Poet of the Week Archive: October, 2005

October 3 - 9, 2005: Nancy Dillingham

Nancy Dillingham's poems tap our emotional keyboard with deft and delicate, yet meaty and strong vocabulary. Imagistic, narrative, dense as a laurel thicket, clean as the hogkiller's knife, precise as a lightning flash -- these poems catch at the senses; they linger like a memory, illuminating the spirit. As a master carver removes to reveal essence, this poet pares away verbiage and peels back syllables. The result is spare and stellar -- poems as blindingly immediate as sticking tongue to frozen metal. Ms. Dillingham writes of the pioneer woman ("Pioneer woman/ in all my silences/ I think of you"), the mountain woman ("There is a landscape/ of the heart/ that sets us apart"), and gives her the universal womanhood grounded in the specific ("Still/ as a white sapling/ she stands/ daguerreotyped/ by the night."). Her poems move us through the seasons and through the hurts and beauty of a hard life. She does all this with some touches of humor but without glossing over the painful miscarriage, the snakebitten child, or the mood of the wife -- the "umber statue in the dusk" who waits in the doorway when the unfaithful husband returns from his week with her sister in Idaho. -- Celia Miles

Celia Miles retired from Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, where she taught English and worked closely with Nancy Dillingham on the yearly production of the college's literary journal, Victoria Press.

A note from Nancy Dillingham: The following poems are taken from my latest book of poetry, First Light, inspired by my grandmother Zella Dillingham. I wanted to pay homage to her through an "imagined" journey of the archetypal mountain woman who carves out family and community in a western North Carolina wilderness valley -- the valley of Dillingham in Big Ivy. As I say in the author's comment on the back of the book, I follow her down the "hardscrabble road from marriage, childbirth -- and death -- to midwifery, folk medicine, and metaphor." (A footnote: I was born at home and my grandmother "attended" my mother.)

First Light

Soft as smoke rising
she moves
transparent
in white nightgown
barefoot
along the trace
to the springhouse

lifts the latch
and takes
from its cool
haven
one print
of sweet butter
delicate
as the flower
perfectly implanted
on its smooth
round face

Marriage

Fifteen
and not many chances
for courting . . .

When they say
her husband plucked her
like a flower
from his first wife's grave
(new mother for
his four small children)
it is so . . .

A quick stab of pain
a drop of blood
escharotic
she made her peace with passion . . .

it is hardscrabble life
she romances now

Shivaree

Having jumped the broom
in her Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes
and only pair of shoes
she steps close to the affray
over the threshold
out of the frying pan
into the fire

Resolution

Her resolve
is like looking
for lizards
in the creek

turning over
the rocks
waiting for the disturbance
to clear

Conviction

Through the yard
the bloodhounds ran
tracking a loose convict . . .

It happened in the hen house . . .
When she lifted the latch
the convict rose before her
like Lazarus

One breast in his hand
he tore at her clothes
then disappeared
like an apparition
into the woods

She rose on watery legs
gathered her eggs into her worn felt hat
without breaking one . . .

She heard it coming
from a long way off
a persistent buzzing
in her head like the droning of bees

It was her own voice
spiraling within her
dark and coiled
writhing like a snake
ready to strike

her scream
raping the morning's silence

In the Garden
fall, from the Old English feallan, to fall down

Under molten skies
she spies
Henry
black-as-indigo
field hand

spread out
like a week's washing
against the fence stobs
head back
arms akimbo

She opens
her mouth
ready to go
into her familiar
rigamarole

Henry, you been out all night --
got tight -- didn't make it home?

when
she sees
he's still
as some old
scarecrow

while a bird
pecks at
one of his eyes
as if his face were
a discarded corncob

Midwife

The first time
she lifted life
from the writhing chasm
of a dark, bloody womb

and heard the baby's cry
pierce the plundered room
she swooned
like a lover swoons

and the sweat dripping
from her brow
to her eyelids
became amulets

auguring a fateful journey

Nancy Dillingham is the author of three books of short stories and poems: New Ground (1998), The Ambiguity of Morning (2001), and First Light (2003). Her work currently appears in The Asheville Poetry Review's tenth anniversary issue.

