Poet of the Week Archive: December, 2005 Part I

November 28 - December 4, 2005: doris davenport and Darnell Arnoult

Sadly enough, we often lose some of our best NC poets to other states. Whether through marriage or jobs, these poets leave us, but not in spirit. Most of them still consider themselves North Carolina writers. Such it is with two "ex-pats" who have published books with LSU Press within months of each other, doris davenport and Darnell Arnoult. Both have been good friends of mine for years, and I am pleased to be able to feature their work this week. These books bring fresh voices to the Southern/Appalachian renaissance already making such an impact on contemporary poetry. We hear much about novels by Appalachian writers -- Lee Smith, Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, Charles Frazier -- but an amazing amount of poetic talent is also bubbling up. LSU Press is already tapping some of it. Davenport's and Arnoult's books each adds a distinctive voice to that group. -- K.S.B.

madness like morning glories: poems, by doris davenport
Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005

I met doris davenport shortly after she received a North Carolina Artists Fellowship back in the '90s. As part of the Western Carolina University Writers Series that I was then directing, she spent two days on campus visiting classes and giving a standing-room-only reading. She wowed the audience and consequently has been invited back to read and do workshops with some of our public-school students over the years. She now lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she has taught at Stillman College. Her new collection of poetry, madness like morning glories, brings a strong new African-American voice to the canon of Southern literature. No one can spin a story quite like doris. A performance poet par excellence, she brings her strength, beauty, and morning-glory humor to every reading she gives. Most recently her work has appeared in Appalachian Heritage -- poems so engaging that I read them to my doctor at my last physical! (I had brought the journal with me for company while I waited.) How often can you say that about a poet's work? Any Southern writer who can take the hoary old subject of hog killing, for example, and make it funny and poignant is worthy of respect and enjoyment. (And in case you're wondering, my doctor loved the poems.) As a poet, doris gathers in the voices of her African-American community and makes them resonate in our imaginations. -- K.S.B.

Now, I know you remember so and so

meaning somebody who rode through town once, ten
years ago or who lived and died before your birth. They
expect you to remember, to know, just like your mind is
their mind and if you don't, they might take it personal.
Get so mad at you, they can't get on with the story.

Not like Fannie Mae. She will get all into a story and
catch herself: "But that was before you
were born." Great Aunt Fannie Mae will pause, grin for emphasis
and say, "And I just wish you
coulda seen it!

not me.
When i get through
when i am done
won't be no wishing
you could see.

You gone see.

1002 Desota Drive, Newtown

at the top of one hill and the bottom of
another street unpaved dusty red
dogwood trees, a big flower garden in front

train tracks, across
a deep grassy ditch. At train time, when Momma
went from Gainesville to Cornelia
Grandpa & Granny & Daddy stood
in the backyard waving at us
waving back on the train (Grandpa waved a red bandanna)

sometimes i stand there with them
wave at Momma and my
sisters heading north
somebody still

stands there waving
           &
           waiting

Miss Robbie Mae Franklin
(February 13, 1932 - April 7, 2003)

You cannot get too familiar with some people.
If you play with a puppy, it will lick you in the face.
And I made sure these little people understoodthat
about me. My students were all
afraid of me - as they should have been.
A few of them hated me, or thought they did.
As an alumnus of South Carolina State, I had high,high
standards to uphold; my students as well.
              They cringed, when they came to
me for high school English and
French. Oh, I heard their little stories; I
laughed in their faces. A few of them truly
fascinated me. Uh huh. They really did.
              Indeed, I had high standards! Appearance to
deportment, it was imperative that I
did and I taught them by
precept and by example, the way I carried
myself and dressed (because all of
my sorors and I were known for looking good.
Uhhh huh, we really were). Unlike some others,
I socialized only with those in my class, not with
those for whom I wished to set an example.
Familiarity breeds contempt, so I had my
Chivas Regal with Sara Mae or another peer; I
never socialized with my children. But I taught.
Oh yes, I taught, and I'd tell them,
"You're gone remember
Robbie M. Franklin." And right now,
most of them on the hill
would thank me for it.

Cycles

Regulated by the whistle
blowing time at the veneer plant
cycles of sunsets blown on a whistle
the mountains
in endless seasons, spring to
fall blown each year
winter encircling the hill in ice
regular concentric circles of
irregular spiral lives

doris davenport has a Ph.D. (African American Literature) from the University of Southern California. She has taught at a number of colleges and universities from New Haven to Los Angeles, Oklahoma to Ohio. She has done more than 100 poetry performances and workshops and published book reviews, articles, essays, and five books of poetry. The most recent is madness like morning glories, from which these poems are drawn.

