Poet of the Week Archive: June, 2006

May 29 - June 4, 2006: Writers' Group of the Triad

Judith Hill, a Greensboro writer and the founder/director of the Wildacres writers' workshops, started the Writers' Group of the Triad in 1990. The Writers' Group (also known by its initials, WGOT) is an umbrella nonprofit organization for area writers of various genres who meet monthly or bimonthly in subgroups. Members share expertise and information, offer critiquing to their peers, and provide encouragement, The organization, which currently has nearly a hundred members, also serves the larger community. Members are called upon to conduct workshops, judge writing competitions, edit publications, and organize special events. And the membership itself sponsors many such events. Last year's agenda included either workshops or guest speakers in the following areas: creative writing, book marketing, publishing, public speaking, and copyright law.

The poetry group is one of the subgroups of WGOT. It has operated continuously since its inception in 1990, and is currently going strong. In the first year of its existence, it published The Voice Within, a small collection of member poetry, produced by desktop publishing and hand-bound by group members. More recently, in 2003, WGOT published Wordworks, a 350-page anthology of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Two years ago, the poetry group undertook a more active role in the community, forming a liaison with the Greensboro Public Library and working with the organizers of Poetry GSO, Greensboro's month-long celebration of National Poetry Month in April. "Poetry, Jazz and Java" began as a one-time event at a local coffee house in 2004 to build public interest in a reading two days later at the Carolina Theater by Billy Collins, then U.S. Poet Laureate.

In 2005, through the efforts of WGOT's poetry group members, "Poetry, Jazz and Java" became the title of a series of poetry readings: seven during National Poetry Month and two others during the fall/winter. The series has united our area poets like nothing before. As part of their goals, the WGOT poets seek to bring together WGOT members, faculty and student poets from the various colleges and universities, and the many poets we have in the community at large. The first reading of 2006 took place at one of the local Starbucks on February 13th, the eve of Valentine's Day, to celebrate love. This was the first but perhaps not the last theme-oriented reading. Eight more Poetry, Jazz and Java events took place last month. Others will be scheduled in the fall.

The Writers' Group of the Triad, and its poetry division, welcome new and interested members, regardless of credentials, experience, or publications. For information click here: www.triadwriters.org - Catherine Ashley-Nelson

Catherine Ashley-Nelson, retired from the English Department of NC A& T State University, has been a member of the Writers' Group of the Triad since 1990.

Sullivan's Island Girls at Thirteen
       --Caren Masem

When summer began
our feet burned
on the hot gravel
of the beach road
leading to the dunes.
Even hotter the hills
rose in the oven
of a coastal summer.
Salt almost grainy
lingered in the damp air
chafing child-chubby thighs.
As we leaped across gullies
seagulls sang to us.
We danced across the sand,
holding hands, pulling one another
into the next season
of the year, of our lives.
By autumn our souls toughened.

Caren Masem lived in various places in the United States before settling in Greensboro four years ago. She has taught for thirty years, including a four-year stint at Iowa State University. Her poetry has been published in several magazines for Jewish women, and she has read her poetry in coffee houses and bookstores.

The Junkman
       --Larry Webb

A hot summer afternoon in the 1950's:

I sit idly swinging on my grandparents' front porch in Louisville, Kentucky,
Treasure Island, for the moment, indifferently set aside.
A junk dealer's wagon approaches at a listless cadence,
his weary horse a scrap itself -
a remnant of the past emerging, at this naptime hour,
while my grandparents, inside the house,
lie peacefully sleeping to the soft utterance of clocks.

The junkman stops:
a black man nearly old enough for slavery to be a first-hand memory.
He looks at me with rheumy eyes, his sunken mouth open in the heat
to draw, with labored weariness, what shallow breath
his slim, enfeebled body needs.
We exchange a fleeting look across fifty feet
and nearly twice that many years
and he seems about to smile or speak, but does neither.

Turning away, he makes a soft clicking sound
and his horse moves on, with a flick of its tail -
down the street, beyond my narrow field of vision
and only this instant circling back into memory.

