Vitiello

Chris Vitiello lives in Durham.

from Key Bridge
3.viii.2001

(Friday, 9:32 pm, October
I'm 17, peach light, Matt stops the car
under the red & white Kentucky Fried Chicken sign
just over the border on the corner of Georgia and Alaska

halfway down the block, we pass the bums who know
that we know about the Chinese take-out place
with bulletproof glass --

there's a party somewhere
somewhere, there's a party
somewhere, somebody's parents went somewhere else and somebody isn't being watched by somebody like they ought to be watching/watched

there's a party somewhere
there's a party somewhere

from Key Bridge
8.ix.2001

Here's the story: his name's Frank
in my English and drama classes, second period lunch,

the only black invitee to my 13 th birthday
showed up an hour early

he'd ridden the bus
from his apartment complex

we ate pizza, watched Night of the Living Dead,
Day of the Dead, & Dawn of the Dead -- movies

about race.

Sorry Farmer Ted

So much more than time to spare, your life
perhaps, or an afternoon - the money
let it fly, like myth
it can't sleep still, but your life, your daughter, your September picnic-
the way a man with a plan on the street
asks for money together with the bone, a crepe myrtle trunk
thank the sparing hand, stems, and trunks, steamships
that never rise. See the stillness the world
is when you aren't looking and your life
several days from college.

Say No

just because
simply because
the simple fact of being awake
mere wakefulness
opening one's eyes
bidding adieu to Orpheus
chance consciousness
even though the waking life
leaving dreamland
saying goodbye to the Sandman
          just because
          simply because
          merely because
                                  you are awake
                     does not mean you
                     should get out
                     of bed

One Question

Crow parade, the scavenger shuffle:
closing time at entertainment town.

Accidents like cars: drama incarnate-;
look at the shape, the circle,

the round about love of a stranger at the welfare office
taking change for a long distance call: the elephant's trick,

a tuning fork. Step left, step right,
slur the center for shuffle.

There are days we could spend dancing-
cash that disco check -- see the world all night

in the rain the stranger shares with us.
A red oak down by lightning then wind.

It is so quiet here under the sun: a mouthless village,
though the carrion doesn't last long on the tarmack -

keep on the right: walk from here:
they want us to stay though even the flies

won't cross the county line.

Ken Rumble is the director of the Desert City Poetry Series, which with the support of a North Carolina Arts Council grant brings poets from North Carolina and elsewhere together for readings in fall and spring at Internationalist Books, in Carrboro. He is a contributing editor of the poetry journal Fascicle , a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group, and a member of the board of Carolina Wren Press.  He received an MFA in poetry from Pennsylvania State University. His poems have appeared in literary journals including Carolina Quarterly, Parakeet, 5AM, effing magazine, Cranky , and others.  Key Bridge, his second collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2004 & 2005 Verse Press Book Prize. The North Carolina Writers' Network hired him to organize its annual fall conference, which was held in Asheville earlier this month.