Meanwhile she has also worked to end all the "isms" (racism, sexism, stupidism, heterosexism) and to inject joy, laughter, and passion into daily life. This approach to life was inspired by growing up among the hills and mountains (and kinfolk) of northeast Georgia.

doris davenport is available for workshops, lectures, and performances. She can be reached at expertise@earthlink.net.

What Travels with Us: Poems , by Darnell Arnoult
Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005

I met Darnell Arnoult through my good friend Isabel Zuber, who told me how much she liked the poems Darnell was writing then. How many years ago was that? I can't begin to count them. Like doris's poems, Darnell's capture the voices of a particular place with compassion and humor, with nary a shred of pretension or condescension. Reading her first book of poems, What Travels With Us, is a journey through one story after another. Like doris, she brings a fresh new voice to our regional literature. She has the enviable ability to give both a sense of the communal and the personal. Even as she is presenting a believable and moving picture of her community, she is also giving these characters their own unique story to tell. Add to that her own story, as she tells it in some of the work gathered in this book, and you have a densely layered collection of poems whose language rises and falls with the cadence of real voices. There are stories both funny and poignant, and there are songs of various kinds (love songs, laments, and hymns); and then, there are poems that examine the nature of kinship and what endures.

The voices in Darnell's work are from a community that is slowly losing its sense of itself, its stories, its center, and in this it is reminiscent of other Appalachian and Southern stories -- Lee Smith's novel Oral History, for example. At the center of this "place" is the poet's eye, sharp and discerning yet loving, that is able to render these people's lives with humor and generosity.

Much of this book's material risks the cliché, the sentimental, as so much of mountain/mill life has been done to death, but out of that risk comes a lot of the book's effectiveness. The voice is so dead-on, so believable, that the tone is consequently neither patronizing nor pandering. -- K.S.B.

Outrageous Love

How long
did I wait for
him to come love me? Lord!
I was starving! But hard as his
heart was

it was
food to me. Why
I had to bite my way
to that poor blinded and bleeding
thing. A

demon
I was. Must have
smelled the blood. On some nights
between cold sheets and closed eyes I'd
feel the

dark soft
ringlets, as if
his head already lay
on that pillow there waiting for
my love

to touch.
I'd feel that man's
skin beneath my hands, his
curls sliding between my fingers.
My hands

traveling
his neck, his chest,
his belly. Trace and taste
sweet bites of ribs, of tender thigh,
morsel

of neck
meat. Must have cast
a mighty spell on him
gobbling him up like that in dreams.
He came

to me
on a Sunday.
The mountains moved closer.
I heard a whippoorwill at noon.
He knocked.

I knew
it was him and
there he stood. Said he was
eaten up by melancholy.
Eaten

by a
sorrow. Me on
his mind all the time. He
didn't show his heart to any
body.

Truly
I have married
meat and bread. As sure as
this banquet passes my lips, love
is food.

Immersion

While my trousers cling wet and heavy as past sins,
women in hats stand on the bank and pray.
Half-bodies of men in white shirts bob on the river.
Their glazed foreheads glisten in God's own sun.

Women in hats stand on the bank and pray,
singing in disjointed chorus, Praise Jesus. Hallelujah.
Their glazed foreheads glisten in God's own sun.
Heads fall back calling, God in Heaven cleanse this man.

Singing in disjointed chorus, Praise Jesus. Hallelujah.
Wash away his iniquity and cleanse him. Hallelujah.
Heads fall back calling, God in Heaven cleanse this man.
Icy fingers clamped over my face push me down into the depths.

Wash away his iniquity and cleanse him. Hallelujah.
Cleanse and sanctify, Jesus, in this holy water, God.
Icy fingers clamped over my face push me down into the depths.
They call on God and the river to wash me in the blood of the Lamb.

Cleanse and sanctify, Jesus, in this holy water, God.
Half-bodies of men in white shirts bob on the river.
They call on God and the river to wash me in the blood of the Lamb,
while my trousers cling wet and heavy as past sins.

Photograph in the Hall

Bill leans toward her, hand on the hood, loving her with his eyes.
The woman, head down and eyes up, leans back against the Buick's ribs.
I see this picture and want to be Mae at sixteen, about to be a bride.

They are sharing something private -- a joke, lust, full hearts, like minds --
not touching, yet only a hint of separation. They are savoring what is left of courtship.
I see this picture and want to be Aunt Mae at sixteen, about to be a bride.

Her hair is swept into soft round waves, a thick roll of dark hair pinned behind.
She looks up at Uncle Bill sheepishly, pleasure already on her lips
and Bill presses toward her, hand on his new Buick's hood, loving her with just his eyes.