Larry Webb, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, served in the U.S. Army from 1968-1971 before attending the University of Miami in Ohio, where he earned a B.S. degree in education. He has lived in Greensboro since 1991 and works in the insurance business. He notes that the insurance field has yielded only two significant writers, Kafka and Wallace Stevens. But, he says, he is "encouraged in his writing by the conviction that the law of averages says we are long overdue to produce a third."

Connie Ralston has served as facilitator for The Writers' Group of the Triad's poetry group for the past several years. Her poetry has been published in GW, Chiron Review, and Poet magazine as well as in A Turn in Time and Wordworks. She has won several prizes in various poetry contests such as the fifth Iva Mary Williams Inspirational Poetry (first place) and Chiron Review(third place). She is a former assistant editor of Our State magazine and is currently working as a writer and editor in the furniture industry.

Wind Spirit
          --Fran Ostasiewski

A feathered symphony floats.
The day begins. A warm morning
breeze holds clouds aloft,
shapes them into childhood
symbols, shakes loose, gently
lowers fragrant cherry blossoms.
Across the road a gust ripples
the grass and tousles a horse's mane.

The wind brushed earth's face
long before this moment, a mere
instant in wind's eternity.
All it brings, all it caresses,
comes before and after I breathe.

Fran Ostasiewski is the organizer of Greensboro's Poetry, Jazz and Java series. He serves on the committee with the Central Library in coordinating various poetry events. He is also treasurer of The Writers' Group of The Triad. As a poet, he has a special interest in haiku. His haiku have appeared in two anthologies celebrating the form: Walking the Same Path and Rose Haiku for Flower Lovers and Gardeners. His poetry has also appeared in The Writers' Group of the Triad's multi-genre anthology, Wordworks (2003), where "Wind Spirit" first appeared.

Yadkin County Thanksgiving
            --Kelli Rush

I claim this craze
of guinea hens
and cousins,
of floral aunts
with casseroles
and cackles
loud as legend,
of uncles skinning squirrels
and doling out the tails
to squirming boys and girls
with dirty hands.

This was my day
of hay on high
and hurl your body
from the top,
of roll and stop,
nose to nose with cow.
Lofty day--
of wrapped
in flap
of elder arm,
of warm around,
of my, my,
of turkey, turnip,
crust of pie,
slop trough,
rough ride,
hide inside magnolia-‹
slouchy fort
from which to plot
assault
on chicken coop-‹
and stoop and rusty nail
and pocket that
and sock that
fist into a bin
of grain.

Any other day
I was all Schwinn and suburb.
This, however, is my blurb,
my footnote.
This is I,
in pig sty.
On pasture lane.
With saggy hound.
The is be am.
All bona
and all fide
as the fat, pink mole
at my old aunt's eye.

Kelli Rush is a copy editor at Pace Communications, where she is assigned to Hemispheres magazine. She has been interested in writing since she was a teenager and has published poems in small magazines. She likes the precision that poetry requires and loves to find the perfect word. Recently she has been reading the works of Sylvia Plath and a contemporary poet from Idaho named Catherine Wagner. She enjoys the freshness of their language.

Catherine Ashley-Nelson, retired from the English Department of NC A& T State University, has been a member of the Writers' Group of the Triad since 1990. She has edited or co-edited anthologies for WGOT as well as the Greensboro Group. Her poetry has appeared in Blue Pitcher, Bay Leaves, and the following regional anthologies: Edge of Our World, A Turn in Time: Piedmont Writers at the Millennium, and Wordworks. She assists in setting up Greensboro's Poetry, Jazz and Java series.

Visiting Pinewood Cemetery
            --Janice L. Sullivan

After hurricane Floyd shook
North Carolina like a cougar
slings it prey, I drove east
fearing mother's newly buried casket

was floating in the Tar River.
At the cemetery, I sloshed
through sand and murky water,
read family markers: Hardee, Tripp,

Boyd, Wilkerson, and Clark.
Nearby, a live oak housed
a colony of lampblack crows.
Their loud cawing scratched

the calm September morning.
A bronze marker, uprooted
leaned against an oak, a stair step.
In the middle of the cemetery,

remnants of magnolia silk flowers
lay at the foot of my parents' graves.
I called their names. For a moment,
they were with me in the graveyard.

