Poet of the Week Archive: November, 2006

November 6 – 12, 2006: Heather Ross Miller, in conversation with Isabel Zuber

"I am so happy," Heather Ross Miller said with a smile. "A door opened. There was a marvelous springboarding and I found myself writing sometimes three poems a day." It was that creative rush that she had come to Winston-Salem to talk about. We had coffee and pound cake with our friend, Emily Wilson, on Emily's screened porch and were in a mood to celebrate.

Heather and I have known each other for years, have shared our work, and met now and then as our families and careers permitted. Then came the Internet and email and, as is the case for many of us now, we found ourselves in touch as never before. We wrote back and forth about her wonderful memoir, Crusoe's Island, her short stories, and poems. We talked about my novel, and the trauma of moving after a very long time in one place.

Then, about a year and a half ago, in the middle of a flurry of emails about Kay Byer's appointment as North Carolina's poet laureate, Heather sent me a brand new poem. More than a hundred have appeared since then on my computer screen.

Poets will always love and understand Wordsworth's thought from his preface to Lyrical Ballads more than 200 years ago. Heather quoted him as she explained what was happening in her writing:

...poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

The day we met on Emily's porch, she brought with her every one of her poems from this overflowing, including many I had not seen, all enclosed in a translucent pearly folder. She thinks she has the makings of three new full-length collections, plus another recent project -- a small book of grandmother poems for her first grandchild, who is expected this winter.

Heather explained that she tries to avoid the glib, the arch, and the cavalier, but that she does enjoy being funny and I love it when she is. "It can be difficult though," she said. "It's easier to write about blood and dropping down dead than it is to be funny!"

She talked more about writing and writers. "I look for 'the best tone' in a poem and I try for tension in the line. I want echoes, associations, and power in the words. A poet doesn't need many words. What a poet needs are good readers. I like those poems that are tense, weird -- and clear! When I reread some of my own early work now it seems too hard, too concealed."

In addition to these considerations Heather said that she also has in mind how the poem looks on the page. "I like them to look like the stanzas in a hymn book. It gives me a certain feeling to see that."

Heather mentioned her admiration for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop and especially for Billy Collins, the recent poet laureate of the United States, as an example of the sort of clarity she had in mind. (She also mentioned some poets that she cares less for but their names shall not be revealed here.)

Heather has revised some of the "gift" poems she has sent to me. Of course, revision is necessary and I enjoy the new versions, too, but nothing can quite compare with sitting down at the computer, opening the in-box, and finding a new poem from a friend. Of course, they are not written just for me but in the first few moments of reading it seems that they are.

I am blessed to get poems from several poetry friends online, in hard copy, and in published form and I appreciate my good luck. It is Heather's generous outpouring, however, that enriches my days most often. I am envious of anyone with that ability.

Heather is grateful for it, too, and hopes it continues. "I need all the muses I can get!" she says.

Here are some of the poems Heather has sent. I'll begin with the one that started it all. Heather introduced her poem with this message: "Got a volunteer punkin vine growing in my woodpile. What d'you think the old nursery rhyme means?"

A Pumpkin Eater's Wife

I hollowed out my biggest pumpkin,
digging a deep tureen of rind and pulp,
a huge round urn I could turn my face
in, if I wanted.

This work smelled good, like fresh earth,
fall woods, crackling November fire,
a good cornshucking smell.
They'd have oyster stew to start,
move on to turkey, and then this pie.

I watched myself pour cream,
brew coffee, moving along my table.
I watched them eat this fine pie
I made them right off this vine.

I am an able woman,
and always on time,
but when the sun goes down,
it could catch me still here,
both hands cold inside
my pumpkin, raw as meat,
the knife and spoon spilled
over my tired bare feet.

Helpless to resist the strong, chilly ending of "The Pumpkin Eater's Wife," I asked for more, and received this in reply:

Dancing Girls

We danced as ivy,
heart-shaped and green-veined,
bouree steps weaving us
over the floor. And nobody
minded until the youngest
said, This is not dancing,
and she rose to her toes,
dropping the ivy, standing
completely naked,
except for ribbons
around her ankles.
We felt afraid, ashamed
she would outdance us,
and she did, little sister.
She danced all night
and settled in the morning
like a warm cloud
to kiss us, to nourish us,
the older and unmarried girls.

Our father, more afraid
of her than any man, still
sent a man to stop her.
But she stopped him,
making sure the last thing
he saw filled him full of her,
something as hollow
as his beating heart,
something as naked
and muscular
as a girl dancing.

