Poet of the Week Archive: June, 2005

June 6 - 12, 2005: Michael Chitwood

I've been lucky enough to know Michael Chitwood and his poetry for nearly two decades. What he writes never fails to delight and instruct me.

Delight first, because that's what poems afford above all: concentrated verbal pleasure. Chitwood's free verse is tight and vivid. If I have students whose work is too prosy or abstract, I give them a copy of Salt Works or Whet orGospel Road Going or that masterpiece The Weave Room and say: Look how wonderfully sharp and specific these lines are, how nothing is wasted! His poems are also delightfully surprising, with satisfying leaps of imagery and audacious imagination. They are always accessible, the language of a man speaking to his fellow humans, who can enjoy his words without a fancy college degree. Finally, they delight because they are so Appalachian, so deeply rooted in that lofty place: we are both mountain natives, and so I'm going home when I read his lines. I get their wit and edge and ache.

It may sound strange to call his poems instructive, but they are in a number of ways. Chitwood is a connoisseur of quirky facts, especially natural or historical ones. From him I have learned about trebuchets and lard firkins, for example. His poems have also taught me through their larger groupings. I don't know another contemporary who is better at discovering a subject (the unionization of a cotton mill, the truth, old folks' whatnots, familiar adages) and developing it through a series of poems. And Michael Chitwood's poems have also taught me - by example, through their very existence - about the value of diligence and persistence. He is a hard-working and prolific writer, so if I ever feel like slacking off all I have to do is think, Mike's at his desk every day, working at writing, sending his words out into the world; I should be, too. His perseverance is truly inspiring. – Michael McFee

Michael McFee teaches creative writing and North Carolina literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of six books of poetry - most recentlyShinemaster (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006) - and the editor of two anthologies of poetry and fiction by North Carolina writers.

From Whence

Tonight, the moon is hauling bituminous,
two hundred cars.
When it hits the trestle you'll hear the deck timbers rattle.
Cinder chips spike the black roundabout.
This is the dead light, just bright enough
to make a shadow if you're out in the dark.
The moon has the throttle and the all clear.
The moon is on government business
and the rails are empty all the way up the valley.
This is light enough to read a short note by.
Tonight, the moon's got papers and two pushers.
It's highballing combustible rock to a fare-thee-well.
Head lamp rocking from the soft roadbed,
this is light with a load.
This is light there's no stopping.
This is dug up light, light from all the graves
when the graves give off light.
This is light with wheels.
Come shine, silver me a while.

Quarters, Dimes, Nickels

You think it's only money, this change
on the bottom of municipal pools,
this silver rain that spilled from towels
and the little mesh pockets inside swimsuits?
It works loose and fishtails to the concrete bottom.
At night the dead dive for it,
their long hair undulant as seaweed,
Washingtons, Roosevelts, Jeffersons,
the dead scour the bottom like headhunters
and then it's off to the drink machines,
the snack box that advises "Don't go around
hungry." The dead are starved,
staying under so long and the hard scissor kicks
really build an appetite and they can't forget
those crackers, those bright orange crackers
that are a color of nothing else in life or the afterlife,
the color of nothing else and the dead must have them.
Some nights it's like that – the dead ravenous,
the damp amoeba-blots of their soles on the concrete,
the smell of chlorine.

Born and raised in the hills of the Virginia Blue Ridge, Michael Chitwood is a freelance writer and a visiting lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A new book, From Whence, is slated for publication by Louisiana State University Press. Both these poems are drawn from that collection and are reproduced here with permission of Mr. Chitwood, who holds the copyright. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Field, The Georgia Review and numerous other publications. Ohio Review Books has published two books of his poetry: Salt Works(1992) and Whet (1995). His third book, The Weave Room (1998), was published by The University of Chicago Press as part of its Phoenix Poets series. Also in 1998 Down Home Press published his collection of essays, Hitting Below the Bible Belt. His most recent collection of poems, Gospel Road Going, was published in 2002 and was awarded the 2003 Roanoke-Chowan Prize for Poetry. Mr. Chitwood is a regular commentator for radio stations WUNC-FM, in Chapel Hill and WVTF-FM, in Roanoke, VA. His book reviews and articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines including the Greensboro News & Record, The Charlotte Observer, and the Raleigh News & Observer's magazine.

June 13-19, 2005: Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin & Susan Lefler

Sometimes a writing workshop rewards you beyond measure. So it was with a class at John C. Campbell Folk School, in Brasstown, several years ago. Among the participants were two poets I knew little about, Susan Lefler and Jeannette Cabninis-Brewin. Cracker-jack smart, I decided on the first day, and able to vocalize their reactions to the work the group presented. Over the course of a week, their own work began to speak, Jeannette's obviously the more assured and experienced; Susan's still a bit tentative but with the eagerness of the beginner breaking through in ways that hinted at what was to come. After the workshop, the two of them began an e-mail critiquing relationship that quickly became a real literary friendship. The results of that friendship can be seen in these poems. So can the results of a workshop whose energy still keeps stirring years later. Archie Ammons once said that a good poem has an inexhaustible source of liveliness at its heart. So does a good poetry workshop, if it has writers like Susan Lefler and Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin in attendance! -- Kathryn Stripling Byer

On Reading William Stafford the Morning After the Election

Sometimes I pick up this book and never
open it. Instead, I turn it over to be smiled on
by the square plain face of the old man.
It's all there: Kansas, and Quaker values.
He looks like a man who ate corn flakes
while reading Hesiod's Works and Days.
Who worked though the days:
digging ditches in prison where they sent him
for preferring peace, writing alone
in that early dark abandoned by the lazy.
He looks like my father would have looked
if he had had a kinder mother and a bluer, larger sky.
Sometimes I kiss his smooth, papery face.