Janice L. Sullivan is president of the Poetry Council of North Carolina and a member of the North Carolina Poetry Society. She is an annual participant in the Wildacres Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared in several North Carolina journals and anthologies: Bay Leaves, NCPS Award Winning Poems, Flying Machines: International Icarus, Pembroke Magazine and A Turn in Time: Piedmont Writers at the Millennium. Two poems will soon appear in GTCC's new literary journal, Write Mind.

David Mahood has been writing consistently for ten years. His published work reflects a range of interest from environmental issues and his business, Olive Designs, to more intimate writing in poems, which have been published in Lone Wolf Review, Writer's Cramp, Geneseo Bicentennial Celebration and Fifth Street Review. Splitting time between Massachusetts and North Carolina, he can be found in traffic on I-95 north or south. He is also a proud father of two boys and Maryann's permanent partner.

Only the Wind
             -- adrian vyner-brooks

I felt cool fingers
glide up my back
          and rivers of pleasure

a healing touch
          released my neck

a breath's distant song
          opened my desire

turning to see you
there was only the wind
and the space
          where you might have been

Adrian Vyner-Brooks is a native of Liverpool, England who came to the U.S. in 1980. He studied engineering at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, but has developed an interest in poetry. He is one of the newer members in the Poetry Group and claims to have panic attacks before meetings. His modesty aside, Adrian has such a beautiful reading voice that everyone in the poetry group wants him to read their poetry as well as his own.

Aphrodite
(Written about 8 years ago)
           --N.K. Origer

She is standing
in front of a blue sky,
blue sea, and dressed
the way she is,
the being that she is,
it is hard to say
where the sea ends
the sky ends
and all of her
ends.

There are stars
in the fathoms above us
they punctuate realms
that are so far - they
are near: and the
white light of those
heavens surrounds us:
the beach is a brilliance
of crystal and calcium,
jewels at her feet,
on her skin,
in the air.

If she moves,
then I move
and I know
how it is
with the tides -
how they follow
their mistress - the moon
how the sky
wants to merge
with the sea
lose its reach
in her depths
lose forever
to touch her
if only to watch
her hair...
how it softens
the light
like raw silk.

N.K."Brinkley" Origer was born in New Jersey across the river from Manhattan. She moved to Florida with her family and went to graduate school in Tallahassee, where she studied with Van Brock, a poet and English professor while at the same time pursuing an MBA in Finance. Her poetry has been published in Appalachian State University's Cold Mountain Review. She currently works as an accountant and holds degrees in psychology and strategic management in addition to accounting.

Nerve
(6-18-04)
           --Coventry Kessler

The chemo blew the nerves out in my feet:
I tread on soles half-numbed with novocaine.
The surgeon's knife as well was not discrete,
Severing touch while it was cutting pain,
So that, with your gentle finger you can trace
The no-man's-land between alive and dead
Where power lines are down, the lights erased,
And strangers rouse neither hope nor dread.
Remaining properties now seem more dear
To guard against the dying of the light:
A hand's caress of cheek or heat of tears
More precious than the moon-blest, star-filled night.
And so I would not trade for treasures rare
The joys and pain to which the flesh is heir.

Coventry Kessler was born in Washington State but grew up in Indiana, California, and Oregon. She has spent most of her adult life in North Carolina. A former English teacher, she now designs online courses for UNC-G. In her words, she has "four grown sons, two middle-age lady cats, an unmentionable ex-husband, and more unfinished manuscripts than you can shake a stick at." She says "Nerve" is a Shakespearean sonnet written for a class exercise focused on touch.

June 5 - 11, 2006: Michael Beadle

There's Michael, and then there's Beadle.

If you read Michael Beadle's poems in a sheaf all at once, you may feel you've been ambushed. Going along through the lines of "The Folded Poem," "Morning at Fontana Lake," "March," and "A Kiss of Sorts," I admired the nuances of such phrases as "We think in whispers," "gauzy sun," "Each day is a diary / that tries to recall warm days." This poet, I thought, has an exquisite sense of evanescence, a discriminating eye for the fritillary brevity of fleeting experiences.

