
|
|
Poet of the Week Archive: August, 2006August 7 - 13, 2006: Susan Meyers
Susan Meyers, photo by Gene Furchgott Keep and Give Away, from which all of the poems that follow are drawn, is the title of North Carolina native Susan Meyers's new book from the University of South Carolina Press. It may also serve as a metaphor for her life, for it is her giving spirit that characterizes everything she does. It was Susan's generosity that eased my return to my home state over ten years ago when I wasn't sure I wanted to be here. We met at Weymouth in Southern Pines during a North Carolina Poetry Society meeting, and her warm welcome put me quickly at ease. Shortly afterwards, she was elected program chair and then president. It was during her presidency that the society sponsored Sally Buckner's remarkable and important anthology Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry. In the years since we met, our friendship has flourished, and she's welcomed me into her home, her life, her husband Blue's kitchen, and her world of poetry. Though our approaches to our work are different -- she a lyricist and I a storyteller -- our admiration and appreciation for the other's craft and our sharing of both our work in progress and our lives has solidified our friendship. Her world of poetry is also shaped by a giving spirit. As a lyric poet, she investigates the possibilities of words, sounds, rhythms, and forms, and weaves them into lines that continue to astonish me in poem after poem about nature, fishing, her long relationship with Blue, and her devotion to family, past and present. Her words are at the same time playful and serious, as in the surprisingly complex poem, "Neither the Season, Nor the Place." On the apparent smooth surface of the poem, she rides the lake with Blue and comes upon a gathering of "quivering loons," who in their dipping and rising are "reaching out into the air / like questions that reorder the day." Like the years of a long marriage, the bodies of the loons "glide in a slate cloak / of understatement," knowing instinctively what is right for the moment, and what is not, in the same way she does, as she tells us in her opening lines: "Some mornings I mutter down the hallway / of our marriage and open the only available door." It is neither the season nor the place for anything else. Who but a skillful poet would see in the antics of wintering loons such clarity? Susan works tirelessly for poetry. She struggles for precision in her own work. She freely offers support and expertise to both fellow poets and aspiring ones. And without hesitation, she devotes hours and hours to promoting a vision of poetry throughout both Carolinas. She may now claim South Carolina as her home, but we'd be wise -- and poetry would be better off -- to never let her leave her Old North State. -- Barbara Presnell Barbara Presnell's collection of poems, Piece Work, won the 2006 Cleveland State University First Book Prize and will be published by Cleveland State in spring, 2007. In addition, she has published three chapbooks, and her collection of textile mill voices, Sherry's Prayer, won the North Carolina Humanities Council's 2004 Linda Flowers Prize. She lives in Lexington and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her poems were featured on this web site in September, 2005.
Guitar On any given night it picks its way Say it's a tin cup with bent handle.
Keep and Give Away What do I know of man's destiny? With a bushel basket in hand more than the sum of his summer even counting Early Contenders cucumbers, Kentucky Wonders too. the numbers: blackberries and figs in pecks. And don't forget divided into keep and give away. tubers and pods -- heavy Now he's shelling peas in his lap to the ping, ping. He's more and despite a constant reckoning in this long, hot growing season.
Neither the Season, Nor the Place Some mornings I mutter down the hallway Another and then another loon rises in place,
Villanelle for Gertrude Stein Buttons, tender, and delicate as rain, We close a gap, expect an inch of gain. Unanswered questions, the day's refrain, A double-threaded shank can break, the same Love when anchored, can still grow, retain
Someone Near Is Dying To sit for hours by your bed the chickadee at the feeder fidgeting My desire is to leap into the midst What does your every move show If this moment, bare as twigs, the limb, in its loose skin not the branch stunted The beauty of Spanish moss is the curl grass, its inclination toward green; at the end of her day, humming.