Bill and Mae came to visit this evening. Out for a little Sunday ride.
Him with his hardening arteries and her straining against arthritis in her back and hips.
I see this picture and want to see Aunt Mae at sixteen, about to be a bride.

Bill saw her working a tobacco field and right there decided.
He offered her a new dress, but she chose the freedom of vows in her own old shift.
Bill leans toward her, hand on the Buick's hood, loving her eye to eye.

Today they move slow. Hold hands to hold up. Stop to rest. Hard to believe back when there was no rest to be had, he watched her old shift slide like water across her breasts and
hips and
             pool at her feet.
I want to be the young girl I never knew, sheepishly urgent. Ready to be a bride.
Her handsome man leaning toward her, hand on the hood, loving her with ready eyes.

Darnell Arnoult's first novel, Sufficient Grace, will be published by The Free Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in June 2006. Her short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in a number of journals. She worked for many years as an arts and education administrator for the Center for Documentary Studies, at Duke University, and received her master's degree in English and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. She has taught creative writing for the Duke Short Course Program and the Duke Writers Workshop. She married a Tennessee cowboy in 2000, and they now live on a small farm in Brush Creek, where Darnell is at work on her next novel. But she returns to North Carolina often to conduct readings and workshops. More information, including her tour schedule, is available on her web site: http://www.darnellarnoult.com.

December 5-11, 2005: Paul Aaron

The rewards of being poet laureate can sometimes be categorized as serendipity. That's how I would describe finding Paul Aaron. I had made a quick trip into Chapel Hill's Branch's Bookstore back in late May only to find it in a state of crisis, about to close. On the counter were flyers advertising a benefit reading, along with contact information. Naturally, I made use of the contact e-mail and that's how I met Paul. In the course of our e-mail conversations, he sent me a new poem he'd done, about Dulce, the chicken-sized dog. I was charmed, and I have remained so ever since by Paul's unique voice and personality, his energy, and his devotion to making poetry a part of our everyday lives. He is an activist for the literary arts, and for him, poetry is a way of expressing all the emotions and experiences in his life. I know that I will always find something surprisingly human when I read one of Paul's poems. I say surprising, because he comes to each poem with a fresh eye, seeing things that take the rest of us by surprise. Maybe that's what serendipity really means—the world opening up connections in ways that enrich our perspective on what we call reality. Paul Aaron wouldn't call this serendipity, though. Paul would call it poetry. –K.S.B.

The Cat-sized Dog

Dulce the cat-sized dog
rides around in a bicycle basket.
Rides in the car in a loving lap.
Sits on the sofa on a plumped up pillow
curled at the feet of a greeted guest,
met with a great big bark.

OK a little bark
with a half-sized howl.

Turning topsy-turvy hearts of all who meet you,
Sweet, sweet, sweet like your name,
Dulce, the chicken-box love dog,
you've got me wrapped around your little tail.
Turn me over like a capsized love boat
I'm full of little doggy love.

I Was Sweet, Struck Dumb Out

       The last time I played wiffle ball, I wanted a home run,
                                              and couldn't get one.

              The next morning, I called my girl.
                         Said I'd played ball with my friends,
                                   hit a triple, two doubles, a bunch of singles
                                                                   and struck out.

                     "No home runs," I shouted in mock anguish.
"I wanted a home run."

                     My sweetheart said,
                                      "home runs?"
                                             with a question mark in her voice.
           "You hit plenty of home runs.
Don't be greedy."

After the storm

It was a quiet storm
on a quiet North Carolina February day.
Saura, your eyes opened widely.
Our curtains shivered in the spirited wind.

Out the window flew my soul
with yours as
rain fell hard
from my eyelids.
It was all over
so suddenly.

It was then the tree limbs fell around us.
Earth split open its craggy domain.
Rocks falling, as from the sky
meant nothing to me
but a cover for your grave.

And there was nothing.
Birds and buzz saws were silent.
Car engines faded off into the distance.
A last whistle sounded from the train.
You will be with us no more.

The breasts that I loved to touch
are cold now,
a last lingering kiss on cold lips,
no longer a lover's thrill,
but "good-bye."

After the storm is over
there is a quiet blue
in the silent sky.
It tells us we no longer need to fight with
the wind and the rain.
Nature's bigger moment
has come upon us.

A Word Of Thanks

Each time I sit to eat, I picture
the earliest of times.
A cell finds another.
It grows and plants seeds.
I am her genes, his genes.
Generations later I sit.
I imagine my earliest originator
eating seeds of the earliest originators of corn.
Each species moves together through the years,
grain and human side by side, to plant each others progeny.
With humblest feelings, and the seed, I sit.
Thank god. Eat corn.