Oh, I was feeling all refined and sensitive. . . .

Then there leapt out at me the other Michael Beadle, the Ebullient Twin, the Ghozlak, the Lippery, the Bubbasaur, who came roaring and soaring, snorting and cavorting out of a raucous thicket of slamjam rhythms, spitting rhymes like the driverwheel of a steam engine setting off sparks. This is the one who wrote "3...2..1," "Yaylong," "The Dastly Skull Duggeries," and the pop-top others.

For a moment there, I thought it was me. I have gone plumb schizophrenic, I figured. No poet can be so much the obverse of himself, so janiform, so Jekyll-&-Hyde in just a few poems. But when I went through the pages again, there he was, the two of him, the romping stomping Michael and the other Beadle, the savorer of wisps and clues and misty hints.

As soon as I understood that I had not become suddenly crazy, I admired the poems all the more and enjoyed them all the more. And maybe I began to comprehend that Mr. Beadle is a poet of delights, some of which he casts in a cool, suggestive minor key and some that he delivers in the brassiest, sunniest, most major of keys. And maybe it came to me also that we wouldn't want one without the other, any more than we would want a piano that did not sport keys both black and white.

If The First Law of Art is Contrast, as someone told me when I was just a tot, then Michael Beadle is its Enforcer.

Celebrate, you-all! -- Fred Chappell

Fred Chappell was North Carolina's poet laureate from 1997 through 2001. He was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro from 1964 to 2004. For his many works of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism he has received a long list of awards -- among them the Best Foreign Book Prize from the Academie Francaise, the Bollingen Prize, and the Aiken Taylor Prize. He lives in Greensboro with his wife, Susan.

The Naming

"What about this one?" I asked.
"Mylax," he replied.
"And this one?"
"Plumdrum," he declared.
We were at the lakeshore again
among the cool bed of rocks,
conjuring names. Each word
echoed across the water,
a spell whispered to ancient spirits.
Aya, Zephanos, Ghozlak.
A god, a prophet, a sorcerer.
We lifted each rock,
felt its weight in our palms,
until its name came to us
as if by divination.
Then, we'd hurl the rock
far as we could into the lake,
giving it a new depth to find.
There we sat, the only ones left
in a world who could recite
its litany of names --
Whillet. Milanthium. Lippery.
Some would be mythical beasts,
others lost temples, pirate ships.
We never thought to use
our own names or the names of families
too dull for this sacred duty.
As darkness crept into the cove,
we chose new rocks,
hardened by time, tempered by water,
trusted their shapes in our hands,
and steadied our minds
for the naming.

A Town Too Small For Maps

Folks used to call her Sauls' Crossroads,
until the postal service said the name was too long.
So, somebody thought on it, yelled "Eureka!"
Eureka, that ancient exclamation of inspiration.
The name stuck long enough to celebrate
her centennial. They say Sherman marched through
once, stopped for a drink, Atlanta ash still on his boots.

There's time to think on a lot of things here.
The stoplight stays red long enough for drivers
to look both ways at boarded up storefronts.
Post office doubles as a town hall. Over there
used to be Sauls' General Store. After school,
we'd meet for 3-cent gum and a 12-ounce coke,
maybe a run at Gallaga or Ms. Pac-Man.
In the pine-draped house a quarter mile down
lived Miss Nancy, a state representative.
I once sat in her house, a spell of dark wood.
Thick, bronzed plaques lined her walls. They say
she could match wits with the best in Raleigh.

Outside town long rows of tobacco lined the highways.
How I'd pray the harvester would get
to the end. Reach down, curl a hand around
the stalk, break off three, four leaves
from the bottom, dump it in the tray again
and again. Hands and forearms turned gummy black.
'Baccer dew wet our shirts, dried stiff as blood.
Early mornings we'd top and sucker,
break off flower tops, pinch out buds,
flick fat, green worms from the leaves.
We'd stop mid-morning when the boss man
or the boss man's son brought us
Little Debbies and a coke bottle I'd tilt sideways
to suck down faster, feel the burn in my cheeks.
By August, we'd be at the bulk barns, sifting
through crispy, golden leaf, toss out what's burnt.
Burlap bundled plump, knotted, bound for market.
Stack 'em high in the big trucks, boys!
Leaves littered the sides of highways,
like money spilled out of a stolen bank truck.
And the best brand of flue-cured that season
paid for school clothes and car payments.