Hat of Many Goldfinches Say you could wear twenty goldfinches on your head, But how to seduce the finches to stay. A sprinkle Never depend on a hat of goldfinches I once knew a woman who wore her robin hat Now she knows to wait
A past president of the North Carolina Poetry Society and the current president of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, Susan Meyers is frequently tempted to say that she is from "Carolina," leaving off the "North" or "South." A North Carolina native, she grew up in Albemarle and Greenville; she and her husband now live in South Carolina, near Summerville. Even her book publication history shows an allegiance to both states. Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), her first full-length book, was chosen by Terrance Hayes for the inaugural South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. Her chapbook, Lessons in Leaving, won the 1998 Persephone Press Book Award (now the Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Publication Award, managed by the North Carolina Writers' Network), judged by Brendan Galvin. Her poetry has also appeared inCrazyhorse, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, and other journals, as well as on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily web sites. Her book reviews have been published regularly in The South Carolina Reviewand Review Revue. A long-time writing instructor, she has served as the poet-in-residence at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., and as a mentor for creative writing students at the Charleston County School of the Arts. She holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Queens University, in Charlotte. August 14-20, 2006: Janet Lembke
[Excerpts from Virgil's Georgics: A New Verse Translation by Janet Lembke (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.] It's terribly unfashionable now, especially among "serious" poets, to premise that nature holds a mirror to humanity - humanity being far too civilized and dominant to be dumped into Mother Nature's roiling pot of existence. Many of our literary lights celebrate their egos ad nauseum. Nature in poetry might be a useful tool for symbolic argument, but seldom is it allowed to speak for itself - polishing our mirrors. When Janet Lembke and I first met we recognized our kinship instantly - that perennial society of ancients living and breathing science and religion, art and industry, myth and person all in one. Janet, of course, is known for her many books on natural history that with literate candor and canny insight meld classical and mythic allusion with observed fact in crisply intimate and wide-eyed, lovely words. Thus I wasn't surprised when she, with Merlin-ease, transformed a series of photographic captions for a collection of miraculous olive trees images (Tuscan Treesby Mark Steinmetz and Janet Lembke, The Jargon Society, 2001) into a soaring book of minimalist poetry - conjuring from Italian soil and oil a harmonious tome of visual and poetic delights. No Italian chef could any more elegantly cook up a better Bolognese, a more perfect and integrated-integral -- one.
Janet Lembke, photo by Mark Olencki Janet's sisterhood with the earth has led inevitably to the garden and the table, thence to books on cooking and gardening - and even an impressive personal manual on how to help someone die. Early in her career, Janet translated old Latin poems, snatching them from the hands of pedantry back into their natural poetic state. Her translations of Hecuba, Electra, and other classical plays demonstrated her agility with archaic languages and her understanding of the antique mind. So it was inescapable that she would turn her gaze, and her bamboo stylus, to Virgil'sGeorgics. In her translator's note she raps her rapture in meeting with Virgil and reflects on those "men who knew much about poetry but little about farming" who before her rendered Virgil in "British English." She proclaims her "pleasure has been to use American English. In with grain, out with corn! Out with truncheons and buskins, in with sturdy twigs and boots!" It would take just such a woman farmer as Janet, who has farmed the wild and the tame as Virgil did, to do him contemporary justice. Janet and I - imperfect and impudent children of Dame Kind that we are - proselytize ceaselessly our inseparable ties to the earth and the cosmos. The undeniable and inexorable threat of global climate change and the continued testosterone-driven antagonisms of nationalistic and religious fervor and market-driven greed (these even Virgil experienced first-hand) dispossesses us of our rightful bounty, peace, culture, self-awareness, and self-determination. Miguel de Unamuno instructs us, "From your work you will be able one day to gather yourself." Virgil teaches incessant labor, but also of its handsome gifts-fertility, abundance, and character. Virgil and Janet demand we re-inhabit our world in primal symbiosis. Being fruitful and multiplying is a much more complex command than we know. Virgil's Georgics is one lesson-book which can serve us well. Janet's Virgil proves the point. I'm happy to walk the furrows with Janet, my green friend -- Jeffery Beam Jeffery Beam was raised in Kannapolis and now lives in Hillsborough. He is poetry editor of the print and online journal, Oyster Boy Review, a contributing editor toArabesques Review, and a botanical librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill. His award-winning works of poetry include Visions of Dame Kind (Jargon Society, 1995), An Elizabethan Bestiary Retold (Horse & Buggy, 1997), and The Fountain (NC Wesleyan College Press, 1992). His new and selected spoken word CD collection, What We Have Lost, was a 2003 Audio Publishers Association Award finalist. His art song collaboration "The Life of the Bee" with composer Lee Hoiby continues to be performed on the national and