When Heather sent "Dancing Girls" she asked if I knew the fairy tale it referred to. "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," I wrote back, but I had to ask what "bouree steps" are.

The following poem, "Ancient of Days," arrived with this envoi from Heather: "I always hoped God might turn out to be an old black lady with a shepherd dog and a calico kitty, just sitting on her porch watching the world, waiting for us all to come on home for supper."

Ancient of Days

I'm telling you god
is a little old black woman
with a blue headrag and one
gold earring. She has a
quiet shepherd dog, and her cat's
got four white feet, calico
patches, a little black mask
around both eyes.

Now she sits on the evening porch.
Birds gone to roost in the eaves,
cat in her lap, dog drowsing.
A little gray wool sticks
out from the headrag,
and she tucks it in.
She smells like sweat
and baking soda,
a hint of tobacco,
and she looks far far
across the field going dark,
and sees things coming.
Her heart beats so easy.
She tugs at the gold ring
in her ear, whispers
to the cat, the dog
things they can hear,
things they will bring us
when we're ready
to hear ourselves,
and I tell you this
is holy god.

Did you ever crawl up to get something you had been forbidden but couldn't resist? To me the last six lines of "In the Cabinet" are heartbreaking. Here:

In The Cabinet

Kitchen white with glass fronts,
drawer pulls and locks, built in
hard to the west wall, two little
gold birds lived there, salty pepper
birds, the size of my thumbs,
untouchables, china stacked
behind their wings, goblets
to the front, little birds
of paradise.

I crawled up and cut myself,
bloodying the plates, fisting
my little birds until they broke
before I fell. Somebody pried
gold splinters from my skin,
little bloody bird pieces,
and I cried then
for all the things
I would lose in my life,
for birds and for blood,
and for the joy
of holding.

My aunt was in the WAVES and I wanted to be her. I connected with this one.

My World War Two Make-Believe

Six years old, marching smartly,
I lead my crisp grown-up
company of WAVES,
every girl dressed blue,
every leg a dancer,
straight down the middle
of town, out to Badin Lake
and past an aircraft carrier.
Of course the sailors
hang off the rails hooting.
But I pay them no mind,
men always love me.

I am a volunteer woman
accepted for my services
in emergencies, in navies,
in argosies of great sea power,
and I am good at this,
and look good, too,
in deeper blues,
when my love, a bosun's mate,
pipes me aboard.

I know a lot about wars.
I know anchors form
the cross. I know waters
mean clean death.
And I know I am here,
unpaid and free, giving
you what I want to be.

A while later Heather sent this message and the poem that follows: "Here's one for my little late mammy, wrote a few days before she left."

Dreaming My Mother's Death

For a year I've dreamed her
young and nervous and angry,
her hair in a page boy, hair
she called ash blonde. She
stands in the kitchen on Spruce,
sun splattering the violets
she grows in a window, small
African things, blue and pink,
from the genus saintpaulia, named
for the German who found them,
Baron von Saint Paul.

She doesn't know that, only they
are as delicate and determined
as she in her world of casual
disappointments, such as me,
such as my father. These
are such pretty things!

She will live ninety years,
not in this kitchen, but in
many, and then she will die,
and I dream there will be violets.

Heather introduced "Cat Love" this way: "Here, darlin', is a love poem about old cats, old women, and old men. Enjoy."

Cat Love

My tom has bested Solomon's
thousands of queens and wives
and harlots and concubines,
and just an old
country cat.

He sprawls in the shade,
jaded by an aptitude
he hardly understands.
I bring him water, pat
his head. Sex is terrible
work, especially for cats.
I might make a joke,
sing a song, but he shuts
both his eyes, sleeping off
the squalls and snarls,
the fights to keep his prize.
I see he's got notched ears,
badly bent whiskers,
and his kingly ruff lost
a bushel of tar-patch puff.

I wonder, if you were my tom
for a night, could you handle
all that hot-wired sex
throbbing through you?
Could you lose an ear, a paw,
any essentially moving part
to keep my favor?
Ah, you'd bear the wounds, love,
and let me lick the sharp flavor
of your blood.

These last poems Heather sent are for the new baby, expected in February.

Medicinals

Best not to have babies
in cold weather, though
I know you can't help it
if you do. So make little
nightgowns of kittens
to put them to sleep in.
Then they and the kittens
will pull each other close
as mittens, dream all winter
and blossom into health.