But on this day the pages fall open and present
the work. Clean as wooden boxes with corners
seamlessly mitered, fine-sanded to silk. One after another
I open the soundless lids that never stick or creak,
that close with a satisfying Click,
just as Yeats instructed us they should.
Here's one that tells me how to go on.
Here's another that tells me why. And, inside
this one, a hidden message about grief:
His, mine. Somehow he knew. Life is long,
he says. And it doesn't get easier. Nor is it possible
for life to be any more beautiful than it already is.
Just keep on following that thread.

I follow it outside to the garden
in the bottomland beside the plum trees.
In detail, by ideal light, my country lies
revealed to me there: ringed around by
mountains I possess the way a lover
possesses the illicit object of her desire.
They may be bound with paper chains to others
but with me they make their marriage
day by day, over and over. In the act of looking up
I'm lifted to their summits, which are in truth
purple, majestic. The Raven comes
to look down his nose at me. Hoooo, YEAH! he yells,
making mock of my self-important miseries.

In a few days, hard frost will wither
the exuberance of these flooding of vines,
the nasturtiums that spread out over the spent
hills and rows, and splash up over empty
bean-trellises. And the little trees
where late-ripening peppers dangle
red, gold and green. Even then
these oaks will bend in over the clearing,
deepening in their russet convictions.
Even then, the frost-hardy bitter greens –
mustard, collard, arugula, Russian kale –
will stand up to their burden of ice crystals,
will offer themselves to sustain us.

These things are not symbolic.
It's the reality of them that comforts.
Now I understand the land is what we have left
when our notions of nationhood vanish.
It runs on, from under my feet here,
under cities and under sea, fruitful for those
who remain faithful to it. Stafford reminds me
"All over the world, in every country
there are people who never become killers."
I am one of them. Praise God, I say aloud
to the coy butternut squash reclining
in their rumpled bed of lacy green. Hoooo, YEAH!
cries a voice from out of the depth of the sky.

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin lives in Cullowhee. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as The Atlanta Review andAppalachian Heritage and a chapbook is forthcoming.

The Photographer at Cataloochee Waiting for Elk

He drives across the mountain eager for light.
Late afternoon stirs every leaf to gold, Palmer Creek
sings arias and crickets answer back.
Somewhere the elk brace for head-on clashes,
bearing witness to the aristocracy of horns.

He kneels by a flash of red and aims his macro lens
where ground thyme crowds beneath one minaret
mushroom. The old frame church across the road
nestles in its fold of hills, no congregation
but the sleepy birds awaiting vespers.

The triple sycamore stands guard
as seven wild turkeys rustle through dead leaves
to the road. The tripod looms on gangly limbs,
capturing a universe of moss and leaf, elk step
from the wings like shadows. The shutter clicks
the heartbeat of the trees, the chromatic
ripening of leaves.

Easter Monday

It took courage to taste that black jelly bean,
but she did. At seven she's learned to risk.
And then she told her dad: they taste nice,
but in a dreary, homeless sort of way.

Easter Monday, the day after the empty
tomb, a dreary, homeless
sort of day, rain driven slantwise
by the wind and birds tuckered out

from all those Easter songs; a day of leftover
lamb and questionable eggs. You wonder
after two thousand years what it was
they heard. The world remains a dreary

homeless sort of place, Easter hope
silent as dead lilies, the message of the one
who left the tomb, abandoned
like so many scattered bones.

Susan Lefler lives in Brevard. Her poetry has appeared inAsheville 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.

June 20-26, 2005: John York

I like to think of John York as "family," in the way that writers sometimes feel about those whose perspective and use of language seem akin to their own. Having known John for longer than I can begin to remember, I know how tenacious he has been in the development of his craft. Here is a Southern voice that is rich and compelling, humorous and humane, generous and gentle without losing any poetic muscle. I have admired John's poetry for years and his work richly deserves a wider audience. No longer "promising," it has arrived in all its down-home glory. John has worked hard as both a high-school teacher and a poet for a good while, and his integrity shows forth in his poems: there is nothing stinting in his presentation of his world. The scents, the sights, the tactile details all shine through with a winning and memorable style and voice. The best compliment I can give? That I wish I'd written these poems! – Kathryn Stripling Byer

June

One morning, I walked down
the ditch between young corn and shining gravel,
cool white sand

lovely to my uncallused feet.
I shuffled toward the giant trees hanging
over the road,

walked right into a shower of music,
as strange as the melodies picked up by radio
telescopes--music from the stars.