October 10 - 16, 2005: Ricky Garni

Ricky Garni is our poet of the parenthetical thought and I adore him for it. Since we first met over a decade ago, through the offices of the North Carolina poet and publisher Jonathan Williams, he has continued to entrance me with his adventurous imagination and his inventive self-published works. As different as our work is, we share a common belief in the Other which feeds us, and in the mysteries of language. We both admire Jean Dubuffet's definition of art: "Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name; it loves to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called."

I envision Ricky at Gertrude Stein's couch; Alice beaming with approval. They would have liked Ricky not because he twists language inside out, feelings upside down, and thoughts middle to middle but because he, unlike her many contemporary disciples who pursue obfuscation for obfuscation alone, moves in circles and spirals and wicked topsy-turvys like a child. He is naturally so. Gertrude would gleefully have had Alice invite him to tea, coffee, chocolates and Alice would have cooked something nice. Something better than nice. The dogs would have nibbled his socks and everyone would have laughed. Picasso, then Tchelitchew, would have painted him. Ricky joins those quirky quarky quacky ones -- Stein, Christian Morgenstern, Russell Edson, Stevie Smith, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Starr Hamilton, and Kenneth Patchen -- in a realm where what is not is IS and what is is IS NOT. It's a world where all can play with none left behind. But you have to turn your thinking caps around, or cut holes in them, or turn them inside out. -- Jeffery Beam

Jeffery Beam is the author of numerous works of poems including Visions of Dame Kind (The Jargon Society, 1995), The Fountain (North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1992), An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold (Horse & Buggy Press, 1997), and the award- winning spoken-word compilation What We Have Lost: New & Selected Poems 1977-2001 (Green Finch Press, 2001). He is the poetry editor of the online and print literary journal Oyster Boy Review.

Ricky Garni attended Duke University and has lived in the Triangle since 1986. He has produced twenty-odd books of poetry and prose in limited editions. Mr. Garni has published widely in print and on the web and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize on three occasions. His work has been featured in anthologies by Pif, Mitochondria, and Megaera. Over the years, Mr. Garni has worked as a teacher, a recording engineer and arranger, a wine merchant, and a graphic designer. In the mid-90s, he organized a series of readings in the Triangle: 101 Secret Wing Dings. Slated for 2006 is The 1865 Project, in which the audience and speakers will be either younger than 18 or older than 65, and all invited to share parts of the world and history that they dearly love and wish to voice and preserve. Mr. Garni is presently in the process of completingMake It Wavy, a compilation accepted for publication byOyster Boy Review's Off the Cuff Books. His long-term favorite enterprise is a collection of autobiographical comic multimedia poems entitled The Eternal Journals Of Crispy Flotilla.

October 17 - 23, 2005: John Balaban

I first encountered John Balaban's work in the 1970s at the Unicorn Press in Greensboro, when the publisher showed me, with great excitement, lovely hand-made volumes of Balaban's first translations from the Vietnamese. Some thirty years later, when we were hiring a poet-in-residence at North Carolina State University, I was delighted to rediscover John, and learn what a remarkably prolific, varied, and brilliant career he has had. The author of twelve books of poetry and prose, he has won many awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship. But what knocked me out -- and made me want to hire him -- was the work itself: the beautifully crafted, moving poems, the translations, the fiction, and Remembering Heaven's Face, a memoir about his experience serving as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, where he worked to save children injured in the fighting. In this remarkable book -- perhaps the finest ever published about this period in Vietnamese history -- Mr. Balaban observes the Vietnamese people, countryside, and war with a humane yet fierce and passionate eye. The memoir also reveals John Balaban as a man of great courage and moral principles.

While the war was still going on, Mr. Balaban returned to the Vietnamese countryside to tape folk poetry, which he translated and has now published in several volumes. During this time he first encountered the work of Ho Xuan Huong, an 18 th-century courtesan and political mastermind whose poems are still very much alive in Vietnam. Spring Essence, a volume of her poems published in 2002, is arguably one of the most important translations ever made in any language, for it presents Ho Xuan Huong's poems for the first time in its calligraphic originals: that is, in Nom, the ancient Vietnamese script, which had never before been set in type. Since then Mr. Balaban and his foundation (http://nomfoundation.org) have compiled a dictionary of Nom and have begun an online archive of the classics in this 1,000-year heritage.