international stage. The songs and a recitation of the texts can be heard on Albany Record's "New Growth." Among his current projects is the libretto for an opera based on the Persephone myth. Gospel Earth has just been released as an online book by Longhouse. You can read and hear more of his poetry at his website. An Introduction to Virgil's Georgics Georgics -- the word means "farming." And Virgil's long, four-book poem of that name deals throughout with farming. The books treat, respectively, of agriculture and the astronomical signs for sowing and harvesting; trees and grape vines; livestock, especially cattle, horses, sheep, and goats; and, finally, bees, from whom comes the celestial gift of honey. Virgil knew by heart whereof he wrote, for he was born to a well-to-do peasant family that made its living from the land. First published in 30 B.C., his Georgics is above all a love song to the earth of Italy and almost everything that grows or grazes there. With a few understandable exceptions, like snakes and grain-plundering mice, plants and animals alike receive Virgil's fond attention. But, like many lovers, Virgil was also filled with doubts and blamed passion itself for much that may go awry. Despite the best human efforts, the most unremitting hard work, the world in which we live has never been made perfect. And Virgil's coming of age was filled with dispiriting, chaotic events -- political power grabs, corruption, civil wars, assassinations -- which he was helpless to counter except in the singing of his poems. The central thesis of the Georgics is that hard work -- sheer, ceaseless hard work -- is the only buffer between the farmer and ruin. All too often, it is flimsy. Storms strike, drought bakes the fields, disease fells flocks and herds, and nothing the farmer does -- not hoeing with extra diligence, not saying prayers over and again -- can keep the random blows of nature from wrecking his enterprises. Yet, joy and gentleness suffuse the poem as much as gloom and despair. The poet writes tenderly of such matters as wintertime work in a farmer's household and tending the flocks and herds in summer. Does this poem matter today? The answer is a twofoldYes. Two thousand years after Virgil's day, gardeners and farmers use the same tools -- rakes, hoes, pruning hooks -- and the same methods for testing soil and grafting scion to stock. More important, the Georgics passionately advocates caring without cease for the land and the crops and animals that it sustains. A message inhabits its instructions: Only at our gravest peril do we fail to husband the resources on which our lives depend. That council is as valid for today and tomorrow as it was for long-gone yesterdays.
Book 3, lines 242-277 Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque Every last species on earth, man and beast alike,
Book 3, lines 322-338 At uero Zephyris cum laeta uocantibus aestas But, when joyful summer at the West Wind's bidding sends
Book 4, lines 8-32 Principio sedes apibus statioque petenda, First, you must seek a fixed abode for the bees, to which
Janet Lembke, now resident in Staunton, Virginia, lived on and wrote about the North Carolina coast for many years and retains her affiliations with the state's literary community, including membership in the North Carolina Writers Conference. She will be on the faculty of the North Carolina Writers' Network's fall conference November 10-12. Ms. Lembke is the author of ten books of essays about the natural world, six translations from Latin and Greek, and one cookbook. As a newly certified master gardener, she gardens when she is not plotting the next book. Some things do not change: Many of her tools and methods are those mentioned two thousand years ago by Virgil in hisGeorgics, a long poem about farming in Italy. Its four books deal respectively with agriculture, trees and vines, livestock, and bees. Her translation of the poem was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. August 28 -September 4, 2006: Cathy Smith Bowers
More than any other teacher or poet I've worked with, Cathy Smith Bowers has been able to show me the true craft of writing poetry. Her insights come from a lifetime of careful observation, raw experience and the pride she takes in seeing all the right words fit into all the right places. As a student in her critique classes, I've come admire her gift of nurturing a writer through the art of revision. She gives you the courage to trust your own intuition as you enter a poem and figure out how to rearrange lines, what shape the poem needs to take, how the rhythm flows, when to use enjambment, and how to end a poem without being overly sentimental or pedantic. Cathy is the kind of teacher who inspires you to do your best work by giving you a healthy dose of honesty, humor, encouragement and technical advice. Diligent and playful, studious and humble, she offers common-sense criticism rather than condescending platitudes that make poetry all the more accessible and enjoyable. She is a voice for poetry at a time when humanity needs poetry more than ever. Michael Beadle is a poet, journalist and teaching artist who lives in Canton. His first book of poetry, An Invented Hour (Hard Times Press), was published in 2004, and his poetry has been featured in The Raleigh News & Observer and Gatherings (Spring Street Editions, 2001 -- an anthology of western North Carolina poets edited by Kathryn Stripling Byer. Beadle is a contributing writer with Smoky Mountain News, a weekly newspaper covering Haywood, Jackson, Macon, and Swain counties. As a performance poet, A+ Schools Fellow, and writer-in-residence, he tours the state doing writing workshops and poetry shows for schools, festivals, church and civic groups, and Elderhostels. His work appeared on this web site in June, 2006. He has studied poetry with Ms. Bowers in the Great Smokies Writing Program, in Asheville.