Dangers

Our world has its dangers, love,
kills the powerful, the beautiful,
a president shot down in Dallas,
and a princess struck in Paris
in a tunnel in the middle
of a summer night.

Ordinary folks, too,
a plane full of children,
a tower full of workadays,
they perish in a blaze
of such grief, we can only
pray and weep.

You are sleeping now,
waiting to enter in
our dangers. I hope
when you are born
toward the end of winter,
the air crisp and cold,
you will find us gentle,
affectionate, our world
whole and at peace.

Heather Ross Miller, with more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction, is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Washington and Lee University. She lives in Albemarle. Her most recent collection of poems is Gypsy with Baby (Hammond, LA: Louisiana Literature Press, 2005).

Isabel Zuber lives in Winston-Salem, was a librarian at Wake Forest University for many years, and is now writing full time. Her poetry collections are Oriflamb and Winter's Exile and her novel, Salt, was published by Picador USA.

November 13 – 19, 2006: Christopher Davis

The Duende works on the body of the dancer like the wind works on sand.
        (from "The Duende: Theory and Divertissement," by Federico Garcia Lorca)

I think of Lorca reading Christopher Davis, and Hart Crane -- those who push me harder, reading them, than I might initially feel comfortable with, and ultimately farther than I ever intended to go. The honesty of the "torment" described so movingly in a poem like "At Saint Martin-in-the-Fields" is typical of Davis's work, especially his haunted, new collection, A History of the Only War. He doesn't flinch, seems drawn to explore deeper and deeper recesses of emotion, the utter wilderness of the self. If it is poetry's duty not to flinch, and I believe that it is, then Davis's work makes clear why our beloved art tends to attract fewer (but fitter, perhaps) readers than other genres . . . it isn't easy. Facing that moment of breaking down on the steps where others, one feels, have also knelt: that is not easy. But the poem also honestly, truthfully, acknowledges the joy, that duende or Rilkean music which is everywhere at once -- and the "ghosts inside of it" which are "moving/forever forward." Davis's work is a poetry of such concentrated beauty, such release, that referencing Lorca or Rilke seems to me the only appropriate gesture here. Seldom have I read a poet so stuck on the body, the "Pick-and-Save" of our real selves; seldom have I read a poetry which brings me so habitually to the threshold of rapture, whether furtive and sexual, or ecstatic and spiritual. It is as if for Davis there's little else to say, and perhaps no other way to say it except by transcribing gusts of feeling pulsing through the soul as form, as physical and sonic shape, and as directly as possible. And frankly, who can argue? For there is little else to say, and probably no other way to say it. -- Michael White

Michael White's third collection of poetry, Re-entry, won the 2005 Vassar Miller Prize. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

At Saint Martin-in-the-Fields

A heaven-blue oval of stained glass glows
opaquely, reflecting tiny, trembling flames.

The torment in mother's eyes washed away
from family memory, personality, finally,

history, empty, body ready
to curl alone around death,

I cry on worn-down marble steps. Dignity
and a dress shirt make one sit up. Endlessly

held days have burned into the fingers traces
of warmth that should be pressed into playing

tight strings. The ghosts inside music mosey
slowly past, crumbling, reforming, moving

forever forward into the breath
of the living, the having lived.

A History of the Only War

At battlefields, I need to feel
      alone, free
from my reenacting friends,
      into the dusk-dark, leafy
everlasting
      wound,
to taste, outside this
      flinch-filled air,
the warm salty bone of my own thumb,
      to grasp a gun,
to make it shoot
      me in the mouth,
let freedom ring,
      echoes of screams
flaoting closer
      through those white
petals exploding,
      through the limbs of dogwood trees,
every way at once
      away from me.

Express
            hearing Mozart

Ah, driving south, windows down, shirtless
skin, chilly wind, high requii, divertimenti,
his genius, fifteen, singing, quick strings

as light as light, bright, excited in-
tellect, imagination twingeing, like
a rabbit dripping from a raptor, or

crouched before a glory hole, confessing something,
operas of orgasm occurring outside your collapsing
body, doe's corpse decomposing, oh, oboe urging

lower love, touching today, busting soul open on a bridge being
built over bundles of rusted junk sunk in mud, minor whistling
understudying our grunting music, ugly, human, humbled, uh.

Still Point

See that ice pond, perfectly round? Frozen,
it must have looked like God's hand mirror.