John Balaban is a devoted and exacting teacher of poetry who often gives readings and talks throughout the state and nation. We're fortunate to have him in North Carolina. Read more about him on his own website (www.johnbalaban.com) and in the spring of 2006 be sure to look for his next book of poems. Meanwhile, enjoy the poems below. -- Angela Davis-Gardner

Angela Davis-Gardner has written two critically acclaimed novels, Forms of Shelter and Felice. Her third novel, Plum Wine, will be published in spring, 2006. Many of her short stories and personal essays have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. Her honors include two fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the 1992 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Ms. Davis-Gardner teaches creative writing at North Carolina State University, where she was chosen Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor, 2002-2004.

A note from John Balaban on the first poem in this group in its various forms -- Nom, roman script, and his English translation:

Ho Xuan Huong -- her given name means "Spring Essence" -- was born around 1775 in a period of civil war, foreign invasion, and social disintegration. Her fame in Vietnam as a poet and cultural figure continues to this day. A concubine, although a high-ranking one -- one of her cousins became Emperor -- she followed Chinese classical styles in her poetry, but preferred to write in nom, the language of ordinary Vietnamese. And while her prosody followed traditional forms, her poems were anything but conventional, often operating as complete double entendres, and sometimes suggesting tonal echoes of subversively risque. And if this were not enough to incur disfavor in a time when impropriety was punished by the sword, she wrote poems that ridiculed the authority of the decaying Buddhist church, the feudal state, and Confucian society. Yet, because of her stunning poetic cleverness and the sense of spiritual hunger that one can see in poems like "Autumn Landscape," her poems survived, copied by hand for almost 100 years before they finally saw a woodblock printing in 1906.

Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong is the first printing of her collected poetry in any Western language. Indeed, it is the first time that her poems have been actually printed in the nom she wrote in, rather than passed on by hand or copied in limited woodblock editions. One thousand years of nom writing -- in literature, law, religion, government, medicine, and philosophy -- are currently unreachable to all but a handful of Vietnamese scholars who can still read this ideographic writing system that began its slow surrender to Western-style, roman script towards the end of the 17 th century. Spring Essence is a first step, through computer analysis, towards recovering this long literary tradition.

Autumn Landscape

Drop by drop rain slaps the banana leaves.
Praise whoever sketched this desolate scene:
the lush, dark canopies of the gnarled trees,
the long river, sliding smooth and white.
I lift my wine flask, drunk with rivers and hills.
My backpack, breathing moonlight, sags with poems.
Look, and love everyone.
Whoever sees this landscape is stunned.

The following poem is drawn from Mr. Balaban's collection of his own poems entitled Path, Crooked Path, John Balaban, 2005. Copper Canyon Press, in Port Townsend, Washington, will publish the book next spring, and the poems appear here with the permission of Mr. Balaban and Copper Canyon (http://www.coppercanyonpress.org).

Highway 61 Revisited

Summer was flooding the city highways
bathing sycamores below the savage tenements,
leafage flushed green, almost obscuring
the plastic grocery bags snagged in branch tops
flapping in the roadside wind, in the whine
of semis and buses and cars and vans
plastic shreds fluttering, prayer flags of the poor,
as rackety apartment ACs hummed an AUM chorus
in the June cement heat, and I sped by, heading out
once more for the heart of the heart of the country
rolling down Highway 61, heading West and South,
lighting out again, away from fanfare and drumbeats,
the couples holding hands in their slow motion leaps
from the skyscraper windows billowing smoke.

In midwestern farmlands rustling wheatcrowns,
spreading out with alfalfa and sorghum, sprouting corn,
I thought I was lost, in the crickets and songbirds,
but tire whine and bumper glare kept me on course
and when I picked up the soldier mugged in the bus station,
teeth kicked in, wallet taken, hitching back to base in Waco
to his tank repair unit readying for another Iraqi war
I knew I was on the right road, running like a lifeline
across the palm of America.

                                           In Texas, I heard voices.
In the dead-ugly creosote basin of Midland-Odessa
where--all across the hot mesquite horizon--oil jockeys
pumped crude from the sandy wastes, and a billboard
boasted "Home of President and Mrs. George W. Bush."
I had a powerful urge to pee and pulled off the highway.
Taking my whiz at an Exxon, then gassing up again,
I looked around when I heard a voice calling "Help me."
Calling softly, "can you help me?" I looked around
and saw an elderly man in a battered Honda, door open,
big shoes planted on the greasy cement, looking at me.
"What do you need?" I asked, thinking maybe a few bucks,
but he wanted me to lift his legs into his little car.
Prosthetic legs, I could feel, heavy as cinder blocks.
"Where you headed?" I asked, as he turned the key,
but he just pointed his finger like a gun, said
"that way, down Highway 61."