Trying to "capture" Cathy or her teaching style in words is a bit like trying to find the words to convey a piece of music. But I can draw a picture with words. It is of Cathy teaching a class at the Appalachian Writer's Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky. She is standing in front of the room, opening an umbrella as an example of metaphor as she unwraps the roots of the word. It happens to be pouring rain outside the classroom and before she can close the umbrella again, in walks her fellow teacher George ELLA Lyon (yes, her name actually is George Ella) dressed from head to toe in garbage bags (her impromptu raingear). And NO, Cathy did not plan this ahead, which goes to show that she lives right. One of her favorite phrases is "abiding image" and I can tell you that this scene will ever be an abiding image for me. Another recurrent theme for Cathy is "hunk of stone." She maintains that you cannot "set out to write a poem." Instead, you must begin by writing a hunk of stone and only later do you set about chiseling to discover the poem. Cathy is a brilliant teacher and an acute listener who can point to strengths and weaknesses in a poem while at the same time managing to empower the student. She is also enormously funny and the rapport that develops in her classes and workshops is another aspect of their effectiveness. As I said in the beginning, as hard as you try for find the right words to convey a piece of music, eventually it's better just to give up and listen. Reading Cathy's powerful poems will give you a real connection to her music. Being in her classes is like being immersed in a symphony. You become a part of something larger than yourself, in the power of words, the music of words, the beauty of ordering them, rejoicing in them. She helps poets, at whatever stage they may be, to believe in themselves and in their work. Susan Lefler lives in Brevard and is contributing writer and editor-at-large for Smoky Mountain Living magazine. Her poems have appeared in The Lyricist, Icarus, Appalachian Heritage, The Asheville Poetry Review, Wind, Passager, and Lights in the Mountains. Her poem "Drawing from Inside Out" was published with honorable mention in Kakalak 2006 (an anthology of North and South Carolina poets). Her poem "Altars Everywhere" appeared with honorable mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society's Pinesong: Awards 2006. Her photographic history of Brevard was published as a part of Arcadia's series Images of Americain 2004. Her work appeared on this web site last month. She has studied poetry with Cathy Smith Bowers in the Great Smokies Writing Program, in Asheville.
Cathy Smith Bowers, photo by Jerry Stockdale The Sabbatical The year I lived in a cabin grew ashamed of me, I in the faraway city she could lunching in grown-up restaurants, where she alone of all earth's she wanted, her fingers soft, the expensive, loved possessions the kiss she blew as I pulled out, bumping and rattling into the humdrum as she watched, to a single room It didn't help she was about to turn of cool. Didn't help when the birthday to witness the strange woman the witch they thought they'd left the window's dim-lit frame, I hovered and newt, seasoned thick commode I had dragged from the creek sprouts along the sill they mistook, to me again, before the soft knock that were finally in style once more. there at all, but back, still, in the distant in her outstretched palm, I saw had spun over night. puffing her lips toward mine.
Where's My Frog? We worshipped her, Mrs. King, on junior high and all those kids before driving to our dingy would have done anything the way we cherished our always tired, the most wretched to her desk, Lavon Deese, too, to all the other teachers whose heads bent quiet above the hard beneath our soles creaking with every filled fresh each Monday with peonies as the tests and essays grew, to deliver safely down the hall into at Saturday matinee, the sole purpose like the light in the painting my mother you could not escape no matter where leaves curled and brittling like the husks the swampy dregs. When we eased into her hungry for the smallest wafer of her peering deep inside, those three bleak the mysterious ker-plunk we'd heard The rest of that whole year we suffered with her each Monday to bask my dreams would conjure, childhood's then high school and on to college, fan of an antique shop, would lift from its shelf and Look, he would say, as he handed it to I don't know what happened to Lavon.
Pansy So I've come to love the flower walked past. Beneath my dormant rose, less numerous than its many
For Okra I'd never seen so green a green when I knew for certain you were been? But no -- come get some okra
Crepe Myrtles When the heaviness of dog days of summer's end. Such popsicles, the truck that brought them? The little
Learning How to Pray When I heard my brother
Cathy Smith Bowers is a native of South Carolina. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte and in the Great Smokies Writing Program, in Asheville. Ms. Bowers was a winner of the 1990 General Electric Award for Younger Writers and a South Carolina Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared widely in publications such as The Altantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, The Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and many others. Her first book, The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas, was published in 1992 as the first winner of the Texas Tech University Press First-book Competition in their Poetry Award Series, subsequently named for Walt McDonald. Iris Press republished that book in 1997. Iris Press published her second book, Traveling in Time of Danger, in 1999. "Learning How to Pray," which appears here, is drawn from that collection with the press's permission. "Pansy," "Crepe Myrtles," and "For Okra" -- also on this page -- are drawn from her third collection, A Book of Minutes, which Iris Press published in 2004 and which are presented here with the press's permission. "The Sabbatical" and "Where's My Frog" are unpublished and appear with the author's permission. |