It's stagnant, covered with a lime green skin
slightly brighter than the meadow under foot

but exactly the same shade as the film over our
windshield (so it's not duckweed, it's pollen.)

Let us chuck wadded drafts of a mash note
at that shattering surface bullfrogs splash

across: "Picture winking monks tiptoeing to You,
proffering a snifter bright with goldfish, a kazoo."

Christopher Davis is the author of A History of the Only War (Four Way Books, 2005), from which the first two poems that appear here are drawn. He is also the author of The Tyrant of the Past and the Slave of the Future, which received the 1988 Associated Writing Programs Poetry Award, and The Patriot, which appeared in 1998 in the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. His poems have appeared in many journals, including American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review (where "Still Point" first appeared and "Express" is awaiting publication), Denver Quarterly, Fence, Harvard Review, and The Journal and in several anthologies. Born in Los Angeles, he received an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1985 and is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

November 20 – 26: Kathryn Stripling Byer

Language Matters
This week I'm taking the web space normally reserved for "Poet of the Week" to introduce you to a series of essays I've been writing for various North Carolina newspapers since last June. I've titled these essays "Language Matters," because, as North Carolina's poet laureate, I want to help spread the word that language does matter, in both large and small ways, in all areas of our lives.

You'll find current and previously published essays in an archive on the Council's web site. Just click "Press Room" on the home page, scroll down the column of items on the left of the Press Room page to "Language Matters," and click again. Or click here.

I'd welcome your response to anything you read in "Language Matters" -- now or in the future. Please e-mail your comments to ncarts@ncmail.net and put "Language Matters" in the subject line. Let us know if you'd like us to post your message with the appropriate essay in our archive. -- K.S.B.

A Thanksgiving Bon Appetit for Language Lovers

Thanksgiving always sends me back to my cookbooks, looking for the old grease-stained recipe cards passed down by my kinfolks. I can't imagine a Thanksgiving feast without my mother-in-law's pumpkin pie or my grandmother's cornbread dressing. This year, however, I've been thinking about another kind of feast, one that American poet Mark Strand celebrates in the beginning of his poem "Eating Poetry": "Ink runs from the corners of my mouth./There is no happiness like mine./I have been eating poetry."

I'm not suggesting that we replace our Thanksgiving turkey and dressing with a sheaf of poems, giblet gravy ladled over every stanza, but I'd like to suggest that we give thanks for those who work hard to encourage literacy and keep the joy of reading alive, so that we can continue to satisfy our imaginations' appetite for the word-feast that Strand describes.

What better place to begin than with the staffs of our local newspapers? Lynn Hotaling edits The Sylva Herald, which serves my community. She tells me that her oldest daughter learned her letters at age two from a daycare teacher who used the paper as a visual aid. I can go Lynn one better! I have a photograph of our seven-month-old daughter stuffing a page of The Sylva Herald into her mouth, and yes, she grew up to be a voracious reader.

For that, I credit not only her early ingestion of newsprint but also some public school teachers who nurtured her appetite for words. Despite more and more time taken up with paperwork and testing, teachers can still make good things happen in classrooms where their own love of language encourages their students to enjoy it with gusto.

Literary festivals are another fine way to set the table for readers. You can find them year-round, all over the state. Where I live a literary feast par excellence was recently served up: the third annual Great Smoky Mountains Book Fair, sponsored by City Lights Book Store, The Friends of the Jackson County Library, and Western Carolina University's Honors College. Imagine opening a new book, leaning over it as if to smell its contents, savoring it like the first slice of roasted turkey! Well, that's what happened one Saturday earlier this month when sponsors, authors, and readers gathered together to give thanks for the literary nourishment that this region has to offer.

Organized as a benefit for the public library's new building fund, with a percentage of all sales going to The Friends of the Library, this event is a labor of love. All three sponsors work hard for months to plan the fair. Then comes the "kitchen-work": the ordering, moving, and setting up of the books themselves. As anyone who has moved just one box of books knows, it's heavier than a 20-pound turkey lifted from a hot oven. But if you have ever watched librarians or booksellers handling their books, you'd swear they were serving up the juiciest of birds, accompanied by a steaming crockery of sweet potato casserole.

Such a feast (or should I call it feat?) is as filling as a seven-course Thanksgiving meal. Even better, it shows what a community can accomplish when its members come together to share, and prepare, their five-star recipes for encouraging reading and creating an audience for the authors whose books help us savor the world around us.