I turned onto a less traveled blacktop running south
past volcanic peaks to Mexico and The Big Bend.
From my windshield to the horizon, dust-devils
swirled over the greasewood and yucca spikes,
whipping up little tornadoes of dust and grit
around the odd horse or pronghorns grazing with cattle
behind hundreds miles of barbed-wire fences--a dry land,
old haunt of raiding Apaches, Comanches, Pancho Villa.

But tonight is the summer solstice and I am with friends
in this high desert border town rumbled by freight trains.
Outside the moon has risen over the Sierra Madres,
shining on burros shuffling through willows, below cottonwoods
along the Rio Grande, glistening on the backs of thumb-size
toads in the stone pans where water seeps in the canyons,
shining on the humble folk wading into Texas,
shining on the Border Patrols, on the DEA blimp,
shining on the bright empty ribbon of Highway 61,
loud with strange cries echoing across America.

John Balaban is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, including four volumes that together have won The Academy of American Poets Lamont prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2003, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Mr. Balaban is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

October 24 - 30, 2005: A Haiku By Any Other Name....

Back in April, the town of Sylva observed its yearly "Greening Up the Mountains," a street fair to welcome in the spring. As part of its display, City Lights Bookstore, owned and operated by my friend Joyce Moore, wanted to make poetry the centerpiece. We discussed several ideas to encourage folks to experience writing a poem. Magnetic poetry for passers-by to play around with? Some sort of springboard for poets of all ages to dive off of and see what they could find? We settled on a haiku writing "hook." The prize for best poem in each age group would be a poem written by me in response to the winning entries.

We knew we shouldn't ruin the spontaneity of the event by having each person sit down to study the guidelines for haiku -- the linear pattern of five, then seven, then five syllables, for example -- before they began. This was supposed to be a street fair, after all, not a classroom. We simply suggested that passers-by write three-line poems about one thing or another, seasonal or not. So all day long folks stopped by the City Lights display and tried their hand at writing these approximations of haiku and later Joyce and I read them with a great deal of pleasure.

Below are the winning poems, with my poems talking back to them. I didn't attempt a haiku in response. I wanted to let my enjoyment of the poems spill over whichever way it wanted.

(Victoria Kelly, Courtney Clapper, and Megan Nicholson are students in western North Carolina. Ann Woodford is a Chapel Hill resident who has a cabin in Robbinsville.)

Sponteneity and attention to a particular image or moment are among the hallmarks of haiku, and therefore, the form is one that works well as an introduction to poetry for just about anybody. The traditional Japanese haiku is a form well worth studying, and I encourage everyone who is interested in poetry to become familiar with haiku's history.

The best place to begin is by visiting the excellent website maintained by the North Carolina Haiku Society: http://nc-haiku.org/. There you will find a discussion of haiku's history and its form, as well contemporary innovations on it. You'll find suggestions for using haiku in the classroom. And you'll find examples of haiku by a number of fine poets, including Lenard Moore, who has been president of the Society for several years and has won haiku awards both here in the U.S. and in Japan. These are haiku by a master of the form! -- Kathryn Stripling Byer

Age Twelve and Under (tie)

By Victoria Ashley Kelly:

I love ice-cream so
much I made a haiku so
sweet about it

KSB's response:

Ice Cream

Ice cream waits
in the cone
for a haiku to eat it

the taste oh
so cold on the tip
of the tongue

as if teetering there
on the edge
of all gone,

and so sweet
it tastes
just like a poem

By Courtney Clapper:

Old lazy kitty
sleeps on a red sofa
a black tired cat

KSB's response:

Black Cat

Too lazy to bring any
bad luck,
too much trouble
roaming around
spooking people
who ought to know better,
the cat on the red sofa's
dreaming
a soft slinky
sliding down into
a silky red
silence, this sleepy
cat curled
on the sofa
like nobody's business.