Paul Aaron has recently returned from a tour of New York and New England, where he was promoting his CD of songs and poems, "Love, Sex, Coffee and Politics," published by Saura Press. The CD, recorded with the poet Jaki Shelton Green and guitarist Matt Kalb, is based on the evenings of poetry, prose, and song that he regularly stages in Chapel Hill and Durham. In addition, Mr. Aaron has gained some prominence as a literary activist in the Triangle area. Over the last July 4 th weekend, he organized a festival of literature and music, "Independence Day for Independent Bookstores," celebrating independent bookstores.

Mr. Aaron's publications include the collection of short stories and poems, Bush Doubles Oil Price and Other Stories, Fact and Fiction (Chapel Hill: Saura Press), and the short story, "White Flower," published by the magazine Urban Hiker. His short story, "Catastrophizing," was performed by The Deep Dish Theater Company in 2003. See www.paulaaron.com for a selection of his writings on love, politics, life, and death, and the "poetry stories" he performs with the children's poetry group, "The Crumpetty Tree Irregulars."

Mr. Aaron lives in Hillsborough. He was married for twenty-six years to Saura Bartner, Master Teacher of the Alexander Technique, who is now deceased. He has three children and will be married next spring to Liz Gilson, who recently left a successful career in computer training to pursue a Ph.D. in Religious Studies.

December 12-18, 2005: Maureen Ryan Griffin

Maureen Ryan Griffin says that she has loved words ever since "The Cat in the Hat." In her coaching, her critiquing, and the workshops she gives through her business, Word Play, she demonstrates that love every day. But even more than words, she loves life, and she radiates that love for life both in her poetry and in her being. You can see it in the three poems that appear on this site – "Diamond," "The Thin Air of Our Intentions," and "Dear Vivé." In this last poem, especially, she presents that love in "this scatter of fragrant blossoms" – a metaphor for that intense love for life that overcomes our sadness, our fear of death. Her poems are touched with humor, with love for people and nature, with an understated passion that keeps them from becoming sentimental. She knows the hard things – see "The Thin Air of Our Intentions" – but she will not be defeated by them. In the work of Maureen Ryan Griffin, it may be autumn, but it is never winter. "This Scatter of Blossoms" – the title of her beautiful chapbook – is there to remind us to breathe, to be, to taste, to feel, to find. – Tony Abbott

Tony Abbott is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English Emeritus at Davidson College. He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Man Who(Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag Press, 2005) and of the Novello Festival Press Prize winning novel, Leaving Maggie Hope (2003).

Diamond

What if you lost your diamond in your laundry room, what if it were wrenched
from its setting when your ring caught on the lid of your washer? What if
you had a thing about laundry, you'd married a man with two kids, had two more
of your own, someone always wetting the bed
not to mention your mother who had what you would have to call a laundry
fetish, spending hours scrubbing socks on a washboard till her hands were rough
and red, sorting light greens, dark greens, bluish greens, greenish blues for godssake,
piles of laundry everywhere and it drove you crazy?

What if you'd spent hours looking through that last wash load even though you knew
it was in the dryer when the diamond went flying
because what would your hand have been doing by the washer
if you'd already taken the clothes out? You feel like a victim of some crime
who keeps repeating, I don't know, I can't remember, It all happened so fast.

What if you'd recently given your creative writing students your favorite haiku
you found in a book about how to keep order in your home –
My house has burned down/I now own a better view/of the rising moon –
and asked them to write a response?
Why does your family have so many clothes anyway? Why
can't a sweatshirt last more than one day, all those dribbles
of taco sauce, chocolate milk, mustard, it's enough to make you want to lie down and cry.

What if you keep finding poems you wish you'd written,
you've been muttering to e. e. cummings, who knows if the moon's NOT
a balloon because that simple poem of his you read when you were ten
floats back and back and back? What if you liked the light reflecting off your diamond
better than moonlight, what if you remember showing your husband
the most gorgeous moon you ever saw, brimming and tremulous
as a girl who's just been kissed by the boy she's secretly loved since second grade,
and how he'd responded, What's the big deal?
What if, when you'd told him about the diamond he'd said,
At least it's not a liquid asset and you were doubly depressed
because not only was this totally beside the point
but you could tell he genuinely thought
his saying this would make you feel better? And meanwhile

the laundry is piling up because he's too busy to take apart the washer
and you don't want to use it till you're sure
you won't be flushing the diamond
away with the scum. Every available container is overflowing; there'll only be more
dirty clothes tomorrow, this riptide
of laundry is pulling you under and you need
the baskets empty. You can't even laugh
when your stepson says, But if there wasn't any laundry
we'd all be dead.