Now those fields yield cotton, far as the eye
wants to see, rows that end in dark woods.
The only grocery in town shut down last year.
A few gas stations keep a steady business
for the families and farms that remain.
The elementary school closed after consolidation.
Weeds spike through faded lines in the parking lot.
The sharecropper shacks and tin barns lean
like old men waiting to fall, ready to die.
Fields stretch on for miles to other crossroads --
Patetown, Nahunta, Faro, Black Creek.

When a lady asks me where home is,
I pause a moment to give her an approximation:
Near Goldsboro, I say, about an hour east of Raleigh,
knowing she won't stray too far to find
what lies in a town too small for maps.

Honey

What bees see, science tells us,
is a swarm of light --

30,000 hexagonal lenses trained
like paparazzi, recording every

angle of trespassed flight, every
succulent stamen, every pixel of petal.

If only I had such eyes.
Perhaps I could have seen your tears

coming on the eve of our anniversary,
a night you wanted to yourself

because the world takes more
than you can give, and I couldn't

resist another jab of guilt
for the present I wouldn't receive.

If only we knew how to honeycomb
these moments -- even now,

as I hold you in the kitchen and wait
for sobs to become words again.

Shibboleth

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth:
for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him,
and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time
of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
-- Judges 12:6

In the days of Gilead when tribe fought tribe
for fat cattle and a place at the well,
knowing the name of a town
meant more than oasis,
meant you were welcome,
and they wouldn't have to slit your throat
or burn your tent in the middle of the night.
So before you go embarrass yourself
tangling up the names of these rivers,
roads, mountains taken from Cherokee --
Oconaluftee         Wayah         Nantahala --
remember there are subtle ways
of knowing you ain't from 'round here:
if you articulate a lazy syllable
or roll out a short vowel --
Appalachia         Cashiers        Leicester.
Folks you mistake for stupid
have a quick ear and a sharp wit
to know the difference
between native and stranger,
friend and trespasser,
so take your time to learn
the lay of the language
These words become your home
or leave you wishing it was.
Before you come to claim
your acre among these hills,
where coves mark centuries with cemeteries,
ease your tongue into the right accent,
carry pronunciation like a passport.
No need to tell your life story,
just volunteer the local shibboleth.

Born in Syracuse, N.Y., and raised in eastern North Carolina (Kinston and Eureka), Michael Beadle earned his B.A. in journalism and mass communication in 1994 from UNC-Chapel Hill. As an award-winning journalist, he has worked 12 years with community newspapers across the state, and is currently a contributing writer with Smoky Mountain News, a weekly newspaper covering Haywood, Jackson, Macon, and Swain counties. Mr. Beadle's feature stories have been published in Business North Carolina, Carolina Alumni Review, and Smoky Mountain Living.

As a performance poet, A+ Schools Fellow, and writer-in-residence, Mr. Beadle tours the state doing writing workshops and poetry shows for schools, festivals, church and civic groups, Elderhostels, and private parties. His first book of poetry, An Invented Hour (Hard Times Press), was published in 2004, and his poetry has been featured in The Asheville Citizen-Times, The Raleigh News & Observer, and Gatherings (Spring Street Editions, 2001) -- an anthology of western North Carolina poets edited by Kathryn Stripling Byer. Mr. Beadle lives in Canton with his wife, Nicole Wilhelm, and their three cats.

June 12 - 18, 2006: George Moses Horton

In 1999, the North Carolina Division of Archives and History approved placement of a historic marker celebrating the achievements of George Moses Horton. The marker would be the first in the state for an African-American and also the first for a nationally recognized artist in Chatham County. After long delay the marker was unveiled on June 3rd, 2006, at a ceremony at Fearrington Barn, in Pittsboro. It stands now on the northeast corner of 15-501 and Mt. Gilead Church Road. The marker reads:

George Moses Horton lived