This essay appears, in somewhat different form, courtesy of this week's Sylva Herald. Ms. Byer wrote this special edition of "Language Matters" at the Sylva newspaper's invitation.

November 27 – December 3, 2006: John Amen

In his collection titled More of Me Disappears John Amen's poems move from topic to topic, landscape to landscape with the same stunning intensity of his first book, Christening the Dancer: juxtaposition of surreal and real images; cataloging of inner and outer chaos; often final lines erupting into a declaration of truth, clarity, or survival. This second poetry volume explodes with wondrous puzzlement and convoluted metaphors -- truly poetry for re-thinking: memorable lines to ponder; voices crying from the heart; and discovered in the couplet poems, a quiet emotional impact.

John's poetry sometimes speaks, sometimes screams and shouts. When I read his poems, I become a guest who stays for dinner and wine, feasting and eventually inebriated by his bold imagery and poignant observations. Consequently, I wonder if Ginsberg and Whitman are dancing on the head of a pin, nodding their heads at John?
-- Sara Claytor

Sara Claytor, a former teacher of writing, literature, and public speaking, co-edits The Moonwort Review. Rock Way Press will publish her first full-length poetry book, Keeping Company with Ghosts, in 2006.

Things Are Happening Too Fast

The wings of the world
are flapping like a fish in a dry pail.

Sometimes I terrify myself,
the things I could destroy.

There is a rainbow above the refinery;
in the hammock of stars, a scribe is weeping.

I pass like a current
through empty sockets of my mother's skull.

The day emerges like a mole.

Our Father, deaf and mute in the gilded air.

Verboten

We are in Paris, my grandparents and I,
visiting my grandfather's sister, the one who
failed to get out of Europe in 1938. I am
seven years old. My great-aunt's arms remind
me of spaghetti strands, and she speaks
in a high, labored voice, as if a little
pump inside her is not working right.
They are drinking wine and speaking
of French-U.S. relations when the long
sleeve on her arm falls down. Before
she can clutch it, I see the faded blue
tattoo on her flesh. "What are those
numbers?" I ask. A silence explodes
through the room like spores.
My aunt picks up a tray of empty
glasses and retreats into the kitchen.
"Some questions," my grandfather
says, rubbing his own unblemished arm,
"should not be asked." As life went on,
I learned that most of the questions
I wanted answers to fell into that category.
Still, I asked them; and I'm still asking them.

What I Said to Myself

Choose the butterfly over the chrysalis.
Choose light, the ballroom, the well-lit restaurant.

You have for lifetimes strummed minor chords
on the coast of a dead sea. Think major, spindrift.

The sex between you and grief is becoming mechanical.

Despite your vestigial sentiments to the contrary,
a scab's story is much greater than that of a scar.

Your cock is not an umbilical cord, it is your
heart's mouthpiece. Choose sunrise, please.

It is time to do something that might cause
embarrassment. Let emptiness mother your child.

Put away the map, where we're going won't be on it.

There is nothing particularly inspiring about a death wish.

You have learned all there is to learn from the woman in black.

It is time to stop insulting ecstasy. Masochism
is an empty udder. What was is a cipher. Pick
the rose over the injured dove. Pick warm waters.

Attend a circus. Go for the comic. There is nothing
more mediocre than the association of dysfunction with genius.

Indulge in color. Believe me, there is not a problem.
Plumb bright places for new symbols.

Recommendation: study evergreens.
Find me. We have much to talk about.

Persistence

This morning I slept in ambition's arms,
dreamt of my mother climbing a stairwell.

I am equal parts water, ash, and illusion.

The sky belched stars as the earth meditated.

I am committed to nonsense, as well.

What I believe is a cracked conch
echoing in my ear. God bless the mad.

There is a gift being offered.

I am chiseling through ice to receive it.

Last Words

Cut loose from the womb of my ship,
drifting like Icarus in this white suit,

destiny is broken down to numbers,
x amount of inhalations, x temperature

tolerable, knowing that a breathless
demise is what awaits me. You tickle

my ear like an insect, urgent whispers
wrapped in static; dissecting my silence

as if I were the first person to enter
the house of God. There is no gauging

my location now. This is true transcendence,
mind meeting the unknown, language

unavailable, the brain itself groping for
impulses to send south to the body. This is

what I wanted, to die in the mouth of the sun,
lungs imploding like a flattened can, all sense

of mortal obligation cauterized like a wound.
A moment can indeed define a lifetime,

karma be vaporized at the threshold of death.
Light fl