What if this is as bad as you thought, this ungainly string of angst when what you wanted
was a perfectly
chiseled,
glittering
little poem? You've sifted
through the lint behind the washer and dryer, pulled dusty bottles
of ant spray and silver polish off the shelves,
you know this poem is only going to end up like all the others
lost between the covers of obscure literary journals
nobody reads. If you're lucky.

What if you never find that one-third carat of pure carbon,
when just a week ago your daughter
trailed her finger over it, snug in its band – the way
she runs her finger over dresser tops and bookcases, so pleased
to find dust there – and said, I'll get this diamond when you die, won't I?
I mean I don't want you to die or anything
but I will, won't I?

The Thin Air of Our Intentions

If my brother still remembers
having to bathe in the same washtub
with a bar of Lava that, rough
as it was, couldn't scrub away
the image of the furred bodies
Grandma's hands held underwater
one by one until air
no longer bubbled to the surface –
well, that's just how it is.

Life's cheap, cats keep
having litters, gardens teem
with growth. That same brother denies
he drowned Japanese beetles
by the dozens, plucking them
from Grandpa's roses, though I saw him
do it. I can't forget
the man I met on a beach who shared
his documentary on man's inhumanity
to fruit – footage of mouths
bearing down, knives cutting
into flesh, gas chambers
tinting innocent tomatoes
some approximation of red.

Ridiculous. We're none of us
vicious, are we? Just making room
to breathe the thin air
of our intention to live.
My Polish grandmother didn't mean
harm to anything – she was just
doing her job, the way she fed
wash through the wringer
of her new machine, whistling
a tuneless ditty. Safe in Garfield Heights
when Oswiecim became Auschwitz,
it was easy for her to choose
what was necessary
and what was not.

Dear Vivé

Autumn again. Walking Peppercorn Lane,
having just read your letter from Prague.
Yes, my stepson's still gone. I haven't stopped
worrying, but I'm learning to go on.
I lost my Swiss Army knife (the one
you and I used to cut our fruit and cheese
that day at Connemara). It disappeared
while I was camping. I hunted for it long
into the dark, again the next morning,
hating this need to have all I own
close around me. Thinking of you, your belongings
pared down to what fits in a backpack,
then of my stepson, moving from one place
to another with next to nothing, all he's ever had
lost or traded away. And how, even as I walk
this dirt lane answering your letter in my head,
I'm gathering – burgundy stars of sweet gum,
butter poplar, bright sourwood leaves,
a cluster of lavender aster. I picture you
drinking tea in Dobra Cajovna, struggling
through MacBeth in Czech, picking mushrooms
in a Bohemian forest. You write you've never
really left anything behind, your history
attached to you as stubbornly as barnacles to a boat.
Did I ever tell you about the book of Tao
I picked up in a Cincinnati bookstore?
Fifteen at the time, I devoured Lao Tse's words ~

Empty yourself of everything
Have much and be confused
No greater misfortune than wanting
something for oneself

                                       ~ all the while blissful
at possessing the words, the starkly beautiful
photographs, the ink-scrolled characters of Chinese.
Mottled red maple leaf, round oak gall, cone,
I picture your gloved hand (it's so cold there!)
clasping my letter, see our shared sky reflected
in this rut of rainwater. Too late in the year
for this scatter of fragrant blossoms, but it is here
and I find it - honeysuckle . . . breathe deep
into stamen, deep into is, into I am. Here, now
I put back one bittersweet leaf
for you, one pinecone for the boy I couldn't reach;
set one trumpet-shaped flower into the water
for what we don't leave behind.

Maureen Ryan Griffin has loved words since her "Cat in the Hat" days. An award-winning poet and nonfiction writer, she is the author of two collections of poetry, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water. Her commentaries can be heard from time to time on NPR station WFAE (90.7), and she was a contributor to the anthologies Hungry for Home (Novello Festival Press) and On Air: Essays from Charlotte's NPR Station, WFAE 90.7 (Main Street Rag Publishing). She teaches creative writing at both Queens University and Central Piedmont Community College, and offers writing workshops and classes, as well as individual coaching and critiquing, through her business, WordPlay. Her latest venture, a book entitled Spinning Words into Gold: A Practical Guide to the Craft of Writing, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing in March, 2006. Maureen lives in Charlotte with her husband, Richard, and their children, Dan and Amanda (when Amanda's on break from UNC - Chapel Hill, that is).

Click here for Part II of the December '05 Archive