Age 13 to 20:

By Megan Nicholson:

The woman is old
and she is very very cold
inside and outside

KSB's response:

Old

So young to be
able to feel
old, the cold
of age creeping up
year by year,
doorstep
by doorstep,
the very,
very
almost unbearable
feeling of losing
the warmth
day by
day
till her cold
fingers
no longer know
how it feels
to dig deep into
warm garden soil.

Age 21 and over:

By Ann Woodward:

the misty dawn glow
     through barely budding branches
          young squirrels scramble

KSB's response:

Squirrels

Never still
once the light
wakens them
they leap
and tumble
and sneak
down the trunk
of the oaktree to
study the birdfeeder
I've filled before
breakfast. I know
they'll figure out
how to leap up
on the tray,
scrambling,
scattering sunflower
seed, making
pigs of themselves
with their tails curled
like question marks,
taunting me,
how did
they leap
that far,
that fast,
how did they
get to be
that smart?

Trick or Treat!

Several years ago, when my daughter was in middle school, I was working on her Halloween costume, a long blue silky princess dress, and in the course of that work, I was thinking about writing a sestina, a form in which six words are repeated in a pre-arranged pattern as end words for each line in the six stanzas. I asked her to pick six "magic" words for me, which she did. Silk, copper (the name of her dog), rose, pumpkin, lost, and hem. The last word must have come to her as she watched me hemming her princess dress. The poem seemed to spin right out like magic itself.

Years later, when our daughter was in college, I remembered the Halloween poem I had written for her and decided to write another, as Halloween approached, using the same end words. I was never satisfied with the poem, though there were parts of it that pleased me. I pulled it out again just a few months ago and decided to scrap the sestina form and use the images and magic words in a free verse form. The conclusion is borrowed from my friend George Ella Lyon, who was in a poetry circle I participated in last year. The "bright face of forever" seemed to capture so intensely the face of the full moon on All Hallows Eve that I couldn't resist stealing it! - Kathryn Stripling Byer

Halloween

for Cory, who chose this sestina's magic words

A princess, she likes the way silk
sounds, how smooth on her rose
colored tongue, yet thrilling as copper
coins flipped. Heads or tails. Lost
or found. Daughter, daughter, the pumpkin
grins under the full moon, the hem

of your dress sweeps the hem
of the black curtain falling like silk
over everything, changing the pumpkin
you carved to look fierce to a lost
clown who sits on the sidewalk and begs for a copper
coin, too scared to tell how he rose

from the dead, wearing one perfect rose
in his buttonhole, no longer pumpkin
but suave as the sibilance silk
makes, a gentleman tossing a copper
coin into a beggar's cup, wafting cologne from the hem
of his handkerchief. Everyone knows it's a lost

art, our show of pretending we've lost
nothing lasting to time, as if copper
coins aren't squandered, as if a little girl's silk
dress will never go back to its rose-
wood and mothballs a muddy mess, hems
falling down. If I asked him, the pumpkin

would say he knows nothing of this. Let us pumpkins
be pumpkins, he'd say. Let all little girls lost
in their masquerade be found alive by a copper
who talks tough but scrubs muddy hems
for a princess who cries. Let him pocket her rose-
colored glasses and carry her home. "Silk,"

she whispers, but she wants to say something silk
only means the beginning of. Ask any pumpkin
what happens next. Princess grows up and has lost
all the petals she saved from her ring-around-rose
garden. Time's trick. Its treat? Kiss the hem
of her skirt: how it carries the faint taste of copper,

the fragrance of rose-water! Under the copper
moon, she lifts the hem of her silk skirt and bows to the pumpkin,
a real princess lost in the moment, her brief kingdom.

Halloween Again

and time slides like silk
against silk.
Easy to get lost
in letting go
this time of year.
Lost letters.
Lost memories.
Lost copper
earrings a friend
gave me.
Split Silk,
I haven't forgotten
the name
of that church
on the far side
of home,
how it rose
from the roadside,
a hymn to the landscape
I passed through
where pumpkins
lay stacked beside fields
like the kindling
my ancestors gathered
for bonfires
on All Hallows Eve
when the veil
between seen
and unseen trembles
sheer as silk
through which
we might, if
we come close
enough, see
the other side
waiting for us
as a mirror waits
to be filled
with the bright
face of forever.