I couldn't see any aliens,
but I knew their hymn--how wide the sky
was my rough translation,

or maybe the visitors
were merely chirping, laughing at a dirty
blond boy: a wingless creature,

how slowly and quietly he moves.
I could tell they were the true rulers of the universe,
making radiant the worm,

the grasshopper, the morning glory –
the singers' babel a blessing,
telling everything to grow.

Shining Wind, Stone, and Tree

At dusk the air turns to blue marble,
and wind sends dark limbs waving,
waving, growing into the obsidian night,
studded here and there
by streetlights, apartment window lamps.
Walking by the high school, I stop to look
at a courtyard, a squared aquamarine,
brightly lit but blurry in wind:
in the center grow two dogwoods, sea anemones
straining the air through their blossoms.

All through the school year I've looked out
my windows, whenever students' heads
bowed to a story and words started to blur:
I've watched these trees, their leaves
slowly burning, crisping; limbs veining
gray walls; then thawing, collecting light.

I've told my students, Build your minds,
but follow your hearts forever; I mean, look
at this courtyard. The walls are like the things
you learn, the dogwoods are like your dreams.

I tell them whether they listen or not,
since the wind twirls parking lot trash
and rubs markers and cornerstones.
Since blossoms scatter from tossing limbs.
Since the wind turns on me, leaves me
praying that I'm polished as I'm flaked away.

John Thomas York was born in Winston-Salem in 1953. He grew up on a farm in Yadkin County, in northwestern North Carolina. He has degrees from Wake Forest, Duke, and UNC-Greensboro and has taught in the public schools for twenty-seven years. In 2003, the North Carolina English Teachers Association (NCETA) named him the state's Outstanding Teacher of the Year. "June" appeared in the spring, 2002 issue of Appalachian Journal. "Shining Wind, Stone and Tree" appeared in Mr. York's chapbook, Johnny's Cosmology(Winston-Salem, NC: The Hummingbird Press, 1994). Both are reproduced here with permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

June 27-July 4, 2005: Dannye Romine Powell

"Dannye," I say, "you've got the most wonderful quirky edge to your poetry - like no other - and at the same time so human and immediate." I've been telling her this since the 1970s, all the years that Dannye and I have been in a poetry work group together. The original cast consisted of Harriet Doar, Dannye, and Susan Ludvigson. I joined soon after, as did Judy Goldman and Lucinda Grey. After Judy dropped out to concentrate on novels, we were supplemented by Mary Hunter Daly and Dede Wilson. So now we are six. Six who have enriched one another's work by our sternly passionate criticism. I think I speak for all in saying this give-and-take has also been a wonderful self-learning process. "Now, Julie," Dannye says, underlining my poem in her on-the-target way.
--Julie Suk

Julie Suk is the author of The Darkness Takes Aim and two other collections of poetry: Heartwood and The Angel of Obsession. She lives in Charlotte. Her work was featured as one of the "Notable Books by North Carolina Writers" on the North Carolina Arts Council's web site in May, 2005.

It Is Said that Wigmakers

simply by the sense of smell
can tell whether the hair
is from combings
or has been cut
from the living.
What about this tendril
I clipped from your head
moments after you died
because I could not leave
all of you there
on the table
under the strange light
because I could not leave
all of you there.

The Avalanche
He braked the old green Chevy
         on the side of a mountain
              somewhere out west

and bet my mother he could
            start a serious avalanche
                 by kicking a single rock into another

no she said no please don't Dan
           please don't start an avalanche
                please and in the back seat I

an only child trapped
            with a pile of Archie and Veronicas
                watched my mother's chin crumple

while out the window my father hunted
           the sun-crazed slope for that one rock
                  that would knock our whole world loose

All I Know for Certain

After the phone call      my father and I drove
morning and night      we knocked and knocked
on the hard loved door      you answered
in your soft brown voice      your skirt drifting
into drowsy folds      you did not cry
I studied your skirt      for traces of sorrow
studied your face      in this fire-lit room
where your mother lay cold      arms folded
I heard you say      I could weep buckets
but it wouldn't bring her back      I couldn't fathom
how you stayed the flood      until the morning you died
and I folded your arms      studied my own face
stopped knocking at last      on the hard loved door

Dannye Romine Powell is the author of two collections of poetry, At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home (1994) and The Ecstasy of Regret (2002), both published by the University of Arkansas Press. She has won fellowships in poetry from the NEA and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Field, Beloitand Praire Schooner. The Ecstasy of Regret was a finalist for the Southeastern Booksellers Award, and Andrew Hudgins chose it as winner of the Brockman Campbell Award. She is also the author of Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1994). She is a local news columnist for The Charlotte Observer. "Is Said that Wigmakers" appeared in the spring, 2004 Bellevue Literary Journal. "The Avalanche" appeared in the spring, 2005Ploughshares. All three poems are reproduced here with permission of Ms. Powell, who holds the copyright.